Magazine / The Hindu
Oct 12, 2003
URL: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2003/10/12/stories/2003101200230400.htm
THEATRE
In the eye of a storm
Veteran theatre person Habib Tanvir has been at the receiving end for staging two plays that deal with issues like untouchability, casteism and communal harmony. He speaks to SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY about the controversy.
IF William Shakespeare had been a 21st Century Indian dramatist, his "Hamlet" would not have had the line, `What's in a name?' And, if the bard had persisted with it, he would have got a sharp retort: "Everything!"
At least, that is what theatre thespian Habib Tanvir would have said.
Suddenly after being on the road for 60 years, the second-generation migrant from Pakistan finds that his name has become a baggage these days. After all, how can a Muslim stage plays that laughs at the tyranny of upper caste Brahmins? So what if he has been showing "Ponga Pandit" for decades in every corner of the country, and abroad.
Tanvir admits he has been wedged in the maelstrom of politics. Touring through Madhya Pradesh with the plays, "Ponga Pandit" and "Jisse Lahore Nahin Dekhya" last month sponsored by MP Sanskriti Parishad, the 80-year-old veteran had to face the fury of militant Sangh Parivar groups for what they called "playing with religious feelings".
"The series of attacks on my plays, particularly `Ponga Pandit', have nothing to do with religious sentiment. With state elections coming, it is mere play of politics between the ruling party and the Opposition. And, I have a name that suits them," says the veteran, somewhat fractious at the way "things are becoming anti-art".
"Theatre, for that matter any art, is not just supposed to entertain but to stimulate thinking. It should ironically laugh at life, question our rituals, lacks, social evils," he says.
Art, to him, is all about asking questions. "Ponga Pandit" too asks questions. "It is a deeply religious play and shows that to reach God you do not need a via media," argues the Padma Shree dramatist.
But who would argue with a band of self-declared custodians of Hinduism swearing to "even take the bullets" to prevent the play from being performed.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Tanvir has been on the right-wingers' hit list. Soon after the Babri Masjid demolition, his plays were targeted too. "There were protests in Gwalior. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad also demonstrated in the United Kingdom when I took my plays there," he says.
This time, what upset the members of Bajrang Dal, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party were scenes showing a character entering the village temple with shoes, a sweeper carrying an idol in her basket and a pundit lighting an incense stick with a bidi. But the director of the Naya Theatre argues, "The character shown entering the temple with his slippers is a village simpleton. When the priest tells him to leave his shoes outside because God lives in a temple, he asks, `does that mean God is not everywhere'.
"Also, it shows the sweeper genuinely interested in listening to the Satya Narayan Katha, but with the pandit coming in between with endless rituals, she decides not to have medium to reach God."
While the play pokes fun at upper-caste Hindus, what is not true is the Sangh Parivar's campaign that Tanvir has written the play. It was actually penned by two Dalit writers way back in 1930s, which explains the constant reference to the upper caste oppression.
"I chose `Ponga Pandit' because it speaks for social equality and justice.
"`Jisse Lahore Nahin Dekhya' is a superb play to show people the strength of communal harmony, an issue most important in present-day India, especially after the genocide in Gujarat," says Tanvir.
And therein lies another irony. "Jisse Lahore Nahin Dekhya" is fine with the right-wingers, for it shows a fanatical gang of Muslims trying to chase away Hindus from Lahore. It suits their political agenda but social evils like untouchability, caste-system and hollow rituals are shown in "Ponga Pandit", it angers them.
"It is a pity that politicians are rapidly bringing the country into a situation that do not permit art to flourish," says the Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee.
Responding to the Sangh Parivar observation that he should set his eyes on Muslim religious atrocities too, Tanvir comments, "If someone does come out with a play which criticises oppression of the weak in the name of any religion, I would be the last person to protest".
He says the Valmiki Samaj performed a puja organised by the BJP to protest against his plays. "But interestingly, it was not allowed to be held inside the temple but just outside it. And, this inequality is what `Ponga Pandit' laughs at," he adds.
Though, according to a local newspaper, none of the state BJP office bearers had seen "Ponga Pandit", Tanvir says, "Two BJP MLAs turned up with a big posse of supporters at Baghpat on the Janamastami night. Since the play is basically a comedy, it has dialogues and situations, which can surely tickle your senses.
"The leaders too were seen laughing at the discourse but as they came with a decided plan of action, slogan shouting, pelting of stones and eggs soon started. After much pleading to carry on the play, both by the cast and the genuine theatregoers, we had to leave the stage fearing violence."
But none of all this actually scares Tanvir. After a brief visit to Delhi, he is eager to get back to Bhopal and hit the road with "Ponga Pandit" and "Jisse Lahore Nahin Dekhya" again.
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October 12, 2003
October 04, 2003
THE RIOT ECONOMY: The Ganj Basoda case
South Asia Citizen's Wire Special
October 4, 2003
URL: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sacw/new/CommunalMPOct2003.html
THE RIOT ECONOMY:
The Ganj Basoda case
Produced by The Bhopal Group on Communalism
On the 14th of January, 2003 "riots erupted" in Ganj Basoda, a small town of Madhya Pradesh -the first tremors of a post Gujarat Hindutva. The incident was swiftly attributed to the slaughter of a cow. This article following the incident and its surroundings inverts this modality to argue that the alleged ‘cow-slaughter’, far from being a reason of the riots could only have been a necessary appendage of the economy of the riot itself.
"The incident happened at around nine in the morning. Near 11:30 the shops were on fire. Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town had been gutted and burnt down. Soon the ash settled and the administration took charge "
Janpad panchayat president, Ganj Basoda
"According to the police, the trouble began on Tuesday morning when the word spread across the town that a cow was being slaughtered in the house of a rickshaw puller, identified as Salim, 33, a resident of Choori mohalla. As the word spread across the town, an angry mob gathered in the area and went on the rampage, indulging in arson and stone pelting………. Though the accused managed to escape, two carcass and 12 hides were reportedly recovered from his house…. Police later arrested the accused………..The accused was involved in such activities in the past also and a similar incident was reported in 1999, a senior state police official said"
Hindustan Times, Wednesday, January 15, 2003
"It was an assemblage of about five hundred people, who divided into smaller groups of 70-80. Each group responsible for a location and consisting largely of people from that particular locality." An observer
Ganj Basoda, the town that witnessed the ‘riots’ -a classification, we shall challenge in this article- on the 14th of january in which almost all the muslim owned shops were selectively gutted and put on fire is a small town of about eighty thousand people of whom a very small fraction (about 5-6 percent) are muslims. The town is apparently not one of those afflicted sites, where communal violence erupts habitually, echoing the faintest, distant howls; like a mourning in which continence itself may bear violent overtones, a mourning for which a violence had to be self-inflicted.
"The trouble began on Tuesday morning when the word spread around that a cow was being slaughtered in the house of a rickshaw puller, Salim " [1]. What does the word ‘trouble’ allude to here? What is the expanse of ‘events’ that it circumscribes? Is it a uniform sequence of events to be put into a single box, engendered by a single event- the first disturbance of a peace; the first disturbance on a still surface. Let us broach the subject further. This ‘disturbing’ event, the alleged ‘genesis’ of the trouble was: A cow had been killed. To use a hackneyed phrase -which however on that account, should only be more seriously taken, leave alone, trivialised- ‘this hurt the sensibilities of the majority community’. The rest, was the revenge of ‘the hurt’.
All empirical evidence, as we will argue in this article, suggests that this alleged sparking point -the slaughter of a cow- could only have been a fictional point created as a lump to which reason is made to fall back upon - the sinful, illegitimate, matricidal lump. But how could reason rest there. This lump will need to be broken into minute parts, the ‘event’ into its component ‘events’. Where exactly did the ruckus begin? Did somebody see a cow being slaughtered? Or did somebody see a cow being taken inside a house, where the lone purpose could have been to slaughter it? How did the news travel; who were the harbingers? None of these and many such questions, the just demands of a logical coherence, were followed. Logic, once it reached (leaping over obstacles) to a comfortable end - the Event- was stubbed. These aspersions of fiction on the Event are however not meant to make a positivistic statement claiming an umbrella inculpability for Salim and his family. This is only to say that there is little evidence to support the particular charge against Salim’s family of having slaughtered a cow on that particular moment, the trigger to the ‘riots’-The Event. In fact, as the imbricated facts and interests are gradually unfolded, one effortlessly shifts to the point, where one can see it strip into an astute plot carefully timed and placed. That however does not mean that this plot excluded every element of spontaneity. Far from it, it harvested -a harvest perhaps provided for in its modality- deeply sown seeds of hatred, a structurally misdirected organicity; an organicity which is more akin to a malignant tumour than to a growth of life.
Salim’s family of three included his wife and an adolescent daughter. They lived in a rented house, a small kutcha house with a polythene sheet for a roof with the landlords’ double storey building providing the backdrop. Salim: a rickshaw-puller (what economy for a person’s description!); his wife: a housewife and by many accounts, an industrious woman who used to trade in animal flesh, bringing it from Sagar and Sironj towns which house licensed butcher houses; his daughter: a girl-child entering that age (of marriage) when parents in many parts of the country anxiously start scrambling for the tiniest bits of resources. In this poor family’s struggle for a living, the petty trade in animal flesh was an important aspect.
Animal flesh is an expensive commodity, often beyond the means of the working classes. Among the different types of animal flesh, beef - meat of the buffalo and cow family- for the simple demand-supply equation costs only a fraction of the cost of meat and poultry. While beef, as most who have eaten it say, has no particular palatal advantage -except may be the advantage of difference, no mean advantage- it is no gross disadvantage either. This skew, largely a creation of the partial ban on beef in the state, carves a niche in the market for beef. Surprisingly, contrary to expectations where a ban should have hopped up prices, beef rates remained more or less stable -a clear indicator that the prices were being determined not by discerning palates but the hungry needs of the masses, from whom there was little to gain by bargain; the risk element could not be converted into money, for there was just no surplus to appropriate; a cornered dealer can do nothing but squirm. It was this market that Salim’s wife, eager for avenues to augment the family income, was battling in. Commuting to Sagar every few days by a local train, surreptitiously carrying flesh in it, regularly bribing the railway police personnel and the ticket checker, secretly bringing it home and selling it from there -no mean labour for a small amount of money. And for all this labour, Salim remained a rickshaw puller, pulling people twice his body weight; his house, the rented shanty it was. This destitute family, breaking its back in the struggle for life was however not even to be spared to live its lot; after all, it had hurt ‘sensibilities’, venomous sensibilities which like flying snakes in waiting, would hover from all around to bite it.
While Salim’s wife used to trade in animal flesh and also beef, there is little evidence to suggest that she traded in cow-beef and none which points towards their ‘slaughtering of cows’. Besides, even if for a moment we were to disregard this dearth of evidence, a backward logical movement from the embellished, smooth structure of the larger events (which are blamed to have been engendered by the cow slaughter, The Event) that followed, proves that The Event -or rather its fiction- fits in too well, comfortably and organically with this structure to have been exterior to it -and the structure too well laid out to be precariously built on this tenuous foundation. It could only have been this structure’s creation, its own necessary appendage. We need to discerningly follow and disentangle these events, which left entwined are fiddles for the dominants.
"The incident happened at around nine in the morning. Near 11:30 the shops were on fire. Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town had been gutted and burnt down". There are no hiccups between the first and the second sentence, for those two and half hours. This is the interregnum when the Event (whatever be its form) is transformed into a riot: stone pelting, plundering and finally, burning of shops -the culmination, the final vengeance, complete annihilation of the symbol in the shop- after which the revenge, the thirst quenched, it settles down. This is the period of the spreading of the word, the swarming of people, the incitement of passions, the formation of the frenzy. This period of transformation is the main culprit for which the tenuous beginning (the Event) is a poor alibi. That beginning could only have been the necessary elongation of this interregnum, the initiation of the elements of the interregnum -a holy initiation.
This interregnum is the breathing space that ideas shocked with the first brush of reality need, to gather their appurtenances, reorganise their senses, to cast one last look to see that everything is settled for the launch. As the events to follow it would tell, it was during this interregnum that the Basoda ‘riots’ were infused with the rational core that determined their fine method -an exacting strategy, precise targets and a limit.
"Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town had been gutted and burnt down". Ganj Basoda has a fairly spread market, in which there is little to distinguish shops on the basis of their ownership. There is no spatial or functional segregation -no concentration of muslim shops. But for some convenient cases, it is difficult to make appellate distinctions -identifications of shops are more often than not secular. How then does it become possible to segregate every single of these scattered muslim-owned shops -they constitute no more than 5-6% of the total number of shops- plunder them and set them to fire, all within an hour or a little more. Let us not forget that this is as precise an exercise as any, an error of less than ten percent, that too not human, but solely due to the swigs of fire. The few muslim shops that remained, by most accounts belong to members of one or the other factions of the right -the BJP, the RSS, the Bajrang dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
What informed this method? Were they catalogues that had been astutely prepared, discerningly studied, mnemonically memorised. Probably, yes. But that would still be insufficient and not unfold itself as full-proof as the real act suggests. It needed the aid of a method, organic and structurally located; harnessing a raw and alive information.
"It was an assemblage of about five hundred people, who divided into smaller groups of 70-80. Each group responsible for a location and consisting largely of people from that particular locality." The division of the mass on neighbourhood lines, clusters of local people carrying minute details -If the shop was rented by a muslim, only the ware had to be destroyed; if it belonged to a muslim, the shop was to be put to flame- also perfect foil to settle old scores, vengeance that may have long forgotten its roots. Spreading over the town, these groups break into identified shops, plunder and set fire. Within a period of about an hour, the project- benefiting from the economy of decentralisation- is completed. These groups never move to the residential areas or indulge in further damage. The commotion ends at its very peak, when it has tasted ‘victory’, a surrender of the adversary. Would a rabid crowd be satisfied with a symbolic end -burnt shops? Would it not push itself straight into the adversary’s den -the residential areas- to lay the enemy prostrate physically, in the ‘real’ sense? Would it not at least, cross the limit somewhere, for a moment, may be?
This divided mass instead stops abruptly after the commercial areas, without a single leap towards the residential areas, nor towards any other object. Its consummate economy -precisely marked shops looted and burnt to order, a finely defined finitude, an absolute lack of transgression- never betrays the lack of a central rational control. There is no ‘mass’ here, no traces of disorder, no madness -no ‘riots’. This was a project that had met its objective and its objective successfully completed, it vanished living behind haunting traces. We however do not mean that this project was devoid of all organic appendages, a glossy ball that collected no dust. Far from it, it gained profusely from these organic wastes. But its core, the movement defining element remained till the end, in the anterior, the programmed instrumental rationality which it inherited from the moment of conception. To understand the conceptual constitution of this project, we need to cast a glance at the surroundings, from where the seed was cast, or at least from where it got the orders to finally erupt out of its shell -the portentous shadows of which the teratogen’s actual birth was only a concretisation, a cold condensation.
If Salim’s family traded in beef (of any kind) there was nothing extra about the 14th of January. If it had exceeded legal limits, the excess continued from years before and the VHP, Bajrang Dal etc. -by all accounts, the executors of the project- with their extensive ruffian network could not have been oblivious of it. Salim’s landlord (Soni) as also the household opposite of the street (Yadav) are both active VHP and Bajrang Dal activists (respectively). It is worth noting here that two years back, the muslim community had disallowed Salim, a rented house in their locality for his alleged indulgence in beef-like trade. For whatever legal transgression Salim may be exposed to blame, he can not be tried for making that moment, the moment of the Event (or rather, the fiction of the Event) possible. And what dubious logical leap is made to account for the transformation of this fiction into a violent display in which the property of a particular community is selectively put to fire, the hard-earned savings of a lifetime’s labour reduced to ash, a people converted into illegitimates in their own land -the religious identity of the fictitious transgressor!
It was not Salim’s excess that marked the 14th of January. The project -or its timing- was a necessary congealing of the surroundings, the filling of a void, the exuberant overbrimming of the void; a reckoning to be finally counted, to be at last rewarded. A sign of the surroundings that hovered about the project, anterior to its actualization, can be found in the events that followed the project. The hoverings themselves came into overt lustrous forms -public declarations, speeches with much fanfare, statements of intent- culminating in threats of carry-over to the elections, the final front. It is at this end, this constantly alluded final point that this economy finally bares the aetiology of its projects, of the project. It is the economy of the front i.e., the election-market, which insinuates itself, back and forth, in all its projects.
We would do well to take a view of some ‘significant’ moments that surround the events in Godhra. In February 2002, the Godhra carnage takes place which, irrespective of its cause, is efficaciously used by the BJP regime in Gujarat to allow a violent deluge against the muslim community. A delirium is created. A delirium strong enough to wipe away the formations of political rancour against the BJP, which had been steadily building up for more than a year, and tenacious enough to yield a bumper harvest, nine months later. The consummate economy of the frenzy could not but vehemently push the case for its own repetition -even if a ‘riot’ had to be manufactured.
Following the Gujarat results, members of the BJP and the VHP openly assumed menacing tones, threatening repeats over the country: Hindutva had finally come of age; the instrument had passed the acid test, it waited eagerly for another prey -writhing against the tether to jump on the next passersby. It could not have laid low long. Madhya Pradesh seemed to be the most convenient and potentially rewarding spot to give it its bite of flesh. In late December itself, Uma Bharati -Madhya Pradesh’s potential Narendra Modi - was handed over the reins and Narendra Modi -the beast himself-, the stewardship. By early January, she had started camping in Bhopal, travelling into the hinterland and building the ‘tempo’ of the party cadres. Not to be left behind, an upbeat VHP, asserted itself in the form of a rally in Bhopal chaperoned by its version of Narendra (Milosevic) Modi, Praveen Togadia. And there were many more marches of the exuberant ‘victors of Gujarat’, uninitiated into restrain.
Togadia on the 11th of January declared in a press conference in Bhopal [2.], "Not only Madhya Pradesh but also other states would be painted in saffron colours by the time the next assembly elections are held here". There are no interludes in this exposition. The particular is precisely located in the general, it is the later from which it derives its substantiality. The period is defined by the ‘given’ -project end. The instrument is clear by its colour and the act clear in the continuity of its expanse -paint. This statement however reflects a position that has moved far ahead of its vacillating countenance a decade back. The ‘Saffron’ had dropped from being a supposedly ideological position to its real place in the squalor of the election-market. It is this squalor, which determines its forms and its moments of assertion.
It of course requires no digging to locate the roots of the discourse on cow slaughter -or the event of cow slaughter- in the election ground. And as cows are everywhere, temples are everywhere too -scattered ready-to-harvest sacrednesses. Be it the Ayodhya site or the recent case of Bhojshala in Dhar, the archaeology of ‘Hindu religious sites’ is well synchronised with the movement of the election machine. So are other aspects of the BJP (and its allies’) propaganda: Swadeshi, Islamic terrorism, Muslim population burst, Pakistan bashing etc.
But these phenomenon are obvious enough not to warrant a reiteration. The relation that the BJP has helped congeal between genocide and electoral fortunes in a liberal democratic setup, the possibility of a (necessary) relation between gross violence and a democratic sham, is finally on a vulgar display. This forthrightness is obviously a result of the substantial power and resources edifice that it has structurally established for itself, specially in the last decade or so. While symbols like temple, cow etc. have undoubtedly played an important role in its rise, it was only a matter of time before the organisation outgrew these symbols. It obviously still progresses stepping on symbols, but then with the growth and establishment of the organisation, the scarcity of symbols ceases to be a limiting factor. There it is important that the resistance movement too move beyond a ‘symbolic’ to a real contest; from a contestation of symbols to a battle of organisation; from tolerating a democratic chimera to a movement for substantive democracy.
In the cow, temple etc. were traces that the sangh parivar fed, cultivated and harvested. The selection was a shrewd one not only in terms of the potential of their appeal but also in the inherent proclivities of the tendencies so galvanised. In such a situation, the congress strategy of attempting to appropriate the BJP’s symbols, and therefore of feeding the same tendencies is characteristic of its vulgar opportunism. While the possibility of this providing a temporary strut to the congress cannot be theoretically dismissed, it is more probable that in the sloughs of the last vestiges of liberalism -once its very raison d’etre- may finally be the appearance of its own disintegration. Cows and temples, the BJP’s steps of ascendance may well be the steps that the congress uses to descend.
Endnotes:
1. Extract from HT, quoted above
2. Press Trust of India, 11th January, 2003
October 4, 2003
URL: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sacw/new/CommunalMPOct2003.html
THE RIOT ECONOMY:
The Ganj Basoda case
Produced by The Bhopal Group on Communalism
On the 14th of January, 2003 "riots erupted" in Ganj Basoda, a small town of Madhya Pradesh -the first tremors of a post Gujarat Hindutva. The incident was swiftly attributed to the slaughter of a cow. This article following the incident and its surroundings inverts this modality to argue that the alleged ‘cow-slaughter’, far from being a reason of the riots could only have been a necessary appendage of the economy of the riot itself.
"The incident happened at around nine in the morning. Near 11:30 the shops were on fire. Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town had been gutted and burnt down. Soon the ash settled and the administration took charge "
Janpad panchayat president, Ganj Basoda
"According to the police, the trouble began on Tuesday morning when the word spread across the town that a cow was being slaughtered in the house of a rickshaw puller, identified as Salim, 33, a resident of Choori mohalla. As the word spread across the town, an angry mob gathered in the area and went on the rampage, indulging in arson and stone pelting………. Though the accused managed to escape, two carcass and 12 hides were reportedly recovered from his house…. Police later arrested the accused………..The accused was involved in such activities in the past also and a similar incident was reported in 1999, a senior state police official said"
Hindustan Times, Wednesday, January 15, 2003
"It was an assemblage of about five hundred people, who divided into smaller groups of 70-80. Each group responsible for a location and consisting largely of people from that particular locality." An observer
Ganj Basoda, the town that witnessed the ‘riots’ -a classification, we shall challenge in this article- on the 14th of january in which almost all the muslim owned shops were selectively gutted and put on fire is a small town of about eighty thousand people of whom a very small fraction (about 5-6 percent) are muslims. The town is apparently not one of those afflicted sites, where communal violence erupts habitually, echoing the faintest, distant howls; like a mourning in which continence itself may bear violent overtones, a mourning for which a violence had to be self-inflicted.
"The trouble began on Tuesday morning when the word spread around that a cow was being slaughtered in the house of a rickshaw puller, Salim " [1]. What does the word ‘trouble’ allude to here? What is the expanse of ‘events’ that it circumscribes? Is it a uniform sequence of events to be put into a single box, engendered by a single event- the first disturbance of a peace; the first disturbance on a still surface. Let us broach the subject further. This ‘disturbing’ event, the alleged ‘genesis’ of the trouble was: A cow had been killed. To use a hackneyed phrase -which however on that account, should only be more seriously taken, leave alone, trivialised- ‘this hurt the sensibilities of the majority community’. The rest, was the revenge of ‘the hurt’.
All empirical evidence, as we will argue in this article, suggests that this alleged sparking point -the slaughter of a cow- could only have been a fictional point created as a lump to which reason is made to fall back upon - the sinful, illegitimate, matricidal lump. But how could reason rest there. This lump will need to be broken into minute parts, the ‘event’ into its component ‘events’. Where exactly did the ruckus begin? Did somebody see a cow being slaughtered? Or did somebody see a cow being taken inside a house, where the lone purpose could have been to slaughter it? How did the news travel; who were the harbingers? None of these and many such questions, the just demands of a logical coherence, were followed. Logic, once it reached (leaping over obstacles) to a comfortable end - the Event- was stubbed. These aspersions of fiction on the Event are however not meant to make a positivistic statement claiming an umbrella inculpability for Salim and his family. This is only to say that there is little evidence to support the particular charge against Salim’s family of having slaughtered a cow on that particular moment, the trigger to the ‘riots’-The Event. In fact, as the imbricated facts and interests are gradually unfolded, one effortlessly shifts to the point, where one can see it strip into an astute plot carefully timed and placed. That however does not mean that this plot excluded every element of spontaneity. Far from it, it harvested -a harvest perhaps provided for in its modality- deeply sown seeds of hatred, a structurally misdirected organicity; an organicity which is more akin to a malignant tumour than to a growth of life.
Salim’s family of three included his wife and an adolescent daughter. They lived in a rented house, a small kutcha house with a polythene sheet for a roof with the landlords’ double storey building providing the backdrop. Salim: a rickshaw-puller (what economy for a person’s description!); his wife: a housewife and by many accounts, an industrious woman who used to trade in animal flesh, bringing it from Sagar and Sironj towns which house licensed butcher houses; his daughter: a girl-child entering that age (of marriage) when parents in many parts of the country anxiously start scrambling for the tiniest bits of resources. In this poor family’s struggle for a living, the petty trade in animal flesh was an important aspect.
Animal flesh is an expensive commodity, often beyond the means of the working classes. Among the different types of animal flesh, beef - meat of the buffalo and cow family- for the simple demand-supply equation costs only a fraction of the cost of meat and poultry. While beef, as most who have eaten it say, has no particular palatal advantage -except may be the advantage of difference, no mean advantage- it is no gross disadvantage either. This skew, largely a creation of the partial ban on beef in the state, carves a niche in the market for beef. Surprisingly, contrary to expectations where a ban should have hopped up prices, beef rates remained more or less stable -a clear indicator that the prices were being determined not by discerning palates but the hungry needs of the masses, from whom there was little to gain by bargain; the risk element could not be converted into money, for there was just no surplus to appropriate; a cornered dealer can do nothing but squirm. It was this market that Salim’s wife, eager for avenues to augment the family income, was battling in. Commuting to Sagar every few days by a local train, surreptitiously carrying flesh in it, regularly bribing the railway police personnel and the ticket checker, secretly bringing it home and selling it from there -no mean labour for a small amount of money. And for all this labour, Salim remained a rickshaw puller, pulling people twice his body weight; his house, the rented shanty it was. This destitute family, breaking its back in the struggle for life was however not even to be spared to live its lot; after all, it had hurt ‘sensibilities’, venomous sensibilities which like flying snakes in waiting, would hover from all around to bite it.
While Salim’s wife used to trade in animal flesh and also beef, there is little evidence to suggest that she traded in cow-beef and none which points towards their ‘slaughtering of cows’. Besides, even if for a moment we were to disregard this dearth of evidence, a backward logical movement from the embellished, smooth structure of the larger events (which are blamed to have been engendered by the cow slaughter, The Event) that followed, proves that The Event -or rather its fiction- fits in too well, comfortably and organically with this structure to have been exterior to it -and the structure too well laid out to be precariously built on this tenuous foundation. It could only have been this structure’s creation, its own necessary appendage. We need to discerningly follow and disentangle these events, which left entwined are fiddles for the dominants.
"The incident happened at around nine in the morning. Near 11:30 the shops were on fire. Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town had been gutted and burnt down". There are no hiccups between the first and the second sentence, for those two and half hours. This is the interregnum when the Event (whatever be its form) is transformed into a riot: stone pelting, plundering and finally, burning of shops -the culmination, the final vengeance, complete annihilation of the symbol in the shop- after which the revenge, the thirst quenched, it settles down. This is the period of the spreading of the word, the swarming of people, the incitement of passions, the formation of the frenzy. This period of transformation is the main culprit for which the tenuous beginning (the Event) is a poor alibi. That beginning could only have been the necessary elongation of this interregnum, the initiation of the elements of the interregnum -a holy initiation.
This interregnum is the breathing space that ideas shocked with the first brush of reality need, to gather their appurtenances, reorganise their senses, to cast one last look to see that everything is settled for the launch. As the events to follow it would tell, it was during this interregnum that the Basoda ‘riots’ were infused with the rational core that determined their fine method -an exacting strategy, precise targets and a limit.
"Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town had been gutted and burnt down". Ganj Basoda has a fairly spread market, in which there is little to distinguish shops on the basis of their ownership. There is no spatial or functional segregation -no concentration of muslim shops. But for some convenient cases, it is difficult to make appellate distinctions -identifications of shops are more often than not secular. How then does it become possible to segregate every single of these scattered muslim-owned shops -they constitute no more than 5-6% of the total number of shops- plunder them and set them to fire, all within an hour or a little more. Let us not forget that this is as precise an exercise as any, an error of less than ten percent, that too not human, but solely due to the swigs of fire. The few muslim shops that remained, by most accounts belong to members of one or the other factions of the right -the BJP, the RSS, the Bajrang dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
What informed this method? Were they catalogues that had been astutely prepared, discerningly studied, mnemonically memorised. Probably, yes. But that would still be insufficient and not unfold itself as full-proof as the real act suggests. It needed the aid of a method, organic and structurally located; harnessing a raw and alive information.
"It was an assemblage of about five hundred people, who divided into smaller groups of 70-80. Each group responsible for a location and consisting largely of people from that particular locality." The division of the mass on neighbourhood lines, clusters of local people carrying minute details -If the shop was rented by a muslim, only the ware had to be destroyed; if it belonged to a muslim, the shop was to be put to flame- also perfect foil to settle old scores, vengeance that may have long forgotten its roots. Spreading over the town, these groups break into identified shops, plunder and set fire. Within a period of about an hour, the project- benefiting from the economy of decentralisation- is completed. These groups never move to the residential areas or indulge in further damage. The commotion ends at its very peak, when it has tasted ‘victory’, a surrender of the adversary. Would a rabid crowd be satisfied with a symbolic end -burnt shops? Would it not push itself straight into the adversary’s den -the residential areas- to lay the enemy prostrate physically, in the ‘real’ sense? Would it not at least, cross the limit somewhere, for a moment, may be?
This divided mass instead stops abruptly after the commercial areas, without a single leap towards the residential areas, nor towards any other object. Its consummate economy -precisely marked shops looted and burnt to order, a finely defined finitude, an absolute lack of transgression- never betrays the lack of a central rational control. There is no ‘mass’ here, no traces of disorder, no madness -no ‘riots’. This was a project that had met its objective and its objective successfully completed, it vanished living behind haunting traces. We however do not mean that this project was devoid of all organic appendages, a glossy ball that collected no dust. Far from it, it gained profusely from these organic wastes. But its core, the movement defining element remained till the end, in the anterior, the programmed instrumental rationality which it inherited from the moment of conception. To understand the conceptual constitution of this project, we need to cast a glance at the surroundings, from where the seed was cast, or at least from where it got the orders to finally erupt out of its shell -the portentous shadows of which the teratogen’s actual birth was only a concretisation, a cold condensation.
If Salim’s family traded in beef (of any kind) there was nothing extra about the 14th of January. If it had exceeded legal limits, the excess continued from years before and the VHP, Bajrang Dal etc. -by all accounts, the executors of the project- with their extensive ruffian network could not have been oblivious of it. Salim’s landlord (Soni) as also the household opposite of the street (Yadav) are both active VHP and Bajrang Dal activists (respectively). It is worth noting here that two years back, the muslim community had disallowed Salim, a rented house in their locality for his alleged indulgence in beef-like trade. For whatever legal transgression Salim may be exposed to blame, he can not be tried for making that moment, the moment of the Event (or rather, the fiction of the Event) possible. And what dubious logical leap is made to account for the transformation of this fiction into a violent display in which the property of a particular community is selectively put to fire, the hard-earned savings of a lifetime’s labour reduced to ash, a people converted into illegitimates in their own land -the religious identity of the fictitious transgressor!
It was not Salim’s excess that marked the 14th of January. The project -or its timing- was a necessary congealing of the surroundings, the filling of a void, the exuberant overbrimming of the void; a reckoning to be finally counted, to be at last rewarded. A sign of the surroundings that hovered about the project, anterior to its actualization, can be found in the events that followed the project. The hoverings themselves came into overt lustrous forms -public declarations, speeches with much fanfare, statements of intent- culminating in threats of carry-over to the elections, the final front. It is at this end, this constantly alluded final point that this economy finally bares the aetiology of its projects, of the project. It is the economy of the front i.e., the election-market, which insinuates itself, back and forth, in all its projects.
We would do well to take a view of some ‘significant’ moments that surround the events in Godhra. In February 2002, the Godhra carnage takes place which, irrespective of its cause, is efficaciously used by the BJP regime in Gujarat to allow a violent deluge against the muslim community. A delirium is created. A delirium strong enough to wipe away the formations of political rancour against the BJP, which had been steadily building up for more than a year, and tenacious enough to yield a bumper harvest, nine months later. The consummate economy of the frenzy could not but vehemently push the case for its own repetition -even if a ‘riot’ had to be manufactured.
Following the Gujarat results, members of the BJP and the VHP openly assumed menacing tones, threatening repeats over the country: Hindutva had finally come of age; the instrument had passed the acid test, it waited eagerly for another prey -writhing against the tether to jump on the next passersby. It could not have laid low long. Madhya Pradesh seemed to be the most convenient and potentially rewarding spot to give it its bite of flesh. In late December itself, Uma Bharati -Madhya Pradesh’s potential Narendra Modi - was handed over the reins and Narendra Modi -the beast himself-, the stewardship. By early January, she had started camping in Bhopal, travelling into the hinterland and building the ‘tempo’ of the party cadres. Not to be left behind, an upbeat VHP, asserted itself in the form of a rally in Bhopal chaperoned by its version of Narendra (Milosevic) Modi, Praveen Togadia. And there were many more marches of the exuberant ‘victors of Gujarat’, uninitiated into restrain.
Togadia on the 11th of January declared in a press conference in Bhopal [2.], "Not only Madhya Pradesh but also other states would be painted in saffron colours by the time the next assembly elections are held here". There are no interludes in this exposition. The particular is precisely located in the general, it is the later from which it derives its substantiality. The period is defined by the ‘given’ -project end. The instrument is clear by its colour and the act clear in the continuity of its expanse -paint. This statement however reflects a position that has moved far ahead of its vacillating countenance a decade back. The ‘Saffron’ had dropped from being a supposedly ideological position to its real place in the squalor of the election-market. It is this squalor, which determines its forms and its moments of assertion.
It of course requires no digging to locate the roots of the discourse on cow slaughter -or the event of cow slaughter- in the election ground. And as cows are everywhere, temples are everywhere too -scattered ready-to-harvest sacrednesses. Be it the Ayodhya site or the recent case of Bhojshala in Dhar, the archaeology of ‘Hindu religious sites’ is well synchronised with the movement of the election machine. So are other aspects of the BJP (and its allies’) propaganda: Swadeshi, Islamic terrorism, Muslim population burst, Pakistan bashing etc.
But these phenomenon are obvious enough not to warrant a reiteration. The relation that the BJP has helped congeal between genocide and electoral fortunes in a liberal democratic setup, the possibility of a (necessary) relation between gross violence and a democratic sham, is finally on a vulgar display. This forthrightness is obviously a result of the substantial power and resources edifice that it has structurally established for itself, specially in the last decade or so. While symbols like temple, cow etc. have undoubtedly played an important role in its rise, it was only a matter of time before the organisation outgrew these symbols. It obviously still progresses stepping on symbols, but then with the growth and establishment of the organisation, the scarcity of symbols ceases to be a limiting factor. There it is important that the resistance movement too move beyond a ‘symbolic’ to a real contest; from a contestation of symbols to a battle of organisation; from tolerating a democratic chimera to a movement for substantive democracy.
In the cow, temple etc. were traces that the sangh parivar fed, cultivated and harvested. The selection was a shrewd one not only in terms of the potential of their appeal but also in the inherent proclivities of the tendencies so galvanised. In such a situation, the congress strategy of attempting to appropriate the BJP’s symbols, and therefore of feeding the same tendencies is characteristic of its vulgar opportunism. While the possibility of this providing a temporary strut to the congress cannot be theoretically dismissed, it is more probable that in the sloughs of the last vestiges of liberalism -once its very raison d’etre- may finally be the appearance of its own disintegration. Cows and temples, the BJP’s steps of ascendance may well be the steps that the congress uses to descend.
Endnotes:
1. Extract from HT, quoted above
2. Press Trust of India, 11th January, 2003
October 02, 2003
July 26, 2003
AN APPEAL FROM BABABUDANGIRI SOUHARDA VEDIKE [Karnataka, India]
[November 25. 2003]
Massive anti-communal convention planned in Chikkamagalur in karnataka to protect the hindutva onslaught on the Bababudangiri shrine
AN APPEAL FROM BABABUDANGIRI SOUHARDA VEDIKE
Dear friends,
Indian political scene is entering another phase of communal cauldron. As the general elections are fast approaching, the Ayodhya issue is being raked up again with a fascist vigor. And are 'discovering' 'Ayodhyas' all over India. And in that pursuit they have 'discovered' such an issue in 'Bababudangiri', a Sufi shrine in the midst of Western Ghats in Karnataka.Since 1998, fascist forces of sangh parivar are trying to rake up anti-Muslim fanaticism in Karnataka by mobilizing campaign for the 'liberating Bababudangiri and recovering Dattatreya Peetha'. Since 5years, they are using the religious sentiments of Hindu devotees as cannon fodder for their anti Muslim programme and the same time brahminising the Dutta cult, which in fact is synchronous with Sufi cult, identified with oppressed masses.
But the ploys of sangh parivar are being successfully challenged by the secular and democratic forces of Karnataka and they have been partially successful in forcing them to be on the defensive.Last year, many progressive and democratic organizations and individuals from Shimoga and Chikkamagalur regions of Karnataka took the initiative in mobilizing all the secular forces of different ideological faiths, under the singular task of resisting the attempts of parivar to saffronise Karnataka by using the issue. More than 450 intellectuals and 150 organizations all over Karnataka were united under the banner of 'save Bababudangiri committee'. A huge gathering of more than 10,000 people was organized in Chikkamagalur, just 10 days after the parivar gathering in the same town, which had in fact terrorized minorities. This historical event boosted the morale of victimized minority people, increased the confidence of secular forces and pushed the fascist forces to the wall.
This year, being the election year, BJP has already declared that they would make Bababudangiri, 'Ayodhya of south'. VHP-BD is organizing a similar congregation, with a declared motive of destroying the shrine this time. Already in a smaller dry run, they have already destroyed the shops belonging to the Muslim community, near the shrine.They have already declared that on December 7th a gathering for 'liberating Dutta Peetha' shall be organized in Chikkamagalur.
The secular and democratic forces of Karnataka have taken up this as a challenge and have declared that they would also organize a similar rally on the same day to 'save Bababudangiri'. We believe this 'aggressive secularism' could only be the real answer to growing fascism. On Dec.21st we are also planning to hold a rally under the slogan 'let us build souharda Karnataka' at the same place. We have been successful in mobilizing all secular forces for this task.
We appeal to all the anti-communal and progressive forces to support this effort, in all possible means, funds, propaganda, participation etc.We consider our fight against Hindu fascism in Karnataka is part and parcel of the same at all India level.
You can:
1. Release press statements, collect signatures of as many people as possible and send them to S.M.Krishna, chief minister, Vidhana Soudha, bangalore-560001. Or send mails to smk@bangaloreit.com, demanding not to permit sangh parivar to communalise the issue, not to allow provocative meetings, speeches and slogans by sangh parivar. etc
2. Publicize this issue and the efforts against it as widely as possible.
3. Participate in the events, which are organized in this regard.
Mobilize the funds to make success the programme. You can send the cheuqes/dds in the name of Sarjashankar Haralimath payable at Shimoga.
K.L.Ashok
(Convener,Bababudangiri souharda vedike)
Contact address: K.L.Ashok, convener, Bababudangiri souharda vedike,
Dharanishiva nilaya 2nd cross, Bapooji nagar, Shimoga, Karnataka-577 201.
Phone: 0- 94481 55604 (Dr.Vasu). E-mail:
Massive anti-communal convention planned in Chikkamagalur in karnataka to protect the hindutva onslaught on the Bababudangiri shrine
AN APPEAL FROM BABABUDANGIRI SOUHARDA VEDIKE
Dear friends,
Indian political scene is entering another phase of communal cauldron. As the general elections are fast approaching, the Ayodhya issue is being raked up again with a fascist vigor. And are 'discovering' 'Ayodhyas' all over India. And in that pursuit they have 'discovered' such an issue in 'Bababudangiri', a Sufi shrine in the midst of Western Ghats in Karnataka.Since 1998, fascist forces of sangh parivar are trying to rake up anti-Muslim fanaticism in Karnataka by mobilizing campaign for the 'liberating Bababudangiri and recovering Dattatreya Peetha'. Since 5years, they are using the religious sentiments of Hindu devotees as cannon fodder for their anti Muslim programme and the same time brahminising the Dutta cult, which in fact is synchronous with Sufi cult, identified with oppressed masses.
But the ploys of sangh parivar are being successfully challenged by the secular and democratic forces of Karnataka and they have been partially successful in forcing them to be on the defensive.Last year, many progressive and democratic organizations and individuals from Shimoga and Chikkamagalur regions of Karnataka took the initiative in mobilizing all the secular forces of different ideological faiths, under the singular task of resisting the attempts of parivar to saffronise Karnataka by using the issue. More than 450 intellectuals and 150 organizations all over Karnataka were united under the banner of 'save Bababudangiri committee'. A huge gathering of more than 10,000 people was organized in Chikkamagalur, just 10 days after the parivar gathering in the same town, which had in fact terrorized minorities. This historical event boosted the morale of victimized minority people, increased the confidence of secular forces and pushed the fascist forces to the wall.
This year, being the election year, BJP has already declared that they would make Bababudangiri, 'Ayodhya of south'. VHP-BD is organizing a similar congregation, with a declared motive of destroying the shrine this time. Already in a smaller dry run, they have already destroyed the shops belonging to the Muslim community, near the shrine.They have already declared that on December 7th a gathering for 'liberating Dutta Peetha' shall be organized in Chikkamagalur.
The secular and democratic forces of Karnataka have taken up this as a challenge and have declared that they would also organize a similar rally on the same day to 'save Bababudangiri'. We believe this 'aggressive secularism' could only be the real answer to growing fascism. On Dec.21st we are also planning to hold a rally under the slogan 'let us build souharda Karnataka' at the same place. We have been successful in mobilizing all secular forces for this task.
We appeal to all the anti-communal and progressive forces to support this effort, in all possible means, funds, propaganda, participation etc.We consider our fight against Hindu fascism in Karnataka is part and parcel of the same at all India level.
You can:
1. Release press statements, collect signatures of as many people as possible and send them to S.M.Krishna, chief minister, Vidhana Soudha, bangalore-560001. Or send mails to smk@bangaloreit.com, demanding not to permit sangh parivar to communalise the issue, not to allow provocative meetings, speeches and slogans by sangh parivar. etc
2. Publicize this issue and the efforts against it as widely as possible.
3. Participate in the events, which are organized in this regard.
Mobilize the funds to make success the programme. You can send the cheuqes/dds in the name of Sarjashankar Haralimath payable at Shimoga.
K.L.Ashok
(Convener,Bababudangiri souharda vedike)
Contact address: K.L.Ashok, convener, Bababudangiri souharda vedike,
Dharanishiva nilaya 2nd cross, Bapooji nagar, Shimoga, Karnataka-577 201.
Phone: 0- 94481 55604 (Dr.Vasu). E-mail:
June 15, 2003
OUR BOWL, THEIR POT
The Telegraph [India]
June 15, 2003
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030615/asp/opinion/story_2054749.asp
OUR BOWL, THEIR POT
- Integration could yet acquire a truly multicultural resonance
SECOND THOUGHTS / GITHA HARIHARAN
[Photo caption] Piquant salad bowl
We don’t have to look for inspiration elsewhere, at the American melting pot, for example, with its reluctant multiculturalism. We have our own overflowing, piquant salad bowl. Our biggest strength is the Great Indian Experiment, a unique experiment in which an extended family of peoples speaks in many tongues, voices, communities. Where else but in India do you have a secular principle meeting the reality — not the idea — of a multicultural society?
But not everyone wants this experiment to continue. The biggest danger to our survival comes from the straitjacket-lovers — fundamentalists from various camps. The reigning fundoos beat the swadeshi drum, but strangely enough, they reject this one truly, uniquely, Indian experiment. Instead they are obsessed with replicating the European nation-building model via blood-and-kin nationalism. As they consolidated their nations, the European heroes of our pseudo-swadeshis ruthlessly exterminated minorities or shipped them off to melting pots elsewhere. Rigid borders were drawn with room for only one language, one religion, one exclusive nation. In the process, much was lost; this loss continues, in the present, to threaten countries from Germany to Canada with rupture. They too (mostly courtesy colonialism) have their version of multiculturalism now; but it is a kind that has to be coped with, the kind with strains and stresses that have to be somehow contained and fitted in.
Back on home ground, the real one, not the fundoo one: though its very existence seems an anomaly or a near-miracle, the Indian model of multiculturalism may have a lesson or two to offer anyone serious about examining the possibility of European “integration”. Both Indians and non-Indians have acknowledged, (some shaking their heads ruefully, others throwing up their hands), that there are many ways of viewing “India”. All of them have discovered in the process that perhaps there is only one way these stubbornly elusive strands and sharp-edged fragments can be contained in the same frame, whether in the imagination or in reality. It is by seeing India as a political entity which derives its reason to exist, and gathers its strength to survive, from its overweening diversity and hybridity.
Suppose we look at just a part of this “plural” Indian soul. Language is an obvious example to focus on, given the link between language and naming the world; between language and dream; language and identity; language and expression. Language-wise, certainly, India’s multicultural project is by no means a modern phenomenon. In his essay, “The Case of a Wounded Literature,” Malayalam poet and critic K. Satchidanandan points out that quite a few Indian poets between the 10th and 19th centuries — Guru Nanak, Mira and Kabir for instance — wrote in two, three or even four languages, without any conscious effort or cultivated scholarship. Indeed, our languages themselves are multilingual. Satchidanandan takes up the case of Malayalam. In addition to generous doses of Sanskrit and Tamil, it has, in day-to-day use, naturalized words from Urdu, Kannada, English, Dutch and Portuguese.
Later, multilingualism was closely identified with Indian nationalism. The polyglot nature of Indian culture was, for the colonizer, an alien map, impossible to link with their vision of a political entity; useless for journeys in real life. The British, with their monolingual and monoreligious culture, were simply unable to comprehend the multi-lingual, multi-religious culture of India. Charles Trevelyan found the “diversity among languages” to be “one of the greatest existing obstacles to improvement in India”. It may be useful to air, once again, the astonishing array of such expressions of a “global” homogenizing impulse of another time — looking the ancestors in the face so to speak, before taking on their descendants in contemporary times.
It may also be useful to mention here the political contests that have always existed as undercurrents to a dynamic multilingual scene. To uphold the Indian multilingual model is not to gloss over the perennial conflict between the normative voices, say in a language like Sanskrit, and oppressed or protesting voices such as those of the Dalits. Even a medieval poet like Kabir drew attention to the inevitable tension between the language in power, Sanskrit, describing it as “the stagnant water of the Lord’s private well” as opposed to the spoken language, “the rippling water of the running stream”.
A historian may perhaps see the presence of competing cultural forms as a symptom of reasonable health. There are other, more persuasive reasons to handle with care the case being made for the Indian multicultural model. If we point out that the universalist tradition of Europe, the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment, have all now culminated in the one-world diktat of the International Monetary Fund, we can also recall that independent India has built its daring secular project on the shaky foundation of a partition along religious lines. In our part of the world, the secular fabric is growing distinctly frail, large frayed patches marked by “barbaric survivals” or a retreat from modernity. In another part of the world, on the rebound from the brutalities of 19th century colonialism, the descendants of colonizers find it difficult to recognize continuities, interdependence and interpenetration.
Suppose we straighten our backs for a moment, temporarily shake off those crude dichotomies — ethnocentricity and pluralism, east and west. Why do we — all of us then — find “integration” or “unity in diversity” so difficult to achieve? After all, these are widely recognized, on all continents, as worthy and indispensable clichés, a little like the air we breathe or the water we drink. The answer — in its baldest form — is that regardless of vantage point, our colonial pasts and the new imperialisms of the present are fertile breeding grounds for unequal relationships. So that the criss-cross of unequal relationships exists not just between the erstwhile colonizers and the erstwhile colonized, but in the midst of multicultural India or multicultural Europe.
“The fact of the matter is that colonialism cannot simply be ‘put aside’,” says Alok Rai in a typically elegant and insightful 1992 essay, “Black Skin, White Masks”. Rai elaborates: “Quite apart from the comprehensive material damage, one carries the coded inscription of the unequal colonial relationship in the deepest recesses of one’s being.” The “post-colonial” — or for that matter the “post-colonizer” — are vulnerable to all “the twists and turns of the dialectic of the post-colonial consciousness, in which betrayal and inauthenticity are a constant danger, and appear in bewildering and unsettling disguises”.
Perhaps this is one reason why some of our traditionally multicultural societies are, when pushed against the wall of the neo-colonial present, so vulnerable to revivalisms. There is always the possibility of a nostalgic harking back to a time when peaceful co-existence was possible. We do not know if this golden age is true or a sustaining myth, or something humanly in between. If there was, once, some diluted version of an integrated federation minus original sin, the contemporary models of multiculturalism — even those with a spectacularly hoary tradition — contain within it layers of contradictions it would be dangerous to slap whitewash on. If we admit this, our ideological vision may fill a better mould; words such as integration may assume a truly multicultural shade. Dreams need not turn into nightmares.
June 15, 2003
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030615/asp/opinion/story_2054749.asp
OUR BOWL, THEIR POT
- Integration could yet acquire a truly multicultural resonance
SECOND THOUGHTS / GITHA HARIHARAN
[Photo caption] Piquant salad bowl
We don’t have to look for inspiration elsewhere, at the American melting pot, for example, with its reluctant multiculturalism. We have our own overflowing, piquant salad bowl. Our biggest strength is the Great Indian Experiment, a unique experiment in which an extended family of peoples speaks in many tongues, voices, communities. Where else but in India do you have a secular principle meeting the reality — not the idea — of a multicultural society?
But not everyone wants this experiment to continue. The biggest danger to our survival comes from the straitjacket-lovers — fundamentalists from various camps. The reigning fundoos beat the swadeshi drum, but strangely enough, they reject this one truly, uniquely, Indian experiment. Instead they are obsessed with replicating the European nation-building model via blood-and-kin nationalism. As they consolidated their nations, the European heroes of our pseudo-swadeshis ruthlessly exterminated minorities or shipped them off to melting pots elsewhere. Rigid borders were drawn with room for only one language, one religion, one exclusive nation. In the process, much was lost; this loss continues, in the present, to threaten countries from Germany to Canada with rupture. They too (mostly courtesy colonialism) have their version of multiculturalism now; but it is a kind that has to be coped with, the kind with strains and stresses that have to be somehow contained and fitted in.
Back on home ground, the real one, not the fundoo one: though its very existence seems an anomaly or a near-miracle, the Indian model of multiculturalism may have a lesson or two to offer anyone serious about examining the possibility of European “integration”. Both Indians and non-Indians have acknowledged, (some shaking their heads ruefully, others throwing up their hands), that there are many ways of viewing “India”. All of them have discovered in the process that perhaps there is only one way these stubbornly elusive strands and sharp-edged fragments can be contained in the same frame, whether in the imagination or in reality. It is by seeing India as a political entity which derives its reason to exist, and gathers its strength to survive, from its overweening diversity and hybridity.
Suppose we look at just a part of this “plural” Indian soul. Language is an obvious example to focus on, given the link between language and naming the world; between language and dream; language and identity; language and expression. Language-wise, certainly, India’s multicultural project is by no means a modern phenomenon. In his essay, “The Case of a Wounded Literature,” Malayalam poet and critic K. Satchidanandan points out that quite a few Indian poets between the 10th and 19th centuries — Guru Nanak, Mira and Kabir for instance — wrote in two, three or even four languages, without any conscious effort or cultivated scholarship. Indeed, our languages themselves are multilingual. Satchidanandan takes up the case of Malayalam. In addition to generous doses of Sanskrit and Tamil, it has, in day-to-day use, naturalized words from Urdu, Kannada, English, Dutch and Portuguese.
Later, multilingualism was closely identified with Indian nationalism. The polyglot nature of Indian culture was, for the colonizer, an alien map, impossible to link with their vision of a political entity; useless for journeys in real life. The British, with their monolingual and monoreligious culture, were simply unable to comprehend the multi-lingual, multi-religious culture of India. Charles Trevelyan found the “diversity among languages” to be “one of the greatest existing obstacles to improvement in India”. It may be useful to air, once again, the astonishing array of such expressions of a “global” homogenizing impulse of another time — looking the ancestors in the face so to speak, before taking on their descendants in contemporary times.
It may also be useful to mention here the political contests that have always existed as undercurrents to a dynamic multilingual scene. To uphold the Indian multilingual model is not to gloss over the perennial conflict between the normative voices, say in a language like Sanskrit, and oppressed or protesting voices such as those of the Dalits. Even a medieval poet like Kabir drew attention to the inevitable tension between the language in power, Sanskrit, describing it as “the stagnant water of the Lord’s private well” as opposed to the spoken language, “the rippling water of the running stream”.
A historian may perhaps see the presence of competing cultural forms as a symptom of reasonable health. There are other, more persuasive reasons to handle with care the case being made for the Indian multicultural model. If we point out that the universalist tradition of Europe, the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment, have all now culminated in the one-world diktat of the International Monetary Fund, we can also recall that independent India has built its daring secular project on the shaky foundation of a partition along religious lines. In our part of the world, the secular fabric is growing distinctly frail, large frayed patches marked by “barbaric survivals” or a retreat from modernity. In another part of the world, on the rebound from the brutalities of 19th century colonialism, the descendants of colonizers find it difficult to recognize continuities, interdependence and interpenetration.
Suppose we straighten our backs for a moment, temporarily shake off those crude dichotomies — ethnocentricity and pluralism, east and west. Why do we — all of us then — find “integration” or “unity in diversity” so difficult to achieve? After all, these are widely recognized, on all continents, as worthy and indispensable clichés, a little like the air we breathe or the water we drink. The answer — in its baldest form — is that regardless of vantage point, our colonial pasts and the new imperialisms of the present are fertile breeding grounds for unequal relationships. So that the criss-cross of unequal relationships exists not just between the erstwhile colonizers and the erstwhile colonized, but in the midst of multicultural India or multicultural Europe.
“The fact of the matter is that colonialism cannot simply be ‘put aside’,” says Alok Rai in a typically elegant and insightful 1992 essay, “Black Skin, White Masks”. Rai elaborates: “Quite apart from the comprehensive material damage, one carries the coded inscription of the unequal colonial relationship in the deepest recesses of one’s being.” The “post-colonial” — or for that matter the “post-colonizer” — are vulnerable to all “the twists and turns of the dialectic of the post-colonial consciousness, in which betrayal and inauthenticity are a constant danger, and appear in bewildering and unsettling disguises”.
Perhaps this is one reason why some of our traditionally multicultural societies are, when pushed against the wall of the neo-colonial present, so vulnerable to revivalisms. There is always the possibility of a nostalgic harking back to a time when peaceful co-existence was possible. We do not know if this golden age is true or a sustaining myth, or something humanly in between. If there was, once, some diluted version of an integrated federation minus original sin, the contemporary models of multiculturalism — even those with a spectacularly hoary tradition — contain within it layers of contradictions it would be dangerous to slap whitewash on. If we admit this, our ideological vision may fill a better mould; words such as integration may assume a truly multicultural shade. Dreams need not turn into nightmares.
May 31, 2003
The destruction of pluralist India
The Hindu, Jun 01, 2003
Literary Review
The last decade has seen the systematic capture of socio-political and cultural space by the Hindu Right. The three books under review offer a comprehensive overview and secularist critique of the whole process, says SHAJAHAN MADAMPAT.
VEER DAMODAR SAVARKAR and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, both irreligious and "unconventional", represented the mutually complimentary, yet outwardly antagonistic streams of religion-based, two-nation theory in pre-independence India. Savarkar scripted the drama and Jinnah literally enacted it to its (il)logical conclusion. The major point of agreement between the two gentlemen was, however, the theory that Hindus and Muslims constituted two different nations, unable to coexist and historically irreconcilable with each other. Having won independence, Indians heaved a sigh of relief that, despite partition and the horrendous genocidal violence that accompanied it, the newly born Indian nation had decided to follow a course fundamentally at odds with the anti-national forces on the Muslim and Hindu Right alike.
Well over half a century after partition, we are yet again confronted with the same forces, no less dangerous though in a different form. The last couple of decades have seen a systematic capture of socio-political and cultural space by fissiparous forces, represented this time by the Hindu manifestations of the ghost of Jinnah. They have not only managed to win a popular mandate to rule India with the help of opportunistic alliances with "secular parties", but also unleashed a scathing attack on all the pillars of India's multi-culturalist existence. While those occupying positions of power attack them from within through a number of manipulative strategies and transformative measures, the lumpen fringe do so by way of naked verbal and physical aggression. The three books under review here provide a comprehensive overview and secularist critique of this whole process that continues to erode even a semblance of sanity from the public space. The landmarks of the "devastate India" campaign have been the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the antediluvian attempts at rewriting history, represented mainly by the NCERT's introduction of new social science textbooks.
Communalism, Civil Society & the State is a collection of profound essays by some of India's most respected scholars, including K.N. Panikkar, Aijaz Ahmad, Irfan Habib, Mushirul Hassan, Romila Thapar and Prabhat Patnaik. These essays emerged from the disturbing realisation that, as the introduction rightly portends, "communalism has quite clearly made the transition to the full-blown symptoms of fascism". The "Gujarat experiment" confirms this, bringing into focus the twin elements of mass participation and state complicity in communal carnage, leaving the victims with no recourse either to the collective wisdom of the civil society or to the rule of law. The active role that social groups considered thus far on the opposite side of the Hindu Right, such as Dalits and Adivasis, played in Gujarat, added to the complexity of the situation. That all the three landmark Hindutva exploits happened during the BJP rule (at the time of the Babri demolition the BJP was in power in UP) belies the naïve optimism in some liberal circles that the taste of power would ultimately quell the savage passions of the bloodthirsty fanatic fringe. The ominous truth is that India is at the threshold of fascism, a second partition has actually occurred, this time on a psychological plane.
The economic deterioration and rising unemployment made rampant by globalisation provided the right atmosphere for chauvinist mass mobilisation. Fascism requires a period of economic crisis as a necessary condition for its mass growth. A recolonised economy serving the interests of the advanced capitalist countries is sure to cause widespread frustration. One question remains unanswered: why have the progressive forces completely failed in translating this despair into constructive political action? Several contributors refer to the take over of the nationalist space by the fascist elements, leaving India's constitutional framework vulnerable to cynical distortions and manipulations. Even the Congress party is now more interested in playing the BJP's B team, than in confronting the demon head on. Third world nationalisms originally emerged as a result of people transcending narrow sectarian and cultural barriers in their struggle against imperialism. However, the calculated invisibility of new forms of imperialism renders the whole political space ambiguous and in utter chaos.
Saffronised and Substandard comprises articles, editorials and news reports that expose the mediocrity, factual inaccuracies and wilful distortions that mark the new NCERT textbooks. The silences and distortions in these textbooks were only to be expected, but the fathomless depths of philistinism and matchless ignorance with which the authors wrote these books are simply "spectacular". The essays by Arjun Dev, Kumkum Roy, V.M. Jha, Sumit Sarkar, K.M. Shrimali and others offer a minutely analytical account of the textbooks. One the one hand, one feels the authors of these textbooks only deserve the charity of our contempt; they are not even worth any serious engagement. On the other, one shudders at the thought of how pathological the mindset of a generation that grows up on a fair dose of this kind of histories would be.
The Republic Besmirched documents media reports and commentaries on the demolition of the Babri Mosque. The pieces compiled in this book make one feel that despite many shortcomings, the English media reflects the conscience of the nation even in these deeply troubling times. The three books, taken together, will provide adequate information and analysis of the historic rape of India that has continued unchecked during the last decade.
Communalism, Civil Society & the State: Reflections on a Decade of Turbulence, edited by K.N. Panikkar and Sukumar Muralidharan, Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, p.181, Rs.120.
Saffronised and Substandard: A Critique of the New NCERT Textbooks, Articles, Editorials, Reports, Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, 2002, p.160, Rs.75.
The Republic Besmirched: 6 December 1992, edited by Anand K. Sahay, Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, p.172, Rs. 60.
Literary Review
The last decade has seen the systematic capture of socio-political and cultural space by the Hindu Right. The three books under review offer a comprehensive overview and secularist critique of the whole process, says SHAJAHAN MADAMPAT.
VEER DAMODAR SAVARKAR and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, both irreligious and "unconventional", represented the mutually complimentary, yet outwardly antagonistic streams of religion-based, two-nation theory in pre-independence India. Savarkar scripted the drama and Jinnah literally enacted it to its (il)logical conclusion. The major point of agreement between the two gentlemen was, however, the theory that Hindus and Muslims constituted two different nations, unable to coexist and historically irreconcilable with each other. Having won independence, Indians heaved a sigh of relief that, despite partition and the horrendous genocidal violence that accompanied it, the newly born Indian nation had decided to follow a course fundamentally at odds with the anti-national forces on the Muslim and Hindu Right alike.
Well over half a century after partition, we are yet again confronted with the same forces, no less dangerous though in a different form. The last couple of decades have seen a systematic capture of socio-political and cultural space by fissiparous forces, represented this time by the Hindu manifestations of the ghost of Jinnah. They have not only managed to win a popular mandate to rule India with the help of opportunistic alliances with "secular parties", but also unleashed a scathing attack on all the pillars of India's multi-culturalist existence. While those occupying positions of power attack them from within through a number of manipulative strategies and transformative measures, the lumpen fringe do so by way of naked verbal and physical aggression. The three books under review here provide a comprehensive overview and secularist critique of this whole process that continues to erode even a semblance of sanity from the public space. The landmarks of the "devastate India" campaign have been the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the antediluvian attempts at rewriting history, represented mainly by the NCERT's introduction of new social science textbooks.
Communalism, Civil Society & the State is a collection of profound essays by some of India's most respected scholars, including K.N. Panikkar, Aijaz Ahmad, Irfan Habib, Mushirul Hassan, Romila Thapar and Prabhat Patnaik. These essays emerged from the disturbing realisation that, as the introduction rightly portends, "communalism has quite clearly made the transition to the full-blown symptoms of fascism". The "Gujarat experiment" confirms this, bringing into focus the twin elements of mass participation and state complicity in communal carnage, leaving the victims with no recourse either to the collective wisdom of the civil society or to the rule of law. The active role that social groups considered thus far on the opposite side of the Hindu Right, such as Dalits and Adivasis, played in Gujarat, added to the complexity of the situation. That all the three landmark Hindutva exploits happened during the BJP rule (at the time of the Babri demolition the BJP was in power in UP) belies the naïve optimism in some liberal circles that the taste of power would ultimately quell the savage passions of the bloodthirsty fanatic fringe. The ominous truth is that India is at the threshold of fascism, a second partition has actually occurred, this time on a psychological plane.
The economic deterioration and rising unemployment made rampant by globalisation provided the right atmosphere for chauvinist mass mobilisation. Fascism requires a period of economic crisis as a necessary condition for its mass growth. A recolonised economy serving the interests of the advanced capitalist countries is sure to cause widespread frustration. One question remains unanswered: why have the progressive forces completely failed in translating this despair into constructive political action? Several contributors refer to the take over of the nationalist space by the fascist elements, leaving India's constitutional framework vulnerable to cynical distortions and manipulations. Even the Congress party is now more interested in playing the BJP's B team, than in confronting the demon head on. Third world nationalisms originally emerged as a result of people transcending narrow sectarian and cultural barriers in their struggle against imperialism. However, the calculated invisibility of new forms of imperialism renders the whole political space ambiguous and in utter chaos.
Saffronised and Substandard comprises articles, editorials and news reports that expose the mediocrity, factual inaccuracies and wilful distortions that mark the new NCERT textbooks. The silences and distortions in these textbooks were only to be expected, but the fathomless depths of philistinism and matchless ignorance with which the authors wrote these books are simply "spectacular". The essays by Arjun Dev, Kumkum Roy, V.M. Jha, Sumit Sarkar, K.M. Shrimali and others offer a minutely analytical account of the textbooks. One the one hand, one feels the authors of these textbooks only deserve the charity of our contempt; they are not even worth any serious engagement. On the other, one shudders at the thought of how pathological the mindset of a generation that grows up on a fair dose of this kind of histories would be.
The Republic Besmirched documents media reports and commentaries on the demolition of the Babri Mosque. The pieces compiled in this book make one feel that despite many shortcomings, the English media reflects the conscience of the nation even in these deeply troubling times. The three books, taken together, will provide adequate information and analysis of the historic rape of India that has continued unchecked during the last decade.
Communalism, Civil Society & the State: Reflections on a Decade of Turbulence, edited by K.N. Panikkar and Sukumar Muralidharan, Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, p.181, Rs.120.
Saffronised and Substandard: A Critique of the New NCERT Textbooks, Articles, Editorials, Reports, Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, 2002, p.160, Rs.75.
The Republic Besmirched: 6 December 1992, edited by Anand K. Sahay, Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, p.172, Rs. 60.
A Fascist future of the past - Thanks to hindutva THE history of India is being retold
Frontline
Volume 20, Issue 11, May 24 - June 06, 2003
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2011/stories/20030606001508100.htm
EDUCATION
HISTORY RETOLD
K.N. PANIKKAR
Fascist future of the past.
THE history of India is being retold. And with the support of the government. There is nothing extraordinary in either of them. For history, like any other discipline, undergoes continuous revision. That is when historians gain access to hitherto unused sources or employ new analytical tools. The historian's work is also contingent upon the infrastructure generated and controlled by the government, particularly the archival and the archaeological. On many occasions, research projects are undertaken with the financial support proffered by the agencies of the government. Yet, the historian in independent India has enjoyed enough intellectual freedom to pursue his work without external interference. It is arguable that the advances made by Indian historiography during the post-Independence period would not have been possible without this independence. The situation has rapidly changed during the last few years. The government is now a key player in the writing of history, deciding and dictating what constitutes authentic history and disseminating it through its agencies such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
The past is a matter of interest to all governments as it often serves as a source of legitimacy for their politics and as a justification for the society and polity they seek to construct. The involvement of succeeding governments in India in matters historical can be traced to these reasons. Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had taken keen interest in the writing of history; the latter even embedded at the Red Fort in Delhi an official version of history in a time capsule. Their engagement was integral to the nature of their politics: the creation of a secular nation out of the diverse religious communities into which the people were organisationally, ideologically and emotionally divided. The attempt, therefore, was to retrieve the past from the colonial distortions and thus construct a nationalist history, which would reinforce the sense of commonness that the anti-colonial struggle had proffered. More important, to call attention to the fact that the secular character of the nation is not a contemporary construction but a part and continuation of its historical experience. Nehru had already laid the foundation for such a view in The Discovery of India , which was subsequently elaborated by many.
The government of independent India had initiated several projects, primarily to underline the historical processes that contributed to the making of the nation. One of the earliest efforts was to commission a history of the Revolt of 1857, which was initially entrusted to R.C. Majumdar who, however, withdrew owing to some differences of opinion. It was subsequently undertaken by Tarachand, Majumdar publishing his version independent of the government. Tarachand also wrote a multi-volume history of the freedom movement, which was sponsored by the government. Majumdar's withdrawal underlined the tension inherent in government sponsorship, which was sought to be overcome by setting up independent and autonomous institutions.
It was in this context that the NCERT and the ICHR came into being. These institutions, like other such bodies as the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), were envisaged as autonomous organisations with full control over their academic activities without any interference from the government. The question of autonomy was seriously debated in the ICSSR during the chairmanship of Sukhamoy Chakravarty when the government tried to control its activities. Although financial dependence and academic autonomy are difficult to reconcile, eventually the government recognised the significance of such organisations functioning within an autonomous sphere. Unfortunately, such ideas have no sanctity in the new dispensation and these institutions have been relegated to the position of loyal appendages of the government. Yet, it is necessary to recall that both the NCERT and the ICHR, by their constitution, are independent and autonomous organisations.
THE NCERT's main brief was to prepare standard textbooks for use in schools all over India. In the field of history, the NCERT had managed to persuade some of the outstanding historians of India - most of whom are in the list of `eminent historians' derisively described so by Arun Shourie, now Disinvestment Minister - to write books for school children from Class VI onwards. Although these textbooks had several limitations in both content and pedagogy as recently pointed out by Krishna Kumar about the modern history textbook, they marked a healthy departure from the books then in use in schools. In a country where scholars hardly wrote textbooks the participation of some of the well-recognised names in the project was itself an achievement. It was clear that their involvement was part of an effort to bring about a paradigm shift in the teaching of history. Understandably, these textbooks earned near-universal acclaim at that time. Apart from the professional competence, they helped students envision the nation as a secular entity.
These textbooks came under adverse comments during the Janata regime after the Emergency. Reportedly at the instance of some leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the government contemplated the withdrawal of these books on the plea that they injured the religious sentiments of Hindus. In the face of nation-wide protests, the government decided to refer them to some historians, an overwhelming majority of who found nothing wrong with these books. The government, therefore, dropped the idea of withdrawing them.
These are the same books that have recently attracted the ire of the Sangh Parivar on the same grounds - that they either injure the religious feelings of the people or insult the historical memory of certain communities. Initially, the government decided to expunge all such facts from the text and later decided to suppress them altogether and replace them with new books. Unlike in 1977, there was no consultation with historians, at least not known to the public, and the decision was reportedly taken by the Human Resource Development Minister who, if his public pronouncements are to be believed, has emerged as an `acknowledged' authority on history! He has, however, announced that in future all textbooks would be vetted by religious leaders to ensure that they are properly sanitised of all objectionable material. This change of procedure is perhaps a reflection of the erosion of the commitment of the government to democratic values. About the practice of history, however, the government censure raises an important question. What part of history should the people know? It needs no reiteration that all facts of history can never be incorporated in any work, let alone in a textbook. But can deletions be made on the ground that they are likely to be uncomfortable to some? For instance, should the textbooks contain the changing food habits of the people, influenced as they were by the nature of social organisation and the system of economic production? That the consumption of beef was not a taboo during the Vedic period is a significant marker of the social organisation at that time. So was its prohibition at a later time. Both help explain the patterns of social change. Similarly should the iniquities of the caste system, practised even today, be kept under wraps? Should we shroud the fact that Gandhiji was killed by a Hindu fanatic? If we accept the principle of selective presentation based on political convenience, quite a bit of our known history would be lost to the coming generations.
The NCERT has published four textbooks to replace the old ones: India and the World for Class VI, Contemporary India for Class IX, Medieval India and Ancient India for Class XI. In the foreword to these books, NCERT Director states: "The new techniques and technologies, new excavations and explorations have resulted in fresh interpretations of several situations in history... . The new NCERT textbooks in history have been prepared adhering strictly to the principle of giving an objective account of historical events. The latest researches and interpretations in the field have been incorporated." This indeed is a laudable sentiment, as the fruits of recent research should necessarily find a place in the textbooks. The earlier textbooks were written about 30 years ago, and much has happened since in Indian historiography by way of empirical advance and conceptual innovation. Unfortunately, the new textbooks, despite the Director's claim, hardly contain anything new, either empirically or analytically, except assertions of certain unsubstantiated claims about the antiquity of Indian civilisation and its achievements and the indigenous origins of the Aryans. In fact, these textbooks, replete with factual errors and unacknowledged reproductions from the works of other scholars, are much poorer in knowledge and unprofessional in pedagogic methods. They have depended more on imagination than on historian's craft.
THE objection to these books, however much the critics have harped on factual errors and anachronisms, is much more fundamental. The errors, as NCERT Director has repeatedly stated, can be corrected, even if they are a poor commentary on the knowledge of the `specialists' who have authored these books. But then several of them are not simple errors unwittingly committed; there appears to be some method in the madness. For, some facts are deliberately suppressed, others are underplayed and some others are blown out of proportion. They seek to establish the unmatched antiquity of Indian civilisation and its unparalleled achievements. For instance, Indian civilisation is credited with an "unbroken history of 8,000 years i.e. from Neolithic times" and the Upanishads are described as the "greatest work on philosophy in the history of humankind". Hinduism, "the eternal spiritual tradition of India," is traced to the Harappan civilisation, which coincides with the Vedic. The religious and political practices of the ancient civilisation are still in vogue, which suggests continuity from the ancient past. The pipal tree, the linga, fire, sun, wind and sky, which were the objects of worship during the `Harappan-Vedic' civilisation continue to be so even today. Similarity also exists in political practices and institutions. The rules which "governed the debate and behaviour of the members in Sabha and Samiti were like in our Parliament". The king was assisted by a council of ministers, which was "called mantriparshad as today". The rulers were "chosen by the people of the kingdom like we choose our government today".
The achievements of Indian civilisation in science and technology receive particular attention. India is projected as the original home of knowledge in many a field. The Class XI textbook states: "In the field of mathematics, astronomy and medicine India had much advanced knowledge during this period in comparison to any other country in the world. These developments in science and technology in India were first borrowed by Arabs and then by the Western world." The narrative that follows does not say how the Indian knowledge in these fields was advanced than others or how the Arabs and the West incorporated it. Surprisingly, what is said about Vedic science is exactly the same in both Class VI and Class XI books! Surely, Class XI students should know more about the scientific achievements of the Vedic Aryans.
In contrast to the repeated references to science and technology in ancient India, the textbook on medieval India is remarkably silent about them. It gives the impression that there were no scientific pursuits or technological innovations worth mentioning in this period. The chapters on culture focus mainly on architecture, painting and religious movements. But in all of them the syncretic tendencies that emerged as a result of the coming together of two different streams, which produced a new cultural ambience, are scrupulously overlooked. The changes in the architectural style as a result of the mutual influence of the Islamic and the Hindu traditions do not find a mention, even if some of the finest structures of medieval India were the result of this interaction. At the same time architecture is used to underline religious division. Shajahan, it is stated, forbade the construction of Hindu temples and destroyed others. The number of mosques repaired or constructed and temples destroyed by Aurangazeb form the only content of the section on the decline of Mughal architecture!
The plural religious context and influence as a factor in the emergence of medieval religious movements such as the Bhakti and the Sufi movements and in their philosophical outlook have been unambiguously rejected. The Bakhti movement, it is asserted, was "not a Hindu response to the egalitarian message of Islam and its spread among the lower classes," but only the continuation of the tradition from the times of the Upanishads and the Bhagvat Gita. Similarly, Sufism is described as "a movement that arose independently within the Muslim world and not as a consequence of its interface with Hinduism". Apart from a passing reference to Dadu, none of the Nirguna Bhaktas like Kabir, and Raidas find a place in the text. The caste system and religious practices such as idolatry, which the Nirguna Bhaktas criticised and rejected have been completely overlooked. The attitude of the Sufi saints towards Hinduism and their attempts to promote cultural synthesis do not figure at all in the discussion. Such silence is perhaps not accidental, but part of a design to foreground religious exclusion and difference as the characteristic of Indian society.
The suppression, distortion and invention of historical facts, which are aplenty, have undermined the quality of these new textbooks and have made them unworthy of use in the schools. More importantly, the sense of history that it seeks to convey tends to weaken the unity of the nation and endanger social harmony. For almost everything that happened in history an undercurrent of religious identity is either directly or indirectly suggested and the cultural and philosophical dynamism that the presence of different religious streams had entailed, has been scrupulously avoided. Added to that is a pro-Hindu slant; the defence of Hindu social institutions running through the entire narrative. For instance, the section on conversions does not give any information about the causes and the process of conversion. It only tries to prove that the "so-called tyranny of the caste system" has nothing to do with conversions and that the social condition of the converts did not improve thereafter.
A close reading of all the four textbooks leaves the impression that the history of India is being projected in religious terms, privileging the Hindu as the embodiment of the nation. This is a departure from the secular-scientific outlook of the earlier textbooks. This change is symptomatic of the political project of the present government, namely to redefine the Indian nation as Hindu, euphemistically claimed as the realisation of cultural nationalism. What the NCERT has done is to reshape the Indian past in order to provide historical justification for this political project and to mould communally the historical consciousness of the coming generations. In the process, it has neither respected the norms of historical discipline nor followed its generally accepted methods. The imprecise and unsubstantiated statements and totally unconnected digressions, which are far too many to recount, make these books professionally unacceptable.
The present revision of history, academically bizarre but politically well-crafted, becomes intelligible only in the context of the communalisation of the public discourse during the last few years. The communal view of history presented by the textbooks used in the schools run by the Sangh-controlled Vidya Bharati, has considerably contributed to this process. So has the Hinduised notion of the past popularised by the Itihas Sankalan Samiti, entrusted with the task of rewriting history. So far, this interpretation had no credibility or acceptance in academia. By providing the stamp of its governmental authority, the NCERT has brought it to the mainstream. The `new' history that it propounds, reminiscent of what the fascist regimes did, is likely to contribute to the creation of a sense of popular ultra nationalism. For, it seeks to inculcate a false sense of pride in a community with a dismal present by associating it with a past where it had unparalleled achievements to its credit. Such a view can serve the `nation' well, by providing an ideology for organising the politics of identity, exclusion and hatred. The example of fascism in Europe has demonstrated the lure of aggression for the defeated and the sense of hatred that it could generate. The NCERT textbooks invoke the past to create a similar psychology of pride and aggression. Hindu communalism has thus made yet another advance in moulding the future generations in a communal way.
K.N. Panikkar is Vice-Chancellor of the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala.
Volume 20, Issue 11, May 24 - June 06, 2003
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2011/stories/20030606001508100.htm
EDUCATION
HISTORY RETOLD
K.N. PANIKKAR
Fascist future of the past.
THE history of India is being retold. And with the support of the government. There is nothing extraordinary in either of them. For history, like any other discipline, undergoes continuous revision. That is when historians gain access to hitherto unused sources or employ new analytical tools. The historian's work is also contingent upon the infrastructure generated and controlled by the government, particularly the archival and the archaeological. On many occasions, research projects are undertaken with the financial support proffered by the agencies of the government. Yet, the historian in independent India has enjoyed enough intellectual freedom to pursue his work without external interference. It is arguable that the advances made by Indian historiography during the post-Independence period would not have been possible without this independence. The situation has rapidly changed during the last few years. The government is now a key player in the writing of history, deciding and dictating what constitutes authentic history and disseminating it through its agencies such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
The past is a matter of interest to all governments as it often serves as a source of legitimacy for their politics and as a justification for the society and polity they seek to construct. The involvement of succeeding governments in India in matters historical can be traced to these reasons. Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had taken keen interest in the writing of history; the latter even embedded at the Red Fort in Delhi an official version of history in a time capsule. Their engagement was integral to the nature of their politics: the creation of a secular nation out of the diverse religious communities into which the people were organisationally, ideologically and emotionally divided. The attempt, therefore, was to retrieve the past from the colonial distortions and thus construct a nationalist history, which would reinforce the sense of commonness that the anti-colonial struggle had proffered. More important, to call attention to the fact that the secular character of the nation is not a contemporary construction but a part and continuation of its historical experience. Nehru had already laid the foundation for such a view in The Discovery of India , which was subsequently elaborated by many.
The government of independent India had initiated several projects, primarily to underline the historical processes that contributed to the making of the nation. One of the earliest efforts was to commission a history of the Revolt of 1857, which was initially entrusted to R.C. Majumdar who, however, withdrew owing to some differences of opinion. It was subsequently undertaken by Tarachand, Majumdar publishing his version independent of the government. Tarachand also wrote a multi-volume history of the freedom movement, which was sponsored by the government. Majumdar's withdrawal underlined the tension inherent in government sponsorship, which was sought to be overcome by setting up independent and autonomous institutions.
It was in this context that the NCERT and the ICHR came into being. These institutions, like other such bodies as the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), were envisaged as autonomous organisations with full control over their academic activities without any interference from the government. The question of autonomy was seriously debated in the ICSSR during the chairmanship of Sukhamoy Chakravarty when the government tried to control its activities. Although financial dependence and academic autonomy are difficult to reconcile, eventually the government recognised the significance of such organisations functioning within an autonomous sphere. Unfortunately, such ideas have no sanctity in the new dispensation and these institutions have been relegated to the position of loyal appendages of the government. Yet, it is necessary to recall that both the NCERT and the ICHR, by their constitution, are independent and autonomous organisations.
THE NCERT's main brief was to prepare standard textbooks for use in schools all over India. In the field of history, the NCERT had managed to persuade some of the outstanding historians of India - most of whom are in the list of `eminent historians' derisively described so by Arun Shourie, now Disinvestment Minister - to write books for school children from Class VI onwards. Although these textbooks had several limitations in both content and pedagogy as recently pointed out by Krishna Kumar about the modern history textbook, they marked a healthy departure from the books then in use in schools. In a country where scholars hardly wrote textbooks the participation of some of the well-recognised names in the project was itself an achievement. It was clear that their involvement was part of an effort to bring about a paradigm shift in the teaching of history. Understandably, these textbooks earned near-universal acclaim at that time. Apart from the professional competence, they helped students envision the nation as a secular entity.
These textbooks came under adverse comments during the Janata regime after the Emergency. Reportedly at the instance of some leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the government contemplated the withdrawal of these books on the plea that they injured the religious sentiments of Hindus. In the face of nation-wide protests, the government decided to refer them to some historians, an overwhelming majority of who found nothing wrong with these books. The government, therefore, dropped the idea of withdrawing them.
These are the same books that have recently attracted the ire of the Sangh Parivar on the same grounds - that they either injure the religious feelings of the people or insult the historical memory of certain communities. Initially, the government decided to expunge all such facts from the text and later decided to suppress them altogether and replace them with new books. Unlike in 1977, there was no consultation with historians, at least not known to the public, and the decision was reportedly taken by the Human Resource Development Minister who, if his public pronouncements are to be believed, has emerged as an `acknowledged' authority on history! He has, however, announced that in future all textbooks would be vetted by religious leaders to ensure that they are properly sanitised of all objectionable material. This change of procedure is perhaps a reflection of the erosion of the commitment of the government to democratic values. About the practice of history, however, the government censure raises an important question. What part of history should the people know? It needs no reiteration that all facts of history can never be incorporated in any work, let alone in a textbook. But can deletions be made on the ground that they are likely to be uncomfortable to some? For instance, should the textbooks contain the changing food habits of the people, influenced as they were by the nature of social organisation and the system of economic production? That the consumption of beef was not a taboo during the Vedic period is a significant marker of the social organisation at that time. So was its prohibition at a later time. Both help explain the patterns of social change. Similarly should the iniquities of the caste system, practised even today, be kept under wraps? Should we shroud the fact that Gandhiji was killed by a Hindu fanatic? If we accept the principle of selective presentation based on political convenience, quite a bit of our known history would be lost to the coming generations.
The NCERT has published four textbooks to replace the old ones: India and the World for Class VI, Contemporary India for Class IX, Medieval India and Ancient India for Class XI. In the foreword to these books, NCERT Director states: "The new techniques and technologies, new excavations and explorations have resulted in fresh interpretations of several situations in history... . The new NCERT textbooks in history have been prepared adhering strictly to the principle of giving an objective account of historical events. The latest researches and interpretations in the field have been incorporated." This indeed is a laudable sentiment, as the fruits of recent research should necessarily find a place in the textbooks. The earlier textbooks were written about 30 years ago, and much has happened since in Indian historiography by way of empirical advance and conceptual innovation. Unfortunately, the new textbooks, despite the Director's claim, hardly contain anything new, either empirically or analytically, except assertions of certain unsubstantiated claims about the antiquity of Indian civilisation and its achievements and the indigenous origins of the Aryans. In fact, these textbooks, replete with factual errors and unacknowledged reproductions from the works of other scholars, are much poorer in knowledge and unprofessional in pedagogic methods. They have depended more on imagination than on historian's craft.
THE objection to these books, however much the critics have harped on factual errors and anachronisms, is much more fundamental. The errors, as NCERT Director has repeatedly stated, can be corrected, even if they are a poor commentary on the knowledge of the `specialists' who have authored these books. But then several of them are not simple errors unwittingly committed; there appears to be some method in the madness. For, some facts are deliberately suppressed, others are underplayed and some others are blown out of proportion. They seek to establish the unmatched antiquity of Indian civilisation and its unparalleled achievements. For instance, Indian civilisation is credited with an "unbroken history of 8,000 years i.e. from Neolithic times" and the Upanishads are described as the "greatest work on philosophy in the history of humankind". Hinduism, "the eternal spiritual tradition of India," is traced to the Harappan civilisation, which coincides with the Vedic. The religious and political practices of the ancient civilisation are still in vogue, which suggests continuity from the ancient past. The pipal tree, the linga, fire, sun, wind and sky, which were the objects of worship during the `Harappan-Vedic' civilisation continue to be so even today. Similarity also exists in political practices and institutions. The rules which "governed the debate and behaviour of the members in Sabha and Samiti were like in our Parliament". The king was assisted by a council of ministers, which was "called mantriparshad as today". The rulers were "chosen by the people of the kingdom like we choose our government today".
The achievements of Indian civilisation in science and technology receive particular attention. India is projected as the original home of knowledge in many a field. The Class XI textbook states: "In the field of mathematics, astronomy and medicine India had much advanced knowledge during this period in comparison to any other country in the world. These developments in science and technology in India were first borrowed by Arabs and then by the Western world." The narrative that follows does not say how the Indian knowledge in these fields was advanced than others or how the Arabs and the West incorporated it. Surprisingly, what is said about Vedic science is exactly the same in both Class VI and Class XI books! Surely, Class XI students should know more about the scientific achievements of the Vedic Aryans.
In contrast to the repeated references to science and technology in ancient India, the textbook on medieval India is remarkably silent about them. It gives the impression that there were no scientific pursuits or technological innovations worth mentioning in this period. The chapters on culture focus mainly on architecture, painting and religious movements. But in all of them the syncretic tendencies that emerged as a result of the coming together of two different streams, which produced a new cultural ambience, are scrupulously overlooked. The changes in the architectural style as a result of the mutual influence of the Islamic and the Hindu traditions do not find a mention, even if some of the finest structures of medieval India were the result of this interaction. At the same time architecture is used to underline religious division. Shajahan, it is stated, forbade the construction of Hindu temples and destroyed others. The number of mosques repaired or constructed and temples destroyed by Aurangazeb form the only content of the section on the decline of Mughal architecture!
The plural religious context and influence as a factor in the emergence of medieval religious movements such as the Bhakti and the Sufi movements and in their philosophical outlook have been unambiguously rejected. The Bakhti movement, it is asserted, was "not a Hindu response to the egalitarian message of Islam and its spread among the lower classes," but only the continuation of the tradition from the times of the Upanishads and the Bhagvat Gita. Similarly, Sufism is described as "a movement that arose independently within the Muslim world and not as a consequence of its interface with Hinduism". Apart from a passing reference to Dadu, none of the Nirguna Bhaktas like Kabir, and Raidas find a place in the text. The caste system and religious practices such as idolatry, which the Nirguna Bhaktas criticised and rejected have been completely overlooked. The attitude of the Sufi saints towards Hinduism and their attempts to promote cultural synthesis do not figure at all in the discussion. Such silence is perhaps not accidental, but part of a design to foreground religious exclusion and difference as the characteristic of Indian society.
The suppression, distortion and invention of historical facts, which are aplenty, have undermined the quality of these new textbooks and have made them unworthy of use in the schools. More importantly, the sense of history that it seeks to convey tends to weaken the unity of the nation and endanger social harmony. For almost everything that happened in history an undercurrent of religious identity is either directly or indirectly suggested and the cultural and philosophical dynamism that the presence of different religious streams had entailed, has been scrupulously avoided. Added to that is a pro-Hindu slant; the defence of Hindu social institutions running through the entire narrative. For instance, the section on conversions does not give any information about the causes and the process of conversion. It only tries to prove that the "so-called tyranny of the caste system" has nothing to do with conversions and that the social condition of the converts did not improve thereafter.
A close reading of all the four textbooks leaves the impression that the history of India is being projected in religious terms, privileging the Hindu as the embodiment of the nation. This is a departure from the secular-scientific outlook of the earlier textbooks. This change is symptomatic of the political project of the present government, namely to redefine the Indian nation as Hindu, euphemistically claimed as the realisation of cultural nationalism. What the NCERT has done is to reshape the Indian past in order to provide historical justification for this political project and to mould communally the historical consciousness of the coming generations. In the process, it has neither respected the norms of historical discipline nor followed its generally accepted methods. The imprecise and unsubstantiated statements and totally unconnected digressions, which are far too many to recount, make these books professionally unacceptable.
The present revision of history, academically bizarre but politically well-crafted, becomes intelligible only in the context of the communalisation of the public discourse during the last few years. The communal view of history presented by the textbooks used in the schools run by the Sangh-controlled Vidya Bharati, has considerably contributed to this process. So has the Hinduised notion of the past popularised by the Itihas Sankalan Samiti, entrusted with the task of rewriting history. So far, this interpretation had no credibility or acceptance in academia. By providing the stamp of its governmental authority, the NCERT has brought it to the mainstream. The `new' history that it propounds, reminiscent of what the fascist regimes did, is likely to contribute to the creation of a sense of popular ultra nationalism. For, it seeks to inculcate a false sense of pride in a community with a dismal present by associating it with a past where it had unparalleled achievements to its credit. Such a view can serve the `nation' well, by providing an ideology for organising the politics of identity, exclusion and hatred. The example of fascism in Europe has demonstrated the lure of aggression for the defeated and the sense of hatred that it could generate. The NCERT textbooks invoke the past to create a similar psychology of pride and aggression. Hindu communalism has thus made yet another advance in moulding the future generations in a communal way.
K.N. Panikkar is Vice-Chancellor of the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala.
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