Books

THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS: The Great War in the Middle East by Eugene Rogan. Basic Books, New York, 2015.

SPEAKING from the Grand Mosque of Mosul in July 2014, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, warned that ‘this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.’ The Islamic State also put out a propaganda video titled End of Sykes-Picot, claiming that its forces would smash all the borders that were drawn nearly a century ago. The reference to the ‘Sykes-Picot conspiracy’ became something of a trope invoked alike by western leaders and analysts to underline the momentous changes that were apparently underway in the Middle East owing to the Islamic State’s military onslaught. That it referred to a secret Anglo-French understanding during the First World War to carve out the territory of the Ottoman Empire was widely recognized, but few of the ersatz experts seemed to be aware of the wider historical context to the birth of the modern Middle East.

Eugene Rogan’s outstanding history of the collapse of the Ottoman empire could not have been more timely. Author of the much acclaimed The Arabs, Rogan draws on a dazzling array of sources in several languages to provide a highly accessible account of a story that is little known and less understood. He rightly argues that while the Great War began as a European conflict, it was the Ottoman entry into the war that turned it into a world war. Unlike the minor campaigns in the Far East and East Africa, the Middle East witnessed major battles over the entire course of the war. These battles, moreover, drew soldiers from countries as varied as India, Australia and New Zealand to Senegal, Sudan and Ireland – as well as the Arabs, Kurds and Armenians. ‘The Ottoman front was a veritable tower of Babel’, Rogan writes, ‘an unprecedented conflict between international armies.’

For six centuries the Ottomans had ruled over the largest Islamic empire in the world. Already by the end of the seventeenth century, the Ottomans were unable to hold their own against the absolutist states of Europe, and the boundaries of the empire began to shrink in Europe. The rise of the new nationalist movements in the early nineteenth century led to further loss of territory in the empire’s Balkan provinces. In the closing decades of the century, Russia, France and, above all, Britain picked off chunks of Ottoman territory. In particular, the British occupation of Egypt since 1882 under the fig-leaf of Ottoman sovereignty, as well as Britain’s entry into the Persian Gulf in pursuit of oil, loosened Ottoman control over the Middle East.

It was against this backdrop of internal and external threats that a group of young military officers – the Young Turks – rebelled against the Sultan in 1908 and sought to save their state by modernizing it. This revolution was followed by three wars against European adversaries in the next five years, resulting in the loss of Ottoman possessions in the Balkans and North Africa. The constitutional movement of 1908 morphed into an autocratic government led by a triumvirate of Unionists – Enver, Talat and Cemal. These men saw two major existential threats to the Ottoman state. Internally, they were concerned that the Arab provinces might succumb to the sirens of nationalism. They were also fearful of the Armenian claims to lands in the eastern Anatolia – a problem that coincided with Russia’s avowed territorial ambitions in these parts as well as the Straits of Dardanelles and the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. In the face of the Russian threat, the Ottomans cast about for a European ally.

When the crisis erupted in Europe in July 1914, the Turkish leaders worked out with the Germans the terms of a secret defensive alliance against Russia. Yet, they waited out the conflict until early November, when it became clear that the Germans would not put up with further dragging of the feet. The Ottoman entry into the war was accompanied by a call from the Sultan (Caliph) for a global jihad against Britain, France and Russia. The British were particularly unnerved by the prospect of their Muslim imperial subjects, especially in India, rising up in response to the Caliph’s call. They got the Muslim princes – the nawabs of Bhopal, Rampur, Murshidabad, Dhaka and the Nizam of Hyderabad – to affirm that the Sultan had misled the Muslims and that the latters’ loyalty rested with the British empire.

Of greater immediate concern to the Ottomans was mobilizing their own army for the war. In a superb chapter, Rogan shows how the Ottomans mobilized their men and geared up for the exigencies of the war. His account of the various military campaigns, including the Ottoman victory at Gallipoli, makes excellent use of various first-hand testimonies from both sides and gives us a sense of what it felt like to be at the sharp end in these campaigns. A running thread through the military history of the Ottoman war is the British-Indian Army’s participation in various campaigns in the Middle East. Rogan is particularly good on the Indian Army’s ignominious campaign in Mesopotamia, especially the surrender at Kut al Amara.

The Ottoman victory at Gallipoli was a close run thing. In fact, the campaign began against the backdrop of setbacks in Suez and in eastern Anatolia. The latter defeat at the hands of the Russians spurred the Turkish leadership to embark on a massacre of the Armenians. The question of whether this should be called ‘genocide’ remains a politically sensitive one even today. Rogan rightly uses the term, but also helps contextualize it. The fundamental problem was the weakening legitimacy of the imperial authority and its consequent reliance on a range of local actors to extract societal resources for the war. This was compounded by the growing paranoia of the leadership about a variety of ethnic groups, especially but not exclusively the Armenians. Rogan’s account of the Armenian genocide is particularly moving: by using several survivor testimonies he brings individual experiences into sharp focus. At the same time, he also shows how the Young Turk leadership went after other groups such as the Arabs in Syria.

Eventually it was the Arab revolt supported by the British that turned the tide of war against the Ottomans. Unsurprisingly, Egypt and the Arab lands emerged from the war expecting the dawn of a new age of independence. They were to be as disappointed by the outcome of the war as their erstwhile imperial overlords. The punitive settlement that the victors sought to impose on Turkey led to a resistance movement under Mustafa Kemal. The final settlement took place only July 1923. Four months later, Kemal ‘Ataturk’ took over as the president of the Turkish republic. The Ottoman empire and the caliphate had fallen through the trapdoor of history.

Meantime, the Middle East had – with the significant exception of the creation of Israel – taken the shape that persisted for the next century and that is currently being challenged by the Islamic State. Ironically the restoration of the caliphate was a dream that began to take hold in Arab lands almost as soon the caliphate was abolished. By explaining the deep historical background and showing the very modern roots of this seemingly reactionary programme, Rogan leaves us with a powerful sense of how the past and the present are closely intertwined in today’s Middle East.

Srinath Raghavan

Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi

 

POVERTY AND THE QUEST FOR LIFE: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India by Bhrigupati Singh. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2015.

IN recent years, different regions in Rajasthan have gone through successive droughts and marginalized groups have suffered from severe food shortages, malnutrition and starvation deaths. Bhrigupati Singh’s book, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India examines the processes that led to such forms of deprivation, while going beyond representations of abjection and lack to reveal the aspirations and vitality of the Sahariyas, classified as primitive tribes, and the lower and middle caste groups in the villages of Shahbad in Baran district, Rajasthan.

The author engages with scholars who have explained how the modern state and non-state disciplinary regimes have simultaneously created, as well as sought to ameliorate, poverty and statelessness. Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) conceptions of sovereignty and ‘bare life’ have been central to understanding conditions of marginality by showing how various forms of sovereign power have cast certain groups of people as undignified, undisciplined, and incapable of achieving proper political life and citizenship. In these ways, bare life is excluded from the political realm, and exposed to various forms of violation.1 The author argues that Agamben’s theories of sovereignty and bare life do not account for the multifaceted aspects of state power and the life force, shared moral aspirations, and the complexities of inter-caste and tribe relations that he found through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Shahbad. He provides a range of concepts to analyze power, sovereignty, and ethics by redrawing an understanding of ‘political theologies’ that he says allows him to ‘move between religious and secular domains of life without necessarily collapsing all distinctions.’

In the first part of the book, Singh conceptualizes power and sovereignty by drawing on the work of the philologist Georges Dumèzil, who shows how the deities of Mitra and Varuna respectively express the contractual and coercive forces of sovereignty. The author analyzes state power by examining the local practices of the forest department that reveal histories of extraction, revenue generation, and attempts at rationalization, or the Varuna aspects of the state. The Mitra dimensions of the state include development and welfare where, for example, the forest department seeks to promote community participation and user rights over forest enclosures. Singh argues that Agamben’s conception of sovereignty focuses solely on the coercive, or Varuna, dimension of the state and does not consider the coexistence of Mitra and Varuna.

Along with the depletion of forests, the lack of water availability has also contributed to deprivation and poverty in this region. Singh explains that the high yielding variety of wheat, ushered in by the Green Revolution, requires extensive water extraction for optimum yield and has led to a drop in groundwater levels. At the same time, people’s dietary preferences have changed from grains considered coarse, such as millets, to wheat that is seen as fine, more appetizing, and consumed by high castes.

In the second half of the book, Singh focuses on ethics, which he defines as ‘forms of relatedness and energies that exceed the terms of force and contract’ (135). The author examines such forms of relatedness by showing how Carl Schmitt’s (1985) notion of the friend-enemy grouping – where the possibility of war between nation states informs antagonistic relationships in even the most ‘banal forms of politics’2 – is much more complex in everyday life. He draws on several ethnographic vignettes around festivals, genres of speech and song, and epic storytelling to reveal how the concept of ‘agonistic intimacy’ enables us to understand the everyday modes of both contestation and cohabitation among different castes. Focusing on shared moral aspirations among agons, Singh examines the recent arrival of a deity, Tejaji, into Shahbad. The oral epic tells of Tejaji, of the Jat caste, who retrieves stolen cattle from Meena tribes and gives up his life because of a promise made to a snake. In contemporary Shahbad, Tejaji possesses only the Sahariyas, and among them those who are vegetarian and teetotallers.

In order to explain the arrival of Tejaji and how and why middle and high castes, along with the Sahariyas, participate in the healing rituals (of snake bites), songs, and festivals that revere Tejaji, the author situates the Tejaji epic in relation to genealogies of the transformations of the warrior ethos. Drawing on the work of Dumèzil, Singh describes the centrality of the warrior force, exemplified by the reverence for Indra in the Vedic epoch. During the composition of the Mahabharata and Brahmana texts, the warrior force was redistributed among the functions of the priest, warrior, and cultivator, leading to the ‘demotion of Indra’ and the emergence of divinities such as Krishna (pp. 174-178). The author proceeds to show how Friedrich Nietzche describes the ways in which the global transformations of the warrior ethic led to the emergence of ‘ascetic ideals’ in different religions. These ascetic ideals, for instance of promise and self-sacrifice, can also be seen in the Tejaji epic. The reception of Tejaji into Shahbad was, according to Singh, a part of a ‘shared moral aspiration’ (165) toward asceticism by different castes. These ascetic ideals cohere around the cultivator function and the veneration of the cow – themes manifest in rituals, festivals and songs that revere Tejaji.

The last two chapters of the book delve further into ethics and individual subjectivities. Singh describes intricate details of the sources of strength and weakness of a woman called Kalli, who is a fieldworker with the NGO, Sankalp. Kalli contested elections for the position of panchayat sarpanch and lost, and continues to have political ambitions. We learn that Kalli has a deity, a Jind, who possess her and is a source of both comfort and conflict. Singh shows how the Jind’s socialization into Kalli’s family parallels her own sense of well-being as she raises children, finds strength among other women, and is an effective fieldworker for Sankalp. The manner in which Kalli navigates inter-caste and tribe relations is depicted through a series of episodes in which Kalli organizes a rally to the police station to protest against the petty violence committed by a man of the middle-ranking Nagar caste toward a Sahariya who is related to Kalli. Later, Kalli supports the Nagar family during an argument over disputed land in a forest enclosure. Kalli’s son borrowed money from the Nagar family and works for them. Here, the concept of agonistic intimacy becomes particularly productive in understanding everyday inter-caste relations that otherwise confused the NGO workers, who were uncertain about where to locate Kalli’s loyalties.

Singh further develops his ideas of vitality and agonistic intimacy to explore the life of a man he calls Bansi Maharaj, who was a bonded labourer and is now an ascetic. Bansi Maharaj defies common sense ideas of what counts for human holiness, as he does not belong to a great ascetic lineage, is married and, rather than renouncing his social milieu, plays with his Sahariya identity in creative ways. His distinctive asceticism attracts people of higher castes and enables him to revise the modes of interaction between Sahariyas and middle and high caste groups.

The book provides insights into the manner in which inter-caste and tribe interactions contribute to shaping the formation of individual subjectivities. We may also probe into the ways in which analyses of regional employment trajectories and institutional practices, along with those that Singh provides, mediate in the shifting forms of sociality between different castes and tribes. How does the employment of Rajputs, Gujjars, Jats, and Ahirs in western and central Rajasthan in the Indian Army and its practices of recruitment based on the martial race theory – where colonial officers considered Rajputs the predominant martial race and measured other martial races against them – impact the formation of subjectivities and sociality? During my fieldwork with retired Gujjar jawans and officers in villages in Dausa and Karauli districts in Rajasthan, I found that army practices shaped how people spoke of veerta or a way of being brave and martial that intersected with the manner in which Gujjars interpreted oral epics such as that of Devnarayan. The Devnarayan epic undermines the mainstream Rajput history of Rajasthan, as the heroic Devnarayan defeats the Rajput Rana in battle.3 Ethics of veerta were also reflected in how Gujjars evoked discourses of martyrdom and sacrifice to describe events of the Gujjar andolan for Scheduled Tribe status in 2006 and 2007 where police officers fired at and shot a number of Gujjars. Can we employ the nuanced approach of a concept like agonistic intimacy, while simultaneously attending to the circulation of ideas of bravery, hostility, and enmity that are reflected in institutional practices, people’s interpretation of epics, festivals, and ritual, and in political mobilization? How might the various forms of asceticism that Singh traces exist alongside and even complement a martial ethos?

The book provides concepts that can be applied to a range of different contexts and ideas that will hone the frameworks by which we view power and ethics. It should also be read by anyone who wants to understand conditions of marginality and poverty and those involved in development. For example, Singh’s concept of agonistic intimacy in the chapter titled ‘The Waxing and Waning Life of Kalli’ provides insight into how tribal, Dalit, and other women navigate inter-caste and tribe relations that revise the more familiar narratives in which women who have recently gained political power are seen to be easily influenced by higher castes and men. Singh’s descriptions of the struggles, aspirations, vitality, and skills of tribal women, who are often uneducated and illiterate, points, I believe, to how legislation in Haryana and Rajasthan that mandates a certain level of education for women who contest panchayat elections will have disastrous implications for Indian democracy.

Devika Bordia

Socio-cultural anthropologist, Delhi

 

Footnotes:

1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998.

2. Aditya Malik, Nectar Gaze and Poison Breath: An Analysis and Translation of the Rajasthani Oral Narrative of Devnarayan. Oxford University Press, USA, 2005.

3. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1985.

 

KASHMIR: The Loss of Innocence by Kiran Kohli Narain. Eminence Design, Mumbai, 2015.

AS one reads the book on Kashmir what strikes is the extraordinary sense of detail of people, places, things starting from over 65 years ago: it is a love story really, for a place and a time that has vanished forever. And in a sense because it is a chronicle told by a young girl, whose heart has remained enmeshed in the magic of a Kashmir of childhood, there is a certain inevitable sense of loss and longing, echoing the vanished farm of Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood.

There are a few things that make this book readable and sometimes quite surprisingly unique. First, it is written from the viewpoint of a Punjabi Hindu girl who felt perfectly at home in the Kashmir of the 1950s and ’60s. Second, it is a tribute of a daughter to a father and a mother, both of whom encouraged independent thinking, education and, more unusually, working with ones hands. It is also written from the perspective of someone who did not come from a wealthy or influential background, someone who lived among people of different faiths and traditions, and who remembers the historical and psychological mood of the time, layered as it were, with the everyday detail of life in a family and community.

The book is an important document, possibly incomprehensible to a youth that grew up during the 1990s and later, because it speaks of a Kashmir that was historically a composite culture. The author writes about her first home when her father was posted as an officer of the state forest services: ‘Baramullah was the last resting place of the saint Sayyad Janbaz Wali and not only did it have a rich composite culture with Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh historical places of worship but it was also the gateway to the beautiful princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.’

Within an idyllic setting of mountains and rivers, one discovers the distinct personalities of the six Kohli sisters as they grow into young women, even through the terrible events of Partition and the Kabaili attacks and later, as they come to terms with loss and difficult times. Through it all we become aware of the importance placed on education by a father who never allowed the girls to feel handicapped due to their gender. Kiran, the only girl at the Amar Singh College, was encouraged to study what she chose.

The author describes the beauty of the valley in spring very evocatively, the almond blossom, irises, fields of mustard and then of autumn when the chinars turn ‘yellow, orange and then fiery rust…’ Equally evocative is her account of their neighbours in Magarmal Bagh, a predominantly Punjabi speaking neighbourhood where the Durranis and Sethis lived and met and went to each other’s homes for festivals and weddings. Juxtaposed with the beauty of the place and the camaraderie of the people, is the story of coming of age and departure from the beloved childhood place.

As Kiran speaks of the past, she is constantly aware of the events that seemed to change the Valley, struggling to retain its rich cultural hybrid flavour to a place that both turned hostile to the Hindus and increasingly became insular. With the killing of her brother-in-law, the family acutely felt the severance that comes from exile. Even though her nephew went back to make a film on Kashmir as an act of courage and closure, Kiran could not rid herself of the pain and sadness after her father’s death, and did not return for another 25 years. What she saw on her return was a Kashmir that had changed forever; evidence of conservatism in dress and outlook, loss of natural environment and huge swathes of farmland turned into building sites, abandoned old homes and a ‘generation of young Kashmiris (who) had grown up without knowing what it was like to have Hindu neighbours, to study in classrooms with Pandit and Dogra classmates or eat from the same traambi regardless of religious considerations… where Sufi tolerance was the norm…’

The book and indeed Kiran’s voice, her experience of a gentler world, the stoic acceptance of change and hardship, the poignant joys of growing up, strikes a chord because it is a ‘true’ chronicle of a real time and real place. In some ways the book is reminiscent of Richard Llewellyn’s, How Green was My Valley. Childhood, and its tastes and smells and feelings of comfort and sharp insight are all beautifully captured. The sense of loss is magnified by the loss of a magical place of the past, but also a magical and treasured sense of community, and the confrontation with a fractured and diminished present. In the lament of the exile is the yearning for a lived past, which perhaps can be encountered only in an experience and nurturance of a spiritual homecoming. Possibly, this alone might help to once again make real the now vanished perfect place.

Jyotsna Singh

Artist, Delhi

 

WHY INDIA IS NOT A GREAT POWER (YET) by Bharat Karnad. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2015.

Bharat Karnad’s latest offering, tantalizingly titled, Why India is not a Great Power (Yet) makes for compelling reading, because even those who disagree with his passionate advocacy will admit that he propagates the national cause far more effectively than do our effete policy-making elite. Sweeping in scope and provocative in content, the book is written in Karnad’s usual forceful and cogent style. The author makes skilful use of history and Indian politics to bolster some powerful, and often bombastic, arguments. For a scholar living in the sheltered ‘groves of academe’, I would rate his knowledge of defence planning, strategy, doctrines, and weapon systems as ‘above average’. However, it is certainly not enough to warrant repeated excoriation of the military leadership – past and present – that he frequently presumes to indulge in.

For an average Indian, engaged in struggles with issues of roti, kapda, makan, bijlee, pani, sadak, corruption and rising prices, one suspects that any talk of great power status would be akin to a slap in the face. At the same time there are other Indians who would insist that further discussion on this topic is redundant because we are already a great power by virtue of our geography, demography, rising economy and, above all, superior 4000 year old culture.

Karnad, clearly, takes a different view. On the very first page of the book, he lists out ten criteria for great powerhood that include attributes such as a ‘driving vision’, ‘outward thrusting nature’, ‘a sense of destiny’, ‘inclination to establish distant presence’ and ‘a willingness to use coercion and force in national interest’, to list a few. Regrettably, in my 45-years in the Navy and Ministry of Defence (MoD), I have never detected the slightest sign of any such ambition in the Indian state or any of its functionaries – political, bureaucratic or diplomatic.

So it would be fair to question the author’s quixotic inquiry into India’s ‘great power’ quest, when we know that a dysfunctional Parliament, lack of vision in the government and the country’s decrepit, bureaucracy-driven security structures preclude any prospect of attaining it in the foreseeable future.

The book’s leitmotif is essentially a lament that India has missed every opportunity to rise to its potential. Karnad sets out manifold reasons for this: a diffident and risk averse polity which has consistently held back its punches, a stove-piped and over-bureaucratized government, absence of an articulated national vision, hollow hard power, over-emphasis on soft power and finally, a military which remains trapped in an industrial age mindset. He is right on every count, and renders a valuable service by dwelling, in great detail, on these national shortcomings.

What strains the reader’s credulity is Karnad’s radical prescription for putting India on track to achieve its ‘destined glory’. His grandiose plan is rooted in an ‘Indian Monroe Doctrine’ and involves India defining a vast security perimeter, extending from the Caspian Sea to Antarctica and from East Africa to SE Asia. Having bound this area together with security, trade and economic ties, he wants India to act as a maritime ‘security provider’.

However, it is when dealing with China that Karnad takes one’s breath away. Choosing to ignore the very handicaps he had pointed out earlier, and the incongruity of a poor and struggling India donning a hegemon’s mantle, Karnad recommends that Pakistan be downgraded as a security threat and eventually won over economically. At the same time, he recommends that China be confronted head-on, in Tibet as well as at sea.

Some of the unorthodox measures he suggests to contain China are guaranteed to rattle the diplomatic and military communities alike. Apart from an unrealistic and ambitious scheme to establish Indian bases in the Pacific and Indian Ocean as well as in Central Asia, he recommends that India should resume thermonuclear testing and arm Vietnam with nuclear weapons. Resurrecting a discarded Cold War concept, he suggests the planting of nuclear demolition charges on Himalayan ingress routes to deter the Chinese. His most utopian suggestion involves the basing of an Indian ballistic missile submarine in Australia to deter China!

Countering historian Ramachandra Guha’s list of objective reasons why India will/should not become a superpower, Karnad points out that the straitened economic circumstances of Elizabethan England and Bismarckian Germany did not prevent them from attaining power and dominion. History, however, seems to point the other way, because Queen Elizabeth’s reign was known as the ‘Golden Age’ of affluence for England and a prosperous Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck, was the world’s first welfare state.

Having offered a critique, I must resile somewhat, and focus on the book’s true worth, which lies elsewhere. As highlighted below, along with a comprehensive analysis of why India has ‘flattered to deceive’, Karnad also offers rare and valuable insights into India’s post-independence security decision-making and evolving security postures. I would strongly commend this book to a broad spectrum of readership interested in contemporary Indian history, defence, security, strategy or international relations.

India is a nuclear weapon state with conventional forces that count amongst the largest in the world. For the year 2015-16, Parliament voted 40 billion USD for defence. To this figure, if we add expenditures incurred on the nuclear deterrent, on ‘special projects’ and on the Home Ministry’s million strong central armed police forces, India possibly spends about USD 100 billion on internal/external security.

As Karnad describes in detail, India has rarely been able to leverage its economic or military might to deter or dissuade any country – Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka or even tiny Maldives – from undertaking actions inimical to Indian interests. While the international community may applaud India’s apathy in the face of grave provocations such as the 26/11 Mumbai terror episode, the taxpayer is entitled to ask whether annual expenditures of the order of USD 100 billion are not too heavy a price to pay for merely demonstrating ‘strategic restraint’. Most of the answers to this conundrum can be found in Karnad’s book.

The author casts a sharp beam on India’s national security domain to unerringly pick out its shortcomings and flaws. He also, unflinchingly, points out the price that we are paying for this gross mismanagement, in terms of a half-empty arsenal, a military-industrial complex that has failed to deliver and a higher defence organization that may not be able to cope with 21st century conflict.

One wishes that some of the educated few in India’s political establishment spare time from electoral politics to read this book. They would realize the truth of Karnad’s words, that ‘the lack of a comprehensive vision, strategy, game plan and primarily, political will, and a scatter-shot approach to marshalling national resources… give the impression of a country clueless about what it wants and how to get it…’

Arun Prakash

Admiral (retd.), Indian Navy, Goa