[Reader-list] Muslims, Rajputs or Punjabis?

[Shivam]

  An irrelevant enumeration 
  The concept of the Census itself is a colonial and retrograde one
designed to benefit an imperialist master.
  
  By Shardul Chaturvedi
  The Indian Express / September 16, 2004
  http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=55153

 
The debate in the media about the 'implications' of Muslim growth is
nauseating. The Parivar is jumping with a sense of triumph. Their
age-old allegation about Muslims multiplying faster than Hindus have
been proved, by a secular agency, under a secular government. Secular
gharanas are silent, understandably so, they have routinely dismissed
this knowledge as communal propaganda. Now they have nowhere to look.

About thirty years after they silenced the last rebel gun in the great
revolt, the British decided to make sense of the country they had come
to acquire. And from this curiosity, arose the most novel and
extraordinary endeavour of human mapping: the Census. Quite
understandably, the British did not know where or how to begin, for
Indians needed to be defined, classified, measured, numbered and put
in categories. What were these categories? Who were to devise them?
These were the daunting questions our benevolent masters faced, and
not for the first time in their rule and certainly not for the last,
they settled for the easiest and the most damaging answer.
 
They summoned a bunch of Maulvis and Brahmins to Calcutta, sat them
down, and settled once and for all, the fundamental definitions of a
Hindu and a Muslim. Maulvisque and Brahmanical perspectives —
parochial, textual, and most certainly very communal — gave the
British their basic understanding of Islam and Hinduism. We were
defined hence by our most fundamentalist representatives; men who
often knew little beyond their Arabic and Sanskrit texts and had very
little connections with the actual anthropological realities of India.
And with such categories in hand, British officers jumped into the
Indian leviathan, numbering and categorising people, deciding their
races, observing their noses, measuring their jaw structures,
categorising them as Moslems, Hindoos, Parsees, Sikhs, martial,
effeminate, brave, treacherous, criminal, thugs, genteel.

More often than not, Indian realities did not fit into the categories
given to the British by Indian 'representatives'. It was tough to
decide whether Punjabi Rajput Muslims in what is now Pakistan, were
culturally Muslims, Rajputs or Punjabi. But the thumb rule was: when
people did not fall into categories, categories were clamped on to
them. This was the great Census of 1881, which rather than generating
identities from Indians, imposed them on the people, often herding
them into categories they themselves did not comprehend. But soon,
informed of who they were, and how much in numbers, of what race, how
brave, how respectable, and the rest, Indians quickly internalised the
knowledge, and started believing, behaving, demanding, combining and
aspiring according to their newly found categories.

Rajputs 'realised' that they were warriors, Sikhs — martial, Brahmins
— intellectuals, Mewatis — Muslims, Tamils — Dravidians, Punjabis —
Aryans and Muslims — a new category — minority. From that day we can
safely date Muslim distrust in number politics and in democracy, and
the Hindu confidence in it.

The Census of 1881 is widely seen as an event of huge consequence in
Indian self-image and identity. Unsurprisingly, it marks the beginning
of the politics of identity — of communalism, casteism, and racism of
the Aryan-Dravidian type. Besides, most Indians, when they learnt that
they were not 'adequately' something, became more desperate to mimic
the prototype. Categories were hardened, genealogies purified,
languages codified and accents chastened. And the Census, a complete
colonial artefact in methodology and intent, continues to replicate
itself in our times, provoking similar responses, fears and demands.

Indians who follow Islam continue to be seen as ''Muslims'' — an
almost homogenous monolithic block, and when we are informed that
there is something called the Muslim growth rate, we believe in it,
though it would be fairly obvious to an even casual observer that
Muslims and Hindus of the same class grow at the same rate. Muslims
grow faster because more Indian Muslims belong to the lower classes
than Indian Hindus and if Muslims were compared to the Hindus of the
corresponding classes, the similarity would be striking. But then our
Census sees people in terms of their religion, not class, which could
be another, perhaps fairer method of understanding people, because
members of the same class show social and cultural similarities, which
very often members of the same community do not. Most upper classes,
for instance, show a decline in the rate of reproduction, irrespective
of religion.

Except the Jains, who have startled all by their alarming rate of
growth, and given that most Jains in India are not particularly poor,
there needs to be serious examination of their growth rate. And I am
alarmed, not because they constitute any threat to India, but over the
simple issue of population explosion. In the similar way I am
disappointed that lower and lower middle-class Muslims have not taken
to family planning. Addressing such an issue requires complex and
sensitive responses, certainly more sensitive than seeing Muslim
growth as a threat to the country.

The threat logic is confusing. Venkaiah Naidu wants us to believe that
if Muslims continue to grow at the current rate, they would soon
imbalance the demographic equilibrium and threaten national security.
How? By simply overtaking Hindus in numbers? That might,
hypothetically, change the cultural idiom of the nation state, but why
and how would that threaten national security?

(The writer is a history scholar who completed his research from
Oxford University.)


o o o o o o o o  


  Holding out for a hero 
  It is a strange society that mocks Veer Savarkar 

  By Ashok Malik
  The Indian Express / 16 September 2004
  http://iecolumnists.expressindia.com/full_column.php?content_id=55156 
      
 
 
Since delay brings detachment, maybe it is appropriate to revisit the
recent controversy around Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Right from the
time Mani Shankar Aiyar removed the redoubtable patriot's name from a
plaque in Cellular Jail, Port Blair, Savarkar became a political
football. Yesterday's mascot was used to fight today's battles.
In all this, yet again that old chestnut hit home — Indians have zero
sense of history. The past is only relevant as a backward extension of
the present.
 
A jejune magazine article informed us Savarkar was a Chitpavan
Brahmin, part of a community that seemingly specialised in
''ideologues ... of Hindu nationalism''. One of them was Bal Gangadhar
Tilak, accused of introducing ''primordial" Hindu imagery into public
discourse.

It is the sort of sweeping, breathtaking assessment that leaves you
gasping. In one sentence, an entire community has been written off as
''tainted'' by the parameters of contemporary political correctness.
In one phrase, the great Tilak has been disowned, handed over to
Acharya Dharmendra and the VHP.

A decade and a half after the tempestuous secularism/pseudo-secularism
debate, are we back to square one? Does it take one half-won election
to have all those discredited leftists and professional time-servers
come crawling out of the woodwork?

Why does Savarkar evoke such passion? He was a thinking man's Hindu, a
prodigious mind, an author of repute. His Hindutva (1923) is a
persuasive and remarkably evocative document.

As such, to the liberal rabble, he is flesh-and-blood refutation of
the charge that Hindutva lacks an intellectual tradition. Hence the
fervent desire to destroy him, efface him, erase his memory.

To see Savarkar minus his context is to do disservice to not just him,
but to India. The Poona Brahmins, contrary to what conventional wisdom
may be, were among modern India's early elites, along with, for
instance, the Parsis of Bombay, the Banglo-Indian bhadralok of
Calcutta. These are not groups to be scoffed at; they shaped the
consciousness that evolved into Indian nationalism. They are our
founding fathers.

Yet, it is also true that they were marginalised by Gandhi's mass
politics. By the early 20th century, they moved away from the
Congress, seeking reference points to the left or the right, in
conservatism or socialism. Bengal saw a tension between both strands
before the left won. In Maharashtra, Savarkar, influenced more by
Mazzini than Marx, went the other way.

The big black mark against Savarkar is that he was implicated — though
acquitted — in the Gandhi murder case. Even if Savarkar was not
directly involved, it is a fair argument that the Hindu political
opinion of the times, shaped by the likes of Savarkar, both fed on and
fed an antipathy to the Mahatma.

If you listen to today's television debates — or read the ghastly
chapter on Savarkar in Freedom at Midnight, packed with cheap shots
that mar an otherwise readable book — you would imagine the build-up
to the Mahatma's murder was an open-and-shut, black-and-white affair.

It wasn't; and making Savarkar the scapegoat won't make it so. The
contrasting pulls of Gandhi and Savarkar, of Hindu as saint-exemplar
and Hindu as warrior-ideal were at their most extreme at Partition.

Speak to Punjabis or north Indians of a particular generation and they
will tell you Gandhi was considered irrelevant after Partition. When
they saw him making friendly gestures towards Pakistan in the midst of
bloodletting, they hated him.

Yet the moment the Mahatma was killed, the fury was spent, it was
Hindu extremism that stood in the dock. The very segments so critical
of the Mahatma were numbed by his murder. His death was point of
closure for the mad frenzy of Partition.

India moved on, developing a collective amnesia about its turbulent,
violent birth as a free nation. Gandhi's politics died at Partition;
the Congress killed his ethics at Independence and, by the mid-1950s,
junked, perhaps correctly, his economics too. The RSS sought to
repackage itself, divorce its Hindu politics from the Mahatma's death.

For all concerned, Savarkar became the convenient fall guy — the man
you could blame everything on.

Savarkar loved India as much as Gandhi or Nehru did. His idea of India
was different — some would say more organic and inspirational — but
his credentials should never have been in question. What sort of
society is it that mocks its heroes?

It is pertinent to draw an analogy with the United States. The first
big ideological debate in American politics was between Thomas
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. It led to the first contested (as
opposed to unanimous) presidential election in 1800, where Jefferson
took on Hamilton-backed John Adams.

At stake were two very different visions of America. Hamilton was
pro-business, he wanted to preserve freedom but rebuild ties with
Britain in the interests of trade. Jefferson distrusted London, was
taken up by the rhetoric of Revolution-era Paris.

In a sense, the Hamilton-Jefferson split anticipated the
Republican-Democrat divide of our age. Yet do today's Republicans ask
voters to shun Democrats simply because Aaron Burr, Jefferson's
vice-president, killed Hamilton in a duel?

Isn't that what Mani Shankar Aiyar and Arjun Singh do when they link
the BJP to the Mahatma's death?

Admittedly the comparison may be overstated. Eighteenth century
politics in the US and that in India 150 years later were chalk and
cheese. Even so, the larger point remains.

Hamilton and Jefferson are both American heroes. Can't Gandhi and
Savarkar share space in the Indian pantheon?