Showing posts with label Rushdie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rushdie. Show all posts
Monday 28 June 2021
Saturday 1 May 2021
Salman Rushdie on Midnight's Children at 40: 'India is no longer the country of this novel'
Four decades after his Booker-winner was published, Salman Rushdie (in The Guardian) reflects on the Bombay of his childhood – and his despair at the sectarianism he sees in India today
Longevity is the real prize for which writers strive, and it isn’t awarded by any jury. For a book to stand the test of time, to pass successfully down the generations, is uncommon enough to be worth a small celebration. For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight. This is why we do what we do: to make works of art that, if we are very lucky, will endure.
As a reader, I have always been attracted to capacious, largehearted fictions, books that try to gather up large armfuls of the world. When I started to think about the work that would grow into Midnight’s Children, I looked again at the great Russian novels of the 19th century, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Dead Souls, books of the type that Henry James had called “loose, baggy monsters”, large-scale realist novels – though, in the case of Dead Souls, on the very edge of surrealism. And at the great English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, Tristram Shandy (wildly innovative and by no means realist), Vanity Fair (bristling with sharp knives of satire), Little Dorrit (in which the Circumlocution Office, a government department whose purpose is to do nothing, comes close to magic realism), and Bleak House (in which the interminable court case Jarndyce v Jarndyce comes even closer). And at their great French precursor, Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is completely fabulist.
I also had in mind the modern counterparts of these masterpieces, The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Adventures of Augie March and Catch-22, and the rich, expansive worlds of Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing (both too prolific to be defined by any single title, but Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Lessing’s The Making of the Representative from Planet 8 have stayed with me). But I was also thinking about another kind of capaciousness, the immense epics of India, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and the fabulist traditions of the Panchatantra, the Thousand and One Nights and the Kashmiri Sanskrit compendium called Katha-sarit-sagar (Ocean of the Streams of Story). I was thinking of India’s oral narrative traditions, too, which were a form of storytelling in which digression was almost the basic principle; the storyteller could tell, in a sort of whirling cycle, a fictional tale, a mythological tale, a political story and an autobiographical story; he – because it was always a he – could intersperse his multiple narratives with songs and keep large audiences entranced.
Bombay ... a hubub, a maelstrom. Photograph: Galit Seligmann/Alamy
But in spite of these echoes, Saleem and I are unalike. For one thing, our lives took very different directions. Mine led me abroad to England and eventually to America. But Saleem never leaves the subcontinent. His life is contained within, and defined by, the borders of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As a final proof that my character and I are not one and the same, I offer another anecdote. When I was in Delhi to do one of the first Indian readings from Midnight’s Children, I heard a woman’s voice cry loudly as I walked out on to the stage: “Oh! But he’s got a perfectly ordinary nose!”
Forty years is a long time. I have to say that India is no longer the country of this novel. When I wrote Midnight’s Children I had in mind an arc of history moving from the hope – the bloodied hope, but still the hope – of independence to the betrayal of that hope in the so-called Emergency, followed by the birth of a new hope. India today, to someone of my mind, has entered an even darker phase than the Emergency years. The horrifying escalation of assaults on women, the increasingly authoritarian character of the state, the unjustifiable arrests of people who dare to stand against that authoritarianism, the religious fanaticism, the rewriting of history to fit the narrative of those who want to transform India into a Hindu-nationalist, majoritarian state, and the popularity of the regime in spite of it all, or, worse, perhaps because of it all – these things encourage a kind of despair.
When I wrote this book I could associate big-nosed Saleem with the elephant-trunked god Ganesh, the patron deity of literature, among other things, and that felt perfectly easy and natural even though Saleem was not a Hindu. All of India belonged to all of us, or so I deeply believed. And still believe, even though the rise of a brutal sectarianism believes otherwise. But I find hope in the determination of India’s women and college students to resist that sectarianism, to reclaim the old, secular India and dismiss the darkness. I wish them well. But right now, in India, it’s midnight again.
Longevity is the real prize for which writers strive, and it isn’t awarded by any jury. For a book to stand the test of time, to pass successfully down the generations, is uncommon enough to be worth a small celebration. For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight. This is why we do what we do: to make works of art that, if we are very lucky, will endure.
As a reader, I have always been attracted to capacious, largehearted fictions, books that try to gather up large armfuls of the world. When I started to think about the work that would grow into Midnight’s Children, I looked again at the great Russian novels of the 19th century, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Dead Souls, books of the type that Henry James had called “loose, baggy monsters”, large-scale realist novels – though, in the case of Dead Souls, on the very edge of surrealism. And at the great English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, Tristram Shandy (wildly innovative and by no means realist), Vanity Fair (bristling with sharp knives of satire), Little Dorrit (in which the Circumlocution Office, a government department whose purpose is to do nothing, comes close to magic realism), and Bleak House (in which the interminable court case Jarndyce v Jarndyce comes even closer). And at their great French precursor, Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is completely fabulist.
I also had in mind the modern counterparts of these masterpieces, The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Adventures of Augie March and Catch-22, and the rich, expansive worlds of Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing (both too prolific to be defined by any single title, but Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Lessing’s The Making of the Representative from Planet 8 have stayed with me). But I was also thinking about another kind of capaciousness, the immense epics of India, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and the fabulist traditions of the Panchatantra, the Thousand and One Nights and the Kashmiri Sanskrit compendium called Katha-sarit-sagar (Ocean of the Streams of Story). I was thinking of India’s oral narrative traditions, too, which were a form of storytelling in which digression was almost the basic principle; the storyteller could tell, in a sort of whirling cycle, a fictional tale, a mythological tale, a political story and an autobiographical story; he – because it was always a he – could intersperse his multiple narratives with songs and keep large audiences entranced.
A performance of the Ramayana at a theatre in Bangalore, 2015. Photograph: Aijaz Rahi/AP
I loved that multiplicity could be so captivating. Young writers are often given a version of the advice that the King of Hearts gives the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the Rabbit becomes confused in court about how to tell his story: “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on until you come to the end; then stop.’” It was inspiring to learn, from the oral narrative masters of, in particular, Kerala in south India, that this was not the only way, or even the most captivating way, to go about things.
The novel I was planning was a multigenerational family novel, so inevitably I thought of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and, for all its non-realist elements, I knew that my book needed to be a novel deeply rooted in history, so I read, with great admiration, Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel. And, because it was to be a novel of Bombay, it had to be rooted in the movies as well, movies of the kind now called “Bollywood”, in which calamities such as babies exchanged at birth and given to the wrong mothers were everyday occurrences.
I wanted to write a novel in which memory and politics, love and hate would mingle on every page
As you can see, I wanted to write a novel of vaulting ambition, a high-wire act with no safety net, an all-or-nothing effort: Bollywood or bust, as one might say. A novel in which memory and politics, love and hate would mingle on almost every page. I was an inexperienced, unsuccessful, unknown writer. To write such a book I had to learn how to do so; to learn by writing it. Five years passed before I was ready to show it to anybody. For all its surrealist elements Midnight’s Children is a history novel, looking for an answer to the great question history asks us: what is the relationship between society and the individual, between the macrocosm and the microcosm? To put it another way: do we make history, or does it make (or unmake) us? Are we the masters or victims of our times?
My protagonist, Saleem Sinai, makes an unusual assertion in reply: he believes that everything that happens, happens because of him. That history is his fault. This belief is absurd, of course, and so his insistence on it feels comic at first. Later, as he grows up, and as the gulf between his belief and the reality of his life grows ever wider – as he becomes increasingly victim-like, not a person who acts but one who is acted upon, who does not do but is done to – it begins to be sad, perhaps even tragic. Forty years after he first arrived on the scene – 45 years after he first made his assertion on my typewriter – I feel the urge to defend his apparently insane boast. Perhaps we are all, to use Saleem’s phrase, “handcuffed to history”. And if so, then yes, history is our fault. History is the fluid, mutable, metamorphic consequence of our choices, and so the responsibility for it, even the moral responsibility, is ours. After all: if it’s not ours, then whose is it? There’s nobody else here. It’s just us. If Saleem Sinai made an error, it was that he took on too much responsibility for events. I want to say to him now: we all share that burden. You don’t have to carry all of it.
The question of language was central to the making of Midnight’s Children. In a later novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I used the acronym “Hug-me” to describe the language spoken in Bombay streets, a melange of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English. In addition to those five “official” languages, there’s also the city’s unique slang, Bambaiyya, which nobody from anywhere else in India understands. Clearly, any novel aiming for readability could not be written in Hug-me or Bambaiyya. A novel must know what language it’s being written in. However, writing in classical English felt wrong, like a misrepresentation of the rich linguistic environment of the book’s setting. In the end I took my cue from Jewish American writers such as Philip Roth, who sprinkled their English with untranslated Yiddish words. If they could do it, so could I. The important thing was to make the approximate meaning of the word clear from the context. If Roth talks about getting a zetz in the kishkes, we understand from context that a zetz is some sort of violent blow and kishkes are a sensitive part of the human body. So if Saleem mentions a rutputty motor car, it should be clear that the car in question is a ramshackle, near-derelict old wreck.
In the end I used fewer non-English words than I originally intended. Sentence structure, the flow and rhythm of the language, ended up being more useful, I thought, in my quest to write in an English that wasn’t owned by the English. The flexibility of the English language has allowed it to become naturalised in many different countries, and Indian English is its own thing by now, just as Irish English is, or West Indian English, or Australian English, or the many variations of American English. I set out to write an Indian English novel. Since then, the literature of the English language has expanded to include many more such projects: I’m thinking of Edwidge Danticat’s Creole-inflected English in Breath, Eyes, Memory, for example, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s use of Igbo words and idioms in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, or Junot Díaz’s slangy, musical, Dominican remake of the language in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
I loved that multiplicity could be so captivating. Young writers are often given a version of the advice that the King of Hearts gives the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the Rabbit becomes confused in court about how to tell his story: “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on until you come to the end; then stop.’” It was inspiring to learn, from the oral narrative masters of, in particular, Kerala in south India, that this was not the only way, or even the most captivating way, to go about things.
The novel I was planning was a multigenerational family novel, so inevitably I thought of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and, for all its non-realist elements, I knew that my book needed to be a novel deeply rooted in history, so I read, with great admiration, Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel. And, because it was to be a novel of Bombay, it had to be rooted in the movies as well, movies of the kind now called “Bollywood”, in which calamities such as babies exchanged at birth and given to the wrong mothers were everyday occurrences.
I wanted to write a novel in which memory and politics, love and hate would mingle on every page
As you can see, I wanted to write a novel of vaulting ambition, a high-wire act with no safety net, an all-or-nothing effort: Bollywood or bust, as one might say. A novel in which memory and politics, love and hate would mingle on almost every page. I was an inexperienced, unsuccessful, unknown writer. To write such a book I had to learn how to do so; to learn by writing it. Five years passed before I was ready to show it to anybody. For all its surrealist elements Midnight’s Children is a history novel, looking for an answer to the great question history asks us: what is the relationship between society and the individual, between the macrocosm and the microcosm? To put it another way: do we make history, or does it make (or unmake) us? Are we the masters or victims of our times?
My protagonist, Saleem Sinai, makes an unusual assertion in reply: he believes that everything that happens, happens because of him. That history is his fault. This belief is absurd, of course, and so his insistence on it feels comic at first. Later, as he grows up, and as the gulf between his belief and the reality of his life grows ever wider – as he becomes increasingly victim-like, not a person who acts but one who is acted upon, who does not do but is done to – it begins to be sad, perhaps even tragic. Forty years after he first arrived on the scene – 45 years after he first made his assertion on my typewriter – I feel the urge to defend his apparently insane boast. Perhaps we are all, to use Saleem’s phrase, “handcuffed to history”. And if so, then yes, history is our fault. History is the fluid, mutable, metamorphic consequence of our choices, and so the responsibility for it, even the moral responsibility, is ours. After all: if it’s not ours, then whose is it? There’s nobody else here. It’s just us. If Saleem Sinai made an error, it was that he took on too much responsibility for events. I want to say to him now: we all share that burden. You don’t have to carry all of it.
The question of language was central to the making of Midnight’s Children. In a later novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I used the acronym “Hug-me” to describe the language spoken in Bombay streets, a melange of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English. In addition to those five “official” languages, there’s also the city’s unique slang, Bambaiyya, which nobody from anywhere else in India understands. Clearly, any novel aiming for readability could not be written in Hug-me or Bambaiyya. A novel must know what language it’s being written in. However, writing in classical English felt wrong, like a misrepresentation of the rich linguistic environment of the book’s setting. In the end I took my cue from Jewish American writers such as Philip Roth, who sprinkled their English with untranslated Yiddish words. If they could do it, so could I. The important thing was to make the approximate meaning of the word clear from the context. If Roth talks about getting a zetz in the kishkes, we understand from context that a zetz is some sort of violent blow and kishkes are a sensitive part of the human body. So if Saleem mentions a rutputty motor car, it should be clear that the car in question is a ramshackle, near-derelict old wreck.
In the end I used fewer non-English words than I originally intended. Sentence structure, the flow and rhythm of the language, ended up being more useful, I thought, in my quest to write in an English that wasn’t owned by the English. The flexibility of the English language has allowed it to become naturalised in many different countries, and Indian English is its own thing by now, just as Irish English is, or West Indian English, or Australian English, or the many variations of American English. I set out to write an Indian English novel. Since then, the literature of the English language has expanded to include many more such projects: I’m thinking of Edwidge Danticat’s Creole-inflected English in Breath, Eyes, Memory, for example, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s use of Igbo words and idioms in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, or Junot Díaz’s slangy, musical, Dominican remake of the language in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Children wait to participate in Indian Independence day celebrations. Photograph: Jagadeesh Nv/EPA
I found myself in conversation, so to speak, with a great forerunner, EM Forster’s A Passage to India. I had admired this novel even before I had the great good fortune, as an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, to meet Morgan Forster himself, who was in residence there as an honorary fellow, and was generously and kindly encouraging when I shyly admitted that I wanted to write. But as I began to write my “India book” – for a while I didn’t even know what it was called – I understood that Forsterian English, so cool, so precise, would not do for me. It would not do, I thought, for India. India is not cool. India is hot. It’s hot and noisy and odorous and crowded and excessive. How could I represent that on the page? I asked myself. What would a hot, noisy, odorous, crowded, excessive English sound like? How would it read? The novel I wrote was my best effort to answer that question.
The question of crowdedness needed a formal answer as well as a linguistic one. Multitude is the most obvious fact about the subcontinent. Everywhere you go, there’s a throng of humanity. How could a novel embrace the idea of such multitude? My answer was to tell a crowd of stories, deliberately to overcrowd the narrative, so that “my” story, the main thrust of the novel, would need to push its way, so to speak, through a crowd of other stories. There are small, secondary characters and peripheral incidents in the book that could be expanded into longer narratives of their own. This kind of deliberate “wasting” of material was intentional. This was my hubbub, my maelstrom, my crowd.
When I started writing, the family at the heart of the novel was much more like my family than it is now. However, the characters felt oddly lifeless and inert. So I started making them unlike the people on whom they were modelled, and at once they began to come to life. For example, I did have an aunt who married a Pakistani general, who, in real life, was one of the founders, and the first chief, of the much feared ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But as far as I know he was not involved in planning or executing a military coup, with or without the help of pepper pots. So that story was fiction. At least I think it was.
Saleem Sinai went to my school. He also lived, in Bombay, in my childhood home, in my old neighbourhood, and is just eight weeks younger than me. His childhood friends are composites of children I knew when I was young. Once, after a reading in Bombay, a man came up to me and said: “Hello, Salman. I’m Hairoil.” He wasn’t wrong. The character of Hairoil Sabarmati, or at least Hairoil’s neatly oiled and parted hair, had indeed been based on him. But he had never been nicknamed Hairoil in real life. That was something I made up for the novel. I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that my childhood friend introduced himself to me by a fictional name. Especially as he had lost all his hair.
I found myself in conversation, so to speak, with a great forerunner, EM Forster’s A Passage to India. I had admired this novel even before I had the great good fortune, as an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, to meet Morgan Forster himself, who was in residence there as an honorary fellow, and was generously and kindly encouraging when I shyly admitted that I wanted to write. But as I began to write my “India book” – for a while I didn’t even know what it was called – I understood that Forsterian English, so cool, so precise, would not do for me. It would not do, I thought, for India. India is not cool. India is hot. It’s hot and noisy and odorous and crowded and excessive. How could I represent that on the page? I asked myself. What would a hot, noisy, odorous, crowded, excessive English sound like? How would it read? The novel I wrote was my best effort to answer that question.
The question of crowdedness needed a formal answer as well as a linguistic one. Multitude is the most obvious fact about the subcontinent. Everywhere you go, there’s a throng of humanity. How could a novel embrace the idea of such multitude? My answer was to tell a crowd of stories, deliberately to overcrowd the narrative, so that “my” story, the main thrust of the novel, would need to push its way, so to speak, through a crowd of other stories. There are small, secondary characters and peripheral incidents in the book that could be expanded into longer narratives of their own. This kind of deliberate “wasting” of material was intentional. This was my hubbub, my maelstrom, my crowd.
When I started writing, the family at the heart of the novel was much more like my family than it is now. However, the characters felt oddly lifeless and inert. So I started making them unlike the people on whom they were modelled, and at once they began to come to life. For example, I did have an aunt who married a Pakistani general, who, in real life, was one of the founders, and the first chief, of the much feared ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But as far as I know he was not involved in planning or executing a military coup, with or without the help of pepper pots. So that story was fiction. At least I think it was.
Saleem Sinai went to my school. He also lived, in Bombay, in my childhood home, in my old neighbourhood, and is just eight weeks younger than me. His childhood friends are composites of children I knew when I was young. Once, after a reading in Bombay, a man came up to me and said: “Hello, Salman. I’m Hairoil.” He wasn’t wrong. The character of Hairoil Sabarmati, or at least Hairoil’s neatly oiled and parted hair, had indeed been based on him. But he had never been nicknamed Hairoil in real life. That was something I made up for the novel. I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that my childhood friend introduced himself to me by a fictional name. Especially as he had lost all his hair.
Bombay ... a hubub, a maelstrom. Photograph: Galit Seligmann/AlamyBut in spite of these echoes, Saleem and I are unalike. For one thing, our lives took very different directions. Mine led me abroad to England and eventually to America. But Saleem never leaves the subcontinent. His life is contained within, and defined by, the borders of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As a final proof that my character and I are not one and the same, I offer another anecdote. When I was in Delhi to do one of the first Indian readings from Midnight’s Children, I heard a woman’s voice cry loudly as I walked out on to the stage: “Oh! But he’s got a perfectly ordinary nose!”
Forty years is a long time. I have to say that India is no longer the country of this novel. When I wrote Midnight’s Children I had in mind an arc of history moving from the hope – the bloodied hope, but still the hope – of independence to the betrayal of that hope in the so-called Emergency, followed by the birth of a new hope. India today, to someone of my mind, has entered an even darker phase than the Emergency years. The horrifying escalation of assaults on women, the increasingly authoritarian character of the state, the unjustifiable arrests of people who dare to stand against that authoritarianism, the religious fanaticism, the rewriting of history to fit the narrative of those who want to transform India into a Hindu-nationalist, majoritarian state, and the popularity of the regime in spite of it all, or, worse, perhaps because of it all – these things encourage a kind of despair.
When I wrote this book I could associate big-nosed Saleem with the elephant-trunked god Ganesh, the patron deity of literature, among other things, and that felt perfectly easy and natural even though Saleem was not a Hindu. All of India belonged to all of us, or so I deeply believed. And still believe, even though the rise of a brutal sectarianism believes otherwise. But I find hope in the determination of India’s women and college students to resist that sectarianism, to reclaim the old, secular India and dismiss the darkness. I wish them well. But right now, in India, it’s midnight again.
Saturday 3 November 2018
Wednesday 27 December 2017
Saturday 15 February 2014
The ‘Pulping’ Of Thought
That Penguin has decided to pulp Wendy Doniger's The Hindus should come as no surprise...
This article is not about the content of Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. That debate, I am sure, will happen. This article is about the larger context within which, Penguin, the publisher of the book, decided to call it a day and reach an agreement with the little known Siksha Bachao Samiti which had found the book offensive to Hindu religious sensibilities. That Penguin has decided to pulp The Hindus should come as no surprise. Rather one must praise Penguin for fighting it out for four long years when many others surrendered meekly or were more than happy to oblige the government of the day.
This was waiting to happen. The signs were ominously clear. Remember James Laine’s book on Shivaji and its aftermath when the Sambhaji Brigade hoodlums decided that it reflected badly on their Maratha icon. Or consider the cowardly capitulation of the Symbiosis institute in cancelling the screening of Jashn- e-Azadi, again due to pressures from right wing Hindu groups. Consider again, the VC of Madras University succumbing to threats from a lunatic Muslim fringe and not letting Amina Wadud speak on the campus. In each of these cases, the method has been similar: religious or nationalist groups have approached the state that their ‘feelings’ are hurt, the state through the police or the courts has tried to convince institutions and individuals not to create a ‘law and order’ problem and the institutions have more than obliged. More than being a ‘republic of hurt’, we are in this present mess because the state has abdicated its responsibility to protect freedom and dissent.
------
Also read The Silencing of Liberal India
------
In the neo-liberal dispensation, the state has taken a managerial turn. It is no longer interested in ideological positioning towards the creation and inculcation of a modern citizenry. Rather, it has become post ideological in the sense that it is only interested in the management of a problem. In this kind of a resolution, ' community sentiments', no matter how dumb they may be, become the defining resolution. There is no creative engagement with the problem, but only postponing of the problem through an appeasement of the worst possible kind. The state has not withered away, but consciously abdicated itself, leaving matters of democracy and dissent to de dealt and debated by communities. In our case, religious communities are hardly amenable to a rational debate.
Spokespersons of gods, they appropriate for themselves what is good or bad for their respective communities; they define the boundaries of free speech and limits of tolerance. If critique is central to modernity, then our principal critique should be directed towards religion. But the more important question to ask is whether one can do it in a context where the state is arraigned against the critic. We are perhaps looking into a bleak future: a future without criticality, engaged writing, meaningful publishing, ability to talk and think. Some have called this state of affairs as fascism.
What is equally problematic is the academic credibility that this managerial turn of the state gets through fashionable terms like multiculturalism. Acceptance of different faith communities must be promoted, but it should not preclude the right to criticise what one finds retrograde or purely abhorrent in a particular religious or cultural tradition. In the name of promoting and practising multiculturalism, there has emerged a culture of silence around issues which need to be critiqued and roundly condemned. Tolerance (which is itself a problematic word) of different cultural traditions should not mean tolerance of anti- women, anti- gay attitudes present within different cultures. Added to this is also the managerial turn of some activists who claim to have created alternative spaces for articulating dissent, freedom and resistance. Before we knew that Tarun Tejpal was more interested in profits (of different kinds) rather than in making us think through his ‘thinkfest’, there was the Jaipur literary festival. The meek abject surrender by the organisers which we witnessed when Salman Rushdie was not allowed to speak at the festival speaks volumes about their politics and conviction. One is tempted to ask the need for this alternative space when it cannot speak out against religious bigotry.
Freedoms of thought, freedom to hear and be heard are values which must be defended if India is to become a better democracy. And where religious communities are concerned, freedom to critique, provoke and even offend should be understood as an inalienable part of freedom of expression.
Wednesday 12 February 2014
The silencing of liberal India
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express
Yet another book withdrawn and pulped by the publisher under pressure. The “pulping” of Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, is the pulping of liberal India. The agreement by the publisher to withdraw it is like putting a contract out on free expression. In India you publish at your peril. It is in a shockingly long line of books and art withdrawn from free circulation one way or the other, sometimes against the law, sometimes in the garb of law.
India is a democracy, but its reputation as a bastion of liberal values is dimming by the day. The argumentative Indian is being replaced by the offended Indian, the tolerant Indian by the intolerant mob, the reflective citizen by the hurt communal mobiliser, the courageous Indian by the cowardly thug who needs the state to protect it against every argument, the pious Indian by the ultimate blasphemer who thinks he needs to protect the gods rather than the gods being there to protect him. Whether this is a tiny minority or represents the majority is beside the point. The point is that the assault on free expression is winning. How is liberal India being silenced?
Liberal India is being silenced because its joy at exposing hypocrisy is far greater than its commitment to defending freedom. Every time a book is under assault, the same tiresome argument breaks out. “Oh, you did not speak when so and so was banned. You did not speak when Taslima Nasreen was the target, or when Jitender Bhargava was ordered to withdraw his book on Air India.” Or there is the partisan division: you did not object to what the Congress did to Salman Rushdie, or the CPM in West Bengal.
The point is that we spend all our psychic energies in exposing each other, not in defending values. If freedom is to survive, we have to set aside this debate on hypocrisy. It devours all energy. But it also legitimises the disposition that is at the heart of banning books: a fragile ego that takes joy in revenge, rather than taking pride in freedom. Let us get on with the task of defending the core values.
Liberal India has been silenced because it never understood that toleration does not, to use Govind Ranade’s phrase, come in halves. You cannot pick and choose when to be tolerant. You cannot choose to be tolerant along partisan lines. Neither can you choose to be tolerant based on what you think are distinctions between good and bad scholarship, serious and scurrilous books. These distinctions are a good basis for criticism; they are not the best basis for deciding whom the law will protect. And R.V. Bhasin, author of a banned book on Islam, will be protected as much as Wendy Doniger. And so it should be. If you want a hundred flowers to bloom, a few weeds will grow as well.
Liberal India has been silenced because the one institution that needs to protect it constantly fails: the courts. Civil society and politics have a lot to answer for. But the incentives to mobilise around the banning of books have largely been created by the laws and by the convoluted jurisprudence of the courts. A law that signals that it is open to banning books will incite mobilisations to ban books. If the state gives the category of taking easy “offence” such aid and succour, offence will be easily taken.
In the case of Doniger’s book, there seems to have been no threat of the book provoking large-scale violence. Despite protest and criticism, the book has been in circulation. But more importantly, the courts have sown the seeds of further confusion. For example, the Bombay High Court judgment on the Bhasin case upheld the idea that it is “no defence that the writing contains a truthful account of past events or is supported by good authority.” Courts uphold the idea that the criticism of religion must only be “academic”, whatever that means. Lampooing is part of legitimate criticism.
While banning the novel, Dharamkaarana, they showed no regard for the artistic integrity of the work. Courts should be the bully pulpit of constitutional values. They should draw strong lines protecting freedom. No wonder liberals worry that the court will not rescue them. No wonder the mere threat of litigation is a dampener on free expression.
Liberal India has been silenced by professional offence-mongers. Those who now claim to speak on behalf of communities use every trick they can to silence. There is often the threat of violence. The use of law is not, in this instance, an exercise of citizens’ rights. It is the use of law as a tactic of intimidation. Often, these groups have the implicit backing of political parties. No political party in Maharashtra stood up for the rights of scholars. As a result of the James Laine episode, most publishers do not want to even touch books on Shivaji.
The BJP’s relationship with groups that initiate these mobilisations has often been one of plausible deniability. It gives aid and succour to vicious offence mongering, it legitimises this contrived narrative of Hindu hurt. All it needs to do to overcome these suspicions is come clean and emphatically state that it does not support the “withdrawal” of books. We do not need political parties that take on the garb of liberalism by avoiding issues; we need political parties that actually defend liberal values.
Liberal India has been let down by its publishers. If major presses like Oxford University Press (OUP) and Penguin cave in to the threat of litigation so easily and fail to take matters up to the Supreme Court, it will become easier for people to intimidate. Recall OUP’s conduct in the case of the Calcutta High Court banning a scholarly monograph by Hans Dembowski on the judiciary. Indian business is supine because it feels politically vulnerable at so many different levels.
Liberal India has been silenced by its educators. The extraordinary failure of the project of liberal education is manifesting itself in the pathology of liberal institutions. If so many of India’s educated middle classes, which inhabit key institutions like the judiciary, bureaucracy, media, are so confused about basic constitutional values, if they are so content at liberty being abridged, one by one, you have to wonder about liberal education.
The fact that universities themselves did not remain exemplars of criticism, that they banished a healthy engagement with tradition has meant that the most ignorant and violent have now become the custodians of tradition. Wendy Doniger could not have damaged Hindus. But if Liberal India dies, Hinduism will die as well.
Wednesday 11 September 2013
The right to Offend
Pritish Nandy in The Times of India
Implicit in the freedoms we cherish in our democracy is our right to offend. (Editor - Is this so?) That is the cornerstone of all free thought and its expression. In a country as beautiful and complex as ours, it is our inalienable right to offend that makes us the nation we are. Of course I also recognise the fact that this right attaches to itself many risks, including the risk of being targeted. But as long as these risks are within reasonable, well defined limits, most people will take them in their stride. I am ready to defend my right to offend in any debate or a court of law. But it’s not fine when mobs come to lynch you. It’s not right, when they vandalise your home or burn your books or art or stop you from showing your film or, what’s becoming more frequent, hire thugs to kill you. Authors, journalists, painters, and now even activists and rationalists are being openly attacked and murdered.
It’s a constant challenge to walk the tightrope; to know exactly where to draw the line when you write, paint, speak.(Editor - Isn't this contradictory to the implicit right to offend statement at the introduction?) The funny thing is truth has no limits, no frontiers. When you want to say something you strongly believe in, there is no point where you can stop. The truth is always whole. When you draw a line, as discretion suggests, you encourage half truths and falsehoods being foisted on others, you subvert your conscience. In some cases it’s not even possible to draw a line. A campaigner against corruption can never stop midway through his campaign even though he knows exactly at which point the truth invites danger, extreme danger. Yet India is a brave nation and there are many common people, ordinary citizens with hardly any resources and no one to protect them who are ready to go out on a limb and say it as it is. They are the ones who keep our democracy burning bright.
Every few days you read about a journalist killed. About RTI activists murdered for exposing what is in the public interest. You read about people campaigning for a cause (like Narendra Dabholkar, who fought against superstitions, human sacrifices, babas and tantriks) being gunned down in cold blood. Even before the police can start investigations, the crime is invariably politicised. Issues of religion, caste, community, political affiliation are dragged in only to complicate (read obfuscate) the crime and, before you know it, the story dies because some other, even more ugly crime is committed somewhere else and draws away the headlines and your attention. And when that happens, criminals get away. We are today an attention deficit nation because there’s so much happening everywhere, all pretty awful stuff, that it’s impossible for anyone to stay focused.
Even fame and success can’t protect you. Dr Dabholkar was a renowned rationalist, a man of immaculate credentials. Yet he was gunned down by fanatics who thought he was endangering their trade in cheating poor and gullible people. Husain was our greatest living painter. He was forced into exile in his 80s because zealots refused to let him live and work in peace here. They vandalised his art; hunted down his shows, ransacked them. Yet Husain, as I knew him, was as ardent a Hindu as anyone else. His paintings on the Mahabharata are the stuff legends are made of. A pusillanimous Government lacked the will to intervene.
Another bunch of jerks made it impossible for Salman Rushdie to attend a litfest in Jaipur. Or go to Kolkata because Mamata Banerjee wanted to appease a certain section of her vote bank. For the same reason Taslima Nasreen was thrown out of Kolkata in 2007 by the CPM Government. Even local cartoonists in the state are today terrified to exercise their right to offend simply because Mamata has no sense of humour. Remember the young college girl on a TV show who asked her an inconvenient question? Remember how she reacted?
When we deny ourselves the right to offend, we deny ourselves the possibility of change. That’s how societies become brutal, moribund, disgustingly boring. Is this what you want? If the answer is No and you want to stay a free citizen, insist on your right to offend. If enough people do that, change is not just inevitable. It's assured. And change is what defines a living culture.
Implicit in the freedoms we cherish in our democracy is our right to offend. (Editor - Is this so?) That is the cornerstone of all free thought and its expression. In a country as beautiful and complex as ours, it is our inalienable right to offend that makes us the nation we are. Of course I also recognise the fact that this right attaches to itself many risks, including the risk of being targeted. But as long as these risks are within reasonable, well defined limits, most people will take them in their stride. I am ready to defend my right to offend in any debate or a court of law. But it’s not fine when mobs come to lynch you. It’s not right, when they vandalise your home or burn your books or art or stop you from showing your film or, what’s becoming more frequent, hire thugs to kill you. Authors, journalists, painters, and now even activists and rationalists are being openly attacked and murdered.
It’s a constant challenge to walk the tightrope; to know exactly where to draw the line when you write, paint, speak.(Editor - Isn't this contradictory to the implicit right to offend statement at the introduction?) The funny thing is truth has no limits, no frontiers. When you want to say something you strongly believe in, there is no point where you can stop. The truth is always whole. When you draw a line, as discretion suggests, you encourage half truths and falsehoods being foisted on others, you subvert your conscience. In some cases it’s not even possible to draw a line. A campaigner against corruption can never stop midway through his campaign even though he knows exactly at which point the truth invites danger, extreme danger. Yet India is a brave nation and there are many common people, ordinary citizens with hardly any resources and no one to protect them who are ready to go out on a limb and say it as it is. They are the ones who keep our democracy burning bright.
Every few days you read about a journalist killed. About RTI activists murdered for exposing what is in the public interest. You read about people campaigning for a cause (like Narendra Dabholkar, who fought against superstitions, human sacrifices, babas and tantriks) being gunned down in cold blood. Even before the police can start investigations, the crime is invariably politicised. Issues of religion, caste, community, political affiliation are dragged in only to complicate (read obfuscate) the crime and, before you know it, the story dies because some other, even more ugly crime is committed somewhere else and draws away the headlines and your attention. And when that happens, criminals get away. We are today an attention deficit nation because there’s so much happening everywhere, all pretty awful stuff, that it’s impossible for anyone to stay focused.
Even fame and success can’t protect you. Dr Dabholkar was a renowned rationalist, a man of immaculate credentials. Yet he was gunned down by fanatics who thought he was endangering their trade in cheating poor and gullible people. Husain was our greatest living painter. He was forced into exile in his 80s because zealots refused to let him live and work in peace here. They vandalised his art; hunted down his shows, ransacked them. Yet Husain, as I knew him, was as ardent a Hindu as anyone else. His paintings on the Mahabharata are the stuff legends are made of. A pusillanimous Government lacked the will to intervene.
Another bunch of jerks made it impossible for Salman Rushdie to attend a litfest in Jaipur. Or go to Kolkata because Mamata Banerjee wanted to appease a certain section of her vote bank. For the same reason Taslima Nasreen was thrown out of Kolkata in 2007 by the CPM Government. Even local cartoonists in the state are today terrified to exercise their right to offend simply because Mamata has no sense of humour. Remember the young college girl on a TV show who asked her an inconvenient question? Remember how she reacted?
When we deny ourselves the right to offend, we deny ourselves the possibility of change. That’s how societies become brutal, moribund, disgustingly boring. Is this what you want? If the answer is No and you want to stay a free citizen, insist on your right to offend. If enough people do that, change is not just inevitable. It's assured. And change is what defines a living culture.
Saturday 13 April 2013
Is Imran Khan a Fascist?
Pakistan: Myths and consequences
The Islamic and irrationally anti-Indian elements in the self-image of the Pakistani state have led it down a self-destructive path.
Salman Rushdie famously said that Pakistan was “insufficiently imagined”. To say that a state is insufficiently imagined is to run into thorny questions regarding the appropriate quantum of imagination needed by any state; there is no single answer and at their edges (internal or external), all states and all imaginings are contested. But while the mythology used to justify any state is elastic and details vary in every case, it is not infinitely elastic and all options are not equally workable. I will argue that Pakistan in particular was insufficiently imagined prior to birth; that once it came into being, the mythology favoured by its establishment proved to be self-destructive; and that it must be corrected (surreptitiously if need be, openly if possible) in order to permit the emergence of workable solutions to myriad common post-colonial problems.
In state sponsored textbooks it is claimed that Pakistan was established because two separate nations lived in India — one of the Muslims and the other of the Hindus (or Muslims and non-Muslims, to be more accurate) and the Muslims needed a separate state to develop individually and collectively. That the two “nations” lived mixed up with each other in a vast subcontinent and were highly heterogeneous were considered minor details. What was important was the fact that the Muslim elite of North India (primarily Turk and Afghan in origin) entered India as conquerors from ‘Islamic’ lands. And even though they then settled in India and intermarried with locals and evolved a new Indo-Muslim identity, they remained a separate nation from the locals. More surprisingly, those locals who converted to the faith of the conquerors also became a separate nation, even as they continued to live in their ancestral lands alongside their unconverted neighbours. Accompanying this was the belief that the last millennium of Indian history was a period of Muslim rule followed by a period of British rule. Little mention was made of the fact that the relatively unified rule of the Delhi Sultanate and the Moghul empire (both of which can be fairly characterised as “Muslim rule”, Hindu generals, satraps and ministers notwithstanding) collapsed in the 18th century to be replaced in large sections of India by the Maratha empire, and then by the Sikh Kingdom of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
During British rule the cultural goods of the North Indian Muslim elite (Urdu language, literate “high church” Islam, Islamicate social customs, a sense of separateness and a sense of superiority to the ‘natives’) became more of a model for the emerging Muslim middle class. But even as many leading lights of the North Indian Muslim community fought hard to promote what they saw as “Muslim interests”, they were also attracted by the emerging notion of a modern and democratic Indian whole. Some of these leaders (including Jinnah) simultaneously espoused elements of Muslim nationalism and secularised Indian nationalism and sometimes went back and forth between these ideals or tried to aim for a synthesis. Some of this multi-tasking was undoubtedly the result of sophisticated political calculation by very smart people, but it must not be forgotten that a lot of it was also a reflection of the half-formed and still evolving nature of these categories.
In this confused and somewhat chaotic setting it is hard to argue that any particular outcome was inevitable or pre-ordained. But the tension between the Muslim elite’s sense of Muslim distinctiveness (a sense cultivated by the British rulers for their own purposes at every step) on the one hand and emerging Indian nationalism dominated by Hindus on the other, led some Muslims to think about various schemes of separation. Allama Iqbal, for example, imagined a separate Muslim country in the Northwest that would serve as India’s martial bulwark against central Asian marauders, while also acting as a laboratory for the development of an as yet uncreated Islamicate culture of his dreams. In this dream, Islam is not a static revealed truth; it is an evolving idea, a fire in the minds of men that drives them to endlessly create something new and heroic, yet rooted and eternal. The audience for this romantic but sophisticated fantasy was necessarily small, but less sophisticated versions of this vision played a role in exciting the minds of many young and newly-educated men during the movement for Pakistan.
Other visions of Pakistan were cruder and more literal minded and imagined a state where perfect Islamic law (already revealed and written in books, waiting to be applied as it had once been applied in the golden ages past) replaced “failed heathen systems”. Since no orthodox school of Sunni Islamic law had actually evolved beyond medieval models there was no way those blueprints could create a working modern state. But these mythical visions had played a prominent role in the propaganda of the Muslim league and they prepared the ground in which crude Salafist fantasies would find traction in the years to come.
The historian Ayesha Jalal has convincingly argued that Mr. Jinnah in fact wanted to use the threat of partition as a bargaining ploy to secure more rights for the Muslim political elite within united India. In this view, Mr. Jinnah and his lieutenants had never fully answered the many objections that were raised against the partition scheme because they never really expected the scheme to be carried out, but via a complicated series of mistakes and miscalculations on all sides, partition ended up becoming a reality.
Pakistan as it was created did not really overlap the domain of the North Indian Muslim elite who had been the main drivers of this demand. One way to solve this problem was to imagine the actually existing Pakistan as a transitional phase between British India and the re-establishment of some future Delhi sultanate (this crackpot scheme being the official ideology of the Zaid Hamid faction of Paknationalism). The other was to imagine that the cultural heritage of the Delhi Sultanate has now been transferred in toto to Pakistan by the North Indian Muslim elite and would grow and prosper here as the unifying culture of Pakistan. This package frequently included conscious or unconscious disdain for the existing cultures of Bengal, Punjab, Sindh, Pakhtoonkhwa and Baluchistan, and an irrational determination to expiate any sign of ‘Indian-ness’ in the greater cause of Urdu-speaking North Indian Muslim high culture.
The Bengalis found this so hard to swallow that they opted out of the experiment altogether. And in spite of the creation of a pan-Pakistan middle class that has been acculturated into a (necessarily shallow) version of North Indian Urdu culture, these contradictions remain potent in the West as well. Separatist movements are one consequence of this attempt to impose a shallow and partly imaginary Pakistani nationalism on existing cultures; a more insidious consequence is the accelerated decay of deeply rooted cultural frameworks and the growth of shallow Saudi or Western (or mixed-up) cultural tendencies in the resulting vacuum.
Other contradictions at the heart of the “two-nation theory” proved equally deadly in the long run. Pakistan had been created utilising the language of Muslim separatism and the millenarian excitement generated by the promise of a “Muslim state”. And even at the outset, these ideas were not just convenient tools for the elite to achieve economic objectives (a view common among leftists). The elite itself was Muslim. To varying extents, its members shared the myths of past greatness and future Islamic revival that they had just used to obtain a state for themselves. In a world where modern European institutions and ideas were taken for granted even by relatively orthodox upper class Muslims, the disruptive political possibilities hidden in orthodox Islamism were not easily appreciated and dreams of Islamic revival could take on almost any form.
Most hardcore Islamists had not supported the Pakistan movement precisely because they regarded the Muslim League leadership as Westernised modernists ignorant of orthodox Islamic thought. But they were quick to realise that Pakistan was a natural laboratory for their Islamic experiments. The fact that fantasies of Islamic rule had been projected as models for the state made it very difficult to argue against those who claimed to speak in the name of pure Islam. Besides, orthodox Islamists possessed the twin notions of apostasy and blasphemy that are extremely potent tools to suppress any challenge to Islamic orthodoxy. These tools create problems in all modern Muslim states, but they are especially hard to resist in a state supposedly created so that Islamic ideals could “order the collective life of Muslims in the light of the Quran and Sunnah” (to quote the Objectives Resolution). Consequently the modern Pakistani state has slowly but steadily ceded ideological ground to Islamists who can legitimately claim to be closer to the Islam described in orthodox books and taught in orthodox schools.
This rise of Islamic politics was not an overnight process. In fact Left wing slogans had far more appeal in the first 30 years of Pakistan than any Islamic slogan. But the Islamists proved far-sighted and persistent and used a succession of wedge issues to insert their agenda into national politics. From the anti-Ahmedi agitation of 1953 to the successful effort to declare them non-Muslim in 1974; and from the free-lance enforcement of blasphemy laws in British times (albeit one that prominent Muslim leaders including Allama Iqbal supported in the Ilm Deen case in the 1920s) to the powerful instrument of legal intimidation, bullying and state-sponsored murder created by General Zia in the 1980s, the Islamists have steadily tightened their grip. Having adopted Islam and irrational denial of our own Indian-ness as core elements of the state, the ‘modern’ factions of the establishment lack the vocabulary to answer the fanatics. This has allowed a relatively small number of Islamist officers to promote wildly dangerous policies (like training half a million armed Islamic fanatics in the 1990s) without saner elements being able to stop them. This unique “own-goal”, unprecedented in the history of modern states, is impossible to understand without reference to the Islamic and irrationally anti-Indian element in the self-image of the Pakistani state.
---------------------
Pakistan and its Stories
I recently wrote a piece titled “Pakistan, myths and consequences”, in which I argued that Pakistan’s founding myths (whether present at birth or fashioned retroactively) make it unusually difficult to resist those who want to impose various dangerous ideas upon the state in the name of Islam. The argument was not that Pakistan exists in some parallel dimension where economic and political factors that operate in the rest of the world play no role. But rather that the usual problems of twenty-first century post-colonial countries (problems that may prove overwhelming even where Islamism plays no role) are made significantly worse by the imposition upon them of a flawed and dangerous “Paknationalist-Islamic” framework. Without that framework Pakistan would still be a third world country facing immense challenges. But with this framework we are committed to an ideological cul-de-sac that devalues existing cultural strengths and sharpens existing religious problems (including the Shia-Sunni divide and the use of blasphemy laws to persecute minorities). Not only do these creation myths have negative consequences (as partly enumerated in the above-linked article) but they also have very little positive content. There is really no such thing as a specifically Islamic or “Pakistani” blueprint for running a modern state. None. Nada. Nothing. There is no there there. Yet school textbooks, official propaganda and everyday political speech in Pakistan endlessly refer to some imaginary “Islamic model” of administration and statecraft. Since no such model exists, we are condemned to hypocritically mouthing meaningless and destructive Paknationalist and Islamist slogans while simultaneously (and almost surreptitiously) trying to operate modern Western constitutional, legal and economic models.
This argument is anathema to Pakistani nationalists, Islamists and neo-Islamists (e.g. Imran Khan, who believes a truly Islamic state would look something like Sweden without the half-naked women) but it is also uncomfortable for upper class Leftists educated in Western universities. Their objections matter to me because they are my friends and family, so I will try to answer some of them here. These friends have pointed out to me that:
- India is not much better.
- The US systematically supported Islamists in Pakistan and pushed for the suppression of leftist and progressive intellectuals for decades.
- Colonialism.
About the India objection, I believe that objection misses the point. The Indian subcontinent is all a work in progress. Every nation has miles to go. We are by far the largest repository of REALLY poor people on planet earth. Indians (defined as anyone belonging to the wider Indian genetic and civilisational cluster, hence including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan) are the most numerous population group on earth (outnumbering the Chinese by hundreds of millions) and living standards in greater India are barely ahead of “sub-Saharan Africa” (which admittedly includes South Africa, so the category is rather heterogeneous and misleading) and social and economic problems are correspondingly huge.
Culturally too, it is a remarkably heterogeneous and variegated civilization (though still recognizably “Indian”) and the modern Indian state is very far from being a model for anyone. While its founding myth and ideal are positive ideals (multicultural, secular, democratic India) its actual practice is frequently very far from those ideals. But if and when India approaches its ideal, it will have improved. And its ideal draws upon the same vast storehouse of experimentation and theorization to which every other modern country and culture contributes and from which they all draw their lessons. That India is not much better is expected. But it is swimming the same river as everyone else and with time, may swim better. It may even contribute some original ideas of its own to the great (and frequently bloody and unjust) ongoing project of human social organization in the 21st century CE. But what is (ostensibly) being attempted in Pakistan is something different. IF the “ideology of Pakistan” propaganda is taken remotely seriously then something not yet in existence elsewhere is to be created in Pakistan. This will be something religious, Islamic, republican, democratic, socialist, capitalist and fair (all elements may not apply). In principle one must concede the possibility that Pakistan and its leading intellectuals will craft something new, different and better than anything that exists elsewhere in Europe or Asia today. In practice one can take one look at said intellectuals and, well, enough said.
The US has indeed played a large (and usually negative) role in Pakistani politics (and continues to play a large role). But while US imperial intervention is a fact of life, it is not (and has never been) omnipotent or omniscient. Many countries have maneuvered from a position of dependency to one of near-independence. Pakistani nationalism and its supposedly Islamic ideal are neither a necessary result of US intervention, nor its best antithesis. The Pakistani bourgeoisie can and should dump both and still figure out how to manage US intervention.
Colonialism I will leave to the post-colonialists.
There are limits to what can be discussed on a highly educated liberal blog without getting lost in translation.
Finally, a recent concrete illustration of how the founding myths work to alter the direction of events in Pakistan.
A couple of days ago, prominent journalist (and Islamist Paknationalist) Ansar Abbasi wrote a front page “expose” in the daily The News, owned and operated by the supposedly modern and forward looking “Jang Group” (the largest media group in Pakistan). In this article, he announced that the Punjab government (led by the right-of-center Pakistan Muslim League-N; a party that is no stranger to using Islamist and Paknationalist propaganda) had deleted some “Islamic” chapters from the 10th grade Urdu language textbook for 2013. His litany of complaints included the following:
The second chapter in the old edition was on ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ written by Dr Ghulam Mustafa Khan. This important chapter highlighted the basis for the creation of Pakistan and endorsed that the country was created in the name of Islam, to make it an Islamic state, has been replaced by a new chapter on ‘Princess of Paristan’ (Paristan ki shahzadi) written by Ashraf Saboohi.
… Poetry of a Indian poet Firaq Gorakhpuri has been included in the text book and the poet is presented as a hero awarded by the Indian and Russian governments.
While the title page of the book contains the picture of Allama Iqbal, it does not contain any poem of the great poet of Islam and Pakistan. Excluding extremely impressive Islamic poetry, the new text book, however starts with a Hamd (praise of Almighty Allah) and Naat (praise of Hazrat Muhammad — PBUH).
Keep in mind that this is a textbook meant for the Urdu language class, not the Islamic studies or Pakistan studies class. One day after the publication of this attack (and its amplification on social media, especially by supporters of Imran Khan) chief minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered the “Islamic chapters” reinstated. It took less than 24 hours for matters to be corrected.
Cricketer and philanthropist Imran Khan has recently become very popular among young people educated through these textbooks. His current policy is to be all things to all people and his manifesto is progressive and liberal and completely skips the topic of Islam and the so-called ideology of Pakistan. While it is unlikely that he will overcome various hurdles and become the leading party in the coming elections, even if his party were to somehow sweep into power it will never be able to resist demands couched in the idiom of Islam and Pakistan. This is because neither he nor his fans have any vocabulary with which they can counter arguments that are obviously in line with orthodox Islam and behind which looms the specter of blasphemy and apostasy. Within their circles, some of these people can and do have conversations about modern Islam and the need to counter “extremism”, but when someone like Ansar Abbasi becomes aggressive, they will have to back down.In fact, their fate is likely to be worse than Shahbaz Sharif's because they want to achieve their modern Scandinavian Islamic state without resort to “dirty politics” or hypocrisy. It is very hard to square that circlewith resort to dirty politics and hypocrisy…without them, it is likely to be impossible.
(Listen from the 1:20 mark onwards)
Finally, it is not my claim that there is something essentially barbaric about “Islam” which makes an “Islamic” solution impossible. Islam is what Muslims make of it. It has been made many things in the past and will be made into many things in the future. But intellectual development in orthodox mainstream Sunni Islam has been moribund for centuries. This is partly due to the unusual success of blasphemy and apostasy memes that were meant to protect orthodoxy from criticism but have also made it sterile. I do not think that this is a permanent state of affairs. There are already glimmers of change. Much more will happen as orthodox controls loosen. But the time frame of that renaissance and the immediate needs of the Pakistani state do not coincide. For now, we have to stay away from Islamism or we are going to end up with Munawwar Hassan’sIslam. That’s just how things happen to be at this point in history.
History was old and rusted, it was a machine nobody had plugged in for thousands of years, and here all of a sudden it was being asked for maximum output. Nobody was surprised that there were accidents…
—Salman Rushdie, Shame
Omar Ali is a Pakistani-American physician who also moderates the “Asiapeace” discussion group on the internet. This article first appeared on 3Quarksdaily. The paintings are by Punjabi artist Shahid Mirza
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)