Rewriting history in the land of immigrants

Nope. The title of this post should not lead you to think that this is about trump and the United States of America.  Though, yes, that could work too.

It is about another land of immigrants. One of the oldest ever.

I quoted that country's Supreme Court back in 2011:

While North America (USA and Canada) has new immigrants who came mainly from Europe over the last four or five centuries, India is a country of old immigrants in which people have been coming in over the last ten thousand years or so. Probably about 92 per cent of the people living in India today are descendants of immigrants, who came mainly from the North-West, and to a lesser extent from the North-East.

Yep, this post is about the fascist and his party in the old country. 

modi, the fascist, was elected a couple of years after that remark by the Supreme Court.  And, boy have things changed in a hurry in India. The overwhelmingly majority Hindu population seems to have gladly signed on to the fascist politics!

After coming to power, they quickly started rewriting India's history itself, very much consistent with George Orwell's warning in 1984, in which he wrote: "Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." 

Rewriting history, in which Winston Smith was employed, has always been a favorite of those fascist thugs.  And that is exactly what is unfolding in India now.

During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.
The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.

Instead of the fictional Winston Smith, you have numerous modi's toadies working on this grand project. 

Where do non-Hindus fit into this history that is being rewritten?

For India’s Muslims, who have pointed to incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous.
The head of Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.” “The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”

Yep, who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future.

A park. An elderly Muslim. Hindu religious music. Bad mix!

I typically reach the park well before dawn breaks.  It is warm even at that hour, with an occasional breeze.

But, I am rarely ever the only person that early at the park.  I am even more amazed at the sight of women, walking alone by themselves, that early.  At least this part of the old country is far away from the rape news geography.

Slowly they come.  In ones and twos, and by the tens as the sunlight begins to stream in.  One of those I have seen every morning is an older gentleman who walks slowly with his right hand holding a cane.  Always clad in the same outfit--a white lungi, a white shirt, and a white Islamic skullcap.

When I see that older Muslim gent, I become all the more ticked off at the public address system.  Why?  Let me explain.

This is a public park.  A government owned and maintained park.  Yet, throughout the more than an hour that I am there, they blast--very loudly--Hindu religious music.  Only Hindu religious music.  Nothing but Hindu religious music.  As if it is not a park but the grounds at a Hindu temple.

The older Muslim's outfit made his religion obvious.  There could be, among the walkers, people of faiths other than Hinduism.  Perhaps even an atheist or two.  (I do not count for I am a citizen no more of this old country.)  Why should the government bombard Hindu religious music on people who do not care about Hinduism?

Of course, this is not the first time that I am blogging about this atrocious deluge of religion in a public space.  But, it is even more of a sore point given that the sociopolitical environment is now charged/changed with the election of the Hindu nationalist party to power at the federal level.

The attempt to make the public space secular was perhaps a non-winnable fight from the very beginning of an independent India.  As India started the process of becoming a republic, Jawaharlal Nehru strongly advocated for Rajaji to transition from the office of Governor General and become the country's first president.  Nehru opposed the rival candidate, Rajendra Prasad, who was backed by Vallabhai Patel:

Mr. Patel’s choice for president was Mr. Prasad, a teacher and lawyer who had just presided over the assembly that drafted India’s constitution. This frustrated Mr. Nehru, who tended to be annoyed by Mr. Prasad’s public religiosity – by, for instance, his stated dedication to renovating the Somnath temple in Gujarat.

It was not that Somnath was a Hindu temple, but the temple had a long history of tension between Hindus and Muslims.  After the bitter partition along Hindu/Muslim lines, after the tragedy of lives lost and displaced, and property destroyed, Nehru did not want to trigger more communal tension with a Hindu president inaugurating the renovated temple.  Nehru lost that fight.  I suspect that the fight to keep religion off the public space was also lost; I cannot imagine Rajaji, despite the religious scholar that he was, accepting the invitation to inaugurate the temple.

I suppose I am stuck with the loud Hindu religious music every morning at the park.  At least it is temporary for me, and I will soon return to my sanctuary--the public space by the river where no government, or private group, blasts any religious music.  But, that old Muslim gent has no choice, I guess.

This, too, is India for you.

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #5

So, back to Wendy Doniger after that brief diversion to appreciate the world ;)

All we know is that the Indus Valley Civilization people vanished into thin air, and there were the people of the Vedas.

What was the relationship between the people who composed the Vedas (the ancient Sanskrit texts beginning with the Rig Veda, in around 1500 BCE) and the people who lived in the Indus River Valley?  Where were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization after the end of the IVC?

I would assume that one awesome, awesome prize awaits the person who successfully and convincingly answers those questions.

I wonder if it is also built into the old tradition not to get preoccupied with the origins. There is a Tamil saying that I often heard expressed back in the old country: "ரிஷி மூலம் நதி மூலம் ஆராயக்கூடாது" (do not try to trace the origins of sages and rivers.)  Thus, there was no systematic effort to dig up the past?  And now we are stuck with the best guesses that we can possibly come up with in order to sort out what happened to the IVC people, and where the Vedic people came from?

Doniger walks us through the guesses:

The Aryans invaded India from Indo-Europe
The Caucasians strolled in from the Caucasus
The Vedic people originated in India
The Vedic people lived in the Indus Valley

I am tempted to write "no dice" but cannot because Doniger writes that the six-sided dice that we use now traces its origin back to, yep, you are thinking correctly:

Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of the cubical dice began in South Asia and indeed in the IVC.

Some gamblers they were, it seems. It is high time India and Pakistan collected royalties from the trillions and trillions that have been gambled since that invention ;)

Grabbing the evidence from the horse's mouth--yes, horses are evidence here--Doniger writes:

Knowing how important horses are in the Vedas, we may deduce that there was little or no Vedic input into the civilization of the Indus Valley or, correspondingly, that there was little input from the IVC into the civilization of the Rig Veda.  

So, what's the answer?  Forget trying to solve the IVC/Vedic people puzzle.  Where and how did Hinduism originate?  There are at least five cultures that have made Hinduism "a bricoleur, a rag-and-bones man, building new things out of the scraps of other things."

(1) Stone age cultures in India long before the Indus are the foundation on which all later cultures are built.
(2) At some point, impossible to fit into the chronology or even an archaeology, come the Adivasis, the "Original Inhabitants" of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices to various strands of Hinduism. ...
Next come (3) the Indus civilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and after that (5) the culture of the Vedic people. Along the way, other language groups too, such as (6) the Tamils and other Dravidian speakers, who may or may not have been a part of the IVC, added pieces to the puzzle.

So, there, you have it.

Or, if you prefer a shorter answer: we have no freaking clue!

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #1

I started reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus." As I noted in this earlier post, the trigger was the news about how the Hindutva elements pressured the publisher, Penguin, to withdraw all the copies and pulp them and not sell the book in any form in India.

I am doing this not to merely piss off the Hindutva idiots--that is merely a wonderful bonus. I figured that this whole brouhaha is a neat opportunity to read a scholarly book, about a religion and tradition in which I grew up, though it has been decades since I gave up on any religion--not only Hinduism.

If the first few pages are any indication, then this will be a joy to read. The language is so light and reader-friendly even as she presents some serious materials.  And a great deal of humor too!

I plan to provide quotes from Doniger on a regular basis, and add my own comments as well. Here is the first of what might be a long series.

Hindus may approach their scriptures as a part of their piety or as scholars who study Hinduism as they would study any other human phenomenon, or both simultaneously. ... But there are also advantages in a more academic approach, such as a religious studies approach, to which the religion of the scholar in question is irrelevant. ...Nowadays most non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism strike the familiar religious studies yoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they write about. ...I sympathize with the many American and British Hindus who have been raised in a particular tradition, generally the philosophical neo-Vedantic tradition, and therefore are genuinely shocked to hear, from an American woman, about aspects of their own tradition that are not only entirely new to them but often offensive by virtue of their violence or sexuality. But it is precisely for the sake of such Hindus, and for their children, as well as for non-Hindus who know nothing about Hinduism, that I feel it important to write about the lesser known aspects of the tradition, particularly those aspects that revisionists have purposely erased from contemporary versions of the texts. .... And so I intend to go on celebrating the diversity and pluralism, not to mention the worldly wisdom and sensuality, of the Hindus that I have loved for about fifty years and counting.(excerpted from pages 13-16)

An intellectual, religious studies, approach is about questioning and understanding, and not to simply treat the texts as the words from god.  Of course, that is bound to be upsetting to the true believers--I am reminded of my grandmothers whose typical comeback was "you don't ask why" to questions I had. .  And more so when the analysis and interpretations are being done by a person who grew up in a different faith, in a different country, and who is a woman.  Three strikes and you are out ;)  

I love the way Doniger writes about scholars striking "the familiar religious studies yoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they write about."  That is such a shame.  And all the more heartening and refreshing to note how Doniger goes where the analysis takes her.  

And most of it all, I can certainly relate to her comment about "celebrating the diversity and pluralism, not to mention the worldly wisdom and sensuality, of the Hindus that I have loved for about fifty years and counting."  While in Doniger's case the fifty years and counting was from the time she became intellectually, and emotionally, invested in Sanskrit and India, in my case it has been from birth.  I suppose I will echo her thoughts if I write similar phrases about the United States.

Can't wait to get through the entire book--690 pages of text alone, excluding the notes, bibliography, and index, which makes it a weighty tome at 779 pages!  

If no incoming fire, you are bombing the wrong place

It all started with a tweet. A short one in my Twitter feed.

This is a bad sign... Penguin withdrawing/pulping Wendy Doniger's book "The Hindus" from India. http://t.co/G1boBxlHaD
— Meera Subramanian (@Meeratweets) February 11, 2014

I haven't read that book, but remembered that it created a controversy in India and that there was pushback from nationalistic and Hindutva groups.

So, I then did a quick search to see if the author might have said anything about it.  There was nothing, but I came across a recent interview with her, which I watched. I then tweeted a response:

@Meeratweets Hey, bad sign indeed :( thanks to your tweet, I ended up watching this interview with #Doniger http://t.co/CZg1GH1Brs
— sriram khe (@congoboy) February 11, 2014

Apparently this was not a case of a tree falling in the forest and nobody hearing the sound it did, or did not, make:

@congoboy @Meeratweets Stupidest fuck, if some1 calls ur mother a Monkey, witout knowing shes a Human, what'd u do?!http://t.co/F77J07P7ol …
— Teja (@teja_am) February 11, 2014

It always amazes me that those who want to deny the freedom of expression and inquiry often do that with discourteous language too.  Not that I care for their courtesy while shutting me up!

Some random Twitter user is not going to scare me.  As a first step, I let "Teja" know that this "Stupidest fuck" read the tweet by ... well, I retweeted it!

The WSJ reports on this decision by Penguin:

One of India’s largest publishing houses has agreed to withdraw and pulp all copies of a 2009 book written by a leading scholar of Hinduism that reinterprets the history of the ancient religion. Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd complied with an agreement drawn up by a court in Delhi on Monday to recall and withdraw all copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, and cease to publish or sell it in India. 

In that same report, the WSJ reminds us that this is not the first instance of a book being banned in India. What a shame!

The paper also notes this:

A review of the book, published in the Journal in 2009 said that Ms. Doniger had succeeded in “making modern sense of the texts and tales of Hindu society, as well as of the rituals and symbols of the Hindu people.” 

At the end of it all, I figured that the best thing I can do is to buy a copy of this banned book, and read it over the next couple of months. "Teja" and his buddies will be delighted that their work has catalyzed me into buying the very book they have successfully banned in India.

As for the title of this post, I heard something along those very words in an NPR segment--I wish I remembered when it was for me to zoom into it and attribute the source.

Update: I should have known that some of the commentators I pay attention to will have something to say ... here is Shikha Dalmia:

[Her] aim in writing the book was to save Hinduism from misinterpretations of both hostile alien interlocutors and nativist Hindutva boosters.
Here is a flavor of the book from a review by Daily Beast columnist Tunku Vardarajan, former Newsweek international editor:

A religion without a central church or pontiff — and with no predominant sacred place (a la Mecca) -- Hinduism has spawned hundreds of competing devotional sects and theological strains. Ms. Doniger does a deft job of tracing their few unifying tenets — those of karma (actions) and dharma (righteousness) and a merit-based afterlife and of holding these beliefs up to critical examination against the obvious injustices of the caste system. Her most beguiling chapters, though, are the ones in which she examines the impact on the Hindus of India's numerous foreign invaders -- from the earliest "Aryans" in the second millennium B.C. to the imperial British, the last and perhaps greatest external shapers of Hindu society.

Am all the happier that I purchased the book. The paperback. I prefer the old style, when it comes to books.  As Dalmia notes:

The silver lining in all this, as Doniger told England-based Salil Tripathi last night, is that in the age of Internet, Penguin can’t actually ban the book. “Anyone with a computer can get the Kindle edition from Penguin, NY, and it’s probably cheaper, too.”
So go for it dear readers. It’s for a good cause.

Yes, buy it.

Spontaneous aggregation of the like-minded and exclusion of "others"

Every visit to India, I worry that most interactions amongst people are defined by the "in group" and "others" criteria.  In the non-work social space, there appears to be a great deal of conscious and subconscious decision-making based on various "in group" attributes, especially religion, language, and caste and sub-caste.

It worries me even more than that this gets spatially reflected: neighborhoods with dominant "in group" demographics.  Worry is an understatement, though--it freaks me out quite a bit.

Such a geographic separation of "in group" and "others" was not uncommon here in the US, too.  After all, even the history of "white flight" as a response to racial integration is not easily forgettable.  Fair housing laws and a lot more inter-racial and inter-cultural mixing, along with education and understanding, has decreased a great deal of geographic exclusion of the "others."  Thankfully!

Sometimes, I think of the geographic exclusion in India as non-violent and passive-aggressive "ethnic cleansing" of neighborhoods.  It freaks me out even more.

India, with its long history of the awful caste system, has a terrible history of geographic separation of people.  My grandmothers' villages were classic examples of these.  In the small village of Pattamadai, the brahmins, for instance, lived in "agraharams" while Muslims lived in a different part of town, and the non-brahmins in yet another part of town.

In my other grandmother's place, in Sengottai, it was no different.

 In the map on the right, which is of the eastern half of Sengottai, the brahmin neighborhoods were clustered about the center.  (Click on the figure for a clearer image.)  As is typical of the "agraharams," temples were the focus of the neighborhoods. 

The Muslim part of town was across on the west side.  In between are the traditional non-brahmin neighborhoods, including the one where the my high school friend's grandfather's home is located.

During my childhood, I have spent many summer vacations in Sengottai and Pattamadai.  But, never had I even remotely wandered into the Muslim areas.  It was much later, did I walk around these places and get a sense of the lay of the land.  Graduate schooling, which helped me better understand these issues, furthered my intellectual and personal curiosities. 

The good news is that even these small towns are beginning to change.  A few years ago, during Christmas time, I was pleasantly surprised to see a lit up decorative star hanging outside one home in a agraharam.  A Christian family had moved in to the neighborhood, I was told, when I casually asked my uncle.  Of course, it was at the end of the street, far away from the temple.  To me, it was progress.  A huge progress.  Over the years, I see that many non-brahmins have also moved into those agraharams.

I never saw a Muslim household though.

Now, it could be that I had not taken any systematic census, and could have overlooked a Muslim-occupied home or two.  But, my sense is that Muslims hadn't moved in.

I thought about all these even as I started reading this report about Muslims in the city of Hyderabad:

Ghettoisation of Muslims in a city boasting a long 700-year-old history of ‘their’ rule? Quite ironic but it does exist, mainly owing to periodic bouts of communal riots and a media-created image of the city as ‘terrorist hub’, though not as virulent a form as seen in Mumbai and Delhi.

It generally fits into the patterns I have seen in India.  For Hindus, there is a lot more uneasiness when it comes to Muslims than with any other religious group. This was the case even before 9/11, since when dirty politics often employs Muslims and terrorists as synonyms.  Since 9/11, and since the attacks in Delhi and Mumbai by Pakistan-based outfits, and the horrific events in Gujarat, I would think that the geographic exclusion of Muslims might have increased in many parts of India.

[There] are apartments where some fastidious Hindu residents would not allow Muslims to stay “especially for their cultural practices like sacrificing sheep on Bakrid.” It’s not just Muslims but lower caste Hindus too who face this problem when they encounter “vegetarian only” boards, a euphemism to bar those from “other castes” in places like Himayatnagar, Nallakunta and Chikkadpally in the new city. Fortunately such instances are very few in Hyderabad.

 In a related story, the same paper reports:

Finding a home to rent in India's national capital is an arduous task for anyone - but, an investigation by The Hindu has found, almost impossible for citizens who happen to be Muslim. Homeowners and property dealers contacted by reporters often firmed up deals, only to be disqualified as soon as they revealed their religion.

Housing apartheid was at its worst in New Delhi’s most affluent and educated neighbourhoods: New Friends Colony, Vasant Kunj, Jangpura and Rohini. By contrast, in areas such as Mukherjee Nagar, Karol Bagh, Janakpuri and Ashok Vihar the responses were mixed.

In one case, a property agent representing a homeowner in New Friends Colony flatly told The Hindu's reporters, “The landlords want only Indians, not Muslims.” 

Ouch! Muslims become non-Indians?  How awful :(

Property dealers seemed to operate an informal network of religious segregation, often pointing The Hindu's reporters to supposedly Muslim-appropriate neighbourhoods. More often that not, they were told to look for houses in the fringes of posh colonies. Property dealers in Rohini suggested Rithala, one in Jangpura proposed Bhogal, famous for its Kashmiri population and Afghanistani refugees, a broker in New Friends Colony suggested Sukhdeo Vihar and Jasola both of which are close to another Muslim ‘ghetto’ Jamia Nagar, and one in Vasant Kunj suggested Munirka and Kishangadh.

Neighbourhoods like these appear to be emerging as enclaves for the growing Muslim middle class in Delhi, which despite its education and economic achievements is denied access to neighbourhoods preferred by Hindus from similar backgrounds.

On the travails of finding a house, Prof. Rizwan Qaisar, an academician at Jamia Millia Islamia, said while looking for a house in Saket and Munirka DDA Flats he came across instances where his name mattered a lot. “Every thing was fine till I revealed my name. After facing ‘no’ from several property dealers, I had to finally shift to Noor Nagar in Jamia Nagar.” “Several social groups face discrimination in housing but for Muslims the edge is sharper,” Mr. Qaisar said.

It is terrible.  

Photo of the day: at the Taj Mahal

A couple steps more and it is the Taj Mahal.  And here was this person clad in a highly orthodox and religious Hindu outfit, as a tourist (?) going to see the what is essentially mausoleum/tombs of Muslims.  Isn't it how it is all supposed to be--we go around and try to appreciate and understand life that is different from what we might be used to?  A wonderful juxtaposition that I enjoyed noting at the Taj.

Oh, yeah, I was at the Taj Mahal :)

Religion matters not

a group of Muslims in eastern Uttar Pradesh told a colleague: “Sixteen major banks have failed in the United States; not a single Indian bank has folded up; all because we have had Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister.”

Profound implications in that quote in this report from The Hindu. India's prime minister is a Sikh--a small minority in India. A much larger minority, the Muslims, is happy with this Sikh as a prime minister, in a country dominated by Hindus.

Which is why I keep reminding my students and anybody who asks me that religious differences do not trigger violence in India. It does not mean that there are no prejudices--that is in plenty. But, quite a peaceful country though, given such immense differences.

Am glad that the BJP did not win. Yes, the Congress has a long history of playing communal politics. But, BJP is in a dangerous league of its own.
However, I don't think the prospect of Indira Gandhi's grandson being projected as Dr. Singh's successor is a healthy sign. Returning to an adoration of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is not something to be proud about. On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi seems to be one hell of a hard working guy--at least, it will not be handed to him on a golden platter as it was the case with Indira and later with Rajiv Gandhi.

The coming benign authoritarianism in India

Over the last couple of years, every time I visited India somebody or the other commented on how I look like Narendra Modi--the chief minister of Gujarat. Sometimes it was just the beard that triggered such a comparison. They thought it was a compliment, and I always had to smile outside but cringe inside! As a visitor, the last thing that I wanted to do was pick a fight on this.

Why cringe? This is a guy who oversaw the worst communal violence when, as Robert Kaplan writes, "More than 400 women were raped; 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, murdered; and 200,000 more made homeless throughout the state." All in a matter of hours :-( The US government, at least in this context, has done the right thing by denying Modi visa to visit the US.

But, Modi is a popular guy in India. He is one mix of contradictions. In a land of corrupt politicians, Modi is known for high levels of fiscal integrity. A workaholic's schedule he has. Has created a business-friendly environment in Gujarat. Has a reputation for being an authoritarian leader. And, yes, has a strong anti-Muslim outlook. I was visiting India during his recent re-election. With all the election noise in the background, one television news channel, mimicking the hysterical news shows in the US--more like Hardball--had one of the most bizarre and awful discussions ever. The topic, if I remember correctly, was "All Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims." Talk about (ir)responsible journalism!

I won't be surprised at all if Modi, or somebody like him, becomes the prime minister really soon. Kaplan echoes the sentiments I have heard all too often in India--both when I was growing up there, and during my recent visits, when he writes:

India’s rise as an economic and naval power has invited frustrating comparisons with China: whereas the authoritarian government in China can make things happen, development happens in India mainly in spite of the government. Hanif Lakdawala told me that, especially because of the nightmarish chaos of Indian cities, “there are some in this country ready to accept a fascist, or at least a very strong dictator.”

Not a fascist, in my opinion, but certainly someone like Modi. As Vimal Ambani, a prominent, liberal-minded Gujarati businessman, told me, “At the end of the day, Modi still offers the best model for governance in India.”

Because, the reality is that most Indians are sick and tired of the lack of governance, and corruption, which they correctly perceive as holding them and the country back from a much more rapid advancement. What good is a right to vote when the choice is between tweedledum and tweedledee and when even water is in shortage, is a typical comment.

I am afraid that the collapse of Pakistan will not only embolden the likes of Modi, but that a larger number of Indians will also prefer that kind of a "stronger" leader. When that happens, Francis Fukuyama can write about why history did not end, and is being re-written!

Photo of Modi: The Atlantic