A new Art Blog

I started a new Art Blog recently, called Art Futures Kolkata. Its credo is "Making Art Accessible, Relating Art to Community."

My comrade-in-arms on the Art Blog is my friend and colleague of many years, George. The Art Blog could be a good way of commemorating the 25th anniversary of our friendship!

We hope that Art Futures Kolkata will be a powerful and critical voice, of dissent and aesthetics.

Ashis Nandy lectures

Dr Ashis Nandy is a political psychologist and social theorist whose path-breaking work has revitalized scholarship on political psychology, the Indian encounter with colonialism, mass violence, nationalism and culture. In 2008, he was listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals of the world by the journal Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One of his most celebrated books, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), is currently being honored as it comes out in its 30th edition.

Dr Nandy is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

The Center for South Asia together with the Stanford Humanities Center organised a lecture by Ashis Nandy on 6 March 2009. The title of the lecture was:"The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia".

Ajit Sanzgiri, who attended the lecture, wrote:

A Post-Secular Intellectual

I attended the talk. It was more a look at the life of Vinayak Savarkar - arguably the father of Hindu nationalism in India. Much of it was uncontroversial (at least to people who don't hold Savarkar in high regard) and unsurprising. So let me just quote the bits that seemed 'interesting'.

Right in the beginning, Dr. Nandy said the practice of biography is somewhat different in South Asia than in the rest of the world - by which I presume he meant Western scholarship. Biographies in S. Asia either tend to be pamphleteer rants - in which he included A G Noorani's biography of Savarkar - or unquestioningly adulatory [of which I presume there are many for Savarkar].

He pointed out that Savarkar was not a 'believing Hindu'. He ate meat and fish despite being a Chitpavan Brahmin and advocated eating beef. He was an avowed atheist and dismissive of the plethora of Hindu divinities. Interestingly, Jinnah, who Nandy mentioned as the representative of Muslim nationalism in South Asia, wasn't a practicing Muslim either and quoted an interview of M.C.Chhagla (Jinnah's nephew) in which he said one of his duties as Jinnah's secretary was to make sure he did not have to receive religiously minded visitors who might disturb him while enjoying his whiskey or a ham sandwich.

Among the various nineteenth century religious reform movements in South Asia all the Hindu and Buddhist ones and some (though not all) Islamic ones were (in Nandy's opinion) a reaction to the challenge posed by evangelising Christianity and represented a desire to "become in some ways like the enemy they wished to resist, the better to resist it".

That this was also the inspiration behind both Hindu and Muslim religious nationalisms. Speaking specifically of Savarkar, Dr. Nandy said, having studied European history and political theory he had come to the conclusion that a modern nation state had to be based on a dominant 'national identity' (respectively Hindu or Muslim) and minorities "tamed". This, Nandy said, is only emulating the examples set by England where Catholics were systematically marginalised and France where protestants were targeted. [These are Dr. Nandy's views.] Nandy pointed out that Savarkar had always had the most cordial relations with Jinnah and (apparently) completely sympathised with the demand for partition.

He had a fascinating riff on modern day fundamentalisms being attempted solutions to the problem faced by greater mobility.

Why is this a problem ? Well, before the nineteenth century - being a devout Hindu (or to some extent Muslim) meant following practices that were necessarily local, in a language that was local, worshipping aspects of divinity (whether deities, saints or whatever) which were also local. These things didn't travel well in case the devotee had to move long distances. As mobility increased - a need arose in the minds of some - to make faith portable like a laptop. The tensions that we see today are in some ways the results of this.

Savarkar was tortured at Andaman and this probably explains his offer to cooperate with the British authorities and the reduction of his prison sentence (initially condemned to two life sentences).

In an aside he said that in democratic India it is far easier for a Dalit (or some other minority) to be the head of the state government in 'communal' Maharashtra than in 'Communist' West Bengal. He said this in response to a question about why Gandhi's most bitter internal enemies were Chitpavan Brahmins from Maharashtra, the bhadralok babus of Bengal and - to a lesser extent - Tamil Brahmins.

In his introduction he was described (using text he had prepared) as a 'post-secular' intellectual. I meant to ask him to explain this but it slipped my mind, there were so many interesting threads to pick.

The defense attorney to Nathuram Godse (Gandhi's assassin) has recorded Godse's disappointment that Savarkar not only did not own up to his role in the assassination plot but deliberately distanced himself from the plotters and did not show any support or sympathy for them. [Savarkar narrowly avoided conviction in the case. Subsequent enquiry brought damning evidence to light.]

While I have always admired Nandy's writings, I came away with a very positive impression of his attention to detail and genuine dedication to scholarship.

Nandy's lecture is accessible here.

Here is a report on another talk by Ashis Nandy, carried in India West:

Hate Not Last Word in Partition: Nandy

by Ashfaque Swapan

It was not hatred, but a strong undercurrent of humanity, that was the surprising finding of research on the traumatic bloodbath of the Partition, iconoclastic Indian researcher Ashis Nandy told an audience March 3 at the University of California.

Nandy made some unconventional points: Even in the terrible bloodbath that claimed the lives of millions, as many as one in four people among survivors said they were saved by the other community, and their fondest memories were still of the days when they lived with the ostensibly enemy community. He added that while those who engaged in the killings virtually got off scot-free, they paid a price in terms of mental and physical health and some even accepted culpability in their later age.

Nandy was the featured speaker at the Sarah Kailath lecture here.

UC Berkeley sociology Prof Raka Ray, chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, introduced him as an “intellectual extraordinaire” who was India’s first post colonial theorist, calling him a “prototypical public intellectual” and India’s most famous dissenter.

“I am a little perturbed by my steady decline into respectability, and I do not know what to do about it,” quipped Nandy, who brought an avuncular bonhomie to his
lecture.

Nandy highlighted his presentation with gripping stories of individuals caught in the maelstrom of murder, hatred and exile in 1946-48.

According to conservative estimates, roughly one million people died, but Nandy puts the figure to over two million.

Nandy and associates carried out a study that included about 1,300 interviews with survivors of the Partition violence of 1946-48, including 100 in-depth interviews.

“When we started the study, we depended heavily on available data on other genocides, and I must say some of the things did not fit,” Nandy said.

“The first finding that surprised us that nearly one-fourth of all survivors said that they owed their survival to somebody from the opposition,” he said. “This figure was astonishing because nowhere we have come anywhere near it — in any other genocide.”

Another surprising finding was the lack of rancor among direct victims, he said.

“The second finding is … that those who actually faced the violence, those who are direct victims, the first generation of victims, those who have been subject to the violence, those who have seen it first-hand, mostly were those who had lesser prejudice and lesser bitterness about their experience than their own children and their grandchildren because they had lived in communities where the other side was the majority,” Nandy said. “They have lived with them and they had very warm memories of that experience. Many of them have said that those were the best days of their lives, whereas the children have a packaged view mostly of those violent days and how the family survived . . . So they carry more bitterness, more hostility.”

Nandy focused on an individual to underscore some of his points. During the research on the Partition, an associate had interviewed Madan Lal Pahwa, who was raised in what is now Pakistan.

Raised in a “kattar” (orthodox) Hindu family, Pahwa grew up to become a Hindu militant. He participated in vigilante groups that killed Muslims, said Nandy, and even threw a bomb at a prayer meeting of Mahatma Gandhi five days before Gandhi’s assassination.

Many years later, during an interview for the research, Pahwa appeared to have mellowed considerably.

What was Pahwa’s most treasured memory? “It is Pak Pattan (his ancestral village in Pakistan),” Nandy said. “And what he remembers in Pak Pattan the most, not only what he called the pure air and the pure milk and the green vegetables . . . above all (Muslim Sufi spiritual leader) Baba Farid’s mazar (tomb). He used to sneak out at night from his home . . . and with his friends go to the mazar (saint's tomb-shrine).

That Sufi music and the singing he remembers as the most valuable moments of his life. The memory of the shared shrine, the Sufi music, the ambiance of the mazar had left a deep impression on him.”

Pahwa also subsequently revised his earlier blanket condemnation of Muslims. “Muslims were otherwise friendly people,” Pahwa reportedly said. “A small minority of Muslims were bad, the politicians.”

“In South Asia, living with multiple selves is not an exception, we don’t diagnose it as schizophrenia,” Nandy quipped.

“I don’t think you should be surprised that even Madan Lal Pahwa showed at least some awareness somewhere that he was culpable,” he said.

“Fanaticism drives a person but insaniyat — humanity — is also there,” Nandy said. Nandy also mentioned a “third striking feature of this genocide.”

“I have yet to meet, or any of our team has yet to meet, a killer who is happy in his old age,” he said. “I am yet to meet a happy killer.

Even the ones that claim to be at perfect peace with themselves either
have psychosomatic ailments or other instances of mental ill health directly traceable to the experience during the violence of '46-48. So escaping prosecution is not the last word in this matter.”

India’s pre-partition history of various communities living together was the result of a pre-Western tradition of tolerance, Nandy said.

This became clear after he researched the 600-year history of communal peace in the Kerala port city of Kochi.

The initial response of people, when asked about their history of peace, was predictable.

“They gave all the responses people like us would love,” Nandy said. People said that the absence of violence was because people were secular, progressive and educated.

However, said Nandy, deeper examination revealed something else.

“Nobody liked anybody else. Tolerance, alas, was based on mutual dislike,” he said. “Every community thought they were the best. Yet in Cochin there was no instance of serious violence in 600 years of recorded history.

“And then gradually I deciphered that in a community-based society, a society where individuation has not gone beyond a point, there is bound to be this dislike and this sense of superiority. . .

“But whereas you think your community is the best you also learn the (other) community’s right to believe they are the best. That mutuality is there. Secondly, the other is not only the other, but they are a part of you, you internalize. . . . The other is crucial to your self-definition. . . There are no annihilatory fantasies. . .

“This is not the enlightenment vision of cosmopolitanism, it is the alternative form of cosmopolitanism, and I am now convinced that this is the cosmopolitanism with which societies based on communities survive.”

He said that the most bitter opponents of Gandhi, including his killers, didn’t dislike him mainly because of his perceived appeasement of Muslims. Gandhi’s critics in India hated him because they thought he was too mired in tradition to allow India to develop as a modern state, Nandy said.

However, that may have been Gandhi’s strong suit, Nandy suggested.

“Somewhere Gandhi’s strength lay not in conforming to the ideas of proper politics of modern India and middle classes, that in any case found him a liability and a problem, people like you and me, perhaps his strength lay partly in the folk traditions of India, in the realities of India that is outside the reach of modern India,” Nandy said.

The Return of the Sacred

These recent lecture by Ashis Nandy brought to mind a lecture by Nandy I attended, at Calcutta University's Centre for South and South-East Asian Studies, in January 2008.

Visiting the Centre again last week, I found they had published the lecture.

It was titled "The Return of the Sacred: The Language of Religion and the Fear of Democracy in a Post-Secular World".

It was presented earlier, in 2006, in Sydney, and an MP3 audio file of that lecture is accessible here.

On the subject of the partition of India, a must-read article is by Ayesha Jalal: "Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia". This is accessible here.

More on events in Pakistan

In response to my post on the people's movement in Pakistan and the comments made by some readers, Dr Nayyar Hashmey, of Wonders of Pakistan wrote:

"I sent this rejoinder to all my friends on 14th of this month when the clip titled "Sheeshay ke GharoN maiN" was being aired on the Geo News Channel here in Pakistan.

I am also sending my comments which I put up on my blog in response to my dear Sidhu Saaheb, who too is a blogger friend from India.

I hope this will clarify a lot of reservations expressed by our friends in India."


This text was written and sent on 14th March, two days ahead of the proposed Long March to Islamabad.


I do not agree with the friends who say that country’s major news channel is adding fuel to the fire. (I have seen that clip “Sheeshay kay Gharon maiN” and found nothing wrong in that).

First of all, let me make it clear I am neither a supporter of Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif nor an opponent of Mr. A. Zardari. I am a common Pakistani. I do feel, however, whoever does good for this country, is acceptable and respectable; no matter to which party, group, section or community he belongs. Yet, while assessing the role of Mr. Zardari vis-à-vis the lawyers, the civil society, and the political parties, who have joined together for a long march - there are those who label everybody raising their voice to restore the ex C.J. as biased against Zardari. They support Mr. Zardari and label others as biased, whereas most of them seem to be tainted with a heavy bias in favor of Mr. Zardari & his policies.

What is wrong if a news channel or for that matter anyone else hints on those long speeches & sermons made by politicians in the past about democracy, about independence of judiciary, independence of media, and economic issues (so brutally restricted to the cheap slogan of roti, kapRa aur makan i.e. bread, clothing and shelter).

To have an overview on this slogan, we will have to dig a bit of history. The founder of the PPP, Mr. Z.A. Bhutto (ZAB) coined this slogan when the whole world was clamouring for socialism. It was in this peculiar climate (in the sixties) that ZAB’s slogans like "Democracy is our politics, Islam our creed and socialism our economy" became the hallmarks of the PPP and mesmerized the people, the workers, the peasants, the lower middle class, the intellectuals as well as leftists of that age. As a result, he sweeped the elections in the then West Pakistan, presently Pakistan.

On whether he achieved this objective: to my mind he utterly failed to deliver what he had promised. His greatest achievement, however, of historical import was to create awareness among the downtrodden of the society that they too are human beings and, therefore, deserve every thing which the rich have in this country.

Now taking a cue from late ZAB, Mr. Zardari again copied the roti, kapRa aur makan stance. Unfortunately he never elaborated how he would ensure this roti, kapRa and makan for everybody.

To do this, some homework is required by the party’s own working groups on different policy issues like finance, economy, foreign affairs and so on. These issues are tackled by technocrats who believe in the manifesto or the guiding philosophy of a particular party. Where Mr. AAZ stands in this regard we all know very well.

Now when the same man says he has restored the deposed judges, I think, he, being a cinema runner-cum feudal-cum politician doesn’t seem to have any credentials in that regard. He only reaped the advantage of Mohtarma’s (i.e. Benazir's) sudden killing by unknown assailant / s, and who despite being all-powerful in the country is unable to do any thing with regard to the murder of his own slain wife. And then he doles out half a billion Rupees to UNO’s investigators, when people are taking their lives to be free from wretched life.

Now the second point that these friends raise is that some judges have become controversial. But dear friends, the same judges who took the oath (and who had originally sided with the former CJ but later could not sustain the economic and administrative pressure by Mr. Zardari’s cohorts) were inducted into their respective posts because they agreed to toe the line of his government. What justice can we expect from such judges?

Agreed, the ex-CJ is also the person who took the oath under the PCO and who earlier granted indemnity to the ex-Dictator Parvez Musharraf, but as you know, the end justifies the means. Had he not taken oath then, how could he then later decide to go against the infamous doctrine “of necessity”.

Secondly, in one’s life, one needs to take decisions according to the situation prevailing at a particular moment of one’s life / history.

Times change and so do the strategies. This is what the ex C.J. too did.

As for Zardari adopting the policies of Parvez Musharraf, or trying to copy ZAB’s style of the sixties - that cannot succeed now, as he is neither ZAB nor do we live in the sixties. And the ex-Dictator Musharraf has also gone with his “danda mar” (i.e. wield the stick) policies of yesteryears.

Through his amateurish and immature politics, AAZ has brought the country to an abyss just like the ex-dictator Musharraf, and similarly he will meet his fate which is already written on the walls.

History gave him a big chance. He could have mended the past mistakes, corruption and high-handedness. His dubious deals, his 10 percent past, his buying Surrey Palace and offshore bank deposits ... all amassed during Mohtarma’s previous stints in power (the poor lady earned all the disrepute, just because of her husband’s extraordinary lust for money). The nation gave him a chance but he has failed and failed miserably.

As I said earlier, it is now written on the wall that he is going, I only pray that his successors do not repeat the same mistakes which he committed. Because our history shows that our politicians are the best people in their thoughts and approach when they are in opposition but once they come into power, its another story. As they say in Persian, ‘one, who enters a salt mine, turns salt himself’.

Let us pray and endeavor that this does not happen now.

I do agree, things will not change overnight. We are plunged in so many issues, so many problems, on so many fronts and each one demands vision, statesmanship, guidance and sincerity of purpose at the top level, which can bring results in tangible terms, otherwise taqreer ke badshah tau iss mulk main pehle hi bharay paRay haeN (i.e. retribution already hangs heavy upon this nation).

I hope my friends won’t mind my lengthy rejoinder in this regard. It is being sent in all sincerity and love for my country, which all of us know is our last refuge. God forbid, if we lose this, in any form - geographically, economically, politically - it will be worse than a nuclear holocaust.

With all the good wishes.

Nayyar Hashmey

P.S.

Although I had my reservations about Mr. Zardari’s capabilities to deliver, yet when he addressed the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi via a satellite link from his official residence in Islamabad last November, suggesting good relations with our big neighbor India, I felt at that moment that perhaps he does have the vision, the mindset that may bring this country out of its perpetual aggrandizement against India (which our army generals-cum-CLMA’s-cum Chief Executives-cum-Presidents adopt, as such a stance suits them best), but alas! Instead of demonstrating some bit of statesmanship, he has involved himself into petty issues like refusing to reinstate the ex-CJ (to whom he too owes a lot, since it was the ex-CJ who had the courage to challenge the brutal dictatorship of Gen. (Retd.) Parvez Musharraf. You can see some material in this regard on my blog.

Pakistani Zindabad!

I celebrate with Pakistanis the announcement by the Prime Minister of Pakistan that the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who had been sacked by erstwhile dictator Musharraf, would be reinstated. This followed the mass demonstrations across the country, led by lawyers.

Indians have much to learn from Pakistanis about keeping democracy alive. Indians have been lulled into slumber by the rituals of democracy in India, devoid of its substance. Thus, the forthcoming parliamentary election in India (April-May) is being billed as the greatest event in the history of democracy... rubbish!

For too long, for an entire generation, Indians have taken their democracy for granted, and been steeped in apathy. And thus rendered our democracy comatose. A democracy is only as good as its citizens' consciousness and activism.

In the state of West Bengal, where I live, the ruling govt committed a crime against humanity in Nandigram exactly 2 years ago - and is still in office! Yes, there were protests, rallies and demonstrations. But the people at large, and especially the "intelligentsia", are great "constitutionalists". The rulers can only be overthrown through the ballot, they say! "Politics" is understood to mean merely party-politics. Not popular consciousness and action! But if 1 million people had converged on Writers' Building (the seat of govt, in Calcutta) and bayed for the blood of the killer govt / ruling party - that would have seen the rulers scurrying out like rats through the drain-pipes.

So, I hope my fellow-countrymen (and women) learn from our dear neighbour, Pakistan. And until then, I doff my topi to Pakistanis and say: Pakistani Zindabad! (Long Live Pakistanis!)

Photo: Courtesy Dawn

The Muslim Minority In India after 9/11

by Akeel Bilgrami

I am grateful to Syeda Imam for sending this essay by her brother. This is based on the essay published in Communalism Combat in November 2001. It should be compulsory reading for all thinking Indians (perhaps that's an oxymoron!).

The term 'minority' marked a subject of study only after statistics began to influence the governance of societies as well as influence the methodology of the social sciences. But its point and rationale was to generate a site of much more than statistical importance - such is the power of numbers. Thought of in purely descriptive terms it is intended to convey the site of ethnicities, religions, races, and less often these days, of socio-economic station. Thought of in more evaluative terms, it is often the carrier of rights, partly because it is often the target of discrimination. All of these things are absolutely central to what I am about to say, but I will approach the subject a little more obliquely: by seeing the Muslim minority in India as the site of a certain mentality.

And here is a curious thing. Even casual reflection on the subject suggests a paradoxical conclusion: that it is precisely this minority mentality which is to be found among the Muslim majority populations all over the world. We owe this paradox to the abiding power of colonial history, even after formal decolonization, a subject to which I'll return, at the end.

Though it is by now a banality to say in a general way that there are many Islams, it is worth saying that it is perhaps more true of the Indian sub-continent than of anywhere else in the world. These Muslim communities began to arrive in India as part of the elaborate maritime trade with West Asian groups well before the invasions that are usually studied by historians resulted in the Delhi Sultanate.

Apart from the sectarian distinctions between the Sunnis and Shias, and the regional dispersal of Punjabi, Bengali, Hindusthani, Mapillah, Gujarati, and Oriya Muslims, there has been much diversity in the spiritual and scholarly leadership as well, shaping an extremely differentiated religious culture in the country over the last three centuries. In the eighteenth century there were figures of influence such as Shah Wali Allah of the Nashqbandi tradition situated in the more courtly ethos of princes, to the more populist Chishti Sufi tradition of Shah Abdullah Bhitai, Bullhe Shah, and the poets Mir and Dard; then there was the later reformist strain owing to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Chiragh Ali, the Shia thinker Ameer Ali, the novelist Nazir Ahmad and the Shibli Numani of the Nadvatul Ulema, there was the famous Deoband school and its network for providing traditional learning of the Ulema, the even more orthodox Ahl-i-Hadith school which favoured the strict letter of Hanafi law, as well as the much more relaxed Barelwi tradition stressing very local customary practices, and the remarkable Ahmadiyyas who emerged under the leadership of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed that he was at once the Muslim Mahdi, the Christian Messiah, and the avatar of Krishna.

The twentieth century saw figures ranging from the poet Muhammad Iqbal, to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad the refined and learned exemplar of the Congress slogan of 'composite' Hindu-Muslim culture, to the wholly different Maulana Mawdudi (and his following in the Jamaat-i-Islami, now in Pakistan), who may rightly be described as fundamentalist because of his insistence on the return to the Quran and the hadith, and who was of much influence on Syed Qutb, the Egyptian fundamentalist thinker said to be the inspiration of self-styled 'jihadi' groups today which are linked to Osama bin Laden.

Coursing through this diversity, Muslim religious life in India has been characterized by two tendencies which are preserved in a delicate balance due to the tension between them. On the one hand, at the level of ritual, ceremony, and a broad range of other quotidian practice, there is a great deal of pragmatic and syncretic ("sufistic") retention of local features that are quite continuous with many aspects of Hindu life and cultural practice. On the other, there is the scriptural and transcendental, and normative element tied to the ulema and characterized by a deferential gaze that goes beyond the local toward the Arabian lands from where the classical doctrine originated. This is hardly surprising since the Islamic faith itself arrived in India via travels through Persia and Turkey and Central Asia acquiring local accretions from there, so the ultimate and formal, bookish elements had always to be recalled in self-conscious ways at all points in the midst of often livelier homegrown and alien elements.

The tense balance created by this double movement - of form and root - has persisted in India through the centuries to this day, and though there is much integration of the two elements there is often rivalry between them, not just in the rural and poorer sections of society, but even in such highly metropolitan cultural productions of Hindusthani music or the Hindi cinema of Bombay, which for decades might quite properly have been regarded as the last, urban outposts of sufism, still to some extent resisting the narrowing doctrinal visions of Muslim (as well as Brahmanical Hindu) religious orthodoxy.

It is precisely this balance which is increasingly made precarious by developments over the last few decades, and by some striking recent events of which the aftermath of September 11th is the most spectacular. There is to begin with the relative poverty of Muslims in India ever since the more landed and educated Muslims, fearing loss of estate and discrimination in career opportunities in India, left for Pakistan during the partition. For those who stayed, those fears have largely been realized. There was also another major loss, the loss of their language Urdu (indeed the language of many Hindus in north India as well) which was given away as an exclusive gift to Pakistan because the Indian leaders, for all their avowed pluralism and secularism, were unable to withstand the nationalistic pique of Hindu ideologues in their own Congress party who put great pressure to drop Urdu altogether as a medium of instruction in the national and regional school curricula.

And in general ever since the passing of Nehru, there had been a tendency in the Congress party, to adopt the most debased and cynical strategy that democracy allows, the strategy of trying to win elections by appealing to majoritarian sentiment against minorities such as Muslims and Sikhs. This strategy which culminated in two or three hideous events - the pogrom against the Sikhs after Indira Gandhi's assassination, the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya by a mob of Hindu political activists, the slaughter of several hundred Muslims in Gujarat a few years ago-- has ironically led (until recently) to repeated defeat of the Congress party at the hands of a Hindu nationalist party which can play the majoritarian game much more openly and brazenly than can the Congress with its hypocritical avowals of secularism.

The Muslim 'minority' in India therefore has had the ideological potential to vex in at least two ways. First, it is open to perception as a minority which is descended from the Muslim conquerors who ruled for centuries over a predominantly Hindu people, and thus a good target for 'historical' revenge. Second, it is open to the perception of being a residual population, one that had its choice of leaving for the newly created Muslim nation of Pakistan in 1947, but which chose to stay, so it must now adapt in accord with the culture of the Hindu nation it opted for.

These ideological perceptions, once merely the vision of a fringe, thought of as the "Hindu Right" and opposed to the secular tendencies of the central leadership of the freedom movement and of post-Independent India --most particularly of Gandhi and Nehru-- is now very much the vision of the majoritarian Hindu ideology that pervaded the national government at the centre for a substantial period until very recently, as well as in some (but by no means all) of the states and regions in the country.

Even putting aside the dubious conceptual elements in these perceptions (i.e., the very idea of 'historical" revenge, and the restriction of choice to the options "Either go to a Muslim nation or stay in a Hindu one") there are plain historical facts which expose their falsity.

With regard to the first perception, there is the fact that most Muslims today are not descendants of a conquering people, but Hindu converts; and there is the fact that a number of the Muslim rulers of India showed a remarkable amount of religious tolerance, comparable at least to the Muslim rule in mediaeval Spain. With regard to the second, there is the fact of the essentially and helplessly sedentary nature of the poor and labouring classes which made immigration over thousands of miles no serious option at all, and there is the fact of the idealism of both this class and the much smaller but admittedly more mobile educated middle class of Muslims who thought a secular India was a better option than a nation created on the basis of religion. But these are mere, contemptible facts, and ideological perceptions, as we know, are the products of a free social imagination.

This ideological situation has made Indian Muslims deeply resentful and defensive in their mentality. And this mentality is adversely affecting the double movement I mentioned of rooted quotidian syncretic diversity on the one hand and invocation of scriptural form and fundamentals on the other, by threatening to tilt the balance in favour of the latter over the former. In a situation where material life as well as self-respect is increasingly threatened by alarming majoritarian tendencies in the polity, the absolutist doctrinal side of the double movement is holding out promise of dignity and autonomy in the name of Islam, specially among the young. The attractions are utterly illusory of course - they are manifestly undemocratic, they are deeply reactionary on issues of gender, and they are phobic in the extreme of modernity, even a homegrown and non-western path to modernity. They are 'reactionary' in every sense of the term, and one point I am stressing is that they are reactionary also in the sense of being a reaction to the feelings of helplessness and defeat, and the seeming lack of viable alternatives to cope with these feelings.

Just to give an example of reaction-formation, one response to the combination of poverty, lack of career opportunity, and the loss of Urdu has been the rise of the phenomenon of the 'madrassa', which are religious schools peppered all over the country but specially in north India, very often financed by Saudi Arabian largesse, and which offer free education in Urdu, and a place for boys from poverty-stricken families to live without cost while they train into strict scriptural doctrine, to some extent providing a recruitment ground for future careers in fundamentalist movements. (I say ‘some’ extent and mean it. The extent may well be highly exaggerated by a careless journalistic class.) This is just one example as I said, and all of it predictably leads to more backlash from Hindu ideologues, and in turn more defensiveness, surfacing in more aggressive reactions among the Muslims.

I want to say something about this defensive and reactive Muslim mentality. What is most striking is that it is precisely this mentality that is found all over the Muslim world, even where Muslims are an overwhelming majority, the only difference being that the reaction there is of course not to Hindus but to American presence and dominance. I will not catalogue the whole familiar (and what would be dreary if it were not so palpable) litany of the wrongs of American foreign policy in the Middle-East, not to mention Vietnam, East Timor, Chile and various other parts of Latin America. From the overthrow of a decent and humane leader like Mossadegh in Iran right down to the detailed support over the years of corrupt, elitist and tyrannical leaders in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and so on, to the cynical arming and training of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, as well as the longstanding support for occupation by expansionist settlement in Palestinian territories, America, driven as always by corporate interests, has, as is well-known, bred a resentful reaction among non-elite sections of the population all over Muslim lands. That all this follows a long history of colonial subjugation and condescension by European powers, even after decolonization, involves all of the West as the target of such reaction. For some years now, this resentment has taken on an explicitly religious, Islamist rhetoric, again because Islam seems to provide an ideological peg of dignity and resistance to hang these resentments on.

All this is familiar, though what perhaps is less so is that initially, and even until a very few years ago, specifically anti-American (or what are sometimes called "anti-imperialist") versions of Islamism were much more prevalent in Iran than in client states such as Saudi Arabia; but as a result of Al-Jazeera and other forms of communication made possible by new technologies, Muslims even in Saudi Arabia who had hitherto been uncritically pro-American in their sympathies have been exposed to some of the political and economic realities in Arab nations, and have been able to detach themselves from the cognitive clutch of the royal family and elites.. And some of the most volatile and restless among them have (again as a result of the new communicative technologies) been able to join with similar anti-American groups in neighbouring and even far-flung lands, from the caves of Afghanistan to cells in Hamburg, London, and New Jersey.

The point of importance however is this. That this Islamist rhetoric is a dangerous and brittle source of self-respect is obvious to most Muslims in these countries, but there does not seem even to them to be any viable alternative, and it is this conflicted position of many Muslims which I think should be crucial to any analysis of our present times.

I think it can safely be said that as a matter of ubiquitous empirical fact - whether in Mumbai or Cairo, Karachi or Tehran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, New Jersey or Bradford-- most Muslims are not absolutists at all, and are in fact deeply opposed to the absolutists in their midst. This is evident in the fact that before September 11, whenever there have been elections the 'fundamentalist' parties have failed to gain power, whether in Iran or in Pakistan. Even those who do not oppose the fundamentalists are too busy with their occupations and preoccupations to be seduced by any absolutist fantasies about an Islamic revival worth fighting for. Yet these ordinary Muslims who form the overwhelming majority in Muslim nations have not had the confidence and courage to come out and openly criticize the absolutists and this is because they too are affected by the defensive mentality that pervades these regions. To be openly critical seems even to them to be a capitulation to Western habits and attitudes of arrogant domination, going back to colonial history and, as I said, palpably present in their lives even today. What would give them the confidence and courage to be critical of the absolutists in their midst? is a question of the utmost urgency in our time, and it should be a question that is on the mind of every humane and sensitive American and European today.

What is perfectly obvious is that bombing the hell out of impoverished nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq is not going to do it, nor is the constant pinning of the problem as being one of Islam versus freedom and modernity. It is not freedom that ordinary non-fundamentalist Muslims are against, it is not modernity which they want to shun, it is the naked corporate-driven,geo-politically motivated wrongs of American and Western dominance of their regions which they oppose; and if they confusedly sit silently by as Islam is invoked in grotesque distortions by the most detestable elements in their society to be the ultimate source of resistance against this domination, it behoves those of us who are more privileged in having escaped these resentments and their causes, to try to give them the confidence to see their way out of this confusion.

To do so, we will have to call things as they evidently are, evident to everyone except some insular American and European citizens unaware of the effects of their government's actions in the world,, and much more culpably, journalists who speak and write in the mainstream media as well as mandarin intellectuals in universities. We will have to say that what happened on September 11th was an act of atrocious, senseless, and unpardonable cruelty. No effort to understand Muslim mentality, as mine is, should (or could) muffle the sound of this criticism. But we will have to say also that the bombing of a parched and hungry nation like Afghanistan, of creating what seems like almost permanent insurgent mayhem in Iraq, which was already devastated by years of a cruel and immoral embargo, and then sitting back and allowing the destruction of Lebanon first, and now Gaza, are merely the last and among the worst in a century filled with such immoral interventions. All that can only be the first step in working towards addressing the deep historical and contemporary sources of this defensive mentality.

In doing so, we cannot forget that the confused Islamist rhetorical overlayer by which this defensive mentality presents itself to the world is a reactionary rhetoric of the supposed pieties and glories of an Islamic past, but the hopes and aspirations not of fundamentalists but of ordinary Muslims who have succumbed to their rhetoric, are existential hopes and aspirations for a future, in which a radically politicized Islam has no particular place and point at all. If we see this very important dialectical point with clarity, our own efforts need not fall into the confusions that the rhetoric encourages, as some writers (Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ignatieff, Niall Fergusson, Thomas Friedman to name just a few) clearly have when they write articles in leading magazines and newspapers with titles such as "Of Course Its About Islam" or "Who Said It is Not About Religion!" These sleek writers with their fine phrases are buying into the very confusion of those whom they are opposing and in doing so they are letting down the millions of ordinary Muslims all over the world who, in the end, are the only weapons America and Europe have against their terrorist enemies.

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director, Heyman Centre for the Humanities, Columbia University.

Photo: © Herbert Wong

City symbol

The crow is the most commonly seen bird in Calcutta. It is a most resourceful creature, with amazing habits, remarkable persistence and awesome tenderness. But it can also be a most annoying creature. It is first and foremost a scavenger.

The crow could be an apt symbol of Calcutta, of its people and its ethos. But that would only be with a touch of irony and pathos: symbolising the degraded condition that the human being has fallen to. The common man in Calcutta has been reduced to being a scavenger. There is a great resourcefulness implicit in that, but that is not what man was destined for. Poverty, apartheid and apathy have reduced the human to the scavenging crow.

That also means that the situation visualised in Hitchcock's The Birds, albeit with an ironic twist, is something that Calcutta should be ready for.

Picture: Suhas Roy

Unstoppable...

Weapon of Choice (open in a new window)

A tale of India

I do not normally pay much attention to advertisements, and especially those of Pepsi and the like, However, I have been really tickled pink, so to speak, by Pepsi's current "Yeh Hai Youngistan Meri Jaan" ad ("This is Young India, My Darling"), featuring some of the young players of the Indian cricket team. I can go on watching it and each time I'm in splits. The swagger, boorish brag and threatening shoulder swish of the little big guy bully boy, who snubs Ishan Sharma, are just too much! And the look (of incredulity) shared with us, on Ishan's face - is also just too much!

"Jaanta hai, mera baap kaun hai?"

Do you know who my Dad is?

That's the tale of India. Not democracy, not rights, not rule of law, but who you are, whose son you are, who you know, what your connections are, who fixed things for you. In my own Calcutta, things happen because of the CPI(M), the ultimate Dad, and the implied threat of violence against anyone who dares question anything they do, whether it is illegal, immoral or inhuman.

If there's one lesson young India needs to take to heart, then that is - it does NOT matter who your Dad is. All that matters is you, your aspirations, your dreams, your zeal for success, your hard work, your unremitting persistence and pursuit of excellence. And that will make YOU a real Dad!

Here's the ad.



The soundtrack:

Scene with MS Dhoni

You would have heard of electricity, water and phone connections. But this connection?! Oh my Dad!

Scene with Ishan Sharma

In the admission line, the son of the VIP says: "Do you know who my Dad is?"

Who's a Daddy now!

Scene with Sreesanth

In the midst of talk of moves, lovey dovey talk, the commissioner's son says: "Romeo, do you know who my Dad is, yaen?"

Scene with Virendra Sehwag

At the (hair-cutting) saloon chair, the minister's only son says: "Off, don't you know who my Dad is?"

Hail dad!

Final scene with all four players

Now, today, we don't know yesterday's Dads. If we know anything, its only our thirst. To get ahead, only one connection is necessary, the one between you and your thirst.

Yeh Hai Youngistan Meri Jaan!