A Writer's People by V S Naipaul

"All my life I have had to think about ways of looking and how they alter the configuration of the world." With this prologue, Naipaul starts his book, A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (Picador, 2007).

The book contains five essays that deal with many figures, mostly literary ones. There is an essay on Mahatma Gandhi, the only non-literary figure in this collection, which is the most fascinating chapter of the book. But Gandhi too was a writer. His autobiography, with its simplicity, directness and naked honesty, has greatly impressed Naipaul.

In the book's first chapter, The worm in the bud, Naipaul discusses his early days in Trinidad and how he became aware of Trinidadian writing and writers: Derek Walcott, Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon, and his own father, Sreepersad.

Early on, Naipaul had realised the literary barrenness and lack of culture in Trinidad; he was in sixth standard when this precocious student understood the futility of a career in writing in the small place: "As always in these in colonial places, there were little reading and writing groups here and there, now and then: harmless pools of vanity that came and went and didn't add up to anything like an organised or solid literary or cultural life." Naturally, he needed to get away from the smallness of a place like Trinidad.

To have come from a small island like Trinidad, without the human wealth of Ibsen's Norway, there seemed to be nothing but a literary cul-se-sac for writers from Naipaul's Trinidad. "Small places with simple economies bred small people with simple destinies," he writes.

Spiritual emptiness

Walcott had become a local figure--his poetry was appreciated in his home island. But the local figure had to endure a kind of humiliation. He was tormented by his job on the local Sunday paper: "It would have been humiliating for him to be bossed around by people he saw as his inferiors."

Naipaul talks of a spiritual emptiness that poets such as Walcott had to face in the island. "The spiritual emptiness was a problem for everyone from the plantation territories who wanted to write," he says. "Many were destroyed or silenced by it."

Walcott found his own way around that emptiness. How? "He began to fit his island material to older, foreign work. He might take an old Spanish play, say, and re-work it as a local play: Shakespeare's method."

Naipaul does not approve of this borrowing. "It is the better and truer part of the labour of a writer from a new place to work out what his material is, to wring substance from the unwritten-about and unregarded local scene," he says.

International success was not coming soon to Walcott. He had exhausted the first flush of his talent by singing praises of the spiritual emptiness of the place. He had been promising for too damn long. He needed a job; he had become ordinary. To Naipaul, if you are a writer or a poet and you are in need of a job, you are ordinary.

A writer lives principally for his writing

In the same essay, Naipaul writes about other Trinidadian writers. Edgar Mittelholzer was a mulatto, and wrote a well-regarded novel, A Morning at the Office. Later in life, he set himself on fire in London, like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam. Naipaul thought he was a dedicated writer and his self-immolation was shocking for him.

Samuel Selvon was a Trinidadian writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, A Brighter Sun. "It is hard to be the first with any kind of writing, and Selvon in this book burnt up his simple material," Naipaul comments. In far-off London, Selvon lost touch with his material. He became wordy and absurd: "The prosiness, piety and self-regard were intolerable."

On Naipaul's own father, Sreepersad, he says that he damaged his material when he tried to fit it to what he thought of as a story: the trick ending, say. "In fact," he writes, "if he could have taken a step back, he would have seen that there were more things to write about...but probably that step back into the bad colonial setting would have caused him pain, and pain was something he didn't wish to face in his writing."

An English way of look

The book's second chapter is on Naipaul's friendship with novelist Anthony Powell.

He begins the chapter thus: "He was fifty-two, at the peak of his reputation, and I was twenty-five and awkward, poor in London, with one book published. For a reason I couldn't understand--there was every kind of difference between us--he offered his friendship."

Naipaul was not particularly impressed with Powell's novels. He thought they were extraordinary failures in many respects. He thought his writing didn't undermine his subjects--a hallmark of good writing.

But he cherished his friendship with Powell. Powell was the editor of Punch and he had loved Naipaul's first novel. On this Naipaul says: "It turned out that he had not only sent the book out for review; he had read it. This was more than I expected. He then said something which I thought very wise...He said that, whatever its flaws, a writer's first novel had a lyrical quality which the writer would never again recapture." In this literary judgment, Naipaul found a depth of civilization.

He appreciated Powell's (Tony) good nature, the absence of malice in him. "I had longed to get away from the easy malice of the small place I grew up in, where all judgments were moralistic and hateful and corrupting, the judgments of gossip," he writes. "But so far I hadn't been lucky in England." He had found people in the University and at BBC mean and provincial for the most part.

In his essay, Naipaul wonders why Powell wrote and why he had got started on the writing life and why he had stayed (many start, few stay), and whether there was a true need. "His writing didn't seem to come out of need," he writes. "He seemed to have risked nothing...Unlike Greene and Orwell and Waugh at no stage did he go to meet the world. His conviction was that his world was enough."

There is a lesson for the young writers here. How many of you go out to meet the world?

Overliterate societies have their own snares, Naipaul says. By 1930s, when Tony was beginning, very little about the great European societies (Dickens's England, Tolstoy's Russia and Balzac's France) had been left unsaid. "These societies," Naipaul observes, "had been diminished for various reasons -- war, revolution; and the world around these once unchallenged societies had grown steadily larger." Then Naipaul makes a very acute observation. He says: "A society's unspoken theme is always itself; it has an idea where it stands in the world. A diminished society couldn't be written about in the old way, of social comment."

Books do not live if they are not original, he says. If you do what has been done before, your book is not going to survive. It is hard to be the first (Naipaul's father's problem). It is possibly harder to come near the end. That was Tony's challenge.

In his later life, like Waugh, Tony moved to the English countryside--it was like withdrawal from life. To live in the English countryside, he says, was to be sheltered and creatively to die.

Looking and not seeing: The Indian way

The third chapter of the book is about the Indian way of looking. Mark his words: he says looking but not seeing. The chapter mainly dwells on three writers: an Indian indentured labourer, Rahman Khan's autobiography, Jeevan Prakash (The Light of Life)--Rahman was a teacher of Hindu scriptures and a labourer in Surinam; Gandhi and Nehru. He describes Gandhi through the eyes of Aldous Huxley. He talks about Gandhi's years in London and his various experiments with food and so on.

He sees Gandhi's journey (through England and South Africa) akin to that of Bhuddha's--a spiritual journey. Gandhi's rebellion was not of the European kind. "The theme of rebellion is one of the great themes of Western European literature," he writes. "The true modern novel arises when the rebel, the man apart, feels himself strong enough to take on the established order, and when that order is fluid enough to make room for him." Gandhi's rebellion starts with small, manageable political aims but as his vision widens, the nature of his rebellion grows.

Disparate ways

This chapter is on Flaubert and his novel Salammbo, a retelling of the rebellion of mercenaries in Carthage, the tale extracted from the work of the Greek historian Polybius (200-118 BC). Naipaul admires Falubert's style in Madame Bovary, but is not impressed with his accomplishment in Salammbo. In Madame Bovary, Naipaul notes, the language is plain and clean and brief. "The elegance and the drama lay in the spare, unexpected detail...this was what caught at the reader." This was prose that had to be read slowly, he says.

Bovary was grey, Salammbo purple. Naipaul thus contrasts the two novels: "It seems quite another writer--someone coarser, steeped in nineteenth-century orientalism and melodrama--who, five years later, published Salammbo."

Naipaul sees the novel's failure as an indication of Falubert's over-ambitiousness. "Ambition makes a writer reach beyond what he has achieved," he remarks.

In passing, Naipaul strikes at Flaubert's publicity-seeking nature: "He was an early self-publicist. He wished people to know that his writing didn't come easily, like Balzac's. It took time, and was original."

India again: the Mahatma and after

The last chapter has many curious characters: Gandhi, Vinobha Bhave (he calls him a foolish man), and Nirad C. Chaudhuri.

He considers the early part of Chaudhuri's Autobiography brilliant but when it comes to scholarship, he meets Naipaul's disapproval, even scorn. "He was no scholar," Naipaul says of the Bengali intellectual.

It is the last three pages of the novel that interested me in a great way. They deal with the contemporary writing scene in India. "Sixty years after independence that problem (fitting one civilization to another) is still there," he says. "India has no autonomous intellectual life...now they look away from India for ultimate fulfilment. They look in the main to Britain and the United States...That's where the better jobs are, where Indians are well thought of, and that is where people of a certain level wish to live and marry--and make cookies and shovel snow off the pavement in winter--and educate their children."

Naipaul makes some valid criticisms of the new Indian writing that has emerged from, especially, the Indian Diaspora:

1. These novels are by and large autobiographical, family stories with daddyji and mamaji, and nanee and chacha, against a backdrop of extended Indian families. Each extended family produces a writer. "One writer, one book: it may not build a literature, but it is a system that allows new writers and new families to come up all the time."

2. Is this writing just old fashioned Indian boasting? he asks. Is it something new, a new awakening, or just a part of publishing culture in Britain and the US? "The question has to be asked," he insists, "because no national literature has ever been created like this, at such a remove, where the books are published by people outside, judged by people outside, and to a large extent read by people outside."

3. The new Indian writers, Naipaul claims, are trying to imitate other successful writers (after getting educated in the West). "They are not bursting with the wish to say anything," he writes. "They are guided in the main by imitation." Should they be Irish or German or should they indulge in wordplay (swipe at Rushdie?) or should they try magic realism? And I like this one: "Should they be like the late Raymond Carver and pretend they know nothing about anything?"

"This is where India begins to get lost. The writing school's India is like the writing school's America or Maoist China or Haiti."

Naipaul's judgment is final and it is harsh: "India has no means of judging. India is hard and materialist. What it knows best about Indian writers and books are their advances and their prizes. There is little discussion about the substance of a book or its literary quality or the point of view of the writer."

On the last point, I think Naipaul's views need not be as hidebound and pessimistic as they are. Things are changing in India. While the expat Indian writer is still accorded respect, homegrown writers of quality are emerging too. However, as in the West, there is no exclusive respect for the literary writer anymore. For if you can honour an ordinary hack just because he is on the bestseller list, what point is there in your honour for the literary type who has taken enormous risks with his life (and not just chucked his lucrative consulting or banking job). Perhaps, like your politicians and actors, you get the writers you deserve.

Gandhi's experiments in chastity

From The Independent:

Eighteen-year-old Abha, the wife of Gandhi's grandnephew Kanu Gandhi, rejoined Gandhi's entourage in the run-up to independence in 1947 and by the end of August he was sleeping with both Manu and Abha at the same time.

When he was assassinated in January 1948, it was with Manu and Abha by his side. Despite her having been his constant companion in his last years, family members, tellingly, removed Manu from the scene. Gandhi had written to his son: "I have asked her to write about her sharing the bed with me," but the protectors of his image were eager to eliminate this element of the great leader's life. Devdas, Gandhi's son, accompanied Manu to Delhi station where he took the opportunity of instructing her to keep quiet.

Questioned in the 1970s, Sushila revealingly placed the elevation of this lifestyle to a brahmacharya experiment was a response to criticism of this behaviour. "Later on, when people started asking questions about his physical contact with women – with Manu, with Abha, with me – the idea of brahmacharya experiments was developed ... in the early days, there was no question of calling this a brahmacharya experiment." It seems that Gandhi lived as he wished, and only when challenged did he turn his own preferences into a cosmic system of rewards and benefits. Like many great men, Gandhi made up the rules as he went along.

While it was commonly discussed as damaging his reputation when he was alive, Gandhi's sexual behaviour was ignored for a long time after his death. It is only now that we can piece together information for a rounded picture of Gandhi's excessive self-belief in the power of his own sexuality. Tragically for him, he was already being sidelined by the politicians at the time of independence. The preservation of his vital fluid did not keep India intact, and it was the power-brokers of the Congress Party who negotiated the terms of India's freedom.

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If I were an Indian Hindu

by Zafar Anjum


A Singapore journalist says both major parties in India must abandon increasing communalism

"Some countries are united by a common language; India has around fifteen major languages and numberless minor ones. Nor are its people united by race, religion or culture…Does India exist? If it doesn't, the explanation is to be found in a single word: communalism. The politics of religious hatred."

—Salman Rushdie in "The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1947" in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91

If I were a regular Indian Hindu, I would not find it difficult to believe that the country today is threatened by the forces of Islamic terrorism— no matter what the Muslims say in their defense.

Further, I would add that the terrorizing Muslims and the evangelizing Christian missionaries are creating grave threats to India's progress, a country that is rediscovering its destiny as a superpower in the world stage.

I'm saying this because the recent terrorist bombings in many Indian cities have changed our lives. We live in fear of being blown away while shopping or traveling. How can we not blame the Muslims when members of their community have created this atmosphere of terror in the nation of peace-loving Hindus?

I know what I am talking about. I read newspapers. I watch TV. Lest you should believe that I am a dehati, I am not. I could be a government official, an IT professional, an employee of an MNC, a businessman or even a member of the diaspora. I could be anyone.

I am using the term 'regular Indian Hindu' as a classification for those Hindus in India who are not liberal (or communists or atheists or pseudo-secularists) or have not acquired liberal education in India or abroad and who are conscious of their Hindu identity. Our liberal brethren, the so called 'pseudo-secularists' (whoever invented this term must be a Indian Hindu and I want to give him shabashi for this innovative coinage) might even object to the phrase "Indian Hindu" as a contradictory duality—an Indian is an Indian, end of the matter, they'd say—but I wouldn’t have thought the worst of it.

For me it wouldn't have been difficult to bask in the glory of a resurgent India as a member of 'Hindu India' —an India that is waking up from its thousand year old slumber of inertia and slavery— first by the murderous Muslim invaders, followed by the wily British, who between them, ruled us for nearly a millennium.

But there are many who want to prick my balloon of pride. For instance, take the recent terror attacks in various Indian cities and the Muslim response to it. Let us keep our discussion confined to this topic and not get side-tracked by the issue of conversion of dalits and adivasis by the Christian missionaries, an issue that equally infuriates me.

If I were a regular Indian Hindu, I would feel the police action justified in the Batla House, Jamia Nagar police-terrorist encounter cases, no matter what people like Arundhati Roy have to say on this matter. When scores of innocents died in terrorist-planted bomb blasts in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Delhi, what is the big deal if the Delhi police killed two Muslim terrorists in an encounter?

Some Muslims are finding holes in the manner the police conducted the encounter and arrested the terror suspects. I give two hoots about it! I have my own problems to solve, my own life to live. But if I did care about the issue, being a newspaper reader and TV news watcher type, I would have felt the demands of inquiry into the whole episode by the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Group or Delhi Union of Journalists unnecessary, nothing more than an act of minority appeasement.

Why demoralize our police force, I would have asked them? After all, we lost one of our own brave policemen in the encounter, didn’t we? I would have damned the conspiracy theories circulated by these doubters and gossip mongers. They do nothing or just shed crocodile tears when bombs go off in crowded bazaars and kill scores of innocent Indians. But when one of them is killed, they ask for enquiry and provide legal aid to those terrorists? How unpatriotic!

But they are not alone in what they do. To make matters worse, (I would have thought it a matter of shame) some of our own, the pseudo-secularists, are party to the game being played by the Muslim intelligentsia and some publicity-hungry liberal minded media persons. The same way that they did after the Gujarat riots—they could not appreciate the fact that what had happened was a natural reaction to the dastardly act of burning our holy men alive on the Sabarmati Express. What did they get after doing all those exposes and investigations? All they could achieve was that they kept Narendra Modi bhai from visiting the US. That’s it. Was it worth all that muck-racking?

Therefore, clearly, if I were a regular Indian Hindu, I would have no difficulty in believing that Hinduism is under threat from Islamic terrorism. I would, in that position, seem reasonable if I believed that Indian Muslims, even after the country’s partition in 1947, have wasted all opportunities given to them. They are always looking for special treatment. They have hundreds of apologists of all kinds to make excuses on their behalf. As such, my message to fellow Hindus would be this: We have done enough for these guys, and they have performed dismally, so let us stop bothering about them.

Because of our peaceful nature, others have dominated us for centuries. They could do it because we were weak. Now we must strike back by showing that we are more aggressive even than the ones that dominated us. We have shown it in Gujarat, and elsewhere in the country. But these Muslims don’t seem to be getting the message.

If I were a regular Indian Hindu, I would have no difficulty in believing in all that that I have just said. But, as it happens, I am not.

I happen to be an Indian born in a Muslim family. And as such, the tentacles of my consciousness were trained in a different manner—different from those belonging to other communities.

Despite the difference, I find it difficult to blame my “regular Indian Hindu” friend for the way he thinks. It is not his fault—it’s my way of looking at him that makes him appear faulty. But he may not be at fault at all. Perhaps he was brought up in a certain manner and while I believed in “unity in diversity,” he believed in some other philosophy—an idea of India that was different from that conceived by Gandhi and Nehru—and as old as them, shared by those who distributed sweets on the streets hearing the news of Gandhiji’s assassination.

Perhaps he does not even hold Gandhi and Nehru in high regard. He has been fed a certain version of India’s struggle for freedom and he believes in that version, as I do in mine. Right from his childhood, he has been exposed to a certain kind of thinking: all through shishu mandirs, shakhas, ekal vidyalayas, sant samagams, television serials, the rath yatras, leaflets, videos, CDs (I have borrowed this impressive list from Shabnam Hashmi, Communalism, Centrestage in Tehelka).

Therefore, I don’t want to blame my “regular Indian Hindu” friend for he is the creation of someone’s hard work. Like I am the creation of another group’s hard work. He is as legitimate an Indian as I am, albeit with a different idea of India. What matters though and what will determine our future is where we stand today: which ‘idea of India’ has moved from the center to the periphery and vice versa and which idea of India will eventually prevail. This is something that, everyone—Indians as well as Asians—need to watch out for as it relates to the Asia’s America (a nod to Daniel Lak, India Express), Asia’s liberal superpower.

...

My India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity: ideas to which the ideologies of the communalists are diametrically opposed. To my mind, the defining image of India is the crowd, and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once. But the India of the communalists is none of these things — Salman Rushdie in “The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1947” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91

As a child, I was sold on the ideas of Gandhi and Nehru. In school, I grew up on the ideals of a secular India, built on the foundations of syncretic ethos, an India where all citizens are equal before the law and where all religions are equally respected. While we wrote essays on the greatness of Gandhi and Nehru, Indira Gandhi ruled the country with an iron first. Those were the post-Emergency Congress days and everything looked normal in our small town of pre-television era.

Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai, aaaps me sab bhai bhai — we were to repeat this phrase. I believed in it and continue to believe in it.

Growing up, I knew that I was living in a country where the majority of the population consisted of Hindus. But I had no problems with that. Rather I enjoyed the diversity of India. My father’s best friends were Hindus. As much as I looked forward to Eid, I looked forward to Durga Pooja and Chhat—the two major festivals in Bengal and Bihar. My village came under the cross section of these two dominant cultures. During Durga Pooja, it was a common practice for us to roam around the town, be a part of the crowd and admire the pandals. On Chhat, we all waited to taste the delicious thakwa, a kind of snack prepared on that day—equivalent of Eid’s sewaiyan. Every December, I used to wait for Christmas to see the beautifully decorated churches, and if fortunate enough, get a chance to nibble at the cakes and pastries in the homes of my Christian acquaintances.

Then came 1984. Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own guards and all hell broke loose. Thousands of Sikhs were mercilessly massacred in Delhi. The slogan-- Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai, aapas me sab bhai bhai—began to sound shaky and fake.

I passed out of school and went to Aligarh Muslim University for further education. Aligarh is a communally sensitive town. While still a student there, I saw the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the riots that followed. The country’s atmosphere had completely changed.

The end of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb

But a slow change had started years even before the Babri demolition. At that point of time, I could not grasp the importance of those changes but in hindsight they seem to be damaging to the country’s secular ethos, the Ganja-Jamuni tehzeeb of India. What was happening was that slowly but surely, Muslim cultural elements, however small in significance but were taken as a given by Muslims, began to disappear from public life.

For example, take the “unity and diversity” ads taken out by the government. Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai, aapas me sab bhai bhai. I used to see these national integration ads regularly in the media, in Urdu magazines and on the back of buses and on walls. Gradually these ads began to disappear. They were replaced by other slogans on the wall. One slogan that I can remember vividly is this—Bharat desh me rehna hai to vande matram kehna hoga. While some Muslims began to paste stickers like Fakhr se kaho hum Musalman hain, I also began to notice some Hindu establishments prominently displaying stickers with slogans—Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain.

Mughlai food: A vanishing act?

Along with the slogan baazi, I noticed two more things: Airbrushing of India’s Muslim, specifically Mughal, heritage and the undisputed dominance of Hindi in the common cultural space. Consequently, as the chandrabindu (dot, a sort of a diacritical mark) vanished from devnagri (Hindi), Mughlai food too disappeared from the great Indian menu.

While the Mughal and pre-Mughal Islamic architecture such as the Red Fort and Qutub Minar in Delhi and the Taj Mahal in Agra remained untouched (except for the mad claim that the Taj was built by a Hindu ruler), Mughlai food was airbrushed from the menu. Everything became tandoori or Punjabi—this is not to deny that there is no specific Punjabi cuisine but I find the case of the missing Mughlai cuisine intriguing. Also, I don’t think somebody sat down and deliberately performed the act of erasure (like somebody in the ministries forgot to commission the ‘useless’ unity in diversity ads). However, it has happened and consequently, today, if you go to any Indian restaurant, you will see typically two broad categories of cuisine: North Indian and South Indian. And the vast part of the North Indian menu would be Punjabi food, which is not totally illegitimate. But I can’t help asking: where has the Mughlai food vanished?

The vanishing act of the Mughlai food (Superstar Shahrukh Khan once said that he loved Mughlia food, perhaps he meant Mughlai—he does not see the terminology so often so even an articulate person like him got it all mixed up) is not that big a deal but it can assume a greater significance if seen in the light of the communalization of Indian historiography. Let me give you an example from one of Rushdie’s writings again.

Muslims as ‘Mughals’?

In the introduction to his book of essays, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91, Rushdie talks of a seminar in London in which eminent writers and historians from India were invited to speak at the festival of India in 1982. He writes: “…an eminent Indian academic delivered a paper on Indian culture that utterly ignored all minority communities. When questioned about this from the floor, the professor smiled benignly and allowed that of course India contained many diverse traditions—including Buddhists, Christians and ‘Mughals’. This characterization of Muslim culture was more than merely peculiar. It was a technique of alienation. For if Muslims were ‘Mughals’, then they were foreign invaders, and Indian Muslim culture was both imperialist and inauthentic. At the time, we made light of the gibe, but it stayed with me, pricking at me like a thorn.”

In the light of this experience, it would not seem impossible if Muslims took the airbrushing of the Mughlai food items from the Indian menu as an act of alienation.

Ghazal becomes Gajal

The same way the chandrabindu (the dot below a devnagri letter to signify pronunciation) seems to have been airbrushed from common devnagri lipi. It was meant to be a meeting ground of Urdu and Hindi, if you will—the two sister languages that also fell victim to communalization in India. The result is disastrous. The chef on TV has no compunction in pronouncing zeera (cumin seeds) as jeera. And the literature student has no problem asking: Yeh kya Galib (Ghalib) ki gajal (ghazal) hai. It grates my ears through. The interesting thing is that even no-Urdu knowing Muslims today pronounce words in this fashion.

Et tu, Bollywood?

And finally, the technique of alienation seems to have invaded the most secular of India’s cultural spaces—television and Bollywood. These are not just virtual cultural spaces but powerful engines of culture-generation. After the 1990s, as Bollywood moved from producing the cinema for the front benchers to the cinema for the yuppie, multiplex-going crowd, its stars and filmmakers began to define and set the cultural agenda of the country. Their impact on Hindus and Muslims, both off screen and on screen, are alike. As noted American political philosopher Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, it’s also interesting that Bollywood is the one place where Hindus and Muslims intermingle and intermarry and there is not any great sense of the gulf between them.

After the death of the Muslim socials in Bollywood (a natural corollary of the death of the Muslim elite), its filmmakers turned their back on Muslim characters. How many principal Muslim characters have you seen in Bollywood movies in the post Manmohan Desia era? Don’t even try to count on your fingers.

The situation is worse in TV’s case, especially the popular daily soaps on satellite TV channels. With the exception of the low-budget fantasies like Alif-Laila, in the world of Saas bhi kabhi bahu thi (which is supposed to be popular even in far and away Afghanistan) and Kahani ghar ghar ki, there are hardly any mainstream Muslim characters. It seems they are not part of the glamorous and prosperous social fabric of India which is more or less true.

These are big-ticket questions for the entertainment world. But I am asking a minor question. Like the national integration slogans, Mughlai food and the chandrabindu, one more thing has disappeared from Hindi movie, well almost: the Urdu language titles, along with Hindi and English, in the opening credits. In the last 10-15 years, I think I have seen most movies have done away with it.

I was glad to see that not all filmmakers have forgotten this tradition. Shyam Benegal prominently displayed the Urdu titles in his latest film, Welcome to Sajjanpur, in the feature’s opening credits.

I agree that these are not big issues—where do they stand in front of typically cited larger issues such as fundamentalism and terrorism?

My “regular Indian Hindu” friend might ask me how do these minor, inconsequential things matter to the Indian Muslim mind? My answer is: a lot. These are minor issues but they act as psychological symbols—symbols of our existence, participation and inclusion with the nation at large.

How these symbolic things, tokenisms, if you will, have tiptoed their way out of the public consciousness remains a mystery to me. But I would rather not have had them disappear from our public lives.

“Let us consider dispassionately the consequences which will follow if we give effect to the Pakistan scheme. India will be divided into two states, one with a majority of Muslims, and the other of Hindus. In the Hindustan State there will remain three and half crores of Muslims scattered in small minorities all over the land…they will be weaker than they are today in the Hindu majority provinces. They have had their homelands in these regions for almost a thousand years and built up well-known centres of Muslim culture and civilization there. They will awaken overnight and discover that they have become alien and foreigners. Backward industrially, educationally and economically, they will be left to the mercies to what would become an unadulterated Hindu raj.” —Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in a statement issued on 15 April 1946, responding to Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution

The prescient maulana had seen it coming more than half a century ago. After India’s independence, developments such as vote bank politics, Hindu Muslim communalism and saffronization of the Indian middle class have made the maulana’s worse fears come true. Muslims today lag behind all other communities in India. Their condition is worse than that of the dalits.

But blaming the state for all the ills of the Muslim community for the last 50 years has not got the community any further. As the Vice President of India Shri Hamid Ansari said in the recently concluded World Summit of the Aligarh Muslim University Alumni: “While Shikwa (complaint) about our condition was valid, there was no need to carry it to the point of incapacity for autonomous action. We failed to take note of, emulate and adapt, the initiatives taken by other communities in creative ventures in the field of education independent of government agencies.”

It would be a cliché to repeat that Muslim communalism has been feeding Hindu communalism. It’s good that by and large Muslims have disowned their communal leadership but have not been helped by the secular leadership—they continue to remain a rudderless community, a mere pawn in the chess board of the great Indian ‘vote-bank’ politics.

But things can’t be left where they are. The status quo must change.

One thing that Muslims must do, in order not to alienate themselves from the Hindus, is to respect Hindu sentiments, respect their religious books and culture and emphasize the syncretic values of Islam and Hinduism. A siege mentality of staying aloof will not work any longer, as it has not worked in the past. Similarly, my religion is better than yours mentality will also not work. The members of two communities have to mingle together on equal terms.

Terrorism: Indian Muslims falling in the trap of denial?

Apart from the efforts that need to be put in to ameliorate the conditions of the community, Indian Muslims also need to the face the charge of terrorism squarely, as columnist Vir Sanghvi recently asked: Are Indian Muslims falling in the trap of denial?

“This terrorism must not be allowed to drive on even bigger wedge between India’s Hindus and Muslims,” he says. “Some of this is up to the Muslim community. From what I remember of the 1980s, Muslims are reacting as many Sikhs did then: arguing that the stories of terrorism are made up and that it is all a conspiracy against their community.”

“India’s Muslims must be wary of falling into the trap of denial,” he suggests. “I am prepared to concede that some of those arrested for terrorist attacks could be innocent. I am prepared also to admit that the police do concoct cases. But can every arrested person be innocent? Can every e-mail from the Indian Mujahedeen be a fake?”

There is a lot of truth in Sanghvi’s questions. No one is arguing that the black sheep in Muslim community should be treated differently from the black sheep of other communities. However, can the entire community be held hostage for the wrong doing of misguided few? Must we profile people because of their faith? Must we incarcerate people without evidence and torture them to extract spurious proof? If not checked, will this not hasten India’s sliding into a fascist state?

Where is the moral leadership?

These are the questions that liberal Indians like Harsh Mandar and Arundhati Roy are asking today and these are the questions that both Hindus and Muslims need to ask of the police and the state. And our politicians should provide the moral leadership that is required of them at such times, not the usual vote bank politics that they are used to. After communal riots erupted in Delhi in the wake of a bloody partition of India, Gandhi went on a fast to stop people from cutting each others’ throat. No one expects today’s leaders to take such a self-sacrificial stand but some semblance of moral leadership has to be shown.

To their credit, a large number of Indian Hindus have been accommodative of the minorities. Indian Muslims, whether in India or abroad, must realize that Hindus are their best friends. Both share the same culture and are heirs to a rich 5000-year old civilization. Both have to work together to defeat the communal forces. Our sane minded leaders have tried to do so for the last hundred years or so but not with much success. It is time we took the matter in our own hands and gave communal hatred a silent burial.

Will that be easy? I have my doubts but let us make a beginning. Opening our circle of friendship to people of all faiths can be a good starting point. Everyone, all Indians, need to embrace a rational approach to civil life—don’t believe in unverified information, stop spreading rumors, and try to understand each other better.

At this juncture, India’s new elite and the technocratic middle class need to play a special role. “What I’m really discouraged by is the growing dominance of a technocratic middle class that is anti-political and for whom the suffering of excluded people doesn’t mean a lot,” said Martha Nussbaum. “This IIT mentality — become technically competent engineers, forget about human values — is very dangerous, particularly for a country like India.”

India’s new elite and the technocratic middle class need to pay heed. If they really want India to become the America of Asia, they can no longer afford to be silent and apolitical.

Published in Asian Sentinel, Hong Kong, Oct 29, 2008
http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1510&Itemid=159

Gandhigiri in the Netherlands

"Immunizing a country against the pandemic of xenophobia and outright dehumanization is serious business," says Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, in his discussion on the Dutch's preparations to preempt a Geert Wilders-inflicted pandemic of 2008 in The Washington Post's On Faith forum (Wilders, photo above, leader of the right-wing, anti-Muslim Freedom Party, of which there are only nine members in the 150-seat Dutch lower house, had long threatened to release a film exhibiting, in his words, "the violent and fascist elements of the Muslim faith").

He says, "at the highest levels of government, the preemptive media response was palpable and powerful. The Dutch Foreign Minister stood by the right to free speech while putting reasonable parameters on the proviso, saying "freedom of expression doesn't mean the right to offend". The Dutch Interior Minister warned media companies against broadcast, noting the repercussions globally, saying "a broadcast on a public channel could imply that the government supported the project". Even the Dutch Embassy in Washington D.C. categorically condemned the content. But most impressive, was the showing by Amsterdam's mayor Job Cohen, who is Jewish, saying flatly that Wilders was 'dehumanizing Muslims'."

But at the ground level, at the people to people level, a lot of Gandhigiri was applied to achieve great results (so far so good):

Mindful of the buzz building in the Arab press and keen to concoct a global media strategy to counteract a crisis, the Dutch appealed to international organizations like ours [Cordoba Initiative] to proactively engage Muslims in prevention-oriented activities. Mobilizing Dutch Muslim civil society, in close consultation and coordination with our Dutch Muslim legal liaisons on the ground, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Locally, Muslims showered Wilders with kindness, sending flowers and emailing virtual hugs. This coincided with a coordinated campaign involving educational radio and TV programs, talks, flyers, T-shirts, and peace-promoting online petitions – all with the purpose to prevent political furore. Internationally, young Muslim leaders, from Europe to the United States to the United Nations, rallied to support local Dutch efforts and while focusing on similar inoculation efforts in their own countries. In sum, grassroots engagement was rigorous, respectful and well-regimented – exactly the kind of early warning system that is needed at a local level to immunize a population from a threat.

More

A flower for every bullet?

Some thoughts on Muslims and global terror. Not mine but of others. But how well they echo those of mine and of many others:

From Prof Amitava Kumar's blog who quotes Gandhi in this excerpt:

Will someone fax the following quote from Gandhi, on p. 70 of the galleys, to Washington DC:

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

Here's a quote from Indian journalist Burkha Dutt's article on Mohammad Haneef (thanks again Prof Kumar):

...And yet, an innocent man continues to be held in solitary confinement with the ludicrous explanation that the solitude is actually designed to give him more ‘privacy’. Haneef has eloquently argued his own innocence, describing himself as a “Muslim with moderate views” who believes that “every drop of blood is human”. When Australian Prime Minister John Howard still goes on to declare grandly that he is “not uncomfortable” with the young doctor’s continued detention our outrage is spontaneous and entirely legitimate.

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy on the Lal Masjid (Pakistan) shootout:

What explains the explosive growth of this phenomenon?
Imperial America's policies in the Muslim world are usually held to blame. But its brutalities elsewhere have been far greater. In tiny Vietnam, the Americans had killed more than one million people. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese did not invest in explosive vests and belts. Today if one could wipe America off the map of the world with a wet cloth, mullah-led fanaticism will not disappear. I have often asked those of our students at Quaid-e-Azam University who toe the Lal Masjid line why, if they are so concerned about the fate of Muslims, they did not join the many demonstrations organized by their professors in 2003/4 against the immoral US invasion of Iraq. The question leaves them unfazed. For them the greater sin is for women to walk around bare faced, or the very notion that they could be considered the equal of men.

M J Akbar in his column, Byline:

Five years ago, there was only one terrorist in Iraq: Saddam Hussein. He terrorized his people, perhaps the worst form of terrorism. There was one reason for anger five years ago. Who can count how many reasons jostle for attention in a young person's mind after four years of war, mayhem and occupation? Four million Iraqis have been displaced; the demographic equivalent in India would be more than 200 million uprooted. That is the scale of the human disaster. No one has an accurate count of the Iraqi dead. Bush spends a quarter million dollars a minute on just the war in Iraq. Read that again, it isn't a mistake: A quarter million dollars every minute. That bill doesn't include the costs in Afghanistan. Even the British appetite for Bush has ebbed, with a Cabinet minister saying that British policy will not be joined at the hip to Washington. British casualties are now approaching the rate suffered in World War II. And only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of Anglo-American troops.

Whatever the cause, such are the effects. As Paul Wood, defense correspondent for British television's Today program, said on Friday, "Who wants to be the last man to die for a lost cause?" A newspaper is life distilled into still life. If the siege we mentioned is global, then perhaps a good checkpoint is a global newspaper through which we might ponder the mysteries of cause and effect.

The top of the front page of the July 12 edition is a moving photograph of a woman, her head bowed beyond sight, her tears hidden in the cusp of an anguished hand, sobbing on the coffin of a lost son or husband, one of the over 8,000 Muslims massacred by Serbs in Srebrenica twelve years ago, during the ethnic cleansing that began on July 11, 1995. They have just identified a fresh lot of 465 victims.

Where is one of the principal leaders of this genocide, a mass murderer called Gen. Ratko Mladic. If you want to chat with him, down at the nearest cafe. If you are the European Union or America, then he becomes invisible. He cannot be found.

Below this picture is the story of Lal Masjid, a citadel of paranoia, xenophobia and terrorism masquerading as a mosque and madrasa. There are no Christians or Serbs in this battle in Pakistan, which has taken at least a hundred lives. This is a war between different attitudes to faith. And this is proof that terrorism is a fire that can also burn the hand of those who feed it.

And, here's a great piece on this issue by Saaed Naqvi:

The Muslim elite in Delhi and Oudh had been decimated during 1857. Globally, they were smashed when the Ottoman empire was liquidated in the wake of World War I. None of that was on TV. But in March ’91, Muslims in particular saw with their own eyes the defeat and humiliation of a Muslim state, Iraq, with roots in one of the world’s great civilisations. Then followed the two "intifadas", the four-year-long brutalisation of Bosnian Muslims, Srebrenica, rape camps, the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, the continuing occupation of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, desecration of the holiest of shrines in Samara—and all on live TV.
Any wonder, then, that the Muslim world is in a state of rage? Just as the workers of the world had nothing to lose but their chains, a section of Muslims feel they have nothing to lose but their daily humiliations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza etc. This is the way it comes across to them, riveted as they are on a diet of live TV. But responses of the world’s Muslims vary. Indian Muslims belong to an exceptional category for a simple reason: the world’s second largest Muslim population has the good fortune to operate in a multicultural, secular democracy. Remember, a massive demonstration at Ramlila grounds thwarted US President George Bush from addressing a joint session of Parliament. The vent of democracy keeps Indian Muslims from terrorism.

Can the oppressed of the world learn some Gandhigiri and put an end to this circle of violence? What about sending a bouquet of flower to the oppressor for every dead body? A flower for every bullet? Can we do it anywhere and everywhere? Let us bury all hatred and violence under the unbearable lightness of the flower power? You think it is not possible? Gandhi showed us how to do it nearly a century ago.