Sh. Ashok Kumar Dhiman
Chief Architect
ARCHITECT DEPARTMENT
New Delhi Municipal Council
New Delhi
Subject: My opinion on your public notice regarding Sunheri Masjid.
Dear Sir,
I am to draw your attention to the Public Notice, published in TOI, dated 24.12.2023, inviting objections and suggestions to the proposed removal of Sunehri Masjid located inside the roundabout at Rafi Marg adjacent to Udyog Bhavan in New Delhi, on the consideration of regulating traffic around. the (notice by Architect NDMC inviting comments on email chief.architect@ndmc.gov.in). Earlier in this case, apprehending demolition of the mosque, the Delhi Waqf Board moved to the High Court of Delhi in WPCC) 8950/2023 and CM APPL 34086/203 and the Hon’ble Court, on assurance from NDMC, that they would not act in contravention of the legal position, disposed of the petition. Despite, this, within a week NDMC issued the public notice. The haste with which the notice has been issued indicates that NDMC is determined to remove/demolish the mosque and public notice, giving only 8 days to respond, is intended to provide a legal cover for ensuring demolition of the mosque. Moreover, the basic thrust of the notice is on demolition and not on the smooth flow of traffic on the roundabout. The mosque is not only a Waqf registered with and managed by the Delhi Waqf Board but also happens to be one of the 141 Heritage Sites notified by NDMC on the advice of the Heritage Conservation Committee.
The intention of the NDMC to demolish/re-allocate the mosque with the approval of the HCC, by treating it only as a heritage site suffers a legal infirmity that, Sunheri Masjid is also a practicing mosque having protection of the 1991 Act.
The consideration of traffic arrangements in the vicinity of the mosque is not tenable for the following reasons.
(a) The mosque is located well within the roundabout and does not hamper traffic in any way. The public notice does not give the nature of obstructions of the roundabout, hence no suggestions are likely to come from the public on the notice.
(b) There has been no dislocation of traffic on the roundabout due to the entry of namaziz into the mosque, as there is not much, and is manageable even on Fridays. There has been no complaint in this regard. However, if considered essential in the future, a subway can be conveniently provided from the footpath of any one of the five roads converging to the roundabout, exclusively for the mosque barring entry of others in the park adjacent to the mosque in the roundabout.
(c) There are two other such roundabouts in the vicinity; at the Tughlak Road – Akbar road intersection, Krishi Bhavan and Janpath-Motilal Nehru road intersection, there is no such proposal for those roundabouts though the flow of traffic, there is much higher but is being smoothly managed by traffic police.
(d) Section 11 (n), 11 (p), 2002 and 2007 of the NDMC Act 1994, referred to in the Public Notice relates to improvement, removal of obstructions in traffic regulating vehicular movement, and ownership/ control of public streets. The mosque being well within the roundabout is not on a public street and therefore invoking powers conferred under these Sections of the Act is not valid.
As such, the mosque located inside the roundabout can be retained without any hindrance to the traffic around as other similarly placed roundabouts are not causing any problems.
Given the above, you are requested to make use of your good offices to respond suitably to the public notice in question, so that the Heritage Conservation Committee can be apprised that the mosque, which happens to be a heritage as well is causing no such hindrance which makes its demolition indispensable.
It is also advisable to ensure responses to the public notice citing the above reasons or many other reasons for which the mosque needs to be protected.
with regards
Your's Sincerely
|
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
December 27, 2023
India: Objections to the proposed removal of Sunheri Masjid in New Delhi
April 13, 2023
The Hindu Nationalist Campaign to Promote Yoga | Deeksha Udupa & Raqib Hameed Naik
The Hindu Nationalist Campaign to Promote Yoga
An organization with ties to India’s RSS uses seemingly benign cultural tactics to spread its ideology—including the annual “Yogathon.”
By Deeksha Udupa and Raqib Hameed Naik
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/yogathon-hindu-nationalism/
December 01, 2020
India: NRC not a solution; it is only an instrument to consolidate Assamese cultural essentialism | Suraj Gogoi (Dec 1, 2020, The Telegraph)
The Telegraph
False pledge: NRC in Assam
It is not a solution; it is only an instrument
to consolidate Assamese cultural essentialism
Many liberals and self-proclaimed Marxists in Assam held the firm belief — they still do — that the National Register of Citizens will eradicate the gaze of suspicion on ‘illegal’ people. This belief is nothing but an instance of false consciousness, a story manufactured by the caste Assamese middle class and the Assamese nationalist to invoke a spirit of acceptability among people towards the NRC. A bureaucratic exercise cannot be a solution to social malice.
The elite among Assamese Muslims also supported the NRC process in this hope, as did a number of ‘miya’ poets. But by the time the NRC list was published last year, Assamese civil society bodies started expressing their dissatisfaction with the 1.9 million people who were left out of the register. The figure was too less for them.
The NRC is far from over. The stories of hope that were sold are fading with every passing day. The anti-foreigner rhetoric has resurfaced, once again. It has been given a new lease of life and has indoctrinated a new group of youngsters into the fold of Assamese nationalism. This has resulted in a toxic mix of jingoism and hatred towards those perceived to be outsiders.
Other lives
The recent debate that emanated from the public rejection of the idea of a char-chapori museum by Assam’s health minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, is a case in point. The proposal for a museum, which would reflect the culture and heritage of the people living in Assam’s char-chaporis, had come from the Departmentally Related Standing Committee on Education of the Assam government. The committee had proposed this idea along with another museum for the Gorkha community. The proposal was presented to the legislative house in March; 10 of the 15 committee members who gave those recommendations are from the ruling party in Assam.
Char-chaporis are heterogeneous, non-colonizing spaces that are not inhabited by Bengali Muslims only. The health minister’s resistance reflects not only the sensibilities of the Assamese but also the condition of minorities in Assam. It is evident that Assamese society suffers from ‘sociocentrism’, a condition in which the identity of a pluralist society is articulated through a dominant member of the group. For the caste Assamese, it is unimaginable that artefacts associated with the Bengali Muslim community can be a part of the Srimanta Sankardev Kalakshetra in Guwahati. Sarma’s remark also embodies a mindset that perceives the Bengali Muslim to be a polluting element degrading Assam’s culture. Hence the need for segregation and the rejection of the idea of a shared space. The rejection reveals the extent of alienation and dehumanization of minorities, especially miyas.
Sorry picture
The elements that are integral to the iconography of the miyas being circulated on the social media — a torn lungi, barbed wire, muri, ittar — portray what the French writer, Albert Memmi, calls ‘heterophobia’: the fear of difference, both real and imaginary. There is proof of such fear lingering in Assam. The health minister reportedly blamed the ‘invasion’ of Covid into Assam on Muslims. The chief minister is reported to have noted in a public rally in Bodoland that the ‘Mughal’ assault on Assam continues, and that if we don’t become conscious of it, Assam’s mother tongue will become Arabic. These comments come in the backdrop of the Assam government discontinuing the funding for madrasas in the name of modernizing education. This kind of vilification has coincided with the rise of right-wing politics in Assam. But this should not take away from the fact that antipathy towards minorities has been organic to Assam’s culture.
The NRC is not a solution. It is only an instrument to consolidate Assamese cultural essentialism.
December 21, 2018
Publication Announcement: Charvak ke Vaaris (‘Descendants of Charvak’) by Subhash Gatade
Charvak ke Vaaris (‘Descendants of Charvak’) by Eminent writer Subhash Gatade
Samaj, Sanskriti evam Siyasat par Prashnvachak (A Questionnaire before Society, Culture and Politics)
About the Book:
Ideas become a material force when they are gripped by the masses. A great philosopher of yesteryear's had rightly claimed. The times which we are passing through are witness to a similar situation. Masses are excited, they are agitated as well and are present before us as a material force in an organised way also.
It is a different matter that instead of the idea of human emancipation - from its various bondages - the notions of 'us' and 'them' has gripped them and is driving them. Instead of challenging the trinity of religion, capital and state, which have made the life of an individual vulnerable in many multifarious ways or have thrown the individual to the mercies of invisible forces, they seem to be mesmerised by it. Irony is that this phenomenon is not limited only to this part of South Asia.
This forms the central concern of the present book although it's focus is very limited. It's a questionnaire before present state of India's society, culture and politics.
ITS NOW AVAILABLE FOR OUR DEAR READERS:
https://www.amazon.in/dp/8193928717
Samaj, Sanskriti evam Siyasat par Prashnvachak (A Questionnaire before Society, Culture and Politics)
About the Book:
Ideas become a material force when they are gripped by the masses. A great philosopher of yesteryear's had rightly claimed. The times which we are passing through are witness to a similar situation. Masses are excited, they are agitated as well and are present before us as a material force in an organised way also.
It is a different matter that instead of the idea of human emancipation - from its various bondages - the notions of 'us' and 'them' has gripped them and is driving them. Instead of challenging the trinity of religion, capital and state, which have made the life of an individual vulnerable in many multifarious ways or have thrown the individual to the mercies of invisible forces, they seem to be mesmerised by it. Irony is that this phenomenon is not limited only to this part of South Asia.
This forms the central concern of the present book although it's focus is very limited. It's a questionnaire before present state of India's society, culture and politics.
ITS NOW AVAILABLE FOR OUR DEAR READERS:
https://www.amazon.in/dp/8193928717
November 24, 2018
Regardless of whether we become a Hindu "Rashtra" by law or not, we are already becoming a Hindu "Rashtra" in practice
Business Standard, November 23, 2018
Modi and the cultural reframing of India
Aakar Patel
Regardless of whether we become a Hindu "Rashtra" by law or not, we are already becoming a Hindu "Rashtra" in practice
About 15 years or so ago, it became clear to me and many other observers that the chief minister of Gujarat was bringing something new and fresh to Indian politics. What he was communicating to his audience and how he was connecting was a departure from the past. What I mean is this: At the national level, India’s leaders had played down majoritarianism even when they indulged in it. The Congress said it adhered to or pretended to adhere to a Nehruvian secularism which saw India in civilisational terms but not necessarily through the prism of a particular faith. For the first few decades after 1947, this kept capped the sentiment against minorities that was rampant in the rest of newly independent South Asia.
The Bharatiya Janata Party abused religion more openly but professed horror and shock when confronted with the result of their mischief. Having led the mob to Ayodhya, L K Advani was surprised that it pulled down that mosque he campaigned against, and announced it was the “saddest day of my life” (2,000 Indians died in the violence that ensued). Mr Advani’s partner Atal Bihari Vajpayee also spoke in reasonable and measured tones while building a party and political movement on the corpses of his fellow citizens.
Narendra Modi was different. He was not defensive about his posture and there was no quarter offered, even as lip service, to minorities. He put forward his contempt and lack of sympathy without ambiguity in the face of the greatest horrors visited on his fellow Gujaratis on his watch. This is the material he was communicating. What was new also was how he was doing it.
He recognised and appreciated the fact that Indians like charisma in their leaders and we like heroism and bombast. What would frighten the voter in another part of the world as something too authoritarian, extreme and nationalistic would be quite appealing in our parts. What the few would see as comical exaggeration and reduction, the many would find attractive.
All of this interested me a great deal. I began to focus much of my column writing on him, also translating his poetry and his essays and biographies. However, I thought, and I have also written this somewhere, that he was a man before his time.
My logic was as follows: In the United States, it is the blue collar or working class that is the base of Donald Trump and his reductionist nationalism. In India it is actually the thinking middle class that is given to rabidity more than the poor or the working class.
The tolerance of the average Indian, who was forced in everyday life to engage with a Muslim, and who was not affected by a debate on 9/11 and global jihad and such things, was not reflected in the middle class. It was the middle class that would gravitate towards Mr Modi’s siren call but they were insufficient in number at that point (that is, 15 years ago) in our economic history and therefore unlikely to make a difference. And so while he was unique and significant, he had perhaps come a few decades early because the ground wasn’t ready.
Of course, I had made some mistakes in my assessment. For one, I ignored his other qualities and his attractiveness outside of his majoritarian appeal. The bombast and the heroism would indeed find takers. And second, that a plurality would do the job and a majority wasn’t really needed. The third thing that I hadn’t foreseen was how quickly he would yank the polity from the clutches of namby-pamby secularism and take it towards what is called the “right” (but is actually just simple majoritarianism), producing a constant emphasis on identity and a targeting of minorities.
A decade ago it would not have been particularly easy for the side defending “Brahminical patriarchy”, a term of everyday use in academia and caste debates, to win, as it so comprehensively has done now. And it owes everything to Mr Modi and the success of his cultural reframing of India as it sees itself.
I have had the unfortunate experience of engaging with a lot of mid-level officers of various enforcement agencies in the last few weeks. I am a pessimist by nature but even I have been taken aback by how crude their representations are and how lacking in any nuance their arguments in favour of nationalism and majoritarianism are.
All around us, we are seeing the signs of this awakening produced by a new confidence — the result of the Modi era. Business Standard reported this month that corporates were giving their mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility allocations to gaushalas. This is illustrative and, once again, is not something one would have encountered just a decade ago without some resistance from media and civil society. But today, it is normal and we are going to have to live with this sort of a thing for a long time now.
It is difficult for India to replicate exactly what Pakistan did to its minorities because Islam is more regulated and easier to reduce to a set of precepts than Hinduism. Doctrinal Islam also has less that is in conflict with modern principles of equality and rights than doctrinal (Sanatan) Hinduism. The danger is not that we will become a Hindu Rashtra by law, but that we are becoming, if we have not already become, a Hindu Rashtra in practice.
Modi and the cultural reframing of India
Aakar Patel
Regardless of whether we become a Hindu "Rashtra" by law or not, we are already becoming a Hindu "Rashtra" in practice
About 15 years or so ago, it became clear to me and many other observers that the chief minister of Gujarat was bringing something new and fresh to Indian politics. What he was communicating to his audience and how he was connecting was a departure from the past. What I mean is this: At the national level, India’s leaders had played down majoritarianism even when they indulged in it. The Congress said it adhered to or pretended to adhere to a Nehruvian secularism which saw India in civilisational terms but not necessarily through the prism of a particular faith. For the first few decades after 1947, this kept capped the sentiment against minorities that was rampant in the rest of newly independent South Asia.
The Bharatiya Janata Party abused religion more openly but professed horror and shock when confronted with the result of their mischief. Having led the mob to Ayodhya, L K Advani was surprised that it pulled down that mosque he campaigned against, and announced it was the “saddest day of my life” (2,000 Indians died in the violence that ensued). Mr Advani’s partner Atal Bihari Vajpayee also spoke in reasonable and measured tones while building a party and political movement on the corpses of his fellow citizens.
Narendra Modi was different. He was not defensive about his posture and there was no quarter offered, even as lip service, to minorities. He put forward his contempt and lack of sympathy without ambiguity in the face of the greatest horrors visited on his fellow Gujaratis on his watch. This is the material he was communicating. What was new also was how he was doing it.
He recognised and appreciated the fact that Indians like charisma in their leaders and we like heroism and bombast. What would frighten the voter in another part of the world as something too authoritarian, extreme and nationalistic would be quite appealing in our parts. What the few would see as comical exaggeration and reduction, the many would find attractive.
All of this interested me a great deal. I began to focus much of my column writing on him, also translating his poetry and his essays and biographies. However, I thought, and I have also written this somewhere, that he was a man before his time.
My logic was as follows: In the United States, it is the blue collar or working class that is the base of Donald Trump and his reductionist nationalism. In India it is actually the thinking middle class that is given to rabidity more than the poor or the working class.
The tolerance of the average Indian, who was forced in everyday life to engage with a Muslim, and who was not affected by a debate on 9/11 and global jihad and such things, was not reflected in the middle class. It was the middle class that would gravitate towards Mr Modi’s siren call but they were insufficient in number at that point (that is, 15 years ago) in our economic history and therefore unlikely to make a difference. And so while he was unique and significant, he had perhaps come a few decades early because the ground wasn’t ready.
Of course, I had made some mistakes in my assessment. For one, I ignored his other qualities and his attractiveness outside of his majoritarian appeal. The bombast and the heroism would indeed find takers. And second, that a plurality would do the job and a majority wasn’t really needed. The third thing that I hadn’t foreseen was how quickly he would yank the polity from the clutches of namby-pamby secularism and take it towards what is called the “right” (but is actually just simple majoritarianism), producing a constant emphasis on identity and a targeting of minorities.
A decade ago it would not have been particularly easy for the side defending “Brahminical patriarchy”, a term of everyday use in academia and caste debates, to win, as it so comprehensively has done now. And it owes everything to Mr Modi and the success of his cultural reframing of India as it sees itself.
I have had the unfortunate experience of engaging with a lot of mid-level officers of various enforcement agencies in the last few weeks. I am a pessimist by nature but even I have been taken aback by how crude their representations are and how lacking in any nuance their arguments in favour of nationalism and majoritarianism are.
All around us, we are seeing the signs of this awakening produced by a new confidence — the result of the Modi era. Business Standard reported this month that corporates were giving their mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility allocations to gaushalas. This is illustrative and, once again, is not something one would have encountered just a decade ago without some resistance from media and civil society. But today, it is normal and we are going to have to live with this sort of a thing for a long time now.
It is difficult for India to replicate exactly what Pakistan did to its minorities because Islam is more regulated and easier to reduce to a set of precepts than Hinduism. Doctrinal Islam also has less that is in conflict with modern principles of equality and rights than doctrinal (Sanatan) Hinduism. The danger is not that we will become a Hindu Rashtra by law, but that we are becoming, if we have not already become, a Hindu Rashtra in practice.
November 23, 2018
India’s socio-political narrative has changed to BJP’s advantage | Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
The Economic Times, Nov 23, 2018
View: India’s socio-political narrative has changed to BJP’s advantage
By Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
Recently, there were two eye witnesses to an attempted burglary: a neighbourhood Muslim tailor, and a Hindu watchman. Both saw burglars arrive on motorcycles and get away after their failed attempt. The police scanned CCTV footage at a neighbour’s residence and, on zeroing in on some suspects, summoned the tailor and guard for identification.
The owner of the house where the police were at, reluctantly permitted the Muslim tailor inside, telling the police, “You never know them. He may see the footage and get ideas.” Later, an elderly lady in the neighbourhood enquired if the suspects seen on the CCTV footage video ‘looked Muslim’.
Cowering in Fear
In most parts of India, there is nothing unusual about such exchanges. Underprivileged Muslims are welcome to better-off, predominantly Hindu localities for work. But there is a threshold they must not cross. At the end of each day, they return to their ghettos, and are watched more intensely by the police than the colonies where disadvantaged Hindus live.
Some Muslim families do live — disproportionately — in middle-class and upwardly mobile colonies. Social interactions with Hindus are restricted and, barring odd instances, few have close friends from the other community. Prejudice towards minorities, chiefly Muslims, is not a recent phenomenon. Divisions have existed since ages, in many cases heightened after Partition, especially among the traumatised. But being unapologetically suspicious of Muslims is relatively new, the earlier hypocritical, more shrouded form being increasingly disposed of.
It would be tempting to lay the blame for such a development solely on the BJP’s and its affiliates’ doorstep. This is a simplistic way of comprehending a complex phenomenon. Yes, there are reasons for accusing elements of the party of polarisation since the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation in the late 1980s. Yet, one would be an ostrich by pretending that the phenomenon of distrust becoming legitimate sentiment, is solely the result of BJP’s pursuits.
Over the last few years, there has been a paradigm shift in socio-political discourse across the spectrum. The post-Independence consensus — that minorities, especially Muslims, must be made to feel at ease in a secular India —has significantly weakened. No societal contract — as opposed to the constitutional one — can be gauged any more on the ‘responsibility’ of the majority to create an atmosphere in which India’s Muslims are assured that their ancestors took the correct decision to not migrate to Pakistan.
Future historians would be better placed to flag the point when this shift took place. Today, one can only surmise that the change is as much the result of BJP’s propagation of Hindutva, as it is the acceptance of this framework by other parties, ‘secular’ ones included. From a time when BJP’s adversaries contested this framework ideologically, they now vie with it as its ‘true’ flagbearers.
Take the stance over faith as determinant in the Ayodhya dispute. Initial attempts to have it proved that the temple town was indeed Rama’s birthplace was abandoned, and replaced with the construct that matters of faith need not be proved and are not judiciable. In the ongoing assembly polls, Congress has actually pledged support for constructing the Ram Path Gaman, the mythical pathway Ram is believed to have traversed during his vanvaas.
Since September 2017, Congress president Rahul Gandhi has regularly visited temples during polls — to correct the impression that, in Sonia Gandhi’s ‘infamous’ words, Congress was ‘prominority’. From when identifying with those on the margins of society was politically correct — and correct politically — being on the right side of majoritarian thinking is now viewed as practical.
Till the Cows Come Home
Globally, there is rising support for illiberalism and sectarianism. At a recent dialogue with visiting German journalists in New Delhi, the conversation dwelled significantly on similarities and dissimilarities between Hindu nationalistic thought and ideas that have propelled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerging as the third-largest group in the Bundestag. Even in the US, the wave of Islamophobia is echoed in certain Indian debates on issues like cow protection and illegal immigrants far more than they were immediately after 9/11or even 26/11.
India has undergone at least two phases, when almost every political party adopted positions around a central political idea. After Independence, much of the public discourse centred around the Nehruvian economic model and socialism that existed in various shades: Nehruvian, Lohiate, communist and even a Jan Sangh variety.
Later, secularism became the focal point with BJP, too, claiming to practise the ‘genuine’ secularism while labelling its opponents as ‘pseudo-secularists’.
Now, most leaders across the political spectrum are willing to display their ‘Hinduness’, or ‘being Hindu’. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi had turned down an offer to wear a skull cap in public, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had famously said how in India ‘one has to wear the topi at times, and on other occasions, sport a tilak’. Today, wearing the topi has probably become optional.
This is not about ritual practise, but how a nation is imagined and the space of minorities within it. Even a BJP defeat in state elections, or even the Lok Sabha elections, is unlikely to restore the previous template. Battlelines have been drawn within the ‘Hindutva’ terrain.
Some have soft postures, others hard. But the thought-processor of the India Machine will be this, at least for some time to come.
View: India’s socio-political narrative has changed to BJP’s advantage
By Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
Recently, there were two eye witnesses to an attempted burglary: a neighbourhood Muslim tailor, and a Hindu watchman. Both saw burglars arrive on motorcycles and get away after their failed attempt. The police scanned CCTV footage at a neighbour’s residence and, on zeroing in on some suspects, summoned the tailor and guard for identification.
The owner of the house where the police were at, reluctantly permitted the Muslim tailor inside, telling the police, “You never know them. He may see the footage and get ideas.” Later, an elderly lady in the neighbourhood enquired if the suspects seen on the CCTV footage video ‘looked Muslim’.
Cowering in Fear
In most parts of India, there is nothing unusual about such exchanges. Underprivileged Muslims are welcome to better-off, predominantly Hindu localities for work. But there is a threshold they must not cross. At the end of each day, they return to their ghettos, and are watched more intensely by the police than the colonies where disadvantaged Hindus live.
Some Muslim families do live — disproportionately — in middle-class and upwardly mobile colonies. Social interactions with Hindus are restricted and, barring odd instances, few have close friends from the other community. Prejudice towards minorities, chiefly Muslims, is not a recent phenomenon. Divisions have existed since ages, in many cases heightened after Partition, especially among the traumatised. But being unapologetically suspicious of Muslims is relatively new, the earlier hypocritical, more shrouded form being increasingly disposed of.
It would be tempting to lay the blame for such a development solely on the BJP’s and its affiliates’ doorstep. This is a simplistic way of comprehending a complex phenomenon. Yes, there are reasons for accusing elements of the party of polarisation since the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation in the late 1980s. Yet, one would be an ostrich by pretending that the phenomenon of distrust becoming legitimate sentiment, is solely the result of BJP’s pursuits.
Over the last few years, there has been a paradigm shift in socio-political discourse across the spectrum. The post-Independence consensus — that minorities, especially Muslims, must be made to feel at ease in a secular India —has significantly weakened. No societal contract — as opposed to the constitutional one — can be gauged any more on the ‘responsibility’ of the majority to create an atmosphere in which India’s Muslims are assured that their ancestors took the correct decision to not migrate to Pakistan.
Future historians would be better placed to flag the point when this shift took place. Today, one can only surmise that the change is as much the result of BJP’s propagation of Hindutva, as it is the acceptance of this framework by other parties, ‘secular’ ones included. From a time when BJP’s adversaries contested this framework ideologically, they now vie with it as its ‘true’ flagbearers.
Take the stance over faith as determinant in the Ayodhya dispute. Initial attempts to have it proved that the temple town was indeed Rama’s birthplace was abandoned, and replaced with the construct that matters of faith need not be proved and are not judiciable. In the ongoing assembly polls, Congress has actually pledged support for constructing the Ram Path Gaman, the mythical pathway Ram is believed to have traversed during his vanvaas.
Since September 2017, Congress president Rahul Gandhi has regularly visited temples during polls — to correct the impression that, in Sonia Gandhi’s ‘infamous’ words, Congress was ‘prominority’. From when identifying with those on the margins of society was politically correct — and correct politically — being on the right side of majoritarian thinking is now viewed as practical.
Till the Cows Come Home
Globally, there is rising support for illiberalism and sectarianism. At a recent dialogue with visiting German journalists in New Delhi, the conversation dwelled significantly on similarities and dissimilarities between Hindu nationalistic thought and ideas that have propelled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerging as the third-largest group in the Bundestag. Even in the US, the wave of Islamophobia is echoed in certain Indian debates on issues like cow protection and illegal immigrants far more than they were immediately after 9/11or even 26/11.
India has undergone at least two phases, when almost every political party adopted positions around a central political idea. After Independence, much of the public discourse centred around the Nehruvian economic model and socialism that existed in various shades: Nehruvian, Lohiate, communist and even a Jan Sangh variety.
Later, secularism became the focal point with BJP, too, claiming to practise the ‘genuine’ secularism while labelling its opponents as ‘pseudo-secularists’.
Now, most leaders across the political spectrum are willing to display their ‘Hinduness’, or ‘being Hindu’. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi had turned down an offer to wear a skull cap in public, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had famously said how in India ‘one has to wear the topi at times, and on other occasions, sport a tilak’. Today, wearing the topi has probably become optional.
This is not about ritual practise, but how a nation is imagined and the space of minorities within it. Even a BJP defeat in state elections, or even the Lok Sabha elections, is unlikely to restore the previous template. Battlelines have been drawn within the ‘Hindutva’ terrain.
Some have soft postures, others hard. But the thought-processor of the India Machine will be this, at least for some time to come.
November 18, 2018
India: Let’s not dance to the tune of Hindu martial music | SA Aiyar
The Times of India, November 18, 2018
Music should respect no borders of nation, region, religion or language. It should soar across the world and captivate all humanity. I am aghast that a Delhi concert, sponsored by Spic Macay and the Airports Authority of India (AAI), had to be “postponed” after Hindu fanatics warned against the participation of Carnatic music maestro T M Krishna.
His sin is that he has often included Christian and Muslim themes in his music. That is actually the sort of inclusiveness that has always marked Indian music, and indeed all Indian culture. Alas, the fanatics had so much clout with the ruling BJP that the sponsors had to back down. This was cultural barbarism.
Jawaharlal Nehru would have been outraged by such barbarism. But no outrage flowed from Rahul Gandhi and his gutless Congress cohorts, who have abandoned Nehruvian secularism for a soft Hindutva that smells like the leftovers of a BJP meal. Fortunately, the Aam Aadmi Party, which rules Delhi state, came to the rescue by providing an alternative concert platform for Krishna.
Hindu fanatics have cowed many artists. But not Krishna. He says, “The troll army has the underlying patronage of people in power. I have been trolled for a long time for my social position, my perspectives on politics, and my disagreements with the BJP regime. I believe in every art form. Allah, Jesus and Ram make no difference. It is a multilingual and multi-religious country.” Bravo!
After the latest ruckus, he tweeted, “Considering the vile comments and threats issued by many on social media regarding Carnatic compositions on Jesus, I announce here that I will be releasing one Carnatic song every month on Jesus or Allah.” All musicians and artists need to applaud this stance, in contrast to the pathetic BJP whitewash attempted by dancer Sonal Mansingh (who, not entirely coincidentally, was earlier nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the BJP government).
Hindustani music has many glorious roots, many sources of inspiration. The sitar is a modern version of the Persian setar (a three-stringed instrument), the sarod originated in the Afghan rubab, and the harmonium came from the European accordion. That does not make them Muslim or Christian or foreign. They are part and parcel of Hindustani music. Bismillah Khan and Amjad Ali Khan are as essential to Hindustani music as Ravi Shankar or Hari Prasad Chaurasia: their religions are irrelevant.
North Indians may not be aware of the remarkable absorptive capacity of southern Carnatic music. Classical music is often viewed as traditional and resistant to change. But the violin, introduced during the British Raj, has become so integral to Carnatic music that its followers would be outraged at the suggestion that it is alien.
Far from objecting, South Indian audiences cheered when Uppalapu Srinivas began using the mandolin to play Carnatic music. Indeed, he attained fame with the nickname Mandolin Srinivas. Today, Kadri Gopalnath is the foremost exponent of Carnatic music on the saxophone. Unlike Hindutva barbarians, these musicians know that music and musical instruments have no borders.
The bhajan may be called Hindu religious music. But Muslims have sung many of the greatest bhajans. Mohammed Rafi was among the greatest bhajan singers of all time. Probably the most famous bhajan in film history is O Duniya ke Rakhwale from Baiju Bawra. The music was composed by Naushad Ali, the lyrics were penned by Shakeel Badayuni and the song sung by Rafi. These three Muslims created a bhajan dearly beloved by Hindus, because music knows no boundaries.
My favourite bhajan of the 1950s is Insaaf ka Mandir Hai, from the film Amar. Here again, the music was by Naushad, the lyrics by Shakeel Badayuni and the singing by Rafi. In addition, the film was produced by Mehboob Khan, and its three main actors were all Muslims — Dilip Kumar (aka Yusuf Khan), Madhubala (aka Mumtaz Jehan Dehlavi) and Nimmi (aka Nawab Banoo). Did this detract in the slightest from the quality of the bhajan? No, it was a triumphant demonstration that music conquers all barriers.
The barbarians want us all to dance to the tune of Hindu martial music. Well, the most nationalistic musical event featuring the armed forces bands is the Beating Retreat ceremony every year on January 29 at Vijay Chowk in New Delhi. Every year, the bands play Sare Jahan se Achha, penned by Iqbal. They also play Abide with Me, which was Gandhiji’s favourite Christian hymn. The message is clear: patriotism and music should have nothing to do with religion.
Music should respect no borders of nation, region, religion or language. It should soar across the world and captivate all humanity. I am aghast that a Delhi concert, sponsored by Spic Macay and the Airports Authority of India (AAI), had to be “postponed” after Hindu fanatics warned against the participation of Carnatic music maestro T M Krishna.
His sin is that he has often included Christian and Muslim themes in his music. That is actually the sort of inclusiveness that has always marked Indian music, and indeed all Indian culture. Alas, the fanatics had so much clout with the ruling BJP that the sponsors had to back down. This was cultural barbarism.
Jawaharlal Nehru would have been outraged by such barbarism. But no outrage flowed from Rahul Gandhi and his gutless Congress cohorts, who have abandoned Nehruvian secularism for a soft Hindutva that smells like the leftovers of a BJP meal. Fortunately, the Aam Aadmi Party, which rules Delhi state, came to the rescue by providing an alternative concert platform for Krishna.
Hindu fanatics have cowed many artists. But not Krishna. He says, “The troll army has the underlying patronage of people in power. I have been trolled for a long time for my social position, my perspectives on politics, and my disagreements with the BJP regime. I believe in every art form. Allah, Jesus and Ram make no difference. It is a multilingual and multi-religious country.” Bravo!
After the latest ruckus, he tweeted, “Considering the vile comments and threats issued by many on social media regarding Carnatic compositions on Jesus, I announce here that I will be releasing one Carnatic song every month on Jesus or Allah.” All musicians and artists need to applaud this stance, in contrast to the pathetic BJP whitewash attempted by dancer Sonal Mansingh (who, not entirely coincidentally, was earlier nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the BJP government).
Hindustani music has many glorious roots, many sources of inspiration. The sitar is a modern version of the Persian setar (a three-stringed instrument), the sarod originated in the Afghan rubab, and the harmonium came from the European accordion. That does not make them Muslim or Christian or foreign. They are part and parcel of Hindustani music. Bismillah Khan and Amjad Ali Khan are as essential to Hindustani music as Ravi Shankar or Hari Prasad Chaurasia: their religions are irrelevant.
North Indians may not be aware of the remarkable absorptive capacity of southern Carnatic music. Classical music is often viewed as traditional and resistant to change. But the violin, introduced during the British Raj, has become so integral to Carnatic music that its followers would be outraged at the suggestion that it is alien.
Far from objecting, South Indian audiences cheered when Uppalapu Srinivas began using the mandolin to play Carnatic music. Indeed, he attained fame with the nickname Mandolin Srinivas. Today, Kadri Gopalnath is the foremost exponent of Carnatic music on the saxophone. Unlike Hindutva barbarians, these musicians know that music and musical instruments have no borders.
The bhajan may be called Hindu religious music. But Muslims have sung many of the greatest bhajans. Mohammed Rafi was among the greatest bhajan singers of all time. Probably the most famous bhajan in film history is O Duniya ke Rakhwale from Baiju Bawra. The music was composed by Naushad Ali, the lyrics were penned by Shakeel Badayuni and the song sung by Rafi. These three Muslims created a bhajan dearly beloved by Hindus, because music knows no boundaries.
My favourite bhajan of the 1950s is Insaaf ka Mandir Hai, from the film Amar. Here again, the music was by Naushad, the lyrics by Shakeel Badayuni and the singing by Rafi. In addition, the film was produced by Mehboob Khan, and its three main actors were all Muslims — Dilip Kumar (aka Yusuf Khan), Madhubala (aka Mumtaz Jehan Dehlavi) and Nimmi (aka Nawab Banoo). Did this detract in the slightest from the quality of the bhajan? No, it was a triumphant demonstration that music conquers all barriers.
The barbarians want us all to dance to the tune of Hindu martial music. Well, the most nationalistic musical event featuring the armed forces bands is the Beating Retreat ceremony every year on January 29 at Vijay Chowk in New Delhi. Every year, the bands play Sare Jahan se Achha, penned by Iqbal. They also play Abide with Me, which was Gandhiji’s favourite Christian hymn. The message is clear: patriotism and music should have nothing to do with religion.
September 25, 2017
India: Premchand’s 1934 essay on communalism and culture relevant today
scroll.in, 24 September 2017
Batra, the former head of Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS, heads the RSS-affiliated Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas (Trust for the Upliftment of Education and Culture). The Trust has made news for its response to a call for suggestions on reviewing NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) books. The Nyas’s suggestions included removing English, Urdu and Arabic words, a couplet by Mirza Ghalib, references to the thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore, and extracts from the painter MF Husain’s autobiography.
In his book, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, the historian William Gould argues that the language of Hindu nationalism had slowly seeped into the Congress by the 1930s and this furthered the alienation of the region’s important Muslim community. Given this background, Premchand’s essay is remarkable for the relevance it still holds today.
Premchand wrote:
Premchand argued that communal cultural evangelists focussed on issues like language, food, dress and art. On food, he wrote:
Even more distressing is the fact that, seventy years after the Partition, not only is communalism in India working exactly as it was when Premchand was writing, but also that hopes of citizens shaking off the spell of communalism seem to have receded even further.
Premchand’s 1934 essay on communalism and culture is eerily relevant in the India of 2017
‘I do not understand what is this culture that communalism is trying so desperately to preserve.’
Vedica Kant“Communalism is forever paying its respect to culture. Perhaps it is ashamed of being seen in its true form. Like the donkey that wears a lion’s skin and lords over the animals in a jungle, communalism wraps itself in the garb of culture.”These lines are very appropriate for the current socio-political climate in India. The right wing has tightly tied its agenda to the appearance of preserving some idealised examples of Hindu culture and identity. A recent example of this has come from RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra.
Batra, the former head of Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS, heads the RSS-affiliated Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas (Trust for the Upliftment of Education and Culture). The Trust has made news for its response to a call for suggestions on reviewing NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) books. The Nyas’s suggestions included removing English, Urdu and Arabic words, a couplet by Mirza Ghalib, references to the thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore, and extracts from the painter MF Husain’s autobiography.
The more things change...
Given this context, readers might be surprised to learn that the lines quoted above weren’t written in response to the present situation. In fact, they were composed by the writer Premchand. Premchand’s essay “Communalism and Culture” was written in 1934 and is a reminder that rising communal tension is not new in Indian politics. Indeed, communalism always played an especially important role in the politics of the United Provinces, where Premchand lived.In his book, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, the historian William Gould argues that the language of Hindu nationalism had slowly seeped into the Congress by the 1930s and this furthered the alienation of the region’s important Muslim community. Given this background, Premchand’s essay is remarkable for the relevance it still holds today.
Premchand wrote:
“Hindus want to preserve their culture till the end of time, Muslims theirs. Both still think of their culture as untouched, forgetting that now there is neither a Hindu culture, nor a Muslim culture.”When it comes to religion, Premchand argued, there are plenty of differences even within Hinduism and within. If there is a sect of Muslims which considers bowing to even the greatest of prophets infidelity, then there are sects in Hinduism who give religious scriptures no more importance that written gossip. If there is a tradition of idol worship in Hinduism, do we not also see elements of that in Islamic shrine worship?
Premchand argued that communal cultural evangelists focussed on issues like language, food, dress and art. On food, he wrote:
“If Muslims eat meat, then eighty per cent of Hindus eat meat too…Yes, Muslims sacrifice the cow and eat the meat. However, amongst Hindus too there are castes that eat cow’s meat, so much so that they even eat the meat of a carcass…Hindus are the only community in the world that consider cow meat inedible and unholy. So, should Hindus start waging a religious war with the entire world for this reason?”Portending some of the post-Partition problems Pakistan contended with when it came to language, Premchand contended that there was no common language for either Hindus or Muslims. Their linguistic loyalty was determined solely by the region they lived in:
“A Bengali Muslim might not be able to able to speak or understand Urdu, as might be the case with a Bengali Hindu and Hindi. A Hindu in the Frontier Provinces will speak Pashto, just as a Muslim from the area would.”Even in matters of dress, music, dance and painting Premchand could not find any deep divisions between Hindus and Muslims, causing him to write:
“Then I do not understand what is this culture that communalism is trying so desperately to preserve. In actuality, this call of ‘culture’ is a mere pretence. It is a chant used to pull the unknowing towards communalism, nothing else. The protectors of Hindu and Muslim culture are those who have no faith in themselves, their countrymen or in the truth… It is beyond their intellectual capability to think of an issue that can bring Hindus and Muslims together for the cause of a nation.”
...the more they remain the same
Eventually, Premchand was disparaging of both cultures – hardly surprising for a writer who was scathing about the implications of cultural decadence in his story Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) – and communal groups.“This is an economic age and today only that policy will be successful which solves the public’s economic difficulties and through which superstition, this game being played in the name of religion, and the milking of the poor in the name of policy can be stamped out. ‘Culture’ is the addiction of the rich and carefree…Premchand strikes a hopeful note that despite the naked ambitions behind communalism, a more aware and awakened citizenry will recognise the games being played in the name of culture and religion. It was perhaps a rather too hopeful expectation. With the hindsight of history, we know that communal tensions in India only worsened in the coming decades, culminating in the Partition.
After all, what was in that culture for it to be protected? When the public was unconscious a spell of religion and culture was cast on it. As it gains consciousness it has started to notice that this culture was a thief that had robbed it in the form of kings, scholars and merchants. The public today is more concerned about the protection of its life, and this is more necessary than the protection of culture.
There is no reason for any endearment towards that old culture. And communalism, blind to these economic problems of the public, is working according to a programme that will ensure its continued relevance.”
Even more distressing is the fact that, seventy years after the Partition, not only is communalism in India working exactly as it was when Premchand was writing, but also that hopes of citizens shaking off the spell of communalism seem to have receded even further.
May 14, 2017
India: RSS outfit wants manusmriti air brushed
The RSS’s cultural affiliate Sanskar Bharti is planning to tie up with the Union Ministry of Culture to promote activities that will “correct the lies that people have been fed” about ancient Hindu scriptures being “anti-Dalit and anti-woman”, starting with the Manusmriti, a senior office-bearer of the organisation told The Sunday Express.
...
“We are debating the removal of portions from the Manusmriti, which are anti-Dalit and anti-woman and often quoted in arguments against Hindu scriptures,” he (Amir Chand, joint organisational secretary, Sanskar Bharti) said
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/rss-outfit-wants-manusmriti-reworked-mahesh-sharma-culture-ministry-4654823/
March 15, 2017
India: Goondaism, Mob Violence not restricted to a few It stems from a culture of violence
The Wire
Goondaism, Mob Violence and the Perils of Remaining Meek
India’s problem of mob violence is not restricted to a few rogue citizens. It stems from a culture of violence.
March 12 was another sad day for the medical profession and the patient-doctor relationship in India. Photos and videos of
resident doctors being brutally beaten in a government hospital in
Maharashtra’s Dhule have been doing the rounds on social media. As
happens so often, the voices of agitating doctors will be given
temporary sympathetic ears by the public and by authorities, and then,
in a few days, things will go ‘back to normal’. Whether it is violence
against doctors in hospitals or against students on campus, we are a
society that never collectively condemns mob violence – and that has
perhaps been the most important reason we see such attacks happening
with increasing frequency and legitimacy.
The socially legitimised hooliganism of the Shiv Sena and its so-called sainiks is a relevant example. I grew up in the Konkan, a traditional power base of the Shiv Sena, and their unique chest-thumping and bullying are part of my childhood folklore. Years later, I encountered these yet again, from an aggressive district leader, during my stint as a medical officer in the region. At 23 years, I was no less aggressive and was was able to shut him down (it was, fortunately for me, just a verbal duel). It helped that I was a local and that he knew that. Otherwise, as happens in most instances, medical officers are forced to give in to the orders (sugarcoated as requests) of politicians – admit this friend to the special ward, sign a month-long medical leave for this gentleman, do not discharge this saheb, often a criminal avoiding incarceration.
Dealing with borderline goonda politicians is a routine for
doctors all over the country, and many have learnt to interact with them
in ways that avoid trouble both to themselves and to their professional
integrity. Dealing with out-and-out goondas, however, is a
different matter altogether. It is a unique Indian situation, taking
birth from a combination of a generally inept police and judicial
system, and a culture that considers violence to be a legitimate form of
argument and protest. Dozens of assaults on doctors, especially
resident doctors in government hospitals, occur every year. For example,
early last month, a BJP MP assaulted some doctors in a Karnataka town. Last year, doctors were beaten up in, among other places, Puri, Patiala, Nanded and Mumbai. The list is endless.
Each of us has a set of reasons we consider ‘strong enough’ to warrant violence, a threshold that legitimises violence. My primary appeal here is that it is high time we got rid of such a worldview. There is no reason whatsoever that justifies mob violence or physical assault.
It has been painful over the years seeing my fellow doctors experiencing the humiliation of being beaten up publicly, and enduring physical and mental and physical trauma after. Often when such assaults happen, we hear news of doctors threatening to strike, demanding (in fact, begging for) government and public cooperation to prevent such incidents in future. But the incidents are soon forgotten. No wonder, when most resident doctors in government hospitals live in constant fear of being beaten up.
When film director Sanjay Bhansali went through a similar violent experience last month, one thus expected doctors to spontaneously empathise with him. I was disappointed when that did not happen, but in many ways, it was unsurprising. Like the average Indian citizen, many Indian doctors too – despite their high level of education – harbour parochial views about religion and caste, and have their own threshold of what they would consider ‘legitimate violence’. While they conveniently exclude the violence that patients and their kin wreak on them, they either openly condone or stay mum about other forms of desi violence.
For example, when in February 2016, I, like hundreds of academics around the world, extended support to the journalists and JNU students who were bullied and beaten up by mobs, many of my doctor friends cursed me. Besides, being a Maharashtrian, I also know of many doctors who have no moral qualms about supporting the mob violence that is typical of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Sambhaji Brigade and the Shiv Sena.
It is this contradiction of feeling entitled to absolute protection from mob attacks but not raising a voice when other citizens suffer similar violence, that India’s medical community urgently needs to discuss and introspect on. While the medical community regularly (and rightfully) demands and expect protection from mob violence, is it morally justified that it looks the other way when others are subjected to similar violence? Have India’s doctors forgotten that as part of the country’s most educated and respected members they have broader political and social responsibilities too?
Mob bullying and violence is among the most deplorable aspects of our society, and the fearless manner in which Indians assault fellow Indians makes one wonder if the constitution has some hidden special provision of a fundamental ‘Right to Beat Up’. Unless we start strongly condemning each and every instance of mob violence, eliminating such behaviour will remain a distant dream. We must condemn them all as citizens of the Indian nation rather than condemn them selectively as either doctors, academics, Bollywood stars, Hindus, Muslims, Marathas or Rajputs. After all, what we are collectively up against is not a few rogue individuals, but an all-pervasive culture of violence.
There is always strength in numbers. Just ask the mobs. What artists and doctors can hardly achieve through siloed struggles, they can very possibly achieve through a united effort. The most peaceful and the most lasting method to get rid of a dangerous cultural tendency is for more and more citizens to begin openly condemning it, until eventually the wave of condemnation forces that tendency out of cultural norm. With academics, artists and doctors arguably bearing the brunt of the mob bullying, they have sufficient reason to join ranks and begin a nationwide disavowal of the culture of mob violence. They need to speak out against such incidents whenever and against whomsoever they happen, for whatever reasons.
Thus, after the March 12 incident at the Dhule hospital, one expects not just the medical community but the broader citizenry too, to condemn the violence and to put pressure on authorities to punish the culprits. Similarly, when other professionals face mob attacks, one expects the medical community to also be at the forefront of the condemnation and of calls for decisive legal action. It is only as a united society, and not isolated professionals, that we can hope to challenge and tame such an all-pervasive culture of mob violence.
Kiran Kumbhar is a physician and health policy graduate engaged in public health awareness through writing.
Goondaism, Mob Violence and the Perils of Remaining Meek
India’s problem of mob violence is not restricted to a few rogue citizens. It stems from a culture of violence.
The
Indian city of Dimapur is under curfew on Friday after a mob of
thousands lynched a rape suspect.
Representational image. Credit:
Reuters/Files
The socially legitimised hooliganism of the Shiv Sena and its so-called sainiks is a relevant example. I grew up in the Konkan, a traditional power base of the Shiv Sena, and their unique chest-thumping and bullying are part of my childhood folklore. Years later, I encountered these yet again, from an aggressive district leader, during my stint as a medical officer in the region. At 23 years, I was no less aggressive and was was able to shut him down (it was, fortunately for me, just a verbal duel). It helped that I was a local and that he knew that. Otherwise, as happens in most instances, medical officers are forced to give in to the orders (sugarcoated as requests) of politicians – admit this friend to the special ward, sign a month-long medical leave for this gentleman, do not discharge this saheb, often a criminal avoiding incarceration.
Each of us has a set of reasons we consider ‘strong enough’ to warrant violence, a threshold that legitimises violence. My primary appeal here is that it is high time we got rid of such a worldview. There is no reason whatsoever that justifies mob violence or physical assault.
It has been painful over the years seeing my fellow doctors experiencing the humiliation of being beaten up publicly, and enduring physical and mental and physical trauma after. Often when such assaults happen, we hear news of doctors threatening to strike, demanding (in fact, begging for) government and public cooperation to prevent such incidents in future. But the incidents are soon forgotten. No wonder, when most resident doctors in government hospitals live in constant fear of being beaten up.
When film director Sanjay Bhansali went through a similar violent experience last month, one thus expected doctors to spontaneously empathise with him. I was disappointed when that did not happen, but in many ways, it was unsurprising. Like the average Indian citizen, many Indian doctors too – despite their high level of education – harbour parochial views about religion and caste, and have their own threshold of what they would consider ‘legitimate violence’. While they conveniently exclude the violence that patients and their kin wreak on them, they either openly condone or stay mum about other forms of desi violence.
For example, when in February 2016, I, like hundreds of academics around the world, extended support to the journalists and JNU students who were bullied and beaten up by mobs, many of my doctor friends cursed me. Besides, being a Maharashtrian, I also know of many doctors who have no moral qualms about supporting the mob violence that is typical of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Sambhaji Brigade and the Shiv Sena.
It is this contradiction of feeling entitled to absolute protection from mob attacks but not raising a voice when other citizens suffer similar violence, that India’s medical community urgently needs to discuss and introspect on. While the medical community regularly (and rightfully) demands and expect protection from mob violence, is it morally justified that it looks the other way when others are subjected to similar violence? Have India’s doctors forgotten that as part of the country’s most educated and respected members they have broader political and social responsibilities too?
Mob bullying and violence is among the most deplorable aspects of our society, and the fearless manner in which Indians assault fellow Indians makes one wonder if the constitution has some hidden special provision of a fundamental ‘Right to Beat Up’. Unless we start strongly condemning each and every instance of mob violence, eliminating such behaviour will remain a distant dream. We must condemn them all as citizens of the Indian nation rather than condemn them selectively as either doctors, academics, Bollywood stars, Hindus, Muslims, Marathas or Rajputs. After all, what we are collectively up against is not a few rogue individuals, but an all-pervasive culture of violence.
There is always strength in numbers. Just ask the mobs. What artists and doctors can hardly achieve through siloed struggles, they can very possibly achieve through a united effort. The most peaceful and the most lasting method to get rid of a dangerous cultural tendency is for more and more citizens to begin openly condemning it, until eventually the wave of condemnation forces that tendency out of cultural norm. With academics, artists and doctors arguably bearing the brunt of the mob bullying, they have sufficient reason to join ranks and begin a nationwide disavowal of the culture of mob violence. They need to speak out against such incidents whenever and against whomsoever they happen, for whatever reasons.
Thus, after the March 12 incident at the Dhule hospital, one expects not just the medical community but the broader citizenry too, to condemn the violence and to put pressure on authorities to punish the culprits. Similarly, when other professionals face mob attacks, one expects the medical community to also be at the forefront of the condemnation and of calls for decisive legal action. It is only as a united society, and not isolated professionals, that we can hope to challenge and tame such an all-pervasive culture of mob violence.
Kiran Kumbhar is a physician and health policy graduate engaged in public health awareness through writing.
February 08, 2017
India - Nagaland: Choose women's rights over tribal custom - Editorials in Live Mint and the Indian Express
[Two editorials speak out regarding opposition to quota for women in Nagaland]
Editorial in Livemint.com, February 08 2017
The elections for urban local bodies in Nagaland—slated to be held on 1 February—have been postponed in the light of violent protests against the provision of 33% reservation for women. The local elections have been due for more than 16 years now. In September 2012, the Nagaland state assembly had passed a resolution opposing the quota for women. However, this resolution was revoked by the assembly in November 2016, clearing the way for the elections to be held. The assembly and the T.R. Zeliang government were responding to an interim order by the Supreme Court in a petition filed by the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA).
The NMA argues that article 243(T) of the Constitution, which provides for 33% women’s reservation in municipal bodies, applies to Nagaland as well. The opposite view—spearheaded by Naga Hoho, the apex body of Naga tribes—contends that article 371(A) gives precedence to Nagaland’s customary traditions and laws over the laws passed by Parliament. Moreover, the male-dominated tribal bodies assert that Naga society offers equal opportunity to their females obviating the need for any kind of affirmative action.
In reality, no woman has ever been elected to the state assembly in over 53 years of Nagaland’s existence as a state. It has sent a sole woman representative—late Rano M. Shaiza in 1977—to Parliament. The village development boards in the state, on the other hand, do have 25% seats reserved for women. But most of the tribal bodies which act as the custodians of tribal culture and traditions are dominated by men. As a result, the property and inheritance rights are highly skewed against women. This is also a system developed over the years to keep property from being taken outside the community in the eventuality of a woman deciding to marry outside the tribe.
Given the way the arguments are stacked, the first issue at stake here is the writ of the Constitution and the Supreme Court against the power of local customs and traditions. The right of Naga Hoho to speak for local customs can indeed be challenged, but focusing on merely that aspect provides a convenient excuse for not taking the difficult issue head on. As far as gender rights go, Indian laws and community-specific orthodoxies have gone against each other a number of times. The perennial debate on uniform civil code and the recent controversies over the rights of women to enter certain religious places are the best examples.
These debates are just a bit more complex in a state like Nagaland due to its unique history, tribal status, a special relationship with the Union of India enshrined in the Constitution, and the fact of it being riven by India’s longest running insurgency. Even a progressive Indian law can quickly be reduced to a conspiracy by New Delhi to dilute Naga nationalism.
The contest is not confined to the issue of gender rights. It was, for instance in Tamil Nadu, animal rights pitted against local traditions in the recent Jallikattu controversy. One-size-fits-all policies designed in New Delhi without accounting for local and varied granularities have indeed been problematic. But equally, the argument for autonomy has also been misused by communities to perpetuate their own internal inequities. This has certainly been the case for gender rights. A uniform civil code guaranteeing a basic minimum on gender rights is imperative and should be non-negotiable.
The second issue here is one of reservations. Even if the goal of women’s empowerment is a worthy one, is the policy of reservations the right means to get to it? This matter was vociferously debated when the United Progressive Alliance government had introduced a constitutional amendment to institute 33% reservation for women in the legislatures. While some members of Parliament had raised excellent points both in support and opposition of that bill, a few had shown their worst behaviour, forcing the use of marshals to evict them from the house.
The under-representation of women in Indian legislatures is a fact: among 193 countries ranked by Inter-Parliamentary Union, India’s lower house stands at a poor 145 (behind neighbouring Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal) in terms of women’s representation. But the means to address it can be many. One of the prominent alternatives suggested to reservations in legislatures was reservations in tickets distributed by political parties. But this is not foolproof either as political parties might distribute tickets to women from seats which they don’t expect to win.
Another objection to reservations is that women’s empowerment cannot take place by women winning elections against other women. But the outcomes in local body elections—which provide for women’s reservations—show that women are now steadily eating into the unreserved seats as well. Reservations for women are also less prone to creating entrenched political economies which tend to convert public goods into club goods for a handful.
A former French minister, Françoise Giroud, had once said that women will be men’s equals only if incompetent women could hold important jobs just like men did. Taking the cue, men in Nagaland should concede and the state government shouldn’t.
o o o
Indian Express - February 8, 2017
Editorial
Kohima: The Kohima Municipal Council office which was set ablaze by
Naga tribals during their violent protest, in Kohima on Friday. (PTI
Photo)
The Nagaland government’s decision to defer elections to urban local
bodies shows that it remains in thrall to the state’s powerful tribal
bodies. These influential male-dominated groups fomented unrest over the
state government’s decision to reserve 33 per cent of seats for women
in civic bodies, slated to go to the polls in the first week of
February. The Naga Hoho, the body that represents the state’s 16 tribal
groups, contends that the reservation violates the safeguards to the
tribal customary laws provided by the Constitution’s Article 371A. But
women’s rights groups in the state argue that since municipalities and
town councils are not customary institutions, women should be entitled
to the reservations in these urban local bodies mandated by the 74th
amendment to the Constitution. In the run-up to the elections, the state
government had affirmed its commitment to this constitutional
provision. But by backing off in the face of violence incited by tribal
groups, the Nagaland government has shown its lack of resolve to fulfill
its constitutional obligation to gender justice.
This volte-face could have been foretold. Nagaland delayed the adoption of the 74th amendment by 13 years because the state government did not want to upset the tribal groups. In 2011, women’s groups challenged the state government’s refusal to hold elections to urban local bodies in the Gauhati High Court. In its response, the Nagaland government said it had received representations that opposed the reservation of seats for women “on grounds that it was against Naga customs”. The court found the state government’s arguments “flimsy” and directed it to hold elections. The Nagaland government, however, managed a stay against the order in the Supreme Court. In April 2016, however, the apex court vacated the stay order.
That the state government has unresistingly pandered to the anxieties of the tribal groups says something about its inability to stand above the contradictions of Nagaland’s society. At 76.69 per cent, women’s literacy in Nagaland is far above the national average. Naga women work in fields, excel in business, and as academics and professionals. But customary laws prevent them from claiming rights to land or inheriting ancestral property. Since Rano Mese Shaiza was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1977, no Naga woman has made it to Parliament. The Nagaland state assembly has never had a woman member. It is unfortunate that another chance to resolve these contradictions has been lost.
Editorial in Livemint.com, February 08 2017
Communities can’t veto women’s reservation
A basic minimum on gender rights should be non-negotiable even in a state with special privileges like Nagaland
The elections for urban local bodies in Nagaland—slated to be held on 1 February—have been postponed in the light of violent protests against the provision of 33% reservation for women. The local elections have been due for more than 16 years now. In September 2012, the Nagaland state assembly had passed a resolution opposing the quota for women. However, this resolution was revoked by the assembly in November 2016, clearing the way for the elections to be held. The assembly and the T.R. Zeliang government were responding to an interim order by the Supreme Court in a petition filed by the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA).
The NMA argues that article 243(T) of the Constitution, which provides for 33% women’s reservation in municipal bodies, applies to Nagaland as well. The opposite view—spearheaded by Naga Hoho, the apex body of Naga tribes—contends that article 371(A) gives precedence to Nagaland’s customary traditions and laws over the laws passed by Parliament. Moreover, the male-dominated tribal bodies assert that Naga society offers equal opportunity to their females obviating the need for any kind of affirmative action.
In reality, no woman has ever been elected to the state assembly in over 53 years of Nagaland’s existence as a state. It has sent a sole woman representative—late Rano M. Shaiza in 1977—to Parliament. The village development boards in the state, on the other hand, do have 25% seats reserved for women. But most of the tribal bodies which act as the custodians of tribal culture and traditions are dominated by men. As a result, the property and inheritance rights are highly skewed against women. This is also a system developed over the years to keep property from being taken outside the community in the eventuality of a woman deciding to marry outside the tribe.
Given the way the arguments are stacked, the first issue at stake here is the writ of the Constitution and the Supreme Court against the power of local customs and traditions. The right of Naga Hoho to speak for local customs can indeed be challenged, but focusing on merely that aspect provides a convenient excuse for not taking the difficult issue head on. As far as gender rights go, Indian laws and community-specific orthodoxies have gone against each other a number of times. The perennial debate on uniform civil code and the recent controversies over the rights of women to enter certain religious places are the best examples.
These debates are just a bit more complex in a state like Nagaland due to its unique history, tribal status, a special relationship with the Union of India enshrined in the Constitution, and the fact of it being riven by India’s longest running insurgency. Even a progressive Indian law can quickly be reduced to a conspiracy by New Delhi to dilute Naga nationalism.
The contest is not confined to the issue of gender rights. It was, for instance in Tamil Nadu, animal rights pitted against local traditions in the recent Jallikattu controversy. One-size-fits-all policies designed in New Delhi without accounting for local and varied granularities have indeed been problematic. But equally, the argument for autonomy has also been misused by communities to perpetuate their own internal inequities. This has certainly been the case for gender rights. A uniform civil code guaranteeing a basic minimum on gender rights is imperative and should be non-negotiable.
The second issue here is one of reservations. Even if the goal of women’s empowerment is a worthy one, is the policy of reservations the right means to get to it? This matter was vociferously debated when the United Progressive Alliance government had introduced a constitutional amendment to institute 33% reservation for women in the legislatures. While some members of Parliament had raised excellent points both in support and opposition of that bill, a few had shown their worst behaviour, forcing the use of marshals to evict them from the house.
The under-representation of women in Indian legislatures is a fact: among 193 countries ranked by Inter-Parliamentary Union, India’s lower house stands at a poor 145 (behind neighbouring Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal) in terms of women’s representation. But the means to address it can be many. One of the prominent alternatives suggested to reservations in legislatures was reservations in tickets distributed by political parties. But this is not foolproof either as political parties might distribute tickets to women from seats which they don’t expect to win.
Another objection to reservations is that women’s empowerment cannot take place by women winning elections against other women. But the outcomes in local body elections—which provide for women’s reservations—show that women are now steadily eating into the unreserved seats as well. Reservations for women are also less prone to creating entrenched political economies which tend to convert public goods into club goods for a handful.
A former French minister, Françoise Giroud, had once said that women will be men’s equals only if incompetent women could hold important jobs just like men did. Taking the cue, men in Nagaland should concede and the state government shouldn’t.
o o o
Indian Express - February 8, 2017
Editorial
An opportunity lost
In face-off between tribal custom and gender justice, Nagaland government abdicates its responsibility
February 8, 2017 12:04 am
Kohima: The Kohima Municipal Council office which was set ablaze by
Naga tribals during their violent protest, in Kohima on Friday. (PTI
Photo)
The Nagaland government’s decision to defer elections to urban local
bodies shows that it remains in thrall to the state’s powerful tribal
bodies. These influential male-dominated groups fomented unrest over the
state government’s decision to reserve 33 per cent of seats for women
in civic bodies, slated to go to the polls in the first week of
February. The Naga Hoho, the body that represents the state’s 16 tribal
groups, contends that the reservation violates the safeguards to the
tribal customary laws provided by the Constitution’s Article 371A. But
women’s rights groups in the state argue that since municipalities and
town councils are not customary institutions, women should be entitled
to the reservations in these urban local bodies mandated by the 74th
amendment to the Constitution. In the run-up to the elections, the state
government had affirmed its commitment to this constitutional
provision. But by backing off in the face of violence incited by tribal
groups, the Nagaland government has shown its lack of resolve to fulfill
its constitutional obligation to gender justice.This volte-face could have been foretold. Nagaland delayed the adoption of the 74th amendment by 13 years because the state government did not want to upset the tribal groups. In 2011, women’s groups challenged the state government’s refusal to hold elections to urban local bodies in the Gauhati High Court. In its response, the Nagaland government said it had received representations that opposed the reservation of seats for women “on grounds that it was against Naga customs”. The court found the state government’s arguments “flimsy” and directed it to hold elections. The Nagaland government, however, managed a stay against the order in the Supreme Court. In April 2016, however, the apex court vacated the stay order.
That the state government has unresistingly pandered to the anxieties of the tribal groups says something about its inability to stand above the contradictions of Nagaland’s society. At 76.69 per cent, women’s literacy in Nagaland is far above the national average. Naga women work in fields, excel in business, and as academics and professionals. But customary laws prevent them from claiming rights to land or inheriting ancestral property. Since Rano Mese Shaiza was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1977, no Naga woman has made it to Parliament. The Nagaland state assembly has never had a woman member. It is unfortunate that another chance to resolve these contradictions has been lost.
January 18, 2017
Rethinking “National Culture” of India (Razak Khan)
TRAFO -
by Razak Khan
This post highlights one strand of the complex pattern of intellectual entanglements between Indian Muslim and German intellectuals in the twentieth century. I suggest that the issue of minority’s position with respect to national culture were central to the histories of Germany and India in the twentieth century.[i] Following Aamir Mufti´s suggestion, this post situates the problematic status of “Minority” as it emerged as the “Jewish Question” in Germany and traces its re-appearance and persistence as the “Muslim Question” in colonial and post-colonial India.[ii] The entangled intellectual history of Indian Muslim scholarly writings on the issue of “Muslim Question” and minority integration in India share a deep affinity with German thought, particularly on the issue of national culture (Kultur), self-cultivation, education (Bildung/Erziehung) and citizenship ideals that dominated the intellectual debates on the “Jewish Question” and emancipation in Germany.[iii] Kris Manjapra notes that in the “Age of Entanglement” Indo-German connections were forged and sustained both in regulated institutional contexts but also in affective personal ways.[iv] I explore these affective histories and archives by looking at institutional connections between Indian Muslim intellectuals and their German counterparts in the University context and by also illuminating personal relations and friendships forged as teachers and students that led to their evolution as intellectual interlocutors and innovators. The main exemplars in this history are Syed Abid Husain (1896–1978) and Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) within a larger connected network of intellectuals.
Crises are interesting temporalities that produce new entangled histories. Abid Husain was among the many Indian students who moved from English Universities to Germany for higher education in the politically volatile 1920s. The post-first world war period was marked by political, economic and cultural turbulence but also new transregional imaginations, ideas, and connections in Germany. Diverse actors ranging from Pan-Islamist agitators, religious proselytizers, nationalist and anti-colonial intellectuals interacted with each other in the cosmopolitan Weimar Berlin.[v] South Asian and German intellectuals showed remarkable openness to mutual learning. Husain studied and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Herbert Spencer under the supervision of the German educationist and psychologist Eduard Spranger at the University of Berlin. The intellectual exchange lasted beyond Husain’s Berlin residence, continuing in private exchange of letters and ideas.[vi] Subsequently, Husain also translated Spranger´s influential writing on the issue of youth psychology and education.[vii] Questions around youth, education and national culture serve as the running leitmotif that can be traced in Spranger and Husain´s long-lasting Indo-German intellectual exchange which continued even after the division of Germany and partition of India: two crucial events that symbolized the “Minority Question” and “National Culture” politics in Germany and India.
Eduard Spranger remained concerned with post-war intellectual and
cultural development in West Germany and continued to expound on the
themes of culture, education and university that were collected in his
book, Culture Questions of Our Times (Kulturfragen der Gegenwart).[viii]
His post-war writings also took into account global narratives and
polemic on culture, pedagogy and the Nation State that also included
developments in the philosophy and practices of higher education in
India. Abid Husain notes in his autobiography that Spranger believed
that while West Germany made miraculous economic progress after the war,
“only an emphasis on education and citizenship ideal could revitalize
revival of Germany´s true spirit.”[ix]
In fact, to realise this dream, Spranger wanted to start a democratic
educational society that would promote individual freedom, social
justice and create a humanist culture marked by deep civility. This
society was conceived as introducing a consistent, disciplined change in
the educational and political sphere by emphasizing the complex
relationship between education, citizenship and National development.[x]
While Spranger´s educational philosophy and ideas particularly on
youth, education and nation building project slowly declined in West
Germany, they acquired new life and were put in practice in India. Abid
Husain introduced them not just in his household in Jamia Nagar but also
played a key role in implementing them at the Jamia Milia Islamia
School and University as well as through his advisory role in education
and culture ministry at the larger policy level in postcolonial India.
Abid Husain, therefore, emerges as a crucial actor in the long process
of cultural translation, adaptation, and transformation in the
Indo–German entangled intellectual history.
Production of “National Culture” and “Minority Question”
The vision of education and enlightened citizens that were so dear to both of these scholars lay in ruin in divided Germany but found new fertile ground in post-partition India. When Abid Husain was offered a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to work on the subject of minority and national culture, he chose to spend his fellowship year with Eduard Spranger in Tübingen during 1954-55 on revising and translating his book. The book has an interesting history: it was initially written in Urdu as Indian Nationalism and National Culture (Hindustani qaumiyat aur qaumi tahzib) in three volumes in 1946 before the partition of India.[xi] However, as noted by the author in the preface of the revised and translated English version The National Culture of India, It was not just revised but also recast “so as to take a more comprehensive view of the problems we have to solve before a new cultural synthesis, which is necessary to ensure our national unity and freedom can be achieved.”[xii] The revised Urdu title of the book was Qaumi tahzib ka maslah (The Question of National Culture). The violent partition of India did not solve the “Muslim Question”; instead, it created a long lasting “Culture Question” marked by suspicion of the Muslims in India and question of minority integration into national culture.[xiii]
Beyond nationalist frames, it is also important to situate the translation and re-casting of this text within the larger global cold war history and politics of knowledge production about Islam.[xiv] The Rockefeller Foundation reports in the field of Humanities in 1953 emphasized that it “sought to identify and stimulate new cultural growth” and towards this direction gave support to intellectuals for writing recent history and facilitate “better understanding of international problems.”[xv] Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship allowed Husain to revise and translate his book into the English language as part of the larger initiative to understand the role of Islam and Muslims in Indian history. Interestingly, Rockefeller Foundation also funded similar projects of history-writing, most notably the work of Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi – doyen of Pakistani nationalist history-writing exemplified in his work The Muslim Community of The Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent. This book was also written during a Rockefeller Grant at Columbia University. Qureshi arrived at the conclusion of two-nation theory of religious and cultural difference that was contradictory to Husain´s composite nationalism thesis.[xvi] The study of Islam and Muslim culture in South Asia continue to remain a deeply contested topic between Indian and Pakistani historians. However, it is to Husain´s analysis that we must return to understand the responses to the vexed question of National History, Culture and Minority Identity in post-partition India.
The “physically bracing and mentally stimulating” environment of the university town of Tübingen in divided Germany allowed Husain to explore some of the shared questions about minority, national culture and education.[xvii] The book was part of Husain´s intellectual efforts to rethink the place of Muslims in the national culture of India. Husain reflects on the history and prospects of cultural unity and possibilities of a “New National Culture” in post-partition India. Husain´s work has been situated within the writings of Indian Nationalist Historians especially his teacher Tara Chand on composite culture and nationalism in India.[xviii] Husain also acknowledges the influence of his Indian teacher Tara Chand. However, in conceptualizing a new national culture as well as resolving the crisis of the existing one, Husain´s “Nationalist” ideas have a deep transnational – especially German – flavour.
The German influence over Husain´s thought and writings are evident in the salience of national culture and its relationship with education. Andrew Sartori has drawn our attention to the trope of Germanism and Kultur concept particularly in colonial Bengal while C. M Naim has pointed at the French influence in re-shaping conception of civilization in Arabic and into Urdu.[xix] The conceptual reconfiguration of Qaum as nation, Tamaddun as civilization and Tahzib as culture concept in Urdu language and Muslim thought reveals the entangled transregional and multi-lingual (English, French, German as well as Arabic and Persian) nature of intellectual and conceptual history.[xx] This aspect is also evident in Abid Husain´s translation and writings. In the revised book he starts with a comprehensive definition of culture and its various aspects. According to Husain “culture is a sense of ultimate values possessed by a particular society as expressed in its collective institutions, by its individual members in their dispositions, feelings, attitudes and manners as well as in significant forms which they give to material objects.”[xxi] In this conception, culture has objective mental aspect, subjective aspect and material aspect. Husain further elaborates these various aspects so that ”the collective complexes (state, society, art, science) which are permanent results of the attempt to create ultimate value could be regarded as its objective mental aspect, the qualities and attitudes of individuals inspired by these values as its subjective aspect, and the physical objects in which these values are embodied e.g. buildings, pictures etc. would be its material aspect.”[xxii] In this understanding, culture is seen as distinct from the “two allied concepts – religion and civilization.” Husain calls religion “soul of culture” and civilization as the “higher order of culture.” However, Husain cautioned that degenerated religion and civilization devoid of moral value could turn as “enemy of culture.”[xxiii] Thus, evidently Husain was not advocating the civilizational discourse but the concept of national culture as envisaged in the German concept of Kultur as distinct from the French and English concept and discourse of Zivilisation/Civilization.
Culture (Kultur) and education (Bildung/Erziehung) were key concepts in Spranger´s writings. As Birgit Althans summarizes, in his writings on education and culture Eduard Spranger advanced a view of culture as “objective spirit,” produced by mankind which ought to be transferred to the “subjective spirit” of the individual, youth, or child.”[xxiv] Spranger insisted that “Individual cultivation could not occur without the concurrent development of the national character.”[xxv] Bildung or self-cultivation through education was the connecting link between individual and national culture. Thus, Spranger´s culture project is allied with the nation-state project through education.[xxvi] For this project, Spranger advocated the “cultivation of cultural leadership” that would eventually lead to “New Culture.”[xxvii] The role of the pedagogue as key actor in the emotional integration with nation was an important aspect of Spranger´s vision. Husain acknowledged the deep influence of Spranger in shaping his understanding of philosophy of culture and education.[xxviii] He also advocated education as the medium of national integration, but he further elaborated that “This was not just education of body and mind but also spirit”.[xxix] Thus, affective education was the key to bringing true emotional integration with national culture. The revised edition not only diagnosed the problem of national culture and integration in post-Partition India but also recommended solutions: inaugurating a Youth Festival “to bring students from all over India to live together and understand cultural difference” and the setting up of new cultural institutions and academies “to bring together artists in common cultural creation as representative of group-cultures.”[xxx] The National Book Trust was involved in this process through writer’s camp and cultural exchange scheme.[xxxi]
A recurring theme in the German reform pedagogy thought, exemplified by Spranger, was the central role of an enlightened leadership led by the intellectual class to resolve the issue of integration in the national culture. Not just artists and writers but also teachers were involved, and large-scale teacher exchange within India was envisaged to create interaction among diverse linguistic cultures of India and to find the common thread of national culture. In this vision for national integration teachers and fellows of national academies were to be the “makers as well as the messengers of a national culture.”[xxxii] Husain emphasized that minority intellectual leaders, especially teachers, were to play a major role to “integrate our emotions and aspirations, thereby ensuring the unity and freedom of the country.”[xxxiii] Here we find the postcolonial Nehruvian discursive logic of “unity in diversity” being heralded as the mark of Indian National culture. It was not just a solution for post-partition India but also to the global cultural crisis precipitated by Cold War politics. Culture and Cold War politics were connected processes not just in Europe but also in South Asia, based on the fear of the national elites and propelled by the urgent need of harmonising diversity of group cultures with the fundamental unity of a common national culture. [xxxiv]
Abid Husain received the Sahitya Akademi Book Award in 1956 from the Government of India for his work on national culture and integration. As Mushirul Hasan observes Abid Husain represented a “secular integrationist agenda for Indian Unity in which national culture was emphasized over Muslim culture.”[xxxv] The onus here remains with the minority to transcend its minority religious identity and culture with cultural integration into national unity. The emancipation project through Bildung ideal was taken enthusiastically by elite Jews in Germany to transcend their Jewishness and become German citizen. The Nationalist Indian Muslim educationists at the Jamia Milia Islamia (National Islamic University) and the educational policy designed by them brought their German education and experience to the conception of education and pedagogues as vital to the creation of an enlightened and democratic society that is populated by co-operative citizen in post-partition India.
Institutionalizing Islamic Studies and Muslim Integration
The Indo-German intellectual connections were further employed for Indian Muslim integrationist agenda at the Jamia Milia Islamia University. This intellectual connection and influence are evident in the vision of a new Islamic Studies and Comparative Religious studies attempted at the Zakir Husain Institute of Islamic Studies established in 1971 at the Jamia Milia Islamia University. Abid Husain forged new intellectual connections with scholars of Islam and South Asia in Germany. Husain visited Germany again in 1967 regarding plans for launching a new society and journal “Islam in Modern Age” at the Jamia Milia Islamia University. His travelogue and letters recount his meetings and discussion with eminent Islamic studies scholars in Germany. When Husain visited Tübingen again, Spranger was no more, but the small town had become an important center of traditional Indology and knowledge production about India as well as Islamic Studies in West Germany under the leadership of Prof Rudi Peret, Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies, he also directed the Orientalisches Seminar in Tübingen. Prof. Peret expressed his concern about the state of Muslims in Pakistan and agreed with Husain´s project that only Muslims in free secular India could bring about modern reform in South Asian Islam and supported the initiative launched by Jamia Muslim scholars.[xxxvi] Prof. Otto Spies, Arabic and Islamic Studies scholar at Bonn University was an old friend of Husain and offered warm support to his initiative at Jamia. At Bonn University, Husain also encountered the rising young Islamic Studies scholar Annemarie Schimmel. Husain was deeply impressed by this interesting lady who was fluent in many languages including Urdu. They spoke about Islam, Muslims and Urdu Literature in South Asia and bonded over a common research interest in Mirza Ghalib´s poetry. Schimmel remained in touch with Husain. Many of the internationally renowned Islamic studies scholars including W.C Smith and Annemarie Schimmel supported the new Islamic studies globally and especially at Jamia. Schimmel contributed articles for the journal Islam in Modern Age and also forged intellectual relations and friendship with Jamia Muslim scholars as evidenced by the letters exchanged regarding Iqbal and Ghalib and Urdu Literature. Annemarie Schimmel also acknowledged and thanked Abid Husain in her work on Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. [xxxvii]
Conclusion
The afterlife of German ideas can still be found in the institutional archives in Jamia University and as cherished family memories in Jamia Nagar neighbourhood. The entangled Indo-German intellectual history is also spread in the affective archives of shared ideas, feelings and resultant friendship forged between individuals and that also led to connections, exchange and circulations of texts and concepts both in India and Germany. More crucially they continue to show how ideas remained profoundly transnational and manage to cross barriers in the time of partition walls and boundaries in Germany and India.
[i] I am indebted to Prof. Schirin Amir-Moazami and Dr. Ruth Streicher for exemplary editorial comments and support. I also benefited from discussions with members of Modern India in German Archives project and my colleagues at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen University. Special Thanks to Prof. Ravi Ahuja, Prof. Faisal Devji, Prof. Kris Manjapra and Prof. Margrit Pernau for interesting conversations on the Indo-German entangled intellectual histories.
[ii]Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.p.2.
[iii]There exist rich historiography on German intellectual debates on Kultur, Bildung and Jewish emancipation. On the German concept of Kultur see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Revised edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. On Bildung see Rebekka Harlocher, The Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung: A Comparative Cultural History. New York: Routledge, 2016. On Jewish pursuit of Bildung ideal and integration see George Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism. Hebrew Union College Press, 1997.
[iv]Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014, p.6.
[v]Götz Nordbruch and Umar Ryad eds., Transnational Islam in Interwar Europe: Muslim Activists and Thinkers, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
[vi]Syed Abid Husain, Saliḥah Abid Ḥusain ed., Avaz-i dost: Ḍakṭar Syed Abid Ḥusain ke khatut̤, Begam Ṣaliḥah Abid Ḥusain ke nam. Adab Pablikeshanz, 1994.
[vii]Eduard Spranger, Psychologie des Jugendalters. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1924.For Urdu translation see, Syed Abid Husain, Nafsiyat-i unfuvan-i sabab, Delhi, 1958.
[viii]Eduard Spranger, Kulturfragen der Gegenwart. Quelle & Meyer,1953.
[ix]Syed Abid Ḥusain, Ḥayat-i Abid: k̲hvud navisht-i Ḍakṭar Abid Ḥusain. Delhi: Maktabah-yi Jāmiah, 1984.
[x] Ibid., 165.
[xi]Syed Abid Ḥusain, Hindustani qaumiyat aur qaumi tahzib. Delhi : Maktabah-yi Jamiah, 1946.
[xii]Syed Abid Husain, Qaumi tahzib ka maslah. Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu, 1955. The English translation was first published in 1956, Second Revised and Enlarged edition, 1961. I consulted Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978, 2006 reprint. Preface to the Second Edition.
[xiii] Gyanendra Pandey, “Can a Muslim be an Indian?” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 608-629.
[xiv] For an insightful study of Cold War knowledge politics and Islamic Studies see, Rosemary R. Hicks, “Comparative Religion and the Cold War Transformation of Indo-Persian Mysticisms and Liberal Islamic Modernity.”In Markus Dresler & Arvind Mandair eds. Secularism and Religion Making. New York: Oxford University Press,2011,p.141-168.
[xv]Rockfeller Foundation Report,1953,p.280.
[xvi]Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Muslim Community of The Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (610-1947). Hague: Mount & Co. Publishers, 1962,p.7.
[xvii]Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978,p. xv.
[xviii]Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on lndian Culture. Allahabad, The Indian Press, 1963. Also, Javed Alam, “Composite Nationalism and its Historiography.” South Asia, VOL XXII (1999),pp.29-37.
[xix]Andrew Sartori, „Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‚Germanism‘ in Colonial Bengal,“ Modern Intellectual History, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007.pp77-93. C. M Naim, “Interrogating, “The East,” “Culture,” and “Loss”in Abdul Halim Sharar´s Guzahsta Luckna´u. In Alka Patel &Karen Leonard eds. Indo-Muslim Culture in Transition. Leiden: Brill,2011,p.189-205.
[xx] Faisal Devji. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. Harvard University Press, 2013.Margrit Pernau, H. Jordheim, E. Saada, C. Bailey, E. Wigen, O. Bashkin, M. Kia, M. Singh, R. Majumdar, A.C. Messner, O. Benesch, M. Park and J. Ifversen. Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe. New York: Oxford University Press,2015.
[xxi]Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978,p. xxiv.
[xxii] Ibid.,xxiii-xxiv.
[xxiii] Ibid., Xxiv-xxv.
[xxiv] Birgit Althans, “The Use of Culture in Education-From Shared Meanings in Contest and Competition.” In Birgitta Qvarsell, Christoph Wulf: Culture and Education. (European studies in education, Vol. 16). Münster; New York; Mflnchen, Berlin: Waxmann, 2003, p. 52.
[xxv] Eduard Spranger, Das Deutsche Bildungsideal der Gegenwart in Geschichtsphilosophischer Beleuchtung. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1928,p.68-69. Also, Eduard Spranger, Kultur und Erziehung: Gesammelte Pädagogische Aufsatze. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1928.
[xxvi]Birgit Althans, “The Use of Culture in Education-From Shared Meanings in Contest and Competition.” In Birgitta Qvarsell, Christoph Wulf: Culture and Education. (European studies in education, Vol. 16). Münster; New York; München, Berlin: Waxmann, 2003.p. 52.
[xxvii]Colin Leader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim´s Sociology as Political Education. New Brunswick: Transaction Publisher,2002,p.61.
[xxviii] Syed Abid Ḥusain, Ḥayat-i Ābid: k̲hvud navisht-i Ḍakṭar Ābid Ḥusain. Delhi: Maktabah-yi Jāmiah,1984.p.164.
[xxix] Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978, p.211.
[xxx] Ibid.
[xxxi]Ibid., 199.
[xxxii] Ibid.
[xxxiii] Ibid., 204.
[xxxiv] On National culture debates in Pakistan see, Saadia Toor, The State of Islam. Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan. London: Pluto Press, 2011.
[xxxv]Mushirul Hasan. Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence. London: Hurst,1997, p. 246.
[xxxvi]Ṣaliḥah Abid Husain, ed. Rah navard-i shauq: safar namah. Maktabah-yi Jāmiah, 1979,p. 102
[xxxvii] Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent.Leiden:Brill.1980.
Razak Khan is Research Fellow in the „Modern India in German Archives“ project at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) Göttingen University. His current research project is titled “From Berlin to Delhi: Education, Intellectual Exchange and Politics of Cultural Translation in the life and writings of Syed Abid Husain (1896-1978)” and examines the entangled history of Indo-German intellectual connections. He has edited a special issue of Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Volume 58, Issue 5, 2015 and published commentaries in Economic and Political Weekly. He is also completing a book project “Princely Past, Subaltern Present: Locality, Histories, and Identities in Rampur.“
Rethinking “National Culture” of India: An Entangled Indo-German Intellectual History
by Razak Khan
This post highlights one strand of the complex pattern of intellectual entanglements between Indian Muslim and German intellectuals in the twentieth century. I suggest that the issue of minority’s position with respect to national culture were central to the histories of Germany and India in the twentieth century.[i] Following Aamir Mufti´s suggestion, this post situates the problematic status of “Minority” as it emerged as the “Jewish Question” in Germany and traces its re-appearance and persistence as the “Muslim Question” in colonial and post-colonial India.[ii] The entangled intellectual history of Indian Muslim scholarly writings on the issue of “Muslim Question” and minority integration in India share a deep affinity with German thought, particularly on the issue of national culture (Kultur), self-cultivation, education (Bildung/Erziehung) and citizenship ideals that dominated the intellectual debates on the “Jewish Question” and emancipation in Germany.[iii] Kris Manjapra notes that in the “Age of Entanglement” Indo-German connections were forged and sustained both in regulated institutional contexts but also in affective personal ways.[iv] I explore these affective histories and archives by looking at institutional connections between Indian Muslim intellectuals and their German counterparts in the University context and by also illuminating personal relations and friendships forged as teachers and students that led to their evolution as intellectual interlocutors and innovators. The main exemplars in this history are Syed Abid Husain (1896–1978) and Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) within a larger connected network of intellectuals.
Crises are interesting temporalities that produce new entangled histories. Abid Husain was among the many Indian students who moved from English Universities to Germany for higher education in the politically volatile 1920s. The post-first world war period was marked by political, economic and cultural turbulence but also new transregional imaginations, ideas, and connections in Germany. Diverse actors ranging from Pan-Islamist agitators, religious proselytizers, nationalist and anti-colonial intellectuals interacted with each other in the cosmopolitan Weimar Berlin.[v] South Asian and German intellectuals showed remarkable openness to mutual learning. Husain studied and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Herbert Spencer under the supervision of the German educationist and psychologist Eduard Spranger at the University of Berlin. The intellectual exchange lasted beyond Husain’s Berlin residence, continuing in private exchange of letters and ideas.[vi] Subsequently, Husain also translated Spranger´s influential writing on the issue of youth psychology and education.[vii] Questions around youth, education and national culture serve as the running leitmotif that can be traced in Spranger and Husain´s long-lasting Indo-German intellectual exchange which continued even after the division of Germany and partition of India: two crucial events that symbolized the “Minority Question” and “National Culture” politics in Germany and India.
Reception
by Indian students in Germany to Professors of Berlin University, 1926.
In the photo can be seen: Dr. Abid Husain (First from right). The
publisher and author thanks the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin as the
depository of Prof. Krüger’s estate for the friendly permission to use
the photographs of this ZMO archive collection.
Production of “National Culture” and “Minority Question”
The vision of education and enlightened citizens that were so dear to both of these scholars lay in ruin in divided Germany but found new fertile ground in post-partition India. When Abid Husain was offered a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to work on the subject of minority and national culture, he chose to spend his fellowship year with Eduard Spranger in Tübingen during 1954-55 on revising and translating his book. The book has an interesting history: it was initially written in Urdu as Indian Nationalism and National Culture (Hindustani qaumiyat aur qaumi tahzib) in three volumes in 1946 before the partition of India.[xi] However, as noted by the author in the preface of the revised and translated English version The National Culture of India, It was not just revised but also recast “so as to take a more comprehensive view of the problems we have to solve before a new cultural synthesis, which is necessary to ensure our national unity and freedom can be achieved.”[xii] The revised Urdu title of the book was Qaumi tahzib ka maslah (The Question of National Culture). The violent partition of India did not solve the “Muslim Question”; instead, it created a long lasting “Culture Question” marked by suspicion of the Muslims in India and question of minority integration into national culture.[xiii]
Beyond nationalist frames, it is also important to situate the translation and re-casting of this text within the larger global cold war history and politics of knowledge production about Islam.[xiv] The Rockefeller Foundation reports in the field of Humanities in 1953 emphasized that it “sought to identify and stimulate new cultural growth” and towards this direction gave support to intellectuals for writing recent history and facilitate “better understanding of international problems.”[xv] Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship allowed Husain to revise and translate his book into the English language as part of the larger initiative to understand the role of Islam and Muslims in Indian history. Interestingly, Rockefeller Foundation also funded similar projects of history-writing, most notably the work of Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi – doyen of Pakistani nationalist history-writing exemplified in his work The Muslim Community of The Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent. This book was also written during a Rockefeller Grant at Columbia University. Qureshi arrived at the conclusion of two-nation theory of religious and cultural difference that was contradictory to Husain´s composite nationalism thesis.[xvi] The study of Islam and Muslim culture in South Asia continue to remain a deeply contested topic between Indian and Pakistani historians. However, it is to Husain´s analysis that we must return to understand the responses to the vexed question of National History, Culture and Minority Identity in post-partition India.
The “physically bracing and mentally stimulating” environment of the university town of Tübingen in divided Germany allowed Husain to explore some of the shared questions about minority, national culture and education.[xvii] The book was part of Husain´s intellectual efforts to rethink the place of Muslims in the national culture of India. Husain reflects on the history and prospects of cultural unity and possibilities of a “New National Culture” in post-partition India. Husain´s work has been situated within the writings of Indian Nationalist Historians especially his teacher Tara Chand on composite culture and nationalism in India.[xviii] Husain also acknowledges the influence of his Indian teacher Tara Chand. However, in conceptualizing a new national culture as well as resolving the crisis of the existing one, Husain´s “Nationalist” ideas have a deep transnational – especially German – flavour.
The German influence over Husain´s thought and writings are evident in the salience of national culture and its relationship with education. Andrew Sartori has drawn our attention to the trope of Germanism and Kultur concept particularly in colonial Bengal while C. M Naim has pointed at the French influence in re-shaping conception of civilization in Arabic and into Urdu.[xix] The conceptual reconfiguration of Qaum as nation, Tamaddun as civilization and Tahzib as culture concept in Urdu language and Muslim thought reveals the entangled transregional and multi-lingual (English, French, German as well as Arabic and Persian) nature of intellectual and conceptual history.[xx] This aspect is also evident in Abid Husain´s translation and writings. In the revised book he starts with a comprehensive definition of culture and its various aspects. According to Husain “culture is a sense of ultimate values possessed by a particular society as expressed in its collective institutions, by its individual members in their dispositions, feelings, attitudes and manners as well as in significant forms which they give to material objects.”[xxi] In this conception, culture has objective mental aspect, subjective aspect and material aspect. Husain further elaborates these various aspects so that ”the collective complexes (state, society, art, science) which are permanent results of the attempt to create ultimate value could be regarded as its objective mental aspect, the qualities and attitudes of individuals inspired by these values as its subjective aspect, and the physical objects in which these values are embodied e.g. buildings, pictures etc. would be its material aspect.”[xxii] In this understanding, culture is seen as distinct from the “two allied concepts – religion and civilization.” Husain calls religion “soul of culture” and civilization as the “higher order of culture.” However, Husain cautioned that degenerated religion and civilization devoid of moral value could turn as “enemy of culture.”[xxiii] Thus, evidently Husain was not advocating the civilizational discourse but the concept of national culture as envisaged in the German concept of Kultur as distinct from the French and English concept and discourse of Zivilisation/Civilization.
Culture (Kultur) and education (Bildung/Erziehung) were key concepts in Spranger´s writings. As Birgit Althans summarizes, in his writings on education and culture Eduard Spranger advanced a view of culture as “objective spirit,” produced by mankind which ought to be transferred to the “subjective spirit” of the individual, youth, or child.”[xxiv] Spranger insisted that “Individual cultivation could not occur without the concurrent development of the national character.”[xxv] Bildung or self-cultivation through education was the connecting link between individual and national culture. Thus, Spranger´s culture project is allied with the nation-state project through education.[xxvi] For this project, Spranger advocated the “cultivation of cultural leadership” that would eventually lead to “New Culture.”[xxvii] The role of the pedagogue as key actor in the emotional integration with nation was an important aspect of Spranger´s vision. Husain acknowledged the deep influence of Spranger in shaping his understanding of philosophy of culture and education.[xxviii] He also advocated education as the medium of national integration, but he further elaborated that “This was not just education of body and mind but also spirit”.[xxix] Thus, affective education was the key to bringing true emotional integration with national culture. The revised edition not only diagnosed the problem of national culture and integration in post-Partition India but also recommended solutions: inaugurating a Youth Festival “to bring students from all over India to live together and understand cultural difference” and the setting up of new cultural institutions and academies “to bring together artists in common cultural creation as representative of group-cultures.”[xxx] The National Book Trust was involved in this process through writer’s camp and cultural exchange scheme.[xxxi]
A recurring theme in the German reform pedagogy thought, exemplified by Spranger, was the central role of an enlightened leadership led by the intellectual class to resolve the issue of integration in the national culture. Not just artists and writers but also teachers were involved, and large-scale teacher exchange within India was envisaged to create interaction among diverse linguistic cultures of India and to find the common thread of national culture. In this vision for national integration teachers and fellows of national academies were to be the “makers as well as the messengers of a national culture.”[xxxii] Husain emphasized that minority intellectual leaders, especially teachers, were to play a major role to “integrate our emotions and aspirations, thereby ensuring the unity and freedom of the country.”[xxxiii] Here we find the postcolonial Nehruvian discursive logic of “unity in diversity” being heralded as the mark of Indian National culture. It was not just a solution for post-partition India but also to the global cultural crisis precipitated by Cold War politics. Culture and Cold War politics were connected processes not just in Europe but also in South Asia, based on the fear of the national elites and propelled by the urgent need of harmonising diversity of group cultures with the fundamental unity of a common national culture. [xxxiv]
Abid Husain received the Sahitya Akademi Book Award in 1956 from the Government of India for his work on national culture and integration. As Mushirul Hasan observes Abid Husain represented a “secular integrationist agenda for Indian Unity in which national culture was emphasized over Muslim culture.”[xxxv] The onus here remains with the minority to transcend its minority religious identity and culture with cultural integration into national unity. The emancipation project through Bildung ideal was taken enthusiastically by elite Jews in Germany to transcend their Jewishness and become German citizen. The Nationalist Indian Muslim educationists at the Jamia Milia Islamia (National Islamic University) and the educational policy designed by them brought their German education and experience to the conception of education and pedagogues as vital to the creation of an enlightened and democratic society that is populated by co-operative citizen in post-partition India.
Institutionalizing Islamic Studies and Muslim Integration
The Indo-German intellectual connections were further employed for Indian Muslim integrationist agenda at the Jamia Milia Islamia University. This intellectual connection and influence are evident in the vision of a new Islamic Studies and Comparative Religious studies attempted at the Zakir Husain Institute of Islamic Studies established in 1971 at the Jamia Milia Islamia University. Abid Husain forged new intellectual connections with scholars of Islam and South Asia in Germany. Husain visited Germany again in 1967 regarding plans for launching a new society and journal “Islam in Modern Age” at the Jamia Milia Islamia University. His travelogue and letters recount his meetings and discussion with eminent Islamic studies scholars in Germany. When Husain visited Tübingen again, Spranger was no more, but the small town had become an important center of traditional Indology and knowledge production about India as well as Islamic Studies in West Germany under the leadership of Prof Rudi Peret, Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies, he also directed the Orientalisches Seminar in Tübingen. Prof. Peret expressed his concern about the state of Muslims in Pakistan and agreed with Husain´s project that only Muslims in free secular India could bring about modern reform in South Asian Islam and supported the initiative launched by Jamia Muslim scholars.[xxxvi] Prof. Otto Spies, Arabic and Islamic Studies scholar at Bonn University was an old friend of Husain and offered warm support to his initiative at Jamia. At Bonn University, Husain also encountered the rising young Islamic Studies scholar Annemarie Schimmel. Husain was deeply impressed by this interesting lady who was fluent in many languages including Urdu. They spoke about Islam, Muslims and Urdu Literature in South Asia and bonded over a common research interest in Mirza Ghalib´s poetry. Schimmel remained in touch with Husain. Many of the internationally renowned Islamic studies scholars including W.C Smith and Annemarie Schimmel supported the new Islamic studies globally and especially at Jamia. Schimmel contributed articles for the journal Islam in Modern Age and also forged intellectual relations and friendship with Jamia Muslim scholars as evidenced by the letters exchanged regarding Iqbal and Ghalib and Urdu Literature. Annemarie Schimmel also acknowledged and thanked Abid Husain in her work on Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. [xxxvii]
Conclusion
The afterlife of German ideas can still be found in the institutional archives in Jamia University and as cherished family memories in Jamia Nagar neighbourhood. The entangled Indo-German intellectual history is also spread in the affective archives of shared ideas, feelings and resultant friendship forged between individuals and that also led to connections, exchange and circulations of texts and concepts both in India and Germany. More crucially they continue to show how ideas remained profoundly transnational and manage to cross barriers in the time of partition walls and boundaries in Germany and India.
[i] I am indebted to Prof. Schirin Amir-Moazami and Dr. Ruth Streicher for exemplary editorial comments and support. I also benefited from discussions with members of Modern India in German Archives project and my colleagues at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen University. Special Thanks to Prof. Ravi Ahuja, Prof. Faisal Devji, Prof. Kris Manjapra and Prof. Margrit Pernau for interesting conversations on the Indo-German entangled intellectual histories.
[ii]Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.p.2.
[iii]There exist rich historiography on German intellectual debates on Kultur, Bildung and Jewish emancipation. On the German concept of Kultur see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Revised edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. On Bildung see Rebekka Harlocher, The Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung: A Comparative Cultural History. New York: Routledge, 2016. On Jewish pursuit of Bildung ideal and integration see George Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism. Hebrew Union College Press, 1997.
[iv]Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014, p.6.
[v]Götz Nordbruch and Umar Ryad eds., Transnational Islam in Interwar Europe: Muslim Activists and Thinkers, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
[vi]Syed Abid Husain, Saliḥah Abid Ḥusain ed., Avaz-i dost: Ḍakṭar Syed Abid Ḥusain ke khatut̤, Begam Ṣaliḥah Abid Ḥusain ke nam. Adab Pablikeshanz, 1994.
[vii]Eduard Spranger, Psychologie des Jugendalters. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1924.For Urdu translation see, Syed Abid Husain, Nafsiyat-i unfuvan-i sabab, Delhi, 1958.
[viii]Eduard Spranger, Kulturfragen der Gegenwart. Quelle & Meyer,1953.
[ix]Syed Abid Ḥusain, Ḥayat-i Abid: k̲hvud navisht-i Ḍakṭar Abid Ḥusain. Delhi: Maktabah-yi Jāmiah, 1984.
[x] Ibid., 165.
[xi]Syed Abid Ḥusain, Hindustani qaumiyat aur qaumi tahzib. Delhi : Maktabah-yi Jamiah, 1946.
[xii]Syed Abid Husain, Qaumi tahzib ka maslah. Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu, 1955. The English translation was first published in 1956, Second Revised and Enlarged edition, 1961. I consulted Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978, 2006 reprint. Preface to the Second Edition.
[xiii] Gyanendra Pandey, “Can a Muslim be an Indian?” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 608-629.
[xiv] For an insightful study of Cold War knowledge politics and Islamic Studies see, Rosemary R. Hicks, “Comparative Religion and the Cold War Transformation of Indo-Persian Mysticisms and Liberal Islamic Modernity.”In Markus Dresler & Arvind Mandair eds. Secularism and Religion Making. New York: Oxford University Press,2011,p.141-168.
[xv]Rockfeller Foundation Report,1953,p.280.
[xvi]Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Muslim Community of The Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (610-1947). Hague: Mount & Co. Publishers, 1962,p.7.
[xvii]Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978,p. xv.
[xviii]Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on lndian Culture. Allahabad, The Indian Press, 1963. Also, Javed Alam, “Composite Nationalism and its Historiography.” South Asia, VOL XXII (1999),pp.29-37.
[xix]Andrew Sartori, „Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‚Germanism‘ in Colonial Bengal,“ Modern Intellectual History, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007.pp77-93. C. M Naim, “Interrogating, “The East,” “Culture,” and “Loss”in Abdul Halim Sharar´s Guzahsta Luckna´u. In Alka Patel &Karen Leonard eds. Indo-Muslim Culture in Transition. Leiden: Brill,2011,p.189-205.
[xx] Faisal Devji. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. Harvard University Press, 2013.Margrit Pernau, H. Jordheim, E. Saada, C. Bailey, E. Wigen, O. Bashkin, M. Kia, M. Singh, R. Majumdar, A.C. Messner, O. Benesch, M. Park and J. Ifversen. Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe. New York: Oxford University Press,2015.
[xxi]Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978,p. xxiv.
[xxii] Ibid.,xxiii-xxiv.
[xxiii] Ibid., Xxiv-xxv.
[xxiv] Birgit Althans, “The Use of Culture in Education-From Shared Meanings in Contest and Competition.” In Birgitta Qvarsell, Christoph Wulf: Culture and Education. (European studies in education, Vol. 16). Münster; New York; Mflnchen, Berlin: Waxmann, 2003, p. 52.
[xxv] Eduard Spranger, Das Deutsche Bildungsideal der Gegenwart in Geschichtsphilosophischer Beleuchtung. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1928,p.68-69. Also, Eduard Spranger, Kultur und Erziehung: Gesammelte Pädagogische Aufsatze. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1928.
[xxvi]Birgit Althans, “The Use of Culture in Education-From Shared Meanings in Contest and Competition.” In Birgitta Qvarsell, Christoph Wulf: Culture and Education. (European studies in education, Vol. 16). Münster; New York; München, Berlin: Waxmann, 2003.p. 52.
[xxvii]Colin Leader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim´s Sociology as Political Education. New Brunswick: Transaction Publisher,2002,p.61.
[xxviii] Syed Abid Ḥusain, Ḥayat-i Ābid: k̲hvud navisht-i Ḍakṭar Ābid Ḥusain. Delhi: Maktabah-yi Jāmiah,1984.p.164.
[xxix] Syed Abid Ḥusain, The National Culture of India. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978, p.211.
[xxx] Ibid.
[xxxi]Ibid., 199.
[xxxii] Ibid.
[xxxiii] Ibid., 204.
[xxxiv] On National culture debates in Pakistan see, Saadia Toor, The State of Islam. Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan. London: Pluto Press, 2011.
[xxxv]Mushirul Hasan. Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence. London: Hurst,1997, p. 246.
[xxxvi]Ṣaliḥah Abid Husain, ed. Rah navard-i shauq: safar namah. Maktabah-yi Jāmiah, 1979,p. 102
[xxxvii] Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent.Leiden:Brill.1980.
Razak Khan is Research Fellow in the „Modern India in German Archives“ project at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) Göttingen University. His current research project is titled “From Berlin to Delhi: Education, Intellectual Exchange and Politics of Cultural Translation in the life and writings of Syed Abid Husain (1896-1978)” and examines the entangled history of Indo-German intellectual connections. He has edited a special issue of Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Volume 58, Issue 5, 2015 and published commentaries in Economic and Political Weekly. He is also completing a book project “Princely Past, Subaltern Present: Locality, Histories, and Identities in Rampur.“
January 17, 2017
Bangladesh: Mob of 300 sets fire to the Ustad Allauddin Khan Sangitangan [Museum] at Brahmanbaria
The Times of India
Ustad Rashid Khan: Attack on Ustad Allauddin Khan Sangitangan is shocking
Priyanka Dasgupta | TNN | Updated: Jan 15, 2016, 11.23 PM IST
Ustad Allauddin Khan - File photo
Describing the incident as 'unfortunate', music producer and daughter of Pt Jasraj, Durga Jasraj, said, "It seems to be an extension of how they are destroying their heritage and tradition mindlessly." Ustad Rashid Khan said that every time a conflict happens, the first target is always a seat of arts. "After the Gujarat riots, Faiyaz Khan saab's tomb was under attack. Now, this museum has been burnt down. Art and artistes should not be made targets this way. It's sad if people lose lives. But no artiste supports an act of violence or terrorism. Ustad Faiyaz Khan and Ustad Allauddin Khan are not even alive. They too aren't being spared," Khan pointed out.
News has also reached the maestro's grandson, Ustad Aashis Khan. Currently in Mumbai, the sarod player condemned the act of vandalism. "It's a shameful act. Bangladesh has never given due respect to my grandfather. This house belonged to a zamindar. It was gifted by him to my 'dadu'. It housed a museum of the instruments used by him. Now even this has been gutted down. I am shocked! The Bangladesh government must take strong legal action against those who did this," he said.
Ustad Rashid Khan: Attack on Ustad Allauddin Khan Sangitangan is shocking
Ustad Allauddin Khan - File photo
KOLKATA:
In what has been described as one of the biggest assaults on culture in
the subcontinent, the Ustad Allauddin Khan Sangitangan was torched in
Bangladesh recently. On Tuesday, as many as 300 unidentified people set
fire to the Sangitangan at Brahmanbaria that also housed a museum of
instruments used by legendary sarod player Ustad Allauddin Khan. He was
the father and guru of Ustad Ali Akhar Khan and Vidushi Annapurna Devi
and had Pt Ravi Shankar, Pt Nikhil Banerjee and Ustad Bahadur Khan as
his disciples. Protests against the attack have spilled over from
Bangladesh what with relatives and musicians of the iconic musician
condemning the act in the strongest terms. For many of them, this is the
biggest assault on culture since the Bamiyan Buddhas was blown up in
2001.
In Brahmanbaria, students had gone on a rampage to protest the death of their classmate - Masudar Rahman - in a clash on Tuesday. After Rahman succumbed to injuries, protestors vandalised many establishments and set fire to two others including the Sangitangan. Speaking to TOI from Brahmanbaria, Sangitangan's principal Helal Uddin said, "Some boys from a madrassa torched our institute. Four rooms were completely gutted down. These rooms had his sarangi, pakhwaz, flutes, four tanpuras and two sitars. Two sarods, one used by him, have been destroyed." According to Uddin, some 20 letters penned by the maestro, two carpets gifted to him possible by the king of Mysore, a jaye-namaaz gifted to him by the Saudi government after the maestro went on Haj and rare photographs of the maestro with Annapurna Devi, Pt Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan have been lost forever.
"Apart from burning the rooms, the boys took all these things outside and set them on fire. Seeing the flames, I rushed out to see what had happened. By then, the damage had been done," he said.
News of the vandalism has reached Ustad Rashid Khan in Kolkata. "This is the limit. I don't know how people can stoop so low. Bangladesh has such a rich culture. Last November, I performed in Dhaka where some 60,000 people had come to listen to my concert. I'm sure people who love the arts can't do something so atrocious," Khan said in disgust. Hazarding a guess, he said it could be a handiwork of some fundamentalists. "But even the religious people love music. I saw how so many devout Muslims had come to attend Ghulam Ali bhai's concert in Kolkata. Our chief minister Mamata Banerjee took such a good step by hosting a concert. We are so happy to see the respect she is giving to art and artistes. It breaks my heart to think that at this juncture such a thing has happened in Bangladesh."
Sarod player Pt Tejendra Narayan Mazumdar was supposed to visit this museum in a month or two. "The attack on this museum is as heinous as the attack on the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Talibans. I belong to the Maihar gharana which was pioneered by Ustad Allauddin Khan saab. But I see this as an assault on the global art community," Mazumdar said.
In Brahmanbaria, students had gone on a rampage to protest the death of their classmate - Masudar Rahman - in a clash on Tuesday. After Rahman succumbed to injuries, protestors vandalised many establishments and set fire to two others including the Sangitangan. Speaking to TOI from Brahmanbaria, Sangitangan's principal Helal Uddin said, "Some boys from a madrassa torched our institute. Four rooms were completely gutted down. These rooms had his sarangi, pakhwaz, flutes, four tanpuras and two sitars. Two sarods, one used by him, have been destroyed." According to Uddin, some 20 letters penned by the maestro, two carpets gifted to him possible by the king of Mysore, a jaye-namaaz gifted to him by the Saudi government after the maestro went on Haj and rare photographs of the maestro with Annapurna Devi, Pt Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan have been lost forever.
"Apart from burning the rooms, the boys took all these things outside and set them on fire. Seeing the flames, I rushed out to see what had happened. By then, the damage had been done," he said.
News of the vandalism has reached Ustad Rashid Khan in Kolkata. "This is the limit. I don't know how people can stoop so low. Bangladesh has such a rich culture. Last November, I performed in Dhaka where some 60,000 people had come to listen to my concert. I'm sure people who love the arts can't do something so atrocious," Khan said in disgust. Hazarding a guess, he said it could be a handiwork of some fundamentalists. "But even the religious people love music. I saw how so many devout Muslims had come to attend Ghulam Ali bhai's concert in Kolkata. Our chief minister Mamata Banerjee took such a good step by hosting a concert. We are so happy to see the respect she is giving to art and artistes. It breaks my heart to think that at this juncture such a thing has happened in Bangladesh."
Sarod player Pt Tejendra Narayan Mazumdar was supposed to visit this museum in a month or two. "The attack on this museum is as heinous as the attack on the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Talibans. I belong to the Maihar gharana which was pioneered by Ustad Allauddin Khan saab. But I see this as an assault on the global art community," Mazumdar said.
Describing the incident as 'unfortunate', music producer and daughter of Pt Jasraj, Durga Jasraj, said, "It seems to be an extension of how they are destroying their heritage and tradition mindlessly." Ustad Rashid Khan said that every time a conflict happens, the first target is always a seat of arts. "After the Gujarat riots, Faiyaz Khan saab's tomb was under attack. Now, this museum has been burnt down. Art and artistes should not be made targets this way. It's sad if people lose lives. But no artiste supports an act of violence or terrorism. Ustad Faiyaz Khan and Ustad Allauddin Khan are not even alive. They too aren't being spared," Khan pointed out.
News has also reached the maestro's grandson, Ustad Aashis Khan. Currently in Mumbai, the sarod player condemned the act of vandalism. "It's a shameful act. Bangladesh has never given due respect to my grandfather. This house belonged to a zamindar. It was gifted by him to my 'dadu'. It housed a museum of the instruments used by him. Now even this has been gutted down. I am shocked! The Bangladesh government must take strong legal action against those who did this," he said.
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