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HANDBOOK OF MUSLIMS IN INDIA edited by Rakesh Basant and Abusaleh Shariff. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010.

WHAT should the nation’s policy-makers do about the state in which we find the Muslims of India? In our vibrant democracy of passionately competing claims, the tenable answer can only be dispassionately sought through meticulous research rather than the sweeping seduction of rhetoric. Ever since the seminal Sachar Committee Report (2006) hit India on the head with damning data on its largest minority, Muslims have been the subject of considerable and welcome interest – in the media, among policy-makers, activists and academics. The Oxford Handbook of Muslims in India, an edited volume of 13 articles (including an overview by the editors) by an impressive array of academics from around the world, is a valuable addition to our understanding. The articles are scholarly, insightful and rigorous. For the most part, the collection eschews casual, hasty opinion in favour of calibrated conclusion. Given that the book adds to the case for affirmative action in favour of Muslims (a potentially volatile enterprise), this calibrated rigour is important.

The volume is edited by Abusaleh Shariff and Rakesh Basant, leading economists and among the principal authors of the Prime Minister’s High Level Committee Report on the Muslims of India (better known as the Sachar Committee Report). So, do read this collection (as I reviewed it) with the Sachar report close at hand for ready reference, because this volume sits in the same discursive space, and is really a continuation of the same conversation. While some sections in Shariff and Basant’s opening overview (The State of Muslims in India: An Overview) refer to new issues raised by this volume, other sections draw entirely on parts of the Sachar report. (This shift in the overview between two reference points – the Sachar report and the Handbook of Muslims in India – initially makes for somewhat uneasy reading).

Three essays – by Anil Deolalikar (The Performance of Muslims on Social Indicators: A Comparative Perspective), Jeemol Unni (Informality and Gender in the Labour Market for Muslims: Has Education been a Route Out of Poverty?), and P.M. Kulkarni (The Muslim Population of India: A Demographic Portrayal) are in fact expanded or revised versions of papers originally commissioned by the Sachar Committee. So, while the key insights they offer have been absorbed into the Sachar framework, here one can sink one’s teeth into substantive individual arguments. Jeemol Unni’s essay highlights the concentration of Muslim women in informal economic activities, and offers interesting insights into differences between the actual and perceived ‘returns to education’ (especially higher education) among Muslims. One suggestion is that discriminatory entry barriers into regular jobs prevent Muslims from perceiving adequate ‘returns to education’ and, therefore, reduce the demand for schooling. She concludes that in the present scenario education for Muslims is not a route out of poverty.

Several essays, notably one by Sonia Bhalotra and Bernada Zamora (Social Divisions in Education in India) use sources of data different from the Sachar report but support its findings of low growth in primary school enrolment and school completion among Muslims. Through a comparative analysis of three social groups – Muslims, upper and lower caste Hindus – they suggest, curiously, that Muslim children have more advantageous characteristics than low caste Hindu children but ‘appear to suffer from less positive attitudes towards or less good opportunities for primary education.’ The reasons the authors proffer for this unhealthy relationship between Muslims and schools are, however, less than conclusive. While not ruling out ‘discrimination’ as a variable, they also suggest (like Unni) that the Muslim disadvantage in education may reflect a lack of appreciation of the rewards from schooling. It is increasingly clear from this as well as other essays, that there is a need to methodically examine the links between low schooling and those unquantifiable but ubiquitous variables – ‘attitudes’, ‘perceptions’, ‘discrimination’.

A welcome addition in this volume is the section called ‘Socio-Historical Context’. The historical origins of Muslim communities in India and the nature of their embeddedness in traditional Indian social structures and systems, are critical to any understanding of the contemporary Muslim situation. The essay by Irfan Habib (Indo-Islamic Thought and the Issue of Religious Coexistence) covers a broad expanse of history from the 17th to 19th centuries to demonstrate the ‘multiplicity’ of Islam in India. He skillfully illustrates the manner in which a host of Islamic thinkers, scholars and rulers in India contributed to a catholic interpretation of Islam, a faith whose civilizational, behavioural, and intellectual framework was dynamic and promoted religious coexistence. Curiously, the author’s conclusion reads less like historical scholarship and more like the Friday message to Muslims from a (Marxist) pulpit – ‘One is thus reminded of the basic fact that religions in their substance (or how that substance is understood) also change over time with circumstances. It is up to all believers, including Muslims, to so conceive the message of their religion as to be able to live in brotherhood with people of all faiths. For, after all, as Marx (1844/1957:41) says, "Man makes religion: religion does not make man".’1 The pointed singling out of Muslims as the recipients of this message of brotherhood is troubling.

Sociologist Satish Saberwal’s essay (On the Making of Muslims in India Historically) draws on an astounding range of sources to take the reader on a fairly breathless journey. The structure of the essay is less a ‘central argument followed by supportive evidence’, and more a description of a series of historical-sociological processes and moments, seeking to answer the question: ‘How exactly did South Asia’s enormous Muslim population become "Muslim"?’2 He refers here not to conversion but to the larger, multiple processes of identity formation among Muslim communities. Discussions around the deprivation of Muslims in India have also generated considerable interest on whether ‘community-based resources’ can help alleviate the situation; and on why institution-building impulses appear to have been so weak among Muslims? An interesting contention in Saberwal’s essay is that ‘caste’ and ‘sect’ as fields of mobilization were much less available to Muslims than to Hindus; that whereas caste-based mobilization among Hindus took the shape of educational and other institutions, the doctrinal inter-sect conflict (of the ‘my sect’s Quranic truth is truer than yours’ variety) among Muslim sects led to a dispersal of energy. A much fuller exposition of this argument is contained in his book, The Spirals of Contention.3

Taking forward the exploration of ‘community-based’ resources is Abusaleh Shariff’s invaluable contribution on zakaat and waqf (Spiritual Capital and Philanthropy Among Muslims). While much has been written about waqf, it is about the existence of zakaat funds that a million myths prevail. In popular perception, the practice of zakaat seems to enjoy a strangely exotic halo; the sub-text is that a bottomless well of oil money is being generously given as zakaat in secret community spaces for all manner of ‘Islamic’ activities, including madrasas (‘breeding grounds for terrorism?’) and perhaps even for the numero uno of scary Muslim exotica – jihad. Well, Shariff does some dispassionate number crunching, and zakaat suddenly becomes less large, and more mundane. He estimates the total amount available as zakaat funds in India and calculates its redistributive effect to be a modest 10% of the average income of below poverty line Muslim households.

Also, given the lack of what he calls ‘institutional intermediaries’ amongst Muslims in India, the author makes a persuasive case for the legal institutionalization of wakfs (and mosques) as alternative support structures for the development of the community. Shariff estimates that if all wakf properties are put to some commercial use, they can potentially generate (at 10% returns) about Rs 12,000 crore per year. (This, by the way, would far exceed the Rs 7000 crore outlay for the Ministry of Minority Affairs in the entire 11th plan period). I only wish the essay, in addition to bemoaning the encroachment on wakf properties, had made an equally strong indictment of the wakf boards themselves. We hope the Sachar report has spelt the end of an era of obfuscation on the Muslim issue. In the same spirit, let us be honest all round. And let us put under the scanner the way in which corrupt wakf boards have been handing over valuable community property to commercial interests for a song. So yes, the Muslims in India could certainly do with greater, more honest, institutionalized control of wakfs.

It is in the last two essays (Section IV: Policy Implications) that the Oxford Handbook makes the most significant departures from the Sachar report. Free from the constraints of a ‘government’ document, it can afford to engage openly with the troubled R word – Reservations. The first essay (Desai and Kulkarni, Socio-religious Inequalities in Educational Attainment) does a comparative analysis of educational achievements among forward castes, dalits, adivasis and Muslims between 1983 and 2000. And in the case of Muslims, makes a strong case for a dual strategy: secular increase in education among all marginalized groups, along with targeted positive discrimination – notably, job reservations. The idea is similar to that proposed by several other essays in this collection – that some guarantee of formal employment (along with expansion of educational opportunities) will spur educational achievement.

Ask a simple question, and get a clear answer. The second of the two policy-related essays (Thomas Weisskopf, Is Positive Discrimination a Good Way to Aid Disadvantaged Communities?) is a straightforward and insightful theoretical exploration of the pros and cons of a range of affirmative action policies. He spells out the conditions under which policies of positive discrimination are most likely to succeed, and elaborates on the kind of support that is required after preferential selection in order for a candidate to succeed in the position for which he/she is selected. Given that emotive, quota-based policy options seem to either limit or derail most discussions in India, Weisskopf’s expansive continuum of ‘positive discrimination – preferential selection – post selection support – performance of candidate’ is a much needed corrective to present debates. It helps shift focus on outcomes of affirmative action rather than remain mired in the immediate illusion of gaining formal equity.

The essay draws largely on his excellent earlier 2004 work4 and does not, therefore (regrettably), engage with the minefield of the most current affirmative action debates in India. The fact remains that the sheer messy variety of claimants for positive discrimination in India (women, OBCs, dalits, Muslims) and the bewildering heterogeneity of each group (including regional disparities) can confound the neatest theoretical exposition. On Muslims, in particular, the number of ill-informed policy debates on reservations could do with a reality check. It would be enormously useful (perhaps, in another volume) to map the national picture on affirmative action for Muslims and dispel some prevailing myths and misinformation (answering questions like: How many Muslims have reported themselves as OBC, and are availing some benefits of reservation; which states are currently implementing different types and scales of reservations for Muslims, and with what outcome?).

In conclusion, the Oxford Handbook of Muslims in India has outlined three related concerns – security, identity and equity – as the basic paradigm for understanding the Muslim condition. This is the same framework proposed by the Sachar report. Unfortunately, the Sachar report looked only at equity. It was silent on the communal question. Justice too did not figure. A report whose USP was data, did not even stand up and notice the fact that there is still no official national record of communal violence in this country. How many incidents of communal violence remain unprosecuted? How many Muslim men and women (compared to other socio-religious communities) have been picked up under extraordinary laws – TADA and POTA? Jail data (that Muslims in several states are disproportionately represented in the nation’s prison cells) was collected, but kept out of the report. All potentially volatile, emotive issues – identity, communal violence, security, perceptions of discrimination – were stuck in a section called ‘Public Perceptions and Perspectives’, and the authors of the Sachar report clarified that this section alone was written – ‘as they were reported to us without taking a view on them.’5 So the Sachar report failed to ‘take a view’ on security and identity. In its defense, the committee had been specifically mandated to examine ‘equity’ concerns alone. As a government report, seeking to build a difficult national consensus, it chose to steer clear of anything remotely ‘political’; and it did successfully manoeuvre a tricky course through unimpeachable data on education, employment and so on.

But, in the Handbook of Muslims in India, the editors’ explanation for focusing only on equity issues (even though they include ‘security’ and ‘identity’ in their overall paradigm) is less digestible. They argue that while security and identity concerns are critical, ‘an empirical exploration of these multi-dimensional issues is typically hampered by non-availability of relevant "hard" and unbiased data. Such data constraints are typically more severe for security and identity related concerns.’6 Well, if data on discrimination, security and identity is not available, we better generate it fast. And design studies that do not ‘soften’ the evidence in any way.

Several possibilities immediately come to mind – studies on the educational status of Muslim girls and women should include detailed mapping on accessibility of schools, teacher-student ratios, male/female teacher ratios, population wise availability of infrastructure, percentage of boys/girls in madrasas vs. maktabs (mosque schools), but should also look for correlations between dropout rates and quality of schooling, fear factor, security concerns, as well as evidence of discrimination in classrooms. Surely qualitative studies that examine multiple aspects of the relationship between Muslims and education – the relationships between school-based discrimination, fear perception and dropout rates can also be ‘hard’ and ‘unbaised’? The fact is that several essays in this volume, drawing on large data sets, also point to ‘discrimination’ as a catch-all variable when so-called ‘hard’ data fails to shed light on a sociological conundrum.

Several years ago (in the pages of this esteemed journal)7 I had argued that the Sachar report was path-breaking and the challenge was to build on it without losing sight of the other critical paradigms that shape the Muslim experience in contemporary India; that development alone is a limited tool for change; that the fractured relationship between the Muslims and the state (which directly bears upon any development intervention) is structured through the other paradigm of justice and security; that their alienated relationship with the state cannot be built through new schools (i.e. education) alone; that it must simultaneously be structured through the right to life and rule of law. I had also argued that when it came to the gender question, the urgent drive to locate Muslim women’s lives in the basic material matrix of education, employment and health must also acknowledge the ways in which the absence of security and contemporary pressures of identity affect Muslim women’s lives – ‘How do the twin lenses of identity and security impact upon many Muslim women’s increasingly fraught existence within the "community space"? And how do these intersect and interact with the twin paradigms of development and participatory democracy, to create the overall status of Muslim women in contemporary India?’8 While the Handbook of Muslims in India successfully takes forward the dialogue on the development of Muslims, some of these key questions remain unaddressed. And because this conversation must indeed continue, perhaps we can look forward to the Oxford Handbook of Muslims in India, Volume II?

Farah Naqvi

 

Footnotes:

1. Irfan Habib, ‘Indo-Islamic Thought and the Issue of Religious Coexistence’, in Shariff and Basant (eds.), Handbook of Muslims in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2010, p. 34.

2. Satish Saberwal, ‘On the Making of Muslims in India Historically’, in Shariff and Basant (eds.), ibid., p. 37.

3. S. Saberwal, Spirals of Contention – Why India was Partitioned in 1947. Routledge, New Delhi, 2008.

4. T.E. Weisskopf, Affirmative Action in the United States and India: A Comparative Perspective. Routledge, London, (printed and distributed in South Asia by Foundation Books), 2004.

5. Government of India, Social, Economic and Educational Status of Muslims in India, Report submitted by the Prime Minister’s High Level Committee, New Delhi, 2006, p. 10.

6. Rakesh Basant and Abusaleh Shariff, ‘The State of Muslims in India: An Overview’, in Shariff and Basant (eds.), op cit., p. 2.

7. F. Naqvi, ‘Reconstructing Community’, Seminar 569, 2007.

8. Ibid., p. 109.

 

WITNESSING PARTITION: Memory, History, Fiction by Tarun Saint. Routledge, Delhi, 2010.

Witnessing Partition is a big book, in that it deals with a very wide range of Partition literature in chapters that are arranged chronologically and attentive to trends in historical scholarship since 1947. Since there were no trials for the incredible violence that occurred, Tarun Saint sees Partition literature perform the work of testimony. For Saint, ‘the attempt to aspire to a form of proxy witnessing may be discerned as an ethical imperative’ in the best writing on the Partition (55): however, it is in characterizing writing as best or mediocre that the book raises important questions on the function of literature, especially the genre that is Partition literature.

Throughout his analyses, Saint seems torn between reading Partition novels and short stories either as documents faithfully reflecting the debates of their time, or as deploying representational techniques that allow the reader a deeper glimpse into some of the anxieties and aspirations that moulded the people of that time. His first chapter on novels of the ’40s and ’50s discusses Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Khadjia Mastur’s Aangan among others.

Ali’s classic novel on the loss of a way of life, although written in 1940, is seen as presaging events to come; Shah Nawaz’s important novel on the high politics of the 1930s and ’40s and the shift among some ashraf families from the Congress to the Muslim League is read as standing in for Pakistani nationalism and Pakistan; Singh’s novel is seen as reflecting stereotypes on the ‘simplicities of peasant existence [which] may be a byproduct of Singh’s desire to assuage collective guilt as regards the later treatment of Muslims in Punjab’ (101), while Mastur’s novel on betrayed nationalism allows for a critique of the ‘predictable triumphalism’ with which Saint believes Shah Nawaz’s novel ends.

Following Freud, Saint argues that these early novels were products of historical trauma and work as ‘raw narratives’ rather than as well thought out statements on what might have caused Partition or have been destroyed by Partition. Saint also discusses lesser and less known novels that are seen as incapable of apprehending the nature of Partition and of being ‘overly influenced by the rhetoric of the times, whether colonial reporting on riots, or the nationalistic rhetoric of blame’ (113).

The following chapter on Partition’s afterlife deals with novels from the 1960s and ’70s. Important novels discussed include Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, Abdullah Hussein’s Udas Naslein, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, Intizar Husain’s Basti, Rahi Masoom Raza’s Adha Gaon and Topi Shukla. Saint argues that these writers display less of a resistance to ‘working through the memory of the founding trauma’; instead, they imaginatively reconstruct the pre-history of the Partition, and find ways to reinvent the ‘witness sensibility’ especially in the context of communal and sectarian violence. Further, Saint argues that the ‘failure of nationalist histories to address the ambivalent legacy of the Partition led writers to explore the root causes of the deteriorating communal/sectarian situation in terms of a longer time-span and durational history than earlier writers’ (119). I am troubled by the ease with which Saint can presume to speak of what might move a writer to write. Besides, the resources to write a work of fiction and a work of history are quite different, and might well, in some measure, explain the reticence among historians, nationalist or otherwise, of engaging with Partition immediately after the event.

Writers in the 1960s and ’70s are also lauded for weaving their micro-narratives back into larger narratives of collective loss. The marginalization of upper class Muslims in India and of mohajirs remaking a lost world in Pakistan is artfully explored. Sahni’s Tamas, which began to be written after riots in Bhiwandi in 1970, is discussed as an instance of primary and secondary witnessing. Abdullah Hussein’s masterly novel took five years to write and involved interviews with those who migrated from east to west Punjab. Some of the most painful descriptions in the novel stem from his research. Saint is at his best when he does not consciously strive to align the plot of each novel and short story to ‘fact’. As examples, I would note his discussion of two vignettes in Hussein’s Udas Naslein: the presence of survivor’s guilt in the fish-vendor’s culpability during the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the arbitrariness of creating boundary lines as depicted in the land gifted to the patriarch Roshan Ali.

In this chapter Saint faults Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi for not dealing with traumatic violence with empathy and insight. Yet do all novelists need to reflect on violence with equal doses of empathy? This brings us back to the core meaning of literature. Is literature of value only if it is rooted in an ‘ethical imperative’ or can literature that seeks to reveal the workings of prejudiced minds also be regarded as valuable. Is it the message that qualifies fiction as good or mediocre or the quality of the writing itself? After all, Saint’s hero, Saadat Hasan Manto, manages to cast tremendous light onto Partition violence without indulging in saccharine nostalgia or stereotypical empathy.

The next chapter deals with Partition literature produced since 1980. Saint focuses on Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Krishna Baldev Vaid’s Guzara Hua Zamana. Both writers are credited for being in tune with trends in historiography that had shifted focus to ‘little’ histories of people on the margins. However, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers are criticized for their identitarian emphasis. This chapter has a productive discussion of trends in Holocaust literature and the difficulties in using memoirs and witness accounts in fictional writing. Debates among Indian historians on the perils and advantages of using oral history and interview recollections also find place here. Rather than faulting first person witness accounts per se, I think it is more important to train historians to conduct interviews and read and analyze the subsequent transcripts with care.

Saint’s chapter on short stories has the by now customary salute to Manto’s exemplary writings on Partition. Also of interest is his analysis of Mohan Rakesh’s short story, ‘Malbe ka Malik’. Rakesh’s tale about an old Muslim refugee who revisits his home in east Punjab after the Partition, reminds the historian of the wide chasm that continues to exist between the capable novelist/short story writer’s detailing of multiple experiences and the historian’s oftentimes still sterile engagement and investment in the typical Partition displacement story.

In conclusion, Saint’s many analyses of fictive testimonies show that there is no singular authentic Partition experience. Through the prism of literature we find every shibboleth shattering: activists drawn to the Muslim League seem more swayed by the logic of personal and material gain than any real empathy with the predicament of minority Muslims in a Hindu majority India, and in Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, a corrupt and manipulative politician joins the ranks of Gandhian pacifists. Finally, Saint’s close analyses also begs the question of whether and to what extent Partition literature ought to be mined like any other kind of historical source. Given the stylistic innovations deployed by writers like Krishna Baldev Vaid in Guzara Hua Zamana where the protagonist is a young boy, or Shauna Singh Baldwin, where secondary modes of witnessing come into play, I think it is necessary to underline and return to some of the more basic protocols of writing history, especially histories of violence.

Neeti Nair

 

ROAD TO PAKISTAN: The Life and Times of Mohammad Ali Jinnah by B.R. Nanda. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.

HAD this book been written five years ago, and had L. K. Advani or his advisors read it, he might have been spared the huge embarrassment caused by his praise for Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s ‘forceful espousal of a secular state’ in Pakistan. The impression that after achieving his ambition of securing a homeland for Indian Muslims in the form of Pakistan, Jinnah had turned secular, was largely created by Rajmohan Gandhi’s brilliant essay on him in which Gandhi had quoted Jinnah’s first address to the Constituent Assembly delivered on 11 August 1947. However, nearly a decade later, in his 1997 book, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin, Pakistani historian Akbar S. Ahmad offered evidence suggesting that this was not the case. Now, B.R. Nanda has conclusively demolished this myth of a secular-turned-communal-turned-secular Jinnah by writing this well-researched book.

While Nanda painstakingly maps out the road that led Jinnah to Pakistan, he also offers us a glimpse of the road Pakistan has taken since its birth. He quotes from a speech that Jinnah delivered on 25 January 1948 while addressing the Karachi Bar Association. Jinnah declared that people were making ‘mischief’ when they rejected the idea of an Islamic state, adding that, ‘Islamic principles today are as applicable to life as they were 1,300 years ago.’ A few weeks later, he went further. ‘It is my belief that our salvation lies in following the golden rules of conduct set for us by our great law-giver, the Prophet of Islam. Let us lay the foundations of our democracy on the basis of truly Islamic ideals and principles,’ the founder of Pakistan declared. While reading this book, one wonders if the late General Zia-ul-Haq was not trying to implement the Qaid-e-Azam’s vision by Islamizing all aspects of life in Pakistan.

Jinnah’s approach to personal issues was as clever as it was to political issues. When he fell in love with the sixteen-year-old Ruttie, daughter of his close friend Sir Dinshaw Petit, he went up to Sir Dinshaw and asked him what he thought about inter-communal marriages. Only after Sir Dinshaw approvingly spoke about them, saying that they would help national integration, did Jinnah break the news about his intention to marry Ruttie who was less than half his age. And just how did he help the cause of national integration? By converting Ruttie to Islam on the day of their wedding! The year was 1918 when Jinnah was being hailed as the Muslim Gokhale.

Nanda quotes a British journalist who visited India during 1917-1918. He was perceptive enough to comment: ‘At the root of Jinnah’s activities is ambition.’ Nanda has carefully documented the twists and turns of Jinnah’s political journey and the way he kept shifting his position on the communal question, joint electorates and opposition to the British rule. When it suited him, Jinnah championed the cause of joint electorates and Hindu-Muslim unity. Yet he never hesitated to make a somersault on all the important political questions of the day. Nanda’s book gives a fitting reply to those who hold the so-called intransigence of Congress leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel responsible for the hardening of Jinnah’s attitude and his ultimate espousal of the demand for a separate Muslim nation.

Like present-day communalists, Jinnah turned to Islam in the mid-1930s when he realized that he was not able to attract the attention of the Muslim community. So far as the Muslim elite are concerned, Nanda spells out their attitude towards the Congress and the national movement. ‘The self-image of the Muslim elite,’ he writes, ‘as the former rulers of India became a block in the way of their identification with the Indian National Congress.’ The Congress demands for the Indianization of higher services, equitable financial burdens between India and Britain, reduction in military expenditure, reduction in land revenue and separation of executive and judiciary failed to excite the Muslim elite. In 1932, Prime Minister MacDonald’s ‘Communal Award’ practically conceded all Muslim demands, but instead of satisfying the community, it only whetted their appetite for more. And in 1937, much before the Congress assumed power in several provinces, Jinnah opted to play the Islamic card.

The present-day jihadists who dream of converting India into an Islamic country and bringing the entire world under the rule of one Islamic Caliph had their worthy predecessors. The poet Muhammad Iqbal wrote Jinnah a letter in March 1937 in which he talked of the need for enforcement of Islamic Shariat. Nanda quotes this letter wherein Iqbal said that the enforcement and development of the Shariat of Islam was impossible in this country without a free Muslim state or states. At the Sind Muslim League Conference, held in October 1938 with Jinnah in the chair, Fazlul Haq, Prime Minister of Bengal, thundered: ‘If Mohammad-bin-Qasim, an eight-year-old lad, with 18 soldiers, could conquer Sind, then surely nine crore Muslims can conquer the whole of India.’

No wonder that two months later, the Muslim League Executive Council resolved to make use of ulemas for issuing fatwas against extending any cooperation to the Congress. By this time Jinnah, who only ten years ago was advocating joint electorates, had travelled quite far on the road that led to a separate Muslim nation. It was around this time that he started calling Muslims a ‘nation’. It took him another couple of years to propound a full-fledged two-nation theory in which Hindus and Muslims were shown as socially, culturally and political incompatible – as two nations who have always been at war with each other.

Like the present-day Islamic radicals who detest the West and western democracy, Muslim leaders too were not very comfortable with this system of governance. Nanda quotes Col. Muirhead, Undersecretary of India, who told Choudhary Khaliquzzaman, a front-ranking Muslim League leader, in March 1939: ‘You say that the British democracy does not suit you and I see that it does not, but we do not know of any other kind of democracy. We apply the same principle in India which we apply in our own country, and you do not suggest any alternative.’ No wonder that Pakistan is still looking for this alternative.

Nanda has brought out the remarkable personality of Jinnah, one of the finest lawyers produced by the subcontinent, into sharp relief and has warmly discussed his positive traits. His is a dispassionate, impressive and scholarly account of the life and times of Jinnah. The book is a must-read for those who want to understand why and how India was partitioned.

Kuldeep Kumar

 

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY: North-West India Since 1800 by John C.B. Webster. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2007.

‘THIS accounts in good measure for my continuing focus upon the social history of the Christian community as a whole, not just upon the foreign missionaries, and for setting that history primarily within a "social history of India" rather than a "history of a Christian Mission", "history of the East-West encounter", or "history of colonialism" framework’ (p. IX). Sounds correct, because so far most of the works available in India in the name of the ‘Church history’ or the ‘history of Christianity’, focus on the work of western missions or their histories; the Indian part often appears as an appendage to such works. The same holds true for most of the works related to north-west India referred in the introduction of this book (pp. 2-10). Therefore, I agree with the author, when he says: ‘This is the first attempt to write a connected and comprehensive history of Christianity in north-west India. Regional history has built into it a presumption of regional distinctiveness… Since the history of Christianity in north-west has been more socially than theological or missiological driven, and marked more by social than by spiritual or cultural developments of significance, this will be primarily a social history of the Christian people there’ (p. 11). Again, I agree with the author because in India it is the ‘caste element’ which gives the distinctiveness to her content, or what we call our Indian social order (pp. 25-28). This applies to north-west India as well, but with added elements drawn from the prevailing religious milieu, which particularly included Muslim majority presence in the region with its ‘sufi pirs’ influence (pp. 30, 31) as also the influence of Sikh religion (pp. 32-34).

The north-west region with which this book is concerned covers the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, the Union Territories of Delhi and Chandigarh, as well as the Pakistani states of Punjab and the North West Frontier Province (p. 1). The book contains seven chapters which are chronologically arranged. Chapters one to five deal with this whole region, but chapters six and seven, which focus on post-Independence developments cover only India. After the introductory chapter, the author begins narrating the story of north-west Christianity in chapter two, The Beginnings: 1800-57. It is clear this story began at a time when political power in north-west India was in the process of transition from the Mughal to the British (p. 21). The social caste based order; three major well established religious traditions – Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism alongside some presence of Buddhism (pp. 25-38) were in place when Christianity through Protestant missionaries came in (pp. 40-48). The work of the Roman Catholic Church, according to the author, was confined to looking after their own people serving in the East India Company (pp. 39-40).

The author discusses in detail the theological context of missionary preaching, which in general rejects the beliefs of other religions, particularly concerning the salvation of human beings. According to him, almost all the missionaries followed ‘evangelical Christian theology’, according to which ‘Christ and only Christ could save’ (p. 55). The response to the missionary efforts was very poor. According to the author, during the first 50 years, ‘The total Indian Christian community in the entire north-west did not exceed 200 members in May 1857.’

The basic reason behind the poor response according to the author was that: ‘The missionaries preached a highly individualistic gospel to a highly integrated, caste based society and presented it in such a way that only those who were already socially or spiritually alienated could be in a position to understand, appreciate, or fully accept it. For the rest, it seems that the missionaries had been offering some interesting answers to questions about personal guilt and life after death, which nobody was really asking. The result was that the Christian gospel had begun to touch north-western Indian society only at its periphery and, to even lesser degree, among those few who had absorbed some of the spirit as well as the substance of western learning’ (p. 73).

This book contains the story of a north-western Christian community, most of which has reached us ‘after passing through missionary filters’ (p. 17); yet it is possibly the most honest narration known to this reviewer. The author had close links with north-west India for about a half century, and is therefore most qualified to give us such a honest account of a Christian community which has its roots in the ‘periphery’. Chapters three to five deal with the various stages through which the Christian community passed, before it became a distinctive community with its own identity.

Chapter three deals with the core of ‘the High Imperial Era’ from 1858 to 1880, and with the theological understanding of the Christian faith, both of the high British government officials (including various governors of Punjab) and the missionaries, who according to the author ‘were staunch evangelicals’, based upon which both these groups even interpreted the events of 1857 theologically, asserting that ‘God had rescued the British and given them the responsibility of ruling India for the benefit of their subjects’ (p. 75). They even claimed support for their views from the Bible (p. 76). But the author also refers to the positive role of missionaries in the context of north-west India in the area of education, particularly providing education to women and the Dalits, both in Punjab and Delhi (pp. 88-91). However, there were also schools like the Bishop Cotton School and the Auckland House School in Simla, which mostly catered to the upper caste middle class who wanted ‘a western education in order to enter government service and the professions. Thus the system as a whole catered primarily to their needs’ (pp. 92, 93).

The author also reports a significant growth in the community during this period. In Punjab alone, 2675 Indian Christians were reported in the Census of 1868 (p. 111). There was also the development of a Christian community in Delhi, which had a ‘distinct social composition’, because a majority of the converts were from ‘weaver and chamar background’ (pp. 113-118). Punjab by contrast had a few high profile converts, which included Maharaja Harnam Singh, whose son, Sri Maharaj Singh, later become Governor of Bombay and Rakjumari Amrit Kaur, who become the first health minister of independent India. The other well-known convert was Rev. Kali Charan Chatterjie in Jullander, who became the first moderator of the Presbyterian Church of India (p. 119).

Chapter four – The North-West in Ferment: 1881-1918 – discusses the formation of the Christian community in conjunction with changes in the other major religions of this region – Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism. The missionary challenge to these religious traditions impelled them to define their own identities. A number of dynamic bodies came into existence such as the Brahmo Samaj (1863), the Anjuman-i-Punjab (1865), the Anjuman-i-Islamia (1869), the Amritsar Singh Sabha (1873) and the Arya Samaj (1877). Interestingly, many of these organizations borrowed significantly from the Christian missions (p. 135). While on the one hand they sought to defend and protect their religious identities, on the other they also worked to reform their own religions from within (pp. 136-137).

Chapter four focuses on the Dalit response to the Christian faith in the rural areas of north-west India, particularly Punjab, where one of the largest community of Dalits were the chuhars. Traditionally sweepers, most of them work today as landless labourers (p. 168). The Christian movement among the chuhars is traced to a person named Ditt, himself an illiterate dealer in animal hides. Later, two other invididuals, Karam Bakhgh and Chaughatta, came into prominence. About them the author says: ‘Thus, at this early stage, the conversion movement really belonged to the converts like Ditt, Karan Bakhsh and Chaughatta rather than to the mission and its preachers’ (p. 170). It is also likely that the rapid growth of the community in Punjab was largely due to the chuhra conversion movement ‘which remains to this day, as well as a distinctive rural Dalit form of Christianity’ (pp. 181, 183). The chuhra conversion movement, in different parts of India, also placed the plight of Dalits on the public agenda, forcing those concerned about ‘the Christian threat to address the Dalit’s plights in meaningful ways’ (p. 203).

Chapter five – Towards Independence and Partition: 1919-47 – traces a ‘shift in regional priorities from the socio-cultural to the political.’ Even as Christians played a significant, catalytic role in provoking and sustaining socio-cultural change in the region, they were pushed to the sidelines as little more than spectators to power struggles in which others had become the prime movers. Here the Christian role in the political movement in north-west India was minimal, probably because of their position in the society in general. The response of urban Christians was mixed in Delhi and Lahore. The role of All-India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC) was more positive in nature. The chapter also narrates the efforts made by Christians till 1947 towards the formation of an Indian Church.

Subsequent chapters deal with post-independence Christianity in north-west India. Even as Christianity in the region became more independent of foreign control, at the same time it also became ‘more diverse than it had ever been before.’ Like the country itself, the Christian community after Partition also had to conform to new national boundaries (p. 273). Both during the Partition as well as later, ‘Communal neutrality saved many Christian lives; it also put Christians as a trusted position to save other lives’ (p. 277). Christian educational as well as medical institutions were used for this purpose. The churches – the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, the United Church of North India and the Salvation Army – had to reorganize their establishments. A number of charismatic and Pentecostal churches, including the indigenous Azad Masihi Kalisia Church also got established in the region. Similarly, a number of new educational and other institutions came up to meet the needs of the region.

The post-Independence period, saw the development of ‘two more recently developed Christian theologies… The first was a "Christian participation in nation-building" theology which sought to develop "a Christian understanding of certain crucial issue in the political, economic and social development of modern India". The other was liberation theology and its Indian varieties, Dalit theology, which employs a conflict rather than development model of society, views salvation in terms of liberation from systemic oppressed upon the church’ (p. 319). The latter also encouraged the north-west Christian community to play a more constructive role, particularly about the rights of Dalit Christians. Overall, on the issue of Christian leadership in north-west India, the author concludes by saying that, ‘In the Catholic Church, the successors to the foreign missionaries were almost all priests and nuns from outside the north-west, while among the Protestants the most noticeable trend has been towards Dalit leadership from within the region’ (p. 355).

The last and final chapter – The North-West in the History of Christianity in India – though brief, is important because here the author refers to both the common features and distinctive aspects of the Christian community of this region vis-a-vis Christians of rest of India (pp. 357-66). First about the Christian influence beyond the region, he says: ‘The influence of some Christian leaders in north-west India has extended beyond the region: Raja Harnam Singh, Sadhu Sundar Singh, S.K. Datta, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and most recently, James Massey, the son of a Punjabi village pastor, who was the Christian member of the activist National Commission on Minorities from 1996-2000 as well as an intellectual and organizational leader in Dalit circle nationally. Similarly, Christian institutions in north-west India like the Christian Medical College in Ludhiana, St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and Vidyajyoti in Delhi have had significant impact beyond the region’ (p. 363).

The most important point which the author makes about the Christian community in north-west is about their ‘image’ and ‘identity’, and the continuing tension among its members. He says, ‘Although Christians have rejected the scoundrel and foreign images, while perhaps enjoying the flattery of the "self service" image, the Dalit image is the one that posed the greatest challenge to them and for many remains a source of inner tension. Indeed, the tension between a socially defined Dalit identity and a theological defined Christian identity is not easily resolved in a caste based society and within a religious community where, in this particular region, caste is not the primary social marker’ (p. 369).

Overall, this is a book seriously recommended to both the specialist and general reader.

James Massey

 

IN SEARCH OF A BETTER WORLD: Memoirs by Jolly Mohan Kaul. Samya, Kolkata, 2010.

MEMOIRS of old Communists constitute a genre by themselves. We often feel a strange sense of déjà vu when reading them. They usually describe a familiar trajectory, beginning with their youthful, ardent ideological commitment and political involvement, and ending up with old age scepticism or utter disillusionment. Some even swing over to the anti-Communist end of the political pendulum by touting the capitalist model. The most representative of this complex mood is the collection of reminiscences of eminent ex-Communist intellectuals called The God That Failed which came out in 1950. A few of the contributors in this anthology ultimately drifted towards the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. So much for their intellectual integrity!

But some among the battered souls try heroically to retain their basic faith in the need for a ‘better world’ along the egalitarian lines of equitable distribution of wealth and social justice, whether under socialism or Gandhism. It is this faith that sustains the author of the present book, the near-ninety-year old Jolly Mohan Kaul, or ‘Jolly-da’ – as he was known among us in Calcutta in the early 1950s. He was then secretary of the Calcutta district committee of the undivided Communist Party of India and looked after, among other things, its (college and university) students’ fraction of which I was then a card-holding member. His political autobiography thus takes me back to those turbulent days and debates that we shared at party forums and ‘addas’. I should thus locate it in that other tradition of Communist memoirs which, while critical of the prevalent practices of the party, retain and uphold the basic principles of socialist ideology, instead of jumping on to the capitalist bandwagon.

In India, the pioneer among such dissident Communists was M.N. Roy, whose Memoirs (published in 1964, although written earlier) opened up a fascinating history of the international Communist movement analyzed from close quarters by an intellectually keen participant who, though finally rejecting the politics of the party, sought an alternative path to reach the ideal that the movement once propounded by formulating the concept of ‘radical humanism’. In the same category of political memoirs that chronicle the intimate details of the movement, express personal frustrations, and then record the never-ending search for socialist experiments in other avenues, we can place Mohit Sen’s A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist (2003), as also Jolly Mohan Kaul’s present autobiography. The fact that both were contemporaries, came from similar socio-economic backgrounds, and often shared the same misgivings about some of the policies and practices followed by their party leaders – and yet at the end, in seeking solutions, went in different directions – suggest the immense possibilities of a variety of egalitarian experiments at the micro level in diverse corners of India.

Jolly Kaul’s narrative begins in the 1920s with his upbringing in a liberal Kashmiri Pandit family, headed by his father, a government official, who though imbued with modern western values, was equally proficient in the traditional Urdu and Persian cultures – traits that marked families of many Indian bureaucrats and professionals in different parts of the country in those days. This led at times to a peculiar dichotomy. Jolly recalls for instance that all the children in his family were given English names like Prince, Major, Little, Young, Victor – and the name by which he is known. Yet, the family produced dissidents who rebelled against the British colonial rule. His elder brother Lalit (originally christened Lytton, after Lord Lytton), as a student at the Jadavpur Engineering College in Bengal, joined Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement and suffered rigorous imprisonment. Jolly. however, retained his name, adding: ‘I do not always feel jolly but manage to project a cheerful image and people generally think that the name reflects my temperament.’

This temperament was moulded by his journey during the most exciting moments of Indian history – starting from his arrival in Calcutta in 1925 as a school student, growing up amidst the turmoil of both the Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience movement and the militant nationalism of the Chittagong revolt, and as a twelve-year old joining his first political procession taken out in Calcutta carrying the body of Jatin Das, the comrade of Bhagat Singh, who died while on hunger strike in a Lahore prison (not the Andamans, as wrongly mentioned in the book) in 1929. A perceptive understanding of these events was soon to drive young Jolly into the arms of the Communist Party of India in 1941, and he started working among the Calcutta port workers as a trade unionist (a moving account of which experience is found in a chapter that gives us thumbnail sketches of his working class comrades). He narrates the history of his later experiences of passing through the party’s insurrectionary phase in 1948-51, as an underground activist, spending some three years in jail, and finally emerging into electoral politics after his release.

There is a romantic touch to this latter political phase. It was during the first general elections in 1952 that Jolly met someone who was to be his lifelong companion – Manikuntala Sen, the candidate nominated by the CPI to contest from the Kalighat assembly constituency of south Calcutta. It fell to Jolly, as the secretary of the Calcutta district committee of the CPI, to drive her around during the campaign (on a budget of around Rs 5,000 only) in the only car available to the party then – a ramshackle Standard Herald offered by a party sympathizer (a far cry from today’s extravagant Leftist electoral caravan!). The campaign (which led to Manikuntala’s victory) brought her close to Jolly, and they got married the next year. But while Jolly’s family and Manikuntala’s relatives readily accepted the marriage, the reaction of the party’s West Bengal provincial committee was ‘frosty’. What had upset the leadership was that Manikuntala was older than Jolly by several years, and that such a marriage therefore might detract from her winnability in the next election!

Apart from being shocked by such conservative biases among some of the top Bengali Communist leaders, Jolly Kaul always suffered from an ambivalence in his involvement with the movement – anguished by doubts about the political policies of these leaders, like the call for insurrection in 1948, and disturbed by the shocking revelations about Stalin’s atrocities in Khrushchev’s secret report of 1956. (Peculiarly enough, the Soviet invasion of Hungary at the end of that year – which added to our increasing disillusionment with the Soviet party at that time – does not find any mention in his memoirs). But he kept his reservations to himself and, in a frank confession, admits: ‘I was not bold enough to take the decisive step that I should have taken and that I ultimately did take some six years later.’ The pain and moral necessity of the final break came in 1963 when, following the Sino-Indian war, he left the party expressing his doubts about the future of a divided Communist movement caused by the behaviour of Communist China which ‘weakens the democratic and progressive forces in the country and brings grist to the mill of the reactionaries.’ Significantly, his wife Manikuntala also, a year later when the CPI split into two parties, drifted away from the movement, telling her comrades that she was not willing to join either of them, since she came to ‘build the party, not to break it.’

The years that followed opened up a new world for Jolly Kaul. Circumstances put him on the other side of the fence when he joined the corporate world as the head of public relations for Indian Oxygen (1967-81), which enabled him to understand the point of view of his erstwhile ‘class enemies’, and also to introduce the concept of corporate social responsibility that has since become the buzzword among industrial circles. His next stint was as an editor of the economic journal Capital for about five years, which also threw him in the company of the top leaders of industry. But times were changing, and he soon realized that there was ‘no place for the ethical in most corporate exercises.’ He was through with Capital by early 1986, as he was ‘not happy with… the way the proprietor was trying to run the journal.’

Meanwhile, Jolly had turned spiritual – thanks to his wife’s influence who found solace in religion after her resignation from the party. But he was never a person to remain content with meditation or reading scriptures. The continuing urge to intervene in the search for a ‘better world’ led him to respond to a call from the Gandhian trade unionist Kanti Mehta, and join his Gandhi Labour Foundation in Puri in 2003. There followed an exciting five-year period of ‘rich learning experience’, in the course of which he had a chance of discovering the changes in the trade union movement, the degeneration brought about by economism, the corruption of the workers by the political parties by brain-washing them into accepting ‘more money and more privileges’ as the main goal, instead of the larger ideology of a basic change in the socio-economic structure. It also helped him to get a ‘glimpse of the current global efforts to search for a better system and to create a new world,’ that were being made by social activists from all over the world who came together at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004.

Jolly Kaul acknowledges that these ‘dramatic transformations’ in his life – from the Communist phase, through the stint with the corporate world, to Gandhian social activism – were never ‘sudden breaks’, but smooth because of his access to ‘the books and literature suited for each phase’ which helped him to rationally choose his options. At the end of his long journey through varied experiences over almost nine decades, he comes to the conclusion today that the ongoing struggle for a better social system will be successful ‘to the extent that human beings are able to better themselves… begin with oneself.’

This belief harks back to the call given by political philosophers of the past to individuals to develop themselves as better human beings at their own personal level, so as to be able to contribute to the larger collective struggle for a better world. It is this faith in the courage of the individual to reinvent his/her humanity in the face of every defeat that has held back Jolly Kaul from being bogged down into the morass of cynical withdrawal, or political opportunism that many among his old party comrades have sunk into. While touching upon his personal woes and disappointments in the Communist movement, he never loses sight of his social responsibility.

Reading Jolly-da, I remembered Lu Xun’s confession when he was passing through a difficult period in his life: ‘…I have not forgotten the grief of my past loneliness…’ But then he added: ‘...I, for my part, did not want to infect with the loneliness which I had found so bitter, those young people who were still dreaming pleasant dreams, just as I had done when young’ (December 1922).

Sumanta Banerjee

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