Partition continues as Zionist Brahmins plan to Rule and enslave the Galaxy!
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
Partition continues. Holocaust Continues. War on. Civil War on. Humanity Bleeds. Nationalities and aboriginal people annihilated worldwide. It is infinite zenocide as zionist Brhamins plan to rule the Galaxy! Nothing is local. Manusmriti is now Global. Untouchability is translated in purchasing power and enslaved aboriginal people have no entry into the global Market. Depopulation continued with Regress and latin America is shifted in south asia. So, the Middle East war Zone is also shifted right into our heart with war cry: War against Terrorism. All resistance is subverted by the so called Media, Intelligentsia and civil Society which deprives the indigenous people of its existence so that they may capture all the wealth inthis galaxy! All the resources in this Galaxy.Thus, Global anti Imperialsist, anti Neoliberalism, anti apartheid and Anti Untouchability movements have to interweaven to form a Global resistance to upset the apple Cart of the Ruling Zionist Brahmins!
Indian Brahmins created Pakistan to disallow Political Power, civil and Human rights to the eighty percent Enslaved Indigenous People comprising of SC,ST,OBCand minorities.Elite Muslims obliged the Brahmins to get a little Pakistan while they could have ruled India with an alliance with the Indigenous People in this subcontinent. Converted majority Muslims have aboriginal rules and they were against partition of India. The demography and census reports classifying SC, ST and OBC out of Brahminical Hindutva clearly showed that Independence without partition would have meant Doom`s day for the Ruling Brahmins in this subcontinent. They were afraid of Demography, awakening in enslaved communities thanks to enlightenment provided by British Rule free from Manusmriti, and finally of the emerging National dalit Movement under Dr Ambedkar. Interim government experiment in Bengal showcased the emerging coaliation of Dalits and Muslimd reigning. Brahmins could not bear this. They divide d India, introduced Joint majoritarian Electroal system and monopolsing polity and society by false Ideologies and political parties defending Brahmincal interests depriving minorities and nationalities any type of representation. clubbing of castes and Communities rule India to defend brahminical interests at all costs. But this gimmick is laso exposed with Globalisation and High Technology and Higher Education. Thus , they decided to kill higher education for elite autonomy hiking fees hundred times. They killed constitution undermining the fundamental rights of Reservation, introducing neoliberalism. They ejected militant Sikhs and dalit Bengalies out of their bases and making them handicapped, helpless. Thus, the nationalities might not take over the central rule. Five coroe refugees ejected from bangladesh and erst while East pakistan were made deprived of citizenship, mothertongue, reservation and were pitted against aboriginal tribes countrywide with a master plan to divide and rule. Now they introduced Citizenship Amendment act to eject out Dalit Bengali refugees out of this geopolitics once again.
No, it is not final. They kill Constitution, Judiciary and Democracy. they suspend Human and Civil rights. They destroy production system to dislodge and displace aboriginal and indigenous people from life and livelihood. They have become the best comradors of Hindu Zionist White Post Modern Galaxy Order with strategic regrouping under US lead declaring War against Muslims. They invented congress and then RSS. They also created communist and Maoist parties to subvert Revolution and Insurrections. The total game of Opposition politics led by political or non political, civil society or intelligentsia defend the Brahminical ruling interest. Rulig class implement every agenda of its class dominance and the opposition works like saftey VULVE to maintainn the work of the Pressure Cooker, the country Sensex Shining Indai turns to be. Underclasses are living in false dream that they will be liberated by communists, maoists, naxals, Mamata Bannerjee, Medha Patekar or Ulka Mahajan! All of them work together to achieve the goal to turminate and depopulate the enslaved majority so that the three percent Brahmins may rule eternally!
And see what the US slave PM Dr Manmohan Singh says industrialised nations responsible for climate change in Visakhapatnam. Observing that industrialised countries had the "biggest" responsibility for the impact on climate, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today put the onus on them to correct the damage.On the other hand, the central government said Goa's recent decision on seeking de-notification of three SEZs was legally untenable. India's government may decide to raise prices of auto fuels by the end of January, for the first time in 18 months, to lower the burden of record crude prices on state-run refiners. All options, including a price increase and a cut in duties on fuels, will be considered to help the refiners who sell fuels below cost, Oil Minister Murli Deora told reporters in New Delhi today. Deora said he is in talks with the communist allies to seek their approval for raising prices. Crude oil traded near a record in New York after reaching $100 a barrel for the first time yesterday on concern violence in Nigeria may further cut output in Africa's biggest producer. The rise has strained finances at Indian Oil Corp., the nation's biggest refiner, and its counterparts that are forced to sell gasoline, cooking oil and diesel at below-market prices.
"The notified SEZs in Goa cannot be stripped of their status. There is no provision for scrapping a notified zone in the SEZ Act of 2005. State governments cannot recommend de-recognition of the notified status of the zones to the commerce department," Commerce Secretary Gopal K Pillai said after a meeting of the SEZ Board of Approval (BoA).Pillai, however, clarified that it was up to the state government to deal with the formally approved zones that had not been notified. "The Goa government has already transferred land to formally approved zones," he said. On December 31, the Goa government had said it would scrap 12 SEZs in the state and recommend de-notification of three others. However, no request for de-notification has been sent to the Department of Commerce, which is the anchor for the SEZ policy.
Meanwhile,the West Bengal government Wednesday formed an environmental expert committee to monitor all activities in East Midnapore's Nayachar Island for locating there a chemical hub after Nandigram was abandoned for the project in the face of stiff resistance from villagers.
"We have formed an environmental expert committee, headed by former chairman and managing director of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) Subir Raha, to look into all the environmental aspects of the project," Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told a press conference after a cabinet meeting here.The committee will give its suggestions to the government on setting up the chemical hub project at Nayachar, a 40 sq km island in the Hooghly river about 150 km from Kolkata.
A high-level steering committee chaired by the chief minister would also be set up to monitor the project on regular basis. State cabinet ministers, including Industry Minister Nirupam Sen, will be its members.
It will facilitate execution of four sanctioned projects, including the chemical hub at Nayachar, with Indonesia-based Salim group.
With Nandigram in revolt, the proposed chemical hub was shifted to Nayachar, where the state government owns 11,000 hectares of land. The Haldia Development Authority (HDA) also owns some land.
The Geological Survey of India (GSI) has also conducted a study at Nayachar before setting up the project there.
Wednesday's cabinet meeting also decided that the district magistrate will suggest suitable land to the government for any project, keeping in mind the loss to and displacement of local people, Bhattacharya said.
Legal experts say the Goa development can become a complex legal issue. "A zone can be notified only after the state government's approval, on which Goa has backtracked. Moreover, there is a functioning SEZ policy in the state, effective from June 2006. SEZs will find it difficult to function without the state's support, which includes providing water, electricity and sewerage connections, as well as relaxed labour laws, VAT exemption and environmental clearances," said Hitendra Mehta, head of the Gurgaon office of law firm, Vaish Associates.
No other state government has so far sought scrapping of a notified SEZ. However, after Mayawati became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh last year, the state government had asked the SEZ Board of Approval not to consider cases from the state till its go-ahead.
The state did not give permission for an SEZ in Noida that was to be developed by a consortium led by Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Subsequently, it has approved other SEZ proposals.
However, out of the seven formally-approved zones in Goa, three have been notified and are eligible for tax benefits. Proposals for eight zones in the state are yet to be taken up by the BoA, an inter-ministerial body headed by Pillai.
Notified zones in the state include a 123.2-hectare biotech SEZ of Meditab Specialties, a 107.17-hectare services SEZ of K Raheja Corp Pvt Ltd and a 20.36-hectare Biotech SEZ of Peninsula Pharma Research Centre Pvt Ltd. Pharma major Cipla is developing two units in the Meditab zone and has already invested Rs 200 crore.
Addressing the 95th Indian Science Congress here, he said the world cannot walk down the path of environmentally harmful development that developed industrial economies have pursued thus far.
"They bear the biggest responsibility for what has happened and must bear the greatest responsibility for correcting the damage," Singh said, adding climate change posed a great and new challenge to the development prospects and to the livelihood of the people.
Noting that India had adopted a "pro-active and pragmatic approach" to the problem of environmental degradation, he said, "We cannot replicate the western model of wasteful consumption and environmentally harmful industrialisation.
"We need an alternative approach more mindful of our resource endowments, and also of the need to avoid damage to the environment," the Prime Minister said.
"we need a global response, a national response and a local response."
An expert committee headed by R Chidambaram had come forward with a research agenda to study the impact of climate change in the country, he said, adding the government was in the process of identifying a centre of national excellence on climate change.
Orissa violence part of RSS strategy: CPI-M
New Delhi: The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has alleged that the communal violence in Orissa was not "an isolated breakdown of law and order" but a part of an "overall strategy" by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to subvert republican principles.
In an editorial in the latest issue of party mouthpiece People's Democracy, the CPI-M said safeguarding the republic was essential to put the country on the road to prosperity and progress.
CPI-M pointed out that last week's violence in Orissa's Kandhamal district that killed three people, allegedly unleashed by Hindu fundamentalists, came immediately after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s electoral victory in Gujarat.
"This anti-Christian campaign in Orissa is, thus, not an isolated breakdown of law and order. It is part of an overall strategy of the effort to transform modern India through the subversion of its republican principles."
The editorial said: "Such electoral tactics are not transitory but dovetail the larger strategy objective of the RSS - the objective of transforming the secular democratic character of the modern Indian Republic into its conception of a rabidly intolerant Hindu Rashtra."
The article said any attempt to subvert the fundamental pillars of India's constitution could create havoc for the unity and integrity of the country. "India is a country of unparalleled diversities - religious, linguistic, cultural, ethnic etc. The only way a country of this size and diversity can be kept united is by strengthening the bonds of commonality that exist amongst this diversity.
"Any attempt to impose a uniformity on this diversity can only lead to the disintegration of this country. And, it is precisely this that the communal forces under the slogan of 'one country, one culture' are seeking to do," the editorial alleged.
The article recalled the anti-Christian campaign by the RSS and its affiliates launched in December 1998 in Gujarat, a state that is called Hindutva's laboratory and where the BJP has won election after election.
The party also noted that M.S. Golwalkar, one of the prominent leaders of the RSS, had once remarked that the three internal enemies of its pursuit of establishing its conception of a Hindu Rashtra were the Muslims, Christians and the communists.
The communists urged the Indian people to be alert and take steps to stop the efforts to communalise the nation."The majority of Indian people who cherish the republican foundations of modern India need to halt this communal juggernaut in its tracks. This is absolutely essential to first safeguard our republic and to put it on the road of overall prosperity and progress," the article said.
In what is seen as a major boost for Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and a setback for his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Mayawati, the Janata Dal (U)-BJP surmounted heavy odds to retain the Bikramganj Lok Sabha seat while the Bahujan Samaj Party suffered a jolt losing the prestigious Ballia seat to its arch rival Samajwadi Party.
The JD(U) retained its hold on Bikramganj Lok Sabha constituency when its candidate Meena Singh, the widow of former local MP Ajit Singh, defeated her nearest RJD rival Ashok Kumar Kushwaha by 31,258 votes. While Singh secured 1,65,664 votes, Kushwaha polled 1,34,406 votes.
In West Bengal, the CPI(M) renewed its influence on Balaghar Assembly seat with its nominee Bhuban Pramanik defeating his nearest Trinamool Congress challenger Ashim Majhi by 8,410 votes. The CPI(M) victory margin went down by 10,000 votes compared to last polls.
In Ballia, SP Neeraj Shekhar, cashing in on the sympathy for his father Chandrashekhar, former Prime Minister who died last year, romped home by a margin of over 1,30,000 votes over his nearest rival BSP's Vinay Shankar Tewari. Neeraj polled over 2,95,000 votes while Tewari secured more than 1,64,000 votes. This was the first major setback for the ruling BSP in the State.
BJP's Virendra Singh and Congress' Rajiv Upadhya polled over 22,000 and over 10,000 votes respectively losing their deposits.
In Bikramganj, where RJD chief Lalu Prasad had placed his prestige at stake and forged a formidable caste combination and banked on the support from disgruntled JD(U) Rajya Sabha member Bashisth Narayan Singh, Anand Mohan Singh and expelled party leader Upendra Kushwaha.
The RJD boss camped at Bikramganj for well over a week. To make up for his drifting minority vote base, Lalu Prasad even stayed at jailed party leader Akhlaque Ahmad's residence.
With Yadav and Kuswahas making up for nearly 28 per cent votes, Lalu hoped that Upendra Kushwaha, a one -time right hand of Nitish Kumar, would be able to make a major dent in the Kurmi-Koeri combination forged by the Bihar CM in the last Assembly polls. While this did not happen, Lalu even failed to effectively divide the Rajput votes despite support from Basisth Narain Singh and Anand Mohan Singh, who was recently convicted in the murder of former Gopalganj District Magistrate.
Trinamool Congress office set ablaze in Durgapur
Durgapur: A Trinamool Congress office was set ablaze near Durgapur steel plant in Burdwan district of West Bengal last night, police said.
The temporary structure of the party's minority forum office was set on fire by unidentified persons in front of the main gate of the steel plant at midnight yesterday, the police said today.
Trinamool leader Prabhat Chatterjee alleged that it was the handiwork of CPI(M) workers.
CPI(M) MLA Biprendu Chakrabarty denied the charge and asked the police to identify the miscreants.
Burdwan Superintendent of Police Pijush Pandey said that he was aware of the incident and would examine all possibilities, if a complaint was filed.
Tata's `people`s car` heading for Geneva Motor Show
Mumbai: Delhi's Auto Expo starting January 10 will not be the only place where Tata Motors will display its competitively priced Rs 1 lakh car, which will be the cheapest car in the world.
After showcasing the yet-to-be-named car (Ratan Tata calls it "the people's car") in the capital, the company is planning a similar splash at the Geneva Motor Show in March, a company spokesman confirmed. This will be a prelude to entering the competitive European market.
The Geneva show will mark the first time a small car will be unveiled at an international auto show before its commercial launch in India, scheduled for September or October. No test drives will be allowed at the Delhi Auto Show. However, it is not clear whether they will be allowed in Geneva.
Tata Motors has already shown interest in launching the car in markets that resemble India. A joint study is being conducted with Italian partner Fiat in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. Italy is another possibility.Auto experts said the European foray is part of a strategy to maintain respectable margins on the car.
The car, which is to be sold in sizeable numbers (the target is up to 1 million a year by 2010-11), is expected to find a market among middle-income buyers looking to upgrade from two-wheelers.The car will also target buyers of used compact vehicles and mid-sized sedans.
The Geneva Motor Show has been a happy hunting ground for several Tata vehicles including concept cars.The company had unveiled the pick-up Cliffrider (to be launched in India), the Elegante sedan, the TL Sprint among other models at the Swiss show. The recently launched 2.2 litre Safari Dicor was also displayed there.
Other than the Rs 1 lakh car the company may also showcase the new Indica and Indigo at Geneva this spring. Both cars will be launched in India, later this year.
The small car will be produced at more than one manufacturing plant, apart from the upcoming plant in Singur, West Bengal. Its facilities in Uttarkhand, Pune and Lucknow are other options.
West Bengal Govt to set up steering committee for NKID
Kolkata | Wednesday, Jan 2 2008 IST
The West Bengal Government today decided to set up a steering committee headed by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to monitor the implementation of New Kolkata International Development (NKID) project.
The implementation of the NKID project has lot of implications and involves many departments.
It has been decided to set up the high level steering committee to be chaired by the Chief Minister, who will monitor the development of the project on a regular basis.
The implementation of NKID project will be carried in different phases.
In the first phase of the project implementation of Petroleum, Chemical, Petrochemical Investment Region (PCPIR) at Nayachar, development of Raichak and Kukrahati bridge with 25 km stretch of road to be connected with Diamond Harbour Road and a stretch of road will be developed in 24 Parganas (North)besides township development at Kalyani, Baruipur and Haringhata. These townships will be built by NKID on existing lands which are already in possession of the state government.
The NKID, a special purpose private company, was being promoted by the Salim Group, the Universal Success Group and Unitech for development of various projects in West Bengal.
The high level meeting, held at the Writers Building to discuss the NKID project, was presided by the Chief Minister and was attended by Industry & Commerce Minister Nirupam Sen, the IT Minister, the Sunderban Development Minister, the Fishery Minister, the Chief Secretary and heads of other concerned departments.
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| Thursday, January 3, 2008 (Nandigram) It is exactly a year since the Nandigram SEZ crisis began and winds of change are cautiously blowing over the fields in Nandigram. For eleven long months villagers here suffered a siege within as supporters of the CPI (M) and the Trinamool Congress backed Bhumi Uched Pratirodh Committee clashed over the controversial issue of land acquisition for a petro chemical hub. The standoff worsened with the issue turning into turf war for supremacy between the two political parties. A year later the figure of people killed is still not known but at least 50 people have died and several are still missing. Hundreds have been injured and thousands made homeless for months with a feeling of fear and helplessness. That is how the people of Nandigram will remember the year gone by. And this is where the first voices of protest against acquiring land for a Special Economic Zone were heard, exactly a year ago. At a meeting of Kalichandrapur Panchayat, there were rumours that the Haldia Development Authority would announce a land acquisition drive. Villagers feared their land would be taken away by force. One of the victims in the violence that followed was Rehman's 19-year-old son, a member of the Trinamool Congress-backed Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee. ''My son is no longer with us and I don't want an industry. I don't require one,'' said Sheikh Fojla Rahman. In February, the Chief Minister announced no land would be forcibly acquired but by then the damage had been done. And in March police tried to enter Nandigram using force. 14 people were killed in firing after which Nandigram remained on the boil. The administration did nothing to restore calm. For both the CPM and the Trinamool Congress, the issue turned into a turf war for supremacy. Voices of protest echoed on the streets of Kolkata also in Parliament. A spate of bandhs followed, Nandigram became a national issue. The Calcutta High court condemned the firing and ordered a CBI probe. And in November when the CPM tried to recapture its lost base four people died in clashes. But the Chief Minister visited Nandigram only last week, almost a year after trouble first broke out to attend a district level conference of the CPM, where he handed out compensation to the 29 party workers, who were killed last year. Paramilitary forces are present in the area but the general worry is, what happens after they are gone. Both the CPM and the Trinamool who have lined up meetings to mark the first anniversary of the violence claim many of their supporters are still missing. Life is desperately trying to return to normal here in Nandigram as an uneasy calm shadows the shattered peace. The controversial land acquisition issue was hijacked by an intense political battle for turf between the CPI(M) and the Trinamool Congress, crippling life for an entire year. It is not difficult to guess what the people here will be longing for in the New Year, peace that will last. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
CPM defeats split Oppn in Balagarh
3 Jan, 2008, 0145 hrs IST, TNN
The seat fell vacant following the death of former CPM MLA Dibakar Routh, who had won the seat by a margin of about 18,000 votes. Bhuban Pramanik of the CPM bagged 60,101 votes against Asim Majhi of the TC, who secured 51,691 ballots. The CPM's victory margin dropped by about 10,000 votes compared to the 2006 results despite the fact that all the Opposition parties had contested the elections independently and there was no electoral patch-up among them.
Strangely, the Congress emerged as the worst performer as far as vote share is concerned. While the BJP's garnered 8,833 votes, the Congress could account for only 5,864 votes. Naxalite faction CPI-ML (Liberation), which had contested the elections, got 4,530 votes, a little less than the Congress.
Balagarh results clearly indicate the CPM's eroding mass base in rural Bengal after the Nandigram issue. The result also suggests that the Congress leadership is fast losing its influence among the electorate which is basically anti-CPM. People in Balagarh did not take the Congress as an anti-CPM force.
On the other hand, the result also indicates that the CPM may continue with its winning streak unless the TC, Congress and the BJP manage to fight the polls jointly against it.
The three Opposition parties together got 66,388 votes.
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Not Abject Apologia
By Praful Bidwai
02 January, 2008
Countercurrents.org
Prabhat Patnaik has done what no other intellectual allied to West Bengal's Left Front has even attempted after Nandigram: namely, try to turn the tables on Left-leaning critics of the CPM by gratuitously attacking them for their " messianic moralism" and their presumed "disdain" for "the messy world of politics".
His agenda goes well beyond defending the CPM or apologising for one of the most shameful episodes in the Indian Left's history, involving the killing of peasants, devastation of thousands of livelihoods, sexual violence, and gross abuse of state power. It is to declare all criticism of the CPM's policies and actions illegitimate and misconceived, however sympathetic or inspired by radical ideas it might be.
The impact of Patnaik's article will be to prevent rethinking within the CPM, which could produce course correction. Ironically for Patnaik, it will only strengthen the party's neoliberal orientation and the "cult of development" that neoliberalism spawns, which he rails against.
Worse, it will harden the West Bengal CPM's readiness to brutalise peasants and workers (in whose name it speaks) in the interests of the rich and powerful, like the Tatas, Jindals, and the Salim group which is a front for Indonesia's super-corrupt Suharto family.
Patnaik is wrong on both facts and logic. His claim that "thousands" of CPM supporters in Nandigram were forced to become refugees for months is backed by no credible or independent source. Citizens' inquiries, including by a People's Tribunal consisting of a retired High Court Chief Justice, say that refugees from CPM-inspired violence outnumbered "dislodged" CPM cadres by a factor of 10, if not 20.
BUPC-Trinamool thugs too practised violence, but they couldn't have matched the state-assisted clout or scale of the militant operations of the well-oiled party apparatus. Leaks from the CBI report on the March violence, just submitted to the Calcutta High Court, speak of extensive collusion between CPM cadres and the police, which still continues.
As numerous reports in Tehelka, Hard News and Outlook have established, "recapturing" Nandigram wasn't an act of "desperation", which followed "the failure of every other effort at restoring normalcy". It was a planned punitive operation, premised on the abdication by the state of its fundamental responsibility to protect the life and limb of all citizens. The government allowed party thugs to wreak havoc through hostage-taking, arson, illegal confinement, rape, and of course, outright killing.
Equally important was Nandigram's policy context: an indefensible neoliberal plan to impose an SEZ on the people. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee indeed apologised for his "mistakes" in Nandigram. But he hasn't even remotely changed his neoliberal orientation, nor dropped the SEZ plan. He has merely relocated the chemical hub to Nayachar, a geologically unstable island, where no industrial activity, least of all hazardous chemicals production, is permissible under the Coastal Zone Regulations.
For all the apologies and confessions, Bhattacharjee's government appealed in the Supreme Court even against the High Court order for the payment of compensation to Nandigram's victims—a disgraceful thing for a Left-led regime to do. For eight long months, the victims were offered, and got, nothing from the government or the CPM.
At any rate, Nandigram's people don't feel assured that the chemical hub story is over. PWD Minister Kshiti Goswami, no less, has publicly said that the CPM's real plan is to build the hub at Nandigram, and use sparsely populated Nayachar to rehabilitate the displaced.
Patnaik doesn't even pause to reflect on why the bulk of the progressive intelligentsia in West Bengal, and perhaps much of it in the rest of India, has been so critical of the CPMon Nandigram. He wishes away the enormity of what happened on the blind presumption that "the Party" must be right—as always, because by definition, it is with "the people".
It's not "intellectuals" alone who have turned critical of the CPM. Its own Front allies, including the CPI, Forward Bloc and RSP, have publicly accused it of acting unilaterally and dissociated themselves from its Nandigram actions. The Bloc has decided to contest next May's panchayat elections independently. The RSP too will probably do that. The CPI has publicly criticised the CPM's high-handed conduct and some of its economic policies.
These cracks in left unity have appeared for the first time in 30 years. If the Front splits, the CPM will have to carry the blame.
If Patnaik is seriously concerned with political praxis —as he says he is in his attack on "moral messiahs"—, these cracks should worry him far more than a few individuals' comments comparing (although not equating) certain similarities in the violence in Bengal with patterns in the pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat.
This writer has always maintained that the two are not comparable in quality, scale, intention or effect. Referring to Gujarat's communal carnage doesn't help understand what happened in Singur and Nandigram under a secular government blinded by its zeal for industrialisation-at-any-cost, and led by a party whose 30 years in power have turned it conservative, and encouraged it to develop arrogant intolerance towards people within its own plebeian base.
Despite all these qualifications and distinctions, it's impossible for Marxists, socialists or progressives to condone either the overt violence of Nandigram, or the covert violence inherent in the elitist, neoliberal developmentalism pursued by the Left Front. Patnaik simply fails to make, indeed even attempt, this discriminating judgment.
Patnaik's principal explanation for a large number of Left-leaning intellectuals turning critical of the CPM is twofold: " most" of them "are in any case strongly anti-organised Left, especially anti-Communist"; and second, many who "till yesterday were with the Left in fighting communal fascism" have changed their stance. "With the … perceived weakening of the BJP … and …. the communal fascist forces, a certain fracturing of the anti-communal coalition was inevitable …"
The first proposition begs the question: "in any case" says it all. Worse, it conflates disparate categories such as "erstwhile 'socialist' groups", NGOs, Naxalite sympathiers, and "Free Thinkers" (a small, long-extinct student group in JNU). It fails to ask why many intellectuals who have had a lifelong commitment to the Left, and in particular the Communist Parties, feel disillusioned after Nandigram.
The second proposition assumes that the Left led the anti-communal struggle, which became critically important with the BJP's ascendancy in the mid-1980s. This is open to question—despite the contributions of groups like Sahmat and Sanskriti.
Frankly, the anti-communal fight was led by civil society organisations, public intellectuals, and combative activists who dissected BJP-directed textbooks, questioned Hindutva's claims, and valiantly took on Parivar goons. Even journalists played a role, as did feminists. The Left, in particular the CPM, certainly participated in the struggle. But leadership is another matter.
The West Bengal Left Front didn't stop LK Advani's rath yatra in 1990. Bihar's Laloo Prasad Yadav did. After the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, the CPM and its front organisations were marginal in exposing the culprits or providing relief to the victims.
Immediately after the 2002 Gujarat carnage, the Left Front allowed Praveen Togadia to hold provocative meetings in Bengal, in which he justified the butchery of Muslims.
Similarly, the alliance between the organised Left and civil society groups and the progressive intelligentsia is not coming apart mainly under the impact of the BJP's decline. This perception of decline is neither widely shared nor a driving force of the change in question.
That change is primarily attributable to the CPM's increasing tilt towards neoliberalism, especially in the states where it rules, its growing sectarianism towards other Left currents, and its resort to strong-arm tactics against its own former constituency. Patnaik is no stranger to these traits in Kerala, where his attempt to combat pro-rich policies has met with stiff resistance from the CPM's dominant pro-neoliberal faction.
If Patnaik's basic premises are flawed, his charge that the Left's intellectual critics wish to further the destruction of politics and withdrawal from political praxis is patently tendentious. He doesn't cite a single instance to show that these detractors want to establish their "intellectual hegemony". Indeed, the second half of the article is a series of peevish assertions without rationality or roots in reality.
Patnaik makes a false dichotomy by counterposing politics to morality. He altogether misses the point that Leftists are not amoral, but have different, indeed superior and more refined, moral standards than Rightists. They should be scrupulous in adhering to an ethics that makes fine distinctions between constitutional and unconstitutional means, is strong on justice, equity and gender equality, is genuinely inclusive, non-divisive and anti-sectarian, and espouses peace and negotiated conflict resolution.
Particularly objectionable is the charge that the "detractors" distrust politics in the same way as does the "development cult" propagated by Manmohan Singh, which segregates it from politics, considered dirty by the middle class.
From here on, Patnaik indulges in pure fantasising: "The revolt against the CPI(M) is simultaneously a revolt against politics. The combination of anti-communism with a rejection of politics in general gives this revolt that added edge …"
Most of those whom he targets are in fact intensely political and have dedicated great energies to building a politics based on an abiding commitment to the poor, to principle, and to collective dialogue and action within the broad Left.
Perhaps the most deplorable part of Patnaik's argument is the "two-camps" theory—a formulation reminiscent of Stalin's crude dialectical materialism. This can be used, and was used, to justify suppression of freedoms and rights, fake trials, Gulags, invasions, brutalisation of exploited people, indeed, mass murder.
You can't define the "people's camp" by including certain parties regardless of their ideologies, policies or practices, and condemn others as "the enemy of the people" (a quaint-sounding phrase in the 21st century!)
Worthy partisanship does not lie in mindlessly supporting "my party, wrong or right", but in advancing a politics that places the poor, exploited and oppressed at its core.
A final point. One of the most encouraging and healthy developments of the past decade has been the mutually empathetic dialogue and collaboration between the organised Left, on the one hand, and people's movements, civil society organisations and committed Left-leaning intellectuals. This spans a range of issues, including neoliberal globalisation, the people's right to food and employment, human rights, peace and nuclear disarmament, opposition to Empire and hegemonism, and of course, secularism.
Patnaik's article is written not in the spirit of promoting such a dialogue or alliance. It will discourage, censor and delegitimise it—to the detriment of all concerned. Nothing can be more unfortunate
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CPM threat to CBI witnesses
Statesman News Service
KOLKATA, Jan. 2: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) asked the state government to take steps against some CPI-M leaders of Nandigram who allegedly threatened villagers who agreed to be the CBI's witnesses in court to depose on the 14 March police firing incident in which 14 people died. In response to the letter, the state government has decided to file cases against the culprits. State home secretary Mr Prasad Ranjan Roy confirmed this at the Writers' Buildings today.
In his letter to the state government, DIG (CBI) Mr Alok Ranjan mentioned three instances of villagers, who had consented to depose for the CBI, being threatened by local CPI-M leaders. It bears recall that the Bhumi Uchched Protirodh Committee (BUPC) repeatedly alleged that CPI-M cadres were threatening their supporters once they had left relief camps and moved back to their homes. Even the CRPF said that police were refusing to register cases against criminals allegedly backed by the CPI-M after the jawans had turned them over to the officers.
The letter from the CBI ~ another pointer to the fact that all was not well on the law and order front in Nandigram ~ came as a major embarrassment for the state government. This came at a time when the state government was trying to establish that the local administration was not working under any kind of political pressure. That the state home secretary announced so fast the government's decision to act, indicated that the it did not want to let its image get tarnished, especially at a time when panchayat polls were approaching.
Steering panel set up
KOLKATA, Jan. 2: A steering committee headed by chief minister Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was formed today to monitor the progress of a clutch of projects. "In the backdrop of Nandigram and Singur, care will be taken to displace very little of the existing population while setting up projects scheduled to be completed in 15 years' time," Mr Bhattacharjee said.
An expert panel headed by former ONGC chief Mr Subir Raha has been set up to report on the environmental impact as well as the suitability of other factors with respect to the Nayachar project. Zurong Consultancy of Singapore has been appointed by the New Kolkata International Development (NKID), a special purpose private company set up to execute ventures in the state, to prepare another report. The NKID has retained a US firm to compile a report on the proposed Raichak-Kukrahati bridge.SNS
Maoists mow down 2 CPM leaders
Statesman News Service
KOLKATA/KRISHNAGAR/PURULIA, Jan. 2: Maoists made their presence felt in the state after two CPI-M local committee members across two districts were killed allegedly by the Maoists in the past 24 hours.
The state government today admitted that it had failed to counter the Maoists in some rural pockets of the state. The home secretary, Mr Prasad Ranjan Roy said at Writers' Buildings that they had asked those leaders who faced threat to their life not to go to the interiors. Instead, they were asked to stay in the urban areas.
In Purulia, Pahalan Kumar Majhi (45), a local committee member of the CPI-M, was shot dead by a group of Maoists near his residence at Besra village in Balarampur, at 11.30 last night. When Maoists raided the village last night, they shouted slogans against the corruption of the CPI-M at panchayat level. Police seized at least ten leaflets from the spot. The additional superintendent of police, Mr Pranab Kumar Das, reached the spot this morning and admitted that Maoists had been involved in the attack.
Mr Das said : "There were 15 to 20 Maoists. Maoists also injured the mother of the victim, Mrs Dudi Kumar Majhi. The brothers of the victim were injured when they tried to resist the Maoists". Within a few hours after killing the CPI-M leader in Purulia, a gang of suspected Maoist ultras shot dead a CPI-M leader in Nadia's Chapra police station area around 11 am today.
The gang comprising four persons fired shots at Ramprasad Mondol (53), a school teacher as well as a member of CPI-M Doierbazar local committee while on his way to his school at Madhabpur. He was the former food karmadhyakshya of the Chapra panchayat samity. According to the local residents, the attackers fled towards Neoa and Bhagwanpur, the Maoist strongholds between Kotwali and Chapra police station areas. Before leaving the spot, they left some leaflets behind. When asked about the matter, Mr Samsul Islam Mollah, local CPI-M MLA, said: "Mondol was a very popular leader. Though, some posters of Maoist have been found near his body, we are yet to be sure whether the Maoists have killed him."
Mr Kusumakar, the SP, said, "There are some disputes between the local CPI-M leaders and some Maoists about Kalinga Beel (water body) here. The Maoists didn't wish to give rights of fishing to the local CPI-M leaders and this could be one of reasons behind the attack on him."
BJP workers detained
Four BJP workers were detained by the police today in connection with the murder of Sisir Chatterjee, member of the Mongalkote CPI-M zonal committee. He was butchered last evening barely 20 metres away from his party office at Koichar in Katwa. The snifer dogs traced his head to a paddy field where it was dangled from bamboo sticks with Maoist posters and leaflets.
Reacting to the detention, Mr Sanjay Bhattacharya of the BJP alleged that their men were being framed on baseless charges.
| Bloodspill in Assam bandh mayhem: 7 killed in police firing | |
 | Curfew was clamped in Lakhipur town and the army asked to move in after a three-day bandh that began this morning left a trail of death and destruction in Goalpara district of Lower Assam. Seven persons died when police fired on bandh supporters who had turned violent. Two police officers and a CRPF jawan were among the 20-odd people injured in the violence. Several vehicles were either set ablaze or damaged by protesters at different places. |
| The state Election Commission tonight postponed elections in the whole of Goalpara district, scheduled for January 4 and 9, indefinitely. |
http://www.taratv.com/top_story.html
| First anniversary of Nandigram unrest |
| It is exactly a year since the Nandigram SEZ crisis began and winds of change are cautiously blowing over the fields in Nandigram. For eleven long months villagers here suffered a siege within as supporters of the CPI (M) and the Trinamool Congress backed Bhumi Uched Pratirodh Committee clashed over the controversial issue of land acquisition for a petro chemical hub. The standoff worsened with the issue turning into turf war for supremacy between the two political parties. |
SOUTH ASIA SESSIONS
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Session 7: Hidden Away: Tantrism and South Asian Art
Organizer: Rebecca M. Brown, St. Mary's College of Maryland
Chair: Padma Kaimal, Colgate University
Discussant: Janice Leoshko, University of Texas, Austin
While some elements of South Asian tantric art—Tibetan mandalas, yab-yum sculptures, maithuna couples—see no end to exposure and publication, much of the meaning of major tantric art and architecture of South Asia is hidden from the gaze of the uninitiated. The three papers of this panel explore three very different examples of art and architecture which illuminate the relationship between tantrism's hidden aspects and temple sculpture, bhakti, and the construction of modern India.
The first two papers examine temple architecture and its decoration. The first explores the elaborate patterning that embeds tantric meaning within apparently simple visual signs. The second explores the tension between manifest (prakat) and hidden (aprakat) in the structure and the terracotta program of Bengali temples. The final paper explores the manner in which the hidden aspects of tantrism and tantric art were used to establish an Indian modernity in the 1960s and 1970s. As a group, the three authors establish a counterpoint between what tantric art was thought to be in the mid-twentieth century and what artistic production around tantrism looked like in eighth-century southern India and seventeenth-century Bengal. Each paper engages with tantrism as it intersects wider political and religious institutions: royal patronage, Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and the international modern art movement. The papers together move the study of tantrism in art in new directions, showing that even as tantrism is hidden, its presence is central to much of South Asian art and architecture.
Hidden Tantric Lessons in an Eighth-Century Temple
Padma Kaimal, Colgate University
The Kailasanath temple complex was built between 700 and 725 by a Pallava king at his dynasty's capital, Kancipuram, in southeastern India. The architecture and sculpture of this monument express tantric philosophy's central principles through visual signs that remain hidden even as they sit in plain view. Any visitor who gains access to the temple's walled courtyard will see all around her the interlocked buildings and dramatic carvings that carry these tantric meanings. Those meanings, however, may elude her because they lie not in the forms alone but in patterns underlying the placement of those forms throughout the temple complex. Only visitors trained in tantra—initiates in that esoteric tradition or scholars benefitting from the recent publication of tantric secrets—are likely to perceive those patterns and recognize their significance.
One of these patterns I discern at the Kailasanath complex rests in the arrangement of its goddess images. This sculptural program consistently counterposes goddesses on the basis of their sexuality, manifesting as it does so tantra's emphasis on the sexuality of deities, the variability of the supreme Goddess's many manifestations, and the goal of transcending dualistic thought. These core lessons of Tantra are thus embedded in the monument's very plan but screened from the gaze of those who have not learned what to look for.
Hidden Meanings in the Temple Terracottas of Seventeenth-Century Bengal
Pika Ghosh, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the devotional movement led by the Bengali saint Chaitanya (1586–1633), upholds Radha's deeply passionate and self-sacrificing love for Krishna as the ideal state for the devotee to achieve. The primary texts suggest that the goal of the aspirant was to enhance her/his levels of knowledge and meditational skills toward participation in the lila (amorous play) of the deities. This process is understood as a progression from the prakat (manifest) to the aprakat (hidden). The double-storied brick temples built throughout the Bengal delta in the seventeenth century are a site for such aspiration. In this paper I want to explore the possible evocation of older tantric concepts and visual forms that were already prevalent in the region, where rich Buddhist and Shakta tantric traditions had developed earlier, toward enhancing the experience of bhakti. The iconography of the terracotta panels adorning the earliest Vaishnava temples can be read as a progression from the manifest to the more potent "hidden" knowledge, available only to those initiated within the tradition. Panels depicting scenes such as the rasamandala (circular dance of Krishna with the women of Mathura) are particularly rewarding when read in this light.
The Hidden and the Modern: P.T. Reddy, Neo-Tantrism, and the Struggle for Modern Art in India
Rebecca Brown, St. Mary's College of Maryland
In the face of a British public aghast at Indian art forms, Ananda Coomaraswamy's early 20th century justifications of the study of Indian visual culture lay in the valorization of Indian art as an authentic spiritual expression opposed to a post-industrial, jaded western aesthetic. In the years after India's Independence, the question of authenticity for modern art turned to an uncovering of the "hidden" and therefore authentic India, giving rise to a neo-tantric art movement.
This paper examines the Andhra Pradesh artist P.T. Reddy (1915–1996), and traces his struggle with the need to create an authentic Indian visual expression while adhering to the demands of a universalizing ethos within European modernism. His work turns to a reinterpretation of Indian tantric imagery, using its esoteric symbolism and universal forms to bridge the gap between abstraction and Indian-ness. Reddy's neo-tantric paintings explore abstract shapes, mandala-like diagrams, and personal symbolic elements, in order to bring the space of a hidden and therefore "purely" Indian culture to shape the Indian modern art movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
By reading his images alongside post-Independence politics and the religious diffusionism in India (and the world) during this period, this paper examines the effects of a new interest in tantrism on the development of Indian modernism. For Reddy, this meant using the Orientalist assumptions about exotic and mysterious India to construct an Indian modernism which relied on the aesthetic of tantrism with its hidden, esoteric imagery.
Session 8: Crossing Boundaries: The Changing Roles of the Chakrasamvara Tradition in India and Nepal
Organizer: David B. Gray, Rice University
Chair: Robert A. Thurman, Columbia University
Discussant: Laura Harrington, Columbia University
Keywords: religion, art history, India, Nepal, Buddhism.
This panel explores the multiple roles played by the Chakrasamvara Tantra in South Asian history, bringing to light an early medieval Buddhist tradition, the practice of which continues in several South Asian and Himalayan communities. A composite text, Chakrasamvara Tantra drew inspiration from both Hindu and Buddhist sources, criss-crossing sectarian boundaries. It therefore thwarts our ordinary attempts at sectarian identification, proposing instead an alternative model of self-identification, as David Gray argues in his paper. It also challenges our attempts at interpretation, as it is a transgressive text, advocating the crossing of socially defined boundaries such as the purity/impurity and auspicious/inauspicious divides. Its study thus requires hermeneutic sophistication, as Miranda Shaw shows in her paper. Following its composition in India in the eighth or ninth century C.E., it was transmitted to Nepal, where it served as a major influence on the shaping of Newar cultural identity, as John Huntington explores in his paper. Dina Bangdel highlights the importance of representations of the Chakrasamvara goddess Varuni in Newar Buddhist religious history and iconography. Despite its importance in South Asia and beyond it has gained little scholarly attention. This panel will make a contribution toward filling this lacuna in our knowledge of an important South Asian religious tradition. In so doing, it seeks to highlight issues of religious identity and representation in the study of South Asia cultural history, engaging interdisciplinary issues that will be of interest to Asian Studies scholars across a broad range of disciplines and regional specializations.
The Adi Prajna Guhyeshvari and the Beginnings of Samvara Cycle Tantra in Newar Buddhism
John C. Huntington, Ohio State University
Note: This paper is about the less publicly known Buddhist site of Puran (Ancient) Guhyeshvari and not the well-known Naya (New) Guhyeshvari in near Pashupatinath in Deo Patan.
In our recent and ongoing studies of Newar Buddhism at The Ohio State University, we have found that the Svayambhupurana's narratives of the emergence of Chakrasamvara enlightenment methodologies have been reified in a very strict interpretation. Contained within it is the story of the first teaching of the Tantra to Manjudeva by Guhyeshvari and his subsequent teaching of the practice to Prachandadeva of Gaur, who upon receiving initiation (diksha) became known as Shantikar Acharya, the founder of the Vajracharya linage of Chakrasamvara teachings in Newar Buddhism. The incorporation of Guhyeshvari into Buddhism, and her role in Newar Buddhism is little understood and there are several aspects to her role. First, as Adi Prajna, she generates Vajravarahi and the Yoginis of the Chakrasamvara mandala. She indirectly, via Vajravarahi, also generates all of the Buddhaprajnas, who appear as the female Armor deities of the generations stage meditation; she is the goddess Varuni, who is the goddess of the five alcohols (who is the topic of Dr. Bangdel's presentation); and she appears as one of the five Yoginis of Vajravarahi's completion cycle mandala in the Nepal Valley. In summary, she is the underlying fundamental "source" of all Tantric teachings, the pure essence of the transformative realizations of the Chakrasamvara/ Vajravarahi methodology, and is the ultimate primordial goddess of the Nepal Valley religions. This presentation will be extensively illustrated with digital images.
Cannibalism, Astral Seduction, and Raising the Dead: Bizarre Rites or Metaphorical Terrain in the Cakrasamvara-tantra?
Miranda Shaw, University of Richmond
The thematic topography of the Cakrasamvara-tantra is largely the one familiar from previously translated Indian Buddhist tantras, but the text evinces a singular preoccupation with the magical powers (siddhi) said to result from its ritual procedures and potent mantras. Scholars have debated whether Tantric promises of occult powers serve a purely rhetorical function, advance supernormal powers as ends in themselves, or figure among an integrated spectrum of goals. My paper examines the role and status of magical powers in the Cakrasamvara-tantra. I consider first the wide range of siddhis that are proffered and the questions of literal, philosophical, and ethical intentionality that they raise. I then focus on some ostensibly bizarre rites described in the text, such as the consumption of human flesh, an elaborate rite of astral seduction, and a ritual for raising a corpse and compelling it to do one's bidding.
After presenting several exegetical strategies to justify such seemingly bizarre and "transgressive" practices, I consider the degree to which the work contextualizes such rites and powers within its religious universe. I also consider the broader Indic magical corpus as a factor in the immediate audience's "horizon of expectations" and situate this aspect of the text within the Buddhist magical tradition. In determining whether such passages are rhetorical, metaphorical, or literal in intent, I draw upon the semiotic concept of "semantically saturated" texts to elicit how the promises of magical powers serve to map the enigmatic but nonetheless intelligible ideological and practical terrain of a transgressive subculture.
Goddess of Purified Amrita: Varuni in the Chakrasamvara Tradition
Dina Bangdel, Ohio State University
It is well known in the ritual practices of the Anuttarayoga Tantras that alcohol and other spirituous substances are often used as the offerings in the skull cup. Through meditational visualizations, these symbolic substances are transformed into the nectar of transcendent insight (jnana amrita) that purifies the practitioner to effectively realize the attainments of the Tantric Buddhist path. Specifically, in the Newar Buddhism of the Kathmandu Valley, the visualization of the inner offering mandalas, using both red and white alcohol, are fundamental to the practices of the Chakrasamvara cycle. In this context, it is the goddess Varuni, referred to as Suradevi, "Goddess of Alcohol," who is contained in the inner offering and anthropo-morphically manifests the purified nectar.
Although art as well as religious historians have previously overlooked her significance, Varuni's role is central to the practices of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi. The aim of this paper is three-fold: one, to discuss the ritual role of Varuni within the larger Chakrasamvara cycle; two, to highlight the significance of Varuni within the Newar Buddhist tradition, in relation to other Tantric goddesses, such as Guhyesh-vari, Vajravarahi, and the Caturyoginis; and third, to explore the little-known iconographic representations of Varuni in Newar Buddhist and Tibetan art. In discussing Varuni specifically in relation to the practices of the Newar Buddhists, it is also my intention to bring to attention some core features of the Chakrasamvara tradition in Newar Buddhism.
Mandala of the Self: On Identity Construction in a South Asian Religious Tradition
David B. Gray, Rice University
Tantric traditions have appeared anomalous through a variety of different criteria, and have typically been ignored or dismissed by religious and social historians, despite the fact that they have played a very important role in the development of both Buddhism and Hinduism in South Asia and beyond. In this paper I will argue that a reevaluation of these traditions is necessary to further enrich our understanding of South Asian religious and social history, and deepen our awareness of the continued role of Tantric traditions in the lives of many contemporary individuals and social groups. This paper will seek to contribute to this reevaluation process by arguing that traditional attempts at the sectarian identification of Tantric practitioners is flawed and is based upon assumptions concerning self-identification that are not shared by members of these traditions. I will examine in detail the process of self-identification and self-construction encouraged in one contemporary tradition, that of the Cakrasamvara Tantra, which remains popular in Newar and Tibetan communities. Following Comaroff, I will argue that the texts of the Cakrasamvara tradition and the practices based upon them encourage a construction of self-identity based on a rather different set of assumptions than those common in the West, i.e., assumptions concerning the limits and constitution of the self. I will explore the nature of this considerably more expansive and fluid sense of self and its social and historical ramifications. Following Bourdieu, I will also attempt to show how it is constituted via a distinct routine of practices.
Session 27: Language, Genre, and Identity in Colonial South India
Organizer: Rama Mantena, Smith College
Chair: Lisa Mitchell, Mount Holyoke College
Discussant: Velcheru Narayana Rao, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Keywords: India, colonialism, language, and identity.
This panel examines the emergence of new genres of writing and the construction of new written and oral cultures in the context of European and colonial literary, philological, and religious influences in nineteenth-century South India. Covering the role of grammarians, the influences of Orientalists on language study, comparative philology, the rise of a native intelligentsia, and the emergence of new genres of writing, the panel opens up new terrain within discussions of colonialism's impacts upon literary production and practices. In particular, the panel will explore the relationship between changes in oral genres and textual practices on the one hand, and the emergence of new social formations, political movements, and cultural identities on the other. Bringing together scholars whose research crosses the traditional disciplinary lines of anthropology, history, and literary studies, each paper makes use of methodologies from multiple disciplines. Because we would like to initiate discussion broadly on the relationship between language, genre, and identity in South India, we draw connections between two literary cultures represented by Tamil and Telugu, exploring similarities and differences in their encounters with colonial structures of knowledge. In attempting to make existing South Indian literary and linguistic categories correspond with European understandings of languages and literary genres, colonial structures of knowledge influenced dramatic, though often unexpected changes without ever achieving absolute commensurability. This panel explores not only the effects of these colonial structures of knowledge, but also local literary and linguistic practices which resisted easy translation across contexts, and the absolutely new genres and categories created as offshoots of this process.
Biography of a Language: Telugu "Charitras" and the Foundations of Twentieth-Century Politico-Cultural Formations
Lisa Mitchell, Mount Holyoke College
Telugu charitras—biographical narratives origin-ally modeled on similar Sanskrit compositions—are seldom considered a separate genre of writing. Rather, the term is generally viewed as a description of the topical choice of authors' compositions within a variety of genres. Yet a genealogy of the changing uses of the term charitra reflects shifting subjects of significance not only within Telugu writing, but also within larger socio-cultural spheres of southern India. From medieval biographical narratives and celebrations of the heroic contributions of kings, warriors, saints, and founding figures of religious movements, to the "ordinary" protagonists of the first Telugu novels, the use of the term charitra marks dramatic changes in cultural priorities, sources of patronage, organizational principles and foundational categories. The most wide-reaching of these changes is the appearance at the end of the 19th century of charitras—not of individuals—but of territories, languages, and collectivities of subjects. Emphasizing something more important than distinctions between biography and fiction, and between history and "tales," an understanding of charitras does not lend itself to easy commensurability with existing European literary categories and analyses. Moving from the medieval origins of Telugu charitras to their modern incarnations, this paper argues that such discursive reorientations both support and reflect the formation of these subjects—particularly languages, territories, and communities—as qualitatively new entities in discourse and practice. In doing so, such entities were established as objects available for new forms of affective attachment and as solid foundations capable of supporting subsequent political and cultural movements.
Protestant Textual Practice and the Objectification of Saivism
Bernard Bate, Yale University
In the Tamil world of the 1850s, Arumuga Navalar imported liturgical practices of Protestant Christianity into Tamil Saivism. Navalar is frequently known by his title, "The Champion Reformer of Hinduism," which was given to him by the Ceylonese Tamil leaders several years after his death. But in issuing new liturgical rules focusing on pronunciation, clarity of textual recitation, and orderliness of Saivite rites, Navalar did not so much reform Saivism as create it as something entirely new. In this paper I will describe how Navalar and his colleagues combined elements of Wesleyan Methodist and Saivite textual practices into the production of a phenomenologically discreet realm of "religion." The conjuncture of different forms of textual activity, i.e. the sermon and recitation in Saivite temples called pirasangam, became the locus of a political struggle between a newly identifiable Saivism and Christianity. Ultimately, these new aesthetics and ideologies of language became critical in building an anti-colonial "public" who could then be addressed in following decades.
What Is It Worth? Canon(s) in the Colonial Tamil World
A. R. Venkatachalapathy, Madras Institute of Development Studies
The fashioning of a new literary canon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played a central role in defining a Tamil identity. A whole corpus of literary texts was "discovered" and the medium of print was constitutive of this process of literary canonisation. Given the astonishing volume (and quality) of these texts and the manner in which its "discovery" fed into identity politics, the "Renaissance" model has often been employed to describe this process.
Scholarship on colonial South Asia has often concentrated on Orientalism with its emphasis on Sanskrit. This paper draws attention to a "counter-Orientalism" which sought to define a Dravidian-based knowledge which was counterposed to an Aryan/Sanskrit-based construction of India. Such a scholarship had implications for a newly defined canon, which privileged a secular antiquity and a non-Sanskritic foundation of literary production.
This paper also seeks to counterpose the newly defined canon in Tamilnadu with the canon obtaining in colonial Sri Lanka. It is suggested that while the literary canon was shared by Tamilnadu and (Tamil) Sri Lanka in pre-colonial times, a rupture took place in the colonial context.
Secularisation was strong in Tamilnadu: consequently religious literature was either relegated to the margins or only accommodated into the canon for their "literary" merit—this specific appropriation being made by Tamil nationalist/Dravidian movement politics in its attempt to fashion a linguistic identity that would transcend divisions based on caste, class and religion. On the other hand, in Tamil Sri Lanka, religion (Saivism) and caste (Vellalar) played an over-determining role, with continued primacy being given to Saiva canonical texts and Kanda Puranam. The creation of the Indian and Sri Lankan nation-states accentuated the divide.
Telugu Literary History and the Emergence of a Regional Identity
Rama Mantena, Smith College
It is noteworthy that the earliest "modern" histories of the Andhra region produced during the colonial period were of Telugu literature. History, as a way of telling the stories of a people and a region, took hold of the intellectual imagination of Telugu writers in colonial Andhra. However, for these early historians, literature became the avenue through which the past would be consolidated and made whole. What is interesting about this trend is the centrality accorded to a literary tradition in the formation of modern cultural identities. Before Telugu culture was marked geographically (as modern identitarian movements such as the Andhra movement would fight for in their demands for a separate state), literary histories were written linking past with present. This paper will explore the relationship between the formation of modern cultural identities and literary history as a genre. It will be concerned with two principal questions: (1) Specifically, what does literary history provide in the formation and coherence of cultural/regional identities? (2) And why is it that literature gets picked up by the new historical imagination of Telugu writers?
Session 28: Comparative-Historical Approaches to State and Civil Society in India
Organizer: Srirupa Roy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Chair and Discussant: Itty Abraham, Social Science Research Council
Keywords: India, state, civil society, colonialism, NGOs, globalization, military, violence.
Drawing upon empirical material from India, this panel challenges two dominant conceptions of the relationship between state and civil society. First, we critically examine the question of autonomy versus embeddedness, or the extent to which these two "prime movers" of social and political life are independent of each other. Such discussions take the boundary between state and civil society as an unproblematic given that is either present or absent. Through an examination of several different case studies, this panel argues that instead of framing our arguments in terms of whether the state/civil society demarcation does or does not exist, we should examine the concrete social and political dynamics of producing and maintaining, reworking and dissolving this boundary. The interactions between state and civil society are not determined by a pre-given demarcation between the two; instead, the demarcation is itself produced through the continuous interaction between state and civil society, and varies considerably from one context to another, even within a single national framework. Second, we interrogate the modalities of dominance and resistance in the context of state-civil society relations through an investigation of several historically as well as spatially distinct instances, ranging from colonialism (Mongia) to globalization (Kamat), from Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat (Roy) to the politics of ethnic identity formation and civil-military relations in the Ladakh district of Kashmir (Aggarwal). Taken together, the panelists examine the theoretical as well as the political-ethical implications of situations where neither a discretely bounded state nor a monolithically understood civil society are the agents and loci of dominance, resistance and critique.
Producing State and Civil Society: The Status of the Inquiry
Radhika Mongia, University of California, Santa Cruz
In August 1834, following the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain abolished slavery in its colonies. Abolition generated a huge demand for labor in the labor-intensive plantation economies. This demand was met, in part, via the introduction of indentured Indian labor. Though initiated to provide labor to the ex-slave colonies, over the course of the nineteenth century indentured migration became more generalized system of supplying labor to a range of locations. This paper considers the status and modus operandi of the endless state inquiry commissions instated to evaluate the system of Indian indentured migration during the eighty years it was in existence. Within liberal state formations, the inquiry is generally understood as a mechanism that can make the state accountable to civil society. Focusing specifically on the earliest inquiries on Indian migration, motivated largely due to objections from organizations such as the British Anti-Slavery Society, the paper investigates how the inquiry within colonial state formations functioned to both circumvent and incorporate an element of state accountability to civil society. Drawing on such details as the constitution of inquiry commissions, the demarcation of their domain of investigation, and the adoption of certain forms of dissemination with regard to these inquiries, this paper demonstrates how the inquiry serves the ambiguous dual function of simultaneously deflecting and soliciting criticism. It thus suggests that rather than understanding the inquiry within a paradigm of checks and balances, it is better understood as constituting a unique axis for producing the notion of accountability that is so crucial to maintaining the distinction between state and civil society.
The NGO Phenomenon and State-Civil Society Theory
Sangeeta Kamat, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
In the contemporary era of globalization, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing an increasingly assertive role in national as well as transnational arenas. What are the implications of this "NGO phenomenon" for political practices, norms and institutions? In this paper, I examine the policy discourse on NGOs in India to show how state-civil society relations are being restructured within the context of global economic reform, and the ways in which the regulation of NGOs is a key aspect of this restructuring. I argue that the current policy discourse on NGOs presents to us the futurescape of state-civil society relations within a neo-liberal economic context. An analysis of policy debates shows how state and civil society are being deployed as "totemic motifs," making invisible the more complex reconstruction of public good and private interest that interconnects state and civil society. Thus, the globalization of the NGO phenomenon calls into question theories that presuppose the separation of state from civil society. Research on the evolving character of NGOs in South Asia also shows that while NGOs are being regulated as part of the neo-liberal economic agenda, they are not mere handmaidens of the state or of capitalist interests. Rather these organizations continuously reinvent themselves and build alliances that allow them to define, negotiate and contest public and private interests.
The State, Its Security, and a Matter of Goodwill
Ravina Aggarwal, Smith College
This paper analyses the contested relationship between armed forces and civilians in the heavily militarized region of Ladakh, located in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It focuses on a large-scale operation called Sadbhavna (Goodwill), launched in 2001 by the Indian Army in areas of the state where it has frequently battled Pakistan for control over the Kashmir valley. Rather than militants or enemy soldiers, however, the challenges that the armed forces took on through Sadbhavna included improving education, health, and technology services for civilians and inculcating a sense of patriotism in disaffected hearts. Ladakhi leaders initially hailed Sadbhavna as a revolutionary and progressive initiative that would bridge the existing gap between the missions and objectives of the armed forces and the lifestyles and expectations of the civilians they were deployed to protect. Within a year, however, Ladakhi communities were heavily divided on the issue of Sadbhavna, some passionate in their support for it and others blaming it for widening social rifts. Through this case study, I illustrate how the disputed concept of "goodwill" frames policies and discussions about development, citizenship and security and enables us to rethink the relationship between state and civil institutions in border areas such as Ladakh.
Bearing Witness: States, Citizens, and Inquiries on Violence
Srirupa Roy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
On March 2002, the state of Gujarat in Western India was the site of horrifying acts of mass violence against the resident Muslim minority community. Gujarat has also been the site of an unprecedented number of civil society initiatives to collect the testimonies of victims and to gather information on the involvement of the state and its personnel in the systematic planning and execution of what many have termed India's first genocide. This paper is a comparative examination of these varied efforts to document the violence in Gujarat—efforts that both seek to make truth-claims about the events that occurred, and to offer an analysis of the causes of the violence. The variations in the mode of investigation, the analytic claims, the intended audiences and dissemination strategies of the documentary efforts, and the implications of these inquiries for conflict resolution and reconciliation are discussed in an effort to answer a pressing question: when, why, and how do civil society initiatives make a difference in situations of ethnic violence and offer an effective critique of the state? By examining the variations in these initiatives, this paper disaggregates the notion of a monolithic civil society; develops an argument about the effectiveness of local, national and global civil society efforts to address mass violence; and considers whether and how it may be possible for an official or state-sponsored commission of inquiry to undertake the task of "speaking truth to power" by bearing witness to its own excesses.
Session 46: The Dynamics of Diversity: Narratives of Pluralism in South Asian History (Sponsored by the South Asia Council)
Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Manu Bhagavan, Manchester College
Keywords: diversity, pluralism, nationalism, identity, South Asia.
In recent years, countries in South Asia have seen a marked rise in exclusivist forms of nationalism, visions of state and society heavily reliant upon jingoism, scapegoatism, and xenophobia. But resulting myopic constructions, present for instance in the ideology of Hindutva or the communitarian principle of a separate, corporate Muslim community, are dependent upon particular readings of history, a range of "facts and figures" meant to buttress contemporary claims and agendas. While various challenges to these trends have been made to date, a multifaceted assault on the assumptive fabric of exclusivist nationalism has yet to take place. This panel is a step in this direction.
Our three papers explore some of the many socio-cultural conversations that have taken place over time between supposedly distinct communities. In the process, we also underscore the shortcomings and limitations of "meta-communal" groupings. Syed Akbar Hyder examines how the famed Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib dealt with difference and displacement. Chitralekha Zutshi critiques the concept of a unique, historical Kashmiri identity and highlights contextual political strategies that themselves have carried forward new patterns of power and exploitation in the region. And Paula Richman analyzes South Indian tellings of the story of Rama to foreground the epic's multiplicity and to underline its multi-religious dimension. By re-inscribing the dynamics of diversity and plurality into the narrative of South Asian history, we aim to make a pressing contemporary political intervention, putting to rest a variety of canards and debunking the supremacist ideologies of suppression currently prevalent throughout South Asia.
The Poetics of Location: Ghalib's Sense of Belonging in Nineteenth-Century India
S. Akbar Hyder, University of Texas, Austin
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869), the famed nineteenth-century Perso-Urdu poet, operated in the tensions between the multiple worlds he simultaneously occupied. Set in the tumultuous milieu of early and mid-nineteenth-century North India, Ghalib's poetic and prose discourses inscribe new meanings on the concepts of "home," "exile," "religion," and "loyalty." This paper explores the aforementioned signifiers in the light of Ghalib's address to God in abr-e gauhar bar and his praise poem for the city of Banaras, chirag-e dair, by calling attention to the interface of trans-communal sacred geography, the ambivalence toward an abstract enemy, the celebration of homelessness, and the defiance against many a cherished category. Ghalib's playful manipulation of identity markers is read in its historical context while the intertextual relationship between Ghalib and prominent Urdu poetic movements of subsequent generations is highlighted.
The Politics of Kashmiriyat in South Asia
Chitralekha Zutshi, College of William and Mary
This paper argues that the exceptionalist paradigm of Kashmiriyat in the history of Kashmir fulfills the agendas of two inter-linked, at times confrontational, political projects: first, the discourse of a unified Indian nation-state based on a unitary nationalism, and second, a highly federalized nationalism based on regionalized and plural identities. This essay, instead, locates and interrogates the narrative of Kashmiriyat as a historically contingent entity that emerged in the discourse of the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference in the late 1940s and early 50s. The conference propagated this secular mantra in an attempt to elide over the increasingly visible religious, regional, and linguistic cleavages in the state. While the onus for the Kashmir "problem" rests with the majoritarian nationalisms of both India and Pakistan, some of the culpability needs to be shared by this particular brand of Kashmiri nationalism, represented by the Conference, which inherited state structures in the region. Exhibiting similar deformities to the unitary nationalisms of India and Pakistan, this Kashmiri organization has been as reluctant as its Indian and Pakistani counterparts to accommodate religious and local differences and multiple visions of nationalism within Kashmir.
The Dynamics of Narrative Disagreement: Treatment of Ramkatha in South Indian Plays, 1920–1961
Paula Richman, Oberlin College
During the decades immediately preceding and following Indian independence, well-known literary figures writing in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam wrote plays that opened up discussion about the morality of certain actions attributed to Lord Rama in Ramkatha (Rama's story). This paper examines four such plays, one in each Dravidian language, focusing upon how each presented the story from the perspective of a character marginalized or stigmatized in dominant tellings of Ramkatha.
The plays provide fresh and complex perspectives on characters such as Shambuka (the Shudra killed by Rama for daring to perform asceticism), Urmila (the sister of Sita who waited out the forest exile back at the palace) and Ravana (represented as tragically betrayed by his brother). Because these plays are in regional languages, rather than Hindi or English, they are little-known by scholars outside their region. Yet these plays interrogate nationalist appropriation of Ramkatha, give voice to some of the internal contradictions in the narrative, and remind us of the religiously plural context (Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain) out of which modern retellings of Ramkatha emerged.
Session 47: Writing Society, Writing Self: Feminism, Activism, and the Construction of the Social Self in the Work of Four Women Writing in India since 1930
Organizer and Chair: Sarah Houston Green, University of Texas, Austin
Discussant: Vasudha Dalmia, University of California, Berkeley
This panel examines the way that four twentieth-century women writers in India, writing across three languages and multiple geographic, religious, and social boundaries, negotiate the shifting terrains of feminism, activism, and creative expression. The papers will discuss the lives and work of Mahadevi Varma (Hindi), Wajeda Tabassum (Urdu), Kusum Meghval (Hindi), and Arundhati Roy (English). Their various works echo many of the social and political shifts that transformed the Indian literary landscape over the last century: the rise of nationalist ideology; the fall of the last vestiges of the Mughal empire and subsequent re-positioning of the Muslim identity in Indian society; the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and the continuing struggle for Dalit equality; and, finally, contemporary problems of industrial development and the upheaval that the economic demands of globalization inflict on communities across India. The panelists, reflecting on the ways these women engage with issues through writing and activism, explore their published works and, where possible, employ interviews with the authors to answer: What is the nature of the relationship of literature and activism as rendered in their works? How do they envisage themselves as women, as writers, as participants in a continually evolving community?
Sources of Subversion: Mahadevi Varma and the Poetic Construction of the Feminine Subject
Sarah Houston Green, University of Texas, Austin
With the publication of her first collection of poetry, Nihar (Mist, 1930), Mahadevi Varma was poised to become the only major woman poet of the Chhayavad ("Shadowism") era of popular Hindi poetry. She soon joined Jaishankar Prasad, Sumitranandan Pant and Nirala as a definer of the new poetic "manifesto"—the subjective voice over social didacticism. A famous poet whose atypical personal life and quiet political agenda reinterpreted traditional standards in social and nationalist contexts, Mahadevi became a cultural icon and is recognized as a pioneering Indian feminist. She is not deemed feminist because of her poetry's content: it is introverted, devoid of social concerns and features a suffering feminine subject longing for an absent lover. Early in her career, however, Mahadevi ceased writing poetry and began to produce social critiques termed "feminist" because they address the condition of women. This paper questions the apparent disjuncture between Mahadevi's poetry and prose. Julia Kristeva's concepts of the "split subject" and "desire" in a semiotic system are used to expose a feminist impulse in Mahadevi's poetry that stands as a precursor to her activist prose. This discovery raises a question widely pertinent to feminist theory: what is the relationship between feminism and activism?
Tears of Freedom: Recasting Women and the Nation in Wajeda Tabassum's Urdu Short Stories
Karline McLain, University of Texas, Austin
Wajeda Tabassum (b. 1935) is an Urdu author from Hyderabad who has published twenty-eight books and received much critical acclaim amongst Urdu-language audiences. Yet, because only one of her stories is available in English, Tabassum's work is little-known to non-Urdu-language readers. In this paper I will analyze three of Tabassum's stories—"Aazaadii ke Aansuu" (Tears of Freedom, 1977), "Utran" (Hand-Me-Downs, 1977), and "Jaise Dariyaa" (Like a River, 1979)—and will draw upon interviews I conducted with Tabassum in order to bring to light her important commentary on the status of Muslim women in modern India. In 1948 Tabassum witnessed the unseating of the nizam in Hyderabad, and several of her stories portray the decadent lives of the nobility and the peasant revolt during this period. These stories bring a unique perspective to this historical period by featuring female rural and lower-caste protagonists, raising issues that were emerging as central concerns to the women's movement in the seventies. Furthermore, Tabassum's usage of a Dakkani dialect of Urdu and of begamati zaban (women's speech) contribute a sense of sociolinguistic realism to her writing that further shifts the focus away from the historians' emphasis on the domain of high (male) politics and towards the local and the lived.
Refiguring the Feminine: Mapping the Social and Cultural Lives of Women in Dalit Literature
Laura Brueck, University of Texas, Austin
In their 1972 manifesto, the Dalit Panthers include the category of women under their definition of the word "Dalit," widening the connotation of the term to include anyone oppressed under the rubric of caste, religion, or gender. This was a symbolic shift widely heralded by women's organizations across India. In recent years, however, many Dalit women authors and activists have been careful to point out the need to represent the unique social position of Dalit women as one subjected to the multi-valent hierarchies of caste and gender. In an effort to explore this re-positioning of Dalit women in the sphere of cultural representation, I will utilize extensive material from the life and career of Kusum Meghval. Dr. Meghval is a Dalit activist, founder of the Rajasthan Dalit Literature Academy, and the author of works of poetry, fiction, and research in Hindi. Using her fiction and poetry, as well as interviews conducted with her on the topics of creative writing and social reform, I will delineate certain themes in the depiction of Dalit women's identities. What is the nature of women's resistance to caste oppression? How are Dalit women's experiences rendered poetically? What makes the poetic representation of resistance revolutionary?
Framing the Writer-Activist: Arundhati Roy and the Journey from Fiction to Court
Modhurima Dasgupta, Brown University
In March of 2002, Indian writer Arundhati Roy was jailed and fined by the Supreme Court of India for contempt of court. This paper examines the way in which Roy herself frames how in just five years she has gone from publishing her first novel (the wildly successful, Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things) to imprisonment for criticizing the judiciary's decision on the Narmada Dam construction project. Her journey takes us from novelist to feminist to essayist to activist, and finally to her own reluctant self-label as the new breed of "writer-activist" who she says has the "onerous responsibility" that comes with being a writer in India. This paper gives special consideration to how Roy casts the burden of India's writers and artists in general to bring contentious social issues into the space of common understanding. In addition, it reveals how Roy applies the feminist ethos that she was raised with (through her mother, feminist activist and educator Mary Roy) in her writings on behalf of many causes, including the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Dalit women writers, the anti-nuclear campaign, and the anti-globalization movement, to name a few.
Session 61: AAS Presidential Panel: Expanding South Asia
Organizer and Chair: David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Sugata Bose, Harvard University
Many scholars, in various disciplines, are now exploring the messy spatial parameters of the world that American area studies has chopped up into neatly conventional regions. In the context of globalization, new academic approaches and political struggles now contest the established meanings of geography so as to expand the intellectual space available for area studies. This panel presents recent research that indicates intersections and divergences among disciplines that are expanding South Asia.
Mapping Persia, India, and Asia: 750–1750
Richard M. Eaton, University of Arizona
This paper explores the subjective and objective placements of Persia and India over a thousand-year period. I am interested in the assumptions that govern Janet Abu-Lughod's "Eight Circuits of the 13th c. World System" (p. 34), and in the "dead-zones" on her map, i.e., areas that fall within no circuit. I will argue, to the contrary, that one of her dead-zones—the Helmand-to-Sutlej region, with the central Indus at its core—was in fact the fulcrum of a long durée Persianate cultural axis that extended deep into the Iranian plateau and Indian subcontinent. The role played by this objective axis has far-reaching implications for subjective understandings of "South Asia" and the "Middle East."
Of Hometowns and Diasporic Aesthetics
Rosemary M. George, University of California, San Diego
This presentation asks how our understanding of national literature might change if we were to consider the work of R.K Narayan, an established Indian writer, through an aesthetic framework that is fabricated in diasporic contexts. I begin by examining the work of two contemporary first generation South Asian Americans: the novelist Indira Ganesan and the painter Arijit Sen. Their texts suspend (as in architectural suspensions) imagined spaces that first disrupt, and then, paradoxically, refurbish the very notion of belonging securely in a location that has substantial spatial reference. As a counter-point to this examination of diasporic hometowns, I study the work of R.K. Narayan (1906–2001), paying special attention to his creation of Malgudi, the quintessential Indian small town which served as the setting for all of his novels written from the early 1930s to the late 1980s. I demonstrate that when Narayan created Malgudi in the early 1930s, prior to the establishment of the independent nation, he did so from an aesthetic position not unlike that of contemporary diasporic writers. Diasporic aesthetics in this paper describe the imaginings that take place outside of, but overwritten by, the idea of nation in the past, in contemporaneous time or, as in the case of Narayan, in the future. How is South Asia "expanded" and "contracted" in these imaginative renditions of spatial affiliation, which exceed the spatial boundaries employed in South Asian literary studies?
To Be or Not to Be South Asian: Contemporary Indian American Politics
Prema Kurien, University of Southern California
I will look at why some groups of Indian Americans embrace the South Asian label and others reject it, and also briefly touch on the activities of these two camps in the post 9/11 period.
South Asia: A Subcontinental Mind-Set?
Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam
The postcolonial history of Southern Asia is being studied by a partitioned academy. Despite attempts to overcome the iron grip of the nation-state on the historical imagination, South Asian studies is still dominated by territorial assumptions that take states to be entities of sovereign space acting as "containers" of their societies. Capturing the fluidity of human linkages across the subcontinent requires South Asian scholarly communities to become more "de-partitioned." This effort can be helped by focusing on themes that are best studied by teams which pool their expertise of specific South Asian societies. One such theme could be cross-border linkages, e.g., migration by laborers, settlers and refugees; huge and mostly unauthorized cross-border trade flows; or trans-border cultures, languages, and identities. The study of such themes may point us toward new research agendas in which the production of subcontinental "area knowledge" more explicitly serves a thematic and comparative purpose.
Session 67: Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism III
Organizer: Dominik Wujastyk, University of London
Chair: Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago
Discussant: Sudipta Kaviraj, University of London
This panel continues the exploration of problems concerning the conceptual structure and social context of Sanskrit knowledge from roughly 1550 to 1750. The shared premise of the work of scholars presenting papers in this panel is that this period witnessed a special flowering of scholarship in the Sanskrit medium that continued until the establishment of British colonial power. The indigenous intellectual develop-ments of this time have been occluded partly by the grandeur of the Mughal spectacle, which dominates historical writing on this period, and partly by an implicit fundamentalist view of Sanskrit as a key to earlier periods of Indian cultural life.
Little research has been specifically devoted to the intellectual history of this period, in spite of the fact that historical sources exist in abundance, and that the period produced exceptionally interesting scholarly movements which in some ways contributed to the construction of aspects of Indian modernity, in spite of having themselves disappeared in the face of the establishment of European models of education and scholarship.
The papers of Preisendanz (Vienna) and Ganeri (Liverpool) focus on the work of formal logicians, their schools, goals, and self-images as scholars. Bronkhorst (Lausanne) discusses the work of a small but hugely important group of grammarians who for some reason opened up lines of enquiry into the philosophy and metaphysics of language which had been dead for over a millennium. Wujastyk (London) examines the social background and motivations of innovative writers on medicine science at the end of the seventeenth century.
Bhattoji Diksita on Sphota
Johannes Bronkhorst, University of Lausanne
The philosophy of grammar has only four major representatives in the history of Indian thought. One of these is Bhartrhari, who lived in the fifth century C.E. The other three lived more than a thousand years later, in Benares, and may have known each other. The first of these three, Bhattoji Diksita, was the paternal uncle of the second, Kaunda Bhatta. The third one, Nagesa Bhatta, was a pupil of Bhattoji's grandson.
This paper will explore what induced Bhattoji Diksita to come up with his—in relative terms—innovative ideas, concentrating on his ideas about the sphota in particular. This will be done by studying Bhattoji Diksita's ideas against the background of their intellectual precursors, but not only that. In contrast to most earlier Sanskrit authors, we know at least something about the circumstances—social, economic, traditional—in which pandits like Bhattoji Diksita worked, and which inspired them to produce their often voluminous works. An attempt will be made, using these various kinds of information, to obtain some sort of insight into what made a scholar like Bhattoji Diksita tick.
The New and the Old in Seventeenth-Century Indian Logic: The Case of Gokulanatha Upadhyaya
Jonardon Ganeri, University of Liverpool
In an earlier book (Ganeri 1999), I documented the extraordinary achievements of the Bengali philosopher, Gadadhara Bhattacarya (1604–1709). His work established him firmly as a leading "new intellectual" of seventeenth century India. There is good evidence that, within a relatively short period, his influence had spread far outside his native Bengal. Bengali intellectuals were already describing themselves as "new" (navya), in order to distinguish themselves and their ideas from an older site of intellectual production, Mithila. The Bengali genius Raghunatha, in the sixteenth century, had first migrated to train in Mithila and then returned to Bengal to found the new site in Navadvipa. Towards the end of our period, Mithila re-emerged as the center of gravity for philosophical studies in India.
In my conference presentation, I will begin to explore the causes of this transformation in the balance of intellectual power at the end of the seventeenth century. The key thinker of the period is Gokulanatha Upadhyaya (c. 1675), a brilliant polymath, prominent public intellectual and a man of wide horizons and extraordinary intellectual resources. He is the only Sanskrit logician for whom we have evidence of competence in Persian and engagement with the literati of the Islamic court. He wrote widely about the nature of argument and debate, the role of language, the transmission of knowledge, and he responded directly to the intellectual challenge of Raghunatha and the self-proclaimed "new" intellectuals in Bengal. Gokulanatha lived too near to the advent of colonialism for his work to achieve the spread and fame of Gadadhara.
The Production of Philosophical Literature in South Asia during the Precolonial Period: The Case of the Nyayasutra Commentarial Tradition
Karin Preisendanz, University of Vienna
The Nyayasutra, compiled towards the end of the 4th century, is the fundamental text of the Nyaya ("Logic") tradition in the classical period of Indian philosophy A succession of commentaries has been preserved from this early period onwards. Through commenting on the increasingly antiquated basic text of the tradition, later philosophical authors developed their sophisticated metaphysical, epistemological and soteriological ideas, in lively controversy. When, in the llth century, the advanced "old" Nyaya was decisively revolutionized in terms of logic and stringency of argumentation, terminology and style, and the "new" (navya) Nyaya inaugurated by Udayana, the Nyayasutra seems to have lost its attraction as a text to be commented upon, even indirectly.
Surprisingly, however, starting already in the 15th century, scholars turned again to the ancient sutra-text and commented directly upon it. The paper will try to explore this phenomenon in its various aspects: who were these savants who cared about an archaic text far removed from their own level of philosophical sophistication; what and who induced them to write these commentaries; what was their intended readership; what was their attitude toward the "old" commentaries; what consequences had the phenom-enon for this older literature; what is the relationship of the commentaries to their other works; how were the commentaries received; and how and where did they circulate, etc?
Change and Creativity in Early Modern Indian Medical Thought
Dominik Wujastyk, University of London
The great classics of Indian medicine are generally considered to be the compendia composed two thousand years ago, and their study dominates Indian medical history. However, manuscripts of these classic works are relatively rare: for all their fame, they were not widely copied or read. By contrast, Indian manuscript libraries contain thousands of copies of a small Sanskrit medical work entitled "A living for physicians" (Vaidyajivana) composed by the Maharastrian physician and poet, Lolimbaraja (fl. 1575–1600). Lolimbaraja married a Muslim woman, and parts of his famous book are written as passionate addresses to her. Other features of his life and work are unexpected, and these will be examined in the context of other trends of the period, and an attempt will be made to account for the extraordinary popularity of his work, which continues to be read, published and translated in India even today.
Lolimbaraja's work may be contrasted with the vast medical and legal encyclopedia written at almost exactly the same time under the sponsorship of Todaramalla (fl. 1565–1589), one of Emperor Akbar's most famous Hindu ministers. In certain ways, this work pre-figured the legal digests commissioned by Sir William Jones for the purpose of helping the colonial courts understand and regulate their Hindu subjects. The paper will explore Todaramalla's motivations, and will draw conclusions about the social and intellectual life of these and other late sixteenth-century medical authors.
Session 88: Representing South Asian Identities at Home and Abroad
Organizer and Discussant: Claire Alexander, South Bank University, London
Chair: Ashwani Sharma, University of East London
Keywords: South Asia, identity, representation, film/media, diaspora.
In the wake of a resurgent Islamophobia, "Asian riots" across Britain and the events after 11 September 2001, the media scrutiny of South Asian communities at home and abroad has been intense and furious. Too often, South Asian identities are understood as monolithic and antagonistic, a perspective reified through ethnocentric and nation-bound media that belie the more complex mediations of cultural forms and flows.
The aim of this panel is two-fold: firstly, to unpack the contemporary media configuration of South Asian diaspora identities, with particular focus on the United States and Britain. Secondly, and relatedly, to explore the processes of production and consumption of alternative media practices within the diaspora, considering the intersection and subversion of ethnicity, religion, nation, gender and sexuality within practices of representation. From the production and global aesthetics of Indian cinema to formations of South Asian subjectivities, and the often violent consequences of media images, the panel aims to challenge simplistic accounts of the relationship between media and identity. It thus seeks to locate media and cultural production within the material practices and consequences of the everyday.
The contributors are based in Britain and the United States, but their work reflects on the global formation of South Asian identities and media, bringing together perspectives based in South Asia, Europe and the Americas. The panel is cross-disciplinary, combining sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies. It includes both established and emerging scholars, presenting new research, and aims to provide a challenging foundation for audience participation and discussion.
Bordering the Impossible: The Crisis of Identity and Nationalist Utopias in Contemporary Indian Cinema
Reminder Kaur, University of Manchester
This paper investigates the resurgence of nationalist imagery through a consideration of Indian popular cinema from the 1990s. It does so in a context of increasing antagonism with Pakistan, the prominence of nuclear armament, the rising popularity of Hindu nationalism and the effects of validating one's national status against cross-currents of globalization. The legacy of Partition and the unresolved issue of Kashmir also continue to raise their heads in this turbulent mixture. Whilst much has been commented upon the romance movies of the 1990s, less attention has been reserved for what might be described as "war/battle movies" of this decade.
By considering films such as Border, Mission Kashmir, Terrorist, and Kohram (Chaos), I highlight the factors that have led to the prominence of such movies. Demonization of Pakistan, extolling the virtues of brave Indian soldiers (jawans), the sacralization of Indian national territory and populations ("the common man"), and their implications for romance and family values are some of the features that characterize these movies. Claims for coherency in representations become more pronounced at times of worldly crisis. As Kobena Mercer argues: "Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty." I look at what strategies are deployed to mitigate "doubts and uncertainties" in the imagistic quest of such films for what might be deemed the impossible—fixity, coherency, and national integrity.
Ethnicity, Masculinity, Diaspora: Representing South Asian Men
Koushik Banerjea, University of London
Perhaps more than any other development of the twentieth century, film technology has the power to change our perceptions, not just of the cinema, but of the world. While practices of representation within national contexts have been a focus of interest and concern, the implications for diasporic communities remain, however, largely unexplored. This is particularly the case for diasporic South Asian communities.
This paper looks at the conjunction of ideas of ethnicity and masculinity with processes of cultural production and reception through film. Focusing on the genres of "gangster" films, "spaghetti westerns" and Bollywood action films, as epitomizing highly masculinist travelling discourses, the paper looks at the context in which masculine identities are formed on screen across a range of national contexts and visual landscapes. In particular the paper is interested in the intersection between South Asian ethnicity, globalization and diaspora as they are manifest in the cultural practices of film production and interpretation.
The paper will consider the cross-cultural traffic in representations of male alienation, the aesthetics of violence and the influence of these images on the construction and performance of South Asian masculinities. This linkage is made particularly urgent in the wake of the "race riots" (2001) across Northern English cities and towns last summer, and the upsurge in anti-Asian violence since the events of September 11th.
Colourline within Colourline: The Politics of Bombay Cinema in the British South Asian Context
Meeta Rani Jha, University of London
This paper aims to interrogate the role of viewing practice of Bombay cinema in the constitution of the subjectivities of four British South Asian women. An essential part of the meaning-making process is the continual translation of meaning through the cultural global networks. By analyzing the viewing practice of Bombay cinema in a given context, this paper endeavors to contribute to sociological debate around essentialism and its critiques and to wider theoretical debates on subjectivity, community and trans-global and trans-local identities.
This paper argues that the women interviewees had complex interpretations of their viewing practices, which simultaneously disciplined them and allowed for transgressive readings, which re-invented new meanings in the context of their daily lives. The paper explores the interviews as narratives of belonging, exclusion and the processes of attainment of South Asian cultural capital. The paper considers how "Asian-ness" as difference is articulated and produced by viewing practice, and illuminate the deployment of this discourse as a tool to mediate power relations in the context of their lives in contemporary Britain. In this way, the analysis illuminates how structures of exclusion such as race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, age, language, and region operate within the discourse of Bombay cinema viewing for the interviewees.
The Wake of the Sublime: Representing Sikh Americans after September 11th
Brian Axel, Swarthmore College
The inquiry begins with what, after the September 11, 2001, attacks, was reported to have been a general experience in Europe and North America for Sikh men who wear turbans. That is, large numbers of Sikh men have told stories about being identified by children as terrorists. Particularly, the following expression was extremely common: "Look, daddy, a terrorist! I'm scared!"
What is at stake in the analysis of these kinds of moments of interpellation is how the identities of diasporic peoples emerge—not in a relation to a supposed place of origin but, rather, through complex negotiations and conflicts around specific forms of representation, circulating in the wake of unimag-inable violence. Subsequent to September 11, Sikhs who were identified as terrorists were attacked across North America. These practices of identification drew out the features of a transformation in forms of recognition that were both gendered and racialized. These developments prompt a series of lessons that are more generally significant.
In outlining what I call the diasporic sublime, the paper draws upon the works of Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin to suggest a way of thinking about diasporic identity and subject formation in terms of the limits of experience and the limits of the imagination. It argues, in short, that what is significant for understanding the formation of diasporas is an engagement with what cannot possibly be experienced or imagined.
Session 107: Society, Culture, and Scholarship in Colonial Bengal
Organizer: Kumkum Chatterjee, Pennsylvania State University
Chair: Brian A. Hatcher, Illinois Wesleyan University
Discussants: Indrani Chatterjee, Rutgers University; Brian A. Hatcher, Illinois Wesleyan University
Keywords: history, South Asia, colonial, cultural and intellectual history.
This panel engages with certain important hypotheses which dominate South Asian history currently. The issues of colonial knowledge and the emergence of history as a colonial discipline have been at the forefront of historical enquiry in the recent past. However, this body of scholarship, has mischaracter-ized the nature of indigenous South Asian traditions of scholarship as well as the social structures and cultural parameters that underlay them. Secondly, the dynamics of the transition process itself have barely merited attention.
All the papers in this panel address the area of interaction between indigenous scholarly and cultural traditions and colonial influences. Chatterjee's paper takes issue with prevailing views and shows that 18th-century Bengali society, instead of being yoked to repetitive, formulaic scholarly paradigms, found creative, innovative intellectual solutions which were relevant to the time. Curley's paper studies the interaction of western and indigenous traditions in the later 18th century and highlights the nature of social and intellectual activity at the time. Guha-Thakurta's contribution emphasizes how Indian scholars made the complex transition from being "native informants" to modern, professional scholars.
The panel thus interrogates important existing notions and makes significant contributions to the interface of social/cultural history and intellectual history. The paper presenters are well known for their research and publications in the field of social and cultural history; so are the two discussants.
Visions of the Past: Genealogies, Kings, and Society in Early Modern Bengal
Kumkum Chatterjee, Pennsylvania State University
This paper focuses on an extraordinary generic narrative entitled the "Rajabali" (Annals of Kings) which was in circulation among certain segments of literate society in 18th-century Bengal.
The point of analyzing this narrative is that it provides a unique point of entry into a cultural and scholarly world of early modern South Asia—a sphere which has been poorly studied until now. Existing literature has tended to see this period as one of complete intellectual and cultural decadence—or, at best one which was yoked to repetitive, formulaic Puranic traditions which offered it the only way in which it could project a vision of the past.
This paper engages with this formulation by demonstrating that early modern society in fact devised unique ways of conceptualizing its vision of the past by deploying multiple strands of scholarly influences, i.e., the Puranic traditions incorporating genealogies or lineage histories, the chronicles of Muslim kings based in Delhi as well as the ascendancy of the English in Bengal.
The conclusion, which transcends the genre of narratives being specifically studied here points to the creativeness and dynamism of the indigenous cultural and intellectual milieu prior to the age of "high colonialism" in the later nineteenth century.
Trans-Cultural Translations in an Era of Transition: Jaynarayan Ghoshal and Later Eighteenth-Century Bengal
David L. Curley, Western Washington University
The later 18th century witnessed an era of transition in Bengal. On the one hand, it witnessed the decline of the indigenous nawabi of Bengal; on the other, it experienced the establishment of the early colonial state. During this era indigenous cultural concepts and intellectual traditions (i.e. "Hindu"/Sanskritic and Islamicate/Mughal) were strong and vigorous and were in fact being pressed into the service of the early colonial state. Simultaneously, western/colonial influences were gradually filtering into this society. This interface between indigenous and colonial intellectual and cultural tradition is usually located by existing scholarship in the later 19th century. This paper makes an important departure by studying such interactions in the later 18th century, when indigenous traditions were far stronger than what they became in the later 19th century and western/colonial influences had yet to gather the power they subsequently did.
This paper studies the social and intellectual activities of one of the most important personalities of later 18th century Bengal, i.e., Jaynarayan Ghoshal, who had risen to eminence through his connections with English trade to illuminate the issue referred to above. The paper emphasizes how Jaynarayan's contact with missionaries as well as with indigenous groups like the Kartabhaja Vaishnavas combined to produce a complex and unique vision of "social progress" in the early colonial period. This mission of social progress is studied through Jaynarayan's production of a literary treatise, the construction of a school and the building of a temple.
Interlocuting Texts and Monuments: "Insider" Knowledges and "Native" Scholarship in Nineteenth-Century India
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India
This paper explores the early history of the induction of Indian textual and scholarly expertise in the study of antiquities in colonial India. As India's archaeological and architectural remains came to be mapped and surveyed over the 19th century the colonial quest for accurate, authoritative knowledge in this area necessitated the need to tap into a range of "native" linguistic and practical expertise, i.e., the working knowledges of practicing artisanal communities and the detailed textual knowledges of pandits. By the mid to later 19th century, new spaces of participation for Indian scholars opened up within the new "westernized" and professional field of archaeology. Yet, the grounds would subtly shift in the production of the authority of the Indian expert as he found himself negotiating the dual role of "critical insider" and modern scholar. This paper focuses in particular on the figures of Ram Raz and Raja Rajendralal Mitra to highlight the transformation of such scholars from the position of "native informant" to that of professional, modern scholars and the simultaneous moment of both negation and consecration of a modern Indian scholarship in the field in this case of archaeology.
This paper thus is a contribution to the study of the dynamics of intellectual and cultural interactions between colonialism and indigenous Indian scholar-ship in the later 19th century.
Consider the Pandit: The Place of Sanskrit Scholars in the History of Colonial Bengal
Brian A. Hatcher, Illinois Weslyan University
This paper reflects on the place of Sanskrit pandits in the history of colonial Bengal, paying attention both to what we can say about the work of such scholars during this period and to the challenges faced by historians in search of such scholars. Pandits were active on a variety of fronts during this period, from the editing and translating of the Orientalist archive to debates over socio-religious reform, to the construct-ion of modern Hinduism. To the degree that we are able to recover their contribution in such areas, we stand to enrich our understanding of the intellectual and social history of colonial India. While the lives and projects of pandits are often lost to view, there is nevertheless information that can help us in this task of recovery. Using two rare Bengali autobiographies written by 19th-century pandits, this paper attempts to ask questions such as: How have pandits responded to changes in their intellectual, social and political milieu? What role have pandits played as agents in the transformation of their intellectual traditions? And finally, what implications does the search for pandits have for the historiography of colonial India?
Session 108: Knowing South Asian Religions
Organizer: Peter S. Gottschalk, Wesleyan University
Chair: Parimal G. Patil, Harvard University
Discussants: Vijay Pinch, Wesleyan University; Parimal G. Patil, Harvard University
Long after British imperial rule faded from South Asia, an intellectual hegemony remains. Through British administration and cultural influences, Western ways of knowing have, in many cases, displaced indigenous epistemologies, categories, and descriptors. This hegemony has and continues to have a profound effect not only on the way Westerners understand South Asia, but on the self-understanding of South Asians themselves. This paper session will explore pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial approaches to the study of religion in the Subcontinent by Westerners and explore the impact upon scholarship and community life in both South Asia and the West. These papers constitute a set of well-integrated reflections which complement one another in exploring some of the multiple sites of Western conceptualization an eighteenth-century missionary, a Bihari village and contemporary practices of Western and Indian Catholics.
Yet, each of the concepts of South Asian religions considered maintains a relevancy, if not a considerable currency, in today's scholarship. The implications of these epistemologies for contemporary research require a reflexivity toward the foundational logic of the fields of knowledge themselves, not only specific methodologies and conclusions. Although the concepts considered may appear as Western constructions, their appropriation by South Asians means that they continue to have implications for both Westerners and South Asians not only academically but politically and spiritually as well. Ultimately, this session of papers seeks to prompt reflection on the category of "religion" itself as it focuses on Western investigations of South Asian practices, beliefs, literatures, and symbols identified as "religious."
Conceptualizing South Asian Religion: A Precolonial Perspective
Will Sweetman, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
The considerable recent scholarly attention to conceptualizations of South Asian religion has focused upon works from the latter part of the eighteenth century or later, with earlier works being dismissed as superficial. At least some earlier works are, however, worthy of attention not only for their scholarly merit but because they reflect the assumptions of a period which was not yet defined by colonial rule. Among these the works of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, an early eighteenth-century missionary to South India, are of particular interest both for their nuanced conceptualization of Indian religions and because it is possible to identify the sources on which this conceptualization rests. This paper examines the conceptualization of South Asian religion in several of the most important of Ziegenbalg's works and suggest that this conceptualization is based on Indian conceptions to a far greater degree than has been recognized.
The contribution of Ziegenbalg and his colleagues to the early development of Indological scholarship is considerable. J. E. Gründler and Ziegenbalg selected, translated and annotated 99 letters written by Tamils in response to questions about Indian religion and society. These letters constitute the first substantial collection of writings by modern Indians to appear in print in Europe. The work of the mission was important not only in the dissemination of Indological learning in Europe but also in inaugurating the eighteenth-century "information revolution" in India itself, through founding of public schools and the work of converting Thanjavur intellectuals not to Christianity but to Enlightenment ideals of public knowledge.
Knowing Arampur: Western Epistemologies in Colonial Knowledge of Village Religions
Peter S. Gottschalk, Wesleyan University
Despite the rise of postcolonial critiques, much of Western scholarship on the religions of South Asia relies on epistemologies as deployed by British imperial agents. Moreover, many scholars from the Subcontinent continue to rely on these forms of knowledge even as they reflect on the impact of colonial domination. The dependence of contemporary scholars on these epistemologies complicates our ability to reflect critically upon them. By focusing on the object of knowing, rather than on the process, many of the dynamics and characteristics of these epistemologies become clearer. To this end, this paper examines the ways in which the colonial government in "British India" explored and described religion in a village and among its residents in Bihar. The paper contextualizes this study of religion within the larger imperial project of topographic, population, linguistic, and ethnographic surveys of north India from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.
Religion served as a central category for these epistemologies with an assumed set of subcategories meant to differentiate between various groups according to their beliefs and practices. Thus, the Subcontinent quickly became a peninsula bifurcated, in British eyes, by religion. Although the British understood this term to mean something different to Indians than to themselves (no analogous term being indigenous to South Asia before the arrival of Muslims), they did not take this difference as a point of departure for critical reflection but as yet another marker of cultural divergence. This assumption of divergence suffuses Anglo-American scholarship to this day and bears reflection.
Constructing Hinduism in Postcolonial Catholicism
Mathew N. Schmalz, College of the Holy Cross
India and Hinduism have always had a special place in the Catholic religious imagination. While Christianity itself arrived in India long before Catholic missionaries, Indian Christianity has long been associated with Western missionary efforts. In the period following the Second Vatican Council, Indian Catholicism began to reassess its colonial past. The resulting effort to integrate Indian or Hindu ritual practices and symbols into Indian Catholicism was then intended to "inculturate" Indian Catholicism by abandoning Westernized forms of religious expression associated with colonial domination. These efforts gave rise to a range of efforts to adapt Catholicism to Indian culture—from the experimental India rite Mass to the Catholic ashram movement. What unifies both these Catholic efforts to engage Hinduism in a post-colonial age is their effort to revalue the relationship between India and the West. In doing so, however, both approaches have employed standard Orientalist tropes: Hindusim is a unified whole. It is "feminine," "non-rational," "timeless" and almost exclusively identified with what some might call "Brahminism." Especially instructive is the use of various bowdlerized forms of non-dualism within such post-colonial vision since they are deployed not only to articulate the complementarity of religions but also to deconstruct Catholicism itself. This paper will examine how these tropes are deployed in post-colonial Catholic constructions of Hinduism and how they serve to replicate the categories Orientalist discourse even as they attempt to criticize Christianity's colonial past.
Session 125: ROUNDTABLE: Caste's Histories and Political Modernity: A Discussion of "Castes of Mind"
Chair: Anupama Rao, Barnard College
Discussants: Christopher J. Fuller, London School of Economics and Political Science; Gyan Prakash, Princeton University; Gaytari C. Spivak, Columbia University; Judith Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University; Rudolf Mrazek, University of Michigan; M.S.S. Pandian
In this roundtable, a group of senior scholars who work in the fields of anthropology, history, and postcolonial literary studies will bring interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on a discussion of Nicholas Dirks' book, Castes of Mind (Princeton, 2001). In his earlier work, Nicholas Dirks argued that for a colonial sociology of knowledge, caste indicated the tyranny of the "cultural" in Indian society as well as its awkward mutation into a peculiarly colonial form of (illiberal) political agency. Castes of Mind takes up an exploration of caste's history as a colonial category, as well as its role as a form of political identity with great consequence for understanding the histories of democracy and secularism in contemporary South Asia.
The roundtable will focus on the relationship between metropolitan ideologies of political govern-ance and the genealogies of the category of caste in South Asia. Drawing on the panelists' areas of specialization and interest, the roundtable: considers the relationship between caste and race in the metropolitan imaginary, examines the contemporary politics of caste identity and Hindutva, explores how histories of caste discrimination might speak to debates in feminist theory about rights and identity, connects the shared religious and cultural histories of South and Southeast Asia while maintaining the tension between their political presents, and explores political theories of minority rights and recognition.
Session 126: Implications for International Relations: Theory of Changes in Cross-Boundary Practices in South Asia since 9/11 (Sponsored by the South Asian Muslim Studies Association)
Organizer and Chair: Theodore P. Wright, Jr., State University of New York, Albany
Discussant: Howard Wriggins, Columbia University
Keywords: international relations, theory and practice, South Asia, post-9/11.
Events in South Asia since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States have shown a further sharp change in cross-boundary political behavior which has been developing since the end of the Cold War and the appearance of global uni-polarity. A non-state actor, al-Qaeda, and an unrecognized "rogue" regime, the Taliban, have come to play major roles; a "war on terrorism" with no geographic limits or clear termination has been proclaimed, boundaries and border crossing as the criterion for "aggression" have been diminished, international conventions against unlimited detention and even torture of prisoners of war have broken down, expulsion or "ethnic cleansing" of indigenous populations from occupied territories have been practiced, targeting of civilians by both "terrorists" and state security forces have become commonplace, nuclear brinkmanship by middle powers and most recently a policy of "preemptive" attacks on suspected enemies has been announced. How is all of this to be interpreted? The panel will present three different perspectives on this radical new paradigm: a critique of neo-realist thinking by Maya Chadda and David Ariosto on the war in Kashmir, an economic interpretation of the American war in Afghanistan by Syed Bashir Hussain, and an Islamic interpretation of the "clash of civilizations" between and within Islam and the West by Zohair Husain.
End of Ideology, Pax Americana, or Clash of Civilizations? The Broader Logic of U.S. South Asia Policy in the Post-9/11 Period
Maya Chadda, William Paterson University; David Ariosto, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
How do we characterize the post-9/11 United States policy in South Asia, particularly toward the conflict in Kashmir? And how does this policy fit into the larger U.S. goals that have motivated its "war on terrorism"? The connections between the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, dismantling of the Taliban regime, forging of an "antiterrorist" alliance world-wide and the differential role that the U.S. has defined for the two South Asian states in this effort, uncover the broader ordering of U.S. foreign policy priorities in this region and the post-9/11 period generally. This paper will argue that none of the meta explanations of the post-cold War period, whether it is the "end of ideology," "clash of civilization," or Pax Americana or the guiding thrusts that emerge from these, can provide an adequate explanation for the U.S. strategy in South Asia. This is because of the uncertain nature of transition in international politics, and the incomplete nature of nation-states in South Asia. Any full explanation of U.S. policy toward India and Pakistan, particularly with regard to Kashmir, would have to take into account these compelling conditions. It would have to also account for the ways in which these conditions shape the U.S. policy. Neorealism offers a powerful explanation, founded though it is on what are now regarded as the "passé" assumption of "state primacy" and "national interests." It would have to be modified, however, in view of the transnational character of the threats that confront the main players in Kashmir and the ways in which these undermine the theoretical premises of neorealism.
The Political Economy of America's Non-war War in Afghanistan
Syed B. Hussain, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
It is a truism to propose that complex historical phenomena like the questions of war and peace do not generally lend themselves to simplistic singular factors of explanation. On the other hand it is naive to believe that the pursuit of national interest can be fully grasped without a robust understanding of the underlying economic forces. To subject the American preoccupation with its current war in Afghanistan to a political economy approach does not imply, even remotely, a resort to conspiracy theory of historical developments. On the contrary it is a meaningful device to provide additional insights into the multifaceted, far reaching exercise of imperial power in which the U.S. establishment is presently engaged.
It was widely reported in the early 1990's that the U.S. policymakers had initiated extensive discussions to identify post-Cold War threats to the interests of the west in general. Issues of human rights violations, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and drug trade amongst others were identified for strategic planning and preemption. That a modicum of military Keynesianism is involved in such a calculus is reflective of the importance of military industrial complex considerations. That the Gulf oil resources could be made more secure for western access through American arms presence is obvious. That the Caspian Sea area holds vast oil and gas reserves is well documented. That UNOCAL, a giant American oil conglomerate, was planning to build a 1,000 mile long pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea is a matter of public record. As late as 1998, while the Taliban government officials were negotiating the pipeline deal with UNOCAL, the U.S. government was favorably disposed towards the Taliban. The latter lost this favor, maybe coincidentally when they switched from UNOCAL to an Argentinean-French consortium for better returns on their project. Does this mean that the establishment provoked the World Trade Center incident? Of course not. Do these considerations enter into strategizing the present campaign in Afghanistan and elsewhere? Perhaps. Can this be an appropriate object of study? Certainly. This paper is a tentative exercise intended to connect the speculative dots to see if some light can be shed on the political economy of this non-war war.
Changes in International Relations Theory in the Aftermath of 9/11 from an Islamic Perspective
Zohair Husain, University of South Alabama
I shall focus on America's role in the Muslim World and the reaction to it in the form of al-Qaeda, a global revolutionary Islamist non-governmental network. President Bush's "war on terrorism," despite his denials, looks to Muslims like a war against Islamists all over the world and to embody Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. It promises a decade of accentuating an action-reaction syndrome of violence and thereby may broaden, deepen and accentuate revolutionary Islamism, anti-Americanism and both an intercivilizational clash (Revolutionary Islamists vs. Christians, Jews and Hindus) as well as an intracivilizational clash between Muslim secularists vs. Revolutionary Islamists in the twenty-first century.
Session 146: Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, 1850–1950
Organizer and Chair: Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College
Discussant: Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Trinity College
Little work has been done on the history of consumption in South Asia. Economic historians have long been interested in exploring the participation of peasants and workers in production, but attempts to consider their roles as consumers have been piecemeal. Even discussions of the "middle class" rarely analyze consumption patterns before the 1980s. While literature on Europe, Japan and now China has argued for the centrality of consumption to processes of economic change, there has been no parallel tendency in scholarship about the subcontinent.
In this panel we aim at developing a collective approach to consumption in South Asia, one that brings together perspectives from economic, social and cultural history. The panelists come to this subject mainly through work on artisanal products. All have become dissatisfied with approaches that treat buying patterns merely as a function of price or the "survival" of traditional tastes. Consumer choice and desire shaped production and use of goods well before the "consumer revolution" of the 1980s and 1990s. Constructing consumption histories from the colonial period forward will allow us to move beyond simplistic accounts of the replacement of artisanal goods by industrial ones, indigenous products by imports, and local manufactures by mass-made things to appreciate consumer strategies in specific contexts of power. By bringing together studies of several different kinds of commodities and by encouraging input from the full range of Asian specialists attending the conference, we hope to forge a better understanding of the ways consumption patterns have influenced the South Asian economy. This panel marks the early stages in the formation of a working group on the history of consumption.
The Effect of Changing Patterns of Consumption on the Production of Traditional Manufactures in Colonial India
Tirthankar Roy, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics
Consumption patterns changed significantly during the colonial period. Earlier studies tended to stress two aspects of this change: the rise of products manufactured in mechanized industries and the decline of precolonial elites. In emphasizing these two factors, scholars overstated the importance of both and overlooked the breadth of the changes in consumption taking place in colonial India.
This paper seeks to provide an overview of the effects of changing consumption patterns on the production of traditional manufactures in South Asia during the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. It seeks to explore a series of factors influencing shifts in buying patterns. For example, it will examine the influence of imports on consumption not only via direct competition, but also by changing tastes for new designs and new materials. The emergence of "non-traditional" consumers within India will be also be discussed. There were several such groups: European residents; urban middle classes who were fashioning new lifestyles, work habits, work environments, and notions of tradition; and under-privileged social groups who were breaking out of prescribed modes of consumption. The first of these groups was important in a range of skill-intensive products—shawls for example. In clothing and in furniture, there were signs of adaptation to the demands of the other two groups. Migration of laborers and the ethnic melting pots created in railway towns or plantations represented another way consumption was reshaped. Finally, the paper will treat the patronage and consumption of indigenous precolonial elites in the colonial context.
Far more than a simple change in scale of such consumption, there was demand for different goods with different standards and designs.
The paper will then explore some of the adjustments that artisans made in technology, material, location and production organization to meet this changing market environment.
Honor, Desire, and Fashion: Textile Consumption in Northwest India and Pakistan
Michelle E. Maskiell, Montana State University
Women and men in northwestern colonial India used textiles to express established ideas about behavior, but they also used them to embody evolving practices. Textiles as visible and touchable parts of material culture, were and are, in Chandra Mukerji's words, culturally produced "carriers of ideas" that "often act as the social forces that analysts have identified with ideology-as-word" (Mukerji, Graven Images, 15). In other words, people could use cloth to act out preformed ideas but also to modify, even to create, behavioral practices such as those associated with both parda and male respectability. Neither the "discourse of the veil," that dense web of verbiage against and for parda, nor discussions of indigenous ideas of South Asian male honor, have acknowledged the importance of respectable dress for men as well as women. Respectable clothes for men required a great deal of cloth just as modest clothing for women did. Sheer quantity mattered, although the specific characteristics of the textiles used, their thickness, etc., varied historically along class and generational lines. One thinks immediately of the importance of turbans as symbols of Indian male honor among many northwestern social groups. This paper will consider selected late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century everyday practices that centered on the use of hand-woven and/or hand-embroidered textiles for clothing and gifting. Two important examples will be Kashmiri shawls and Punjabi phulkari (embroidered shawls). This paper will show how evolving panda practices, along with changing consumer desire and notions of fashion, effected the consumption of hand-woven and hand-embroidered textiles both before and after Independence.
Economic Change in Western India and the Consumption of Handloom Cloth, 1870–1920
Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College
This paper examines the scale and the patterns in cloth consumption in western India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite the availability of cheaper forms of cloth imported from abroad or manufactured in Indian mills, the demand for handloom cloth actually seems to have grown during this period, thus stimulating the slow growth of the region's handloom industry. This paper explores the reasons for this development. Instead of assuming that this trend was rooted in the stubborn persistence of "traditional" values, I argue that it owes much to changing consumer tastes and shifts in the nature of the regional economy. I explore three dynamic processes influencing the scale and nature of consumption patterns: (1) the growing consumer orientation of newly prosperous peasants who were developing greater cash incomes in certain limited pockets of western India; (2) the spread of regional clothing styles, particularly for women, among urban and rural classes with greater access to cash income; and (3) the successful dissemination of these styles by merchants from producing towns. The paper especially stresses the importance of the highly differentiated patterns in cloth consumption by gender and region. It will also treat the limitations on the expansion of consumption associated with the uneven character of economic growth and the economic subordination of laborers and poor peasants to dominant elites.
Crafting Modern Consumers of Traditional Goods: The Making and Remaking of Artisanal Consumption in Colonial India, 1880–1920
Abigail McGowan, University of Pennsylvania
In this paper I discuss consumption of crafts in late-19th- and early-20th-century Western India as a series of strategies and options available to consumers in the context of expanding availability of goods, both artisanal and machine-made, Indian and foreign. Working through and off from Christopher Bayly's idea of the innate and socially given qualities of cloth in particular, I argue that we need to expand our understanding of consumption in South Asian crafts to include other processes of emulation, fashion, and commercialization—processes which operated not just by replacing artisanal goods with industrial ones, but through new and changing use of "traditional" goods as well.
Specifically, in this paper I will explore the complexity of consumer strategies through an analysis of furniture and block printed fabric made and consumed in Western India. In both these media, objects produced at the turn of the century incorporated Western elements—the forms of chairs, sofas and tables in the case of furniture, new designs in block prints—while at the same time reusing or reinterpreting traditional ones—the decorative carvings and design details in wood, the overall arrangement of patterns suitable for saris, odhanis and the like. These specific examples are evidence of wider trends, whereby consumers selectively appropriated new things while rejecting others and artisans carefully forged new syntheses between traditional and "Western" elements. Such creative responses to changing consumer demand, I will argue, shaped the development of traditional industries in this crucial period of economic adaptation.
Session 147: Private Life of Public Identities: Family, Sex and Nation in Colonial India
Organizer and Chair: Barbara N. Ramusack, University of Cincinnati
Discussants: Mrinalini Sinha, Pennsylvania State University; Barbara N. Ramusack, University of Cincinnati
Keywords: India, sexuality, family history, conjugality, Kamasutra.
This panel seeks to examine critically the emerging discourse on sexuality and family in India through discussions around reforms within the Nayak community in Kumaon district, United Provinces, national debates on birth control, and finally the transnational reception of the Kamasutra and erotic art in the colonial world. These papers together will demonstrate the urgency with which issues of family, conjugality, and sexuality were debated within different public forums in India and Britain. The panel will highlight, once again, the impossibility of separating the public and private spheres in the making of social, cultural, and political identities.
Benighted Folk, Modern Families: Nayak Reform and Middle Class Domesticity, 1850–1931
Sanjay Joshi, Northern Arizona University
This paper will explore the politics and rhetoric surrounding movements of social reform aimed at the "improvement" of a community called Nayaks, living in the Kumaon division of northern India. Nayak men allegedly set up women of their community as prostitutes, and the community was the target of a variety of reform efforts—by Christian missionaries, colonial officials, and most vocally, by middle class nationalists in the early twentieth century. All these agents sought to improve the benighted Nayaks. My paper focuses on the middle class efforts. The denunciation of the benighted Nayaks, I argue, also reveals the way in which the middle class in twentieth century colonial India was seeking to construct its identity as modern and yet not-western. Exploring ideas about sexuality, appropriate gender roles, and most significantly, the family, imbedded in the rhetoric of improvement, my paper explores the construction of a new, and often fractured, discourse of domesticity emerging as part of middle class formation in late colonial India.
Gender, Sex, and Nation: Politics of Birth Control in Colonial India, 1920–1947
Sanjam Ahluwalia, Northern Arizona University
The debate on birth control in colonial India serves as an important site for exploring the social constructs of gender and the politics of national desire and sexualities. International birth control pioneers such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes were keen participants in these debates. Although Sanger highlighted sexual freedom and reproductive control as determining subjectivities of modern individuals, when talking about Indian women within marriage, she undermined their sexuality, arguing primarily for men's conjugal rights. Indian male advocates such as Aliyappin Pillay and Narayan Phadke also saw in the use of birth control greater possibilities for expression of male conjugal rights. Indian middle class feminists were supportive of the cause of birth control and passed a resolution in favor of birth control in 1932 within the All India Women's Conference. Indian feminists, despite their support for birth control, framed women's political agenda within the context of the family, underscoring women's maternal roles. Gandhi was opposed to the introduction of contraceptives in India. Gandhi's antipathy was based on his ideas of women's sexuality—he primarily regarded Indian women as mothers of the nation and as such considered them asexual. Even though participants in the birth control debates spoke from different vantage positions, there were interesting overlaps in their gendered representations of sexuality. This paper will, therefore, examine the contending positions on birth control as a lens to understand the gendered discourse on sexuality within colonial India.
The Sexual Politics of Richard Burton's Kamasutra
Anne Hardgrove, University of Texas, San Antonio
Described by translator Alain Danielou as "the world's oldest and most widely read guide to the pleasures and techniques of sex," the Kamasutra has long been considered an essential repository of sexual knowledge from ancient India. My study begins with the Orientalist "discovery" and translation of the Kamasutra in late 19th century by Richard F. Burton, whose translation, until recently, has been the definitive edition of the text. I situate Burton's translation in light of his wider research on global sexuality and erotica, and consider why Burton's project represented a threat to British ideas of racial superiority. I pay particular attention to how Burton struggled to find ways to make his discoveries and knowledge of exotic sexualities respectable to academic and popular audiences in Great Britain, and explore his efforts to establish the Anthropological Society of London as a respectable venue for his research. I then examine the nationalist response to the Kamasutra in India, and focus on how nationalist leaders initially disavowed traditions of Indian erotica in their political work in the fight against colonialism. Later, in post-1947 independent India, translators and writers newly returned to the Kamasutra, situating the text as part of a nationalist discourse of science, derived from an ancient Hindu tradition. Finally, I discuss the West's construction of gender and sexuality through the Kamasutra and the subsequent popularization of the text, as a form of neo-Orientalism, through the "sexual liberation" movement of the 1960s and beyond.
Session 163: The Construction of Masculinities and Femininities in Eighteenth-Century Spaces
Organizer: Shailaja Fennell, Cambridge University
Chair: Francesca Bray, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Radhika Chopra, University of Delhi
This panel seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum that analyzes the manner in which social, economic, political and cultural processes contribute to the construction of gendered spaces. The eighteenth century is an important site for situating such an analysis with its global currents of modernity and colonialism conjoining with local waves of provincial power mongering and community uprisings in many parts of Asia. These macro and meso level phenomena play a fundamental role in shaping the lives and livelihoods of individuals, households and neighbor-hoods in the city and countryside. The manner in which these phenomena interact and intersect to create and control local spaces in the bureaucratic, cultural, and intellectual spheres provides a valuable opportunity to delineate the gendered dimension of such spatial construction. The use of a gendered lens for studying the growth of local spaces in the eighteenth century will provide important insights into the formulation of categories of male and female and the social construction of masculinities and femininities in the eighteenth century.
Administered Behavior: Bureaucratic Represent-ations of Gendered Identity in Local Spaces
Shailaja Fennell, Cambridge University
The imperative for political control of the local economy in the eighteenth century was a matter of the greatest concern in the river valleys of the Doab and the Jiangnan. The imperial order was considerably exercised by the opposition to central control in the local economies. The local bureaucracies were handed over the onerous responsibility of quelling disaffection and enforcing law and order in the districts under their jurisdiction. The officials of the local bureaucracy employed numerous administrative devices, ranging from legislative procedures to financial sanctions, to ensure conformity in the local polity. These devices have a strongly gendered dimension that can provide rich descriptions regarding the manner in which masculinities and femininities were constructed in the local economy.
This paper focuses on the importance of the normative usage of categories of "male" and "female" in the considerations of the local administration. The regular presence of gendered description in local administrative records such as gazetteers, decrees and official correspondence indicates an acute awareness in bureaucratic spheres regarding the powerful impact of the gendering of individual identity. The central argument in this paper is that local administrative procedure utilized the instrumental value of gender to construct a dominant mode of masculinity and femininity with which to suppress deviance in the political and economic spheres. The characterization of men as "filial" and women as "chaste" are commonplace illustrations of the descriptive techniques employed in the administrative space. These obvious candidates overshadow the more complex and gender-ambiguous qualities such as "excellence," "obedience," and "public-mindedness," which are more central to conformity and acquiescence. Examining these qualities in the context of the construction of dominant sexualities draws out the intricate linkages between the reproductive processes and the political sphere. The central role of the reproductive identities in orienting bureaucratic representations of appropriate behavior in the economic and political sphere shows that there is a pressing need to undertake an integrated analysis of the reproductive, political, economic and cultural spaces through the use a gendered lens.
Music, Masculinity, and the Performance of Sexuality in the Mughal Mehfil
Katherine R. Brown, SOAS, University of London
Elite society in Mughal India was highly segregated in terms of gender, with social space physically separated into male and female domains by the wall of the harem. Gender was also invoked metaphorically within male space as a signifier of social status. Transgressions of the strict norms of princely etiquette were stigmatized as "effeminate" and thus indicative of inferior social status. The male elite were thus encouraged to distance themselves from transgressive behavior, thereby asserting both their masculinity and their high status (see note 1). Because of music's latent potential for transgression in Islam, musical culture is a powerful lens through which to examine the gendering of social norms in Mughal society. Despite their low status, musicians of both sexes were uniquely permitted to enter the most exclusive of masculine spaces, the private mehfil, and, in a subversion of social norms, momentarily to exert power over their patrons in the performance of music. This power was often construed in sexual terms. The roles performed by patron and musician in the seventeenth-century mehfil were deliberately codified to create distance and thus avoid possible transgressions. However, by the eighteenth century, these distinctions had collapsed, and relations between patron and male musician in the mehfil had become overtly homoerotic. In this paper, I will investigate the changing roles of patron and musician in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Delhi, in the light of Mughal constructions of masculinity and transgression. In particular, I will demonstrate how the eighteenth-century sexualization of the most prestigious class of musicians, the kalâwants, is symptomatic of the wider breakdown of social cohesion associated with the eighteenth-century "crisis" of the Mughal Empire (see note 2).
1. Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (1999) 42:1, 47–93 (81–84).
2. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997 (43–45).
"Penetrating the Veil of Mystery": India as the Veiled Orient in British Travel Writing of the Late Eighteenth Century
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Cambridge University
The gendered nature of the colonial and imperial gaze has become almost an axiom of contemporary scholarship on European imperialism. Following Edward Said's Orientalism, numerous scholarly works have reiterated how, from the Enlightenment onwards, the Orient was posited as feminine and passive in order to motivate and justify the masculinist energies of European exploration, conquest and dominion. Yet the widespread recognition of this macro-level gendering of Europe and the Orient has all too often obscured, if not taken for granted, the micro-level processes of depiction and representation whereby it was accomplished. This paper explores one such process: the discursive circulation of the image of the Orient as a veiled woman, and of the European explorer as her male unveiler. Specifically, I will examine the use of this trope by British travelers to India in the late eighteenth century, for example, James Forbes, Bishop Reginald Heber and William Hodges, as well as their descriptions, often accompanied by illustrations, of actual veiled Indian women. I shall also compare these male references to Indian "veiled beauties" to the descriptions embedded within the writings of female British travelers to India in search of the Picturesque. By analyzing how a well-worn trope of the European-Asian encounter, current, in fact, from antiquity onwards, gathered particular discursive agency during the eighteenth century, this paper shall demonstrate the importance of a rigorously historicized approach to gender as an analytical category within colonial discourse analysis.
Session 164: People Out of Place: Finding "Home" in South Asia
Organizer: Yasmin Saikia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Chair and Discussant: David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University
The postcolonial celebration of hybridity and the delinking of people and place have generated theoretical discussions on the constructedness of categories and a questioning of authenticity. This panel aims to intervene in the discussion by focusing on the struggles of three different groups in South Asia who seek to insert themselves in particular places, assert belonging and register oppositional politics of location, in short, find a home. Their predicament makes us aware of the danger of overlooking the historical and lived experiences of marginalized and dispossessed peoples who resist, not revel, in their uprootedness in complex ways.
We are intervening in the discussion by interrogating the concept of displacement. Nila Chatterjee's paper addresses the insistence of Hindu East Bengali refugees from Pakistan, on their entitlement to belong within Indian national space but on their own terms as Bengalis. Yasmin Saikia's paper examines the lack of place for Biharis in Bangladesh and the discourses of "enemy" and "statelessness" generated by the Bengalis that renders them "homeless." Sanjib Baruah's paper questions the power and abuse of the term "tribal" in India's northeast and probes into the relationship between the "tribal" elite, laboring migrants in tribal enclaves and exploitative policies of the political regimes in New Delhi. The questions that emerge from these papers are broadly concerned with political and theoretical issues that arise when people are seen as "out of place" by the dominant order. The presentation of archival material and fieldwork data from the margins of South Asia provides an opportunity to interact with the narratives of people struggling to overcome erasure, physically and metaphorically, to assert belonging and empower themselves on their own terms.
Refusing Marginality: East Bengali Hindu Refugees and their Politics of Entitlement
Nila Chatterjee, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
This paper addresses the predicament of Bengali Hindus who found themselves a minority in post-Partition East Pakistan, and sought resettlement in India. Scarred by the trauma of violence and population exchange wrought by Partition in Punjab, the Indian state was reluctant to acknowledge the East Bengali Hindus' experiences of insecurity, recognize them as refugees or provide resettlement assistance in hopes of discouraging displacement. Despite this official foot-dragging, and public ambivalence in West Bengal towards East Bengali Hindu refuge seekers—the history of latter's displacement has spanned more than four decades. The paper will focus on the displaced's insistence on inclusion within the Indian nation through a narrative of historical entitlement and the pragmatic translation of this discourse into political mobilization for rehabilitation.
Biharis, Bengalis, and the War of 1971: Speaking Silence and Displacement
Yasmin Saikia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In 1971, the Bengalis of East Pakistan went to war against the establishment of West Pakistan. Several groups of non-Bengalis, the so-called Biharis of East Pakistan, did not join the Bengali liberation struggle. In turn, they provided active support to the West Pakistan army. In the post-war phase, Bengalis unleashed a pogrom of violence against the Biharis. Driven out of their homes they were forced to live in temporary rehab camps and they were transformed into "refugees"/ "stateless people," while the govern-ment wrote them off as "Pakistanis waiting for Repatriation." Thirty-two years later, 250,000 Biharis still live in 63 camps all over Bangladesh, without social, educational, legal and political rights. As non-citizens, "Biharis," are denied representation. They cannot even claim the label "displaced." Combining a method of archival research with fieldwork and oral history, this paper investigates two related processes: the transformation of Biharis from citizens of Pakistan to stateless refugees in Bangladesh and the politics of "enemy" narrative of Bengalis that aim to keep Biharis "homeless." Within the Bihari communities several discourses have emerged. For some "home" is India, others claim "Pakistan" and a small group wants to be recognized within Bangladesh. Age and gender play important roles in the choice of "home." The peculiar predicament of Biharis in post-independent Bangla-desh opens up for a renewed investigation the two-nation theory of partition, rights of citizenship or lack thereof and the narratives of identity within the territorialized histories of post-colonial South Asia.
Citizens and Denizens: The Ethnic Homelands and the Crisis of Displacement in Northeast India
Sanjib Baruah, Bard College
A large number of "tribal" people entitled to protective discrimination under the Indian Constitution live in those states. The rights of "non-tribals" to land ownership and exchange, business and trade licenses and access to elected office are restricted. A number of these "tribal" enclaves now are full-fledged states. One of the unintended effects of this regime of protective discrimination is that the notion of exclusive ethnic homelands has become normalized in the region. In a context of massive social transformation that attracts significant numbers of people to the region, this has generated an extremely divisive politics of insiders and outsiders that has led to these displacements.
Session 185: Re-examining Colonial Knowledge: Views from North India
Organizer: Jeffrey M. Diamond, Cornell University
Chair: Purnima Dhavan, Bowdoin College
Discussant: Doris R. Jakobsh, Wilfrid Laurier University
Keywords: colonial knowledge, Punjab, information order.
The discourses surrounding knowledge formation have become more pronounced in recent studies of colonial India. Drawing from and reconsidering the expanding literature about knowledge, including the notion of the "information order" proposed by Chris Bayly, this panel will explore how colonial knowledge was constructed and utilized to formulate categories of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and legal identity. Most researchers now accept that such categorization gave the colonial state greater access to and control over the daily lives of diverse South Asian communities. However, this panel also seeks to explore the long-term implications of this knowledge in the North Indian regions of Punjab and United Provinces. By focusing on the changing colonial interpretations of linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and legal identities in Northwestern India, the four papers will examine how paradigms of colonial information and interpretation were created and tested by the early British administrators. As specific communities in South Asia sought to resist or exploit colonial understandings of social and cultural identities, the panel also will analyze how discursive limits of such categorization constricted debates within colonial society about the paradigms that first created the categories. This analysis will provide us with a broader understanding about the complex nature of the creation and use of knowledge in colonial society along with its wider effects.
Rehabilitating the Sikh "Marauder": Changing Colonial Perspectives of Sikhs, 1765–1840
Purnima Dhavan, Bowdoin College
Official reports of the East India Company from the late eighteenth century identified groups like the Sikhs, Rohila Afghans, and Pindaris as lawless marauders who threatened the stability of Awadh and the northwestern holdings of the company. As Ranjit Singh's forces began to annex larger parts of West Punjab late in the eighteenth century, Sikh chiefs in East Punjab forged new alliances with the British in an attempt to preserve their autonomy. To counter the negative opinion of the British, Sikh chiefs and intellectuals endeavored to explain the genesis of the Sikh warrior tradition through histories and in official correspondence. While Khalsa Sikhs located the genesis of their warrior traditions in the religious reforms of their last Guru, the British credited the martial prowess of the Sikhs to intrinsic racial traits. The British recognized the advantages of an alliance with the Sikh chiefs, and sought to harness their resources to their imperial project, simultaneously limiting the threat of raids on the northwestern borders of the Company's holdings. Seeking to counterbalance the growing power of the Afghans and Ranjit Singh, the British hastened to cement their ties with other Sikh chiefs. Although the colonial theory of the martial races owed much to Sikh Khalsa ideology, by asserting that the vigor of the Sikh martial tradition could only be preserved within the restraining discipline of the imperial armed forces, colonial administrators utilized this theory to reduce the autonomy of the Sikh warrior aristocracy.
Caste, Ethnicity, and Policing in Colonial North India, 1870–1920
David A. Campion, Lewis and Clark College
The philosophy and practices of policing were among the defining elements of British rule in India and had a profound impact upon the colonizers and colonized alike. This paper examines the role of caste and ethnicity in the policing of the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh), one of the most populous and strategically important regions of India during British rule. The creation of a unified Indian Police Service in 1861 led to recruiting strategies in which caste and ethnic identities were simultaneously encouraged and exploited by the colonial regime to create a cadre of loyal policemen. British officials applied their theory of "martial races" to policing and ensured that Sikhs, Gurhkas, Jats, and Muslims enjoyed a privileged and disproportionately large representation as constables and inspectors. Simultaneously, colonial perceptions of the so-called "criminal tribes" helped exclude whole segments of Indian society from government service and subjected them to increased police surveillance and public suspicion. Police recruitment and surveillance practices reinforced the colonial image of India as a conglomeration of races, religions, and ethnicities whose different characteristics could be gleaned from close observation and put to profitable use in the colonial enterprise. This process of dissection by caste and ethnicity served to reduce the vast population of India from an overwhelming and ungovernable whole to numerous constituent parts whose competing interests and group identities could be harnessed and even played against each other by the tiny colonial elite.
Approaches to the Study of Language and Culture in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Northwest India
Jeffrey M. Diamond, Cornell University
The colonial encounter in the northwest Indian region of Punjab was first constructed from the minimal contact British officials had with the region prior to its full annexation in 1849, along with the knowledge they possessed from administering the neighboring region of the North-Western Provinces. After annexation, British officials (and Christian missionaries) sought to develop detailed knowledge about their new territory in order to discover, delineate, reconstruct and classify indigenous knowledge and society. In particular, they investigated the diverse linguistic and cultural foundations of the region. Using a variety of sources, this paper examines the attempts to study late pre-colonial and early colonial Punjab in several key areas of analysis. First, I demonstrate that the Punjab was a region where oral culture and language predominated. Thus, linguistic, empirical, and folklore studies became vital to the efforts to study the predominately oral languages and cultures in the region. I critique the production of these studies by analyzing the writings of colonial officials, missionaries and the indigenous literati. Secondly, I explore how adaptations to Orientalist textual studies in colonial India and the expanding focus on empirical analysis influenced research on the Punjab. Thirdly, I illustrate that these studies offer insights into British rule and colonial comprehension of Indian society as they helped to describe the Punjab to a wider audience in Britain and India. I conclude that these studies shaped the formation of administration in the region and laid the basis for later colonial and postcolonial understandings about Punjabi language and culture.
Law, Women, and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Punjab
Tabassam Shah, SOAS, University of London
Several studies in the history of the Indian subcontinent have drawn attention to the role of law as one of the colonial state's tools for pacification, legitimization, control and reform. Too few studies have addressed the colonial state's formation and application of family law and knowledge about the family, especially regarding issues such as female infanticide. In this paper I will examine how the colonial administration in Punjab was at the forefront of anti-infanticide policy formation prior to the 1870 passage of the Act to Prevent Female Infanticide. Perceiving the practice as a social crime and drawing from government surveys of other Indian provinces, Punjab officials deduced that specific social groups committed female infanticide to preserve their high place in the social hierarchy. To confirm these earlier surveys, colonial officials identified the "infanticidal" population by gathering knowledge on three levels: the ethnography and social causes of female infanticide in Punjab, the nature of the "custom" of infanticide as suggested by folklore within communities, and the extent of the practice in targeted communities. Prior to the 1870 act, the colonial project. to gather knowledge on infanticide involved complex surveillance for detection. Censuses and surveys were used to demarcate areas where surveillance techniques and "punishments" would be appropriately executed. The Punjab government prided itself in maintaining low levels of interference with matters of family and custom. However, this paper illustrates that they did not hesitate to study infanticide in order to influence people's notions of family and community life and eradicate the "pernicious" evil.
Session 186: Globalized Performance Traditions in India
Organizer: Shanti Pillai, New York University
Chair: Frederick M. Asher, University of Minnesota
Discussant: Richard Schechner, New York University
This panel takes a fresh look at processes of globalization in India through an examination of the travel and translation of traditions of performance. The four papers together highlight the complexity of the relationship between local practices and global circulation and point towards the need to rethink some of the classic assumptions long held by scholars on India about the unchanging essential nature of Indian tradition. Coming from a range of disciplines, includ-ing anthropology, performance studies, ethnomusic-ology, and art history, the panel participants define performance broadly and with an eye to aesthetics, political economy, and multivalent significances.
The major themes of the panel are: (1) performances attest to a longer history for global processes in India than is often acknowledged by discussions which center on mass media and Internet technologies; (2) foreign participants play an increas-ingly important role in the production of and meaning attributed to traditional ritual and artistic practices; (3) mass mediated cultural forms and their accompanying performance practices influence local cultural forms, which in turn travel abroad; (4) the globalization of local traditions can exacerbate local inequalities and is not always met with enthusiasm by all local proponents.
Worldly Moves: The Changing Political Economy of a South Indian Classical Dance
Shanti Pillai, New York University
What happens to the local practice of performance traditions that circulate globally? In this paper I will explore the implications that the international production and performance of the South Indian classical dance, bharatanatyam, have for local producers in Chennai, India, the dance's traditional home. My focus will be on the changing political economy of bharatanatyam with an eye to how artistic merit and opportunities to perform in India are increasingly dependent upon a dancer's access to overseas markets and international cultural brokers. I will secondarily consider how local performers, producers and critics feel about these changes and their often gloomy outlook on the future quality of the dance form. This case study demonstrates that the globalization of local traditions does not necessarily translate into a newly invigorated life for those practices and can exacerbate the social, economic, and political inequalities amongst practitioners. Moreover, worldwide performance does not necessarily imply mutual understanding between traditional practitioners and those who make use of their teachings in other places. The lesson is an important one as many scholars have too simply celebrated the globalization of culture, looking to histories of cultural borrowing and transmigratory moves as proof of the resilience of local practices. As my paper will demonstrate, such narratives tend to normalize globalization in ways that too easily allow its contradictions and disparities to escape from view.
Mass Mediated Music in North India during WWII: The Life of a Lucknowi Jazz Musician
Brad Shope, Indiana University
The globalization of cultural practices, so often associated with late-twentieth-century mass media and electronic technologies, actually has a much longer history. Historical ethnographic methods can reveal many surprising and unknown stories about social and artistic interactions in India. This paper examines the flourishing communities of jazz musicians which began to appear in Lucknow during the 1930s. Influenced by the presence of mass produced and disseminated American popular music in North India, self-taught musicians began performing jazz in dance halls, railway institutes, and private clubs. I will explore this music culture by considering the life history of a popular musician who came to the forefront around the Second World War. James Perry, as a young man, was heavily influenced by the presence of American and European gramophone records and foreign radio broadcasts from VOA, BBC, and Radio Ceylon. He performed in several dance halls catering to those celebrating an American popular music aesthetic at the time in Lucknow and, as a Goan, found himself crossing boundaries of identity distinction in numerous capacities. Drawing from Mr. Perry's oral narratives, I will elucidate his musician-ship as it relates to a past cultural demographic in Lucknow and the manner in which it contrasted an established classical music and dance canon.
Festivals, Faqirs, and Foreigners: The 2001 Kumbh Mela
Sondra Leslie Hausner, Cornell University
The Kumbh Mela is a cyclical religious festival that repeats every three years in four North Indian cities. The gathering serves as a fixed point on both the map and calendar of the communities of Hindu renouncers, and their foreign and local followers. Every Kumbh Mela in history has probably been an enormous gathering, but the 2001 Kumbh Mela in Allahabad was the first festival that received massive international press coverage and unprecedented numbers of foreign participants. The BBC ran nightly specials about the festival every day for a month, and the number of foreign and local reporters trailing around recording equipment was a spectacle in itself. Thousands of backpacking foreigners sat beatifically at the feet of renouncers, hoping for spiritual guidance, a hashish pipe, or both.
Although the Kumbh Mela, like other Indian rituals and festivals, is commonly viewed as "ancient" and "timeless," it is actually thoroughly contemporary as it is always the product of present social, religious and political forces. In this paper I will address the multivalent levels of significance of the 2001 event. On one level I will examine the discourses circulated by both the foreign and the Indian press with an eye to how they mediated between local and global dynamics in offering explanations of the event for different audiences. Secondly, I will explore the interactions between foreign and Indian participants as they took place in the various renouncer camps, which became the primary social and spatial centers of the festival's proceedings.
Can the Indian Tune Go Global?
Peter Kvetko, University of Texas, Austin
In November of 2000, musicians, journalists, and executives from the Indian music industry gathered in Mumbai for the MTV-Planet M Music Forum. Their purpose was to discuss the current state of Indian popular music and to consider the possibilities for taking Indian popular music to global markets. In the first section of this paper, I outline the development of Indipop music, focusing on the social and technolog-ical changes in urban India that have spurred the recent emergence of non-film-based popular music and its accompanying performance practices. Next, I analyze the 2000 Music Forum as an important encapsulation of the planning, performance, and reception of Indipop music in Mumbai. Finally, I draw on recent studies of popular world music and globalization theory to draw broader conclusions about performance, transnationalism, and the social meaning of popular music in contemporary urban India.
Session 202: The Bengal Partition, 1947: A Footnote in History
Organizer: Abhijeet Paul, Open University
Chair and Discussant: Daisy Rockwell, Loyola University, Chicago
Keywords: South Asia, Partition of India, Bengal, Bengal after Partition, 1947, poverty, dehumanization, Ritwik Ghatak, Bangladesh, Muslims in Bengal, Partition literature and films, anticolonialism, history, politics.
The renewed academic and popular interest in the Partition of India—of both Bengal and Punjab—has seldom focused on the Bengal side of the story. This multi-disciplinary panel therefore seeks to address the various interlocking issues and narratives of the Bengal partition: communal riots and tensions, refugee rehabilitation and its problems, the Muslim minorities in West Bengal after the Partition, artistic and cinematic representations of the struggle and governmental apathy in its aftermath on both sides of the border—West Bengal and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
Shelley Feldman, by drawing on both historical and comparative examples, concentrates on the dominance of West Pakistan and the subsequent neglect of East Pakistan in any meaningful discourse of the Partition in the specific context of post-war state-building process. Joya Chatterji reinterprets Partition historiography to bring to light the political impact of the ghettoization of the Muslim community in West Bengal during the years 1947–67, which partly contributed to the downfall of the Congress rule in Bengal in 1967. Gautam Ghosh's deployment of anthropological binaries, namely, "civilization" and "barbarism," effected by a temporal reading of written and cinematic texts of the Bengal partition, creates the opportunity for a comparative understanding of post-Partition polity formation in India as well as the post-Cold War American War on Terror. And Abhijeet Paul reprioritizes the human story of the Partition by focussing on the films (1950s–70s) made by Nemai Ghosh and especially Ritwik Ghatak—films that were intensely personal as they were political in their documentation and critique of an absurd divide and its aftermath. Finally, Daisy Rockwell, the discussant, with her understanding of the partition of Punjab, keeps the comparatist view alive in the panel.
Revisiting the Silence around the 1947 East Bengal Partition
Shelley Feldman, Cornell University
Comparisons of the 1947 partition in East and West Pakistan are notable for their differences and for what has been uncovered about the experiences in each place over the past half-century. As well, it is clear that our imaginings of 1947 are largely shaped by the experiences identified by the violence that characterized Punjab and the West, the leadership and high politics of partition in the West, and constructions of South Asian politics constituted by the relationship between (West) Pakistan and India. Further, the 50-year anniversary of Independence, which led to a revival of interest and research on Partition, went largely without comment in East Bengal/East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, although there was some attention to the determinants and experiences of partition in scholarship on West Bengal. In this paper I offer a tentative explanation of these differences in terms of why they have emerged and what they portend for understanding conceptions of partition. Drawing on both historical and comparative examples, I will situate the explanation in a theoretical engagement with Veena Das' understanding of "critical events", and an exploration of processes of state-making in the post-World War II period. I will then use the comparison to specify the sustained salience of such terms as Bangals and Ghotis in the aftermath of both 1947 and 1971.
The Aftermath of Partition: Muslims in West Bengal, 1947–67
Joya Chatterji, London School of Economics
This paper explores the complex impact of Partition on the Muslim communities that chose to remain in the state of West Bengal after 1947. It looks at the processes which forced Muslims into new patterns of settlement, and at the political implications of these changes. After Partition, Muslim families who had lived cheek by jowl with Hindus in many areas of West Bengal, were increasingly forced into small ghettos. Threatened by continuing communal hostility and intimidated by refugee vigilantes into fleeing Hindu-dominated areas, they sought security in numbers in ever smaller areas. The result of this was not only that in the late 1950s and 60s, West Bengal Muslims increasingly asserted a distinct political identity. The very fact of their settlement in dense clusters also gave them more electoral muscle than they would have achieved had they been more widely dispersed. The upshot was that Muslims were able to attain a degree of political influence which few could have foreseen in 1947—and to use their influence to help bring down Congress rule in Bengal in 1967.
Civilization and Barbarism, Then and Now: Post-Partition India and Post-Cold War America
Gautam Ghosh, University of Pennsylvania
This paper will examine textual (fictional, autobiographical, journalistic and scholarly) as well as cinematic narratives of the 1947 Partition of India. I will focus, in particular, on the representation of Bengal within these narratives of Partition and the Partition's aftermath. An interpretation will be provided of the ways in which notions such as "civilization" and "barbarism" are deployed in these materials. This interpretation will, in turn, provide for a discussion of various overlapping notions and practices of "temporality," as these: (i) correlate to various genres of narration and representation; and (ii) create new opportunities for, and restrictions on polity formation in Bengal and in India. I will close with some remarks on the ways in which "civilization" and "barbarism" are being invoked, at present, in the "War on Terror."
Rootless in Bengal: Films of the Partition (1950s–70s)
Abhijeet Paul, Open University
This paper examines the cinematic texts of the Partition representing the economic, social and cultural displacement and the subsequent struggle of the refugees during the 1950s–1970s. It is also interesting to note that the documentation and the critique of the Partition and its impact have been more poignantly told in the films of the fifties and the sixties than in written literature of the time—fictional and non-fictional. Art and politics therefore couldn't have come closer in Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamool (Rootless 1950) and Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha (Subarna-rekha 1962) or Komal Gandhar (E-Flat 1961), for example. The films document and comment on the displacement and eventual rootlessness, the enormous pressure on the fledgling economy of West Bengal during the fifties and especially the sixties, the deplorable social and economic conditions of the refugees, the subsequent struggle of the refugees to gain land in West Bengal, and finally their contribution to the downfall of the Congress government in 1967, thus marking a new era of power-relations between the refugees and the emergent left rule in the state of West Bengal. The Partition films certainly left a deep impact on the New Cinema that was to emerge with Mrinal Sen among others in the 1970s—films that did not hesitate to address bold political themes like poverty, dehumanization, class and gender exploitation in Bengal, without losing artistic integrity.
Session 203: History and Identity: A Discussion of Dalit Perspectives
Organizer: Ramnarayan S. Rawat, University of Delhi
Chair and Discussant: Eleanor Zelliot, Carleton College
Keywords: Dalits, history, anthropology, India, 1850–2003.
The traditionally deemed "untouchables" of India, who constitute 20 percent of the population, are increasingly turning to instruments of democratic politics to press their struggles for social justice. The term Dalit represents a radical new identity coined in opposition to the "untouchable," Scheduled Castes, and Harijan identities of the past, and has been effectively used to mobilize various disparate caste communities. The past two decades have seen Dalit politics move out of the shadows of larger movements which once appropriated their struggles—groups like the Congress, Left and lower caste organizations. The recent successful capture of power by Dalits (represented by the Bahujan Samaj Party) in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh is just one example of this radical assertion. Moving beyond studies which have situated Dalits only in relationship to other movements, this panel seeks to explore the many meanings invested within this increasingly powerful identity. Beginning with an interrogation of some of the categories bequeathed by colonial and national narratives, this panel will explore the historical construction of Dalit identities and trace their operations within everyday lives and practices. Bringing together scholars from three continents and from the disciplines of history and anthropology, the panel will also emphasize Dalit perspectives which counter mainstream understandings of colonialism, nationalism, modernity, community and gender. It will do so by tracing small voices of protest within dominant narratives, exploring Dalit women's contestations of hegemonic discourses, and examining expressions of Dalit identities in literary works and everyday life practices of Dalits.
Making the Chamar a Criminal: The Crime of Cattle Poisoning in Nineteenth-Century Uttar Pradesh
Ramnarayan S. Rawat, University of Delhi
Colonial narratives—shaped by colonial agendas and interpretations of Indian society influenced by Brahmanical texts—provide us with the first histories and accounts of Dalit communities like the Chamars. Colonial accounts of many Dalit communities in the 19th century described them as criminal castes, denied them a history, and created stereotypes that have influenced subsequent histories. Few Dalit communities left any written records for the nineteenth century, raising challenges to historians who wish to understand the perspectives of Dalits in the past. In the paper I read against the grain in order to subvert the hegemonic colonial histories of these communities by taking help from small voices within the colonial archive. Tracing the ways in which Chamars were constructed as a criminal caste by colonial officials, this paper explores how Chamars were accused of the organized crime of cattle poisoning because of their "caste" and "traditional occupation." It argues that Chamars were involved in the leather trade as a legitimate business enterprise, not recognized by the colonial state—an enterprise that involved buying old or sick cattle for their hides. It also examines colonial representations of Chamars as "natural" poisoners and the extension of colonial arguments to all crimes relating to cattle. Most importantly, the paper explores colonial voices of protest and doubt toward the accusations being made against Chamars, opening up spaces for alternative readings of colonial accounts.
Dalit Intellectual Discourse in Modern Andhra: Gurram Jashua
Jangam Chinnaiah, SOAS, University of London
This paper explores the evolution of cultural and literary alternatives by the Dalits (Untouchables) in Telugu literary and intellectual spheres. By focussing on the life and works of Gurram Jashua, an eminent Dalit writer and intellectual, it will analyze the impact of modern liberal democratic and egalitarian ideas on the writings and activities of the oppressed sections and their representatives in contesting the dominance of the caste Hindu intellectuals in literary and ideological spheres. Gurram Jashua wrote nearly thirty Kavyas (texts in poetic form) on the lives and sufferings of Dalits. Denied access to Hindu religious Scriptures by the caste Hindus, Jashua defied these attempts by the upper castes to make knowledge their exclusive preserve and read Sanskrit texts on his own. Among his writings Gabbilam (Bat)—a composition which attacked the caste system and untouchability—is considered the most important. In this semi-fictional and autobiographical text, Jashua narrates his struggle as a poet and human being. Drawing from Kalidasa's Megadhutha (Cloud Messenger), he subverts the Hindu mythological symbols and uses the Gabbilam (Bat) as a metaphor for an untouchable who is considered neither a human being nor an animal. In narrating his personal sufferings, he also takes into account events during the national movement and critically examines their impact on the lives and conditions of untouchables. While articulating the voices of Dalits through his writings in a traditional poetic form, Jashua tried to address the oppressors and to create a space and dignity for his brethren in cultural and literary spheres.
On the Outside Looking In: Rural Dalits, Reproduction, and Modernity
Sarah K. Pinto, Princeton University
It has been said that caste ideologies are, above all, matters of the body. This is true both in terms of Hindu orthodoxy and in encounters with the state and institutions predicated on notions of equality. In rural communities caste identities are often mapped onto both bodily practice and engagement with institutions. In terms of reproduction, such elements as over-reproduction and use or disuse of family planning are used to distinguish persons and groups from one another. This paper explores the ways Dalit women in rural Uttar Pradesh situate their identities as marginal subjects on the home ground of their reproductive bodies, carving out a space for themselves on the edges of institutional practice. I suggest that this marginality provides a space in which the category "Dalit" diffuses into and overlaps with other categories—the poor, the rural, the illiterate, the landless—putting caste into a modern idiom of progress. However, Dalit women at once engage and contest notions of "progress" defined in these terms. As in Dalit political mobilization, they bring into critical focus, even if on fanciful and radical grounds, the dominant imaginings of the Indian state through everyday talk about reproduction and struggles to navigate institutions that stake a claim to their reproductive bodies. Marginality, for them, is a complex and tenuous space, characterized by a tension between longing for enfranchisement, fear of state regimes in which, they suspect, they are "always already" defined as marginal, and rejection of the terms by which "modernity" is defined.
http://www.india-seminar.com/2006/558/558%20the%20problem.htmThe problem
THE idea of Dalit as a perspective has evolved during the past ten years of my research on Dalit society and history. I see my work as a conversation with Dalit writers, writings and politics, one that has fundamentally re-shaped my own intellectual journey. As a caste Hindu, I have been struck by the absence of Dalit points of view within mainstream Indian historiography, and by the necessity of bringing these points of view into active dialogue with caste Hindu narratives of Indian history, society, nationalism and colonialism. The articles in this issue seek to take seriously Dalit perspectives by bringing them into conversation with caste Hindu perspectives which are far too often passively accepted, not simply as the authoritative representations of Indian society and history, but as the only representations. My own education really began in 1992-93 when Dalit friends pointed out in no uncertain terms that there are no Dalits in Â'IndianÂ' history. However, they also made it clear that Dalits and Dalit mohallas are some of the most common objects of study for the sociology and anthropology departments of various universities. Dalits are made into objects of study in ways that caste Hindus and their neighbourhoods rarely – if ever – are.
As I began to pursue this, I found that I had a great deal to learn from my many interactions with Dalits in different parts of North India, and from Dalit writings in the Hindi language, both past and present. These writers and intellectuals had points of view on everything that were markedly different from the rest of Hindu/Indian society. Their views of Hindu religion and society, Indian history, nationalism, colonialism, and the larger world, stood in sharp contrast to what I had learned during my formal education at Delhi University. In my own research I have attempted to bring Dalit perspectives into conversation with the agendas of mainstream Indian historiography. The platform provided by Seminar offers an opportunity to extend this conversation.
I will offer two examples to illustrate what I mean by a Dalit perspective. The examples, one from the 1940s and another from the 1990s, capture the contradiction between the positions of Dalits and non-Dalits over what constitutes Â'secularÂ' politics. A recent familiar event, the decision of the Bahujan Samaj Party to form a government in UP with the support of the Hindu-right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party in 1995 is one example. Prior to this, in 1992, the BSP had walked out of its alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP). BSP leaders argued that as far as Dalit priorities were concerned, there was no real difference between the Congress, the BJP and the Samajwadi Party. The BSPÂ's refusal to have any alliance with the SP, and its electoral alliance with the BJP were described by the mainstream media and intelligentsia at the time as opportunist, and its refusal to join what were portrayed as the secular forces was severly criticised.
The second example is of the Congress nomination of Ambedkar from the Bombay Legislative Assembly to the Constituent Assembly in July 1946, paving the way for his appointment as law minister in NehruÂ's cabinet. Predictably, the Hindi media in UP welcomed this decision and described it as a final triumph of Indian (Congress) nationalism. On the other hand, many Dalits viewed AmbedkarÂ's turnaround as a betrayal of their struggle of the last 20 years, especially the sustained agitation by the SCF (Scheduled Castes Federation) throughout the 1940s. Ambedkar addressed this criticism in one of the most important speeches of his career, delivered in April 1948 at Kanpur. He clarified that he had joined the government to ensure that the Dalit agenda, for which he had fought for 25 years, was incorporated into Congress policies. In addition, he asserted that Dalits must transform their separate identity into a political force with its own distinctive agenda. Not surprisingly the media, especially the Hindi media in the Cow belt, vilified him for preaching communal politics of the Muslim League variety. These two disparate examples bring home the point that both Ambedkar and the BSP had a distinctive Dalit agenda which was not recognized as legitimate by mainstream Hindu opinion. In this note, I will lay out the broad contours of the Dalit agenda that was fashioned in North India in the 20th century.
The category Dalit is now extensively used in both academic and non-academic literature across the world, and in India even the most orthodox elements in Hindu society, as well as the intelligentsia, have taken to using the category Dalit. Indeed, today we can talk of a virtual Dalit Studies in which Dalits are studied from a range of positions and standpoints around common themes: their struggles, identity politics, and efforts to achieve social justice, equality and power, battles for reservations, and ritual status, to name a few. But this begs the question: why should Dalit Studies be confined to studying Dalits? Instead of viewing Dalits as an object of study, I wish to propose that the category Dalit can also be used as a perspective for approaching the study of Indian/Hindu society and history, colonialism and nationalism, democracy, modernity and the larger world.
In this, an attempt is made to evaluate and study Indian society and history, literature, labour, gender, Hindu religion, intellectual formations, the Dravidian movement, and democracy from Dalit standpoints. There is a fundamental rupture between Dalit and non-Dalit writers and activists in the ways they analyze and interpret various facets of our society and history. What we have are two different worlds. We thus propose that Dalit is a perspective.
This point is demonstrated by outlining the evolution of a perspective in Uttar Pradesh that emerged through Dalit social and cultural struggles, Dalit politics and Dalit writings. We suggest that through these diverse activities Dalits worked out their own distinctive world view during the first six decades of the 20th century, a perspective that did not exist earlier, but emerged in the 1920s and slowly acquired a concrete form between the 1940s and 1960s. Ultimately, it is a perspective that today shapes and influences different facets of Dalit lives, and has the potential to reshape the larger Indian society, as well.
By the 1960s, a commitment to the liberation of Dalits, social and economic progress, a sense of pride in Dalit identity, and a firm resolve to resist the domination perpetuated by Hindu society had all become securely ingrained in the minds and actions of both Dalit activists and ideologues, commitments which are evident today. Dalit identity became the foundation for the formation of a new politics, raising a new set of issues and mobilizing all Dalit castes collectively under a single umbrella. The core issue of refashioning a pure, Â'untouchedÂ' identity remained, but the most significant contribution of this new politics lay in the emergence of a Dalit identity as a foundational category for social and political organization of knowledge, lives and agendas.
Dalits questioned and rejected categories like untouchables, Depressed Classes, Scheduled Castes, and Harijans that were coined by colonial and Hindu/nationalist discursive practices. This was not merely to contest dominant ascriptions of their identities but also, more importantly, to question the notions of impurity and pollution attached to their community, identity and history. Various Dalit castes in different parts of India raised this issue independently by claiming that they had discovered a pure past, and a pure identity, either within Hindu religion or outside of it. Familiar examples are the assertions of the Adi-Dharmis and Balmikis of Punjab, the Satnamis of Chattisgarh, the Namasudras of Bengal, the Chamars, Pasis and Bhangis of UP, the Shilpakars of Kumaon, and the Mahars and Chambhars of Maharashtra. I would characterize these initiatives as the first stage in the evolution of a Dalit perspective. Through a range of organizations and caste mahasabhas, Chamars were the first Dalit community to launch a struggle to redefine their identities in UP in the 1910s and 1920s.1 This struggle was launched initially to contest the dominant colonial and Hindu narratives of their Â'untouchableÂ' identity by emphasizing the Â'purityÂ' of their lives and by demanding a status equal to that claimed by caste Hindus.
From police files we have sustained evidence that in the 1920s Chamar mahasabhas mobilized their communities in urban and rural areas by organizing meetings and demonstrations to sustain and spread these ideas.2 It was in the rural areas of the western districts of UP that the movement began to appeal to well-off Chamar agricultural peasants. Although Chamar protests were evident in many parts of the state, there is evidence to assert that the most organized and sustained agitation took place in western Uttar Pradesh. These protests were first noticed in 1922 in the districts of Meerut, Moradabad, Bulandshahr, Badaun, Bijnor, Bareilly, Pilibhit, Agra and Aligarh. By 1923-24, evidence of Chamar protests came from other districts like Saharanpur, Etah, Etawah, Mainpuri, Mathura, Dehradun, Lucknow, Unnao, Kheri Sultanpur, and Pratapgarh, as well as from districts in eastern UP like Benares, Jaunpur, Basti and Gorakhpur.
To sustain the movement, a series of practices were promoted and adopted by Chamar organizations, such as abstaining from impure practices like leatherwork, eating beef and consuming alcohol, maintaining a vegetarian diet, and engaging in specific Hindu religious and ritual practices. In addition, Chamar groups also demanded access to schools and education, and protested against the practices of untouchability, numerous illegal cesses and begari imposed on Chamar peasants by caste Hindus. From early on Chamars were keen to show their loyalty to the British government, a fact reflected in the nature of resolutions passed at these meetings.
In December 1927 the leaders of the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha in UP made a claim for a more inclusive achhut or Â'untouchedÂ' identity to unite disparate Dalit castes. The Mahasabha laid out its agenda in a conference held on 27 and 28 December 1927 in Allahabad, an event that was widely reported and discussed in contemporary newspapers in UP.3 The conference was proclaimed as the first All-India Adi-Hindu conference, and was attended by 25,000 Dalits from UP. Another 350 delegates participated from Punjab, Bihar, Delhi, the Central Provinces, Poona, Bengal, Madras and Hyderabad.
The Adi-Hindu Mahasabha was described as a movement of all untouchables and Swami Achhutanand was declared their true leader. The struggle against social injustice was described as achhut nationalism, social uplift as their religion, and self-respect as their Home rule, and the audience was advised to ignore Hindus who called them Â'traitorsÂ'. By emphasising their achhut identity, the leaders of the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha were hoping to build a new politics that would bring together all Dalit castes – Doms, Mehtars, Pasis, Lal Begis, Dhanuks, Koris, and Chamars. As an evidence of these claims see the Adi-Hindu petition published after this article.
Simultaneously, the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha raised these issues in a petition submitted to the Simon Commission during its tour of India in 1928. The Simon Commission received similar petitions from Dalit organizations in different parts of UP and India. They provide us with useful material to understand the various facets of the Dalit agenda that were being assembled around this time.4 What is striking is that most Dalit organisations which submitted petitions to the Simon Commission were unanimous in claiming a separate achhut identity, making this a marked feature of Dalit politics of the time. Most of the ideas of the Adi-Hindu movement were also widely shared by other Dalit groups across UP, including the Adi-Dharmis from Dehradun, the Kumaon Shilpakar Sabha of Almora, the Jatav Mahasabha of Agra, the Dom Sudhar Sabha of Garhwal, and the Chamar Sabha of Kanpur. Further, evidence from CID weekly reports of these years (1926-30) indicates a good deal of activism conducted by Adi-Hindu organizations.
Through their struggles in the 1920s and 1930s, Dalit activists and organisations in UP gradually formulated an agenda that addressed the concerns of their community as well as issues that mainstream nationalist organisations like the Congress had raised with regard to the vision of an Indian nation and democracy. A more passionate and elaborate discussion of these themes is evident in Chandrika Prasad JigyasuÂ's book, Bharat Ke Adi Niviasiyon Ki Sabhayata (The Civilization of IndiaÂ's Original Inhabitants) published in 1937 from Lucknow. In claiming that achhuts were the original inhabitants of India and descendants of the dasas, asurs and dasyus mentioned in Brahmanical Hindu texts, Dalits were challenging, both colonial and Hindu interpretations of their identity. Achhut was declared as the identity of all Â'untouchablesÂ', separate from the Hindu community. Adequate safeguards for achhuts in various elective bodies in the form of separate electorates was a demand which was to become the cornerstone of their struggle in the coming years. Indeed, by the 1930s, their charter of demands included proportionate representation in legislative bodies, reservations in government jobs, adequate Dalit representation in the Congress ministry, permanent rights over land by changing the tenancy acts, fixed wages for agricultural labour and for the removal and skinning of dead animals, rights to use public wells, the abolition of begari, the right to convert to any religion, and rejection of the term Â'harijanÂ'.
Ambedkar ki Awaz Arthath Achhuton ka Federation (The Voice of Ambedkar or the Federation of Achhuts) was the title of Nandlal ViyogiÂ's 1947 book published in Allahabad. The title proclaims the significance of Ambedkar and the Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) in reshaping achhut identity and politics in the 1940s by giving it a new voice or awaz. A new feature of achhut politics in the 1940s was the emergence of the SCF as a party offering a political platform for all achhuts. In particular, the Federation brought together diverse achhut political and social groups – including Jatavs, Raidasis, Pasis, Dhanuks, Chamars, and others – into a single political formation.
By the 1940s proportional representation, education and an emphasis on a shared separate identity had acquired wider social support among achhuts.5 The appeal of the SCF lay in the fact that it provided an organisational body for Dalits to launch a concerted campaign against the ill-effects of the Poona Pact, particularly its denial of proportional representation for Dalits. Adi-Hindu leaders from UP as well as from other parts of India were present during the foundation of the SCF in Nagpur on 18 July 1942. In UP, the SCF was considered a worthy successor to the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha and rapidly replaced branches of the Mahasabha all over the state. According to Viyogi, the SCF also replaced achhut organisations like the Adi-Dharm Mandal in Punjab, the Depressed Classes League of Namasudras in Bengal and the Depressed Classes Association in the Central Provinces.
The SCF attracted Dalit organisations, particularly Chamar organizations like the Jatav Mahasabha of Agra, the Raidass Mahasabha of Allahabad, and the Kureel Mahasabha and Chamar Mahasabha of Kanpur. The Kumaon Shilpakar Mahasabha was the only non-Chamar organisation to join the Federation in its initial stages. Gradually, the establishment of district branches of the SCF also attested to its growing popularity in urban centres of UP. District branches were established in Agra, Aligarh, Allahabad, Etah, Etawah, Lucknow, Kanpur, Meerut, and Kumaon. The Uttar Pradesh SCF decided to launch a satyagraha in both 1946 and 1947 to protest against the Poona Pact, the Congress and the Cabinet Mission Award for rejecting their demands for proportional representation and a separate electorate. The SCF launched two different satyagrahas in Lucknow against the non-representative character of the Legislative Assembly, the first in July-August 1946 and the second from March to May 1947. There were other issues as well, which I have discussed elsewhere, including the abolition of begari, distribution of land to Dalits, free education and scholarships, and reservations of jobs within the government services.
To reiterate, the achhut agenda laid by the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha in 1928, including a programme for defining a set of rights, seemed to have reached fruition by the 1940s. It was no longer the idea of the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha alone, but one that was shared by various Dalit organizations in UP and beyond. This vision of achhut politics and commitment to rights continues to shape the lives of Dalits today.
It is my submission that by the 1940s the idea of united interests across all castes of Dalits under the shared identity of achhuts acquired hegemonic acceptability among groups who previously would not have recognized themselves as belonging to the same community. It was this perception of a shared agenda that convinced Ambedkar to join the Congress Ministry in 1947.
The formation of the Republican Party of India in 1956 did not represent an abandonment of achhut identity and politics, nor did it represent a move to class politics as suggested by a host of scholars. By framing the formation of the Republican Party of India as a shift from caste to class, we miss the Dalit point of view which envisioned the possibility of building political alliances without losing the focus and power of a united achhut identity and agenda. To cite one example, the Republican Party of IndiaÂ's slogans summed up the mood of the times and revealed the ideological moorings of the party; Â'Jatav-Muslim bhai bhai: Hindu kaum kahan se ayeeÂ' (Jatav-Muslims are brothers: where did the Hindus come from) or Â'Thakur, Brahman aur Lala: kar do inka munha kalaÂ' (Thakurs, Brahmans and Baniyas: blacken their faces). If anything, these slogans indicate that the Dalit struggles against domination by Hindu society were fought along caste lines by emphasising a separate identity. Rather than dissipating, the attractiveness of a shared Dalit identity has continued to grow.
The most enduring legacy of the Adi-Hindu movement in UP was the conceptualization of a separate Dalit identity which was not merely a political category but also a social and cultural category – a way of thinking not just about Dalits but also about Hindu society. It is only through a recognition of the history of this movement and the way of thinking which accompanied the movement that Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu and millions of other Dalits were able to describe the Congress as a Hindu party, or advance their criticism of the left polity for refusing to address issues of social inequity. The sense that Dalits of UP had in the 1940s and Â'50s, and still have today, of having their own agenda, was made possible only through the history and political organisation of these decades. The unmistakable feature of this struggle and its enduring legacy has been the conception of a clearly defined notion of a Dalit politics and agenda. Through the struggles and writings of the past century, Dalits have forcefully articulated a distinct vision and perspective by engaging with Congress nationalism, colonialism, Hindu reform organizations, and the communist movement. This issue of Seminar reflects and engages with this vision in ways that force us to dramatically re-evaluate caste Hindu representations of Indian history and society.
RAMNARAYAN S. RAWAT
* The author can be contacted at rrawat@nd.edu
Footnotes:1. Chamar Sabhas like Jatav Mahasabha, Jaiswar Mahasabha, Jatiya Chamar Sabha and many such sabhas were formed at the village level.
2. Officially known as Police Abstracts of Weekly Intelligence, Criminal Investigation Department (CID), UP. The weekly CID reports provide detailed accounts of Chamar protests in UP. See various CID reports between 1922-1926.
3. Report of All-India Adi-Hindu Mahasabha, 7 January 1928, submitted to the Simon Commission. Appendix: List of Memoranda, Evidence-UP/427, Report on United Provinces (3 Vols) Indian Statutory (Simon) Commission, OIOC, British Library (London, UK).
4. Almost all the representations are also available in the private papers of John Simon. MSS. Eur. F. 77/Simon Collection, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library.
5. See Rawat, Â'Partition Politics and Achhut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Castes Federation and Dalit PoliticsÂ', in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Bloomington, 2002), pp. 111-139.
August 22, 2004
http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/025930.html
Sharing the Past, Dividing the Present: India and Pakistan at 57
I want to thank Jonathan, for kindly extending me this opportunity and invitation to guest post in the wake of the recent 57th Independence Anniversary celebrations and commemorations in India and Pakistan. I had initially thought of exploring some of the problems India faces today and how far it has come in redeeming what its first Prime Minister termed 'our tryst with destiny'; perhaps if time and other pressures permit I will have a chance to do so at a later date. Instead, Jonathan has thoughtfully, opened up another vein of discussion and debate and one that is probably of more interest to those who don't have direct connections to the South Asian region: namely the aftermath of Partition and its consequent impact on inter-state relations and Pakistani/Indian nationalisms. Some of the reasons why this is important are obvious, as two nuclear states, engaged in at least one bloody proxy war and periodic mobilisations and heightened states of military preparedness for war; it is a matter of concern that this might escalate into a full-blown nuclear exchange. Other more long-term factors also play a role, as a recent demographic projection in the Guardian showed, in a few decades India will overtake China as the world's most populous nation, and Pakistan will also be amongst the top ten; the former is a growing industrial, financial and technological power with increasingly supra-regional ambitions, situated next to China; whom many see as the world's next Great Power. So some level of interest, in what has usually been a relatively less pressing, and arguably less than glamorous area of the globe is understandable.
In the interests of brevity and the spare any excessive rambling I will constrain myself to listing some of the major lessons and points of significance in what both achieving Independence and Partition has resulted in. Obviously my view is one that is Indian, strongly Secular and very Left-orientated; I won't pretend to be speak or represent other viewpoints, which are in anycase, well represented both the real world and in the blogging one.
One Nation or Two-Nation: View of an Un-Repentant Nationalist
I have to say that I am an unabashed and un-redeemable believer in the 'one nation' as opposed to the 'two nation' theory; I think for many Indians at least the non-saffronist nationalists it is hard to come around any other way of thinking. As Ambedkar is meant to have remarked, "if Muslims do constitute a separate nation then, India doesn't exist"; by this I don't mean to erase any difference or deny the importance of religious identities but it is just a different basis of nationhood or in other words my religion is not my nation (and neither is my ethnicity). The 'two-nation' theory has done irreparable harm to secular and democratic forms of governance in my view; it is unlikely that it formed the primary aim or gaol of even supposedly separatist organisations like the Muslim League, considering that the Pakistan resolution was the result of failed attempts to reach agreements on power-sharing with Congress during the Nationalist movement. I won't rehash history here but the failure to accept the interim proposals of constitutional safeguards and the actual record of Congress provincial governments in the period of dyarchy; particularly in the United Provinces in the late 1930s indicated that as Nehru remarked 'there lurked many a Communalist underneath a Congressman's cloak' and that Congress was quite cavalier in reaching an accommodation or sharing power with the Muslim League. This pattern was repeated several times right up to the Quit India Movement's launch in 1942 and it bespoke more than anything else not Hindu Communalism but the arrogance and the blindness of Congress elites and leadership; the problem wasn't that Congress saw itself as a Hindu movement but the nationalist movement of Hindus and Muslims and laid a claim to speak for both the Hindu and Muslim masses. Ultimately whatever one thinks of this, such an attitude led Congress to take stands which it couldn't back up in the politics of day and given the immensely restricted electorates that operated then; any strategy that relied on mass movements might have been good when confronting a colonial occupying power but were handicaps in an arena where the primary constituency were the landed and propertied classes of the countryside and the town. It is worth remembering that these decisions were taken on the basis of extremely restricted franchises; less than 10% of the population were eligible to vote and this meant that in the case of Partition effectively 6% of Muslims took decisions that decided the fate of the other 90%. Moreover, as Patrick French has observed, most voters were quite misled as to what they were voting for, preconceptions at the time were that Punjab and Bengal, Muslim majority provinces would go to Pakistan and that Delhi, then a Muslim-dominated one demographically would do so as well. No one voted for Partition as such, which was the outcome of a decision taken by the political elites and by the administrative colonial power.
Much of this history and one can ask what relevance it has to us today. It means several things and its sound still reverberates in our ears; but at the purely ideological level, there is a different conception of nationalism. The mainstream Indian one, held that there was only one nation irrespective of religious affiliation; while the Pakistani one argued that there were indeed two based the Hindu and Muslim religions. This in itself creates several problems; for a start if religion is held to be the basis of nationalism; then the question arises of what to do with other minorities who are in a position to demand a nation of their own: most prominently this meant the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Christians/Animists of the Northeast. Despite their long links and in the case of Sikhism, theological and doctrinal ties with Hinduism, there is no a priori reason for these communities to be absorbed into some monolithic Hindu nation. However, the problems don't stop there; for if ever there was a vexatious question it revolves around who exactly can be considered to be a Hindu. Torrential rivers of ink have been expended on this question with no clear issue; but what is increasingly clear is that the attempt to foist a artificial unity on this body of belief has by large not succeeded. Increasing numbers of people have opted out, in favour of other axis of identification, for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, such as Dalits and those outside it such as non-settled adivasi communities it can offer little and indeed these groups were never really included in traditional and orthodox Brahminnical Hinduism in any major way for sustained periods of time. Revivalist Hinduism most powerfully articulated by MK Gandhi held out an inclusive approach to these traditionally marginalised communities and offered the most significant and strongest attempt to include them within the religious fold; However, in the great clash between Ambedkar and Gandhi; which again in a manner reminiscent about mainstream Indian Nationalism's claim to speak for all religious communities, which arose out of Gandhi's insistence that he ultimately alone represented the true and final voice of the Hindu community (including Dalits) there was no doubt on which side the great bulk of Dalit opinion fell and it lay with Ambedkar. Only through de facto emotional blackmail and political manoeuvring was a humiliating climb-down forced on the latter, as manifested in the Poona Pact which gave Gandhi the mandate he desired. These questions to my mind, then revolve around what axis of identification we are to subscribe to in name of the Nation; in the past many of our conflicts arose out of the insistence that one either had to be one thing or another; no third alternative, no duality, no unwillingness to choose was respected. Thus, we saw the suppression of alternatives within attempts to speak for one community or another; the same thing happened for Muslim Leaguers, as Jinnah's stand could not but mean that he would have to denigrate the credibility of any Muslim politician such as Maulana Azad who refused to subscribe to the two-nation theory and remained with Congress, and as a result was contemptuously referred to by Jinnah as the (Muslim) 'Show-boy' of the Congress. My wish is not to contest or debate these kind of characterisations but to reach an acknowledgement that if we are to take ascriptive identities as a starting point; then there are not just one potential nation or even two but many – Pakistan based on the so-called two-nation theory found this out to its cost in 1971 with the secession of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. This drove, as far as I can see, the final nail into the coffin of the two-nation theory; clearly religion cannot be the sole basis of nationality or nationalism; to the exclusion of other elements of self-identity. My desire is to move towards an understanding that in any heterogeneous society there is a need for the acceptance of differing axis of self-understanding and collective mobilisation and a polycentric nationalism; we might be limited within a single state in India but unless we understand that there needs to be high level of latitude within our own nationalism for people to be able to articulate for themselves their own identities, their own cultures and ways of living; then the spectre of secession and balkanisation will arise for us as well.
Being Honest About the Past:
There is a need for honesty in confronting the past and what it means for us today. No doubt as Hartley's famous dictum goes, the Past is a different country and things are done differently there and I might add, just as with spatial distance, the further back one goes, the more this difference can be accentuated in temporal terms as well as spatial ones. However, we are all to some degree affected by the immediate and the near past; as well as the more distant and ancient; clearly as someone who has studied history and been trained as a historian, the past might seem more important than to those who have not but I don't think this is necessarily the case. As a colleague remarked to me a while ago, archaeology in India has become a political science, it is increasingly used to buttress one or another contemporary argument that rage in the political sphere. From the Ayodhya site to the quarrels over the so-called Aryan Invasion theory; each side marshals its array of historical experts and amateurs to sally forth and do battle. What is of concern is that there is often little reflection on why exactly the Past should be so easily used to legitimate a whole range of political positions in the present, on actually attempting to understand how past generations thought and acted and why they did so and on reconciling those parts of history that we don't like, the evidence that doesn't support our prejudices and the actions that upset us. The first part unproblematically assumes that there is no structural break between the past epochs and the present one and abuses history to naturalise what is not by any means natural; thus the idea of auto-cthonous origins for much of Indic civilisation is touted as the supposed rejection of the Aryan Invasion theory, the obvious corollary being that there is a inherent and timeless bond between the land and the inhabitants and anybody who dares question or attempt to share in this is violating what has always been and should be repulsed. This is what I find so repulsive about ideas of historical patrimony that are often thrown about as part of laying claims to this or that piece of land – this kind of perspective always neglects to see that as a stream of events every generation and every group for much of recorded history has been preceded by others, which they have replaced and in turn have sometimes also been replaced. Are those who have come before us to have no claim as well? What about those whose patrimony we have taken over or those who have come after with claims of their own? Are they to be denied what we assert is ours by some notional and fictional bond? There needs to be an acknowledgement that the past is exactly that the Past, it should be confused with the Present or the Future; especially in the case of the distant and ancient Past. While we don't have complete autonomy over what we can do now, and the process of historical change always involves a large degree of continuity, there is also a fair amount of change there as well. What changes we want, in which direction they flow, are influenced by the Past but they are not controlled by it and neither should there be.
The most egregious abuse of history though has to be that which involves the Nationalist movement and the late colonial period. The idea that "Indian Nationalism" is synonymous with "Hindu Nationalism" is not the vestige of some pre-modern religious conception. It is an entirely modern, rationalistic and historicist idea. Like other modern ideologies, it allows for the central role of the state in the modernisation of society and sees the preservation and valorisation of the state's unity and sovereignty as its primary goal. The notion of "Hindu-ness" in this historical conception cannot be defined by any religious criteria. There are no specific beliefs or practises that characterise this "Hindu" and the many doctrinal and sectarian differences among Hindus are irrelevant to its concept. Indeed, even such anti-Vedic and anti-Brahminnical religions such as Buddhism and Jainism are counted in this view as 'Hindu' ones. Similarly people who were not followers of Brahminnical religion and considered as outside of caste society were so subsumed. Much of this was due to mode of classisication of tradition chosen by members of the middle-class colonial intelligentsia, in the later part of the 19th century; imitating their British colonial masters, who had with little regard for the particularities of geography, anthropology and sociology appropriated a cultural ancestry in classical Greece; there was similar impetus and urge to do so for Indians who saw no reason why they could not lay claim to a comparative classical tradition from the Vedic age. This mode of classicisation could comfortably incorporate as particulars the very antagonistic in reality, anti-Brahminnical movements such as Buddhism and Jainism as well as various other deviant popular sects as well as the explicitly atheistic and materialist Vedic schools of philosophy and logic. A classicisation of the past was a requirement for the vertical appropriation of sanitised popular traditions of the rural peasantry and the lower peri-urban order that this emerging nationalist bourgeoisie sought to include on a controlled basis. The real difficulty for this mode lay in the question of Islam in India, which could claim within the same classicising mode, an alternative classical tradition. This construction of the 'nationalist past' by the early generation of historical and political leaders had been done so as a 'Hindu' one despite the fact that this appellation itself was of recent vintage and that the revivalism chose to define itself by a name given to it by in this case the Colonial Other. This history of the nation could accommodate Islam only as a foreign element, domesticated by carefully occluding its own classical lineage and then incorporating what was left – a popular, demotic and mystical Islam that could be inducted in on the sanitised platform of all-embracing syncretism. The consequences of this nationalist imagining of the past was heavily influential and ultimately damaging in its ability to cast a Hindu-centric glare over that which was not actually Hindu and to polarise as a religious-Communalist struggle something which was an anti-colonial one. I don't want to fall into the trap that so many Indian historians often do; either in the Left-Nationalist camp of characterising pre-colonial India as some Golden Age of religious harmony and the outgrowth of communalism and religious nationalism as the result of evil colonial manipulation and neither do I want to replicate the views of Hindu-Nationalist historians that see the pre-medieval period as some sort of Hindu Golden Age, destroyed by the dark medieval era of Muslim invasions and tyranny replaced by the purgatory of less bad European colonial rule, on the path to a resurgent (Hindu) India. Both these extremes are in my view, dishonest and fundamentally flawed views of looking at the past, quite explicitly and in many cases crudely fashioned to serve very contemporary and un-historical purposes in the present. There were religious tensions in the pre-colonial period and many of these did fall into what could be called 'Hindu-Muslim' divides; but what sense does it make to think of these conflicts in these terms in a period where nobody except widows and temple priests would have classified themselves as 'Hindus'; when regional, social, political identities were more important and which did not fall along religious lines and in which conflict just as frequently if not more was trans-communal in nature rather than inter-communal.
Lastly, in coming to the more modern period of nationalism; I feel that there are too many errors in the interpretation and reading of Indian as well as Pakistani history – quite clearly we see the same events but might was well be talking of completely different scenarios. Many of these differences are admirably captured and analysed in Krishna Kumar's book "Prejudice and Pride" which looks at school histories of the freedom struggle in Pakistani and Indian textbooks and classrooms. The most significant problems occur in the key phases of the nationalist movement and I can't help but feel that what is so often taught as history in our classrooms is less real history or critical history but rather some sort of morality play; with the Indian nationalists as the victim and the Muslim separatists as the villains; this plays into more chauvinist readings of Muslim oppression and Hindu victimisation. Indeed this myth of victimisation has only served to ossify any real understanding of the formative period of our nationalism and has acted to cast us as the constant object-victims of history and external actors. Always acted upon and never acting, always having things done to us and never doing anything to others. As Kumar notes this is narrative device that is mirrored in different way by both sides:
History turns into a brochure, and the personalities involved in it become cardboard figures juggled around in the theatre of significant events. This applies to Gandhi and Jinnah in both Indian and Pakistani textbooks, especially towards the closing scenes of their respective narratives. Some lives are sliced into two halves, one acceptable to the Indian textbook writers, and the other to their Pakistani counterparts – the fate of Syed Ahmad Khan and Iqbal. Basically, both countries treat the history of the freedom struggle as a moral tale. The Indian version highlights the triumph of secular nationalism, and the Pakistani version shows how a cultural vision was realised despite gigantic political obstacles. Neither version has the capacity to accommodate complexities and ambiguities. The Indian version virtually forgets about Muslim politics after the hopes born during the short Congress-League collaboration over Khilafat had died. Here onwards, the narrative must avoid the news of all but pro-Congress Muslims; that is why the Nehru Report, the meagre participation of Muslims in civil disobedience, the discord over basic education during the late 1930s, and the Lahore Resolution are glossed over.
The Pakistani textbooks give the Nehru Report a key place in the story they present; even the most compressed accounts find room for Jinnah's fourteen points. The controversy surrounding Gandhi's proposal for basic education also gets elaborate attention. But then, the brush with which both these matters are portrayed is too thick to do justice to the ideological struggle that existed within the Congress. Ignoring Hindu revivalist influence on the Congress enables the Pakistani school historian to target the Congress more purposefully – in terms of the larger orbit of meaning which Pakistan's young citizens are supposed to inhabit psychologically – by calling it a Hindu organization committed to establishing Hindu Raj in India. Of course one can appreciate why the Indian narrative pays little attention to the course of post-1920s Muslim politics. The obvious reason is that the sub-plot of Muslim politics now onwards belongs to the story of Pakistan's freedom, not India's. However, our appreciation of this simple nationalistic logic should not blind us to the pedagogic and, equally significantly, the political cost of the school historian's decision.
The pedagogic cost is that the 1940s must come as a surprise. Without the background of the social and political alienation of the Muslim landed elite and the intelligentsia of the northern plains, the student can hardly make sense of the sudden emergence of the Muslim League as a powerful actor in the early 1940s. Not surprisingly, the Indian narrative is extremely reluctant to go into the details of any event following Quit India. Textbooks jump from one mention to the next, rushing towards Partition which, from the point of view of the young student, begs for an explanation more substantial than what the British-Muslim conspiracy theory can provide. The subjectivity of millions, as shaped by the socialization inherent in the fable of freedom, sustains the South Asian geopolitical order. By depriving children of any rational means to comprehend the overlap between secular and communal nationalisms, the Indian narrative of the national movement socializes the young to perceive Pakistan as an illegitimate achievement. The rival persuasion, to which the Pakistani narrative is dedicated – both as a matter of educational policy and the structure of the story – is to see India as a Hindu nation. The denial of India's claim to being a secular state is central to the 'Pakistan Ideology' that school textbooks are supposed to uphold and disseminate. It requires either complete avoidance or, in the case of steadier accounts, serious downplaying of any events and personalities marking the spirit of secular nationalism which opposed Partition on moral grounds though it could not stop it from becoming a political reality.
Between 1857 and 1947, we can find episodes where the two narratives converge and others where they diverge. In Partition, we find symptoms of both kinds. The two narratives come remarkably close in the cursory manner in which they deal with the violence associated with Partition. The horror and suffering that millions of ordinary men and women faced receive no more than a few lines of cold recording in most Indian and Pakistani textbooks. However, the treatment of Partition as a political event is completely different in the two narratives. For the Indian textbook writers, it was a terrible tragedy that marred the glory of independence. For the Pakistani textbook writers, it was a stunning achievement, marking an escape for the Muslims from the impending Hindu Raj. By giving Partition the status of a great political – and not just human – tragedy, the Indian narrative fuses the secular and the communal perspectives which had so far stayed altogether separate from each other. Partition evokes an irreparable sense of national loss and victimhood in both progressive and conservative varieties of school historiography. The division of India becomes a memory that Indians must forever regret.
In turn, the Muslims who share the blame for this act with the British in divided India's national record must continue to serve as a stereotype of betrayers. No wonder, the word 'Pakistan' is used as the name of a tendency in cinema and literature; and in every recurrence of communal violence, the memory of the creation of Pakistan is inevitably invoked. It is also not surprising that when a visitor from Pakistan talks about peace, substantial parts of the audience slip into the fantasy of a future when the two nations will be reunited. The visitor is mystified to think why his learned Indian listeners don't realise that reuniting with India will mean death for Pakistan and its struggle to establish a separate national identity. The Pakistani portrayal of Partition as a political event also suffers from a sense of irony. The uncertainty and anguish that Jinnah went through at the time of Partition cannot be represented, for it would diminish the superhuman image school textbooks give him. Textbook writers also find it hard to reconcile the idea that Pakistan was a vision preordained by destiny, with the role of manoeuvre in its actual birth. The Pakistani master narrative alludes to the two-nation theory soon after its coverage of the 1857 revolt, citing Syed Ahmad Khan as its earliest proponent. By the time the narrative reaches the early 1940s, it has already used the theory a few times to convey a sense of inevitability about the eventual creation of Pakistan.
So strongly and repeatedly does the narrative, in most textbook versions, refer to Pakistan as a goal recognized from the beginning of the freedom struggle, that the only curiosity it can satisfy in the final episode is about how the goal was ultimately attained. Yet, when it comes, the final episode conveys the message that Pakistan was the outcome of Hindu intransigence expressed in the unaccommodative attitude of the Congress. For Indian children, not just the narrative of the freedom struggle, but history itself comes to an end with Partition and independence. As a constituent of social studies, and later on as a subject in its own right, history runs out of content in 1947, except for some of the events associated with independence, such as Gandhi's assassination, making of the Constitution and the beginning of Five-year plans. What has happened in the last 55 years may filter through the measly civics syllabus, popular cinema and television; history as formally constituted knowledge of the past does not cover it. Partition remains the last major event to have 'occurred' in India's long history, and as such it can be expected to maintain in the child's mind an evocative freshness – both as an item signifying the end of the freedom struggle and as a factor of children's socialisation into a political legacy. Pakistan is a part of that legacy, and it is a highly significant political fact of contemporary South Asia that the last news Indian children get of Pakistan in the course of their institutionalized education is about its birth. For any more recent news they must depend on sources like Border and Ghaddar. For Pakistani textbooks, Partition marks neither an ending nor a discontinuity, and the narrative smoothly moves on. In the post-independence history of Pakistan, India figures quite often – in the stories of wars, in the context of Kashmir, or simply as a Hindu neighbour. Not just the teaching of history, the entire curriculum is embedded in a masculine, war-oriented and anti-Hindu ideal of the nation state. Textbooks interchange the word 'Bharat' with 'India' in a seemingly unpatterned manner, but if one looks carefully, the former gets preference in contexts which are explicitly hostile.
Talking about the experience of colonialism, Said remarked that the ex-coloniser and the ex-colonised share the same history but remember it differently; well, in this case on both sides of the divide, the post-colonials have an even stronger historical bond but their remembering diverge even more sharply. I don't think being more honest about the past or looking at it critically will solve many of the problems that we face; but I do think that if we can't be honest and properly critical about such vital phases of our own nationalisms' history then there is little scope for us being able to be honest in the present and build a serious foundation for the future. From an Indian perspective, it is time that we debunked the morality play aspect of events and examined them more sensibly; opportunities were missed, problems did exist in how nationalism and a nationalist past were imagined and most importantly both political leaders and parties made big mistakes. Gandhi and Nehru were in several ways giant figures but they were also deeply flawed; Gandhi, often referred to as the 'Father of the Nation' I think by the subsequent turn of events can be said to have been proved largely wrong on a range of issues such as his arguments about the role of religion and nature of Indian society in his debates with Tagore and of course most famously in his analysis and critique of the caste system and the development and history of Hinduism in his clash with Ambedkar. Despite this, they were of a different calibre to most of our leaders today; the main difference that while our current leaders talk a lot about morality and principles; our former ones actually tried to put these into practise instead of chattering about them. Gandhi's fast and his insistence that the portion of the treasury due to Pakistan be transferred to it, hostilities in Kashmir and communal rioting notwithstanding and he was serious about his declared intention to cross the border and live out the rest of his days in Pakistan. A move which would have caused serious embarrassment to the new governments of both countries and which was forestalled, obviously by his assassination. Similar points can be made about Nehru but the main obstacle remains, in that on the crucial issue of Hindu-Muslim relations they were either unable to win over a key segment of the Muslim elite nor were they able to articulate a version of nationalist mobilisation that could prevent and contain communal violence. Many of these developments owed to contingent factors no doubt, such as the different social base of Congress, repeated conflicts and suppression by the colonial authorities and problems of internal social reform and economic debates; however on the insistence of a One Nation stance there was both a reluctance to grant Muslim political aspirations enough autonomy accompanied by an insistence on keeping such an opinion with the 'mainstream' strand of opinion. Such a position could neither bear the expression of any autonomous political dissent and far more damagingly it could not command the confidence to make such expressions marginal. Some of the trap of this kind of mentality is carried over into the thinking of the current Indian Prime Minister, very much a Congressman of the old school and also in my view probably the most administratively competent and intelligent man to occupy that position so far; but in an interview with the journalist Jonathan Power, he made it explicitly clear that any question of a plebiscite in Kashmir was ruled out on the grounds that the "electorate would be completely divided on a communal basis" and on such conditions any "free and fair" expression of democratic desires would not be possible. Whatever one thinks of this analysis, it displays a worrying inability to come up with new solutions to persistent problems that have defied old ones.
Fears, Desires for the Future:
I should conclude this already too long piece by summing up both what I can describe as my fears as well as my desires for the future. These days we hear a lot of apocalyptic talk of the 'clash of civilisations' the threat of Islamist terrorism and the rise of 'Islamo-fascism' (whatever this is meant to be). This has expectedly been interpreted in various opportunistic ways by different states in different regions for their own purposes; some good, but most not so good. There is also a lot of hand-wringing and questioning of whether some states and some nationalisms will be able to survive the supposedly imminent deluge that is going to engulf us (globally speaking here). I have to say this is really not amongst my deepest fears and isn't what really frightens me; of course any potential for a nuclear holocaust, either as part of a military war or terrorist attack is something that would be horrific and terrifying but I don't think we are near such an event occurring. At least from a South Asian perspective, the flash-point of Kashmir does exist as a potential trigger and to use a Clintonism is probably among the more dangerous places in the world. However my fears are more deep-seated and they don't revolve around any such escalation, which would in my view, be a failure of current policy. What worries me, is not the threat of defeat but paradoxically the threat of victory. Of course, this is a luxury allowed to those who come from large nations and those with the resources and power to withstand almost all external and internal attacks – barring the most catastrophic and so won't be shared by those from other situations which are quite different. But it remains a deep and serious source of concern for me; to be truthful; while irredentism is a serious threat in South Asia, I think we have the staying power to overcome it. Both in economic and military terms, only the intervention of a major external power can make any difference and even this in the long-run won't be able to drastically change the outcomes all that much compared to regional factors. But two very serious dangers remain and they are all the more serious because their effects won't be felt immediately and will be dispersed over a considerable time period. The first is primarily a purely internal one; and it relates to the problems encountered in our border states and regions with insurgencies and sub-nationalist movements demanding either greater autonomy or secession. Ultimately, these can be contained without seriously destabilising the internal security situation given the current trajectory of developments; particularly if we are willing to use the maximum levels of force available and apply it in a consistently ruthless fashion. Yet while a military success might be so ensured, the political costs would be huge; already unleashing waves of chauvinist nationalism has caused considerable damage to the judicial integrity of the state, the position of various minority ethnic and religious groups and also to the democratic functioning of the state itself. The question that needs to be asked here and tackled head on; is that if we choose to fight these mini-wars in such a fashion, sure we can win but will it be worth it if we end up living in some form of an illiberal, quasi-democratic, majoritarian segmented autocracy? We need to ask ourselves just how far we are willing go and what costs we are willing to pay before embarking on any such courses of action and look for alternatives while there is still the chance to do so.
The second dilemma is an even more serious and sombre one and this relates very much to the nature of the inter-state system on the geo-political scene. This is the old dichotomy that all ascendant powers must face; from the classical periods of Athens and Rome; it has been faced by democratic and republican powers that acquire both military, territorial and economic power over their neighbours. This is the practise of imperial power abroad and the effects this has on democracy at home; Republic or Empire is something that many emerging Powers will have to face in the modern international system at some stage and already in our hegemonic attitude towards the smaller states of SAARC the foundations of such strategy are being slowly crystallised. Reconciling the existence and continuance of democratic modes of governance and functioning within the domestic sphere will be harder and harder to do externally, as the power of the Nation-state increases and the disparity with relatively smaller and weaker neighbours widens. Even if relations with Pakistan are excluded, enough evidence from our relations with other South Asian states exists to indicate that this is a dilemma which we cannot escape in the long-term and which I don't think we can satisfactorily resolve. The only solution as I see it, which is a greater level of co-operation in economic, political, ecological and demographic terms within SAARC members can defuse this looming problem. This in turn however, rests on two separate and equally crucial pillars: the first is a successful settlement of the Indo-Pak conflict and a willingness by both neighbours to embark on such a course of action and the second is the ability of India as the regional giant to be able to reassure and guarantee to the smaller nation-states that their concerns and treatment within any regional forum or association will not see their interests suffer, will hear their voices taken seriously and won't be an excuse for unilateral Indian hegemonic domination that is detrimental. On both counts, unfortunately, I am pessimistic for the foreseeable future of any major improvement happening.
Posted by Conrad at August 22, 2004 08:43 PMThanks for this; I wasn't aware of many of the background facts and details of historiography you pointed out. I'm not competent to argue with much of what you say, but the following points may be of interest:
archaeology in India has become a political science
History is and always has been a political science, and it seems to be getting more rather than less so. The old saw about history being written by the victors has turned into a dynamic in which control of history is seen as part of victory. The arenas for historical debate these days include legislatures and diplomatic negotiations; witness, for instance, the recurring demands that countries apologize for decades or centuries-old atrocities, or the intense lobbying over whether the United States Congress should recognize that the Armenians suffered a genocide in 1915.
Granted, this isn't new or unique to India, as the Versailles war guilt clause makes clear. In a country like India that is at the center of so many external and internal conflicts, though, it's hardly surprising that history is political or that attempts are being made to legislate it.
if we are to take ascriptive identities as a starting point; then there are not just one potential nation or even two but many [...] in any heterogeneous society there is a need for the acceptance of differing axis of self-understanding and collective mobilisation and a polycentric nationalism; we might be limited within a single state in India but unless we understand that there needs to be high level of latitude within our own nationalism for people to be able to articulate for themselves their own identities, their own cultures and ways of living; then the spectre of secession and balkanisation will arise for us as well.
I agree with this to the point of wondering whether it might have been the optimal solution to the problem of post-colonial regionalism. Maybe India should have been granted independence, not as one nation or two, but as a confederation of nations (which, in many ways, it was during the Raj) united by an EU-type superstructure. It probably wasn't on, though; the idea of effective governmental institutions above the nation-state level was a radical one in 1947, and a conversion of provinces into nations would inevitably have resulted in the maharajahs demanding a role.
I wonder, though, if regional integration might ultimately result in a latter-day version of the same thing. One effect of European integration has been a strengthening of regionalism, as the existence of political institutions above the nation-state level combined with legal recognition of minority rights gives regions an avenue of appeal against the nations of which they are part. If the SAARC ever resolves into something similar, a coalition of smaller countries and regional interests within India might demand rights for regions as a means of preventing Delhi from exercising overwhelming power. I'm not ready to say that this would provide a solution for the two problems you cite, but it might be a start.
Conrad,
You can probably guess where I disagree with you, but here goes:
unless we understand that there needs to be high level of latitude within our own nationalism for people to be able to articulate for themselves their own identities, their own cultures and ways of living; then the spectre of secession and balkanisation will arise for us as well.
This isn't true historically. In France, the Paris region had succeeded over centuries in imposing its dialect and its rule on a largish portion of Western Europe which became France. Federal arrangements in the former Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia crumbled. Quite often, the center does win, and succeeds in imposing its identity on everyone else. Often a good thing, too.
Much of this was due to mode of classisication of tradition chosen by members of the middle-class colonial intelligentsia
This begs the question of why did most other 'hindus' choose eventually to belong to this classicized version of hinduism. It must have been more convincing in the first place.
The [Pakistani] visitor is mystified to think why his learned Indian listeners don't realise that reuniting with India will mean death for Pakistan and its struggle to establish a separate national identity
I still don't understand what you would say to that person. What was Madison's line? "If all men were angels there would be no need laws much less for government". In a state where muslims are in the minority, they will be open to abuse - that's the long and the short of it.
Reconciling the existence and continuance of democratic modes of governance and functioning within the domestic sphere will be harder and harder to do externally
Why? Britain frex did quite well at democratizing and conquering the world at the same time. The USA has become a much more democratic country as well during its tenure as top nation.
Jonathan,
Maybe India should have been granted independence, not as one nation or two, but as a confederation of nations
This would not have solved the problems since identities were diffuse everywhere. You would have ended up with even more border problems between the different nations.
the idea of effective governmental institutions above the nation-state level was a radical one in 1947
Still is.
Posted by: Danny at August 25, 2004 06:47 AMDanny:
In the case of France, the outlying populations arguably didn't have collective identities exclusively of France; Brittany with its tradition of medieval statehood, and Alsace with its German ties, are the exceptions which come most quickly to mind.
Posted by: Randy McDonald at August 25, 2004 04:46 PMDanny:
This would not have solved the problems since identities were diffuse everywhere. You would have ended up with even more border problems between the different nations.
Not necessarily, if the colonial borders were used; these were somewhat more settled than the borders in Africa, so they probably wouldn't have driven as many conflicts. On the other hand, a continuation of the princely states would have left unresolved the problem of what to do with the princes, and the confederal arrangement might have limited the center's ability to control communal conflicts within regions.
Randy:
In the case of France, the outlying populations arguably didn't have collective identities exclusively of France
Corsica? Then again, metropolitan France hasn't really succeeded in imposing its identity on the Corsicans, so maybe it's the exception that proves the rule.
Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein at August 25, 2004 06:22 PMJonathan:
Thanks for this; I wasn't aware of many of the background facts and details of historiography you pointed out.
That isn't necessarily a problem as I think comes out from Kumar's argument about teaching of history – quite clearly many who have been well acquainted and know a lot more about these issues; suffer from various conditioned problems that are hard to shake free of.
History is and always has been a political science, and it seems to be getting more rather than less so.
There is much truth in what you say; I guess my response would be on two levels. Firstly, as some one whose training has been in history and economics, I guess I find it hard to accept this at a basic paradigm simply because economists and historians and economic historians; think about their disciplines in some ways that are very different from how political scientists regard their subjects. We are meant to be open to a degree of verification and have some objective criteria that while peer-determined and not purely objective, are meant to form some sort of standard of judgement of quality independent of politics. I know a lot of this is now idealised and less true, but I think historians and other social scientists will find it hard to accept the politicisation of their disciplines – it is one thing to say that history has become a political science – which I still have difficulty with and another to say that it is hard to take politics out of history – which I agree. However, I think you are right in what you say about the direction that the discipline is going, and one of the problems is that historians are still not well versed in knowing how make political judgements properly nor do they always have the theoretical apparatuses to explore the political implications of their work properly. At some level also, we need to realise that the past is over-determined by concerns in the present and that it can't be allowed to adjudicate all political decisions in the present and nor can it be allowed to become completely politicised. Some level of distinction and barriers need to be set up that allows the past to be the past and the present to be something else entirely; this should especially be the case for the distant past as opposed to the immediate past. Political knowledge and decisions should be differentiated from historical ones in this sense.
Maybe India should have been granted independence, not as one nation or two, but as a confederation of nations (which, in many ways, it was during the Raj) united by an EU-type superstructure. It probably wasn't on, though; the idea of effective governmental institutions above the nation-state level was a radical one in 1947, and a conversion of provinces into nations would inevitably have resulted in the maharajahs demanding a role.
The confederation idea was touted to some degree, but Congress and the Congress elite refused it; for a number of reasons the framework of a weak centre was seen as undesirable and this is what scotched most attempts to come to an agreement that would have satisfied both the ML and Congress. As for the Princely States, effectively they would have been taken over I think, since Land Reform and the demands of the peasantry were a key part of the Congress platform – indeed this is why the NC in Kashmir supported Congress rather than Jinnah's ML since the latter tended on the whole to favour landlords and feudal elements to build up support since it could compete with the Congress and other regional parties such as the Krishak Praja in Bengal or the Punjab Unionist Party in other key provinces. Whether in a unitary state the Princelings could have allied themselves with an ML against a Congress-dominated centre is hard to say; certainly neither Pakistan nor India tolerated them once Partition did happen, though Pakistan was not able to carry out as significant a land reform as India was.
I wonder, though, if regional integration might ultimately result in a latter-day version of the same thing. One effect of European integration has been a strengthening of regionalism, as the existence of political institutions above the nation-state level combined with legal recognition of minority rights gives regions an avenue of appeal against the nations of which they are part. If the SAARC ever resolves into something similar, a coalition of smaller countries and regional interests within India might demand rights for regions as a means of preventing Delhi from exercising overwhelming power. I'm not ready to say that this would provide a solution for the two problems you cite, but it might be a start.
Yeah, that is pretty much my thinking as well; though there are a number of obstacles that would need to be overcome and pitfalls to be avoided.
Danny:
This isn't true historically. In France, the Paris region had succeeded over centuries in imposing its dialect and its rule on a largish portion of Western Europe which became France. Federal arrangements in the former Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia crumbled. Quite often, the center does win, and succeeds in imposing its identity on everyone else. Often a good thing, too.
Couple of points here; first off, from the examples you mentioned it seems that the Centre also loses a lot of times as well; particularly when it seeks to impose its will by force and enter in exploitative relationships with the peripheral regions. This is a big gamble and not one I am sure is worthwhile taking. Secondly, I don't think the French-Parisian example is appropriate; this was at a time when democratic and social situations were quite different, there was no mass-based nationalism, no universal franchise, no concept of social equality or isonomy – we are simply talking about a social and political world very different from our own. Moreover, this process of state-formation was quite a violent one and involved a lot of fighting and dynastic wars with other parts of Europe as well; when a reasonably solidified and universalist nationalism did emerge it led to the 1789 Revolution and then Napoleon – and we all know how this turned out. And what do we have now in France – well a supra-national project in the guise of the EU, which everybody seems to despise so much. If this is the endpoint for a successful assertion of the Centre I hope we can accomplish something similar without having to go through the same bloody industrial killing fields and internal dislocation, which is kind of what my own regionalist approach is about. Lastly, I have to ask, so who gets to decide what the 'central identity' is and who it is imposed on; much of the crisis in India and in Pakistan as well as elsewhere in the region comes from the fact that the Centre itself is divided and those who are having their own identities trampled on and stamped on refuse to go quietly into the night and fight back. And why no, I don't expect any social or political group to commit collective ethnocide or politicide, especially on the hope that in the long run the victory of the centre will be a good thing. This is almost a Marxist-Leninist approach to contemporary suffering, I think it was Freud who said when it being explained to him what Communism in Russia entailed that it involved a considerable amount of suffering and violence in the present from which would lead prosperity and an new age of freedom in the future, that "well I believe the first part". Teleological arguments that rely on deferred omelettes in the future to justify breaking eggs today should be avoided, except as a last resort. I think we need to realise that these days and in our age unlike previous rounds of state-building, power in itself does not confer authority or legitimacy and so the sword and gun simply can't perform the tasks that they used to in earlier periods. Some appeal to popular sovereignty or supra-local ideology is needed along with the various other institutional apparatuses to give the modern state and nation a concrete form; any that rely solely on force will eventually fail.
This begs the question of why did most other 'hindus' choose eventually to belong to this classicized version of hinduism. It must have been more convincing in the first place.
I have simplified the analysis a fair bit here; this is very much a view conditioned by the early intelligentsia which was primarily Bengali and later on north Indian and based on the Gangetic plains. It was a class that benefited from acquisition to all the early requirements of nation-building: access to print capitalism, modern education, urban concentrations of capital and communication and the colonial encounter with modernity. This class were also the intermediaries between colonial rule and the native subjects, and so were essential for the authority and legitimacy of the Raj to be maintained – indeed without such a collaborationist class, the colonial project in India would have not been possible and when sections of this class started to withdraw from supporting colonial rule the writing appeared on the wall for the Raj. If you remember Congress was actually stared by an Englishman and for the first few decades was nothing more than a talking shop for these middle class Indians, who until the interwar period didn't want anything more radical than Dominion status and certainly not independence. This class was only weakly connected to other parts of the nation such as the rural and urban proletariat, the peasantry and the marginalised communities; none of whom really had much of a say in constructing the kind of nationalism they might have wanted. Much of today what passes as 'mainstream Hindu' culture wasn't the case as recently as the late 18th century – a good example is the Kali shrines and cult popular in Bengal, now a huge festival and sect, but in this period it was popular only amongst adivasis, hunter-groups and rural labouring castes. Many of the current festivals have a similar history as the Ganapthi festival in Mumbai, which were a purely constructed one shows. Lastly, who 'chose' to belong to this version of nationalism; even at the elite level and amongst the intelligentsia there was considerable debate about how this should be seen and whether a secular one was more preferable. What overrode them was Gandhian nationalism which had a very different conception of Hinduism and nationalism as well as the role of religion in politics – and which by far was the most popular coherent ideological form, its primary weakness being its reliance on a single charismatic individual.
I still don't understand what you would say to that person. What was Madison's line? "If all men were angels there would be no need laws
much less for government".
Well, it was Kumar that posed that question rhetorically, and he was making the point that many Indians can't understand the Pakistani point over and have a monolithic concept of their own nationalism as well as what it means for current political realities. I do agree with you in that I don't think anybody's national identity as currently constituted should be trashed, I certainly don't want to say to any Pakistanis that there entire national existence is some sort of aberration but I still don't subscribe to the two-nation theory and I don't think many others do either. Frex I don't think many Bangladeshis would necessarily disagree with the argument that the two-nation theory was effectively debunked in 1971 and that for them the creation of Pakistan wasn't the great liberation they were hoping for and much genocidal violence lay later on. However, if the two nation theory is dead, maybe we need to come with a multi-national theory instead; neither India nor Pakistan have successfully been able to incorporate all segments of their territories within the nation-state project; Kashmir remains a bilateral issue though what most Kashmiris want, is I suspect independence from both countries – that is certainly what they understand by the slogans of azadi; the northeast is a complete mess in India while for Pakistan the Pasthun issue is on the boil and attempts to assert state authority in the NWFP and FTA haven't been received well; already one is hearing of various currents moving in Baluchistan which is poised to re-assert its own regionalist demands and the Mohajir movement remains a continual problem. It is probably time that it is accepted that either nationalism has to become flexible in order to include those who feel that they have been left out or it needs to be re-articulated so that instead of one great one-sided version of it emanating out from the Punjab or the Gangetic and colonising the rest of the national imaginary, we have one that is more polyvalent, has several regional centres, doesn't restrict itself to one civilisational tradition and can include other voices as well.
In a state where muslims are in the minority, they will be open to abuse - that's the long and the short of it.
Yes, I thought you would say this. Part of the difference is that we have different conceptions of nationalism and starting points; I am not an ethnic or religious nationalist; this simply to me isn't the basis of nation-hood. One can use the analogy of the family to flesh this out, of course my immediate and ascriptive identity is that of a close-knit unit such as the family and I have a strong loyalty and personal bond to this, just as I do to my own personal family – but one single family can't constitute a society by itself and in itself changes as well as people enter and people leave. To insist that it does would be to artificially restrict and in the end, kill the family unit itself in my view. As for religious identity, I have to say that this is an abhorrent notion to me, as an Indian in anycase, this isn't really what I understand Indian civilisation and our past to be about, religious divisions are for the most part created by men and so can be superseded by them. Since I am not a theist, I can't believe that these have any intrinsic merit or are somehow part of the divine natural order, they are not; which doesn't make them any the less powerful or destructive but my argument is that we have to devise ways and means of living with them and transforming them peacefully rather than eradicating them (the radical secularist-materialist option) or endorsing them to perpetuate further cleavages within social and political bodies (the chauvinist ethnic/fundamentalist position). Personally, this is what a lot of our Freedom struggle was about; while I don't deny there was always a communalist tinge, it was for the most part a mass movement and a pan-communal one. This journey was started together and I feel strongly that we must finish it together (speaking in South Asian terms).
Secondly, there is a practical question, that we have to face. There are over 100 million Indian Muslims and this is the third largest population in the world today; we can't transfer them anywhere, nor can we shove them into cantonments; this is simply a logistical, physical and political impossibility for us. There is also the question of inter-regional politics; at our stage of nation-state formation I completely think that for a proper democratic transition to occur it must be a regional one; unless we see one on such basis there will be a reversion into some form of ethnic oligarchy and authoritarian rule; whether we like it or not Indian democracy's success is bound up with the fate of democracy in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. I tell you quite seriously if democracy doesn't succeed and lay down some deep-roots in the former; then we are in real trouble and it will mean in the end the failure of our own democracy. We cannot avoid entanglements nor interaction and given the dispersal of religious and ethnic minorities this will be potentially explosive if manipulated and held hostage to the machinations of military or repressive regimes in the region. There can be no Iron Wall strategy here, unless we are willing to indulge in violence on a massive scale (levels are already pretty bad) and as our security has now become mutually-dependent thanks to nuclearisation, this is even more the case.
Thirdly, I think the problem of minorities is an inherently democratic one, in that it is only faced by democracies in a particular political way. In most other regimes, particularly authoritarian or repressive ones; whichever group is in power will manipulate, coerce and oppress the rest on its own narrow social base; it might scapegoat some minorities but it can't go too far otherwise it will exhaust the groups of people to blame. However in a democracy, there will always be some level of heterogeneity, as sovereignty is vested in the population as a whole and the individuals that constitute the nation and each element can claim a democratic right to make its own voice heard; not as some sort of favour to the ruling regime or state but on the very basis of democratic legitimisation itself. Minorities in one form or another, are, outside near-homogenous societies, an intrinsic phenomenon of democracies. We cannot escape this problem and even if we were able to remove Muslims from our midst this would not remove the underlying problem; in almost all such democratic states there is always a difference of opinion on how to deal with minorities and other dis-empowered groups in political, economic and social terms; if the supposed group in question could somehow be disappeared this problem will still remain as it is not the existence of the group as such that causes this conflict but the differing positions of those within the polity along ideological lines that does. So some people have a certain idea of national belonging and what constitutes a nation, so they kick out or get rid a group that they don't consider as one that belongs – you don't think that this is a problem for the rest of us? The stigmatised group might have gone but we have to live with the ones that attacked them in the first place and how can they be trusted to respect democratic rights or individual liberty in one sphere and area if they violate it in another. This is also not a purely national-political question; it is also a social question, a gender question, an economic question, a sexual question and instances can be multiplied several-fold; those that arbitrate difference along these lines and don't respect the right of others' alterity will invariably cause conflict in other spheres as well. We have already seen what this can mean for other groups such as women when such values are allowed to pre-dominate and on this I can't see any middle ground. One is either for or against it; political separation of ethnic or religious minorities, in my view is not a fight against communalism or racism within the polity; it is rather the reverse only when these are accepted as inevitable and the combat against them abandoned, can ethnic and religious separatism become the primary political strategy chosen. In my opinion, in most cases and certainly in the South Asian one this is a defeatist mentality and a disastrous one to adopt there is a famous quote by Gandhi on this " the way to Swaraj does not lie through akharas, if they are meant as preparation of self-defence in a Hindu-Muslim conflict they are foredoomed to failure. Muslims can play the same game and make such preparations covert, or overt. They can provide no remedy." As I said, I remain an unrepentant nationalist, and my nationalism doesn't include treating minorities in such a way; the only solution to what you propose from your standpoint is for every minority to have their own state (and hope that the ensuing inter-state conflict doesn't wipe them out) this is not feasible in the Indo-Pak one and even it was I wouldn't advocate or support it; to me it is just comes across as, cowardly (I mean this in metaphorical terms, not personal, obviously) we have a responsibility to act in such a way towards our religious minorities and when that is challenged by those in the dominant majority, then we can't just give in and tell the minority 'yeah sorry but you need to emigrate' this does not remove the problem of the bigots left behind who will find other venues for their pet hatreds and it doesn't do much for those of our own compatriots abroad who are minorities in other states where they can be exposed to the same treatment. This whole way of thinking erodes any real form of democratic governance and will be in the end self-destructive.
I want a state where the major minorities don't have to be afraid or parade their loyalties to exist within the nation. I want one where the axis of identification doesn't have to be along anyone singular ethnic or religious lines, because I don't think such identities can be reduced to such simple categories. In one way or another we are all minorities and should accord the respect we want to others as well. As I said earlier, our independence didn't come cheap, colonial rule was quite repressive and in its indirect economic mis-management of famine and food distribution in particular led to millions of deaths; thousands more died in direct struggle and quite a few million spent years in prison to get it; few of them did this to set up some sort of theocratic, repressive raj; more similar to the one they wanted to overthrow than the one they wanted to replace it with. Living in a democracy is a key part of this and I don't think anything less would be accepted now, despite the disillusionment with it amongst many, particularly elite, classes in India. As I said to you once before, in a democracy, if I push someone; I want him to have the confidence to demand an apology and be ready to push right back regardless of who or what he is; I don't want him to keep quiet and go to another corner, or grimace and rue the day he happened to born in a state where he was a minority, or smile and wish he was living somewhere across the border where he could assert himself freely. I know you will say that you just want to live somewhere where you won't be pushed; but my response is that this is something of a fantasy; under current conditions wherever we live we will either be one who are doing the pushing (a dominant majority) or the ones being pushed (a minority) and in the former case I feel strongly that we should at least live in a state that gives the those in the latter position the confidence to assert themselves without fear and without any sense inferiority. I know this is a tall order but then the fruits of any desirable political order, such as a real democracy, an inclusive national fraternity, an equitable social order, and pluralist civil society don't come on a platter; they have to be fought and struggled for.
You may like this picture as well just to show you that there is indeed no depth to which I will not sink to prove that brown + bearded people can indeed co-exist peacefully. Mr. Musharraf, rip open that biscuit packet ;)
Why? Britain frex did quite well at democratizing and conquering the world at the same time. The USA has become a much more democratic country as well during its tenure as top nation.
Two things; firstly I am a Leftist, so obviously my definition of democracy will include a socio-economic component as opposed to a purely procedural or juridical one that some Conservatives and Classical liberals might prefer. In this sense I do think there is a definite contradiction in the costs of Empire and benefits of it; you have read your Orwell, so you will understand the role the British Empire played in maintaining the domestic class system; I don't think it is any accident that the great advances of the British Welfare state were only achievable once the Empire had effectively been abandoned or was in the process of being so – Beveridge could speak of a war on want, disease and ignorance – not on some distant land far away as a result. I think similarly, having an Empire leads to a distortion in the distribution of economic welfare and is inordinately borne by the less well-off who are the ones who have to go off and fight and die for Empire in many cases. This income and wealth inequality is generally aggravated by following such a imperialist foreign policy as some of the most important Liberal thinkers like JA Hobson have pointed out
Secondly, I think it does have a corrupting effect on how democratic power is exercised domestically as well; in over-strengthening the executive and weakening restraints on its power. It also leads the problem of the Leviathan-state, which accumulates power unto itself as end in itself, rather than a means to another goal; particularly when combined with chauvinist forms of nationalism this can lead to recurring and persistent aggressive foreign policies as well as expansionary ones. This will erode democracy whether one likes to acknowledge it or not, by distorting the domestic scene, introduction of extra-parliamentary/representative group interests and the lure of financial gain for elements within the domestic private sphere and public administration. I think this is along the lines of what many American Presidents warned of, when Washington frex, spoke against entering into alliances with European powers in their continental wars and what Eisenhower referred to when he spoke of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex". Because these effects work indirectly and are structural rather than individualistic in nature or even explicit formal political phenomenon, they are easy to disregard in the short-term and ignore until they have become very deep-seated into the body politic.
The extension of franchise also to key excluded sections of the populace didn't have to do with direct Empire acquisition as such but had other causes – frex the granting of suffrage to women was a result of their actions during WWI and the pressures of the Russian Revolution and the Cold War played a key role in de-segregation in the US. I doubt that imperial foreign policies aided these measures; but they certainly did hamper the kind of democracy that I think a modern, civilised state should aim for in the present.
This is almost a Marxist-Leninist approach to contemporary suffering, I think it was Freud who said [...] Teleological arguments that rely on deferred omelettes in the future to justify breaking eggs today should be avoided
Nice. Point well made. Actually the french example was relatively benign, but never mind.
my argument is that we have to devise ways and means of living with [religions] and transforming them peacefully
The argument here is circular; if you have already have constructed a 'we' which consists of people from different religions, then this is possible. If one hasn't, then there's a problem, and one must think in terms of a more narrow and credible 'we' to begin with - though you could say that my argument is circular as well. In any case, it's good to see you embrace Gandhi's saying "We must become the change we want to see in the world".
Indian democracy's success is bound up with the fate of democracy in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
Why? I mean, I understand that India needs those countries to be stable, but why ought they be democratic?
this does not remove the problem of the bigots left behind who will find other venues for their pet hatreds
This is a very good point. The christians might be next.
Mr. Musharraf, rip open that biscuit packet
The problem is far deeper than Musharraf and you know it. Is there any constituency in Pakistan that's wants unification?
Posted by: Danny at August 26, 2004 12:47 PMHistory is and always has been a political science, and it seems to be getting more rather than less so.
There is much truth in what you say; I guess my response would be on two levels. Firstly, as some one whose training has been in history and economics, I guess I find it hard to accept this at a basic paradigm simply because economists and historians and economic historians; think about their disciplines in some ways that are very different from how political scientists regard their subjects.
Well, part of the problem is that history isn't only the province of academic historians but also of legislatures, diplomats, lawyers and political pressure groups. History has always been dictated in dictatorships, but it has become increasingly common for democracies to determine history by treaty or majority vote. There are several factors that have contributed to this, but I think the following are the most important:
- Historical rights as the basis of claims for property, financial restitution, group legal exemptions, and similar matters, all of which can result in legislative or judicial fact-finding regarding history. One of the primary roles of indigenous land claims tribunals in Australia, NZ, Canada and South Africa, for instance, is determination of historical facts that potentially go back centuries. Applications for national minority rights in Europe can also involve legislative appeals based on history; the list goes on.
- The desire for recognition of past oppression and/or achievement as an integral part of minorities' demands. Something as simple as a declaration of September 2004 as National Jewish History Month in the United States, for instance, is likely to involve legislative findings regarding American Jewish history. Not only Jews but many other minorities make appeals for similar recognition, which can be problematic when the legislature is called upon to sort out competing claims; e.g., over the Armenian genocide.
- History-based diplomacy, in which allegations of historical fact are used to bolster or undermine negotiations or claims under international law. Democracies are no more immune to this than dictatorships - see, for instance, competing claims over what constituted the historical Land of Israel - and such appeals seem to be an effective way to appeal to the court of international public opinion.
All this can sometimes overshadow the work of historians, especially since legislative or judicial declarations (1) have a legal authority that academic history lacks, and (2) have more avenues to make themselves heard. There may also be a spillover effect in which the increasing politicization of history (and possibly a general breakdown of the divide between politics and academia) has influenced the work of academic and popular historians; I've certainly seen some recent historical works that are highly politicized, although I'm not close enough to the field to have an informed opinion as to whether this is a trend.
The confederation idea was touted to some degree, but Congress and the Congress elite refused it; for a number of reasons the framework of a weak centre was seen as undesirable and this is what scotched most attempts to come to an agreement that would have satisfied both the ML and Congress.
This proposal was seriously put forward, then? Was the proposed confederation ever sketched out in any detail, and if so, what would it have looked like?
As for the Princely States, effectively they would have been taken over I think, since Land Reform and the demands of the peasantry were a key part of the Congress platform
But would a Congress-led central government in a weak confederation have been able to force the princely states to democratize and implement land reform, or would the union have been a patchwork of democratic and non-democratic states? What would have been done with Hyderabad, for instance?
Why? Britain frex did quite well at democratizing and conquering the world at the same time. The USA has become a much more democratic country as well during its tenure as top nation.
Two things; firstly I am a Leftist, so obviously my definition of democracy will include a socio-economic component as opposed to a purely procedural or juridical one that some Conservatives and Classical liberals might prefer.
I'm sure you'll really love me for saying this, but I think this belief is a natural extension of constitutional liberalism. The very foundation of constitutional liberalism is that procedural rights alone will not guarantee meaningful democracy; e.g., elections won't guarantee democratic rule if the government can control the information available to voters, prevent the formation of political associations or harass dissidents with impunity. The requirements of substantive democracy are usually framed in terms of political rights but can just as easily be extended to economic rights; after all, a person kept in peonage by an employer is as much deprived of democratic participation as one who is unable to start a newspaper or a political party.
My own conception of democracy, as a constitutional liberal, certainly includes economic rights; for instance, I think that the right to bargain collectively (through unions, labor tribunals or both) is an essential component of democratic self-rule because it provides the only effective mechanism to enforce certain juridical rights. I also think democracy requires certain cultural rights such as freedom of language and artistic expression, and that certain areas of behavior should be left to the individual conscience rather than legal regulation. The key is balance; these rights are often in tension, and the task of a democracy is to prioritize rights and determine the point at which each must give way to the others.
With respect to the socio-economic component of democracy, I tend to draw a distinction between conferring rights and dictating results. This is admittedly a fuzzy concept because rights will inherently rule out certain results, but I think that dictating exact results as opposed to parameters will infringe excessively on other rights and freedoms. This leaves ample room for collective bargaining, wage and hour legislation, socialized health care and other matters that could, at least arguably, be considered necessary or beneficial to democratic rule.
(If I've just read myself out of the constitutional liberal club, let me know.)
In any event, to return to Danny's original point, I'd argue that the European powers did democratize socially and economically during the period of colonialism. Specifically, I'd dispute your argument that the European welfare state only arose after the beginning of decolonization. It certainly expanded during the decolonization period, but this occurred at least in part because of technological advances that increased surplus wealth. The roots of the welfare state - e.g., old age pensions - began in the late nineteenth century, and even more to the point, social democracy first became a significant political force at this time. Not only were France and Belgium more juridically democratic in, say, 1925 than in 1870, but their workers were considerably better off.
Notably, this hasn't happened during the period of American geopolitical dominance - the United States has become more juridically democratic and has become richer in general, but economic inequality hasn't been reduced. This may be due to the differences between traditional colonialism and neocolonialism; in the latter, revenues flow to particular corporations rather than directly to the government, and the price of entry for individual players is higher. If so, I wouldn't expect Indian hegemony over neighboring states to aid socio-economic equality either.
Don't get me wrong - I don't recommend colonialism as an economic system. I recognize the morally corrupting effect that you cite, and I'd question the moral foundation of wealth that depends on the exploitation of another nation. At the same time, though, I think the historical evidence shows that it's possible for a colonial power to democratize both juridically and socially.
Corsica? Then again, metropolitan France hasn't really succeeded in imposing its identity on the Corsicans, so maybe it's the exception that proves the rule.
It was also a mid-18th century addition to the French polity, much later than any other significant region I can think of apart from Alsace.
Posted by: Randy McDonald at August 26, 2004 02:21 PMDanny,
Actually the french example was relatively benign, but never mind.
Was it? Perhaps compared with what came later, but then this could be a function of more limited ability to carry out extermination and violence in the past compared to the present. Unfortunately, we have these days excelled in this skill; so waves of violence will be much nastier and deeper.
The argument here is circular; if you have already have constructed a 'we' which consists of people from different religions, then this is possible. If one hasn't, then there's a problem, and one must think in terms of a more narrow and credible 'we' to begin with - though you could say that my argument is circular as well.
Well, I think the difference between us is that I don't necessarily see the cleavages that are existent within communities as religious and nor do I see religions as the main motor of conflict in such cases. I guess my point is that I don't think the 'we-ness' is pre-determined, of course we can't choose anything we want but there is a range of choices that we can do so from. The problem isn't one of constructing a 'we-ness' that necessarily sublates or overrides religion but one that allows co-existence between different ones and members without violence being the main form of dispute settlement – I think this is acheivable, not easy, but do-able.
In any case, it's good to see you embrace Gandhi's saying "We must become the change we want to see in the world".
You do realise the irony here, in that, like pretty much all Indian Leftists I am a staunch anti-Gandhian.
Why? I mean, I understand that India needs those countries to be stable, but why ought they be democratic?
I think given the demographic existence of communities across border and the fact that too much of nation-building has rested on mutually hostile nationalisms that has prevented a settlement; a democratic transition will allow these issues to be resolved multi-laterally without descending into violence.
This is a very good point. The christians might be next.
In a sense we already are, particularly in the guise of the so-called foreign missionary threat – you know what happened to Graham Staines and his two sons. On the other hand Christians are the classic Janus-faced minority in that they have also been Hinduised to a great degree like other such minorities as Jains and Parsis and through access to excellent education integrated themselves into the more advanced sections of the modern economy and state apparatus. This is also why some sections or elements of the Christian community particularly the more conservative ones have gravitated towards the saffronists, traditional animosities with Muslims play a role here as well. Hence in the Outlook magazine Koenraad Elst was one of the contributors, being one of the most prominent non-Hindu advocates of demolishing the Babri Masjid and George Fernandes was Defence Minister in the NDA cabinet as well as being the only non-Hindu to appear on the front page of Panchajanya, an RSS rag, with a gushing bio and cover-story. For some Christians, religion has become pretty much an ethnic identity not a religious one; they have really become another segemented caste like Jains, Lingayats and other erstwhile reformist social-religious movements. Only the more evangelical sects pose a problem; though the BJP does have a residual fear of all Semitic religions especially Christianity and Islam being the proselytising ones, as Hinduism isn't a missionary one in the same sense – so there is a fear of the under-class leaving orthodox Hinduism for a better path to self-respect elsewhere. This hasn't really happened but it exists as a fear.
However, pretty much any minority can be stigmatised it doesn't have to be religious – you will hear plenty of mentions of the anti-Sikh pogroms that was carried out in Delhi in 1984 and some of the Congress propaganda in northern India was blatantly communal and Hindu chauvinist while in the Punjab itself, it was completely divided along sectarian lines. And this was a religion that is meant to be one of the off-shoots of Hinduism; same problem goes for regions, I mean Bal Thackeray and the SS rode to power by basically targeting South Indians who were supposedly stealing the jobs of Maratha youth in Bombay in the 1960s and caused a fair amount of rioting there; as did Congress/BJP against indigenous movements in the tribal belt and the Northeast; while in Bihar and UP the Dalits and OBCs know very well what will happen to them if the saffronists gain dominance in the countryside and legislatures. Women are the other big group, as the missing women post indicates, I can remember few things as digusting as the BJP mahila organisations bringing out pro-sati marches to protest the 'right' of women to commit sati in the wake of the Deorala Sati. The problem is one that crosses many lines.
The problem is far deeper than Musharraf and you know it. Is there any constituency in Pakistan that's wants unification?
Hehe, come on, I was just trying to pull your leg over the Gorby comparison LOL I have to say, I am not talking about re-unification; even if something like the EU occurs that SAARC grows into; I don't think this means us all becoming one state or sthg – that would be ridicolous but a common economic, foreign and defence policy would definitely be a good and not wildly unrealistic thing. I think this is what Kumar meant when he said that Indians just uncritically expect Pakistan to come crying back into the fold like some kid that had been naughty and learnt its lesson – we need to be realistic this isn't going to happen and why should it. As you said, Pakistanis have their own nationalism and it needs to be respected and treated seriously not demolished; I would be hoping for a synthesis in the future but this would be a very long-term project and would need us to give up more than the other SAARC state would anyway, since we are the dominant power. All this would be far into the future; I mean even a customs union will take time as will a free trade area and other regional associations; but I think a course should be charted out and followed reasonably strictly for greater integration; over time this will allow political and social constituencies to develop. Common with the I-P conflict the ONE thing almost the great overwhelming majority of BOTH Indian and Pakistanis want is peace and a stable one; so there is definitely the foundations to work on there.
Besides, hey now don't deny it, admit it, you loved that picture right?
Jonathan,
I will have to look up some things before I can do your points any justice, so I will just put off answering you straight away but don't take this as me running away or caving in to your Liberal Imperialist tendencies ;P
WHY DOES INDIA NEEDS TO BE A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY?
PLEASE HELP ME TO FIND SOMETHING ON THIS TOPIC.
PLEASE EXPRESS YOUR VIEWS ON IT AND SEND IT TO DIPANSHU_GUPTA@YAHOO.CO.IN OR SATISHGUPTA2000@YAHOO.CO.IN .I WILL BE THANKFUL TO YOU
Does Conrad Barwa have a Blog?
Posted by: Mariam at January 4, 2006 01:40 AMwe can become one nation ,lets all pray
Posted by: vineet at October 31, 2006 02:53 PM
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Aakar Books in New Delhi, India, have just published an Indian edition of Alan Woods' book The Venezuelan Revolution – A Marxist Perspective. Here we provide the new introduction to the book by Lal Khan in Pakistan and details of the publishers for anyone who wishes to get a copy. 
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| Magazine| Aug 22, 2005 Partition The Ides Of August It's been almost 60 years since Partition. Now is a good time to get a clearer understanding of the events that took place and to take responsibility for it. SUNIL KHILNANI |
| Partition divides the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, but it also poses for every one of them enduring puzzles. Why exactly did it happen, and who was responsible for it—given that just a few years earlier, no one could even imagine it? Who were the real winners and losers? Or, was it for all a confusing mixture of both—a pledge redeemed, as Nehru put it at midnight on August 15, 1947, "but not wholly or in full measure"? The winning of freedom as a nation-state was accompanied, it seemed, by the loss of a civilisation: a loss lived out in the post-partition histories of the great cities of the subcontinent, in Bombay and Karachi, Lahore and Delhi, Dacca and Calcutta—cities that had once epitomised a distinctive civilisational achievement. In the great Amar Chitra Katha of the national imagination, Partition is an archetypal tale of tragic heroes and scheming villains, men who make sacrifices and others who betray. In this story, Partition was a cataclysm visited upon the course of India's destined history—those who brought it about were always others, conspiring leaders and impassioned mobs, who together diverted us from our path to freedom. The responsibility for Partition did not lie with us, but with them. |
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