cult-of-masculinity.pdf - Anjali Arondekar, Associate Professor

The Book Review / June 2012 / 1

C o n t e n t s

Salim Yusufji Catching Up With Gandhi by Graham Turner; Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld; Timeless Inspirator: Reliving Gandhi conceptualised and edited by Raghunath Mashelkar 2

Malvika Maheshwari Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India by Benjamin Zachariah 5

Ankita Pandey Accommodating Diversity: Ideas and Institutional Practices edited by Gurpreet Mahajan 7

K.K. Kailash India’s 2009 Elections: Coalition Politics, Party Competition, and Congress Continuity edited by Paul Wallace

and Ramashray Roy 9

Mark Schneider Undermining Local Democracy: Parallel governance in Contemporary South India by Lalita Chandrashekhar 11

Krishna Swamy Dara The Community of Rights: The Rights of Community by Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy 12

Faisal Devji Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism by Justin Jones 13

Tahir Mahmood Islam in the World Today: A Handbook of Politics, Religion, Culture and Society edited by Werner Ende

and Udo Sreinbach 14

Muhammed Haneefa The Malabar Muslims: A Different Perspective by L.R.S. Lakshmi 16

Rahul Mukherji The Eagle and the Elephant: Strategic Aspects of the US-India Economic Engagement by Raymond Vickery 18

Manjrika Sewak Conflict Society and Peacebuilding: Comparative Perspectives edited by Raffaele Marchetti and

Nathalie Tocci 19

J. Devika Markets and Malthus: Population, Gender, and Health in Neo-liberal Times edited by Mohan Rao and Sarah Sexton 21

Anjali Arondekar Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India by Chandrima Chakraborty 22

Book News 24

Chandan Gowda Bipolar Identity: Religion, Nation, and the Kannada Language Film by M.K. Raghavendra 26

Arshia Sattar Kshemendra: Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir translated by A.N.D. Haksar; Kama Sutra: A Guide to the

Art of Pleasure by Vatsyayana. 28

Aasim Khan Lucknow Boy: A Memoir by Vinod Mehta 29

Kishalaya Bhattacharjee Looking Back into the Future: Identity and Insurgency in Northeast India by M.S. Prabhakara 30

B.G. Verghese Jashn-E-Khusrau: A Collection by Shakeel Hossain, Irfan Zuberi et. al. 31

Sucharita Sengupta The Writer’s Feast: Food and the Cultures of Representation edited by Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B. Chatterjee 32

Rakhshanda Jalil Black Ice by Mahmudul Haque. Translated by Mahmud Rahman 33

Abdullah Khan Beautiful Country: Stories from Another India by Syeda Saiyidain Hameed and Gunjan Veda 34

Nita Berry Light House in the Storm: A Collection of 24 Short Stories by members of the Association of Writers and

Illustrators for Children; Search for the Sacred Gem by Nilima Sinha 35

The Book Review Volume XXXVI No. 6 June

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2 / The Book Review / June 2012

Gandhi As Journey, Traveller,And Baggage

Salim Yusufji

CATCHING UP WITH GANDHIBy Graham TurnerPenguin Books, Delhi, 2010, pp. 329, `350.00

GREAT SOUL: MAHATMA GANDHI AND HIS STRUGGLE WITH INDIABy Joseph LelyveldHarper Collins, Delhi, 2011, pp. 425, `699.00

TIMELESS INSPIRATOR: RELIVING GANDHIConceptualised and edited by Raghunath MashelkarSakal Publications, Delhi, 2010, pp. 370, `490.00

Graham Turner, a British journalist,comes to the Mahatma after cuttinghis biographer’s teeth on a life of

Queen Elizabeth, ‘based on intimate conversa-tions with many of her family and friends.’Conversations with another friend, RajmohanGandhi, yielded the present venture: a journeyin Mahatma Gandhi’s footsteps, ‘standingwhere he stood, seeing something of what hesaw, talking to some of the people who knewhim,’ in India, England and South Africa.Turner’s grasp of P.G.Wodehouse is of anorder that enables him to recall the precisecontext in which the Gandhi motif surfaced inRight Ho, Jeeves but he makes no claims tolearning on his immediate subject, admittingthat at the outset he ‘did not even know he[Gandhi] had spent twenty-one of his mostformative years in South Africa’. This is whereTurner’s preferred mode of research, intimateconversations with family and friends, comesinto its own. His guides along the journey—Rajmohan Gandhi in India and England, ElaGandhi in South Africa—keep up the suppliesof erudition and ensure that doors everywherefly open for him. The result is a book withoutfootnotes or a bibliography that yet secures amost privileged access to Gandhi’s life. ‘Beholdthe lilies of the field’, Wodehouse might havemurmured, and Turner would concur, playingup his modest Bertie Wooster to RajmohanGandhi’s Jeeves.

The limpid and absorbing prose of thisbook conceals, as with the best of Wodehouse,a good deal of craft. Turner’s flip choice oftitle—worthy of a Drones Club raconteur—covers a many-threaded narrative combiningbiography, travelogue, interviews and a vividaccount of what it is like to be a descendant ofGandhi. But his dependence on word-of-mouth also makes Turner a peculiarly suscep-tible and credulous reporter. When a dalitinformant in Delhi claims that, post-Indepen-dence, the Mahar Regiment of the IndianArmy has continued to be employed in sweep-ing up after the Republic Day Parade, a shoc-

ked Turner promptly spreads the libel. In fact,the Mahar Regiment is neither dedicated tothe occupation of sweeping nor has custody ofthe sanitary arrangements on Republic Day. Itconsists of trained soldiers and no more thanthe usual regimental complement of tradesmen—cooks, barbers, washer-men and sweepers.At least two chiefs of the Indian Army havecome from the Mahars. Lesson: Turner is athis most reliable when in the company of hisJeeves.

Echoes of Wodehouse, though, are not theonly extraneous factor in evidence. Like theAttenborough movie, the book opens andcloses with Gandhi’s death. Salman Rushdiehad slammed that device, accusing Atten-borough of pandering to a morbid strain ofChristian sentiment, of life presented as awaiting on death and murder as a moral tri-umph for the victim. Its reuse here is anequally questionable aesthetic choice, thoughthe particular resonance that Christ’s exampledid have with Gandhi is one of the runningthemes of the book. Here is Rajmohan Gandhiciting an admonitory letter from Rajaji toGandhi: ‘He wants to reach him at his deep-est, so he invokes Jesus.’ The invocation work-ed, arresting Gandhi’s slide into a dangerousinvolvement with the educated and accomp-lished Saraladevi Chaudhurani. Gandhi’s loveof Christ is, of course, well documented andthe book is replete with instances of hispleasure in hymns, the New Testament and thecompany of his missionary friends.

On a more quixotic note, Turner shows asurprisingly abject regard for the putativevirtues of birth and inheritance. It emergesthat ‘Gandhi had the genes of a ruling class inhis veins,’ a statement all the more feudal insingling out veins for the proper conveyance ofgenes. Can this be an infection caught on theQueen Elizabeth project? An attempt to ex-plain affinities between the Mahatma and hishigh-minded grandchildren? Or an effect of thetransferred affection, even obeisance, thatRajmohan Gandhi attracts on their travels

together? As for evidence, Turner speculates onwhether Gandhi desisted from topping hisclass at school out of a sense of noblesse oblige—‘given his family’s elevated status, he mayhave felt that striving too hard would havebeen bad form.’ Moreover those genes meantthat ‘he constantly surprised his opponents bythe stylishness of his behavior.’ Likewise,Rajmohan Gandhi, descendant alike of theMahatma and C. Rajagopalachari, ‘is—so tospeak—of the blood royal by two differentinheritances.’

This outlook holds up better on Englishground, as when Turner carefully distinguishesGandhi’s Inner Temple training for Law fromthe mere Middle Temple—of inferior archi-tecture, antiquity and, it follows, intake. Thepace set by the ‘wealthier if not aristocraticpupils’ at the Inner Temple may have inspiredGandhi to splash out on his Bond Streetevening suit, chimneypot hat, those lessons indancing—lurid and baffling gestures from oneintent on a teetotal, celibate and vegetarianexistence, painted by his own hand into acorner. Gandhi’s later disbarment from legalpractice—in 1923, for sedition—was notrevoked by the Inner Temple till 1988 (or1983, as it becomes a hundred pages later).Entirely in pompous character, that. And itmay be why—in another of Turner’s finds—when Gandhi returned to England in 1931, hispassport gave out his occupation as ‘farmer’.

Rehabilitating Gandhi with his own fleshand blood is one of the original contributionsof this book. Seen through the eyes of hisgrandchildren he comes across as an attentiveand benign figure, quite the opposite of howhe was with his sons (‘the ultimate controlfreak,’ in Turner’s crisp summation). Another


significant contribution is Turner’s itinerary ofvisits to the physical landmarks of Gandhi’slife: from state-managed sanctified sites atPorbandar and Delhi (‘all sock occasions’), tothose in neglect, such as the house in Rajkotwhere he nursed his sick father and where theroom Gandhi occupied no longer exists, toforgotten ones like the Rajkot Residency (nowregional railway headquarters) from where hewas ejected in 1893, so forcefully that he wasto land in South Africa, and the newly erectedmemorials of his stay in that country.

Gandhi’s lionization in South Africa couldnot begin till the post-Apartheid period, whenthe need suddenly arose for a whole tranche ofstatues. These were supplied from India,where Gandhi is only ever sculpted in hisvintage look. And so, all but one of the Gandhistatues in South Africa that Joseph Lelyveldobserves in Great Soul show him not as he wasat the time but as he later became in India: thebald man in the loincloth. This universal imageof the Mahatma has also proved the morepolitic one to remember him by. This has todo with what Lelyveld, a gifted phrasemaker,describes as the expediencies of producing ‘ateachable heritage.’

Alighting in South Africa, Gandhi spon-taneously ignited into a political figure. Turnerattributes this to his still smarting from thehumiliation at the Rajkot Residency—wherehe had gone to seek an irregular favour andbeen shown the door; Lelyveld, to the piquan-cy of his situation as a London-trained Indianprofessional plunged into a racist ‘frontiersociety’. But the young man who, back inIndia, had meekly undergone purificatoryrituals, bare-chested, to re-enter the ModhBania fold upon his return from England, nowbegins to stand up for his dignity. He walksout of the Durban Magistrate’s court a day

after his arrival in the country, insisting on theright to retain his turban within, and writes aletter to the press on the subject three dayslater. He kicks up enough of a fuss to be re-instated to a first-class berth on the very trainfrom which he had been ejected the previousnight at Pietermaritzburg.

Lelyveld traces the expanding arc ofGandhi’s life as a public figure: from notchingup a series of protests and vindications forhimself, to representing the interests of Indiantraders in South Africa, till his final leadershipof a mass movement—just months to the endof his stay—on behalf of indentured labourers.What makes Lelyveld possibly the bestavailable source on this period is his attentionto context and eye for the telling detail. Inmapping the enlargement of Gandhi’s publicrole he also captures the shifts, hesitancies, thein-built redundancy and problematics ofGandhi’s political outlook and programme, allof which meant that while South Africabecame a theatre of Gandhian action—andspectacular as such—it acquired little by wayof a bankable legacy from him.

Gandhi could not conceive of joiningforces with black South Africans in a commonstruggle against racism. While bridling at theuse of the word ‘coolie’ for Indian settlers, heblithely used the equally derogatory ‘kaffir’ forindigenous South Africans through the greaterpart of his stay in that country. What’s more,‘In the several thousand pages Gandhi wrote inSouth Africa, or later about South Africa, thenames of only three Africans are mentioned.Of the three, he acknowledged having metonly one. And when it comes to that oneAfrican, what documentary evidence there iscovers only two meetings—seven yearsapart…’ None of this restrained him fromholding forth on ‘the raw Kaffir’ in more thanone instance, nor from representing himselfand his people as votaries of the principle ofracial purity.

He misread the political situation there,counting on Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of1858 as a ‘magna charta’ to Indian subjectsthroughout the empire. Buttressing thisproposed partnership was how he saw his role,little realizing that white South Africans andnot London would determine the terms onwhich Indians were to exist in South Africa.The loyal units of Indian stretcher bearers heled in the British cause during the Anglo-BoerWar and the Bambatha Revolt of later wouldaccomplish little for Indian interests in a SouthAfrica where defeated Boer generals wereincreasingly co-opted into government. Norwere any thanks forthcoming from the Zuluswho saw Indians side with the genocidalgovernment and drew the obvious inference. Itwas only in 1952 that the South African IndianCongress formally made common cause withthe African National Congress, three yearsafter a Zulu riot targeting the Indiancommunity.

This is the Gandhi who today makes up ahomoousian ‘Inanda troika, if not trinity’,along with John Dube and the Prophet Shembeas joint fathers of the post-Apartheid SouthAfrica. Not that he was a complete strangerhimself to the ways of realpolitik. He waspolitician enough to buy up the complete firstrun of Rev. Joseph Doke’s admiring biographyof him, distributing copies among membersof British Parliament. He could also evince thedemagogue’s self-serving memory on occasion,happy to convey the impression that his stret-cher bearers had endured hazards on the front-line of which he did not wish to boast. Lely-veld supplies a fact that speaks for itself: amidthe great carnage of the Anglo-Boer War,Gandhi’s unit of eleven hundred men did notsustain a single fatality. Similarly, in the Auto-biography and specifically Gandhi’s account ofthe help he had given Balasundaram, theindentured Tamil labourer and victim of abuse,Lelyveld discovers a ‘full movie treatment’ thatis at considerable variance from Gandhi’s ownearlier recollection of the episode. And of thesubsequent stream of distressed indenturedworkers pouring into Gandhi’s office (again, alater assertion) Lelyveld finds no evidence.

One of the attractions of biography as aform is that it gives us history on a plausiblescale, the scale of an individual life in theworld. This is the outstanding service Lelyveldrenders Gandhi, coming to him not after thefact—when Gandhi is an icon—but recap-turing the shifts and turnarounds, the ephe-mera that attended his life. In doing so Lelyveldmakes Gandhi difficult again, not the planedand smoothed phenomenon of moral trans-cendence (retrospectively applied) who pre-dominates in the popular mind.

The well-selected pictures accompanyingthe text show the continual and dramatic per-sonal transformations that marked the passageof Gandhi’s years. In addition Lelyveld’s me-thod of drawing into close focus certain indi-viduals and events that get underplayed inmost contemporary telling, brings a freshperspective to this much-told story, revealingnew paradoxes. An exemplary case is thechapter on the Vaikom satyagraha, whereGandhi is seen to ‘pursue whatever tortuouslogic comes to hand.’ He warned off GeorgeJoseph from undertaking a campaign for tem-ple entry because Joseph was a Christian andthis was an affair between Hindus; this at atime when he expected Hindus to get exer-cised about the Khilafat. He wanted the Vai-kom campaign to be kept local after havinghimself put untouchability on the nationalagenda. He castigated the idea of a protest fastfor temple entry as it would pit Indians againstIndians, before going on to fast—barely adecade later—against Ambedkar’s advocacy ofseparate electorates for the Depressed Classes;a fast on behalf of savarna interests.

Herman Kellenbach, P.S. Aiyar, SwamiShraddhanand, Mohammed Ali, B.R. Ambed-


kar, Shaheed Suhrawardy, are some of thecompanions and opponents who refract theMahatma for us, showing him in a varied butintimate light, in different phases and places,facing different situations and questions. Themethod is a triumph, revealing Gandhi—viathese shifting scenes and vivid cameos—inrelation to other figures. The kind of imme-diacy and understanding on offer here is notunlike that afforded by a dead man’s personaleffects, discrete and chaotic as they may seem,but which no unifocal account of his life couldever hope to encompass.

For all these strengths the one place wherethe book falters is oddly enough its centralpremise, indicated by that preposition of thesubtitle: ‘His Struggle with India.’ Lelyvelddraws on V.S. Naipaul’s pronouncement thatGandhi was the least Indian of Indian leaders.Naipaul, and Lelyveld after him, takes as hisbasis Gandhi’s lonely crusade for hygiene andsanitation, his dismay at the refusal of Indiansto share it, and his repeated castigation of theIndian attitude towards excrement, denounc-ing it as a great medical, social and culturalevil. In the end, the Indian attitude prevailed.Very true, and it may be added that Gandhi’stime abroad was the making of him to nosmall extent: from his introduction to Hindu-ism and vegetarianism as intellectual pursuitsin London, to his emergence as a politicalleader in South Africa. There was also thatstrong Victorian influence on his moral visionand sense of self.

By this token, would Mao, who actuallywaged war on China’s past, become the lessChinese for it? He had even tried to rebootChinese society in accordance with an alienideology of state. Was Mustafa Kemal the leastTurkish of Turk leaders? Where is the belonging-ness of a leader to be found if not in the scaleof identification s/he attracts at the placewhere s/he operates? Especially in the case of aGandhi who never wielded coercive powers.And if Gandhi the pre-eminent Indian leader

was not pre-eminently an Indian leader, whatdoes that make of his followers?

The third book before us, TimelessInspirator, is exactly what the title gives away,an idealization of Gandhi. The cover promisesno less than ‘45 masterpieces’ within, by ‘45iconic achievers.’ It breathes the command:‘Find your Inspiration, Find your Path, FindYourself!’

Raghunath Mashelkar, the editor, hadgiven away the Baa and Bapu Awards for 2009.On the occasion he had also delivered an add-ress, titled Gandhian Engineering: More fromLess for More. This proved the catalyst. A fewmonths later, he was approached by the officebearers of the Gandhi National MemorialSociety (GNMS)—organizers of the said awardand people who take ‘pride in doing projectswith a soul.’ The 45 iconic achievers wereduly listed and then, ‘the emails flew out of Dr.Mashelkar’s office. One positive response afteranother, and very soon his mailbox was trem-bling with excitement.’ The book had to beassembled in a matter of months, to meet its‘non-negotiable’ deadline of 2 October 2010,when its release would ‘mark 30 years of aglorious journey for GNMS’ and the centenaryyear of the Gandhian, N.K. Firodia, whoseTrust subsidized this venture.

While the editorial team’s elation at havingmet their target is understandable, we mightpause to consider the hurry. There is a calculusof neatly dovetailing interests at work here, ofreciprocity and mutual endorsement, the book’scelebration of Gandhi fast-tracked to reflectcredit on the celebrants themselves: theGNMS and Shri Firodia Trust. A feat ofGandhian engineering? More from less formore? This principle of orchestrating parallelapplause operates within the book as well.Each of the 45 submissions comes accom-panied by a polite pencil portrait of the iconicachiever in question and a page of acclaim forthe writer: ‘a leader among thought leaders,’‘true son of India’, ‘living legend,’ and so on.Once again the undertow is inescapable:Gandhi dual-tasking as a source of inspiration,and as a celebrity platform, a certifier of theclubbable. A memorial to Gandhi that alsoredounds to the glory of the contributors. Thatthese signals may have been unwitting does notdetract from the point; nor does the fact thatmany of the contributors do have admirablerecords of public service.

In all their artlessness and zeal—endingthis book with the fervent hope that it may‘spur a powerful movement of contagiousinspiration’—the editorial team miss thecentral issue. A Gandhi no longer drawing (letalone expelling) breath is not an inspirator inthe sense of exercising any control or agencyof his own. He is a passive and pliable foil,available to all comers. The purported objectof the inspiration takes over, becomes thesubject in all but name and has limitlesspowers of adaptation. This may explain how

the book got prepared so quickly. When UstadAmjad Ali Khan writes here of composing theRaga Gandhi Kauns, Gandhi’s own knowledgeof music is immaterial to the project. MallikaSarabhai puts it across bluntly, in describing ‘aperformance of mine, Sva Kranti: The Revolu-tion Within. Set as a conversation betweenGandhiji and me, it dwells on many of myquestions about his practice, about where I, asa modern woman in a shattered world, standon these issues.’ And Kiran Bedi edifies uswith how she might have gone about being aGandhian commissioner of police, had shemade the rank.

The icon can equally double as theventriloquist’s dummy. Mark Tully, firing fromGandhi’s shoulder, delivers a homily to themedia on how it should conduct discussions.Arun Firodia lectures the State on how torevive the rural economy. GM crops are a bigpart of his vision, and if by contrast, Ela Bhattin her entry views Gandhi’s economy-as-community in direct opposition to globali-zation’s economy-as-corporation, let’s call thather version, shall we? This is the anything-goesGandhi, after all.

Sunil Gavaskar gamely wonders if Gandhihad any interest in cricket, and what moralview he might have taken of the game. SachinTendulkar cherishes the memory of a meetingwith Nelson Mandela and a childhood viewingof Attenborough’s film. (As elsewhere in cele-brity-stan, the sportspersons tend to be cri-cketers here.) Vijay Bhatkar employs the fauxnaif epistolary conceit: ‘Dear Mahatma,’ hebegins. ‘I do not know if this mail will reachyou. But why not? You are a Mahatma…’

Buyers of this book may consider shelvingit with their collections of Chicken Soup for theSoul.

Salim Yusufji teaches History at the Moravian Mis-sion School in Leh, Ladakh.

Thank You

The Trustees of The Book ReviewLiterary Trust wish to record theirgrateful thanks to N.J. Sudarshan andN.J. Krishnan for their generousdonation of Rs. 50,000 to the corpusof The Trust to honour the memory oftheir father, N.S. Jagannathan (amember of the editorial advisory boardof The Book Review). “We have heardabout The Book Review in glowing termsfrom my father, N.S. Jagannathan. Hehad great regard for the work done bythe journal.”


The question of the nation—its presenceor absence, expansion or stagnation,exclusivity or everydayness, or its

accuracy and ambiguity, has quite oftenrendered the concept difficult and unyielding.However, the extensive inquiries and thevariety of propositions put forth by socialscientists over time has made its occurrenceand experience less threatening, more bearableand engrossing. Certain dominant ways ofunderstanding the phenomenon that find theirmainspring across disciplines and regions,which have been efficacious in the study of theIndian nation as well, illustrate sharply theacademic discourses for containing and tamingits manifestations. One important way ofapproaching the concept, the most dominantin social sciences, is to regard the nation as aform of identity that challenges other forms ofcollective identities like class, region, gender,race and religious community. While the ac-knowledgement to differentiate these identitiesremains relatively unquestioned, there is littleconsensus on the role of the ethnic, as oppos-ed to the political, components of the nation.Although national identities and loyalties oftenassume primacy over those of class, genderand race (religious attachments may at timesrival national claims), national attachments canintermingle or oscillate in power and promi-nence with other forms of collective identities.This deliberation is also mirrored in the rivalscholarly definitions and debates on origins ofthe nation-like the primordialist interpreta-tions stemming from the ‘givens’ like religionor language, strongly put forth by Geertz,against Gellner’s thesis of objective, practicalnecessity where nationalism ‘invents nationswhere they do not exist.’

A second position, increasingly problem-atized, looks at the ideological construction ofnationalism as a form of blight, as an indica-tion of a discord with a predisposition toviolence between individuals but more oftenbetween collectives, stressing on the culturalrather than the political aspects of nationalism,although a synthesis of the two might bepossible as well. The doctrine that was firstassociated with popular freedom and sove-reignty prompted various social, political andintellectual developments that found powerfuland explosive expression in radical politics.The ‘people’ must be liberated; masters oftheir own destiny and homeland—a historic

territory, sharing a single public culture that istheirs as heritage, and therefore an expressionof their authentic identity. The third aspect,relevant for our review, sees the nation, and itsrelated concepts like national identity andnationalism, as an import, characteristic of thetwentieth century ‘anti-colonial’ movementsthat were waged to end the imperial rule andto establish new states in the ex-colonial terri-tories. Though this again has not been devoidof tensions and fusions, for instance, betweena civic, territorial, anti-colonial nationalism inIndia on the one hand and various ethnic andpan-cultural movements like Hindu national-ism exerting great influence on the other.

Each of these three ways of approachingthe nation have their characteristic strengthsand weaknesses that have been continuallydebated, argued and counter argued by socialscientists. Alongside these the birth of newnations (at least fifteen new states have beencreated since 1990) and increasing instances ofviolence being designated as ethnic conflictsand secessions, ‘nations’ and nationalism re-main the most pervasive, frenzied and intrac-table issue at the end of the twentieth century,and pose as one of the greatest challenges toboth—an international order based on justiceand equality and a domestic environment sansintimidation and threats. With the ‘nationalquestion’ often taking the centre stage in itsvarious manifestations, can we realisticallyanticipate a retrenchment, let alone its rejec-tion? Can we, ‘the people,’ narrate our historyand the present by looking over the nation andbeyond nationalism? More interestingly, whatcould be the importance of such an endeavour?The book under review puts on the line someof these questions and literatures on nationsand nationalism in an intriguing andchallenging manner.

The author is a Reader in South AsianHistory at the University of Sheffield, and hasfor long been associated with exploring SouthAsia’s social and intellectual history along withmapping connections and gaps between‘academic historical scholarship and popularhistorical consciousness.’ His earlier worksinclude a biography, Nehru and DevelopingIndia: An Intellectual and Social History c.1930- 1950. Carrying forward his deep inte-rest in these subjects, with his characteristicirreverent style of writing, the plot of his newbook Playing the Nation Game introduces and

revolves around a proposition of reviving andrevisiting a project that he believes ‘has so farfailed: of decentring the nation as a centralfocus of history writing in and about India.’Even while advancing his concern to restrainhistory writing in India without letting it besubsumed within ‘an obligatory history ofIndian nationalism,’ Zachariah suitably com-bines the considerations over the structuralpreconditions of nations, its positioning vis-á-vis issues of power and emotions, with areasoning based on the ideological and sym-bolic repertoire that makes nationalism, na-tional identity and nationhood possible. Ofcourse, this then is also the inescapable para-dox of such an endeavour—a deliberation overnation and nationalism in an attempt to de-centre it. But the book is not about nationa-lism; rather it is about ways to move beyondit. The author is convinced of the necessity ofthe work, ‘not just nationally but internationally’as well. He clarifies that it is an ‘attempt atwriting histories of various Indians’ attemptsto provide themselves with a nationalism, andof the inevitable exclusions and failures of suchattempts.’ Thus in a distinctive manner muchof the author’s focus is on modern Indianhistory and historiography—what it has in-adequately interrogated and overlooked andwhat it has over-obsessed about. In the pro-cess he extensively and unavoidably engageswith, appraises and critiques the works ofsome of the more notable historians of India,like Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, SumitSarkar and Sudipta Kaviraj among others. Asubstantial part of the Zachariah methodologyto deal with the category of the ‘nation’ reflectsa comment made by Michel Foucault (whoseother works Zachariah cites often) in On theGenealogy of Ethics that, ‘my point is not thateverything is bad, but that everything is

Decentring the Nation in WritingHistoryMalvika Maheshwari

PLAYING THE NATION GAME: THE AMBIGUITIES OF NATIONALISM IN INDIABy Benjamin ZachariahYoda Press, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 314, `495.00


dangerous, which is not exactly the same asbad…I think that the ethico-political choicewe have to make everyday is to determinewhich is the main danger.’

The first half of the book is spent oninterrogating Indian historiography as a tale of‘selective remembering and strategic forget-ting.’ The outcome of this historiography, theauthor states, is its alignment with the ‘official’historical consciousness—that intends to‘control people’ who have interests differentfrom that of the state. Zachariah then goes onto ‘reconstruct’ the narrative of the Indiannationalist movement by determining who the‘people’ are—Gandhians, the Left, the Right,the outcast(e)s—including women, Muslimsamong others. It is at this point that the readermight be troubled enough to seek refuge inGuha’s or Kaviraj’s distinguished writings onthe subject. But these for the author areunfinished projects. For instance he states that

in Guha’s writings, though he speak of aban-doning History as imposed by the West, hedoes not say the same about nationalism. TheSubaltern Studies project appears to the author‘as the peevish therapeutic attempts of atraumatized elite’ (p. 66).

In the next part the author continues hisargument of writing histories of India thatneed not be encircled within the history of thenationalist movement by exploring three in-stances: a regional variation that looks at theBengali encounters with ‘progress’ and theBritish rule; a religious premise of ‘inventing’Hinduism as a category for national use; andthe third, an ideological Nehruvian stance.Through all of this, Zachariah concludes that‘nationalisms are not matters of scholarlyendorsement or rejection. They are most oftentied up with official remembering and for-getting.’ He provokes when he states that, ‘theseparation of the scholarly and the popular isnot as clear as may be thought, and the rheto-ric and style might be the one thing that dis-tinguishes the two versions of understandingnationalism and nations.’

The curious and troubling aspect ofZachariah’s arguments is that while it beganwith the proposal to decentre the ‘nation’ inhistory writing, it ends up accusing historiansof being nationalists; historians’ failure toperceive or admit their own statism leads themto naturalize nationalisms of one or anotherform, and to normalize the ‘nation-state’. He

cites this as the major impediment in theattempt to look beyond the nation. The over-lap between different discursive frameworksand the historians’ alleged attitude does notreally then help the project move forwardconceptually. Moreover, one gets a feeling as ifthere are no discordant voices within theacademia and popular consciousness. Whatabout those who have precisely struggled (andsuffered) to speak of an alternative conceptuali-zation of Indian history different from the offi-cial history? Finally, despite Zachariah’s asser-tions that the difference between scholarly andpopular perceptions of nation and nationalismmight not be as clear, are there no instructivelessons to be drawn from areas and workswhere there are differences or where they haveindeed escalated? The relatively little attention tothese areas and sometimes a slight lack ofnuances on such aspects of his arguments couldwell be a design of his methodology.

However, in unique ways this book couldencourage historians and political scientists tothink about nations and nationalisms in amore compelling and conscientious way. For adecisive decentring, the ‘nation’ demands aneven more astute inquiry. Zachariah un-doubtedly provides the laudable initial steps.

Malvika Maheshwari is a research associate atthe Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, andteaches Indian politics at the Institute of PoliticalStudies (Sciences Po), Paris.

”

“ Playing the Nation Game

introduces and revolves around

a proposition of reviving and

revisiting a project that he

believes ‘has so far failed: of

decentring the nation as a

central focus of history writing

in and about India.


Peter Ronald de Souza in his forewordsees the book’s central contribution inproviding a ‘frame within which to

understand the troublesome question as tohow a democracy should respond when agroup acquires a voice, when that voice be-comes louder, and when it perhaps grows to bea cacophony?’ In the introduction to the book,Gurpreet Mahajan states that the objective inthis volume is to revisit the often asked ques-tions and the often given answers within themulticultural paradigm. ‘Why should we careabout diversity? How should we deal withcultural diversity? Should these diversities beaccommodated? This volume returns to thesequestions and the answers offered by multi-culturalism, in the process of understandinghow India responded to some of these con-cerns.’ The essays in the volume fulfil theabove stated purpose. While they do revisitsome of the key questions within a multi-cultural debate, they also critique aspects of it.These elements of critique prod me to app-roach the issue of accommodating diversityfrom the bottom. While the editorial intentcould be to look at policy alternatives andoptions before a democracy it cannot bedivorced from identifying why the question ofaccommodation emerges again and again.Looking at the issue from bottom up thereviewer asks, what prevents the accommo-dation of diversity? Why do people find itdifficult to get along?

Two lines of critique emerge as keythemes when one navigates through the essays.First is the recurring idea that the very con-ceptual domain of dominant multiculturalthought is not equipped adequately to under-stand the political and sociological realities ofidentity formation and cultural politics. Se-condly that some multicultural articulations failto understand the power relations within whichthe State works. They seem to not give enoughattention to the structural inequalities that areintimately tied up with the demands of culturalminorities and citizens. In this review I shallmap these two themes which may be under-stated in the text yet are very crucial to knowwhat prevents the accommodation of diversity.

The first theme that emerges from theessays seeks to fortify the conceptual toolssocial sciences have to make sense of ‘diversity’.While acknowledging that multiculturalism hastravelled far from its once dominant liberalvariant, there are profitable suggestions that

emerge in some of the essays. Peter Emberley’sessay examines the idea of ‘diversity’. Heproposes that we steer clear of a fossilizednotion of culture as we frame policies ofpreservation of this diversity. His essay high-lights that a nuanced understanding requires usto situate diversity within its historical locationand integrate the changes it may have gonethrough. Cultures go through transition, theyreinvent themselves, but this should not be asource of anxiety. The task of preservation canhappen alongside the renewal, transformationand reformation of cultures. Citing the exam-ples of the Baul musicians in West Bengal aswell as Dhokara metal casters, he notices howtheir lives and crafts have changed over timeand yet it has not lost its unique culturalidentity. Here one is reminded about the waysin which States and political establishmentsalmost always prefer to deal with a static, self-contained notion of culture and a select fewwho claim to be its representatives. In hisessay Anil Bhatti argues that given the state oftransition that all societies are always in, itmay be productive to abandon ‘bounded multi-cultural’ conditions in favour of ‘pluriculturalconditions’ that are open and fluid. He de-monstrates solidarities of thought betweenEurope and the former colonized world bynavigating through the thought of Herder,Goethe and Tagore. He believes that this cul-tural dialogue can in fact propose radical solu-tions to the problems that afflict our societies.To him these ‘pluricultural’ formations willsharpen people’s sense of commonness insteadof a heightened sense of self and other. Boththese essays persuade the readers to think ofdiversity not as a museumized artifact but indialogue, alive and ever transforming.

To these two voices recommendingconceptual caution, Rinku Lamba adds herconcern. She challenges the dominant ways inwhich liberal multiculturalism is thought about.Are liberal thought structures necessarily to belocated outside thought processes in modernIndia? She gives us evidence from the thoughtstructures of two thinkers/social activists fromIndia, namely Ranade and Phule, of reflectionon their own socio-religious practices, whereboth Phule and Ranade in their own waysseem to appeal to the liberal instruments ofchange to be incorporated within the law andstate for the protection of the marginalized.Her essay thus opens up the conceptual spaceof an Indian variant of liberalism and possibly

multiculturalism. Often liberalism is consi-dered western and a cultural communityreminds one of the indigenous groups/ natives;Lamba’s essay unsettles this practice.

In a similar vein, two essays which open arefreshing conceptual domain for multiculturalpolitics are those contributed by K.K. Kailashand Vinay Lal. Both of these essays point tonon-formal or more appropriately, semi-formalnon-institutional domains of cultural politics.Most often the dominant characters of thisstory have been State policy, cultural minori-ties, legislative debates, constitutional provi-sions, and judicial decisions. However, theseessays bring in electoral mobilization andpopular strategies. K.K. Kailash’s article locatesthe process of accommodation taking placethrough electoral practices. Documenting theelectoral strategies in Kerala he tries to giveevidence of the existence of unique non-formalor semi-formal processes of recognizing as wellas accommodating diversity. It seems the NRIHindu community is also actively invested incultural politics outside the formal spaces.Vinay Lal states the anxieties experienced byNorth American Hindus as a group. Heargues that the middle class NRI Hinduexperiences ‘a self aggrandizing rather than selfdebilitating—anxiety of influence’.1 Hementions several strategies which the HinduNRI community deploy, to transform them-selves into a political force. These are a notice-able transition from recognizing Islam as worldreligion to treating it as an unquestionableliability and source of conflict. There havebeen many attempts made to build solidaritiesbetween Hindus and American Jews. He alsoobserves an increase in the usage of digitaltechnology for the purpose of forging the newHindu identity which is monotheistic and less

Why Won’t We Get Along Better?Ankita Pandey

ACCOMMODATING DIVERSITY: IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICESEdited by Gurpreet MahajanOxford University Press, Delhi, 2011, pp. 340, `750.00


tolerant of the other; also many more NRIvoices are seen sympathizing with the con-servative communal minded Hindus in Indiain pursuit of a certain political interest. All ofthese are ways in which the community triesto overcome this anxiety and make its politicalpresence felt in America. We see in these twoessays that cultural politics is not just a resultof deprivation/marginalization. Despite thepresence of economic comforts and rightsacknowledged, cultural politics can become astrategy for political accommodation orpolitical influence.

Sarah Joseph’s essay echoes many of theseearlier recommended cautions. She argues thatit is too innocent to assume that cultural ac-commodation and political recognition is suf-ficient to manage conflicts within South Asiansocieties. She believes that class inequalitycannot be kept out of any serious attempt tounderstand inequality in South Asia. Despite astated attempt to accommodate, the policies ofthe Indian State have intensified competi-tiveness among groups. She also cautionsagainst two practices that make multicultural-ism the refuge of right wing forces. One ofthem is to think of culture as self-containedreified objects. Second is to think that mererecognition of the cultural groups will takecare of their historical disadvantage. There-fore, it is important to account for powerrelations within which the State is embedded,and structural inequalities which are notaltered.

The second obstacle to accommodation ofdiversity is political not philosophical. Essaysin this volume argue that State policy is flawedin the provisions it makes for minorities ofdifferent kinds. The essays are generous intheir assessment of State policy as it couldhave been also argued that the state has vestedinterests/political compulsions which prevent areal accommodation. There are a set of essayswhich identify several shortcomings in Statepolicy. The essay by Anne Phillips seeks to

evolve a better policy of group representation.Even though she thinks that group-basedmechanisms are broadly apt, they suffer fromthree specific problems as the States implementthem. Firstly, this mechanism becomes self-perpetuating and ends up creating enclaves ofvested interests, resulting in more and moregroups demanding these mechanisms.

Secondly, these policies assume that thegroup is indeed a unified one and that somewithin the group can represent the others.

Thirdly, it is quite tough to evolve criteriato ascertain which groups qualify for thesemechanisms. Often enough group-based me-chanisms of representation end up creatinggrand narratives of cultural difference that maynot coincide with the existence of the groupon the ground. Thus group-based mechanismsneed to be refined for them to avoid such pit-falls. Two other essays in the volume are scep-tical about group-based representations, thoughtheir reasons are different from Phillips’s. Inthe context of the deliberations in the Consti-tuent Assembly, V. Sriranjani points out thatthe Indian Constitution prioritizes the groupover the individual. Sriranjani’s essay demon-strates that the Constituent Assembly’s effortsto recognize the identity of a religious grouphas somewhat neglected the individual citizen’srights. While formally one is free to not choosea religious identity for oneself, the Statediscourses concerning personal law as well asUCC make it difficult for people to opt out oftheir group identities. She demonstrates thisby citing debates of the Constituent Assemblyas well as the judicial pronouncements. To her,the problem seems to be that the Indian State’sconception of rights is prior to the interest itserves and not dependent on it. Giving a pos-sible explanation to this priority accorded togroup identity, Rohit Wanchoo argues thatperhaps it is a characteristic feature of all non-western societies. He agrees that in India it isgroup rights which have found ready accep-tance not individual rights unlike the West. Hesees this preference present not just in theConstitution but in colonial administrativediscourses too. While this mechanism has itsadvantages and one can see why the Consti-tuent Assembly opted for it, he regrets thatwithin the discourse of group-based benefits,the Indian State is losing its grip over somefundamental changes that need to be broughtabout to address the disadvantage of variousgroups. A viable political choice to him wouldbe to amend the way affirmative action isconceptualized in India. ‘Therefore the realpolitical choices are about determining theextent of reservations and the groups that areeligible for such benefits. A viable optionthat tries to cater to both the needs of dis-advantaged groups and to those of indivi-duals would be to provide an extensive sys-tem of state funded education, but withlimited and declining reservations in employ-ment’.2

Asha Sarangi’s contribution to the volumeis a very detailed narrative of the process oflinguistic reorganization of the Indian State aswell as the categories like ‘official language’,‘national language’, ‘mother tongue’ that theState was utilizing to make sense of thedispute. In her judgment, ‘The process ofState formation in independent India had tobe carefully carried out ensuring the duebalance between geography and polity, andculture and State to accord with the demo-cratic survival of collective representation andrecognition of cultural and social diversity’.3

She also believes that the state carried out thisdelicate exercise with much care. WhileSarangi looks at the State doing the tight ropewalk between political compulsions of afederation on the one hand and regionaldemands on the other, Vasanthi Srinivasancredits statesmen like C. Rajagopalachari ‘whostruggled to find the golden mean betweenimposing uniformity and inhibiting synthesiswhile addressing linguistic and communaldiversity’.4 Gurpreet Mahajan in herintroduction adds a crucial missing piece tothis narrative of language politics and linguisticreorganization. ‘The creation of languageidentity based States meant that groups thathad been a minority in the country becamemajority in a region. The creation of language-based States created new minorities, andgroups that were on grounds of religion adominant community suddenly reduced to aminority’.5 Also missing in this narrative isthat ‘in several states the emergent linguisticmajority began to follow a politics of majo-ritarianism as well as exclusion’.6 The variousavatars of the sons of the soil movementswould be an example of this. Thus Mahajanmakes it clear that State policy does not justdeal with an already present minority or majo-rity, but that State policy creates majority andminority in the first place.

Bijen Meetei’s essay conforms withMahajan’s observation in the context ofMeghalaya’s cultural conflicts. He points to theways in which the policies of the Indian Statehave produced competition between differentminorities. Instead of the debate betweenminorities and majority, the politics of recog-nition has emerged among competing minori-ties. State policy in India is highly unequal inrendering social justice and recognition tovarious minorities. The author examines lan-guage as well as land rights provisions amongthe three dominant tribes in Meghalaya todemonstrate that instead of recognizing diver-sity the policy adopted by the Indian Stateactually decreases the tolerance levels amongcommunities.

The last two essays in the volume posit analtogether novel domain where State policy hascompelled multiculturalism to consider theanxieties of majorities in the wake of large-scale migration. The essays of Vidhu Verma aswell as Shefali Jha’s essays remind us about the

“

”

Essays in this volume argue that

state policy is flawed in the

provisions it makes for

minorities of different kinds.

The essays are generous in their

assessment of state policy as it

could have been also argued

that the state has vested

interests/political compulsions

which prevent a real

accommodation.


many ways in which the praxis throws evernew conceptual problems for the theory to re-conceptualize itself. Both of these essays areabout the fear, real or perceived, of the majoritycommunity, feeling a sense of threat in theirhome country. Vidhu Verma writes about theMalayasian case in detail. She argues, ‘Whileenabling a significant number of non-Malaysto acquire legal citizenship, the Constitutionaccepted provisions for affirmative action forthe Malays. By accepting this notion, the ideassketched out in the constitution were riddledwith internal tensions and contradictions.Some of these tensions emerge in the preoccu-pation with special rights for the Malays whichhave left little room for the cultural rights ofthe minorities’.7 Plagued with fear of culturalsuicide also are citizens of the Gulf states.Despite being the majority and nationals intheir home country, Shefali Jha describes thefear of the nationals that their public sphere isdominated by foreigners. This fear is alsostrengthened by the fact that many gulf mon-archies do not allow a participatory role fortheir citizens within the country’s politicalsphere. The question that both these casesraise is: what is the perspective within whichthese claims, strategies and fears are to beunderstood? Are they just mechanisms todominate over the foreigner? Or is there aneed for accommodate these withininstitutional spaces?

This set of essays remind me that anyserious attempt to accommodate diversitycannot be separate from understanding howpower relations produce disadvantage andsustain inequity. One reads about cases ofyoung people from various minority com-munities who face threatening attacks on theroads, in their hostels, in workspaces and inthe police stations. Looking at the politicalviolence against minorities in India, thequestion of equity and accommodation seemsa long shot.

References

1 Lal, Vinay, A Bloated Hinduism: NorthAmerican Hindus and the Imagination of a Vanguard,p. 285.

2 Wanchoo, Rohit, Group Rights, Diversity, andSocial Justice, p. 223.

3 Sarangi, Asha, Linguistic Diversity in a FederalPolity, p. 158

4 Srinivasan, Vasanthi, Prudence andStatesmanship in Managing Diversity, p. 257.

5 Mahajan, Gurpreet, ‘Introduction’, p. 35.6 Ibid.7 Verma, Vidhu, ‘Representing Diversity: The

Malaysian Experience’, p. 307.

Ankita Pandey is Assistant Professor in the De-partment of Political Science, Indraprastha Collegefor Women, University of Delhi, Delhi.

Studying Elections

K.K. Kailash

INDIA’S 2009 ELECTIONS: COALITION POLITICS, PARTY COMPETITION, AND CONGRESS CONTINUITYEdited by Paul Wallace and Ramashray RoySage, New Delhi, 2011, pp. xviii+412, `995.00

Given the centrality that elections havecome to occupy in the political fabricof this country, it is not surprising

that election studies are one of the prominentand oldest research traditions in politicalscience in India. Almost every election hasbeen followed by a number of publicationsanalysing its different dimensions. These stu-dies have employed a variety of approaches,besides the now dominant survey researchapproach, others include case studies, anthro-pological studies, single-election studies andalso interpretative and descriptive accounts(Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2009). India’s2009 Elections, the book under review, is thefourth successive election study by two re-nowned and respected experts on politicalparties and elections, Paul Wallace and Rama-shray Roy. Like their previous collective volu-mes in which they analysed the 1998, 1999and the 2004 General Elections, this study isalso primarily located in the interpretative anddescriptive studies tradition.

As in the previous volumes, the LokSabha election is analysed by examining thepolitical stories in different States. Comparedto their previous study on the 2004 elections,this is a relatively larger volume and coversmore States. The three new States are Karna-taka, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir.While Orissa and Assam have been dropped,Kerala is analysed in a separate chapter unlikein the previous volume. Meghalaya receivedseparate treatment in 2004; however in thepresent study it is part of a chapter whichcovers six of the North Eastern States. The 17chapters that comprise this volume are arran-ged in two parts. The first part deals with the-matic studies and the second part focuses onanalytical State studies. In the second part, theStates covered are analysed under three cate-gories based on party system types; these in-clude one favoured (dominant) party system,alternating two-party systems and multi-partyStates.

The volume brings out rich details ofalmost the entire panoply of political activitieson display during an election including candi-date selection, caste and community calcula-tions, alliances and non-alliances, mergers anddefections, sub-State political considerations,election campaigns and policy agendas, issuedimensions and axis of competition. Theeditors have however left it to the reader todraw not only the similarities and dissimilari-

ties among States but also the generalizableconclusions.

Paul Wallace’s introduction as in theearlier volume merely highlights some of themain talking points of elections 2009. If it waspoverty and India shining in 2004, it isgovernance, stability and dynastic politics in2009. Though it does raise key questions,among others, about the success of the Cong-ress and the decline of the Bharatiya JanataParty (BJP), it does not go on to answer them.The main task of the introduction has beenlimited to summarizing the key issues in thechapters that follow. A framework for analysisor even a general argument setting the tone forthe contributions that follow would have beenmost useful.

The thematic section of the volume isdominated by the federal dimension with fourchapters discussing almost closely relatedissues. The other issues that find space in thesection include alliance making and coalitionpolitics, gender discourse in elections and ananalysis of the BSP’s performance. While,Ramasharay Roy turns our attention to thenature of alliance formation in terms of theircomposition and character, Pramod Kumarexamines the interface between the national andthe regional in the context of coalition politics.


Jyotirindra Dasgupta brings to the fore-front a rather old issue which one thought hadbeen settled with the formation of federalcoalitions; regionalism and its implications fornational cohesion. Dasgupta examines theissue historically with examples from AndhraPradesh, Tamil Nadu and Punjab and arguesthat the ‘disintegrating anxieties’ often attachedto the ‘regionalist turn’ are unfounded (p. 65).Similarly, Maneesha Roy’s analysis of federa-lism, party system and structural changes doesnot bring anything new to the table. This isprobably because Roy ignores the existingcorpus of work as well as debates on the issueof federalism and the party system in thecontext of India. One fails to understand thelogic of discussing the historical background tofederalism in India as well as the institutionalfeatures of a federation in the context of the2009 elections.

Rainuka Dagar’s gender discourse inelections is an interesting subject for analysisbut has been handled unimaginatively. Itspreads itself thin by attempting to cover toomany dimensions and also slips in numerousimpressionistic assertions. It abruptly reports aresult from a survey of teachers across thenorthern region regarding their perception ofwomen’s issues raised by political parties in2009 (pp.123-4). Details about the survey andits context were however not reported in thestudy. The study would have been enriched ifit engaged with similar studies on previouselections. In the final thematic essay, analysingthe Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) performance,Christophe Jaffrelot observes that notwith-standing its Sarvajan strategy, the 2009 elec-tions show that the BSP is primarily a dalitparty. While it has consolidated its positionamong the dalits in Uttar Pradesh, it has notgone beyond the State. He concludes that thenear absence of an organizational structuremakes it likely that it will end up like otherdalit parties that preceded it.

The importance of State-specific factors inshaping the election verdict comes out dis-tinctly in many of the chapters. GhanshyamShah’s study found that despite the votersbeing satisfied with the performance of theUPA, they preferred to vote for the BJP inGujarat because of the performance of theState Government. Interestingly he observesthat the Gujarat BJP had become a ‘regionalparty’ (p.189). Contrastingly, in Kerala thevoters preferred the Congress alliance. GopaKumar explains that this is because of ‘ticketsplitting’ (p. 242) where the voter makes adistinction between elections to the assemblyand parliament. The Congress in this frame-work is perceived by the voters to be betterequipped to deal with issues at the all India-level. Both these chapters are primarily basedon survey-research.

Amiya Chaudhuri’s study captures thedecline of the CPM and the Left-front in whatwas undoubtedly a critical election for West

Bengal. Praveen Swami’s essay on Jammu andKashmir grapples with the issue of how elec-toral democracy plays itself out in a Statecharacterized by ethnic and religious crisis.Karli Srinivasulu’s examination of AndhraPradesh and Binoy Shankar Prasad’s study ofBihar reveal that though on the surface thereappears to be a movement towards develop-mental and governance issues, identity issuescontinue to drive politics in the two States.

Maharashtra and Karnataka are examinedby Raghavendra Keshavarao Hebsur in twoseparate chapters. While a historical approachis useful to contextualize a study, going farback in time is unnecessary. Hebsur’s dis-cussion of the historical past in the case ofboth States could have been covered in a para-graph or so with appropriate references. Amore rational allocation of space would havegiven the author more leverage to focus on theissue under discussion in the two States.

Bhawani Singh and Vibhuti Shekhawat’sstudy of Rajasthan not only has an excitingtitle ‘Silent Tsunami in Rajasthan’ but has evenmore fancy sub-titles within it, like ‘VarunVenom’ (p. 230) and ‘Deglamorized QueenGoes Berserk’ (p. 231) among others. With itsfreewheeling style it reads more like a journa-list’s diary. The paper makes no attempt torelate to the larger changes that have takenplace in Indian politics over the last decade.While Rajesh Dev’s brave attempt to cover themany States in the North East is admirable,the flipside is that the analysis suffers in termsof its depth. The ‘intra-regional diversity andplurality of political claims’ (p. 362) that Devrefers to is not sufficiently captured in thestudy.

This was a rather unexciting volumecompared to the previous Wallace and Roycontributions. Given that this is their fourthsuccessive election study, the editors have theadvantage of a longer and broader perspectiveand could therefore have gone beyond lookingat 2009 as a stand alone election. Having accu-mulated insights from a series of elections,there always exists the possibility of question-ing existing paradigms and developing newtheoretical formulations. The editors may havemissed an opportunity, but this does not takeaway from the painstaking efforts involved inputting together this volume. This study will beuseful to those who missed out the actionduring the 2009 General Elections.

References

Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, ‘Studying Elections inIndia: Scientific and Political Debates’, South AsiaMultidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 3 |2009, Online since 23 December 2009, accessed23 April 2012. URL: http://samaj.revues.org/2784

K.K. Kailash is with the Department of PoliticalScience, Panjab University, Chandigarh.


With the passing of the 73rd amend-ment of the Constitution whichempowered a three-tiered local

(self ) government system or panchayat raj,attention has been focused on the success ofdecentralization in India. Millions of localpoliticians have been elected with constitu-tional authority into the panchayat raj systemsince 1993. The heavy use of reservations forwomen and members of marginal castes haschanged the face of descriptive representa-tion, with important consequences identifiedby scholars in the United States and India.Despite the scope of these reforms, observershave begun to doubt the potency of these re-forms. In Karnataka the term of the presidentof the zilla (district) panchayat has been re-duced to 20 months which is also the case forthe gram (village) panchayat president. Therange of development policy issues overwhich elected local politicians have controlare limited and are often indirectly influencedby State politicians or bureaucrats. And therise of outsourcing of State developmentinitiatives to NGOs and other parallel bodieshave further weakened the degree to whichlocal self-government is a reality in India thathas a substantive impact beyond its well-docu-mented descriptive impact.

The argument taken up by Chandra-shekhar takes off from this point. She arguesthat panchayat raj institutions (PRIs) havebecome marginalized by a trend toward out-sourcing development policy to parallel insti-tutions that do not consult with elected localpoliticians and are not accountable to voterapproval. The exception is Kerala where PRIs

are given important powers over educationpolicy implementation and are consulted byNGO-sponsored self-help groups. Here expertpanels are established only to ensure technicalfeasibility. In Karnataka, PRIs are subservientto State bureaucrats, panchayats have nopower to recruit, transfer or discipline staff,and MLAs (or State legislators) have beenwinning the battle for preeminence vis-á-vis thezilla panchyat president. Moreover, commit-tees overseen by bureaucrats at the district,block, and village levels are directly linked tothe State and side-step the gram panchayats.These commissions set up by the CentralGovernment are financially autonomous andnot accountable to the PRIs although somemembers of the PRIs sit in committeesoutside the formal arena of PRIs themselves.Beyond these commissions, the author focusesher argument on the effect of Societies andState-instituted User Committees (CBOs) thathave taken the functions assigned to PRIsoutside of their purview. The most strikingexample is the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan inKarnataka, which is a centrally sponsoredscheme with the goal of universal primary edu-cation. Meeting minutes of the Zilla Panchayatshow that elected members of the PRI are notconsulted on the activities of this schemewithin the PRI deliberative bodies. The authoralso finds that NGO capacity building effortsuse the PRIs to help them with obstacles totheir agenda but are financially autonomousfrom the PRIs and make decisions that arecompletely autonomous from them.

In Chandrashekhar’s account, supportedby a considerable level of evidence from field-

Marginalizing PanchayatsMark Schneider

UNDERMINING LOCAL DEMOCRACY: PARALLEL GOVERNANCE IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH INDIABy Lalita ChandrashekharRoutledge, Delhi, 2011, pp. 225, `695.00

work in Karnataka as well as close study ofgovernment documents, this effort to removethe PRIs from development has a major costto the deepening of democracy. By circumven-ting the local institutions, marginalized groupsare sidelined as there is no institution ofreservations in these parallel institutions out-side the PRIs. Moreover, voters are likely tobe less aware of development policies becauseelected politicians do not need to sell-develop-ment initiatives to the public.

While this book launches a compellingcomplaint against parallel organizations thatavoid the messiness and benefits of local self-government, its main weakness is that it doesnot provide an explanation for why PRIsshould be better than parallel organizations. Isit simply the case that State politicians won thebattle to keep panchayats weak or is it theircapacity issues that make success in develop-ment initiatives elusive in the short-run? Dopoliticians from the PRIs have the level oftraining necessary to take on the responsibi-lities that NGOs have taken on and does theleaky bucket of local corruption prove toomuch of a risk for outside funders or centralgovernments to bear when it comes to theirdevelopment priorities? I agree that localelective institutions must be strengthened tobring development closer to the people—particularly in rural areas where elite capture isa major risk. The question, though, is whetheror not government efforts to sideline localinstitutions are no more costly than efforts tobolster these representative institutions. Thisof course depends on the will to reform theseinstitutions, provide for needed training in thepolicy area that have been outsourced toNGOs and bureaucrats, and the time it willtake to get the point when panchayats havesufficient capacity to take on this responsi-bility in India as a whole.

Mark Schneider is in the Department of PoliticalScience, Columbia University, New York.

Communication

The Rudolphs’ review (TBR, Vol. 36, No. 3) of Volume I of my Politics of Northern India: 1937-1987, which focuses especially on the early lifeand career of Charan Singh, is the tenth review of the book. All the others have been highly favorable, so I have little to complain about.However, I find the Rudolph review rather out of place and misleading, both in its account of my purposes in writing it and in its assessmentof the purpose of the project as a whole. Moreover, they have wasted scarce space on paragraphs containing irrelevant comments on India’spreeminent former leaders, as well as unnecessarily long quotations from the book, not all quite relevant to their points.

The whole thrust of the review from beginning to end is that I am seeking to provide a place in some ‘pantheon’, as they put it, for CharanSingh. On top of that, they suggest I am seeking to ‘establish an alternative master narrative of post-Independence politics’ to replace those devotedto Gandhi, Nehru, and other exemplary figures. This is not at all my purpose. I am no hero-worshipper nor was Charan Singh. If there is apantheon for honest and decent men and women, then fine, let the Rudolphs place him and any heroes of theirs of similar caliber inside it.

However, the Rudolphs have chosen instead to join the ranks of his ill-wishers by repeating twice in the same review the statement thatCharan Singh had ‘feet of clay’. Somehow, they seem to think I have suggested as much in part of a paragraph from which they quoteconcerning the entirely different matter of the scarcity of jobs for youths outside of government. Moreover, they have focused entirely onwhat they consider to be his defects, not his strengths.

The Rudolphs also seem not to have fully grasped Charan Singh’s views on several matters, including his attitude toward satyagraha. I canassure them, however, that he would not have appreciated Anna Hazare’s campaign, despite his own life-long battle against corruption.

Paul Brass


Sociality is a fact of human existence,however, not an unproblematic one.Even after centuries of contemplation, it

is still as enigmatic as ever. With the advent ofmodernity, tension surfaced between theindividual and the community to which theindividual belonged. Socio-political thinkinghas been varying as to which aspect should begiven prominence over the other. The domi-nant narrative of ‘human’ ‘rights’ largely recog-nizes the individual as the bearer of theserights with some concession to human collec-tives or groups. This epistemic bias has re-sulted in excluding certain conceptions andproblems of marginalized communities fromthe mainstream discourses on human rights.Even when collectivities are recognized by thedominant discourses it is to accommodate theinterests of the dominant collectivities in thename of national, religious and other culturalidentities. Large, multinational business cor-porations are using the idea of community toarticulate and promote their business interestsrather than the interests of their employees orworkers. The book under review, a thirdvolume by the authors, attempts to offer us acomprehensive and critical understanding ofthe concept of ‘community’.

Interdisciplinary and trans-cultural pers-pective is what the authors employ to under-stand the complex issues that surround theproblems of the rights of the community.Their intention is to challenge our academic,theoretical, western, white conceptions of‘community’. This ‘resistance to theory’, asUpendra Baxi calls it, is a Foucauldian strategyfor destabilizing the discursive domains thatnormalize and stabilize historically contingentand fluid practices. For this purpose, the voiceof the subaltern is valued and prioritized overthe standard academic discourses. The domi-nant conception, according to the authors, paysscant attention to the environmental con-ditions making humanity possible. They takeAlan Gewirth’s insight that human rights arti-culate social/community relation rather thanjuridical and normative distinctions which wasput down by Gewirth in his popular text TheCommunity of Rights. Storytelling is givenimportance in order to challenge the dominantdiscourses of power and the State, that tend tohomogenize and promote ‘monologic’ in thepretext of community. The writings ofThomas King, particularly his 1995 collectionOne Good Story, That One is a major inspi-ration for the authors and they draw heavily on

it to make their central concern for the book.Storytelling, here, should not be understood asjust exchanges of fairy tales or horror storiesfor entertainment, but should be seen ascollective biographies of the communities aswell as the resistance against various forms ofcolonization. Storytelling also representsdialogue and ‘multi-logue’. This complex formof speech gives rise to a complex code inwhich ‘communities emerge, develop,disperse, and at times also disappear in theflux of narrative time and space.’ Storytellingsare an alternative source of information forindigenous group linked to land and comesfrom the land. From this perspective, ‘life iscontingent upon a collective relation to theecosphere and the stories that the ecospheregives up through its embodiment offspring,human and other.’

Citing the theatre historian Alan Filewodthe authors comment, ‘the word “community”has become as bankrupt as its rhetoricalpredecessor, “the people”, had by the end of1930s.’ They are also highly influenced by thework of French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy,particularly his The Inoperative Community. Inthis work, Nancy writes, ‘the gravest and mostpowerful testimony of the modern world, theone that possibly involves all other testimoniesto which this epoch must answer……is thetestimony of the dissolution, the dislocation,or the conflagration of community’. GiorgioAgamben’s work, The Coming Community, hasalso influenced the authors. Speaking of thestate’s inability to tolerate that, ‘….singularitiesform a community without affirming an iden-tity, that humans co-belong without any rep-resentable condition of belonging… the state… is not founded on a social bond, of which itwould be the expression, but rather on thedissolution, the unbinding it prohibits… abeing radically devoid of any representableidentity would be absolutely irrelevant to thestate. That is what, in our culture, the hypo-critical dogma of the sacredness of human lifeand the vacuous declarations of human rightsare meant to hide.’ The above critiques of theconcept of community and the state’s usurpingof the human rights discourse while denyingthe same to marginalized communities is theinspiration for this particular work.

The book is divided into four parts with atypical post-modern/colonial style of labelling.The socio-political conditions of several of themarginalized communities spanning fromMexico to India are dealt with. Blacks, Romas,dalits, indigenous populations from North andLatin America, Chinese workers, women,children, animals, environment etc., and theirproblem with rights is the main concern of the

authors. The main argument of the book isthat the rights of the community are shaped bythe ‘ethics of encounter’ in which our ‘rela-tional contingences’ (the community) standmediated by values of civil rights and justice.‘Equality of difference’ should be the guidingnorm in a more subtle, fair and ethical con-ception of ‘community’. The authors arecritical of the newly floating communities likethe ‘facebook communities’ on the internet aspromoting egotistic and narcissistic behaviouramong its members in the interests of businessrevenues. Google, Apple and other corporatelabels are criticized for invoking the notion of‘community’ which is distorting our bioticrelation to others and land. The authorscomment upon how Apple products made inChina by Foxconn have been reported to haveviolated the rights of the workers. The book allthrough emphasizes the inter-relatedness ofsocial collectives and individuals acrosscultures all over the global.

Since the authors cover a broad range ofissues, it is difficult for a reader to criticallyevaluate and appreciate the problems facingmany communities. For example, the problemof dalits is picked up in the later half of thebook but is dealt with in a manner that fits theover-arching argument of the work ignoringmuch of the complexity and specificity of thedalit predicament. The ambitious goal of theauthors to capture the common problems ofmany disadvantaged groups has resulted in afragmented narrative. However, sociologists,political scientists, social activists, legal scho-lars and human rights advocates must read thiswork in order to acquaint themselves with thelatest arguments offered by critical theorists,philosophers as well as the lessons that can belearnt from the struggles taking place all overthe planet.

Krishna Swamy Dara is Post Doctoral Fellow atthe Juritische Fakultet, Humboldt University, Ber-lin.

Trans-cultural PerspectivesKrishna Swamy Dara

THE COMMUNITY OF RIGHTS: THE RIGHTSOF COMMUNITYBy Daniel Fischlin and Martha NandorfyOxford University Press, Delhi, pp. 328, `850.00


The existing vast scholarship on collec-tive identities in India, whether itdeals with caste, creed or nationalism,

is dominated by a concern with their modern‘construction’, a process generally seen ashaving occurred during the colonial period. Soin the last two decades historians have care-fully described the way in which communitiesof all kinds are invented or reinvented througha set of debates, practices and, most importantof all, ‘reforms’. They have shown us howcertain narratives of collective belonging endup defining the terms of debate on any givenidentity, thus closing some avenues of thinkingwhile opening others in the process. In onesense Justin Jones’s important book extendsthis ‘constructivist’ argument to the Shia ofnorthern India. For example, he tells us inmeticulous detail how the fall of the court inLucknow during the Mutiny forced a com-munity that had heretofore been defined by itsaristocratic allegiances to remake itself.

Thus the ulama or religious scholars of thesect not only found themselves bereft ofaristocratic support, but also freed from thecontrol exercised by these great magnates inthe past. Compelled to turn for patronage toordinary believers, these men were able toconsolidate themselves into a corporate groupfor the first time (just as their peers in thegreat shrine cities of Iraq were doing) whiletrying to manage what was now their mostimportant relationship, that with the sect’sordinary laymen, to their best advantage. Inthe meantime these laymen were similarly in-stitutionalizing themselves as Shia represen-tatives, each group turning to the colonial statefrom time to time in order to stake its claimto speak on behalf of the Shia as a whole. AndJones very effectively describes the way inwhich the gradual emergence of electoral andthen mass politics in twentieth century Indiafurther shaped the character of the Shia debateand activity, as it did that of every other groupin Indian society.

The emergence of mass politics, Jonesargues, led to an increase in the contestationfor Shia representation internally, while exter-nally also putting Shias on a competitive foot-ing with the much larger community of northIndian Sunnis. Indeed one of his chief claimsis that what other scholars have referred to asthe ‘construction’ of the Muslim community inthis period was consistently undercut by Shia-Sunni rivalry, itself a sign not of weakness andtradition so much as of vibrancy and change.

For the Shia, therefore, as well as for manySunnis, says Jones, Hinduism did not figure asIslam’s great competitor in colonial India, withthe struggle to reform and represent the ‘Mus-lim community’ being largely an internal one.And in fact it is remarkable how little refer-ence there is to Hinduism in ‘reformist’ Mus-lim texts of this time, especially given the largerole that Islam plays in the simultaneous revi-val of Hinduism. The tendency of north IndianShias to vote for Congress against the Leaguein colonial times, and then for the BJP againstthe Congress more recently, is as much a signof this unconcern with Hindus as it is of arivalry with Sunnis.

Yet it is clear from this book that themore divided they became, the closer to oneanother did Shias and Sunnis move, with theirforms of argumentation and institutionaliza-tion converging so strongly that one is temptedto describe the rivalry between them in Freu-dian terms, as the narcissism of minor dif-ferences. Jones is at pains to make the casethat the many and important Shia figures whorose to intellectual or political prominenceduring this period, ranging from the juristAmeer Ali to Pakistan’s founder MohammadAli Jinnah, were not representative of northIndian Shi’ism in the explicitly ecumenicalform of Islam they propagated, though hemight have considered the possibility that thisapparently non-sectarian religion was if any-thing more Shia than the mirroring acts ofsectarian contestation that his book describesso well. For these men’s generic Islam did notpreclude sectarian identification, only keepingit for one’s inner life in a good example of thecrucial Shia doctrine of taqiyya, often wronglytranslated as ‘protective dissimulation’ and seenby the sect’s enemies as nothing less thandeviousness and hypocrisy.

Given that taqiyya was often prescribedeven in a Shia country like Iran, to regard it as‘protective’ is not very helpful. Instead we maywant to follow up on a comment made by thepoet-philosopher Mohammad Iqbal, himself aSunni, who responded to a question about thedifficulty of establishing secular principles in areligion like Islam, which apparently drew nodistinction between religion and politics, byreferring to the occultation of the twelfth ShiaImam and the consequent necessity of prac-tising taqiyya. European societies, said Iqbal,defined secularism in spatial terms, by con-fining religion to private life and, he thought,giving over the public arena to unprincipled

opportunism. Shi’ism, however, conceived of atemporal division between the contemporaryworld, in which religion could not becomedominant without denying the absence of theImam, and the reign of the messiah himselfwhen taqiyya would finally come to an end.

I mention this example so as to point outthe remarkably imaginative ways in whichShi’ism was thought about in the very periodupon which Jones focuses. Surely whether ornot such men as Ameer Ali or Jinnah wererepresentative of the Shia in a purely nume-rical sense, the ways in which they were ableto think about modern life and society in dis-tinctively ‘Shia’ ways is of great and even cru-cial interest. Otherwise we must resign our-selves to thinking that in the play of mirrorsthat Justin Jones offers us, there is no funda-mental difference between Shi’ism and Sun-nism. And so we come back to the very thinghe denies, the ‘construction’ of a Muslim com-munity in colonial India. Can we suggest, then,that the ‘generic’ and non-sectarian Islamretailed by so many Muslim leaders of thetime, both Shia and Sunni, represented not aunified religion so much as a form of taqiyya,a simulacrum that nobody was actually meantto believe in but rather assent to only as acourtesy? Fragmentary as it is, this suggestionopen up an unexplored vision of ‘secularism’ asa Muslim category in modern times.

Jones does in fact make an importantpoint about secularism as a colonial enterprise,arguing that the British policy of (relative) non-interference in religious matters allowedMuslims in general as well as in their sectarianmilieus to make Islam into a closed system.More than a defensive mechanism in the faceof colonial rule, Jones claims that it was theelimination or enfeeblement of Muslim rulersand aristocracies in British India that offered

Taking Shi’ism to the MassesFaisal Devji

SHI’A ISLAM IN COLONIAL INDIA: RELIGION, COMMUNITY AND SECTARIANISMBy Justin JonesCambridge University Press, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 276,`795.00


both the ulama and lay people the opportunityto turn religion into a totality, whereas thedynasts of the past never allowed either ofthese groups to consolidate themselves orIslam in this way, with royal law, for instance,constantly interrupting and limiting the exer-cise of divine law. And so it was actually colo-nial secularism that, like all forms of thesecular in Euro-American societies, ended upmaking religion possible as a closed andautonomous field. One implication of thisprocess, Jones tells us, was that Shi’ism andSunnism now came to be thought of as closedand alternative systems, precisely as religionsin the modern and indeed Protestant sense thisword has. Their very closeness to each other,therefore, made these competing systems intothe bitterest of rivals. Secularism, we mightsay, lies at the root of all religion, which is whyit can never supplant the latter.

Faisal Devji is Reader in Indian History at St.Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

“

”

...so it was actually colonial

secularism that, like all forms of

the secular in Euro-American

societies, ended up making

religion possible as a closed and

autonomous field. One impli-

cation of this process, Jones tells

us, was that Shi’ism and

Sunnism now came to be

thought of as closed and

alternative systems, precisely as

religions in the modern and

indeed Protestant sense this

word has.

Islam is the predominant religion of con-temporary Africa and Asia and has alarge following in Australasia, Europe and

North America. According to reliable demo-graphic sources in as many as fifty-one nation-states scattered over the continents of Asia,Africa and Europe followers of Islam are in amajority—in as many as forty of them theMuslim population being above 80%. Inmany other countries of these continentsMuslims constitute from a quarter to one-halfof the population. And, then, there are severalMuslim-minority states in Asia and Africawhere the headcount of Muslims is muchhigher than in any of the Muslim-dominatedcountries—India with its 160 million Muslimsbeing on top of such nations. In the West,while Europe is home to nearly 45 millionfollowers of Islam, there are another about tenmillion in the United States. A cautious esti-mate puts the total Muslim population in thepresent-day world at 1.7 billion. According tosome unofficial estimates the aggregate ofMuslim population in Muslim-minority coun-tries on the globe exceeds the total number ofMuslims in all the Muslim countries takentogether. In the present-day world thus Islamremains a force to reckon with and Muslimpresence on the globe is indeed enormous.

The West has always taken a keen interestin this global faith/tradition and has beensince long producing theoretical studies andempirical works presenting various facets ofIslam in its own way. Besides Britain, whichhas in the past ruled a large number ofMuslim countries for long spans of time forwhich reason its interest in Islam is under-standable, Germany too has been in theforefront in bringing out all sorts of books onIslam and the Muslim world. The book underreview here is a recent addition to suchliterature. It was first published in the Ger-man language in Munich in 1984. Edited bytwo German professors, it is a bulky antho-logy of articles and country reports contri-buted by a large group of authors hailing fromvarious back-grounds and covering the entiregamut of Islamic affairs including the situa-tions in the contemporary Muslim world. Thebook when published was well received in theacademic circles in the West as a storehouseof ideas and information about all aspects ofIslam and the Muslim society and went intofive editions in a short span of about twodecades. An English version of the fifthedition published in 2005—various parts of

the book translated by different bilingualscholars—was brought out five years later bythe Cornell University Press in the UnitedStates; and it has now been reprinted in Indiafor distribution in South Asia.

The over 1100-page work is broadlydivided into three parts titled (i) HistoricalExpansion, Political and Religious History, (ii)Political Role of Islam in the Present and (iii)Present-day Islamic Culture and Civilization.Part I, under five heads, contains 16 articlesencompassing a brief history of Islam from itsorigin in the 7th century AD till the present,the Sunni and Shi’a divisions in Islam, majorrevivalist movements of 18th to 20th centuriesin different parts of the world, and statisticaldata on the Muslim presence on the globe. Thesection on Sunni Islam speaks of its history,theology, law and mysticism; and that on theShi’as of the majority Ithna ‘Ashari group andthe Zaidi minority. The Isma’ili Shi’as are notdealt with here—which would have been moreappropriate and just—but, bracketed with theAhmadis and Bahais, under Part III among the‘Sects and Special Groups.’ The chapter onrevivalist movements is quite selective, speak-ing, besides some Arab reformers, of SouthAsia’s Jamaluddin Afghani, Shah Waliullah andSir Syed Ahmad Khan. The continent-wisestatistical data at the end of Part I brieflycovers 38 countries each of Asia and Africa,

Global Faith/TraditionTahir Mahmood

ISLAM IN THE WORLD TODAY: A HANDBOOK OF POLITICS, RELIGION, CULTURE, AND SOCIETYEdited by Werner Ende & Udo SteinbachMunshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 1114, `1795.00

Poetics and Politics of Sufism & Bhakti in SouthAsia: Love, Loss and Liberation edited byKavita Panjabi tries to bridge the gap througha comparative approach on the evolution andcross-fertilization of ideas between Sufism andBhakti. The book focuses on the range ofinfluences across different linguistic andcultural divideds.Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2012, pp.305, pricenot stated.

Book News Book News


12 of Europe and a few countries of Austral-asia and the two Americas.

Part II of the book first deals, under threedifferent heads, with Islamic social systems,economics and law in general. Chapter III inthis Part titled ‘Developments in Law’ attemptsto deal in a short space of about thirty pageswith the legal system of Islam covering itshistory and state in the present age. A briefnote on sources and methods of law is fol-lowed by a cursory look at constitutional law,criminal law, personal status laws, civil laws,commercial laws and economic laws. Thisgeneral discussion is followed by brief countryreports. While major Arab states like Egypt,Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia,Sudan (pre-Partition), Syria and Yemen aredealt with countrywise, there are clusters onthe Muslim nations of the Gulf and NorthAfrica. Separate sections on Sub-Sahara andwhat the book calls ‘Horns of Africa’ provide

information on many other countries of theAfrican continent. Country reports are foundalso on the Muslim States of Central, Southand Southeast Asia, as also on four Muslim-minority states—China, India, Israel andRussia—whose citizenry includes large Muslimpopulations. The section on country reportsends with a chapter on ‘Islamic Diaspora :Europe and Americas.’

Part III of the book opens with an articleon what its author calls ‘orientalistics andorientalism’ and later talks of Islam and cul-tural self-assertion, local traditions, linguisticsphere and reflections of Islam in contem-porary literature. It ends with brief accounts ofa variety of Islamic arts and architecture intheir historical perspective and modern forms.This last part of the book is followed by end-notes for all its chapters, authors’ short bio-graphies, a sixty-page comprehensive biblio-graphy and three indices—names, subjects andgeographical references.

The book is repeatedly described in itsblurb as ‘comprehensive’ but the treatment ofmany aspects of Islam in all its parts is ratherscanty. It is surely comprehensive in its cover-age but the treatment of every subject is notnecessarily so. In an attempt to produce amultum in parvo on the 1400-year old Islamicfaith in its historical and modern settings theplanners of the book, it is evident, had to

unduly restrict the scope of several entries.While the blurb further describes the book as‘most authoritative’ and its contributors asworld’s leading experts on Islam, it is mainly awork of ‘outsiders’—of its forty-four contri-butors only five are Muslim by faith. Of coursetheir impartiality and objectivity is beyondreproach. I personally know quite a few ofthem and have hosted some of them here inIndia at my university including the youngGerman scholar Monica Wohlrab-Sahr whohas attempted to cover all aspects of Islam inthe two vast continents of North and SouthAmericas in a brief five-page piece.

The book is now about three decades oldand the factual information given in it is obvi-ously not up to date. The tabular statement ofMuslim populations found in it dates back to2004. Yet as a single-volume encyclopedic worktouching upon all aspects of Islam and its follo-wers it may well cater to the needs of the Eng-lish-speaking seekers of a general reference book.

Tahir Mahmood, Member, Law Commission ofIndia, is a renowned jurist specializing in IslamicLaw, Hindu Law, Religion and Law and Law Relat-ing to Minorities. He has been Dean, Faculty ofLaw, University of Delhi, Chairman, National Com-mission for Minorities, Member, National HumanRights Commission and Jurist-Member, RanganathMisra Commission.

“

”

Muslim population in Muslim-

minority countries on the globe

exceeds the total number of

Muslims in all the Muslim

countries taken together.


Mappila Muslims constitute morethan ninety percent of the Muslimpopulation in Kerala. The majority

of these Muslims live in the northern part ofKerala, called Malabar region. Historians andsociologists like Roland E. Miller, Stephen F.Dale, K.N. Panikkar, Hussain Randathani andmany others have written about the socio-political and cultural world of Malabar Mus-lims from various perspectives.

L.R.S. Lakshmi examines the social, poli-tical, educational and cultural life of MalabarMuslims under the colonial administrationfrom 1870. At first glance, there is no detailleft unexamined. The seventh and last chapterdiscusses the educational progress, women’sempowerment, religious development and thepolitical life of Mappila Muslims in the twenty-first century. By discussing a wide range ofissues on the Mappila community, she hasmade a sincere effort to satisfy both sociolo-gists and historians alike.

Lakshmi argues that Arab trading and theintermarriage between Arabs and the localwomen, economically motivated religious con-versions by ‘low castes’; this and the egalitariannature of Islam are cited as the main reasonsbehind the Islamization of the Malabar region.However, many will have a problem in usingthe politically loaded word ‘Islamization’ todescribe the peaceful expansion and conver-sion of locals to Islam in the region. The hier-archical social order of the Mappilas is anotable one. The hierarchy is formed not onlydue to the conversion from the Hindu reli-gion, but also due to the Hadrami influence inthe region and the hierarchical social orderthat prevailed among the Hadramis. Thehierarchical order was also strengthened by theeconomic domination and control of the portby the Keyis, Koyas and Baramis. As a critiqueto the egalitarian nature of Islam in Malabar,she sees that ‘the Thangals were spirituallysuperior whereas the Keyis, the Koyas and theBaramis were economically superior. ThePusalar(n)s and Ossans were occupationallyinferior’ (p. 28). When analysing the familial,educational and other aspects of MalabarMuslims, her work is completely silent aboutthese so-called socially, occupationally andeconomically ‘inferior’ communities.

This is a lucidly written book withoutjargon. But, a native reader like me, cannotread the book without making comments on

some serious errors due to the author’s lack offamiliarity with the local language, names ofpersons and places. To begin with, the commu-nity ‘Mappila’ is wrongly spelt throughout thebook as ‘Mappilla’ which in Malayalam means‘unpardonableness’, and the word has nothingto do with the community. The first paragraphof the introduction begins with a factual errorwhen she writes ‘Jews arrived in Cochin asearly as 68 AD and a small town exists eventoday in this region surrounding the oldestJewish synagogue in the world’ (p. XV). Theauthor overlooks the fact that Cochin cameinto existence only in the 14th century. TheParadesi synagogue, built in 1568, is one ofthe many synagogues in the world, but not theoldest.

Throughout the book, Vakkom Moulavi iserroneously called Vaikkom Maulavi. Jamalu-deen Mankada is wrongly written as Jamalu-deen Makkad (p. 164), and Sayyid MunavvarAli as Sayyid Munnaftali (p. 165). Some of theMalayalam words should be correctly written as‘nikudi’ instead of ‘nihudi’ (p. XXVIII), ‘pus-alans’ for ‘pusalars’ (pp. 26, 28, 81), ‘kabarst-halam’ for ‘kavarasthalam’ (p. 65), ‘Kerala Sarva-kala Shala’ for ‘Kerala Sarvakala Shaka’ (p. 164).

The popular notion in academics is thatthe Malabar Muslims are matrilineal and thatthey follow the marumakkathyam system.However, it is just a dominant ideology inacademics and an unjustifiable generalization.Around 14-16 percent of Muslims in Malabarfollow the matrilineal system, and they aremainly from areas like Kannur, Thalassery andsome parts of Kozhikode. Existing sociologicalliterature on the Malabar Muslims havediscussed mainly the affluent and educatedcommunities like Thangals, Keyis and Koyas.This work sadly is not an exception. She hasreferred to previous works on and interviewedpeople mostly from the above communities (p.190). Lakshmi fails to incorporate the familialand marital life of the people from economi-cally poor and educationally backwardMuslim communities in the Malabar region,where the dominant form of family system ispatrilineal. Like some other previous workson the Malabar Muslims, this work alsoshows the outsiders’ failure to reach andconnect with the poor and ‘inferior’ people ofthe Malabar region. It also shows how theaffluent and economically superior communi-ties influence knowledge production.

The excessive and uncritical dependenceon secondary materials have resulted in flawedarguments. Somewhere she argues, ‘Unlike theNayars, the Mappillas were basically traders andshop owners in the coastal belts and agricultur-ists or petty traders in the interior. They didnot normally go to distant places in search ofeducation and employment’ (p. 61). However,this finding is contradicted as she herself saysthat ‘there were a handful of Mappillas whowent to Deoband’ (p. 87) and that some of theMappilas travelled outside the region forhigher education. For instance, they went tothe Al-Baqiyyat-us-Salihat College, in Vellore.In the twenty-first century, Muslims form thesingle largest group of the Keralite workforceabroad.

Similarly, while analysing the educationalrole of Himayathul Islam School in Kozhi-kode, she points out that ‘a characteristicfeature of the school was that it was the onlyinstitution, which imparted free secular andreligious education’ (p. 105; emphasis mine).However, while analysing the educationalsystem of Mappila Muslims in the colonialperiod and after Independence, we can seethat Dars, Madrasas and Othupallis played animportant role in imparting both secular andreligious education to them. In addition tofree education, Dars and Othupallis providefree food and shelter as well for Mappilastudents in the Malabar region. The authorherself points out elsewhere that ‘the Municipalcouncil of Kozhikode maintained sixteenelementary schools in the city, out of whichseven were for the “Mappillas” and seven forthe Hindus. In all the “Mappilla” schools,education was free’ (p. 116). In such a context,Himayathul Islam School was just one of many

A Socio-Historical OutlookMuhammed Haneefa

THE MALABAR MUSLIMS: A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVEBy L.R.S. LakshmiCambridge University Press, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 200, `530.00


schools, which imparted free secular andreligious education for Mappilas.

The strength of the book is that it high-lights many relevant political and social issuesthat should get an urgent attention. Questionsregarding the state’s role in Muslim educationand refugee issues are important. As she says,Mappila Muslims ‘were displaced in 1921when they were driven out as victims of theBritish excesses in Malabar. Many Mappillamen went to Karachi …their women lived inKerala…but post partition period, thesedisplaced Mappillas, whose numerical strengthin Pakistan is around 10,000 are facing visarestrictions from the Indian Government tovisit Kerala’ (pp. 168-169). She suggests that,‘The refugee issue is a serious matter of socialconcern and their grievances need to beredressed without further delay’ (p.169). In thearea of education, the lacklustre response fromthe State and Central Governments has resultedin the rise of many self-financed educationalinstitutions in Malabar.

Like Muslims in India, Malabar Mappilasare also lagging behind in education whencompared to other communities in the region.However, they are much better and higher ineducational achievement in comparison withMuslims in other parts of India. Lakshmi’sdetailed study of Mappila education throwslight on the State’s neglect and bias in allocat-ing funds and resources to the educationalinstitutions in the region. Her discussion offemale educational development and the self-effort of the Malabar Muslims are illuminat-ing. In academics and at the policy level, thereis an urgent need to give attention to some ofthe ‘dark sides’ of self-financing institutions.Behind the banner of community service, ableand qualified graduates are demanded lakhs ofrupees for being appointed to various teachingposts, higher fees and donations are extractedfrom students and the poor are exploited.

Lakshmi also shows how the few economi-cally and socially ‘superior’ elites had con-trolled the political authority of the Mappilacommunity in Malabar region. Discussing thenative representation in the Municipal Boardin Kozhikode, she argues, ‘What is significantis that the Muslim seats in the MunicipalBoard were being filled by wealthy Mappillalandlords and merchants’ (p.134). Even beforeIndependence and after that, the ultimateleadership and authority of the MuslimLeague, one of the major political parties inthe region, has been in the hands of theThangals. They claim to be the descendants ofthe Prophet and are therefore granted asuperior status in the hierarchal social order.

The book makes for an interesting read,giving an overall understanding of the Mappilacommunity from colonial time to the present.One weakness of the book is that, it is toodescriptive and it generalizes some aspects ofthe community like the family structure,religious conversion and status of the womenin the community by analysing a few selectsections and groups of Muslims in the Malabarregion. For instance, she argues, ‘women areas always, highly respected in Mappilla society’(p.162). However, in many parts of Malabar,dowry and child marriage still pose seriousthreats to women’s progress in education andsocial development. As the book makes it clearwhile analysing education, family and socialstructure, there is a lack of homogeneityamong the different sections of the communi-ty. It is a well-researched work, quite informa-tive and meaty too but it fails to impress anative reader as the book abounds in mistakesand fails to give an alternative to the dominantviews. This book will be useful for sociologistsand historians, as well as scholars working onreligious studies.

Muhammed Haneefa is Research Scholar at theCentre for the Study of Social Systems, JawaharlalNehru University, New Delhi.

Indian Association of International Studies(IAIS) isholding its 1st Annual Conventionin collaboration with the Institute forResearch on India and International Studies(IRIIS) on 10-12 December 2012 at theIndia International Centre, New Delhi.IAIS invites papers for the Annual Conven-tion on the theme: The Dawning of the‘Asian Century’: Emerging Challenges beforeTheory and Practices of IR in India.

Proposals for papers and panels are invitedon the following sub-theme:1. Pedagogy of IR in India.2. Peace and Conflict Studies3. Resurgence of Asia, Global Governance and IR Theory4. Indian IR Engagement with IR Theory5. Political Geography and Geo--Politics6. India and its Neighbours7. India and the Great Powers8. South East Asia: New Neighbours9. Ethnicity, Nationalism and Violence10. Gender Studies and IR11. Political Economy12. History and IR13. Domestic Politics and IR14. IR Theory and the War on Terror15. Changing Conceptions of Security/ Sovereignty16. Sustainable Development and Climate Change17. India’s Strategic Thought/Praxis18. Political Theory and IR Thought19. Non--Western Perspectives on IR

Deadline for Submission of Proposals: June 15, 2012

All proposals should be submitted online at: [email protected]

Call for Papers


T he Eagle and the Elephant is the best book on Indo-US relations written by an insider in the US administration.

Vickery holds a bipartisan American viewlargely sympathetic to Indian concerns. It sur-passes Denis Kux’s magisterial book—EstrangedDemocracies. There is a remarkable commit-ment to historical detail to buttress the argu-ment that Indo-US economic relations after1991 were pivotal for its strategic relations.Positive economic inducements rather thansanctions or military considerations will be theharbinger of friendly ties between the two coun-tries. The relationship between the world’s twopopulous democracies of considerable econo-mic significance will be the most significantone for the US in the twenty-first century.

The chapter on civil nuclear cooperationis central to the argument about economic andstrategic relations. India’s nuclear tests in 1998,like the one in 1974, should have brought therelationship to a new low. But the 1998 sanc-tions were reversed quickly. The United StatesIndia Business Council (USIBC), the Confede-ration of Indian Industry (CII) and the Federa-tion of Indian Chambers of Commerce andIndustry (FICCI) and the Indian AmericanForum for Political Education (IAFPE) led bySwadesh Chatterjee played a stellar role inturning conflict into cooperation. This wasreflected in the Joint Statement made byManmohan Singh and George Bush in July2005 and the final passage of the bill acknow-ledging India as a nuclear power in October2008. The chapter provides a graphic accountof how commercial interests helped trumppolitical opposition. This agreement laid thefoundation for robust Indo-US relations. Civi-lian nuclear cooperation since 1959 has beensignifier of trust between the two countries.

The Indo-US economic engagement hasfar-reaching ramifications. First, sixty percentof the fortune five hundred companies out-source their work to India. Commercial ties

Strategic Relationship

Rahul Mukherji

THE EAGLE AND THE ELEPHANT: STRATEGIC ASPECTS OF US-INDIA ECONOMIC ENGAGEMENTBy Raymond Vickery, Jr.Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 352, `695.00

between American and Indian companies mayhave restrained India from taking an aggres-sive posture in the aftermath of the terroristattack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. TheUS Government travel advisories and pressurefrom General Electric considerably reducedthe prospect of Indian aggression. Second,outsourcing created cooperative possibilitiesamong Indian and American companies. Thispolitical economy has secured service trade,despite many attacks on the American H1-Bvisa by the US Congress.

Third, both India and the US are depen-dent on imported oil. While they differ on thepropriety sanctions on Iran—the nuclear dealmay have played a role in scuttling the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project. The Indo-USnuclear deal was clearly delinked from specificIndian foreign policy commitments with res-pect to Iran. But civilian nuclear power was tobe the substitute for dependence on oil. Couldthe nuclear deal have discouraged the IndianGovernment from pursuing the pipeline? Thiscase study fails to analyse other reasons forrejecting the pipeline.

Fourth, Indo-US cooperation on multi-lateral economic issues did not receive a sig-nificant boost till the WTO’s InformationTechnology Agreement (1996). The Indiansoftware industry and American hardwaremanufacturers overcame opposition fromIndian hardware manufacturers to forge a co-operative front during the Singapore tradeministerial. Thereafter, lackluster cooperationensued till Prime Minister Manmohan Singhsupported President Obama’s stimulus packagein the G-20 forum. Indian and American app-roaches to dealing with the financial crisishave found resonance—a factor that affectedthe tenor of Obama administration’s approachto India. This is not a well known insight.

Fifth, India’s transition from a processpatent to a product patent regime is a signi-ficant evolution of cooperation heralded by therise of Indian companies like Ranbaxy, Dr.Reddy, CIPLA and Sun. These companiesdeveloped ties with their American counter-parts in the early 1990s. But the Indian patentlaw drafted in 2005 did not satisfy Americancompanies. To make matters worse, Indiancompanies like CIPLA defied the WTOregime and supplied cheap AIDS drugs toSouth Africa on public health grounds. Overtime, these bold actions received support fromthe US Government, non-governmental organi-zations and American foundations. This nar-

rative suggests that the world is coming aroundto the Indian view regarding the rapaciousnature of the WTO patent regime.

Indo-US cooperation in energy and agri-culture face significant challenges. Neithercould project on clean energy and power take-off after substantial investments had beenmade nor did the two countries share a com-mon approach on climate change. And, thesecond Indian green revolution is not likely tobe an easy transition. The first one in the late1960s is a saga of substantial Indo-US coope-ration. Rural distress in India continues topose a development challenge. Indian Agricul-ture supports more than half the population on14 percent of the GDP. And agricultural GDPis growing less than 3 percent per annum whenthe economy grows at 7 to 8 percent. Rural up-lift demands cooperation between Indian andAmerican companies. It is imperative to de-control the foodgrain distribution system inIndia. These are politically challenging tasks.Companies like Pepsi and Wal-Mart are never-theless making a small difference by bringingthe farmer closer to the market in India.

Overall, the book presents India as acountry whose interests have veered closer tothat of the US after its tryst with globalizationand deregulation since 1991. Cooperation hasreplaced conflict in many areas. The USGovernment needs to accord greater priorityto positive economic engagement and policycoordination. Indo-US relations have beenportrayed as an emerging and powerful rela-tionship among two large independent mindedcountries that can work together withoutbecoming allies.

Rahul Mukherji is Associate Professor in the SouthAsian Studies Programme at the National Univer-sity of Singapore.

...the book presents India as a

country whose interests have

veered closer to that of the US

after its tryst with globalization

and deregulation since 1991.

Cooperation has replaced

conflict in many areas.

“

”


Role of Civil Societies and ItsLimitationsManjrika Sewak

CONFLICT SOCIETY AND PEACEBUILDING: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVESEdited by Raffaele Marchetti and Nathalie TocciRoutledge, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 321, `795.00

C onflict Society and Peacebuilding: Comparative Perspectives is an edited volume of eleven essays, which

explores the linkages between civil society,conflict and peace, drawing on empiricalstudies from regions in Asia, Africa, LatinAmerica and Europe. The book opens with therecognition that civil society plays a significantrole in building sustainable peace and securityin contexts of armed conflict, particularlythose driven by identity and located withinstates. The central space that it has come tooccupy in peacebuilding discourse is based onthe fact that individuals and groups, from avariety of backgrounds, have demonstratedtheir skills and expertise in this area. It isnow recognized that official, government-to-government interactions between instructedrepresentatives of states are insufficient inthemselves to build sustainable peace in divi-ded societies. In this context, the book seeksto delve deeper into how civil society andgovernment actors can partner with one an-other to increase the efficacy of peace inter-ventions and to initiate long-term processesof conflict transformation.

The editors, Raffaele Marchetti andNathalie Tocci, note that while there issufficient evidence to point to the positivecontributions of civil society, what has perhapsreceived less attention is the ability of suchgroups to also work towards entrenching in-equitable status quos and, worse still, exacer-bating conflict in already tense and fragilesituations. The civil society space is not alwaysfilled with progressive politics, and collectiveaction is not always directed towards the com-mon good. Civil society can also be a spacethat fuels discord and it can be captured byvested interests. Thus, on the one hand somegroups voice dissent to make democracy realand substantive, but on the other hand, somemight work towards the subversion of demo-cratic and pluralistic ideals. The authors ad-vance the theory that the influence of civilsociety in a conflict situation depends on cer-tain variables. The first is the context withinwhich a civil society organization operates. Forinstance, how does the larger political contextof authoritarian rule, ethnic nationalism, under-development, overbearing international pres-ence, or a failed state affect the function androle of civil society groups? Further, how doprevailing cultural and societal beliefs influence

the purpose and functions of a civil societyorganization, which is rooted in that society?

Thematically, the chapters fall into threecategories. The first category titled ‘Theore-tical Reflections’ engages with the compositionof civil society in the context of peace andconflict processes. Civil society constitutes thespace between the state, the family, and themarket—interacting with these sectors, influ-encing them, and being influenced by them.The term civil society refers to a complex webof actors who employ myriad strategies andplay diverse roles at different stages of con-flict escalation and de-escalation. It includesactors who initiate short-term and long-termprocesses, ranging from humanitarian assis-tance and ceasefire negotiations to the morelong-term efforts of conciliation, relationship-building, peace education, nonviolencetraining, conflict-sensitive development, andrestorative processes for justice and recon-ciliation. A key strength of this book is theattention that the authors draw to how con-flict shapes the identity and actions of civilsociety organizations. They define them asconstituting a ‘conflict society’ and label themas ‘conflict society organizations’ (CoSOs). Inthis definition, local civic organizations aswell as third-country, international and trans-national civil organizations involved in theconflict in question are included. Adaptingthe Multi-Track Diplomacy model, originallyconceptualized by John McDonald andLouise Diamond of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy in Washington DC, Mar-chetti and Tocci list the following actors intheir definition of CoSOs:· professional conflict resolution

specialists (including technical expertsand consultants);· business groups (including tradeunions and organized crimenetworks);· individual citizens, families anddiasporas (acting on their own);· research, training and education(academia, special interest researchcentres, think tanks, universities);· activism (NGOs, lobby groups,grassroots social movements,nonviolence trainers, human rightsgroups, combatant groups);· religion (spiritual communities,charities, religious movements);

· funding (foundations, individualphilanthropists); and· communication (media operators)

They state that the ability of civil societyto influence peacebuilding depends on thecontext—social, cultural, economic, andpolitical—within which it works. This, alongwith the identities and frameworks of action ofCoSOs and the political opportunity structurein which they operate mix together to deter-mine whether these groups contribute toconflict exacerbation or conflict transforma-tion. In fact, Neera Chandhoke in the chaptertitled ‘What Are the Preconditions for CivilSociety?’ states that such organizations can actas a positive force in peacebuilding ‘only ifexclusionary identity-producing processes aremediated outside the boundaries of civilsociety, and if the State possesses rigorouscontrol over the means and the use of violenceand does not define itself through any parti-cular identity’. As a first precondition, shepoints to the significant role that social inter-action in mixed neighbourhoods (comprisingmembers of different communities) can play inbuilding solidarity among members of civilsociety groups. Related to this is also theexistence of robust workplace and trade unionpolitics, which can forge unity among peopledivided by religion. ‘The second preconditionfor civil society is that religious identitiesshould not become a constitutive aspect of aState-making project. The State should grantequality and freedom to all citizens irrespectiveof their religion, favour none, and discrimi-nate against no one’, writes Chandhoke. Inthis context, she cites the case study ofAhmedabad in Gujarat whose Musliminhabitants were the victims of gruesome,mass violence in 2002 in what has been


described as a ‘near pogrom’. Most civilsociety organizations either participated in theviolence or remained silent. With a fewexceptions, the institutions that represent civilsociety took no action at all, with some activelyparticipating in the violence against the Mus-lims. Chandhoke notes that even though somecivil society organizations mobilized legal,psychological and material aid for the victims,they did not protest against the violence or thefailure of the government to protect its citizens.In this context, she poses the following ques-tions: What shape do civil society organiza-tions take if their members ‘think and act interms of their primary identities rather than asbearers of individual rights’; or, if they emergeas ‘closed ascriptive groups rather than inclu-sive and voluntary social associations; or if thestate codifies the aspiration of one ethnicgroup…?’

The second section of the book exploresthe role of international civil society in pro-cesses of peace and conflict. Laura Zanotti inthe essay titled ‘Protecting Humans, Govern-ing International Disorder: Integrated UNPeacekeeping and NGOs’ looks at how thereformulation of the problematique of securityand the concomitant changes in the strategy ofUN Peacekeeping towards ‘integrated missions’has created not only a regulatory script forNGOs but also a new space for earning visi-bility as well as increasing opportunities formanipulation and contestation. The secondessay in this section by Daniela Irrera titled‘The Roles of NGOs in Humanitarian Inter-ventions and the Peace Support Operation inthe Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’,notes that international non-governmental

organizations have featured both in processesof policy formulation and policy implementa-tion. ‘They are engaged, through consultations,in the definition, affirmation and dissemi-nation of the principle of the “responsibility toprotect”.’

The third section of the book analyses therole of local civil society within specific con-flict areas. Through analyses of civil societyparticipation in regions as diverse as Kashmir,Bosnia, Turkey, Colombia and South Africa,the chapters bring out with deep clarity thedistinctions between international civil societyorganizations and local, grassroots civil societygroups. While the latter have a more nuancedunderstanding of the conflict as well as a big-ger stake in its peaceful transformation, theycan also serve as a potent seed for aggressivegroup mobilization, which in turn could createthe necessary ‘opportunity’ for conflictescalation.

This section opens with a journey toColombia where the author Miguel BarretoHenriques examines the practices and impactof ‘peace laboratories’ in the violence-ravagedLatin American country. The ‘peace labora-tories’ represent an innovative and grassrootsapproach to peacebuilding that traces alter-native paths of promoting peace at the microand regional levels. Based on a participatorymethodology and working with the historicallyexcluded sectors of the Colombian population(such as peasants, indigenous peoples andwomen), the peace laboratories seek to trans-form political, socioeconomic and culturalexclusion, which lie at the roots of the conflict.

Moving to the conflict in Jammu andKashmir, Ayesha Ray in the chapter titled ‘ThePolitics and Identity of Kashmiri Women’sOrganizations’ examines the nature and therole of the Kashmiri women’s movement inIndia. While there is no doubt about thedisproportionate impact of the conflict on thelives and livelihoods of Kashmiri women, thisstudy cautions against essentialist generaliza-tions about women and peace or the existenceof a sisterhood that transcends the markers ofreligion, ethnicity and language. The politici-zation and divisions within a good number ofKashmiri women’s groups that sought to cometogether in the first decade of the 21st centurymirrored the inherent contradictions ofKashmiri society. This has resulted in a frag-mented women’s movement, which is yet togrow beyond the Kashmir Valley to include thevoices of women from Jammu and Ladakh, orthose of displaced Kashmiri Pandit women.

Problematizing the assumption that civilsociety plays a vital role in the promotion ofdemocracy and human rights, the chaptertitled ‘Civil Society and Human Rights Protec-tion in Iraq since 2003’ by Melek Saral pointsto the detrimental impact of unstable stateinstitutions and a divided society on the abilityof civil society to play a constructive role.Iraqi CoSOs have been unable to foster a

democratic culture and protect human rightswithin a context rife with human rights viola-tions and torn apart by ethno-sectarian con-flict. The study on civil society in Turkey titled‘The AKP, Civil Society and Turkey’s KurdishQuestion’ by Ekrem Eddy Guzeldere establish-es the link between democratization and theability of civil society to play a constructiverole, highlighting the importance of the poli-tical, social and cultural context in shaping thenature and impact of CoSOs in the country.

Also included in this volume is aninteresting article on the ‘Role of the Associa-tions of the Victims and Relatives of MissingPersons in Bosnia-Herzegovina’ in the yearsfollowing the signature of the Dayton Accords(by Valentina Gentile). The contributions ofthese civil society associations are analysed inthe context of their common pursuit for jus-tice and truth. The study explores the diversityof approaches as also the tensions between thedifferent associations, and brings to the fore adifferent understanding of ‘civil society’—which is understood as a civilian, non-militarysociety, reflecting a unique form of pluralismand tolerance.

Looking at how civil society reinventsitself in a post-conflict context, VeroniqueDudouet, in ‘Surviving the Peace? The Impactof War-to-Democracy Transitions on HumanRights Organizations in South Africa’, poses apertinent question: ‘In view of the importanceof conflict in determining the nature of civilsociety, when a conflict transits from one stageto another, what are the implications for civilsociety?’ In other words, ‘what happens toorganizations striving for peace and democracyafter they have achieved their goals? How dothey react and reinvent themselves?’ Throughinterviews with local South African humanrights activists, Dudouet concludes that struc-tural changes towards greater institutionali-zation and professionalization have beenobserved, as also relational shifts wherebypreviously adversarial civic actions, such aspublic mobilization against authoritarian andviolent state practices, have given way to col-laboration with, and at times even cooptionby, the government.

This edited volume provides rich insightsinto the diverse purposes, functions and con-tributions of CoSOs in countries experiencingviolent conflict. While generalizations aredifficult, what is clear is that local political andcultural contexts influence civil society organi-zations. They impact the identities of indivi-dual members of these organizations who arestakeholders to the conflict as well. These inturn determine the motivation and ability ofthe organizations to work towards pluralism,inclusivity and the greater common good.

Manjrika Sewak is a Consultant with WISCOMP(Women in Security, Conflict Management andPeace), an initiative of the Foundation for UniversalResponsibility of HH The Dalai Lama, New Delhi.

“

”

... while there is sufficient

evidence to point to the

positive contributions of civil

society, what has perhaps

received less attention is the

ability of such groups to also

work towards entrenching

inequitable status quos and,

worse still, exacerbating con-

flict in already tense and fragile

situations. The civil society

space is not always filled with

progressive politics, and collec-

tive action is not always direc-

ted towards the common good.

Civil society can also be a space

that fuels discord and it can be

captured by vested interests.


Population Management: APolitical Issue?J. Devika

MARKETS AND MALTHUS: POPULATION, GENDER, AND HEALTH IN NEO-LIBERAL TIMESEdited by Mohan Rao and Sarah SextonSage Publications, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 350, `795.00

In 2004, I went around the research insti-tution where I work in search of a dis-cussant for a paper on the historical

shaping of public consent for family planningin 20th century Kerala. This was interdiscip-linary work which reexamined some of thereceived wisdom of demography pertaining toKerala from a critical historical perspective.Many senior colleagues skimmed the title, andfinding ‘family planning’ in it, suggested, ‘Finda demographer’! So I sought out demogra-phers, who read snatches from the paper andstared at me in disbelief, as if it was blasphe-my to historicize hallowed ideas such as the‘demographic transition’.

It is readily apparent that the authors whohave contributed to the volume under reviewdo not subscribe to such piety. Therefore, tome, it represents more congenial company.Academic research on population managementhad travelled, even in 2004, far from the once-unshakeable statist, quantitative, Eurocentrictruths, but large sections of the academia areyet to acknowledge this shift. This volume isindeed capable of forcing a rethinking, as itreveals the advantage to be reaped by criticalscholarship from adopting interdisciplinaryperspectives and methodological and theore-tical pluralism. Many essays in the volumeinterrogate global discourses of populationmanagement dominant within currently-hegemonic neo-liberal conceptions of develop-ment; others focus on specific countries in theSouth to reveal the complexities of the un-folding of the new population managementagenda. The methods used range from statis-tical analysis to textual analysis and anthropo-logical fieldwork. Most essays do not staywithin conventional disciplinary boundaries.And each offers useful insight into the ways inwhich many of the familiar certainties ofpopulation management have not only con-tinued to stay entrenched within national andglobal policy, but also how they now informthe discourse of radical social movements—specifically, feminism.

The volume includes eleven essays con-nected by a common focus on the unfolding ofcontemporary global biopolitics, besides theintroduction which discusses the significanceof critical inquiry into the complex linksbetween the stubbornly-persistent imperativesof population management, the global crisis in

public health triggered off by neo-liberal wel-fare reform, and the transformation of thefeminist discourse of reproductive rights in aworld under neo-liberal hegemony. Some ofthem look back critically at a much-celebratedmoment of feminist ‘victory’, the Cairo Con-sensus of 1994, which is supposed to havedecisively altered the course of populationpolicy globally, setting it away from demo-graphically-driven population managementimperatives towards women’s empowermentand reproductive rights. The argument that theneo-liberal destruction of public health systemsin poor countries and the intensification oftheir exploitation through structural adjust-ment have effectively rendered the promises ofCairo defunct is now common—and power-fully demonstrated by Meredeth Turshen’sessay on health in Africa after Cairo in thisvolume. However, the volume goes beyondthat insight and probes deeper into the multi-ple ramifications of contemporary biopolitics.

The three essays by Sarah Sexton andSumati Nair, Betsy Hartmann, and MarleneFried are especially important in the currentcontext in which the Cairo Consensus isseverely threatened by both the rise of funda-mentalisms around the world and the intensi-fication of neoliberal depredation of publichealth—as Hartmann remarks, this is a timewhen ‘there is a tendency to remember onlythe positive aspects of Cairo and to forget thenegative’ (p. 53). Both reveal how, despite tallclaims, neo-Malthusianism was never unseat-ed; in fact, feminist concerns were reframedwithin its terms, with grievous effect. Hart-mann’s essay throws interesting light on theshrewd deployment by actors and interests inthe US of theories of ‘environmental conflict’,which rested on neo-Malthusian assumptionsand furthered US security interests, in waysthat drew in both environmental and feministactors. Fried’s essay focuses on abortion poli-tics in the US, with special attention to theinternal fractures within feminism, betweenfeminists who emphasize reproductive ‘choice’and women of colour, who uphold reproduc-tive ‘justice’. The latter offer an implicit criti-que of the Cairo Consensus framework’s sub-servience to neo-liberalism, and hence aim at‘achieving the broad set of conditions neces-sary for reproductive and sexual freedom andhealth’, which would mean that human rights

and economic justice are inseparable fromreproductive rights (p. 97).

Fried’s essay also speaks to Rachel Simon-Kumar’s analysis of neo-liberal developmentand reproductive health in India, which tooposes hard questions to positions that gliblyassume that feminist political goals aroundreproduction are attainable through neo-liberalstates and within neo-liberal frameworks.From the Indian experience, Kumar demon-strates that while market-oriented economicpolicy has been proceeding apace, and thoughIndia’s commitment to the ICPD process isnow evident in its population programmestrategies which emphasize reproductive health,these do not seem to have dislodged theimperative of population control. Both Friedand Kumar critique the ‘choice framework’which plays too easily into the neo-liberalrhetoric of individual responsibility and re-mains blind to inequalities and the dangers ofthe unregulated market-place of reproductivetechnologies.

The essays by Martha Rosenberg andSuzanne Schultz represent two key positions inthe feminist debate about the waning of thepromise of Cairo. Rosenberg argues that LatinAmerican feminists, who often had to confrontpro-natalist population policies, did makesignificant gains through the Programme ofAction that emerged through the ICPD; butthis does not mean that there is consensusabout working with the neo-liberal state amongfeminists there. However, the destruction oflivelihood and state welfare in the wake of neo-liberal policies in countries of the region hasconsiderably limited the actualization of thepromises of the ICPD. Schultz, however,argues that the problem is deeper: while themarch of the neo-liberal economic order is


significant, equally important is the march ofthe neo-liberal political order. As she pointsout, the problem is that ‘the mainstream dis-course of gender NGOs has become tied to ananalysis that no longer refuses biopolitical Stateintervention in general’ (p.191). Thereforetheir critique of the world economic order isnecessary but not sufficient. Schultz, import-antly, alerts us to the fact that in the post-Cairovariety of neo-Malthusianism, the ‘populationproblem’ is reframed less aggressively in termsof ‘biopolitical racism’, a fact that remainsundisturbed by the acknowledgement ofgender sensitivity in the Progamme of Action.

Other ramifications of this expandingbiopolitics are brought to the fore in MohanRao’s and Kamran Asdar Ali’s essays whichexplore population politics and fundamental-isms in times of neo-liberal welfarism in Indiaand Egypt respectively. As Rao demonstrates,drawing on contemporary communal politicsand discourse in India, neo-Malthusianismoffers dangerously simplistic explanations todiscomfiting social changes, which in turnleads to virulent, majoritarian communalbiopolitics, which is almost invariably miso-gynist as well. Ali’s essay, which uses materialfrom anthropological fieldwork, explores how‘impotence’, widely feared by the Egyptianpoor, is more importantly an effect of thedeprivations and structural inequalities whichthe structural-adjustment dictated privatizationpolicies have deepened. Indeed, family plan-

ning, which supposedly produces a ‘lean family’,is considered the natural concomitant of theneo-liberal ‘lean state’. The ‘civil society’ offamily planning NGOs is fully complicit withthe latter and their efforts are perceived by thepoor as a form of violence. Their anger isoften couched in the language of Islam—in acontext where simplistic media representationscontinue to attribute Islamic fundamentalism,terrorism, and immigration to ‘overpopulation’.

A particularly interesting essay in thevolume is Lisa Ann Richey’s analysis of theintersecting of the biopolitics of population andthat of HIV/AIDS in Uganda and Tanzania. Sheshows how entrenched gender-constructionsthat strictly separate ‘lover’ from ‘mother’ con-tinue to underlie the HIV/AIDS programmefrom the family planning programme, whichcompete rather than collaborate. However,unlike in the population programme, AIDS hasforced questions of sexuality and gender intodiscussions of the problem—which may also bea reason for the success of Uganda’s HIV/AIDSpolicy in contrast to the dismal state of re-productive health there. There seems littlereason to doubt that despite the internationalcommitment to reproductive health that Cairoaimed at, the fate of reproductive health is stillstrongly linked to priorities and perceptions ofparticular states—even though they might haveendorsed the ICPD goals, like Uganda.

The volume ends, fittingly, I think, withSusan Greenhalgh’s essay on the shift from

Leninist biopolitics to neo-liberal biopolitics inChina. Besides the fascinating detail, what theessay powerfully brings out is the futility oflarge-scale and coercive social engineering, orthe vital significance of its unintended conse-quences. Also, it demonstrates the complexityof the cultural entanglements of family plan-ning when deployed as an instrument of Statepower—the strange sight of a ‘hard-edged,competitive, Chinese modernity’ (p. 326)produced through the exacerbation of tradi-tional forms of misogyny.

The only critical observation I wish tomake is a minor one. While the introductiondoes offer a detailed and careful overview ofthe chapters and the context, it may have beenuseful to also include some discussion on themethodological and theoretical pluralism thatit employs so effectively. It might have alsobeen useful to draw more closely into theintroduction some of the theoretical formula-tions that have informed the most insightfulessays in the volume—specifically, those whichfocus on the unfolding of a renewed regime ofbiopolitics through post-Cairo populationpolicies. This would have definitely streng-thened the single biggest insight of the volume:that population management is primarily apolitical issue and must be analysed as such.

J. Devika is with the Centre for Development Stud-ies, Thiruvananthapuram.

The Cult of MasculinityAnjali Arondekar

MASCULINITY, ASCETICISM, HINDUISM: PAST AND PRESENT IMAGININGS OF INDIA By Chandrima ChakrabortyPermanent Black, Delhi, 2011, pp. 263, `695.00

This book highlights a conceptual andpolitical impasse that is at the heart ofthe most recent postcolonial scholar-

ship on India. On the one hand, much effortis expended at exposing the contradictions andlimits of British colonial rule (scholars tend tomostly ignore the Portuguese colonial presence!)and its reliance on orientalist epistemologies ofrule. On the other hand, such a deconstruc-tive move is equally countered by a scholarlydesire to recover those very epistemologies forevidence of India’s (lost) past and (found)present. Colonialism, most scholars wearilyadmit, cannot simply be expunged from India’spost-Independence history; rather we mustceaselessly work to recognize colonialism’s rolein constructing that very history. No two is-sues are more central to our recuperative pro-jects than the thorny questions of gender andreligion, marked repeatedly as potential spacesof peril and possibility. Even as one needs to

rescue Indian religious practices and beliefsfrom the flattening and/or pathologizing lega-cies of British colonialism, such efforts have tobe equally weighted alongside an emergent andvirulent form of postcolonial and masculinistHindu nationalism.

It is thus timely that the linkage betweengender and religion founds the conceptualfocus of Chandrima Chakraborty’s book underreview. For Chakraborty, any understanding ofIndia’s past and present historical and politicallandscape necessitates a closer look at theinterconnectedness between religion, mas-culinity and asceticism, or what she calls‘the conjunctural alignment of ascetics andmasculinity in Indian political history.’ Morespecifically, she argues that representations ofmasculinity and Hindu asceticism have beenand continue to be instrumentalized for cul-tural and political purposes. Within the colo-nial period, Indian male asceticism (falsely

conflated, she writes, with Hinduism) plays acentral role in the British imperial imagina-tion. Ascetics are seen as paradoxical exemp-lars of a failed and detached Indian masculi-nity that is wilful, mendacious and overalldangerous to the ‘humane’, civilizing missionof the British empire. As figures who ‘wander’aimlessly and without practical purpose, Indianascetics are reduced to bodies that escapecolonial technologies of mapping and surveil-lance. Stripped of their spiritual significance,the Indian ascetics of the colonial imaginaryemerged as shadowy robed figures, capable ofmurder, crime and worst of all, political unrestand revolution. Chakraborty is quick to pointout that such a damning iconography of theIndian ascetic is shared by the Indian agrarianelite of the colonial period who saw the asceticas actively engaged in resisting feudal oppres-sion (pace Sri Aurobindo and Swami Viveka-

“

”

Colonialism, most scholars

wearily admit, cannot simply be

expunged from India’s post-

Independence history; rather

we must ceaselessly work to

recognize colonialism’s role in

constructing that very history.


nanda), even as a small number of Indianscontinued to revere the Indian ascetic as aHindu sannyasi working towards self-liberationand enlightenment.

Refusing such western/colonial notions ofIndian ascetic practices, Chakraborty advoca-tes a more heterogenous understanding of thereligious figure of the male Hindu ascetic thatbypasses our commonsensical understandingof Hindu ascetics as a monolithic groupmarked by their renunciation of worldlypractices. Instead, she calls for a renewedattentiveness to how colonial ascetic masculi-nity transformed itself into a strident symbolof Indian nationalism, providing us with anuanced ‘telos of selfhood and nationhood.’ Byerasing the opposition between nationalismand religion, ‘ascetic nationalist masculinities’emerged more as spaces of negotiation, con-testation and advocacy for preachers, theliterati and nationalist leaders who ‘sought tocontest and alter colonialist views of Hindumasculinity and religion as weak and degene-rate.’ Rather than see ascetic renunciation,celibacy and restrictions in diet as evidence ofan effete Hindu male body, Indian nationalistscelebrated such traits as indicative of the colo-nized male subject’s self-control, courage andindependence. In doing so, Indian nationa-lists, the book argues quite persuasively,broadened the category of Hinduism andreligion in general to a divergent (and oftencontradictory) landscape where the traditionalnotion of religion as unchanging often clashedwith a more secularized version of religion asmutable and flexible.

However, Chakraborty cautions againstany facile celebratory revival of a nationalistascetic masculinity, especially as the concept ofnation in postcolonial India clashes with adifferentiated understanding of sexuality, class,

caste, gender, to name a select few issues.What interests her more is the exploration ofascetic masculinity as a productive site oftension in the continued articulation of Indiannationalism from the colonial to the post-colonial moment. Chakraborty focuses, forexample, on the spectacular ascendancy of theHindu Right (or the Sangh Parivar) and ad-dresses its concerted revival of public asceticfigures who are seen as moral and corporealstalwarts of the body-politic. As is well-docu-mented, the success of such revivals of publicascetic figures has aroused considerable con-cern among the Indian left that often views theparticipation of any religiously affiliated body(individual or collective) as a source of shame,fear and even atavism. For Chakraborty, suchnegative readings of contemporary asceticfigures (while partially warranted) refuse thevariegated historical and political genealogiesof the male ascetic as a figure of anti-colonialpossibility and change. To cede this colonialhistory of dissidence and protest to the currenthegemonic mobilization of Hindu male asce-tics as religious bigots and jingoists is to pre-cisely miss the point. Chakraborty’s insistenceon a history of India that grapples with its ownfraught relationship to a gendered ascetic pastis by far her most incisive and politic interven-tion. In so doing, Chakraborty forces a much-needed and difficult dialectic between the stra-tegies of the Hindu Right and those of thenationalist struggle (Simona Sawhney’s wonder-ful book, The Modernity of Sanskrit, makes asimilar argument about the complex legacies ofSanskrit that are erased by its current over-privileged attachment to the Hindu Right).

In order to trace the variegated history ofascetic masculinities and their multiple repre-sentations, Chakraborty reflects on four keymoments in Indian nationalist history: anti-colonialism, swadeshi nationalism, Gandhiannationalism, and Hindutva. Each chapter (bythe author’s own admission) focuses on elitemale figures, from Bankim Chattopadhyay,Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, RajaRao, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalker and VinayakDamodar Savarkar, and tracks the mobiliza-tion of ascetic masculinity as a means forrecovering and/or igniting nationalist senti-ment. In the case of Chattopadhyay andTagore, the failed Bengali babu is revitalizedthrough his linkages with an asceticized mar-tial and revolutionary masculinity, emblemati-cized, for example through representations ofthe Swadeshi struggle. Gandhi provides amplefodder here for the brandishment of the maleascetic body as the site, par excellence, ofcorporeal excess and containment. Chakra-borty covers an admirable range of sources,ranging from literary texts, speeches and auto-biographies, to provide us with a rich andoften dizzying analysis of how and why asceticmasculinity assumes the kind of criticalimportance it does, from the colonial to thepostcolonial moment. The book’s last chapter

on ‘Hindutva’s “Angry Hindu” and the Rewri-ting of Histories,’ is by far the book’s mostambitious and reflective section. Here, theauthor engages deftly with Hindu Right pro-paganda that centers the muscular Hindu malebody as the repository of the Hindu com-munity-nation. Through such readings,Chakraborty draws her reader’s attention tothe ‘epistemological methodology’ of the Pari-var that allows it to routinely borrow, rewriteand plunder historical archives at will to servethe interests of the Hindutva project. Whilemany historians have warned us about theHindu Right’s predilection for historicalreconstruction, few scholars have attended tothe specific nuances of gender and religion asa nexus of historical authority.

That said, the book’s theoretical ambition(in the best sense of the word) is both itsstrength and its weakness. In one of the mosttelling sections of the book, Chakrabortywrites that her main contribution to currentdiscussions of gender and masculinity is prin-cipally a theoretical one. By proposing todeepen what she calls the under-theorized fieldof colonial/postcolonial masculinity studiesthrough the grid of religion and asceticism,she hopes to extend the question of how ‘ideasof nationhood inscribe themselves onto speci-fic gendered bodies.’ Yet even as the referen-ces to the ‘crisis in masculinity’ and the emer-gence of multiple ‘masculinities’ abound in thetext, the representations of masculinities re-main ensconced in a relatively crisis-freemono-gendered framework. In other words,the reader is presented with a wide array ofrepresentations of ascetic masculinity yet mostcleave firmly to the norm of heterosexuality.Surely to say that a theoretical approach toascetic masculinity brings to light ‘the crisis ofmasculinity’ seems limited as that would be aclaim that most cultural studies scholars work-ing on any aspect of gender in India wouldequally make. For example, the book’s con-clusion clearly grapples with the gender troublethat ascetic masculinities unravel (specificallyin the author’s excellent reading of SwamiRamdev’s success). Chakraborty exhorts thereader to attend to the ‘anxieties’ underwritingnational/nationalist productions of masculinity,only to end with a bland call for masculinity associal construct, eschewing more complextheorizations of gender and sexuality.

Overall, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduismis an engaging and inventive book, and there ismuch to learn from its pages. It will appeal notonly to scholars of South Asia, but also to his-torians, anthropologists and literary scholarsworking within postcolonial cultural studies.

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Femi-nist Studies at the University of California, SantaCruz. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexu-ality and the Colonial Archive in India (OrientBlackswan: New Delhi, 2010).


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AUTOBIOGRAPHYMatters of Discretion: An Autobiogrphy by I.K.Gujral is his life story penned in a forthright andcandid manner. He entered the political fray as afreedom fighter in the British era and after thetumultuous events that rocked the Indian subconti-nent in the wake of Partition crossed over fromPakistan to India, where he had to begin life fromscratch.Hay House, New Delhi, 2011, pp.19, `795.00

A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold by AbhinavBindra with Rohit Brijnath is the story of a man who fought valiantly tomake his own history and with it, his nation’s.HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 229, `399.00

A Drop in the Ocean: An Autobiography by PadmaSachdev, translated by Uma Vasudev and Jyotsna Singhis a bitter journey of a Dogra girl of Jammu whofought with the orthodox and men-oriented society.She lived in an era in which women were subjected tosuspicion and torture. Despite a number of turns andtwists that came her way she achieved success by herdedication and love for people.National Book Trust, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 347,`180.00

BIOGRAPHYBetrayed by Latifa Ali with Richard Shears is aterrifying true story of a young woman dragged backto Iraq by her parents to live under threat of deathfrom ancient family customs.Mehta Publishing House, Mumbai, 2011, pp. 257`400.00

The Kiss of Saddam: Fascinating, Heartbreaking, andAbove All, a Story of Courage by Michelle McDonaldis based on the life and experiences of Selma Mas-son. Her memory of events, and takes the reader on an incrediblejourney, drawing an evocative picture of life in Iraq. It shows just whatone woman will do to save the people she loves.Mehta Publishing House, Mumbai, 2012, pp. 243, `350.00

Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Many Shades, Many Frames byDhruva N. Chaudhuri covers Nirad Chaudhuri’searly years, his struggle to find work, his stint at AllIndia Radio, and goes on to highlight his years inOxford, where he died at the age of one hundredand one.Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2011, pp. 180, price notstated.

My Father Baliah by Y.B. Satyanarayana is a detailed delineation of thedifferent facets of the unique world of untouchables—the inviolablesocietal boundaries and attitudes, the social, economic and culturallandscapes, the norms and patterns of intercommunity and interper-sonal relationships.HarperCollins, Delhi, 2011, pp. 211, `299.00

ENVIRONMENTCleaner Hearths, Better Homes: New Stoves for India and the DevelopingWorld by Douglas F. Barnes, Priti Kumar and Keith Openshaw drawson case studies from six Indian States—Maharashtra, Haryana,

Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and WestBengal—and other stove programmes around theglobe. It discusses India’s best improved biomassstove programmes and suggests policies andpractical ways to promote the use of cleanerburning, energy efficient and affordable stoves.Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2012, pp. 170,`595.00

FICTIONBali and the Ocean of Milk by Nilanjan P. Choudhuryreimagines the eternal conflict between the gods andthe asuras in a whacky thriller littered with bad jokesand corpses.HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 306, `199.00

Opening Night by Diksha Basu is the story of NaiyaKapur, a Princeton University graduate who comesto Mumbai to chase his big Indian dream—Bollywood.HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 279, `250.00

Sorrow of the Snows by Upendra Nath Ashk, translatedfrom the Hindi by Jai Ratan is a satirical yet compas-sionate account of the penury and deprivation thatbegan setting in in Kashmir after Independence. It isalso the larger story of every farmer in India who reststhe responsibility of his happiness and sorrows onGod’s shoulders.Harper Perinnial, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 118, `250.00

MANAGEMENTParenting the Office by Doris S. Davidoff, Philip G.Davidoff, Donald M. Davidoff, and Douglas G.Davidoff provides realistic solutions to management(and parenting!). In this book the authors have donea wonderful job of weaving the similarities betweenhome and office together. It is a modern guide tounderstanding and implementing proven parentingprinciples in your office to increase your personaland your organization’s success.Mehta Publishing House, Mumbai, 2011, pp. 228,`350.00

Brick by Red Brick: Ravi Matthai and the Making of IIM Ahmedabad byT.T. Ram Mohan tells the story of how IIMA was conceived, itsdistinctive governance structure, its unique culture and how a highlygifted manager created the conditions for its enduring success.Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2011, pp. 281, `495.00

MEMOIRConfessions of a Serial Dieter: Secrets from 43 Dietsand Workouts that Took Me from 100 to 60 by KalliPurie demystifies the process of living a healthy, fitand fulfilling life. The book will make you believeyou can do it whether it is losing stubborn weightor chasing your dream.HarperCollins, New Delhi,2012, pp. 225, `250.00

POETRYThe Jewel That is Best: Collected Brief Poems by Rabindranath Tagore,translated by William Radice comprises three voloumes of Tagore’spoetry, ‘Particles’ (Kanika), ‘Jottings’ (Lekban) and ‘Sparks’ (Sphulinga).


The poems are quiet, philosophical observationsthat carry as much meaning as mystery, as muchsensitivity as objectivity.Penguin, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 203, `250.00

Seven Leaves, One Autumn: Poems edited bySukrita Paul Kumar and Savita Singh havecollaborated in creating a symphony of diversevoices. Each poem is rooted in its own milieu;and yet, these poems easily cross linguistic andnational divides to call out to the reader any-where in the world.Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 159, `195.00

POLITICSAnna: 13 Days that Awakened India by Ashutosh,demanding the enactment of a strong Lokpal Bill, wasa watershed moment in post-Independence India.Coming soon after a slew of corruption exposes, themovement galvanized an increasingly disenchantedmiddle-class like nothing had in decades.HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 226, `199.00

Portraits from Ayodhya: Living India’s Contradictionsby Scharada Dubey which studies the barricadedRam Janmabhoomi site, travels through temple alleyways, visits theresidents, ordinary and prominent of a town that has known no peace,is a startling compilation of oral history, a mighty jigsaw puzzle ofvoices from across the town.Tranquebar, Chennai, 2012, pp. 272, `295.00

RELIGIONBeyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness The Dalai

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Lama is an essential statement from the DalaiLama, a blueprint for all those who may choosenot to identify with a religious tradition, yet stillyearn for a life of spiritual fulfilment as they workfor a better world.HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 188,`399.00

The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing theFinal Days of Jesus by Colin J. Humphreys poses anintriguing detective story. The author lays outclearly the apparent contradiction in the description of Holy Weekevents as given in the Gospel of John versus the Synoptic Gospels, andhe proposes his own solution to what he believes is no longer a contra-diction.Cambridge University Press, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 244, `395.00

SPORTSOut of the Blue: Rajasthan’s Road to the Ranji Trophyby Aakash Chopra is the inspiring true story of theplayers’ motivation, their passion for cricket and of acricket association that changed the rules of howdomestic cricketers are groomed in India.HarperCollins, New Delhi, pp. 262, `299.00

TRAVELHot Tea Across India by Rishad Saam Mehta is the story of honey-andsaffron-infused tea shared with a shepherd in Kashmir and a strongbrew that revives the author after almost getting lynched by an iratemob in Kerala, Rishad takes you across the length and breadth of Indiafrom Manali to Munnar, from the Rann of Kutch to Khajuraho, withwit, sensitivity and insight.Tranquebar, Chennai, 2011, pp. 191, `195.00

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In 2002, the Government of Karnatakaprohibited the sales of a massive two-volume history of Kannada cinema publi-

shed by Hampi University Press. It apparentlyhad factual errors and, more importantly, hadmisrepresented Dr. Rajkumar, the Kannadafilm superstar. The prohibition still holds. And,well-documented work on Kannada cinemacontinues to be unavailable. A scholarly bookon Kannada cinema, therefore, would normallybe an occasion for cheer.

A dominant tendency within film studieshas been to track the effects of social powerand ideology in cinematic texts. Here, theemphasis is less on the aesthetic properties ofcinematic images and sound and more ontheir institutional coordinates in social space.Bipolar Identity, too, intends to explain Kan-nada films as texts reflective of and engagingwith local socio-political realities of their time.More specifically, its author, M.K. Raghaven-dra, notes: ‘This is an inquiry into how local/regional identity is addressed in regionallanguage cinema and also whether regionalidentity can conflict with the national identity/other identities’ (p. xii). A few pages later, hesays: ‘. . . the purpose (of the book) is to chartout the way Kannada cinema responds to boththe region and the nation, or, to phrase it dif-ferently, how it negotiates the space betweenthe two’ (p. xivii). He does not consider‘Kannada art cinema’ relevant for his discus-sion since it was closer (especially after the late1970s) to the ‘pan-Indian art film’ promoted bythe National Film Development Corporation,and free from the compulsions of addressing ageographically circumscribed audience, andhad ‘little local appeal’ (p. xii).

A brief summary of the book’s argument:Since the Mysore State was not directly ruledby the British, it experienced colonial ruledifferently than British India. It was a ‘Hindu’kingdom. And, science and modernity cameto Mysore much before Nehru introduced itin India after Independence (I am only sum-marizing the book here). All of these accountfor the differences in ‘film conventions’ (and‘not form’) in Kannada and Hindi cinema inthe pre-Independence era (p. xv). In the deca-des following the unification of Mysore State(later Karnataka) in 1956, the strong symbolicassociation of Kannada films with Mysoresociety began to wear off, especially post-1980.The changing economic, social and political

trends in the newly unified State explain theshifts in Kannada film conventions. And,throughout this process, Kannada cinemamanaged to retain its local identity vis-á-vis theideology of the Indian nation. A parallel pointto note is that Kannada films have all alongbeen ambivalent about Bangalore’s status as aKannada city since it was initially identifiedmore with the British than with Mysore andlater became home to many central govern-ment public sector enterprises.

Bipolar Identity never clarifies whether theKannada films themselves strove to managetheir regional self-identity within a nationalframe. Retaining Kannada cinema’s distinctive-ness and autonomy appear to be ever-presentmotivations for the Kannada film makers. Afew historical facts should complicate such aview. Two Bombay-based producers set up theSurya Film Studio, the first studio in Banga-lore, in 1928; and, their Surya Film Companyproduced numerous silent films in Kannada.Indeed, many of the landmark films of thetalkie era were directed by non-Kannadaspeaking persons from outside Mysore. SatiSulochana (1934), the first Kannada talkie film,was directed by Chamanlal Dongagi, aMarwari. And, Jeevana Nataka (1942), apopular ‘social’ film, was directed by WahabKashmiri, a native of Kashmir. Until the early1960s, most Kannada films were made instudios in Madras. In other words, myriadnon-local elements have mediated the makingof Kannada cinema. Raghavendra simplypresumes that the identity of Kannada cinemaderived from the chief features of Mysoreculture without showing how that might havebeen achieved within the complex field of filmproduction.

What are the ‘constituent elements’, to useRaghavendra’s phrase, of Mysore society thatmade Kannada film conventions unique?First, the widespread practice of endogamy inMysore society, whereby same-caste maritalalliances were sought within geographicallydelimited areas, explains the presence ofarranged marriages in Kannada cinema plots.Second, ‘early Kannada cinema is a non-Brahmin cinema’, wherein the identities ofnon-brahmin characters are used to suggesttheir vocation whereas the figure of thebrahmin symbolizes caste hierarchy itself.Third, Kannada film narratives adhere todharma more strictly than Hindi films since

they came ‘from a space relatively insulatedfrom the colonial encounter’ (p. xxxii).

The sociological factors Raghavendraholds relevant for understanding Kannada filmconventions are not convincing. Caste endo-gamy obtained in most parts of India and wasnot unique to Mysore. Further, by examiningcaste through the enumerative logic of censusin cinema, he misses out on the powerful workof caste in the aesthetics of representation.His thin understanding of caste allows him toconclude, incorrectly, that caste hierarchyweakens in Kannada cinema after 1980 (p. 95-96). A scrutiny of the metaphysics of casteunderlying the cinematic assemblage of imageand sound can better explain the imbricationof Kannada cinema with local caste realities.Regarding the stricter embrace of dharma inKannada films, I wish that the book alsoexplained how that became manifest in ‘a non-Brahmin Kannada cinema’.

Raghavendra’s attempts to read Kannadafilms as an index of ongoing socio-politicalevents stay tenuous. A sample illustrationshould suffice. After noting that women’sdignity was not always secure in films in the1990s, he explains:

. . . the demeaning of women in theKannada films in the 1990s was caused bya lowering of the self-image of the Kan-nadiga, which also reflects in the loweringof the language. The lowering of the self-image may have been the result of localpolitics in which politicians openly dis-graced themselves without being madeaccountable to the constituents of theregion, who remained helpless. This per-haps led to public cynicism over whetherthe political choices that the public was

A Non-Take on Kannada CinemaChandan Gowda

BIPOLAR IDENTITY: REGION, NATION, AND THE KANNADA LANGUAGE FILMBy M.K. RaghavendraOxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 209, `695.00


making in the region had any significanceat all. Was their characteristic tolerancesuch a good thing, they may have won-dered, or were they merely pliant’ (p. 109;emphases mine).

How and why popular disgust with statecorruption translates into popular self-loathing,which then necessitates the negative portrayalof women in films is not explained.

Again, speaking of Kannada films in post-1990 era, Raghavendra notes that ‘the state isperceived to be withdrawing from the publicspace’ (p. 135). This conclusion does not hold.Beginning with Om (1995), many of thebiggest commercial hits in the subsequentfifteen years have belonged to the genre ofextremely violent films. Most of the violentyouth heroes (or anti-heroes) of these films arearrested after enjoying a free hand at violenceagainst the evil-doers. In other words, thenarratives of virtuous young men’s violentconfrontation with systemic evil close with anaffirmation of faith in state-sanctioned law.Another feature of these violent films is theirhigh-decibel symbolic designations of Banga-lore (and Karnataka) as a Kannada space,which should qualify the book’s view thatKannada films have never been certain of thelinguistic status of Bangalore.

Identifying allegorical connections bet-ween cinema and society is another mode ofhistoricism seen in Bipolar Identity. None ofthose allegories seemed plausible. For instance,the relation between Krishnadevaraya, the rulerof Vijayanagar, and his vassal in Vijayanagara-da Veeraputra (1961), we are told, allegorizes,respectively, the relations between India andMysore, wherein ‘the Indian nation... deservesmore loyalty’ (p. 17). It is difficult to imaginehow Krishnadevaraya, a major Kannada icon,could represent the ‘Indian nation’ and his

vassal the Mysore state. Another illustrativeexcerpt:

The metaphysical agent rewarding virtuein early Kannada cinema was god—inmythological films like Harishchandra andBedara Kannappa. If ‘king’ was a way ofrepresenting Mysore, then ‘god’ became away of allegorizing the Indian nation after1947 (p. 19).

Just how did the nation take the place ofgod? We will never know from this book.

Most conclusions in Bipolar Identity arenot self-assured: ‘Early Kannada cinema...appears a largely Shaivite cinema perhapsbecause (sic) of the dominant influence ofVeerashaivas in Mysore’ (p. xxxv). Again: ‘Themotif of Bangalore gaining importance isperhaps because (sic) of the city’s position asthe state capital and not due to any develop-ments within the city’ (p. 33). (The very manygrammatical and typographical errors in thebook show the publisher’s editorial indiffer-ence). Yet again: ‘Many heroines today arefrom Punjab, Gujarat, or Bengal, as though theconstituents of the region have an indetermi-nate identity’ (p. 158; emphasis mine).

An important claim in Bipolar Identitypertains to how the single-party rule by theCongress in Mysore and the absence of astrong anti-brahmin movement (like the oneseen in Tamil Nadu), which did not polarizeany other political constituency, help explainthe iconic distinctiveness of Dr. Rajkumar, thesuperstar of Kannada cinema. Noting that thesuperstar became the ‘voice of conscience’ inthe late 1960s, Raghavendra writes: ‘. . . hisadversaries are not identifiable as traders,landowners, the upper castes, or servants ofthe state, etc. (which are all political catego-ries) but simply as “bad people”, who dothings that are not legally and ethically correct’(p. 38). This line of reasoning, which couldfound a valuable argument, remains, however,under-elaborated.

Bipolar Identity is silent on how the issueof Kannada identity was managed in filmmusic. Kannada music directors have smug-gled in sounds from Hindi, Telugu, Tamil andHollywood films and brought newness to thelocal soundscape without overwhelming theintegrity of the latter. Moreover, popularplayback singers in Kannada films like P. Su-sheela, S. Janaki, L.R. Eswari, S.P. Balasubra-maniam and Yesudas, to name a few, are fromneighbouring states. Notwithstanding theiroccasional mispronunciations, Sonu Nigamand Shreya Goshal are singing sensations incontemporary Kannada cinema. All of this ispublic knowledge. Since music and voice areimportant authenticating signs of identity,examining the film-makers’ cultural diplomacyvis-á-vis Kannada identity in their moviesoundtracks would have been valuable.

Bipolar Identity has been ill-served by itsready resort to de-contextualized analytical

categories such as ‘caste’, ‘nation’, ‘region’ and‘modern’. Despite its consideration of a widerange of Kannada films, its aim of showinghow the history, politics and culture of Mysore/Karnataka mattered for Kannada cinema isnot backed by careful research and analysis.For instance, in order to understand howKannada film conventions evolved, Raghaven-dra chooses Harishchandra (1943) andGunasagari (1953), which he thinks ‘may’ sharein common ‘features characteristic of earlyKannada cinema’ and then adds another film,Vasanthasena (1941) to this list (p. xxi). Forhim, these films also explain why earlyKannada cinema was a ‘non-brahmin cinema’:

Gunasagari appears to have no place for abrahmin character, although there arecaste indicators and the protagonist’sfamily can be identified as Veerashaivas.In Vasanthasena, although Charudatta is abrahmin the film plays down this aspect—although his comic friend Maithreya isoften vocal about being a ‘poor brahmin’(pp. xxxi-xxxii).

Referring to Harishchandra, the only filmamong his chosen films which depicts abrahmin as an evil person, Raghavendra offersan incredible suggestion: ‘Considering that thedirector of the film R. Nagendra Rao washimself a brahmin, the wicked or comicbrahmin was perhaps a convention of earlyKannada cinema’ (p. xxxii).

Indeed, there is an exciting story to tellabout the formation of Kannada cinematicidentity. An engagement with Kannada cine-ma that allows the intellectual problematic toemerge from within it, as it were, can helpensure it will be worth listening to.

Raghavendra’s bibliography consists almostentirely of publications in English. The exci-ting archive of Kannada film magazines andthe memoirs and biographies of Kannada filmindustry personalities might have enabled asatisfying engagement with the issue of Kan-nada identity.

Chandan Gowda is Professor of Sociology, AzimPremji University, Bengaluru.

“

”

A dominant tendency within

film studies has been to track

the effects of social power and

ideology in cinematic texts.

Here, the emphasis is less on the

aesthetic properties of cine-

matic images and sound and

more on their institutional

coordinates in social space.

Bipolar Identity, too, intends to

explain Kannada films as texts

reflective of and engaging with

local socio-political realities of

their time.

Book News Book News

Highway 39: Journeys Through a FracturedLand by Sudeep Chakravarti attempts tounravel the brutal history of Nagaland andManipur, their violent and restive present,their uncertain and yet desperately hopefulfuture. The author’s journey introduces thereaders to stories that chill, anger and offeruneasy reflection.Fourth Estate, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 388,`450.00


Pluralism and Diversity in SocialTraditions

Arshia Sattar

KSHEMENDRA: THREE SATIRES FROM ANCIENT KASHMIRTranslated by A.N.D. HaksarPenguin Books, New Delhi, 2012, pp.155, `250.00

KAMA SUTRA: A GUIDE TO THE ART OF PLEASUREBy Vatsyayana. Translated by A.N.D. HaksarPenguin Books, New Delhi, 2012, pp.209, `450.00

A N.D. Haksar, that prolific and diligent translator, offers us two small but potent little volumes—one, the tried

and tested and much translated Kama Sutraand the other, relatively unknown, Kshemen-dra’s satires from tenth century Kashmir. Bothare a pleasure to read and add to our knowl-edge of the secular aspects of our literary heri-tage and our social traditions, reminding us ofa time when pluralism and diversity were com-monplace. An interesting aspect of these texts,which is subtly revealed in these translations,is the scepticism with which our ancestors re-garded human nature and behaviour. Kshe-mendra seems unconvinced of any real good inhumans and Vatsyayana, the celibate who wrotethe manual on sexual behaviour, is gently mock-ing of the practices that he himself suggests.

In Three Stories from Ancient KashmirHaksar presents Kshemendra’s satires, NarmaMala, Kalavilasa and Desopadesa, all of whichare startling in their resemblance to our con-temporary situation and our attitudes to func-tionaries of the state. Although his tales arelittered with corrupt individuals of all profes-sions and persuasions, Kshemendra saves hisspecial venom for the bureaucrats, a breedsingularly without redemption, in his view. AsHaksar points out, these stories are writtenrather baldly, with few rhetorical flourishes orornamentation. And that serves to highlightthe unsavoury characteristics of the people thatKshemendra describes with such relish. Nei-ther the doctor nor the Buddhist nun are sparedKshemendra’s barbs, the doctor being, ‘. . .nota remover of people’s ailments but of theirmoney . . .’ and the nun nothing less than a‘procuress’. Kshemendra also lavishes detailson his character’s appearances, clothes as wellas features, and one does get the impressionthat he is having a lot of fun when he is paint-ing these word pictures. But his own voice

breaks through the narrative and the descrip-tions and it is one of censure and moral con-demnation. He judges those that he writesabout. For example, women are all over thesestories and like everyone else, there’s not a lotto recommend them—wives are promiscuous,courtesans are greedy, widows will do anythingfor a little sex, even ‘ . . .devotedly (placing)her pelvic region in the guru’s hand.’ Kshemen-dra’s last words for the lustful widow are thus:‘May she give pleasure to all lechers.’

A perfect antidote to Kshemendra’s worldof deceit, hypocrisy and greed is the wonder-fully idealized lifestyle presented by the KamaSutra. No one needs to work here, men andwomen are equally of leisure with little to doother than adorn themselves and develop thegood habits and skills that will make them at-tractive to each other. There is no cheating ordeceiving or bad feeling—even adultery ischeerfully permitted and the wheres and howsof it are laid out in great detail. Apart from thematerial it contains, this new edition of the textis made all the more seductive with its superbproduction—beautifully designed pages, thickcreamy paper and a soft rose pink cover.

Haksar’s lucid translation draws out thecharm of this text, wrongfully famous only forits suggestions about sexual positions andoptions. Of course they are there: the whole ofBook Two is devoted to what an intrepid sexualexplorer might do with his or her partner—how to kiss, how to bite, how to slap, how tohave intercourse and how to behave afteryou’re done. And in a rare moment of equalityfrom the Sanskrit universe, a woman’s pleasureis as important as a man’s. That alone shouldmake this a text worth reading.

For me, the charm of the Kama Sutra hasalways lain in the books that surround BookTwo—the descriptions of the daily routine of agentleman, for example, which include spend-ing some time teaching his parrots and mynahsto talk. After which, he should take a nap.There’s also an absolutely marvellous (andsurely tongue-in-cheek) section about how toenhance one’s penis size involving annointingthe penis and letting it hang down through thegaps in a string bed. A courtesan, too, hasmany skills and tricks that she needs to develop

if she is going to be good at her job. When sheneeds to get rid of a lover, she might ‘talk ofthings he knows nothing about’ or ‘want tosleep’ when he wants to make love. Similarly,our gentlemen friends are guided throughaffairs with the ‘wives of others’ and tutored inhow best to approach both maidens, courte-sans and their own wives. What is particularlytouching is how insistent Vatsyayana is abouttenderness towards a virgin girl, how she mustbe eased into a sexual union over three nights,preparing her both emotionally and physicallyfor a new relationship.

The Kama Sutra sees itself as a shastra (acompendium of knowledge and a manual ofrules written by an expert), which accounts forits taxonomic proclivities—classifying menand women according to the size of theirgenitals and working out permutations andcombinations on the basis of mathematicalpossibilities rather than any physical realities.But Haksar’s elegant translation reminds usthat the Kama Sutra is nothing so much as atreatise on manners—encouraging courtesy,generosity and politeness at all times and to asmany people as possible. Although restrictedto the social and sexual lives of an urbanupper class, it is remarkably free of caste andcreed prejudice—unlike Manu’s Dharmasastra,where everything is predicated on the potentialfor pollution, determining whom one caninteract with and to what degree. It is always apleasure to be reminded that there was a timewhen we were less moralistic as well as lessprejudiced towards each other and had a senseof humour about ourselves.

Arshia Sattar has a Ph.D from the Department ofSouth Asian Languaes and Civilizations at the Uni-versity of Chicago.

Haksar’s lucid translation draws

out the charm of this text,

wrongfully famous only for its

suggestions about sexual

positions and options.

“

”


Poet and essayist W.H. Auden onceremarked that every autobiography isconcerned with two characters, ‘a Don

Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, theSelf ’. Vinod Mehta’s literary self-portraitLucknow Boy fits the description quite well.Only that in this memoir the two charactersnever appear together, at least not on the samepage. First we are introduced to the Self, theboy from Lucknow who spends his days loaf-ing or ganjing around Lucknow’s busy galis andbazaars, and before long he finds himself on aflight to London with nothing more than a ‘BAPass Third Class’ degree in hand. And thenthis boy, the Self, disappears from the stage,and we meet the Ego, the editor, who is athome in the company of the nation’s powerelite, a good-humoured chronicler of the lifeand times of the metropolitan 400 of thefinancial and political capitals of India. In thatsense, there are two books in Lucknow Boy, itis one part memoir, an account of the wonderyears of Mehta’s life in Lucknow and Londonand one part political diary which coversMehta’s experiences in Bombay and Delhi as aprofessional mediawallah.

Perhaps inspired by American writerErnest Hemingway’s romantic memoir of hisyears in Paris, Mehta has quite literally laidout his life’s story in the form of a (moveable)feast. And ideally it should be consumed witha bottle of crisp Chenin Blanc in hand, onethat matches the author’s cut and dry wit.Mehta begins his story by serving deliciouscanapés and amuse-bouchés from his days inLucknow and London in the 60s, giving us ataste of innocence of an era gone. In theseinitial chapters of Lucknow Boy Mehta alsoindulges his readers with revelatory personaltales including the home-grown receipe of his‘psuedo-secularism’ and other such admirableeccentricities. And if one may stretch themetaphor, this fiesta is sure to leave quite afew, including Mehta’s multiple girlfriends,feeling like they have been egg-devilled! Butthis exuberance of his salad days may not suiteveryone’s palette, after all magazine editorsare not public figures, at least not in the waypoliticians, social activists, public intellectualsand film stars are. And hence, their privatelives might not be of the slightest interest tomany, may be with the exception of thesizeable readership of the Outlook magazine.Commenting on this part of the book makeslittle sense, this is personal stuff and it could

An Editor’s EditorAasim Khan

LUCKNOW BOY: A MEMOIRBy Vinod MehtaPenguin Books, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 325, `499.00

have remained just that. We can only go so faras to say that the story is written with maturi-ty, the language devoid of all sentimentality,and not prosy. It would be enough to say thatMehta tells his own story without exertinghimself too much.

It is in the second part of Lucknow Boy,after we are through with the hors d’oeuvre ofhis personal life, that Mehta moves the menuto contemporary politics, and serves us adelectable selection of haute politics. And it isevident that his loyalties lie firmly with hisreaders, and not the ruling classes whose storyhe tells. In these pages he fine roasts the boldand the beautiful for us, among them are someof his ‘friends’ from the media. His ability tonarrate national events as private moments inthe lives of real individuals sets Mehta apart asone of the most competent political editors ofour times (or should one say outlook). In oneepisode after another, Mehta gives us a ring-side view of the political theatre of India’sdemocracy, regaling us with tales of thecoercive lions and cunning foxes engaged in adaily battle for survival. A real heir to themantle held by the Khushwant Singhs, NihalSinghs and Kuldeep Nayars of another era,Vinod Mehta is quite clearly tomorrow’seditor’s editor!

In this part of Lucknow Boy there arerough edges sure, but no hard feelings asMehta recounts his journey from being anamateur chronicler of Bombay’s low-life to aprofessional diarist covering New Delhi’s highpolitics. Reading these passages, one is re-minded of the classic tale of power and politicsserialized in the Lewis Eliot novels by theBritish writer C.P. Snow. In the most celebrat-ed novel of this thirteen book set, Corridors ofPower, the main protagonist recounts a goldenrule given to him by his mentor, ‘Always be onthe spot. Never go away. Never be too proudto be present.’ This, the protagonist admits,was perhaps only the second of the goldenrules, the first being ‘Keep alive’. As Mehtareads straight from the pages of his secretdiary it becomes evident that he has lived hislife standing true to both these golden princi-ples. Now he is sitting in the high offices onRaisina Hill, then he is courting a terriblydisorganized Nobel laureate. One moment heis hosting a newly crowned Miss Universe,and next he is exchanging pleasantries (andchocolates!) with Sonia Gandhi. Atal BehariVajpayee is bent on consoling him, ‘aaj aap

bahut chup hain’ he asks our hero after almostshutting down his magazine. And in themiddle of all this, Mehta manages to set offseveral ‘atom bombs’, a phrase he uses todescribe the explosive stories that havescandalized and provoked the nation overthese years.

The book is also concerned with the innerlife of the press, the political economy of thenews media as well as the changing ‘profession-al ethic’ in Indian journalism. For anyoneinterested in understanding the relationshipbetween press, politics and power, both in pre-and post-liberalization India, Lucknow Boy isrecommended reading. Mehta’s trade-marksagacity as an editor is in fact quite uniqueand there are hints in this book that it mighthave something to do with the absence of avictim-complex that colours the professionalethic of many of his ‘Emergency years’ con-temporaries. As he himself asks, ‘Did Idefy the Emergency? Did I try and opposeGandhi’s repressive regime? Not much.’ Bygiving an honest account of his failures andsuccesses in getting along with the businesstycoons, oligarchs and upright businessmenwho employed him as the editor of theirpublications, Mehta has firmly put the ball inthe reader’s court.

With much candour and sincerity Mehtasucceeds in humanizing his professionalchoices ever since he entered the media as theeditor of Debonair in the 70s. As Mehtarecounts how he lurched from The Post to TheIndependent (both now shut) to The Pioneer,before he managed to pull himself ‘out of thegutter’ and ignite the atomic inaugural issue ofOutlook in the mid-90s, the reader feels that heis in the company of a ‘decent man’. Earningthis compliment of decency, as Mehta states atthe beginning of the book, is the real purposein writing this book. At another level, thesingular focus that Mehta has set for himself inLucknow Boy is to prove that despite what isoften said and written about him, including on


the ‘Letters to the Editor’ pages of his ownmagazine, he has not allowed himself to be co-opted by the Establishment. Incidentally, theterm ‘Establishment’ was also coined byanother journalist who first used it in 1955 inthe London magazine, The Spectator, and insociological jargon anyone who does not jointhe Establishment is considered as ‘the outsid-er’. Mehta’s insistence in calling his bookLucknow Boy is perhaps to further prime hisown image (Quixotic?) as the quintessentialoutsider in New Delhi’s corridors of power.

None of this is to say that the book has noomissions. In fact judging Lucknow Boy only interms of its candid account of India’s powerelite, it can hardly match Raj Thapar’s AllThese Years, a memoir posthumously publishedin the early 90s. In comparison to Mehta,Thapar was herself part of Delhi’s higher circles,an quintessential insider who was also, thoughwe discovered this only after her death, a meti-culous diarist. While All These Years, whichwas published by her daughter Malavika Singhtwo years after Raj’s death, is a completelypersonal story, Lucknow Boy is mostly the workof the Ego, the editor. This argument needs nofurther proof than to look at the fact thatMehta has dedicated his autobiography to hislong-time paymaster at Outlook, the openingpage of the book reads ‘For Rajan Raheja, theprince of proprietors’.

Early in the book Mehta tells us that ‘morethan the Guardian, a journal that shaped mythinking was the New Statesman’ and adds that‘It was in the New Statesman that I first lookedcarefully at the nuts and bolts of political com-mentary.’ Much like the New Statesman inBritain of the 60s, Outlook today sets the linefor the silent majority among middle-classIndians. And with Lucknow Boy, Mehta hasdone a remarkable job; he has let his readersknow the personal context for the particulareditorial line that defines Outlook’s journalism.And that is the final triumph for any editor, tobring his publication’s editorial line (and also hisproprietor’s ego) in harmony with his ownpersonal experiences. With this book, Mehtahas not only established himself as the con-science keeper of the Indian liberal, but also theman who sets the Indian liberal outlook. Andhe validates this claim with his own life story.

Aasim Khan was educated at the School of Orien-tal and African Studies in London, Jamia MilliaIslamia and St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi. Hehas worked as a broadcast journalist and a pressofficer in South Asia and currently lives in London.

Of the Centre and the PeripheryKishalaya Bhattacharjee

LOOKING BACK INTO THE FUTURE: IDENTITY AND INSURGENCY IN NORHEAST INDIABy M.S. PrabhakaraRoutledge, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 286, `795.00

Just when journalism in India is goingthrough a transition of sorts, when valuesand ethics lost in the process are being

questioned, M.S. Prabhakara’s book LookingBack Into The Future helps restore some faith.

The book is a collection of Prabhakara’sdispatches over the last few decades fromIndia’s North East. It is almost fashionable totag places and situations as complex and multi-layered particularly when the understanding ofthat place or situation is inadequate and NorthEast India infamously wears that hat. Thisbook breaks that ‘complexity’ down and offersa window of opportunity to look back andpick up the answers which the present and thefuture will surely be asking.

It is interesting that Prabhakara divideshis reportage into neat sections that in hisview follows the story of this region. I am inagreement with him when he starts with the‘politics of a script’ because language we forgethas been a means of great political upheavalswhether Bengali versus Urdu in East Pakistanor Bodo language in Assam. That’s where thebook takes off and rightfully so. Refer to thetitle again and the immediate future of Assamresonates in this first chapter. There is newsthat along the North Bank of the Brahmaputrapreparation is underway for a renewed agita-tion demanding a separate Bodo state. Prab-hakara had written this article in 1974 wherehe ended on an ominous note; ‘It is not at allcertain that the present agitation (if it evergoes beyond the demand for a script of choice),the incipient demand for Udayachal and anUjani Assam state and other equally frivolousdemands are not part of the whole Ne region,weakening the constituent units into heavilysubsidized little bureaucratic empires, with anarmy of officers and policemen and contrac-tors bloated on good things of life, keepingthings in shape and maintaining Law andOrder. But to divide is also to multiply.’

Prabhakara does not merely report on thelanguage agitation of 1974 or the perceivedhegemony of one script over another. He goesmuch deeper explaining the origin of Bodosunderlining the social and cultural pegs to whatis emerging as Assam’s future conflict. All thearticles compiled in this book go much beyondthe mere ground report.

Academic studies on conflict in India iswoefully weak on primary sources and fieldwork and books such as this can be valuablewith its intensive, laborious and credible

information which is explained in the contextand not left as a stand alone.

From the language movements the scriptmoves to the Census of Assam, a documentthat has had far greater impact than just a dataon population. Assam’s political landscape hasforever been the backdrop of these censusreports. Alleged illegal migration from Bang-ladesh and the ethnic and religious divide thatdrove a wedge into the social fabric of theState has been discussed with historical andempirical details.

However, the heart of Prabhakara’s bookreally lies in his exploration of ethnicity andidentity, the two planks from which thisregion’s volatility is generated. Chapters like‘Reinventing Identities’ and ‘ManufacturingIdentities’ explain the search for ‘identity’, asearch that has decided the course of Assamand North East India over the last five de-cades. This is not a discourse on identitypolitics but it is in these articles and columnswhere the genesis of a history made out of aquest for assertion of identity finds its first telltale signs. In short chapters the history of arepressive State versus hostile ethnicities hasbeen captured and documented.

I was, however, left wondering why thebook focuses on Assam more than the otherStates because the subtitle to the book is about

Mehta has not only established

himself as the conscience

keeper of the Indian liberal, but

also the man who sets the

Indian liberal outlook.

“

”


identity and insurgency in North East India.Tripura for example doesn’t even find a men-tion. Manipur has been touched upon but fora book published in 2012 I expected Manipurto have stood out given that it is the mostinsurgent State in the region today. Nagalandhas been the driver of insurgent movementsacross the region but the book surprisinglypushes that aside with its focus directly onAssam. Though a section of the book dwellson Nagaland and Manipur it comes much laterand departs without the erudition and analysiswhich Prabhakara is known for. At least I forone would await another volume from himwhich sees the region from the end of thespectrum rather than from Assam. Manipur iscertainly one of the mistakes of history thatexplains the assertion and aggression of a sus-tained armed movement. All the parametersused to explain the region’s predicamentechoes in Manipur.

I am not sure what the author’s views onthe concept of a ‘North East India’ is but Iwould like to assume that he sees it as separateentities rather than a ‘patchwork quilt’, a phrasehe himself uses to describe the Indian State’spolicy towards the region. So while the Nagainsurgency set the tone and tenor for insurgen-cies across the States, each one actually has adifferent story which must be told. So if youare looking for an exhaustive account of theULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam) inthis book then you may be disappointed butthe leads, linkages and context of militancy inAssam are provided meticulously and in amanner which is easy to make sense.

In the Epilogue the author presents theidea of a nation in its ‘birth-throes’ and sub-national assertions (or in other words insur-gencies) as churnings of a national State tryingto sync with its own self. But like a true jour-nalist he refuses to take any one side in thisnation versus identity debate. But is sitting onthe fence a dangerous course? If answers to thefuture can be found looking back as it werethen the book provides footnotes to one of themost tumultuous times in the formation of thisnation which is still grappling with the centreas well as the periphery.

Kishalaya Bhattacharjee is Bureau Chief (North-East India) NDTV.

Even as Delhi has been celebrating thecentenary of its restoration as capital ofIndia, a proud fragment of its built

heritage and history, it is fitting that we re-member the doyen of Delhi’s lived culturalheritage, Amir Khusrau (1238-1325), the mostloved acolyte of the great sufi divine, HazratNizamuddin Auliya who, like his master, liesburied in Nizamuddin.

Sufi origins go back to Persia and thetradition was established at Ajmer Sharif inIndia by Moinuddin Chisti whose lineage istraced back to the Holy Prophet. The fourth inhis sinsila or spiritual family was NizamuddinAuliya, following Bakhtiyar Kaki and BabaFarid. Sufi humanism found supreme expres-sion in poetry and music, finding ecstasy inthe imagery of the beloved. This was greatlypopularized in the Rubaiyats or quatrains ofthe Persian polymath and mystical poet, OmarKhayyam. If Firdaus, Rumi, Nizami and otherPersian masters gave the world a range ofpoetic metre, Khusrau exploited the conflu-ence of Persian and Hindavi (the Hindispoken around Delhi) literary styles to breaknew ground with ghazals and, in musical form,qawwalis, a mix of lyricism and love in ayearning to unite with the divine.

Khusrau was court poet to the Khilji andTughlak rulers and is said to have given a brushoff to a curt summons from Mubarak Shah,among the last of the Khiljis, with the remark‘Dilli durast’. After a celebrated life he was laidto rest near the mazhar of his spiritual master,Hazarat Nizamudidin. Nearly 750 years later,the shrine and basti around it still resound tohis undying qawwali compositions. Qawwaliverses were transmitted down the generationsby oral tradition through descendants of theoriginal family known collectively as Qawwali-Bachche. Though mostly congregated aroundAjmer and Delhi they are scattered elsewheretoo.

The history of this great tradition is welltold and, more so, splendidly illustrated andeven recorded on three DVDs, in this finevolume sponsored by the Aga Khan Trust forCulture. The publication is part of a largerproject to restore and conserve both the builtand cultural heritage of Hazrat Nizamuddinand the Basti around it, a warren of fascinatingmonuments and resting places of so many ofthose that breathed life into Delhi over cen-turies, Ghalib among them. Supported by the

Ford Foundation, the larger project alsoincludes restoration of Humayun’s Tomb andgardens and revival of Sunder Nursery, whichwas established in 1911, and urban renewal ofthe Basti.

However, the focus is on the poetry andmusic of Amir Khusrau and the evolution ofthe Qawwali. Variants and innovation arebound to creep into any tradition over time.Qawwali was no exception. Lighter musicbegan to intrude into the classical ragas andtalas to be followed later by the introduction ofpopular foreshortened versions of qawwali inBombay cinema and still later, by the introduc-tion of newer electronic instruments such asthe synthesizer. Qawwali was introduced tofilm in 1944 with ‘Zeenat’ and, with subse-quent developments, now follows the market.

Howsoever this be, the veneration andreverence in which Hazrat Nizamuddin andAmir Khusrau were held has remained.Successive monarchs and noblemen embel-lished the mausoleum. The music lives on notonly in the annual urs but in regular invoca-tions and supplications at the dargah everyThursday and on other special occasions. Theinstitution is managed by twin branches of thefamily, the Sajjadanishin and the Pirzadagan,rival claimants to representing the true line ofsuccession. They maintain the shrine andreceive the nazrana and other offerings anddistribute this among the Qawwali Bachcheand other biradari numbering some 550 to700 members spread over different venues.

Amir Khusrau and the inclusive, humanis-tic sufi tradition of divine love he represents asa disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya remains rele-vant for our times when more radical, funda-mentalist forces seek to impose their will andideology on all. The refurbishing of his memorythrough his verses and music provides nour-ishment to our plural society. The presentvolume and the larger project behind it consti-tute a valuable contribution to that cause.

B.G. Verghese, a columnist and Visiting Professorat the Centre for Policy Research, was a former edi-tor of The Hindustan Times and Indian Express andInformation Adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Doyen of Delhi’sCultural Heritage

B.G. Verghese

JASHN-E-KHUSRAU: A COLLECTIONBy Shakeel Hossain, Irfan Zuberi et.al.Roli Books, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 224, `1995.00

It is almost fashionable to tag

places and situations as

complex and multi-layered

particularly when the under-

standing of that place or

situation is inadequate and

North East India infamously

wears that hat.

“

”


As summer looms upon us, a Gujaratifriend living in Calcutta becomes moreand more disgruntled. Her plaint is the

lack of kesri ker no ras (aam ras or mango pulp)in her city. Upon a suggestion that she pur-chase mangoes and make it at home, came amost painful shriek: you don’t understand! InGujarat right now, everyone is talking mango,buying mango, selling mango, cooking mango.It’s the ambience! In another part of the coun-try a while ago, students hold a Beef Festivalon a university campus to assert their right tomake dietary choices, and intertwined withthat, assert their distinctive identities. There isa lot of food for thought here, and The Writer’sFeast, edited by Supriya Chaudhuri and RimiB. Chatterjee, open up the reader to both thepleasures and profundity of food (the two notbeing mutually exclusive).

Food is so central to our existence andsociety that when one picks up the book, thefirst thought is: why was a book like this notwritten any earlier? The Writer’s Feast negotiatesthe culinary terrain through a variety of textsand an equally rich set of perspectives. Al-though the book is organized into four seg-ments, one each dealing with culture, gender,diaspora and the lack/ limits of food, the ideasdiscussed in one part often segue into andenrich other parts, creating a delightfully un-bounded reading experience.

Food represents as well as constitutes cul-ture. So do literary tropes. The book dis-cusses the interactions between food andliterature under the rubric of culture. A veryinteresting take is how the written-recipe orthe cookbook is the most basic textual repre-sentation of food. Given how elaborate foodrituals are in India, the written recipe was afairly late entrant. Recipe books not onlypreserve knowledge and techniques of cook-ing, but also signify the riches and wealth ofthose who could afford food made out of exo-tic, expensive ingredients, and hence, thosewho were at the pinnacle of power. We get asneak peek into how Indian women were in-corporating the cuisine of the colonizers intotheir own cuisine, an inevitable fallout of themixing of cultures, and of the hard fact thatthe colonizers had the upper hand.

Cuisines are markers of identity, but whatthe writers here explore is how diets becomearticles of faith to the extent that they cancause a fair bit of conflict. Notions of holy and

unholy, clean and unclean, and therefore per-missible or non-permissible were receivedmostly through religious texts, and playedthemselves out through the medium of food,sharpening social cleavages, particularly thoseof religion and caste in the Indian context.Some myths are dispelled too. For instance,there is a tendency to stereotype Muslims asvoracious meat-consumers, perhaps a legacy ofMughal rule in India. But Sufi Islam explicitlyencourages vegetarianism.

A refreshing perspective of the politicaleconomy of the early spice trade between theEast and the West forces us to think abouthow the gastronomic desires of western gentry‘drove shiploads of desperate men to sail rightround a continent and found an empire’.Italian nationalism is interrogated thoughculinary cultures. The pizza, a favourite foodworldwide today and an instant marker ofItalian identity, was looked down upon withinthe country as a confused gastronomicalexperience associated with the dirty south ofItaly. On the other hand, an enterprisingwriter travelled the length and breadth of Italy,compiling recipes and projecting the finalresult as a symbol of the unification of thecountry.

The book presents an excellent genderedreading of food. From a discussion of the wri-tings of food columnists in early 20th centuryMalayali magazine, it appears that at the timewhen matrilineal family norms prevailedstrongly in Kerala, women led free lives andwere getting educated, columnists attempted tocircumscribe their roles and duties as under-stood under patriarchy by doling out advice onhow it is a woman’s duty to cook, and takecare of her husband and household. Thesenorms become rigid over time, and we alsonote how such norms are not the preserve ofIndian society. Through an analysis of novelistAnita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, and the worksof William Faulkner, we understand that notonly was the act of cooking the responsibilityof women, but the burden of maintainingsocial relations fell upon them. Men were in aposition of dominance by dint of ‘bringinghome the bacon’, as also because greaterattention was paid to the nutritional needs ofthe male child. Even when men took to cook-ing, it was mostly for outdoor cooking such asbarbecue, which required the use of heavyequipment. Rebellion comes through the

consumption, by female protagonists, of for-bidden food items.

The engagement of the diaspora with cui-sine is explored at length. The migrant’s senseof loss and nostalgia for the homeland is mostacutely expressed through the food that he orshe is accustomed to, that was available withease and abundance. The memoirs of the dias-pora and novels based on diasporic life repre-sent the life gone by as one of prosperity andaffluence. The present, with its limited foodoptions, comes with the trauma of pauperiza-tion, of loss of stature. In Jhumpa Lahiri’sworks, the female protagonist ends up hurtingherself physically in a bid to recreate theBengali kitchen in the United States. The maleprotagonist heaps indignities upon his Ameri-can wife by forcing her to recreate Bengalicuisine to perfection. Acquiring a taste forforeign cuisine, as we see through SalmanRushdie’s Midnight’s Children, is no guarantorof acceptance in foreign society. While themigrant’s travails are genuine, there is another,more positive process going on simultaneously.When migrants monetize their cuisine bysetting up restaurants, it enriches the culinaryculture of the host state. The question thenarises is, is this celebration of food cosmopoli-tanism or culinary multiculturalism genuine?There is a danger of assuming that the merepresence or enjoyment of various cuisines, orin case of the specific example from the book,the enjoyment of Asian cuisines by whiteAustralians, may be a genuine sign of appreci-ation of hitherto undervalued cultures. It couldmerely be the objectification of such cuisineso that the badge of cosmopolitanism can beproudly worn.

So far, we have discussed a scenario wherefood, irrespective of preference, is available.

Pleasures and Profundity of Food

Sucharita Sengupta

THE WRITER’S FEAST: FOOD AND THE CULTURES OF REPRESENTATIONEdited by Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B. ChatterjeeOrient Black Swan, New Delhi, 2011, pp xvi + 238, ` 525.00


What happens when the individual encounterslimits on access to food? Certain 19th centurymedical manuals, written from Bengal, playeda role in prescribing diets, linking them tomasculinity, community and, if one readsbetween the lines, the nation. These manualsmade a case for general physical debility or‘weakness’ (as opposed to widespread disease)among Bengali males and prescribed dietarycodes to overcome this condition. These dietswere also pitched as markers of civility, sinceit excluded what the lower-castes ate. In thiscase, the restrictions were man-made. Butwhat if nature were to impose restrictions, andforce one to adhere to certain foods? In anexploration of how food is not a matter ofchoice but a question of survival for humans,this question is explored. Accounts of moun-taineers reveal that even when their body didnot desire food or water, they had to keepeating and drinking, in order to fulfil their goalof reaching the summit. However, imposingsuch a tough test of endurance was, in theultimate analysis, a choice that the mountain-eers made when they decided to climb. Famine,on the other hand, affords no such luxury.There is endurance without dignity, as we readfiction based around the Bengal Famine of1942-43. Literature poses the tough question:why did people starve if there is food beforethem? Added to the injustice was the fact thatthe weaker the people became, the lower werethe chances that they would be able to findrecourse.

Many of the themes touched upon in thisvolume will resonate with what we see aroundus even today. Literature succeeds in gleaningthe politics, history, sociology and economicsof food, shorn or jargon, allowing the readerto think and interpret freely. This book ishighly recommended.

Sucharita Sengupta teaches in the Departmentof Political Science, Indraprastha College, Delhi.

‘Everything becomes a story one day.’ So begins the PS section of this Ban-

gladeshi contemporary classic. Itswriter, Mahmudul Haque, is credited withfashioning a new idiom and a distinctlymodern sensibility in the post-1947 writingcoming out from what was once East Pakistanand is now Bangladesh. Haque (1941-2008)belonged to the ‘twice-born generation’, those,that is, who experienced the trauma of birth-ing a new nation not once but twice over.Moving from Barasat on the outskirts of Cal-cutta to Dhaka as a small boy, he was assailedby not only new sights and sounds, but an al-together new sensibility. Being slapped by aschool teacher for failing to wear the Jinnahcap, he struggled to find meaning in an irrevo-cably changed world. Later, during the siegeand fall of Dhaka in March 1971, he wit-nessed the looting, killing and destruction thatpreceded the birth of a new nation that wasexpected to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashesof the old. Each event, each new phase in hislife and his country’s, each new milestonespurred him to write. Everything became astory one day.

Black Ice, first published as Kalo Borof in1977, is quite evidently the work of a child ofPartition. It carries the scars of leaving behindpeople and places once so dear and familiarbut now accessible only in dreams. The relent-less nostalgia of its protagonist, Abdul Khaleq,brings to mind another young man, Zakir,who too had to leave his home in India insearch of a new one across the border inIntizar Husain’s seminal work, Basti (written in1979 but set in 1971 when the war cloudsloomed large over the subcontinent). ButMahmudul Haque is not Intizar Husain andBlack Ice is not Basti. Despite the detachmentof the protagonists, the tone of quiet aloofnessof the narrator, the dream-like motifs, theceaseless journeying into the past, the invokingof an innocent childhood free from bias andfear and the sullying of that innocence, Bastiand Black Ice are as unlike as apples andoranges. Black Ice has none of the allegoricalrichness that leavens Intezar Hussains narra-tive, nor the directness but haunting simplicityof Husain’s elegant prose. Possibly, there issomething about Husain’s prose itself thatremains intact and unharmed by translation.Not having read Haque in Bangla, I cannottell, but I am struck by the comparison andthe fact that it is an unfavourable one.

Vanished Days Never Come Back

Rakhshanda Jalil

BLACK ICEBy Mahmudul Haque. Translated by Mahmud RahmanHarper Perennial, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 123, `199.00

Vanished days never come back and timepast is forever. While Khaleq, and perhapsMahmudul Haque himself might acknowledgethis, everywhere in Black Ice, the past hangsheavy, threatening to overwhelm the present.Why is this so? The answer is provided partlyby Mahmudul Haque himself in an interviewwith the young Bangladeshi writer, AhmadMostofa Kamal, appended at the end of thenovel in the PS section. The writer’s mother,he confesses, had not wanted to leave herhome outside Calcutta to come to Pakistan;she had, in fact, even begun to build a newhouse in West Bengal. Her (two previous)visits to Dhaka had led her to conclude thatonly barbarians lived there, for she had seenno women moving about in public and, in heropinion, a place where women were not allow-ed to move freely could only be inhabited bybarbarians. Yet, the communal tensions grewto such an extent and it became difficult toeven step out of her home that she was forcedto move to the new Muslim homeland with herchildren, leaving a part of their being behind.Decades later, while ostensibly claiming thatthere can be no love for ‘a birthplace thatforces its children to leave’, Haque breaksdown and his voice ‘cracks with anguish’. Thehurt, evidently, is too deep. In Intezar Hus-sain, there is no hurt; just a bewilderment that

“

”

Food is so central to our

existence and society that when

one picks up the book, the first

thought is: why was a book like

this not written any earlier? The

Writer’s Feast negotiates the

culinary terrain through a

variety of texts and an equally

rich set of perspectives.


something as grotesque as Partition happened.Round and round, like a kite with a cut string,Husain’s story drifts and soars, backwards andforwards, flitting between then and now butwith no trace of bitterness.

Khaleq, a teacher in a mofussil town, findstime hanging heavy on his hands as he copeswith the ennui of living in the backwaters andcoping with the harangues of a demandingwife. He sits down to write about his life,especially his childhood. He remembers Puti,the girl who spoke to fish and birds, hisfriends Jhumi and Pachu, the vendors whocame by selling shonpapri and dalpapri, theHindu neighbour who bought him roshmonjoriand pantua, his elder brother Moni Bhaijaan

who loved Chhobi Di and had left, taking withhim her ribbon as a keepsake, promising toreturn but never did. Khaleq remembers, also,leaving his home in West Bengal, taking aferry, setting off on a hijrat to a new land whenlife became impossibly fraught in the old one.

Years later, travelling with his wife deepinto the countryside, he revisits Louhojong,the spot where he had boarded the ferry and isreminded yet again of that fateful night ofmigration:

Everything becomes a story one day.Louhojong, Louhojong! For the first timein his life, that cry had pierced his ears inthe deep of the night. Beside him stoodMoni Bhaijaan, in his pocket a ribbon, onthe ribbon the fragrance of hair, in thefragrance such sorrow, in the sorrow somuch love, in the love so much of theirchildhood.

In the PS section, Haque recalls howBikrampur, beside the Buriganga, fascinatedhim. When the monsoons flooded the low-lying plains and the river became a vast ex-panse of glimmering water, he would take longboat trips down the river, exploring nooks andcranies of the lush countryside. His friendshipwith boatmen, sharing their simple but deli-

cious meals, meeting people who travelledfrom one house to another by boat, as well asthe lush green forested hamlets beside the riversoon became a recurring motif in his novels.In Black Ice, the area around Ichapura appearsas a fantasy world, an escape from the rigoursof a humdrum meaningless life. The doctorwith whom he took some of these boat trips,appears as Doctor Narhari, the conscientious,hard-working country doctor, an idealized yethuman figure.

Khaleq is able to find intellectual compan-ionship in his adult life; the emotional connec-tion with people and places, however, seems tobe missing. The generosity and wisdom, thefreedom and innocence, the pluralism and syn-cretism of his childhood was destroyed, for-ever, by Partition. What came in its place —aloofness and rootlessness—is the only legacyfor these midnight’s children. Boat rides on theriver allow an occasional escape but not areturn; there is no going back, at least notforever. The only certainty, Black Ice seems tobe suggesting, is hopelessness and alienation.

Rakhshanda Jalil is working on a book-lengthstudy of Dr Rashid Jahan, communist, doctor, writerand founder-member of the progressive writers’movement.

The Dark Underbelly Of ShiningIndia

Abdullah Khan

BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ANOTHER INDIABy Syeda Hameed and Gunjan VedaHarperCollins, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 365, `399.00

On the cover of this elegantly writtenreportage-cum-travelogue is a shab-bily dressed teenage girl holding a

toddler. In the background we see the thatchedhouses and many tell-tale signs of extremepoverty. From the cover photograph itself youhave a fair idea what this book is all about. Atthe top of the cover it reads Beautiful Country:Stories from Another India. The title is aptbecause the stories here are, of course, fromanother India; an India which is different fromthe India portrayed by the worshippers ofmindless consumerism and votaries of cronycapitalism. This India doesn’t shine and re-mains unaffected by the impact of double digitgrowth. This is, in fact, the dark underbelly ofone of the world’s fastest growing economieswhere majority of Indian citizens live. Theyare ‘resilient and courageous women and menof India whose ordinary lives and extraordi-

nary spirit inspired the author duo, SyedaHameed and Gunjan Veda to write this book.

Beautiful Country chronicles the journeyundertaken by Syeda Hameed, the socialactivist and member of Planning Commission,and Gunjan Veda, journalist, to that anotherIndia, the India of villages and small towns.And what they observed during their visits wasquite disconcerting. From a river island ofAssam to the tribal areas of Andaman Nico-bar, from the freezing valleys of Ladakh to thebackwaters of Alleppy in Kerala, they criss-crossed the entire country taking notes of thedaily lives of the people living away from theglitz and glamour of the big cities. Duringtheir voyage they encountered the people andvisited the places which rarely appear in themainstream media.

Somewhere in this book the authors takeus to Daniyalpur, Varanasi, and we are intro-

duced to Maimun Nisa and her son. And itgoes like this: ‘Thin face, sunken eyes, hollowcheeks, a frayed light pink dupatta covered herhead. Her son, Imran, was tiny and had theface of an old man—shrivelled and shrunk.His feet were so thin that we wondered if hewould ever be able to walk. His head seemedtoo big for his small frail body’. These linesspeak volumes about the so-called growth that

Vanished days never come back

and time past is forever. While

Khaleq, and perhaps Mahmudul

Haque himself might acknow-

ledge this, everywhere in Black

Ice, the past hangs heavy...

“

”


our country has witnessed during the last twodecades. Clearly, much applauded Manmoha-nomics has failed to bring any noteworthychange in the lives of the people on themargins. Across the country there are manyDaniyalpurs, there are many Maimun Nisasand many Imrans. If we move further, we seea school being run under the open sky inKashmir, thousands of people going untreatedon the river islands in Assam, the men andwomen working on handlooms from dawn todusk for meagre salaries in Malegaon, womenand children dying in the tribal areas of Maha-rashtra and elsewhere for want of basicmedical facilities. Go further and more storiesof misery and deprivation will pour in.

Are we, as responsible citizens of thiscountry, doing our bit for our less privilegedfellow Indians? Or at least are we giving voiceto their concerns? Perhaps not. But, there aremany individuals whose selfless services arechanging the lives of the millions. In Assam we

have Sanjoy Hazarika, a former New YorkTimes correspondent who is managing trusteeof the Centre for North East Studies and Poli-cy Research (C-NES). C-NES is the agencybehind the idea of boat clinics which reach outto thousands of people living on the dif-ferentislands of the Brahmaputra River. Then, thereare a group of doctors who have left theirlucrative jobs and comfortable lives in themetros to serve the poor tribals of Chhattis-garh. Syeda and Gunjan tell us about manysuch courageous men and women who, intheir own small ways, are making a difference.

What strikes me most in this book is thetone of the prose which is laced with empathyand honesty. The authors don’t hesitate toaccept that as a nation we have failed to takecare of our people on the margins. This fact isgenerally not acknowledged by our politiciansand bureaucrats. For example, in the forewordto this book, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, DeputyChairman of Planning Commission, laudsSyeda and Gunjan for their remarkable workbut at the same time he is reluctant to acceptthat the bureaucracy has failed when it comesto taking governance to the downtrodden andpoor people. At the very end of the foreword,he attempts discreetly to dilute the seriousnessof the book. This has been the biggest problemwith our bureaucratic set up that they never

accept the reality and try to brush the truthunder the carpet of statistical data.

About this book, Khushwant Singh says,‘The truth about India’s development, as toldby those who know it, makes for a compellingread.’ I can’t agree more but would like to addthat it also makes for a disturbing read. At theend of this review I would like to quote fourlines from Allama Iqbal’s Bal-e-Jibrail (Gabriel’sWing) which the authors have quoted at thebeginning of the book.

Khol ankh zamin dekh falak dekh fiza dekhMashriq se ubhartey huey suraj ko zara dekhIss jalwa-e-beparda ko pardon mein chhupadekhAyyam-e-judai ke sitam dekh jafa dekh Open your eyes, look at the earth and theskyLook at the sun rising gloriously in the EastLook at its unveiled glory hidden behindveilsSuffer the pain and torture of days ofdeprivation.

This offering, undoubtedly, is going to bean eye opener for those who have not seen thereal India, yet.

Abdullah Khan is with Axis Bank Ltd., New Delhi.

Deadly gases that fill the night air...a killerwave that washes away all...parents who goaway, sometimes forever...the shadow of gunsand suicide bombers...earthquakes, sicknessand riots—heartbreaking tragedies, when achild’s worst nightmares come true, turninghis world upside down…

Here are two dozen heartwarmingstories on love and loss, disaster andpersonal grief, abuse and aggression,

sensitively written by well-known children’sauthors.

Whatever happened to those idyllic child-hood years of innocence and carefree aban-

don, one wonders—when life was an endlessplayground and all was right with the world?

Maybe those wonder years never reallyexisted, after all. Personal and domesticturmoil, unrest in the neighbourhood, every-day stresses in school and the world beyondhave almost always shadowed the lives of theyoung, in one way or the other. What is more,terror and conflict today along with naturaland man-made disasters everywhere, seem tohave put childhood on the fast forward tracktowards adulthood. These sensitive years thatoscillate between childhood and maturitybeyond one’s years, can be lonely and unsure,and are often devastated by physical, mental

and societal worries.Stories have proved to be a time-tested

way to help children cope, heal and adjust toadverse situations. It was with this in mindthat AWIC launched its Book Therapy Project,which believes in the potential of literature tosoothe traumatized young minds and radi-ate hope. Some of the stories in this collec-tion, Lighthouse in the Storm, were developed

What strikes me most in this

book is the tone of the prose

which is laced with empathy

and honesty.

“

”

Book Talk

Nita Berry

LIGHTHOUSE IN THE STORM : A COLLECTION OF 24 SHORT STORIESBy members of the Association of Writers and Illustrators for Children (AWIC/ Indian section of IBBY:International Board on Books for Young People). Cover design and illustrations by Jagdish Joshi.Translated from Hindi by Toofan Mein Jyoti.Ponytale Books, Kolkata, 2012, pp. 256, `225.00

SEARCH FOR THE SACRED GEMBy Nilima SinhaPonytale Books, Kolkata, 2012, pp. 183, `175.00


initially at a creative workshop on BookTherapy conducted by Manorama Jafa, theSecretary General of AWIC. Subsequently,more AWIC author members picked on avariety of themes reflecting turmoil and trau-ma in young lives to weave their stories around.This collection of stories—written in an arrayof engaging styles, is a result of that effort.Every story strikes a chord somewhere, tomake the young reader reflect.

The turmoil of young years, as with thebreakup of the traditional family unit, the lossof a beloved parent, suicide, sickness, AIDS,child abuse, disability, death—all subjects oncetaboo in children’s stories, find a place in thisbook. These are all stories of sadness, of lossand despair. Yet they bring with them hopeand recovery too as new dimensions open,opportunities come by, and the threads of lifeare picked up again.

The suicide bomber changes Shabir’sworld forever, but he finds an unexpected newfriend. Ashis Mittal’s American twang makesschool in India an ordeal—till his prize-winning pictures make his class proud of him.The killer fumes wipe away Taabish’s family,but he finds a new mother and together theyvow to make a thousand smiling suns. Gaurirealizes to her dismay that she is adopted—a‘Hanuman Baby’, but her mother’s deep lovewipes away her trauma.

We meet Shankar who is lame and thebutt of ridicule, but he uses his crutches in theflood to emerge a true hero. The Latur earth-quake buries Amit’s family, but a helpless or-phan exorcises him of his nightmares. And thenew brick wall that divides Neera’s family bringsher world down, but eventually the childrenknock sense into their elders.

We also witness how the creative artseffectively diminish trauma in some children.Amit is gravely ill, but he transcends hissuffering through his poetic creations. AndSunil’s father was brutally killed by Naxalsbefore his very eyes, but the young boy findshis catharsis in art. His drawings incidentally,also help to track down the killer.

When it is dark enough you can see thestars, it has been said. This book was put to-gether in the hope that the young victims ofvarious traumatic situations could identify withsome of the characters in this book. And findcourage and hope through these different stories—to find answers, and weather their own storms.

The cover design and stories of Lighthousein the Storm have been illustrated by JagdishJoshi, one of India’s foremost illustrators. Hisendearing figures and exquisite pen and inksketches give the book a new dimension. Wellproduced by Ponytale Books, Kolkata, withclear fonts and printing on good paper, this isclearly a book for every thinking child.

Search for the Sacred Gem has been pen-ned by Nilima Sinha after a long sabbaticalfrom writing full length fiction for children. Aseasoned writer of adventure and mysterystories set in Indian locales, apart from shortstories, historical fiction, plays and picturebooks, her published fiction includes well-loved prize winners like The Chandipur Jewels,Vanishing Trick at Chandipur, SOS fromMunia, Adventure on the Golden Lake, Mysteryof the Falling Mountains etc. Therefore, onewas naturally curious whether she had retainedher mastery over gripping mysteries andexciting adventure trails. Search for the SacredGem does not disappoint. Indeed, one isgratified to find all this and more in this racyadventure story.

An intriguing Prologue set far back in thepast dramatically introduces the mystery that isto follow. The story is set in medieval India ofthe eighteenth century, at a time when theonce great Mughal emperors ruled Delhi.Smaller nawabs, zamindars and rajas controlledthe peripheral states and the firangees orgoras—the European traders, vied with eachother for political and material gains in aclimate of strife and uncertainty.

Shankar, the protagonist is a gutsy andcompassionate youngster who stumbles upon acurious stone tablet following a devastatingflood, when the course of River Gangachanges. This tablet has a mysterious messageetched on it, which can only be deciphered bymonks at the Buddhist monastery in Patlipu-tra, written as it is in the ancient Pali languageof ‘the days when the Enlightened One roamedthe earth’...Years ago a learned oneSpoke of a stone known to none.A beautiful hue,A tinge of blue,More valuable than eternal life…

And so a quest for the precious gembegins as Shankar and his friends embark on athrilling adventure trail. Travelling by foot,horseback and even steamer, the plucky fiveencounter grave dangers as they are shadowedby thugs and villains down the river to distantlands. Shankar is helped in his quest by mys-tical revelations from the past that appear tohim from time to timein a strange darkness,when bright stars seem to explode in his head.These messages illuminate his way—till hestumbles upon the amazing truth finally.

Racy and action-packed, the book is anenjoyable, well written read, dotted with poeticdescriptions, e.g., ‘The golden orb of the sun

was peeping shyly above the horizon. Dawnwas about to break. Whiffs of clouds weregathering together in the still grey sky,heralding rain…’ History comes alive for theyoung reader as he reads of English andFrench traders in medieval India, politicalrivalries and vendettas, and pitched battles,where the children are often caught in thecrossfire. In this uncertain period of struggleand strife in the country, when the centralMughal authority was weakening and Euro-peans were struggling to gain a political andeconomic foothold, it was easy for bandits andcriminals to roam the countryside. Thereforeany search for the sacred gem by the childrenwas a daunting task indeed. The mysticalrevelations that appear to Shankar give thebook an added spiritual depth as he realizesthe truth about himself, his past life anddestiny.

At a time when Indian urban childrentoday are devouring a diet of western literaturereplete with macabre plots that often borderon adult fiction, action-packed fantasy, un-familiar myths and values—this book, set sofirmly in Indian tradition and ways of lifecomes as a breath of fresh air. It gives ourchildren something they can instinctively relateto—culturally, historically and spiritually, allthrough an enthralling adventure story.

Well produced by Ponytale Books, an up-coming publisher based in Kolkata, one sin-cerely hopes that Search for the Sacred Gemwill find its way to many school library shelves.

Nita Berry writes short stories, picture and activitybooks, historical biographies and full length non-fiction for children of all ages. She has won manyawards including Shankar’s Medal for The Story ofTime (CBT). She was part of NCERT’s textbook teamfor the development of the ‘Marigold’ English text-books for primary classes.

Book News Book News

The Bogoli Phut Days: Pitki’s Adventures in Assamby Tara Goswami is a book for children of allages—to read alone or to read along with theirparents and grandparents. Children from Assamwill find a new way to connect to their culturalheritage and children from other places will findthemselves introduced to a compelling and richworld.HarperCollins, 2012, pp. 60, `299.00

cult-of-masculinity.pdf - Anjali Arondekar, Associate Professor

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Transcript of cult-of-masculinity.pdf - Anjali Arondekar, Associate Professor