Man's life upon this earth

"For of all I have ever seen or learned, this book [Ecclesiastes] seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth – and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound."

Tom Wolfe

Read the Ecclesiastes here.

Song of Saadi

Recently a song was cooking within me.

This is a poem by Saadi, the great Persian mystic, poet and thinker of the 13th century, on the indivisibility of humanity. Raya, a neice of mine, who is Iranian, had put up the calligraphed Farsi lines on Facebook, together with a nice translation in English.

Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.

Transcribing the Farsi in Roman:

bani aadam a'zaaye yekdigarand
keh dar aafarinesh ze' yek goharand

cho ozvi beh dard aavarad roozegaar
degar ozvhaa raa namaanad gharar

to keh az mehnat-e-digaraan bi ghami
nashaayad keh naamat nahand aadami

I was taken by this, especially that they said virtually exactly the same thing as another song I had composed with lines by Shantideva, the great Buddhist monk and teacher, who lived several centuries before Saadi. I thought I should take this and add it to my small collection of songs and chants based on sacred texts.

My neice also directed me to a YouTube video of a song by Shakila, a Farsi singer, singing a song based on similar poetry. I heard that a couple of times. That was in mid-March.



I also happened to hear this awesome Farsi song, also a composition of Saadi, by Ostad Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Homayoon e Shajarian.



Soon afterwards, I met Dr Siddiqui, the anthropologist, who knows Farsi, and got the exact sound / pronunciation and meaning of the Farsi lines. I noted it all down in my pocket note book. A few times, I would open the notebook to the page, and go over the lines, trying to learn them, trying to say them out with a smooth flow of the words. Not happening. Then some weeks later, alone at home, in the quiet stillness of mid-morning it was as if a faint melody entered my ear from nowhere. So as not to lose it (I do not know how to note down music), I recorded it in the voice recorder in my cellphone. That was in mid-April. I played and listened to the melody recording a few times.

Last Sunday, in the evening, as I was idle, I just picked up the notebook, and in a few minutes it was all over, the mastery over the words threaded by the melody, reciting it confidently and smoothly, singing it, inserting inflexions, everything was done.

So now I am eager to sing it, to sing it out!

Friendship Day

Today, 24th March - henceforth, I shall remember it and observe it as "Friendship Day".

It is the birthday of a very dear friend, Dayan. He died in a car crash eight years ago. He was less than 28.

Though Dayan was 15 years younger than me, he was a beloved friend. We were in the same team, over the space of a few months, that did the web-portal of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, "CALMANAC", in 2000 (that is now defunct). I connected with him soon after we first met - thanks to some "zany" interests we shared in common. And we became close friends.

On Dayan's birthday, and on the date of his passing, 19 February, I try to communicate with his parents, and visit his grave. I did that today morning. His parents were in Bombay, and so I went alone to the cemetery, with a mass of marigolds.

As it turned out, today was to be devoted to friends, and I zip-zap-zoo-ed across the city on this mission.

Another dear friend, Samrat, who lives in Assam, was in town, and we agreed to meet despite the narrow "window" of available time. (Samrat and i were on a course together seven years ago. He is also much younger than me.) So after remembering Dayan, I went to meet Samrat, in a coffee shop.

Then on to Debra, a close friend from Durban, South Africa, whom I first met in 1992, someone I would never get to meet in the normal course of things. She was in Calcutta for an important conference. She was in a very hectic situation, and the only time we managed to get was a few minutes around noon, when she exit-ed from a heated discussion to meet her friend.

After that Dr S. That is the anthropologist, Dr MKA Siddiqui. He is a father-figure for me. Despite wanting to, I haven't seen him in a long time, owing to one thing and another. As my movements across the city took me very close to his office, I thought I must see him today. So after seeing Debra, I went to Dr S's office. I had in mind to get from him the correct pronunciation of a Farsi poem by Sa'adi which I want to render to song. I could do that. And i could tell him about another friend, Madhu, who spent twenty years as a friend of the Gond people of Bastar. And also share with him my gladness at possibly visiting again a city I love, Nablus, in Palestine. I was there in 1999 and just being there helped me understand something I'd read Aristotle had said: "Men come together in cities in order to live. They remain together in order to live the good life." My friend, Marwan lives there, and it's thanks to him that I might go there again soon and meet him.

In the evening I attended a meeting and film screening organised by Nagarik Mancha, or Citizens' Forum, a civil society group, to look at what "city development" has come to mean in Calcutta. The Secretary of Nagarik Mancha, Naba Dutta, is an old comrade in public action in the cause of people, from over 25 years ago.

It was only today, thanks to this concatenation of friendly events that it occured to me to call 24 March, a day I associate with a dear friend, Dayan, as Friendship Day. I think meaningful public action can only be built on the pillars of friendship.

I remembered a Sufi tale about "friendship":

Ibrahim dreamed he saw the angel Gabriel writing down the names of the friends of God. Ibrahim asked, “Is my name there?” “No,” the angel replied. Ibrahim said, “I am a friend of the friends of God.” Gabriel was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Ibrahim, I am writing your name at the head of this list.”

And I remembered that one of the 99 names of Allah is - Al-Walí, The Protecting Friend.

Here's to friends!

What is "Mysticism"?

"What do we mean by mysticism?"

Evelyn Underhill asks this question in her book Mysticism (1911) and then proceeds to explain what exactly this means.

I reproduce below excerpts from Underhill's text.

......

Mysticism, in its pure form, is the science of ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else, and the mystic is the person who attains to this union, not the person who talks about it. Not to know about but to Be, is the mark of the real initiate.

The difficulty lies in determining the point at which supersensual experience ceases to be merely a practical and interesting extension of sensual experience—an enlarging, so to speak, of the boundaries of existence—and passes over into that boundless life where Subject and Object, desirous and desired, are one. No sharp line, but rather an infinite series of gradations separate the two states. Hence we must look carefully at all the pilgrims on the road; discover, if we can, the motive of their travels, the maps which they use, the luggage which they take, the end which they attain.

Now we have said that the end which the mystic sets before him is conscious union with a living Absolute. That Divine Dark, that Abyss of the Godhead, of which he sometimes speaks as the goal of his quest, is just this Absolute, the Uncreated Light in which the Universe is bathed, and which—transcending, as it does, all human powers of expression—he can only describe to us as dark. But there is—must be—contact “in an intelligible where” between every individual self and this Supreme Self, this Ultimate. In the mystic this union is conscious, personal, and complete. “He enjoys,” says St. John of the Cross, “a certain contact of the soul with the Divinity; and it is God Himself who is then felt and tasted.” More or less according to his measure, he has touched—or better, been touched by—the substantial Being of Deity, not merely its manifestation in life. This it is which distinguishes him from the best and most brilliant of other men, and makes his science, in Patmore’s words, “the science of self-evident Reality.” Gazing with him into that unsearchable ground whence the World of Becoming comes forth “eternally generated in an eternal Now,” we may see only the icy darkness of perpetual negations: but he, beyond the coincidence of opposites, looks upon the face of Perfect Love.

As genius in any of the arts is—humanly speaking—the final term of a power of which each individual possesses the rudiments, so mysticism may be looked upon as the final term, the active expression, of a power latent in the whole race: the power, that is to say, of so perceiving transcendent reality.

Few people pass through life without knowing what it is to be at least touched by this mystical feeling, Here, in this spark or “part of the soul” where the spirit, as religion says, “rests in God who made it,” is the fountain alike of the creative imagination and the mystic life. Now and again something stings it into consciousness, and man is caught up to the spiritual level, catches a glimpse of the “secret plan.” Then hints of a marvellous truth, a unity whose note is ineffable peace, shine in created things; awakening in the self a sentiment of love, adoration, and awe. Its life is enhanced, the barrier of personality is broken, man escapes the sense-world, ascends to the apex of his spirit, and enters for a brief period into the more extended life of the All.

This intuition of the Real lying at the root of the visible world and sustaining its life, is present in a modified form in the arts: perhaps it were better to say, must be present if these arts are so justify themselves as heightened forms of experience. It is this which gives to them that peculiar vitality, that strange power of communicating a poignant emotion, half torment and half joy, which baffle their more rational interpreters.

The mystic may say—is indeed bound to say—with St. Bernard, “My secret to myself.” Try how he will, his stammering and awestruck reports can hardly be understood but by those who are already in the way. But the artist cannot act thus. On him has been laid the duty of expressing something of that which he perceives. He is bound to tell his love. In his worship of Perfect Beauty faith must be balanced by works. By means of veils and symbols he must interpret his free vision, his glimpse of the burning bush, to other men. He is the mediator between his brethren and the divine, for art is the link between appearance and reality.

But we do not call every one who has these partial and artistic intuitions of reality a mystic, any more than we call every one a musician who has learnt to play the piano. The true mystic is the person in whom such powers transcend the merely artistic and visionary stage, and are exalted to the point of genius: in whom the transcendental consciousness can dominate the normal consciousness, and who has definitely surrendered himself to the embrace of Reality. As artists stand in a peculiar relation to the phenomenal world, receiving rhythms and discovering truths and beauties which are hidden from other men, so this true mystic stands in a peculiar relation to the transcendental world, there experiencing actual, but to us unimaginable tension and delight. His consciousness is transfigured in a particular way, he lives at different levels of experience from other people: and this of course means that he sees a different world, since the world as we know it is the product of certain scraps or aspects of reality acting upon a normal and untransfigured consciousness. Hence his mysticism is no isolated vision, no fugitive glimpse of reality, but a complete system of life carrying its own guarantees and obligations. As other men are immersed in and react to natural or intellectual life, so the mystic is immersed in and reacts to spiritual life. He moves towards that utter identification with its interests which he calls “Union with God.” He has been called a lonely soul. He might more properly be described as a lonely body: for his soul, peculiarly responsive, sends out and receives communications upon every side.

The earthly artist, because perception brings with it the imperative longing for expression, tries to give us in colour, sound or words a hint of his ecstasy, his glimpse of truth. Only those who have tried, know how small a fraction of his vision he can, under the most favourable circumstance, contrive to represent. The mystic, too, tries very hard to tell an unwilling world his secret. But in his case, the difficulties are enormously increased. First, there is the huge disparity between his unspeakable experience and the language which will most nearly suggest it. Next, there is the great gulf fixed between his mind and the mind of the world. His audience must be bewitched as well as addressed, caught up to something of his state, before they can be made to understand.

The mind must employ some device of the kind if its transcendental perceptions—wholly unrelated as they are to the phenomena with which intellect is able to deal—are ever to be grasped by the surface consciousness. Sometimes the symbol and the perception which it represents become fused in that consciousness; and the mystic’s experience then presents itself to him as “visions” or “voices”.

The mystic, as a rule, cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some side-long way, some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader, and convey, as all poetic language does, something beyond its surface sense. Hence the large part which is played in all mystical writings by symbolism and imagery; and also by that rhythmic and exalted language which induces in sensitive persons something of the languid ecstasy of dream. The close connection between rhythm and heightened states of consciousness is as yet little understood. Its further investigation will probably throw much light on ontological as well as psychological problems. Mystical, no less than musical and poetic perception, tends naturally—we know not why—to present itself in rhythmical periods: a feature which is also strongly marked in writings obtained in the automatic state.

All kinds of symbolic language come naturally to the articulate mystic, who is often a literary artist as well: so naturally, that he sometimes forgets to explain that his utterance is but symbolic—a desperate attempt to translate the truth of that world into the beauty of this. It is here that mysticism joins hands with music and poetry: had this fact always been recognized by its critics, they would have been saved from many regrettable and some ludicrous misconceptions. Symbol—the clothing which the spiritual borrows from the material plane—is a form of artistic expression. That is to say, it is not literal but suggestive.

Further, the study of the mystics, the keeping company however humbly with their minds, brings with it as music or poetry does—but in a far greater degree—a strange exhilaration, as if we were brought near to some mighty source of Being, were at last on the verge of the secret which all seek. The symbols displayed, the actual words employed, when we analyse them, are not enough to account for such effect. It is rather that these messages from the waking transcendental self of another, stir our own deeper selves in their sleep. It were hardly an extravagance to say, that those writings which are the outcome of true and first-hand mystical experience may be known by this power of imparting to the reader the sense of exalted and extended life.

Returning to our original undertaking, that of defining if we can the characteristics of true mysticism, I propose to set out, illustrate and, I hope, justify four rules or notes which may be applied as tests to any given case which claims to take rank amongst the mystics.

1. True mysticism is active and practical, not passive and theoretical. It is an organic life-process, a something which the whole self does; not something as to which its intellect holds an opinion.

2. Its aims are wholly transcendental and spiritual. It is in no way concerned with adding to, exploring, re-arranging, or improving anything in the visible universe. The mystic brushes aside that universe, even in its supernormal manifestations. Though he does not, as his enemies declare, neglect his duty to the many, his heart is always set upon the changeless One.

3. This One is for the mystic, not merely the Reality of all that is, but also a living and personal Object of Love; never an object of exploration. It draws his whole being homeward, but always under the guidance of the heart.

4. Living union with this One—which is the term of his adventure—is a definite state or form of enhanced life. It is obtained neither from an intellectual realization of its delights, nor from the most acute emotional longings. Though these must be present they are not enough. It is arrived at by an arduous psychological and spiritual process—the so-called Mystic Way—entailing the complete remaking of character and the liberation of a new, or rather latent, form of consciousness; which imposes on the self the condition which is sometimes inaccurately called “ecstasy,” but is better named the Unitive State.

Mysticism, then, is not an opinion: it is not a philosophy. It has nothing in common with the pursuit of occult knowledge. On the one hand it is not merely the power of contemplating Eternity: on the other, it is not to be identified with any kind of religious queerness. It is the name of that organic process which involves the perfect consummation of the Love of God: the achievement here and now of the immortal heritage of man. Or, if you like it better—for this means exactly the same thing—it is the art of establishing his conscious relation with the Absolute.

The movement of the mystic consciousness towards this consummation, is not merely the sudden admission to an overwhelming vision of Truth: though such dazzling glimpses may from time to time be vouchsafed to the soul. It is rather an ordered movement towards ever higher levels of reality, ever closer identification with the Infinite. “The mystic experience,” says Récéjac, “ends with the words, ‘I live, yet not I, but God in me.’ This feeling of identification, which is the term of mystical activity, has a very important significance. In its early stages the mystic consciousness feels the Absolute in opposition to the Self . . . as mystic activity goes on, it tends to abolish this opposition. . . . When it has reached its term the consciousness finds itself possessed by the sense of a Being at one and the same time greater than the Self and identical with it: great enough to be God, intimate enough to be me.”

This is that mystic union which is the only possible fulfilment of mystic love: since

“All that is not One must ever
Suffer with the wound of Absence
And whoever in Love’s city
Enters, finds but room for One
And but in One-ness, Union.”

The history of mysticism is the history of the demonstration of this law upon the plane of reality.

To sum up. Mysticism is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search for reality, for heightened and completed life, which we have found to be a constant characteristic of human consciousness. It is largely prosecuted by that “spiritual spark,” that transcendental faculty which, though the life of our life, remains below the threshold in ordinary men. Emerging from its hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his life; subduing to its service, and enhancing by its saving contact with reality, those vital powers of love and will which we attribute to the heart, rather than those of mere reason and perception, which we attribute to the head. Under the spur of this love and will, the whole personality rises in the acts of contemplation and ecstasy to a level of consciousness at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception. By this awareness, by this “loving sight,” it is stimulated to a new life in accordance with the Reality which it has beheld.


Image: Solitary Tree, by Dennis Frates.

Christmas greetings

Here is Mr Pascal, by the British animation film artist Alison de Vere. This shall remain an immortal classic, and there's no better time to watch it than Christmas!

Christmas greetings to everyone, and may the occasion spur us to seek and find the child within us.

Calcutta, Tilottama

"Kolkata ek din kollolini tilottoma hawbe."

Jibananda Das

Calcutta shall one day be a swaying Tilottama.


Tilottama: the sum total of every iota of all the beautiful elements on earth, pieced together to every last bit. The line is from Jibanananda Das' poem "Suchetana", written in the late 1930s. The poet says that all the bloodshed and warfare and material advancement are not the last thing, and expresses hope for a transformation towards eternal truths .

Catching the magic of Glass

Remain in peace in the unity of God and walk blindly in the clear straight path of your obligations...

If God wishes more from you his inspiration will make you know it.

JD Salinger, 1958

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in the Rye

I first heard about JD Salinger and his Catcher in the Rye when I was a college student in Calcutta, more than 30 years ago. My sister Sita had got that from a library, and my father told me that so much had been made about the book but he had now read it and was unable to fathom what the book, and all the hullabaloo, was about!

I read Catcher after that, and later Franny and Zooey, when I was still a university student. That left a quietly powerful impression, and was then largely forgotten. I think some years later I read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. When my own fiction writing urge began surfacing, about 20 years ago - a natural outcome of reading a lot of fine literature - I found that there was strong influence of Salinger, and specifically the stories relating to the Glass family.

In 2003, on a visit to London after many years, I came upon and picked up a copy of Catcher and read it again a few months later, after my return to Calcutta. And thus began my "second innings" with JDS, but of course, by now, I too had been through the experience of life, and of walking along the mystic path. Visiting a bookshop with my sons in early 2004, I came upon Salinger's Nine Stories and the Raise High volume and picked those up. Reading them, soon after - I was finally in the inescapable grip or clutch of Salinger, and the magic of the Glass saga. I frantically searched for Franny and Zooey, which I was fortunate to find. I devoured that too.

But we were now living in the internet age, so thanks to Google, I could find so much on the net, by and about Salinger and his writing. I was also fortunate to be able to read Salinger's "uncollected" stories (i.e. those which had been published in various magazines but not collected in one volume). This included "Hapworth", his last published story, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1965. I read what several people, well-known writers, critics, had written about Salinger. I found myself differing from them. I read about the various purportedly eccentric things he had supposedly said or done.

Read the cover story in Time magazine on JD Salinger, which appeared on 15 September 1961.

I also came upon the wonderful Dead Caulfieds site, and began communicating by email with Kenneth Slawenski, the site owner. I am simply a reader-lover of literature, while Kenneth also has the faculties of a literary critic. So we had an interesting dialogue about JDS and his writing.

Since then I have been a translator of the stories of Bengali anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra. He is also a reclusive, stubbornly principled, cantankerous, eccentric, cussed, and yet endearing, person. But I have been fortunate to win his trust and confidence. So now it is easier for me to understand Salinger.

I knew Salinger was of an advanced age, and every now and then - just like I used to do vis-a-vis Studds Terkel - made a mental calculation of how old he must be, and thought about him awhile. In fact just some days before Salinger pased away (on 27 January), I had reflected that he would be 91 now. I only learnt about his demise on 29 Jan. As it turns out, my son Rituraj has chosen Catcher for his high school graded study. So I subsequently gave my copy of the book to him and searched through my computer for articles I had downloaded that might be relevant to him. And so I was once again deep inside Salinger-dom.

I also wrote to Kenneth.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on his passing away.

Kenneth replied:

I was shocked by the news of Salinger's passing. I had heard that he was recovering well from hip surgery last spring and lulled myself with the belief that he would be around for a number of years to come. Extreme old age is not unusual in the Salinger family and while many laughed at him for his meager diet of organic vegetables in the 1960s, no one was scoffing in 2009 when he turned 90.

An amazing thing has happened here that gives me encouragement even at this sad time. In honor of the author, people have started to read and are discovering Salinger and his works in unprecedented numbers. YouTube is bursting with tributes sent in by ordinary people reading The Catcher in the Rye. Catcher is presently the #5 bestselling book in the nation - and would probably be #1 if it were obtainable. Even Amazon.com has run out of copies. Not only of Catcher, but all four Salinger books.

That is a tribute even Salinger would have enjoyed. The only one that really matters.

I reproduce below my reply to Kenneth.

.....

JDS was simply a magician, the allure, mystique, infatuation and pull he created for many people with those few books - that was the magic wrought by the writing.

As far as I can see and understand, JDS was of a strongly mystic disposition, though he also had several other uncommon and powerful elements in his make-up (e.g. military action service). There was also a rich creative synthesis of these multiple dispositions.

He experienced transcendence in his own being, and in his (latter) stories, and specifically through the Glass stories, he sought to write about being and transcendence. I suppose he had experienced for himself how reading and intellection can bring such transcendence.

What JDS lacked in terms of quantity (of disclosed or published output), he more than made up with the intensity of the work. Few writers with a much larger body of work achieve the kind of powerful hold over readers that he did.

There is a big gap between JDS and people in the domain of "literary-" or literature. But I would think his hold is largely outside the literary world, among (thinking) people who are only fiction / literature readers-lovers (like me), not scholars or teachers or literary critics etc. So when people in the literature world have criticised his writing (and his persona as deduced by them from his writing), that may be quite irrelevant.

He has a place even just within the literary domain, simply in terms of his superior story-telling craftsmanship. But JDS saw himself in the wider canvas of life, of public culture, and the thinking, sensitive, aesthetic, self-educating individual within that, writing as a medium within that. And essentially he was writing for people like himself; solitary mystic individuals, men I guess, who have been formed and re-formed through literature. He did connect to and become part of the mystic stream, flowing through the ages, of literature / epic / saga / mythology, and in turn helped to renew that grand stream, in his own time, from his own place .

My own disposition is not to form opinions or judge, but simply to try to understand, with the totality before me accepted as a given; to try to get inside him and his head, to share, to witness. So that is the relation I have to him and his work. From that perspective, I don't find things he said or did to be incomprehensible, just as I don't agree with things said by others (e.g. comments on Hapworth). I think it is an important part of the Glass saga, it is not redundant vis a vis the rest of the saga, for me, it stands well by itself, for someone who has been inside the Glass saga. (There should also be a long gap between the readers' "Glass-enclosure" and the reading of Hapwworth! Like a music composer, and in keeping with his quality-over-quantity nature, JDS also knew well the powerful value and quality of "silence", in the saga of his life and writing.)

Given his reclusive life and secured inaccessibility, his passing away makes no difference. The other way of saying this is that, he was alive (and eternal), and he continues to be alive (and eternal)! His passing away will hopefully have the positive effect of a renewed interest and appraisal and celebration of his writing.

Maybe he made arrangements for his work from his "silent" years to be made public at some later juncture. Who knows!

I guess one could call JDS a writers' writer rather than a writer.

Unfortunately, my father passed away long before I could have told him what the "hullabaloo" about Catcher was about! But I'm sure, by the end of his life, when his innate mystic disposition surfaced, no such explanation was needed.

.....

Farewell, dear friend, and all strength for your onward journey. You remain in our hearts.

Read Adam Gopnik's obituary in The New Yorker here and a tribute by Lillian Ross here.

The quote in the beginning of this post appears on the Dead Caulfields site.

A question of taste

Great products, according to Steven Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and the present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing”.

Identity: Choice & Inheritance

The Idea of Justice, a new book by Prof Amartya Sen, economist and prolific writer, has recently been published.

Read the review of the book in The Economist.

I had attended the Netaji Oration by Prof Amartya Sen in Calcutta, on 27 December 2007, where he spoke on "Is Nationalism a Curse or a Boon?". The full-text version of the lecture is available in The Oracle, journal of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta. (See pages 16-25 of the pdf version of the journal here).

I remember I had written a response to Prof Sen's lecture. That is reproduced below.

...

Dear Prof Sen

I am writing to you after hearing your talk at Netaji Bhavan, Calcutta, yesterday on "Nationalism".

As a student and teacher of economics from Calcutta, it was a privilege to hear you speak.

I have been working among squatters and slum-dwellers in Calcutta since 1984. In 1996, while working as a consultant on a govt of West Bengal planning project, I came upon infant mortality figures from Howrah Municipal Corporation. This showed a significant infant mortality rate differential between Hindus and Muslims. Eventually that led to my working in Priya Manna Basti, a century-old jute workers slum in the Shibpur area of Howrah. This is today home to over 40,000 people, mainly Urdu-speakin Muslims.

That work continues, in an attempt to build grassroots youth capabilities and leadership for slum community development. The work has been akin to a live laboratory, on poverty in the metropolitan Calcutta Muslim slum context. Through the work it was possible to understand that the Hindu-Muslim infant mortality rate differential was a kind of proxy indicator of slum - non-slum differentials in environmental health risks, besides indicating the existence of deep-rooted institutional barriers to securing adequate municipal services in Muslim slums. It is by looking at the disaggregated health statistics of cities that one begins to understand the nature of inequalities and inequities characterising the city, and their impact on the poor. And it is by trying to unearth the causes of differentials that one comes face to face with the meaning, forms and manifestations of prejudice.

Working with the poorest section in the slum, it was also possible to discern the crippling large-scale and long-term impact of the Urdu-medium education system in metropolitan Calcutta. One consequence of this is the phenomenon of "reverse discrimination" in schooling, where boys drop out of school after a meagre amount of schooling and begin working, while girls continue in and often finish school.

I mention all this by way of context, to touch upon the idea that nationalism can also gloss over real differences in power among different religious communities, which persist and make nationalism something devoid of any substantive meaning or even emotive power. With acute segregation of communities and the lack of substantive intercourse between them, the conditions in which the have-nots live is not part of "mainstream" consciousness. And in such a context, raising the issue of these real and persistent differences is seen as "anti-national" or even "communal", depraved and sick, especially in today's "emergent India" situation.

In your talk you spoke about chosen identity in contrast to inherited identity. That struck a very personal chord, since I have long been troubled by the inappropriateness of upholding something that happens to coincide with an identity inherited merely by chance. Professing something which is based on conscious choice always seemed stronger to me. Nationalism cannot be at the cost of anything else, it must be without prejudice to any other identification. For otherwise, it would be devoid of meaning for one possessing that identity. If one had inherited that identity by chance, then such a nationalism would have been something alien.

You must be aware of the work on "Allophilia" by your Harvard colleague Prof Todd Pittinsky. He looks at warm, exuberant feelings towards other people -national, religious, racial or social. That is something coming out of conscious choice, rather than inherited identity. One can think of the feelings towards India, the land of the Buddha, among Buddhists from Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Japan etc. The feeling about Sri Lanka, the land of the Buddhist canon, among followers of Buddha's teachings. The feelings towards India and West Bengal among a section of people in Bangladesh. The feelings towards the people of Vietnam among people in Calcutta and West Bengal during the Vietnam war.

Perhaps this issue of "Choice & Inheritance" could be the subject of your forthcoming thinking and writing!

Here it would be germane to mention the mystic tradition. In India we have many examples like Kabir, whose own identity (religious) was ambiguous, he was non-denominational as well as multi-denominational. Rather than hold on to one identity inherited by chance, mystics talk of finding one's true identity, unobscured by the veil of illusion cast by the false notion of "self". One must choose one's true inheritance, as a human.

As someone close in so many ways to Rabindranath Tagore, you would be familiar with the name of Evelyn Underhill (with whom Tagore translated Kabir's poems), and her classic work Mysticism. In this 800th anniversary year of the great Persian mystic and poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, I look forward to reading your thinking drawing upon the mystic tradition, and bringing this to the fold of the issues and subjects of your concern.

With my best wishes and respectful regards,

Yours sincerely

Year

Its been quite a year.

In January, I travelled to Pune and then Mumbai, for public policy and academic conferences, and then to Delhi, for a business meeting.

In February I visited my son Rishiraj at the Rishi Valley School, in south India, together with my older son Rituraj.

I was unwell and convalescing during February-April. Nonetheless, I managed to complete a writing assignment, on urban protest in Calcutta. I also completed the translation into English of my colleague Amina's articles on the theme "See the City from Here", about slums.

In May, I was in the capital again, to join a friend in his business development. Having decided that I should leave Calcutta and begin a new livelihood, I corresponded with some schools. So I visited the Sahyadri School, near Pune. Shortly after that I visited the Sholai School, near Kodaikanal, in south India. Sholai had an immense impact on me. A school in a forest in a mountain. A haven of peace and solace, far away from the ugly city. The school was started about 20 years ago by an Englishman, Brian Jenkins. He was keen that I join and help to start a teacher training college there, among other things.

In June, on the invitation of a friend, I joined a rural governance study in the northern districts of West Bengal. That was indeed a strenuous and hectic affair. But also one that was very educative, rewarding and reinvigorating, as it afforded a vision of a new Bengal in the making in the grassroots.

I had to submit the manuscript of my translated stories of the Bengali writer Subimal Misra. I managed to extract the time to complete it in great haste and sent that off in early July.

Shortly after that, I travelled to Assisi in Italy. I was invited to join a week-long international children's camp there, organised by two Italian foundations, on the theme of 'Time of Rights'. I accompanied two children from our Talimi Haq School in Howrah. 28 children from India, Italy and Peru participated in the campus, together with teachers and workshop animators. That was like a continuing epiphany. I was in Ancona and Roma briefly before returning to Calcutta.

A few days latter I went to London. I stayed at the International Students House, at Regents Park, where I had lived as a student during 1982-84. I tramped through my old and favourite haunts. I spent a long time, and a small fortune, in bookshops, indulging my penchant for outstanding specimens of graphic literature, to enlarge the mental horizons of my sons.

I attended my friend Mark's wedding, at the Kings College chapel in Cambridge. I was in Cambridge again after 25 years. How I had wanted nothing more than to be immersed lifelong in study in Cambridge! But that was not to be. But now I sang at the chapel as part of Mark's wedding service. The acoustics in the chapel - quite awesome indeed. Yes, I was an a capella singer alright.

In London, I realised that this was the city I could truly and zestfully call my own, and profess love for. After all, it was where I was born again, where I came to light, where I became a man. And in London, this truly international city, I also became aware, for the first time, of the peculiar circumstance of my life, me, an Indian, in faraway Calcutta, being defined so profoundly by the English language.

I then went to Hannover, in Germany, to initiate a business collaboration with a small German electronics company. They have developed tools and technologies for early child learning and for language learning. I intend to bring that to India. I made a close new friendship, with Ralph, the CEO of the company. A powerful business opportunity, a new chapter in my life, a means for enormous wealth creation. Which would enable public good, with the Talimi Haq School as a small sapling to help grow an enormous Right to Education movement for the country's disprivileged children.

Meanwhile, in the small manufacturing enterprise which I have been managing on behalf of my family, we are at a challenging stage. Much to be done, but through that there is the strong potential of becoming a leading manufacturer in the world in the tiny niche we operate in.

Its still only August. I have some more important trips and journeys to make in the coming months. So far, and especially since June, I have been made, unmade and remade during and through the travels, leaving me feeling like a whirling dervish. Patterns and circles, cycles and symmetries, and synchronicities... life clad in epic raiment, humbling one to silent labour.

Shan sines again in Bengal

It took 32 years for the ghost of Siddhartha Shankar Roy to be buried, and for the self-destructive negativism underlying much of life in Bengal to be set aside. Bengal has rejoined the national mainstream. It has been part of a national wave, and played a significant part in enabling the formation of a stable federal govt committed to good governance, economic growth and social inclusion. Bengal had played a significant role in India's anti-colonial and freedom movement. Now, through its electoral behaviour, it has once again found its place under the Indian sun. The people of Bengal have to give flesh and bones to that promise and potential.

It is unlikely that any future govt will last for 30 years - or for that matter, whether "Bengal" as we know it today, will have any meaning in 30 years time, given the pace at which changes and transformations are taking place in the world. Any new dispensation in Bengal has only a short time within which it can carry out the work of repairing, rebuilding and renewing Bengal. It is not a question of pragmatism, or expediency or opportunism. Of erstwhile CPM-supported auto, bus-transport and union mafias, and real estate dons now doing business as usual with new rulers. It is a question of overturning and transforming the way life is lived in Bengal, of how people breathe, and what they are.

Bengal needs vision, inspiration and example; people need counselling and instruction and encouragement; and chastening and chiding and punishment and reward. In short, Bengal needs leadership. Bengalis are habitually averse to all these things. But the same Bengalis can do as much and more when they are inspired, and believe and trust. Netaji is long gone, and is not about to return. Even Prabhakaran, the mass murderer, who claimed Netaji's inspiration, is now dead. The people of Bengal have to find leadership within themselves, individually and collectively. Yes, Bengal needs a new Swaraj party.

With that, no one or nothing can stop Bengal from realising its place of destiny in this planet. A beautiful land, a peaceful and prosperous place, of gifted and quirky people, a different place, which is also a beacon for others.

Painting: The Sun Makers Free Your Mind, by Eric Singleton.

Decay of the spirit of Islam?

from The Economist

The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation, by Ali A. Allawi, Yale University Press.

For those (and they are many) who are convinced by the thesis that the West and its values are under remorseless siege from a menacing and resurgent Islam, Ali Allawi’s antithesis may seem a little surprising, even absurd. But the author is a distinguished Iraqi who has twice served in post-Saddam governments in Baghdad and whose last, much-acclaimed book was a searing indictment of American (and Iraqi) failings. Though the two books tackle very different themes, what they have in common is their author’s intimate knowledge of both Islam and the West, and his unflinching honesty.

Mr Allawi calls his new book an “attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam”. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.

The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an “Islamic alternative”, they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb.

Mr Allawi calmly and methodically deconstructs an Islamic revival which has failed to live up to its promise. Islamist movements and secular governments anxious to pay lip-service to Islam have, between them, failed spectacularly to anchor themselves in genuinely Islamic principles: principles which, for Mr Allawi, are as much about inner spirituality as outward religiosity. The results are everywhere to be seen. Autocratic governments abuse human rights, whether in Islamic Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan or in secular Egypt and Syria. Economies are corrupt and maladministered, and their supposed ethical principles, such as Islamic banking, are a sham. There has been a profound loss of cultural creativity, apparent, for example, in the decay of the Islamic city and its time-honoured traditions of craftsmanship, piety and community.

Mr Allawi buttresses his case with some striking statistics: “The creative output of the twenty or thirty million Muslims of the Abbasid era [750-1258] dwarfs the output of the nearly one-and-a-half billion Muslims of the modern era.” Per head, the income of the wealthiest Muslim country (the United Arab Emirates) is 200 times that of the poorest (Somalia).

Is there a solution? Mr Allawi, himself a Shia Muslim, believes the mystical (or Sufi) tradition must be an integral part of the revival of Islamic civilisation. But here too—although Sufism retains a strong grassroots following in several parts of the Muslim world—he finds himself at odds with both the modernist and puritanical (Wahhabi) strands of Islam, which disdain the individualistic heterodoxy of “folk Islam”.

The West has not helped. Mr Allawi castigates the hysterical Islamophobia which came in the wake of the attacks of September 2001, as well as the hubristic attempts to “reform” Islam in the name of defeating terrorism. He insists that the challenge of recapturing the “spirit of Islam” is a task for Muslims, not outsiders. The stark choice for the Muslim world is between the revival of its civilisation, difficult as that is to achieve, and its secularisation—“the dissolution of Islam into modernity”. Mr Allawi is not sanguine.

Image: From The Spirit of Islam: Experiencing Islam Through Calligraphy, an exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia.

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.

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

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Meditations

10 November is an important date for me. Something happened to me on that date, in 1993. And once again, on the last 10 November something, happened to me. In the intervening 15 years, much has happened, its been a long and difficult journey. But the final destination was indeed a fine one. Enough to efface any despair, depression, dismay, sadness, doubt, confusion, inertia, apathy.

Life is too precious to be destroyed by human folly. Good, Truth, Beauty - LOVE - cannot be extinguished and can only prevail.

Love is not something relating to the external world. It exists first in the inner world. And there it is perfect. Of course, the person feeling that perfect inner love cannot be divorced from the external world. S/he lives in it, but realises the perfection within himself or herself. The inner perfection is more real and rich than anything the external world can bring. But it also offers a promise and hope about the outer world.

Notwithstanding life, circumstances, people, failures - one can still be in a state of certainty, fullness, harmony within oneself. That does not mean a kind of smug stasis, but an equilibrium, a base from which to engage with reality, doing whatever can be done. One may not say, I am happy, for that is impossible when one lives in the daily grind of life and chosen to aspire for, value and desire various public, human ends. But one can learn how not to be unhappy.

Behind anger - lies LOVE. Anger presumes love and sits upon the labour of love. There is a perpetual hunger for love, that remains unrequited. Great love and compassion for all - feeds this hunger, and leads to the humanisation of the dehumanised.