Heterotopias: Nationalism and the Possibility of History in South Asia 9780198066927, 0198066929

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HETEROTOPIAS

HETEROTOPIAS

Nationalism-’1" Possibility OF History IN SOUTH ASIA

edited by

Manu Bhagavan

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

UNIVERSITY PRESS

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ISBN-13: 978-0-19-806692-7 ISBN-10: 0-19-806692-9 Typeset in Minion Pro 10.5/12.5 by Sai Graphic Design, New Delhi 110 055 Printed in India at Shri Krishna Printers, Noida Published by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001

Dedicated to the memory of Leela S. Bhagavan, inspiring humanitarian and mother Edmund G. Beacham, hero and mentor and B.M. Subbanna, beloved grandfather

CONTENTS

Ai knowledgements

ix

Introduction Milhu Bhagavan

1 Conversation I

On the Landscapes of the Margin

I

2.

Local Nationalism or Secessionism? History, Politics, and Identity Struggle of Tai-Ahom in Assam Yasmin Saikia

13

Kashmir and Kashmiriyat: The Politics of Diversity in South Asia Chitralekha Zutshi

44

Conversation II On the Dreamscapes of Literary Imagining

L

Against the Current: Sita and her Foils in Modern Tamil and Telugu Short Stories 63 Paula Richman

-1.

Ghalib and His Interlocutors Syed Akbar Hyder

90

Conversation III

On the Heteroscapes of History 5.

Muhammad Iqbal and the Crisis of Representation in British India Faisal Devji

117

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the ultimate product of a conference I organized at Indiana University, Bloomington in February 2003 on ‘The Dynamics of Diversity: Narratives of Pluralism in South Asian History’ For their generous funding, the contributors and I would like to thank the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Collaborative Plowshares Peace and Justice Studies Program of Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester Colleges, the Indiana Consortium for International Programs, the Indiana Network for the Development of India Awareness, Manchester College, and Indiana University, Bloomington. We are particularly grateful to Martha Selby, Gerald Larson, Jo Young Switzer, Julie Garber, and the editorial team at Oxford University Press for their support.

I would also like to thank the following for granting permission to reprint three of the essays in this volume.

Permanent Black and Oxford University Press, USA for Chitralekha Zutshi’s ‘Kashmir and Kashmiriyat: The Politics of Diversity in South Asia’, in Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; and London: Hurst & Co., 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Duke University Press for Syed Akbar Hyder’s ‘Ghalib and His Interlocutors’ Comparative Studies ofSouth Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 26(3), pp. 462-75. © 2006, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.

X

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Routledge for Faisal Devjis ‘Illiberal Islam’, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, London, New York, New Delhi: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009, pp. 234-63. Reprinted with permission. Manu Bhagavan

* INTRODUCTION Manu Bhagavan

The anthropologist David Scott has recently argued that triumphal narratives of past anti-colonial movements have become anachronistic in light of our present, the future that has been rendered by those same anti-colonial movements. Grounding his analysis in the work of Reinhart Koselleck and Hayden White, Scott examines C.L.R. James twin tellings of The Black Jacobins, one from 1938 and the other 1963, to argue that history unfolds in relation to the variations in problem­ spaces’ in any given present.1 James’ renowned work changes substantively in the decades between the editions, according to Scott. Whereas the first edition placed the Haitian Revolution on a heroic trajectory of success, a Romance in Scott’s words, his second edition instead resonated with disappointment, reading like a Tragedy. Scott is struck by this alternate rendering and questions what might have provoked the change. The answer, he concludes, lies in the present that James experienced in the intervening years. Thus Scott sets out to understand the relationship between pasts, presents, and futures, what Koselleck posits as the link between spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation. Both experience and expectation are present-centred’: experience concerns the ways the past is used and lives in the present, while expectation deals with dreams for tomorrow and the point in time after which a new space of experience will come into existence. For James writing in 1938, the Haitian Revolution was a space of experience that allowed him to think about ways of overcoming his colonially shaped present and thereby create a postcolonial horizon * I am grateful to Paula Richman, Syed Akbar Hyder, and the anonymous reviewers of Oxford University Press for their comments.

2

HETEROTOPIAS

of expectation. Writing in 1963, his problem-space was very dif­ ferent, now informed by the disappointments of the postcolonial predicament and the continued confines of modernity. The future he dreamed and hoped for in 1938 was now past, and so the Revolution was seen in a new light, not as the first step in a teleology of justice, but as a wispy reminder of what might have been. It is in this space of the might have been that the 1963 version becomes a critique of James’ new present. Scotts analysis, with its trope of tragedy, provides a useful point of departure for this book, which began with a concern for the horrific violence that engulfed the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. What began with deaths of Hindu religious pilgrims on a train bogey in the town of Godhra soon became a conflagration of bloodshed throughout the state, consuming villages as well as cities. Contemporary reports from the region as well as subsequent studies and analysis have pointed to state complicity in the carnage, which was almost entirely directed at the areas Muslim minority.2 ‘Gujarat 2002’, as the event has come to be known, represented the endgame in the teleology of India’s right-wing Hindu nationalism: the active erasure of the Other from the landscape and the production of a purified Hindu space.3 Gujarat raised a series of pressing questions: Was the ethnic cleansing we witnessed a product of an extremist agenda, or was there a more natural, a more fundamental, connection between nationalism and violence? Were there areas or moments in which nationalism might necessitate a stand of solidarity, on the basis of an ethics grounded in justice? In turn, what role could ethics play in informing alternatives? And were there ever viable alternatives, other ways of being, of socially organizing?4 A conference was organized in early 2003 at Indiana University, Bloomington, to engage with these issues. This book is the result of that conference, though it has gone through many iterations in the interim. Scott is precisely a useful beginning because his primary concern is with revolutionary nationalism, which he understands as the central tenet of colonial emancipation movements.5 But historian Gary Wilder, while recognizing Scott’s work as unequivocally significant in negotiating our crisis of postcoloniality, sees Scott’s focus on revolutionary nationalism and tragedy as requiring revision. Scott equates the general concept of colonial emancipation with a nationalism bent on ‘territorial sovereignty’. While he laments the

INTRODUCTION

3

failure to bring about total revolution, and the more ideal and just society that went along with it, Scott misses the possibility of other efforts at colonial emancipation, as in the case of Aime Cesaire, who sought liberation without national independence’6 Colonial South Asia too saw its share of alternative possibilities. Indeed, Partha Chatterjee famously referred to the late colonial period as the moment of manoeuvre in the teleology of subcontinental nationalism, the moment when, manifested in the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, another future seemed plausible, one not riven with the shortcomings, excesses, and contradictions of the liberal order of the nation-state derived from the European Enlightenment.7 But while Chatterjee portrays Gandhi as a unique outlier, more recent work has built on Chatterjees initial premise to illustrate just how far within the mainstream Gandhi actually was. Ashis Nandy, for instance, has analysed the writings of Rabindranath Tagore to show how one of South Asia’s first Nobel prize winners was, in fact, a fervent believer in nationalism’s illegitimacy.8 And Ayesha Jalal’s work, well known for helping us to rethink fundamental assumptions about Partition, also reveals that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s conceptualization of an India comprised of a Hindustan and a Pakistan defied the very premise of unitary nationalisms.9 Each of these ‘manoeuvres’ are spaces of po­ tential transformation that allow for ‘alternative futures’.10 It is in how we write and think about these futures that are now past, to para­ phrase Koselleck, that we inform our present and affect our future. To rephrase, what questions historians ask is inherently a political and a moral choice, so scholars concerned with emancipation and justice must frame their queries in any given temporal moment against the backdrop of the circumstances in which they find themselves.11 That is why The Black Jacobins of 1938, concerned with colonial emancipation and the imagination of a freedom in the not-to-distant future was written in one way, and the Jacobins of 1963, concerned with an entirely different set of problems, was written in another way. Scott concludes that the faults of our present are asynchronous with narratives of justice movements from our past. Such narratives therefore have to be discarded in favour of more apocalyptic accounts, so that we can best give meaning to our present, and thereby alter course, in however limited ways, as we go forward. Wilder, however, argues that events unfold in what we might call achronistic time. He looks anew at the Haitian Revolution and shows how ‘the spirit’ of its hero Toussaint Louverture lived in Aime

4

HETEROTOPIAS

Cesaires post-war efforts to create for Martinique a colonial emanci­ pation without national independence’12 That is, there were elements from specific ideas and actions, such as Louverture’s constitution, which Cesaire resurrected.13 History unfolded in an untimely’ way, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not just affect Cesaires present through precedent, but also by actively ‘living’ again in the 1940s and 1950s.14 Broadly speaking, alternatives that did not come to fruition at the time of their imagining nonetheless continue to exist in historical consciousness. Properly excavated, these ideas retain their transformative power to affect the course of the present and the future. But the alternatives imagined in the mid-twentieth century and earlier are no longer relevant in the South Asian context, according to Chatterjee’s accounting, as a result of the moment of arrival’ of nationalism informing the present created after colonial emancipa­ tion.15 It is not just that Gandhi’s vision (or any of the others’) did not come to pass, but that it was actively and fully destroyed by the modernity of Jawaharlal Nehru. In this sense, Chatterjee has already answered Scott’s call to write postcolonial history from the perspec­ tive of tragedy. Yet Wilder’s construction of the untimely suggests the need to revisit this claim on the grounds that the alternatives continue to live and may even be invested with renewed meaning. The impetus to revise our understanding of South Asia’s ‘futures past’ is strengthened by the fact that Chatterjee pegs the wrong villain, caricaturizing Nehru as the Brutus to Gandhi’s Caesar, stabbing his friend and mentor in the back, figuratively if not literally killing him, to create the antithesis of all that the Mahatma stood for, the modern nation-state. Yet, as I have shown elsewhere, Nehru, like Gandhi, Tagore, and Jinnah, did not, in fact, aspire to legitimate nationalism.16 Rather his was a firm commitment to the post-national, as he stated overtly in his Discovery of India, where he called for ‘an end to the national state...[in order to] devise a collectivism which neither degrades nor enslaves.’17 Without Nehru as the cut-off point, there is in fact no definitive moment of arrival. Chatterjee’s larger claim that the postcolonial subcontinent is encumbered by the derivative discourse of European nationalism remains valid, simply on the basis of prima facie evidence from the last sixty years. Rather than reading the development of nationalism in South Asia as individual chapters of a single story, so that when the chapter on alternatives is closed, the chapter on the

INTRODUCTION

5

arrival of the nation-state begins, a more plural narrative might better serve our particular problem-space. That is, one set of questions and answers produces the narrative of the rise and dominance of the nation-state, while another—the focus of this volume—tells the story of alternatives both within and without the overall discourse of nationalism. Elucidating alternatives in a narrative arc that currently rests in a tragic position runs the risk of being romantic. This is not our intention. Thinking with Scott and Wilder, the essays in this volume are meant to show the multiplicity of historical unfolding, that there are many ways of thinking, acting, and being happening at the same time. While certain strands of history, as in the ideologies of religious nationalism that produce a Gujarat 2002 or as in the broader framework of centralized nation-states derived from European thought that allow such notions to thrive, may be dominant at particular temporal moments, as in our current problem-space, this does not preclude the continued existence of other strands, what Michel Foucault calls ‘heterotopias’, subordinated though they may be.18 The tragedy of a postcolonial present mired in violence, animosity towards difference, and at a great distance from the notions of justice envisioned at the height of the horizon of expectation of late anti-colonialism, remains the central focus. But we wish to show that there are multiple, simultaneously occurring spaces of experience. The book is laid out as a series of three interrelated conversations. Our first section, with chapters from Yasmin Saikia and Chitralekha Zutshi, focuses on the peripheries of modern India, the states of Assam and Kashmir. Both Saikia and Zutshi explore local and regional nationalisms at play in these marginalized spaces and highlight their relationship with the homogenizing nationalism of the centre. While discussing the ways in which region and community create alternate notions of homeland and identity, both chapters underscore the challenge to centralized nation-state ideology that continues to percolate in postcolonial India, while simultaneously referencing the internal contradictions and shortcomings these challenges face. Nationalism itself is not any one thing, and even in its success, the achievement of a centralized nation-state, it is subject to constant reinterpretation and contestation. As local groups of Assamese contested an Indian national identity, they asserted new markers of community in an attempt to win political and economic concessions from the central state. Saikia examines

6

HETEROTOPIAS

the motivations behind, and shortcomings of, these various acts of community districting, revealing an underlying explanation for why and how the Northeast has become a problem’ for the Indian centre. Focusing specifically on Kashmir, Zutshi problematizes the idea of Kashmiriyat, the notion that there is something unique and essential about Kashmiri-ness that promotes secularism and communal harmony. She shows how this seemingly diversity-friendly ideology has propped up its own distinct brand of nationalism and shielded its promoters from their own reluctances to accommodate adequately religious and political difference. While the first section engages with the challenge to the ideology of the centralized nation-state at a broad level, the Hindu religious nationalism—Hindutva—that produced Gujarat 2002 is of a more specific breed. Specifically premised on the notion that Muslims and Hindus have been perpetual antagonists, each the negation of the other, the Hindu nationalism of the last three decades has relied on a particular narrative, that of the South Asian uber-epic Ramayana, to mobilize its forces and give its mission meaning—paternalizing, homogenizing, and normativizing. The second section takes on these two pillars of Hindutva. Paula Richman and Syed Akbar Hyder each present alternatives to the idea of master narratives in the literary as well as the political sense, Richman by revealing new pieces of the rich tapestry of tellings that comprise the Ramayana tradition, and Hyder by revealing how the celebrated nineteenth-century poet Mirza Ghalib upended religious orthodoxies (and -praxies) to create a cosmopolitan space accommodating of difference, not least between Hindus and Muslims. Richman shows how Telugu and Tamil tellings of the Ramayana, taking advantage of the pedagogical qualities of the story, refashion and rejuvenate the narrative to unsettle many conventional gender and class structures and to present a politics of justice. Further, Richman locates these literary moves in a long, vibrant tradition and suggests that such contestatory social commentary has always been one of the primary functions of the Ramayana in South Asian history. Syed Akbar Hyder discusses the concepts of ‘home’, exile’, ‘religion, and ‘loyalty’ in the work of Mirza Ghalib, the famous nineteenth­ century South Asian Perso-Urdu poet. Hyder highlights the ways in which Ghalib thumbed his nose at many constricting categories, expressing an ambivalence towards abstract enemies and instead

INTRODUCTION

7

embracing a trans-communal sacred geography whilst simultaneously celebrating a sense of homelessness. While the first section discusses ways postcolonial people living on the margins of the homogenizing space of the centralized nation-state critique the centre and carve out different spaces of experience for themselves, and the second uses literary production to delineate the literal plurality of narrative (and hence of consciousness), our third and final section brings us full circle to shed new light on the moment of manoeuvre of the late colonial period. Faisal Deyji and Ajay Skaria respectively interrogate the works of Muhammad Iqbal and Mohandas K. Gandhi, Devji to illustrate how Iqbal, like Tagore, Jinnah, Nehru, and Gandhi, thought outside the box of imported European liberalism. With Gandhi already well established among this group, Skaria looks anew at the Mahatmas work to reveal not just a political construction outside of liberal discourse, but a historical and ethical one as well. Using the work of twentieth-century poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal as his interface, Devji exposes a deep skepticism of liberal thought, particularly towards categories of interest, repre­ sentation, and contract. Focusing on Iqbals indictment of represent­ ation, Devji underscores how this period was not so much about an academic exercise involving removed-from-reality ponderings on the definition of nationhood, but rather about a vigorous quest for an altogether new procedural terrain unbounded by the limits and shortcomings of liberalism. Re-reading Gandhis works in their original Gujarati, Skaria argues that Gandhi posited a difference between ‘history’ and ‘itihaas', a word that is commonly translated as ‘history’. In the space of this posited difference, the chapter seeks to articulate the ‘Gandhian itihaas’ through extensive interrogation 2nd deconstruction of Hind Swaraj and Gandhi’s Autobiography, among other sources. Gandhi’s political thought, here, is not a nationalism by any accepted definition of that term, for it does not subscribe to premises or prescriptions of Enlightenment thinking. Skaria concludes that Gandhi’s famous philosophical method Satyagraha, the state of being-towards, assumes a ‘unilateral obligation of kinship’. As such there can be no submission or domination in this context, rather the continuous pursuit, or ‘happening’ of truth, the compulsion that produces and sustains the ‘neighbour-stranger’, an idea of originary equality that negates the need for and idea of an equality of measure’ or justice.

8

HETEROTOPIAS

By way of conclusion, Gyanendra Pandey builds off the notion of historical temporality discussed here to argue that we have now reached a moment in which it is possible to speak of a post-history of communalism, when the dominance of the nation-state and globalized capital have brought to the world altogether more horrific forms of violence. By communalism’, Pandey refers to the colonially imbricated manifestation of oppositionally-based religious identities, seen as the master category of interest in South Asia, the primordial form of self and community expression under which other needs, including economic ones, for instance, fall. Ricochetting off of C.A. Bayly s well-known search for a pre-history of communalism, which Pandey has criticized as anachronistic, searching for something before the conditions that produced it had appeared, this final chapter outlines how it is now necessary to talk of a post-history of communalism for precisely the same reason—the conditions and space that gave expression to communalism are now altered, mitigated by the empire of thought that is the culminative moment of nationalism. Yet for all the ways in which the totalitarian forces of nationalism have strangulated freedom of expression and difference, the more these forces have tightened their grip, the more space has slipped through their fingers in which to struggle against them. NOTES 1. David Scott, 2004, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 42-3. See also Rienhart Koselleck, 2004, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Keith Tribe (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, especially chapter 14, pp. 255-75; Hayden White, 1978, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; C.L.R. James, 1938, The Black Jacobins, London: Seeker and Warbury. 2. For more details on the events in Gujarat, see Siddharth Varadarajan (ed.), 2002, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, New York: Penguin Books. For an excellent, investigative journalistic account of the events, see the expose done by Tehelka.com: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107 gujrat_sec.asp. Last accessed on 7 August 2009. 3. For more on Hindu nationalism in India, see among others: Manu Bhagavan, 2008, ‘Princely States and the Hindu Imaginary: Exploring the Cartography of Hindu Nationalism in Colonial India, The Journal of Asian Studies, 67(3), pp. 881-915; Manu Bhagavan, 2008, ‘The Hindutva Underground: Hindu Nationalism and the Indian National Congress in Late Colonial and Early Post-colonial India, Economic and Political Weekly, 43(37), pp. 39-48; and

INTRODUCTION

9

Christophe Jaffrelot, 1996 [1993], The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, New York: Columbia University Press. 4. Another volume that has attempted to grapple with the repercussions of Gujarat 2002 is Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (eds), 2007, The Crisis of Secularism in India, Durham: Duke University Press. 5. See Gary Wilder, 2009, ‘Untimely Vision: Aime Cesaire, Decolonization, Utopia, Public Culture, 21(1), p. 103. 6. Ibid., pp. 101-4. 7. Partha Chatterjee, 2004 [1986], Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, especially ‘The Moment of Manoeuvre: Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society’, pp. 85130. 8. Ashis Nandy, 1996 [1994], The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 9. Ayesha Jalal, 1985, The Sole Spokesman: The Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, New York: Cambridge University Press. 10. Scott uses this term in the context of Hayden Whites conceptualization of historical narrative (p. 49). History as written by some of its more profound practitioners—Hegel, Balzac, Tocqueville, all of whom traded in ‘realistic historicism’—was once someone else’s present, and the events that unfolded thereafter their future. The purpose, and the potential, of history, and of the historian, is thus to construct narratives to direct, or redirect, the course of the future. See Hayden White, 1978, ‘The Burden of History,’ in Tropics of Discourse, p. 49; referenced in Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, pp. 49-51. Wilder (‘Untimely Vision, p. 103) too subscribes to the viability of alternative futures. 11. Scott argues that historical temporality is best understood as a dialectic of questions and answers, in the mode of R.G. Collingwood and Quentin Skinner. See Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, pp. 51-5. See also R.G. Collingwood, 1994 [1946], The Idea of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press; and Quentin Skinner, 2002, Visions of Politics, vol. I: Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 12. Wilder,‘Untimely Visions’, p. 104. 13. Ibid., pp. 121-2. 14. Ibid., pp. 126-7. 15. Chatterjee, 2004 [1986], ‘The Moment of Arrival: Nehru and the Passive Revolution, in Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, pp. 131-66. 16. Manu Bhagavan, 2010, ‘A New Hope: India, the United Nations and the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Modern Asian Studies, 44(2), pp. 311-47. Manu Bhagavan, 2009, ‘Princely States and the Making of Modern India: Internationalism, Constitutionalism and the Postcolonial Moment’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46(3), pp. 427-56. 17. Jawaharlal Nehru, 1946, The Discovery of India, New York: The John Day Company, p. 543.

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18. Michel Foucault, 1967, ‘Of Other Spaces’, lecture translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec. http://www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/ foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. Last accessed 10 August 2009. David Harvey clearly spells out the concept of heterotopia thus: Through a study of the history of spaces and an understanding of their heterogeneity, it became possible to identify spaces in which difference, alterity, and ‘the other’ might flourish or (as in architecture) actually be constructed. Hetherington (1997: viii) summarizes the concept of heterotopia as ‘spaces of alternate ordering. Heterotopia organize a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. That alternate ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things’ .... It allows us to think of the potential for coexistence in the multiple utopian schemes— feminist, anarchist, ecological, and socialist—that have come down to us through history. It encourages the idea of what Marin (1984) calls ‘spatial plays’ to highlight choice, diversity, difference, incongruity, and incommensurability. It enables us to look upon the multiple forms of transgressive behaviors (usually normalized as ‘deviant’) in urban spaces as important and productive. See David Harvey, 2000, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils’, Public Culture 12(2), p. 537. Harvey cites K. Hetherington, 1997, The Band­ lands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London: Routledge. In this same Public Culture article, Harvey strongly critiques the idea of heterotopias, arguing that they ‘presume that whatever happens in such spaces of otherness is in principle of interest and even in some sense acceptable or appropriate.... What appears at first sight as so open by virtue of its multiplicity suddenly appears as banal: an eclectic mess of heterogeneous and different spaces within which any­ thing “different”—however defined—might go on’, p. 538. While I concur with the notion that there is nothing particularly ethical or ideal about a heterotopic space or moment, it is entirely conceivable for there to be many ideal, ethical het­ erotopias existing alongside unethical ones. So, the aim of this book is to examine some of these heterotopic spaces, to mine them for their ideas of justice and their visions of a better world, and to revivify these concepts in an ‘untimely’ way.

Conversation I

On the Landscapes of the Margin

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM? History, Politics, and Identity Struggle of Tai-Ahom in Assam

Yasmin Saikia

Identity in India is, as elsewhere, a contested issue fought in many battlegrounds. The national discourse of a homogenized Indian identity emanating from the centre at New Delhi is challenged in many local quarters. The struggles between nationality and locality, religion, ethnicity, caste, class, and gender are platforms for multiple identity demands in postcolonial India. The ethnic identity movements became dominant in the 1980s with Punjab and Kashmir, in particular, shining a spotlight on local issues that mattered to people in their respective regions. Chitralekha Zutshi s essay in this volume, ‘Kashmir and Kashmiriyat’, charts the historical and political intersections that enabled the rise of Kashmiriyat in the mid- to late-twentieth century as an ethos and banner to struggle for a local Kashmiri identity. But she is quick to point out that Kashmiriyat, like most local identity movements, is not without its process of invention and construction by leaders and followers who use it to enunciate a language and politics for forging a unified and intimate local image to mark its separation from the Indian national identity. Alongside Punjab and Kashmir, in Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, to name a few regional centres, the demands for local identities are proliferating in defiance of the national scheme to create a homogenous Indian identity. Local identity demands are both a quest for and politics of recognition to claim belonging on their terms within a locally identifiable place and an emotion that raises important questions regarding who owns the national space.

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HETEROTOPIAS

This essay investigates the tensions between local and national identity by focusing on the formation of Tai-Ahom identity in Assam.1 Tai-Ahom is a unique identity demand. On the one hand, the proponents claim their historical roots in Southeast Asia, Upper Burma and Thailand, and want to establish linkages with groups there to become a Tai-like community. On the other hand, the Tai-Ahom leaders are seeking a political location as an identifiable Scheduled Tribe (ST) group in India. To understand the Tai-Ahom identity struggle we have to approach it both as a cultural idea claiming to be different from Assamese as well as Indian, and also investigate it as a battleground in the hands of scholars and activists. The Tai-Ahom movement peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s facilitated supposedly by the support of the Assam government headed by Hiteshwar Saikia, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), and a group of Thai academics. For over a decade the TaiAhom leaders created a discourse of a ‘local nationalist’ movement and demanded that the potential for the democratization of political, economic, and cultural institutions should be a realizable goal for marginal communities within the nation-state. The local nationalist demands were based on the claim that they were the sons of the soil of Assam, that is, people of Assam, which endows on them a unique right to demand justice in their homeland. The articulations of local nationalism will be discussed at some length subsequently. The vocalization of the discourse of local nationalism under the banner of Tai-Ahom identity struggle brought a variety of people together in eastern/Upper Assam to express their dissatisfaction with the Indian national identity and the lack of integration of the region within the nation-building process. The assertion to construct a new identity as Tai-Ahom in Upper Assam, the leaders of Tai-Ahom argued, was an exercise of peoples rights to create and experience belonging at a personal and political level. As yet, the promise of a new identity and a demarcated space for Tai-Ahom homeland has not been achieved. The Tai-Ahom struggle today is no more than a fuzzy, passionate longing to access some sort of a glorious past to make a potentially better future. It is both a political and emotional struggle to claim a place to call home, have an identity, and become recognized. To me, Tai-Ahom is not an imagined community, but a quest for people to make a community, which is not yet fulfilled. Multiple '^nts continue to provide leadership at different levels, although TaiAhom is no longer a headline story in Assam. The foundation of local

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

15

historical memories that the Tai-Ahom leaders created in the 1980s and the continuing experiences of marginality enable the people to think of the possibility of emancipatory justice2 on the horizon which provides encouragement to carry on the struggle. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ASSAM In 1873, by the Bengal East Frontier Regulation I, the northeast frontier of British India was demarcated and two distinct zones—the ‘inner line or the hill areas, and the directly administered territory or the plains area of Assam—were created. In 1874, Assam was made into a province and placed under the administration of a Chief Commissioner appointed from Calcutta. During the partition of Bengal (1905-11) Assam was combined with East Bengal to form one provincial administration, but this arrangement was revoked in 1911 and Assam was re-established as a Commissioners province. In 1947, when India became independent, Assam was included as one of the sixteen states within the union. Assam was reorganized and three states were carved out from the erstwhile province in 1967. These were the plains state of Assam, and the hill states of Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, along with, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, and Tripura were constituted as the northeast region of India. The present-day plain state’ of Assam covers 78,438 square kilometres of land that include the two alluvial valleys—Brahmaputra and Barak, and the hills of Mikir and Karbi. The population is more than twenty-six million and include a variety of ethnic and religious groups including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and animists.3 Assamese is the common language spoken by the variety that binds them together and the community called Assamese is the majority community in the Brahmaputra Valley. The history of Brahmaputra Valley before its annexation to the British Raj in the nineteenth century was independent of the rest of India. Also, its history is multiple for the period before the nineteenth century. The entire area was carved out into small and big chiefdoms ruled by different lords and overlords. Local tradition recounts that in ad 1228 a group of warriors, later to be called Ahom by their rivals, entered from the east and defeated the various ruling chiefs. They established the rule of a swargadeo (heavenly king) and brought together various groups of hills and plain people and formed one large administrative unit. This was known as the Ahom kingdom of Assam.

16

HETEROTOPIAS

The autonomous rule of the swargadeos ended in 1813 when Assam was annexed by the Burmese. In 1826, by the Treaty of Yandabo, the Burmese ceded Assam to the British. At the end of British colonial rule, along with many other provinces of British India, Assam was included within the new Indian union that was formally inaugurated in 1947. But the union between Assam and Delhi was not seamless and since independence the gaps have widened. Revolt movements against India and Indian identity have marked the political history of Assam since 1947. Initially, the efforts at claiming an Assamese identity were directed against the Bengalis of Assam, who were constructed and presented as the other’. From the 1960s, an Assamese awareness movement also called Ahamia Jatigathan charted a concerted identity struggle. This was crystallized by the student leaders of the All Assam Students Union (AASU) who started an Assamese identity movement in the 1970s, which, in turn, heralded several new identity movements within Assam. Since then the Bodo Movement for an autonomous Bodoland, ULFA for an independent Assam, Karbi, and Dimasa, along with the Tai-Ahom identity movements have become quite prominent. Scholars of Indian history and politics tend to categorize these movements and many others as militancy and/or subnational demands. Both terms are extremely problematic in my opinion. The root of political and cultural unrest in Assam must be evaluated by keeping in mind the economic and social reality of the place and people. Assam is rich in natural resources including natural gas and petroleum, and is the country’s largest producer of tea, one of the most profitable export items for India. However, the wealth generated from these industries has not trickled down to the local people. Over 40 per cent of the people in Assam live below the poverty line.4 In 2001-2 the per capita income in Assam was around Rs 10,951, which is less than half in comparison to the states of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, while Delhi, Chandigarh and Goa are four times higher than Assam.5 This makes Assam one of the poorest states of India. Economic neglect is accompanied by a sense of social and cultural alienation and most people in Assam feel and think they are made into absent communities in the political and cultural worlds of India. The lack of a place and identity within India on terms that are acceptable to the local people has created an atmosphere of restlessness in the region. Revolt movements have

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

17

mushroomed in consequence. This is viewed by the Government of India as militancy, which legitimizes the deployment of the national army to force the people to give up their struggles. The term subnationalism, like the term militancy, is not useful to evaluate the social and political movements ongoing in Assam, fhe accent on the sub’ part automatically privileges the nation-state as the primary location of identity. Claiming, coercing, co-opting, and often erasing the histories of many groups living within the territories of British India, we know, had enabled the creation of a narrative of Indian history. The colonial narrative of India provided the font for the construction of an Indian national identity. It is the imposition of the constructed national on different forms of local identities that many groups in Assam are resisting. I prefer to call these identity movements local, rather than subnational, demands. By describing them as local, I do not mean that they are discourses that are taking place in the hinterland without any connection to the wider world. I am using local to distinguish the identity movements from the national movement to homogenize Indian identity. The national movements are linked to capital, the West and, nowadays, to the discourse of globalization. Local movements, on the other hand, attempt to override the power of the national. They seek to create a ‘different’ sense of collectivity based on specific constructs that are emotional, sentimental discourses that give meaning to locality and enable them to think of themselves as a people with a ‘homeland’, which is a different space from the homeland of others’. It is very important to note that the local nationalist movements in Assam emphasize the people and their effort is to demand the rights of people, which is a far more potent discourse than the demand made on the platform of citizenship. The leaders claim that erasure from the narratives of national history and lack of power sharing at the level of decision-making about their region’s future has reduced the people of Assam into subject-client groups of powerful interests of groups that control the nation. The state has failed to protect their rights and has made them victims in the national enterprise. To resist the process of further disempowerment, they claim Assam belongs to the people; the Indian state is in occupation of people’s land. Construction of collective memory and rhetoric of resistance are both crucial to make a collective and a discourse to resist the occupation of Assam by India. This discourse and practice is what I call ‘local nationalism’.

18

HETEROTOPIAS

The banner of local nationalism, they believe, will enable them to overcome the erasure from national history and allow them to transform memories into action to create and claim belonging. Ultimately, what local nationalist movements seek to establish is to democratize the national sites of power and politics, and practise citizenship based on rights and choice. The issues of local nationalist quests in Assam are multiple. Since I am mainly concerned with the Tai-Ahom movement, I will focus on this struggle in the rest of the chapter. But before we engage the Tai-Ahom episode we have to first investigate the Assamese movement to understand the local development of Tai-Ahom that emerged in consequence. THE COLONIZED/COLONIZING ASSAMESE

Assamese was a colonial construct. Soon after the British administra­ tion established their control ill the valley, in 1838, and demarcated it from the ‘inner line or hill areas, the plains areas were transformed into a revenue generating province and the subject community was demarcated as a group of taxable, revenue paying peasants. They were called ‘Assamese’. The term Assamese, created, established, and widely circulated in colonial publications and administrative circles, produced a community on paper; but the people who were called Assamese could not come to terms with the colonial representation. Hence from the beginning several local attempts were made to provide an internal formulation of what is Assamese. Local representations emphasized that various groups made up Assamese—Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and others, and tried to blend the variety in the shared site of the Assamese language.6 Self-awareness as Assamese or Jatigathan was outlined by identifying a group of others’—Bengalis, who spoke a different language and were intimately connected with the colonial administration in Assam. The Bengalis benefited from the clerical jobs and opportunities created by colonialism, which, in turn, deprived local people of their autonomy and rights. This community of Bengali others’ was seen as key in the Assamese struggle to find and cement a local identity. Like most anti-colonial struggles, the project of making an Assamese identity was an urban intellectual phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. These Assamese men were mostly centred in Calcutta. The Asamiya Bhasa Unnati-Sadhani Sabha (Assamese Language Improvement Society) was the first association formed in 1899 with

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

19

the purpose ‘to render into Assamese ... important works in Sanskrit and other languages ... to increase interest of the people in reading newspapers; and to establish one literary language for the whole of Assam?7 This was an initial attempt to make one single community of Assamese speaking people in Assam, who could learn to represent themselves through their language and to demand for themselves certain political and social rights in keeping with the spirit of the anti­ colonial struggle led by the Indian National Congress (INC). But the rise of the Assamese association was not welcome in many quarters in Assam since it was seen as a move of upper caste Hindus to join the Assamese struggle with the INC, which was not a popular political agenda in Upper Assam. Many local and political groups emerged in Upper Assam to resist the INC’s intrusion. A group organized themselves under the banner of Ahom Sabha, that later became the All Assam Ahom Association (AAAA). The AAAA asked the people not to give into the INC politics, but resist it by emphasizing the ‘separate and communal identity’ of the Upper Assamese people. To mark this separation it asked the supporters to ‘shed their incredible attachment to Hinduism’.8 As an alternative, Ahom was promoted as the desirable identity of people in Upper Assam. What did the label Ahom mean to the leaders and followers? Ahom is probably the messiest term in Assam because it is an undefinable, fuzzy concept without an etymological root or a genealogical history. Since the end of the nineteenth century the politics of Ahom have been visible and vocal. In the early stages of making an Ahom community the memory of the golden days of the swargadeos rule served the useful purpose for generating a politics of nostalgia and loss. The leaders of the AAAA asserted that Ahoms were the descendants of the swargadeos and hence they should revive the past, claim a royal heritage, and make the future Ahom an independent and separate community from upper caste Assamese Hindus and Indians. A narrative of Ahom history beginning in a place called Mungrimungram, which was identified as an important kingdom in Upper Burma, was invoked and continuity was established by settling a group in Assam through migration.9 The group of settlers was represented as the royal founders of the Ahom community. By claiming Ahom roots in Upper Burma, the leaders of the AAAA emplotted Ahom outside India and tried to shift the core of Assam’s political identity beyond the reach of the INC, which was seen as representing the caste Hindu

20

HETEROTOPIAS

communities of India. This narrative of Assam’s history as independent and separate from Indian history should have been very attractive to the Assamese Jatigathan movement, but it was not. The Assamese politicians had long desired and worked to be included among the Aryan communities of north India, so that they could claim inclusion within a civilized’ group and have a history that was different from the ‘tribal’ communities of the Northeast. To accept the narrative of AAAA would mean sharing a past with people who claimed their origin outside of Aryavarta’10 and the fold of Brahmanic Hinduism. This would make Assamese a debased people without jati and purity. The Assamese leaders wanted to avoid this. Relationship between the leaders ofthe Ahom and Assamese organizations worsened when the Assamese group, to mark their difference from the Ahom, suggested that Ahom was an out-caste community and recommended that their supporters should perform penance to regain their place among caste Hindus.11 The relationship between the two groups of leaders continued a downward spiral. On 15 August 1947 when the Indian union was created and Assam was included within the states of India, in utter frustration the AAAA boycotted the independenceday celebration.12 After independence the label Assamese became the rallying ground to organize for expressing political discontent and resistance against the intrusion of ‘foreign ‘Bengali’ culture in Assam. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the politics of resistance marked protest movements under different banners in Assam. On one hand was the Assamese language movement that became assertively anti-Hindi and anti-north India. On the other hand, the Ahom leaders continued their rhetoric and discourse of searching for their roots in Southeast Asia and in 1968 crystallized this by coining the term Tai-Ahom that was popularized in historical literature.13 In the meantime, Assam was reorganized and the valley dwelling Assamese community was enclosed, which made the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ more defined. The Assamese launched a cultural movement and, over time, underwent massive transformations and emerged as a political-economic movement under the leadership of the AASU in the 1970s. The AASU leaders used the sentiment of economic marginalization to rouse the masses to struggle against India, on the one hand, and created awareness of the problem of unrestricted immigration of Bangladeshis that pitted Assamese against Bengalis, on the other

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

21

hand. As discussed earlier, the anti-Bengali sentiments were not new in Assam. But now the enemy was identified in national/state terms and Assamese versus Bangladeshi became the site of struggle. To understand the construction of hate against the Bangladeshi Bengalis, one has to revisit the British colonial policy in Assam. Colonial exploration into Assam in the nineteenth century had established several profitable businesses and industrial establish­ ments for which labour was imported from outside, mainly from West Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar. The colonial authorities also encouraged the settlement of people from East Bengal. Particularly after the partition of Bengal (1905), Assam was linked with East Bengal and migration was officially endorsed. That colonial authorities encouraged the settlement and migration of East Bengalis into Assam was made clear by Governor Reid in his confidential reports. He writes, In recent years, however, i.e., since the year 1905 or thereabouts, Muslim immigrants, mainly from the Bengal district of Mymensingh, have tended to flock to this valley in ever increasing numbers. Mr. Mullan in his Census Report of 1931 describes the invasion as the most important event in the last twentyfive years [...] destined to destroy more surely than did the Burmese invaders of 1820 the whole structure of Assamese culture and civilization, and foretells that in another thirty years Sibsagar district will be the only part of Assam in which an Assamese will find himself at home.14

What is interesting about this comment is that it shifted blame away from the colonial administration and its policies (which were designed to make serious demographic changes in Assam) to a group identified as Muslims. In these and other colonial documents, the term Bengali was replaced by the term Muslim, and Muslims and the Assamese were pitted against other. Clearly, the divide and rule policy of the British found a home-base site in Assam as it had already done elsewhere in India. The colonial rhetoric of a threatening Bengali Muslim community re-emeregd under the leadership of AASU in the 1970s and Assamese fears that the Bangladeshis would take over and reduce them into a minority group were whipped up to construct Assamese sentiment and motivate political action. By identifying the ‘foreigners in Assam as Bangladeshis the AASU leaders hoped to formulate an Assamese identity. But much before any constitutional process could be outlined for shaping AASU rhetoric, violence against so-called Bangladeshi Muslims became rampant. In 1983, the spark of anti-Bangladeshi

22

HETEROTOPIAS

violence was lit in a small village called Nellie, not far from Nowgong. Thousands were killed overnight and an entire village of presumed ‘Bangladeshi’ children were orphaned. Nelli became a testimony that the student-led movement had lost its non-violent, economic moorings and had become influenced by religious politics that drove a wedge into the Assamese community. The Assamese identity movement took many different forms after the Nellie incident, and increasingly the enemies of Assamese multiplied. Identity politics in Assam became more convoluted. Besides AASU, new leaders emerged in other parts of Assam. In Upper Assam, the Juva Chatra Parishad emerged, and made way for the more radical ULFA. The ULFA and their supporters in Upper Assam diverted attention from the anti-Bangladeshi rhetoric and declared that the main enemy was the Indian state and launched an armed struggle. Some of the AASU leaders made a last bid effort to reclaim and reorient the political struggle of the Assamese and convened under the banner of the Asom Gana Parishad (Assam Peoples Association) or AGP. In 1985 this party contested and won the general elections. They capitalized on the prevailing situation of Assamese sentimentality and politicization and made the subject of being Assamese’ their central discourse and then told people how to behave, look, and speak, in order to claim an Assamese’ identity. In retaliation, resistance movements under different banners emerged, such as Bodo, Tai-Ahom, Dimasa, and Karbi. All these movements worked on the margins of the Assamese Hindu community and its politics. What these new labels signified was difficult to understand immediately. Possibly, there are many different explanations for the variety. The boundaries of self and other within these groups shifted with such ease and frequency in this period that they were hard to keep pace with.15 Of these, the Bodoland movement has been most effective. They have successfully claimed they are not Assamese and have created an autonomous Bodoland council with the help of New Delhi.16 Alongside the Bodoland movement, in Upper Assam the Tai-Ahom floated an ethnic’ identity movement. The Tai-Ahom movement is both a socio-cultural and religiopolitical movement that claims their difference from the Assamese. They view Assamese as a religious group, representatives of the majority Hindu community, and a territorially bounded society whose leaders do not represent the issues of eastern/Upper Assam. Also, the Tai-Ahom leaders deem the AGP government and their

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

23

AASU supporters as appendages of the Indian state. On the other hand, Tai-Ahoms see themselves as the primary community that represents the heartland of Upper Assam, the districts of Sibsagar and (heir surrounding areas where, they claim, the authentic Assamese self prevails. Additionally, as the progeny of the swargadeos, they believe Ahoms uphold the autonomous history of Assam before its occupation by the British and then the Indians. Ethnically, they claim they are l ai, which situates them as Buddhist and not Hindu. The suffix Tai invokes for Ahoms a mythic connection with Southeast Asia. Another area of cleavage between Assamese and Tai-Ahom is class. The people who identify as Assamese are mostly from the middle- and upper­ income groups—professionals, bureaucrats, and business people. The majority of people who claim Tai-Ahom identity are lower-income peasants and working classes. Ahom propagandists believe that if the power of the middle-class Assamese is reduced within Assam, it will solve the problems of the marginalized and disempowered groups. They think it is the Assamese community, created by the AASU and AGP stalwarts, who have refused to sever their cultural and political linkages with India despite their rhetoric of sadhin Asom (independent Assam) and that has been the greatest bane to the local people and cultures of Upper Assam. The Tai-Ahom identity movement took shape within this context of politics and discourse in the upper reaches of Brahmaputra Valley or Upper Assam. Disparate groups of people in the villages are organizing their confused feelings of economic disempowerment and social marginalization to produce a struggle that longingly looks at the past—the glorious days when the swargadeos ruled—to imagine a better future. The experiences and feelings of these people have led them to believe that they are different from the Assamese people of the towns and those living outside Upper Assam. They believe that their culture and society are distinctive. It is this distinction that they are now claiming and calling Tai-Ahom. Numerically, the Tai-Ahom movement claims 600,000 people in its fold. It is a small number, but important, within the twenty-six million that make-up the total population of Assam. In Assam where many communities of outsiders’ are visible and entrenched (against which the AASU and AGP led an unsuccessful agitation), the provocation to break up the Assamese is potentially a ‘dangerous’ sign. Also, the connections with cultures and interest groups outside Assam make Tai-Ahom both intriguing and

24

HETEROTOPIAS

disturbing for national interests. Hence, both Dispur and New Delhi are watching and avoiding the Tai-Ahom demand for identity.

THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF TAI-AHOM The area of the Luit,17 commonly known as upper Brahmaputra Valley, is the centre of the Tai-Ahom movement. The commemoration of the river valley as the home of the Tai-Ahom movement has a long historical journey. To understand this we have to travel back in time and revisit the premodern chronicles of Assam called buranjis and within it read the connection between people and place that constructs a memory for use in the present. The buranjis record that Tilao or Luit was the channel along which the first immigrants under a leader called Sukapha organized their initial settlements by wresting control of the river valley from many rivals. The ability to assert power made them ‘Ahom’— unequal’, ‘unparallel’ group, a name given to them by their rivals. Over time, the Luitpaar (river banks) became the thriving areas of wet-rice cultivation and made the peasant-king powerful enough to claim the title of swargadeo.18 Thereafter, each succeeding swargadeo established a new capital on the banks of the Luit and expanded his political control. In the expansive domain of the swargadeo, the buranjis record, a diverse community formed the kun-how or ami community that translates into English as us’. The us’ community was administered by a group of royal appointees who are sometimes referred to as Ahom in the buranjis. Ahom was selected from within the us’ community and a person could be made and unmade an Ahom by the swargadeo. In other words, Ahom were the king’s men. This system survived until 1826, when the British entered and occupied Assam. In the colonial period the unmarked Ahom was initially transformed into a community comprising of royalty and aristocracy, and then in 1931 the community called Ahom was declared ‘dead’ by the British authorities. In its place, a governable, tax-paying community, Assamese, was constructed to fill up the space of the Brahmaputra Valley. However, for the people in the erstwhile swargadeo’s domain the transformations heralded by colonial rule intensified a nostalgic connection between people and place. The mercantile colonial administration introduced brisk transport on the river, opening up new ways to exploit manpower and natural resources. Labourers from Bengal and Orissa were ferried along

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

25

I he river to the valleys and uplands, where tea plantations, mining, and other profitable ventures were started. As a result, several new communities of outsiders’ were created and the us’ people who had historically lived and worked by the Luit diminished in number and were pushed out of their home and land to accommodate the colonial hunger for a cash crop economy and profit. In the postcolonial period the feelings of ‘displacement’ and alienation of the Upper Assamese people intensified. The political and economic neglect of Upper Assam evidenced in the lack of capital investment in small and heavy industries in the region, skill training, education opportunities, job possibilities, proper medical care, and the I ike, foster a sense of marginality and dispossession among the people. They also face daily encounters with the Indian military permanently posted there to deal with militants’ and protect the frontier from ‘foreign aggressors’.19 The local people there call it ‘Indian colonialism’ and view themselves as a ‘minority’ living without power, resources, or a voice in the administration, the economy, or politics. Due to this depressed present, the past acquired a new meaning, and some people started to invoke the memory of a ‘swargadeo culture’ and a past before British and Indian colonialism transformed their ‘home’ and identity. This awareness and persuasion to ‘remember the past’ provide motivation to the Tai-Ahom identity movement in Upper Assam today. What is it that facilitates the connection between people and place leading to the political unrest and demand for new identity as TaiAhom? Is the venture nothing more than reclaiming a memory? How does this memory serve in the Tai-Ahom movement? Before answer­ ing these questions, it is necessary to remind ourselves that Ahom is not a historical category but an emotional label that constructs the past in a particular way to serve the present aspirations and create hopes for the future. The people who claim the label Tai-Ahom also claim that Upper Assam belongs to them, and that they are the progeny of the ‘peerless’ king’s men—Ahom—who were noble, glorious, and powerful. A direct connection is made between history and ethnicity, or at least a discourse of ethnicity. They hope through this claim they will be identified as a group that is not Assamese, be able to reclaim land and resources in Upper Assam, and make demands for new electoral districts so that they can elect their Tai-Ahom representatives who would speak for their rights. Ultimately, the Tai-Ahom leaders

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HETEROTOPIAS

want to make their followers an ST group who can become eligible for reserved quotas and benefits which they cannot access as Assamese Hindus and have a separate homeland from the Assamese. These claims will be discussed in greater detail in the next section. The claims of the groups who call themselves Tai-Ahom and identify their history with the Luit are not inconsequential. The imposition of the label Tai-Ahom on the landscape of the Luit has denied other forms of articulations of people who identify with Luitpaar but not as Tai-Ahom. Luitpaar is their home too, but the right to claim the area as their homeland is silenced. While open to review and criticism, the brokering of an idea called Tai-Ahom by local politicians in postcolonial Assam has created a space for otherwise disassociated and disparate excluded’ groups to forge solidarity and use the platform of identity to devise political and social actions. In this newly created space they have been able to imagine themselves as something other than the imposed label Assamese’. The gaps between the present reading of the past and the stories that the buranjis tell about the Ahom are underplayed, for what the identity seekers ultimately need is recognition, with or without a history to back the claim.

THE CONSTRUCTIONS OF TAI-AHOM To understand the current politics and identity movement of TaiAhom in Assam one has to place it simultaneously within the contexts of construction of the Indian national alongside transnational Thai interests. First, I will investigate the Indian national identity and nation­ building process and its interpretations within Assam, particularly in the arenas of Tai-Ahom discourse. Then I will explore the Thai interest in the Tai-Ahoms and the different ways they have strengthened the platform of local nationalism, while having appropriated Tai-Ahom to fit the Thai transnational agenda in Thailand. The abstract Indian identity created through the operation of the colonial census was concretized, as far as I can map in 1892 when Lord Ripon created ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ communities, and in 1899 when a red-coloured dot on the imperial map was identified as ‘India by an act of the British Parliament. The people living within the bounded entity called India were tentatively named Indians. This was followed with a historical narrative that periodized and parcelled history to different groups within India. Hindus became primary Indians, everyone else followed them. Independent India inherited

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

27

Ihis narrative. One would have expected that the majority in Assam would have counted as Indians, since they are Hindu. But the problem was that they were already codified as a semi-civilized, semi-tribal people in the colonial administrative parlance and this stereotype was upheld by the Indian administrators and cultural gurus in New Delhi. Assamese, along with other non-Hindu groups of the Northeast, were excluded and reduced to outcaste groups at the frontiers. While a hierarchical scale was constructed that acknowledged some people as more Hindu and thus more Indian than others, the state, on the other hand, created a national history and circulated it as the story of all Indians. This narrative could have worked if people found their histories within the national story. Rather what they found was a single version of north Indian history. The assumption that a single and shared sense of history can serve as a unifying foundation is convenient for the nation-state, but in reality it is a ‘fabricated truth’, or to borrow Vansina’s term a ‘historical gossip’.20 In the early Nehruvian period it appeared some sort of an arrangement for inclusion was formulated under the catch phrase unity in diversity’. The accent of Nehruvian secularism and socialist economy kept many hopeful; people in Assam expected to make progress in the public sector economy. The structuring of this economy, however, instead of creating a variety of horizontal regional states divided them vertically. Economic development in the public sector became a monopoly of north India, and later south India. The reductionism of India’s future into a north-south issue meant large chunks of the rest of the country and population were neglected. The excuse for lack of investment in the Northeast was explained as a policy matter, since the frontier was exposed to possible foreign invasion. Instead of an inclusive agenda, the Northeast was shut off from the rest of India through various restrictive measures that later became codified as ‘Restricted Areas Policy’ (RAP). This meant confinement in every sense of the term—cultural, economic, and political. The result was that the isolated and fragmented individuals and groups in Assam lurned their feelings of desperation and anger into action against the Indian state, and were radicalized. The rhetoric of economic and cultural marginalization along with political disempowerment of the people of Assam was part of a long series of‘articulations’21 and led to I he creation of many discourse communities such as the Assamese, Bodo, Tai-Ahom, and others, to project representative and parochial

28

HETEROTOPIAS

issues.22 The Tai-Ahom leaders were determined to break their socio­ cultural connections with India and Indians by invoking connections with peoples, cultures, and histories of Southeast Asia. The initial success of the Tai-Ahom was determined by many internal and external factors: the support of the ULFA to some measure, financial aid allegedly by Hiteshwar Saikia, and the support of a group of Thai scholars were crucial. The ULFA and Tai-Ahom were never explicitly connected. Nonetheless, both claimed that Assam’s marginality had reduced the peripheral communities from citizens to subjects.23 This rhetoric reached out to a variety of people at the same time and created an audience who without making too much effort to investigate the politics and strategies of the leaders of the two organizations lent their support. The captive audience, along with a shared mystical past created and sustained by images of the swargadeos, made it possible to dream of a political utopia, a dream that temporarily bonded the Tai-Ahom and ULFA movements together. While the audience connected the aspirations of both movements together, the strategies of ULFA and Tai-Ahom identity movement were different. Tai-Ahom leaders emphasized the production of culture as the way to forge a new beginning, while those of the ULFA promoted armed struggle against the state. To fulfil Tai-Ahom dreams the leaders had to turn to the state government and, later on, unsuccessfully to Delhi to seek recognition as an ethnic, tribal’ group, but they failed. Although the Tai-Ahom movement never became a state-wide or state-supported identity movement, unlike the Assamese movement, the financial support allegedly provided by the then chief minister Hiteshwar Saikia, hugely benefited the struggle. In 1988, in a grand ceremony in Golaghat, Hiteshwar Saikia was crowned as a new swargadeo of Assam. He accepted the title, although a few months later he had to relinquish it in the face of severe criticisms from the Assamese media. Nonetheless, it is widely believed that Saikia continued to make large contributions of state funds to create visibility for Tai-Ahom cultural productions. With his help the organization called the Ban Ok Publik Muang Tai (Eastern Tai Literary Society) was created in 1981 and was able to produce a Tai-Ahom religion and culture in the public arena and assume leadership of the identity struggle. Worship such as Sukapha Divah (commemoration of Sukapha) and Me-Dam-MePhi (worship of ancestral spirits) were instituted as public rituals for making a new religion called Phra Lung, which combined elements of

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29

Buddhism with Tantric Hinduism and ancestor worship. Additionally, with the financial help generally believed to have been received from Saikia, the Ban Ok created many new sites for academic and political discussions for making Tai-Ahom history different from Assamese history and culture. Annually, a large public meeting of the Ban Ok was held in different towns in Upper Assam to create a presence of Tai-Ahom agendas and keep alive the discourse of a separate identity from the Assamese. Saikia also supposedly provided money for the construction of a Tai-Ahom jadughar (museum) in Sibsagar, many Seng Rengs (Ahom temples) in Upper Assam, and appointed over 250 lai language teachers in different schools in Assam. The success of the Ban Ok and the Tai-Ahom agenda from the mid-1980s until 1996, made the movement for a Tai-Ahom identity very visible and loud. Many more Tai-Ahom organizations emerged and the numbers rose to seventeen. The Ban Ok ruled supreme over the ancillary groups and organizations. In the mid-1990s, the Ahom Land Demand Committee (ALDC) claimed a new territorial space exclusively for Tai-Ahoms. The leaders of the ALDC hoped that through this separation Tai-Ahom would have their own autonomous space to chart a new political and economic future for the people who would be identified as Tai-Ahom within it. The area that they claimed as the new Tai-Ahom homeland was concomitant to the British colonial division of Upper Assam, which is also the most lucrative area for its natural resources, such as natural gas and petroleum, and is the heart of the tea belt of Assam. I’he ALDC’s demand for a separate homeland was never actualized but it set the stage for making definite assertions for Tai-Ahom. In 1995, under the guidance of the Ban Ok and supported by I liteshwar Saikia, the Tai-Ahom leaders of the different organizations put forward a demand to make Tai-Ahom an ST community and presented a memorandum to the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. They hoped that this would be the first step towards a clear break-up horn the Assamese. They expected that the admission into the ranks < )f ST would provide them reserved electoral seats, employments, and ad mission in institutions of higher learning, and make them eligible lor free aid money for development of the communities identified as lai-Ahoms in Upper Assam. In the long run they envisaged that like I he ethnic’ tribal states of Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and others in the Northeast, the demarcated Tai-Ahom space in Upper Assam would become an ethnic Tai-Ahom homeland. This agenda became

30

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prominent in the mid-1990s and the numbers of Tai-Ahom followers increased. The articulations of Tai-Ahom leaders and followers became indistinguishable from the ULFAs agenda that also claimed to remake a golden Assam in the erstwhile swargadeos domain.24 Apparently, with the rising tide of political demands of the various Tai-Ahom leaders, the ULFA interest merged with Tai-Ahom in Upper Assam. Many activists hoped that through the efforts of the Tai-Ahom and ULFA organizations, they would become a real community of TaiAhom people. No doubt, these decisions led to much confusion, and rifts began to show in the Tai-Ahom movement. Throughout the 1990s the construction of Tai-Ahom identity in Assam was in process. The negotiations and struggles within the vari­ ous groups and agents kept the movement in motion. The messiness, notwithstanding, most of the people in Assam began to accept that ‘Tai-Ahom’ was a historical category and even an ethnic community. The Tai-Ahom community (absent in the buranjis) became natural­ ized in the current narrative as the founder of Assam’s history. In this scenario a new group of agents from Thailand entered the field to remake Tai-Ahom. The Thai academics added their new lines about Tai-Ahom and put them in circulation in Assam and Thailand. How did Thai scholars facilitate the Tai-Ahom identity movement? To answer this question, we first need to investigate the construction of Thai nationalism and the Pan Thai movement that was started in the early decades of the twentieth century and has undergone many incarnations.25 Finding and making the different communities of people within the kingdom of Siam into one seamless group of Thai citizens was started as a royal effort toward the end of the nineteenth century. By 1939, when Siam was rechristened as Thailand, the diverse communities were given the name Thai and they accepted that they were a people living within the boundaries of Thailand sharing a common past. Ethnic differences within the variety were overlooked. Speakers of different Tai languages were deemed as sharing a common language, and the varieties of Buddhistic traditions were considered another site to construct the common Thai base. Through the royal mandate everyone living in Thailand was made Thai. The only difference that was admissible in the royal scheme was regional difference. People were now recognized as northeastern Thai, northern Thai, southern Thai, and so on, rather than Chinese, Khmer, Muslim, and such others. Resistance to this royal construction of a national body of Thai people within Thailand came from a group

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

31

led by Phibun Songgram who refused to accept that Thainess was a contained, bordered identity. They developed ambitious plans to include many groups living outside Thailand, who they claimed also shared Thainess. Phibun and Luang Wichit Wathakan inaugurated the Pan Thai movement in the late 1930s. A great Thai race was born in this discourse and by using the genetic connections between different languages spoken in Southeast Asia they assumed that a common ancestry of Tai people living within and outside Thailand could be mapped and claimed. This was reinforced by invoking the story of l ai migration from Nanchao in southern China, a theory that was propounded by western and missionary scholars in the late nineteenth century and gained wide currency in the early twentieth century.26 This theory enabled the Pan Thai group to assume that Tai people were dispersed in the course of migration to different places and were now determined to find their kin throughout Asia. But the defeat of Japan, the main ally and supporter of the Pan Thai movement, at the end of World War II, weakened the movement and it collapsed. The Pan Thai movement, however, did not die out completely but emerged in different forms thereafter. New groups of Tai-speaking people outside Thailand have been discovered, claimed, and included within the new Thai enterprises and the search for ancestors and roots of Thai history and identity continue to date. Since I am mainly concerned with the Thai and Tai-Ahom interactions in the late twentieth century, I will try to map the process of historical emergence and exchanges between these two groups and reflect on the impact of the Thai discovery of Ahom in this section. Ahom was not discovered in the first Pan Thai drive. The inaugural moment of Ahom in international Tai scholarship, I believe, happened when George Coedes documented the Ahom as the western-most Tai group living in Assam, India.27 Several decades later, in late 1970s, B.J. Terwiel, an anthropologist of Thailand, visited Assam and encountered the Ahom religion in some villages in Sibsagar and was convinced that it was a form of pre-Buddhist practice, which scholars believe was the original religion of Tai people. In his two-volume book, The Tai of Assam and Ancient Tai Rituals, Terwiel announced the Ahom religion as the repository of the ancient pre-Buddhist rituals practised by the Thais’ ancestors.28 His discovery of Ahom as a Tai group of people coincided with the emerging tensions appearing in the AASUled Assamese identity movement. In 1981, the first international

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conference of Thai Studies was held at New Delhi. Many delegates from Assam were invited to participate. We do not know how this was facilitated, but the impact of the Ahom presence was quite dramatic in the conference. The so-called last deodhai (high priest) of the Ahom, who was identified by Terwiel, Domboru Deodhai Phukan, went to the conference and made an appeal to the Thai scholars to help the Ahoms recover their lost religion and identity. Phukan became the emblematic symbol of an Ahom struggle for a separate identity from the Assamese and Thai scholarly interest in the Ahoms flourished. Until this meeting, it appears that the Ahom leaders of Assam had not envisaged an identity struggle. However, the meeting and interest of the Thai scholars invigorated them and made them aware that they should find a past in order to make connections with the Thais, who could deliver them from the oppression of the Assamese Hindu groups. For this an Ahom history and community had to be found to translate dreams into reality. The Ahom delegates, on returning to Assam, turned to the dispossessed, disenfranchised marginal groups in Upper Assam and invited them to join together to build a claim as TaiAhom, which they promised would be an identity of deliverance from poverty and alienation. They claimed the buranjis as the storehouse of an Ahom past and made these documents an emblem of the new Ahom identity. As mentioned earlier, this was accompanied by the alleged financial support received from Hiteshwar Saikia. The internal formulation was thus put into place and suddenly within Upper Assam a community called Tai-Ahom showed signs of emerging. Alongside the internal construction of Ahom, the Thai scholars lent their support and advice to make a local struggle into a transnational agenda. The newly generated Thai interest in Tai-Ahom developed in Thailand under a banner called ‘the community culture movement which was an academic as well as a nativist political agenda led by Chatthip Nartsupha, retired Thai professor of economics, Chulalong­ korn University. The aim of the community culture movement was to recreate ancient Tai villages that could resist the western capital intru­ sion that seemed to be taking over Thailand. As Chatthip envisaged it was a project that constituted an ideological war between the state and the village community’29 The leaders of the community culture move­ ment wanted the Thai villages to return to the ways of their ancestors, but to make it possible they had to find ancestors’ who could educate the transformed Thai villagers in the old ways. Chatthip found the

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

33

A horns in the conference and was convinced that they could serve the purpose of recreating the ancient Tai ways through their buranjis and other preserved knowledges of rituals and worship. Hence he and his supporters patronized, advised, supported, and even directed, from a distance, the Tai-Ahom identity struggle.30 Since 1981, annually the Thai scholars have been attending the Ban Ok’s public meetings where they make speeches and remind the people of the importance of becoming Tai-Ahom. In these public forums they and the Tai-Ahom leaders teach the audience how to discard the imposed Assamese Hindu identity and become Tai-like by learning the Ahom language, travelling to Thailand, contracting marriage with Tai Buddhists, and adopting Tai names, food and dress habit, and the like. Chatthips student Renu Wichaslip undertook the cumbersome task of reading and translating chronicles of divination and oracles written in the archaic Ahom script to facilitate the revival of the ancient religion of the Tai ancestors.31 The Thai scholars’ growing interest in Assam intensified the interaction between several other groups of Thais and non-Hindu communities in Upper Assam. These new interactions were motivated by a missionary zeal to make these communities in Assam like the Thai Buddhist communities in Thailand. This was ironic since the Thai scholars had initially come Io Assam to look for a pre-Buddhist Tai religion practised by their ancestors, and now through them a new missionary effort to convert the Ahoms and other peripheral communities in Upper Assam into Buddhists seemed to take over. In the effort to spread Buddhism in Assam, the Thai monarchy also involved itself. Several Buddha images were sent as gifts to local viharas (Buddhist temples) in Upper Assam f rom Thailand. The Thai scholarly presence, the rising tide of local awareness for a Tai-Ahom identity, and the anti-caste sentiments that marked religious life in the peripheral village communities created a venue for a political consciousness that became purposefully antiIndia/Indian. The label Tai-Ahom was no longer deemed a marker of an outcaste, inferior group. Rather, it was seen as a lucrative entry point to make transnational connections and develop networks for strengthening a local movement to demand political, economic, and social rights. At the mundane level many reasoned that the connections with the Thais would facilitate (at least) travel and increase the potential for developing tourism in Assam. This proposition was attractive even

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HETEROTOPIAS

to the Indian government and influenced by Hiteshwar Saikias plan to make Assam a crossroad for economic exchanges, an international airport was opened to facilitate trade and commerce between Guwahati and Bangkok.32 In April 1996, Hiteshwar Saikia passed away while in office. The Tai-Ahom movement lost their patron and support in the state administration. Simultaneously two new developments took place that changed the course of the Tai-Ahom identity struggle. In Thailand, the economy that was seemingly doing well for over a decade showed signs of recession and in 1997 there was big slump in the market. Foreign capital that had invested heavily in the business sector started migrating out of Thailand, resulting in a sudden halt to the financial boom period of capitalist enterprises in Thailand. The intrusion of foreign capital into Thai villages, which the community culture movement was fighting against, seemed less threatening now. In India, too, there were major shifts. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power in the central government and immediately launched a nation-wide Hindutva campaign.33 Assam, which was seen by previous governments at New Delhi as a frontier area and was hence isolated and never truly incorporated within the national horizon, was targeted by the BJP to spread the ideology of Hindutva to make Hindu Indians out of the Assamese. As an incentive, the BJP government awarded many financial packages for the development of Assam and the Northeast region in general. But power was distributed and almost all the new enterprises operate under the banner of the central government, which means New Delhi and not local institutions and people control the financial and administrative arrangements in these new arenas. Also, a connection between Assamese Hindus with the Hindu communities of the country is suggested by citing the Mahabharata, wherein it appears reference was made to the ancient kingdom of Pragjyotishpur in Assam (present-day area of Guwahati).34 Politically a new development is noticeable. Retired and current generals of the Indian Army are regularly deputed to the Northeast as governors endowed with powers to undermine the elected representatives of the people.35 In other words, the BJP government and now the newly elected Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in Delhi rule the Northeast.36 In the face of New Delhi’s massive political, cultural, and economic campaigns in Assam, a small group

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

35

such as the Tai-Ahom can hardly continue to resist. Also, their supporters in Upper Assam, the ULFA leaders, are no longer able to provide fresh ideas and motivations, since the ULFA organization has lost its political vision and appeal to most people in Assam. Today, the U LFA survives as a band of extortionists. The dream of the Tai-Ahom leaders to constitute a group of independent, autonomous citizens in I Ipper Assam is more daunting today than ever before. I have argued in this essay that identity movements in Assam are a continuous historical-political process. Assamese, Tai-Ahom, ULFA, Bodo, and many more movements have emerged to assert a claim of difference from other groups within and outside Assam. Periodically (hey symbolized the representative banner to pursue general concerns of economic, cultural, and political matters. They want these concerns Io be addressed by the national government and provide a satisfactory solution. In so doing, the leaders of these movements do not pretend (hey can dismantle and root out the influence of the national state in I heir locale. Rather, their effort is to create a situation that would allow (hem to associate as a group, not reduced to a separatist, fictional community, but as powerful members who represent a specific society (hat is democratic and inclusive. We have to evaluate the Tai-Ahom identity movement, along with other local nationalist movements in Assam, against this background which involves a dual process of including the national in local terms and the local seeking to be part and parcel of the national, while maintaining their cultural and social diversities within a territorially demarcated place. The juxtaposition of the local and national by Tai-Ahom leaders is made evident in their demands. They want: recognition of their identity; to have access to the national public resources for development and progress in their communities; and opportunities to make contributions to the social policies and decision-making process in economic, political, and cultural matters. I read the movement as a voice of people who are seeking admission and rights to the nation as citizens. Can their demands be achieved? Like many other regional/local identity movements ongoing in India, the Tai-Ahom movement, loo, envisages that democracy should establish mechanisms through which power can be shared and the oppressed’ allowed to voice (heir concerns as a group. Disputes over the labels of identity draw attention to this concern of the right to organize and be represented as

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a specific group, that is, maintain heterogeneity, while they continue to be part of a composite national community. In Chitralekha Zutshi’s essay we find an excellent example of the political consideration of such grievances during the pre-modern period when Kashmir was ruled by the Mughal, Afghan, and Sikh rulers. Rather than create groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the pre-modern rulers invoked an ethos of love for homeland to motivate Kashmiris to protect and participate in the regional administration as engaged members of the polity. People and place were symbiotically connected and the greater good of the homeland was given primacy. Divided loyalties were discouraged and identities based on affiliations of religion, language, or ethnicities were not fostered. In the modern era, however, this basic political strategy of motivating people to find and create inclusion on a common political platform has been overlooked and in consequence a variety of discourses of separation that incite people to agitate are taking shape. The states response to these local movements is to crush them with force and punishment. This has a spiralling effect and creates further gaps between the different constituencies. In Assam, the people who want to identify as Tai-Ahom interpret Assamese as a historic label of disempowerment and marginalization, used for the convenience of New Delhi. To overcome the condition of oppression and create presence, they are insisting on bringing back ‘dead’ history into living memory. By becoming and being recognized as Tai-Ahom, they posit the claim to self-identity, and exercise the right as citizens to representation within the nation-state. The language of identity is a political demand for the redistribution of power and the right to certain freedoms and guarantees denied to groups of people in Assam. As Stuart Hall argues, the demand for such a citizenship is far more encompassing than a demand for mere political rights, for it aims to restructure the social along with individual aspects of identification, which is both political and social in the final outcome.37 Can the nation-state accommodate this demand? The record of the Indian state has been mixed. The postcolonial governments at Delhi have followed a carrot and stick’ policy towards the Northeast. Beginning from the period of Indira Gandhi’s prime-ministership to the last BJP regime (1968-2003), New Delhi has adopted the policy of bribing people into silence. Also, the B JP’s policy of Hinduization can only exacerbate tensions in Assam, where different religious and political communities live together.

LOCAL NATIONALISM OR SECESSIONISM?

37

Scholars of Assam have suggested different strategies to reform the impasse between Assam and the Indian state. Some recommend a political solution arguing that the fluctuation of demographic pattern caused by the influx of‘illegal immigrants’, that is, Bangladeshis, should be stabilized, so that the local Assamese people feel secure to involve themselves in development schemes guided by New Delhi.38 But this is not an acceptable solution to most people in Assam who have been struggling to claim a sense of autonomy. To become an appendage of New Delhi is the last resort they seek. Another argument calls for greater distribution of power between the centre and the province and suggests a federated structure.39 I agree with this view, but I believe real change requires more than political restructuring. New Delhi has to make several alterations in its approach. The political and mental boundaries of hierarchy and language of groups that rule and have a dominant place in the government must change. India cannot be a place that showcases only the achievement of a few groups, particularly the peoples and cultures of north India that highlight the accomplishments of India’s golden past in Aryanized Brahmanic’ Hinduism. There is nothing incredible about an India that does not include the variety that makes up its populace—the so-called non-Aryans alongside the constructed Aryan communities and histories. Pejorative classifications of caste Hindu civilizational terms such as mlecchas, asuras, and antarjya and labels such as rebels, insurgents, and terrorists that New Delhi has used to degrade the people of the Northeast and make them into second-class citizens have to be eliminated. India has to be more than a place where people are forced to live, some as second-class citizens. For the people of Assam, the idea of an Indian identity is more of a threat of erasure of local selves than a promise of improvement. The government has to change this attitude by prioritizing the people and making it evident to them through various ways and means, including a concrete policy of respect and acceptance of their rights to chart the future course of development in the region. More importantly, New Delhi has to come to terms with the plural pasts that are littered in the landscape of modern India. It is misleading for the political regimes in Delhi to assume that constructed Indian history and identity is deeply rooted and is immutable and simple. Indian national history and identity are contingent, and the central government has to acknowledge the limits of their application and know that they can be subverted. Recognizing the multiple pasts of

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Indian people without politicizing and silencing them as instruments of adversaries can help to mitigate the continuing mistrusts and grievances of neglected and marginalized groups. Rewriting a new, composite national history is crucial in this enterprise. History has to be reverted to people, not simply as a token symbol to acknowledge present and absent communities, but must function as a shared space where communities can learn about each other and be given a voice to represent their multiple memories and what it means to them. People have to find themselves in this history because ‘history speaks to the figure of the citizen.40 National history cannot be an artificial construct given to the people as a directive from above. It has to become local and local histories must be made national. If this is achieved, that is if a real democracy of historical knowledge is developed, encouraged, and taught, the plural communities in India will be able to find themselves and be empowered to recognize the self and others. This will foster a sense of connection to the nation and make the state trustworthy. One can then move beyond and have an Indian nationality that people accept as legitimate and desirable.

NOTES 1. The term Tai designates a linguistic community. (Thais, on the other hand, is the name of the people of Thailand.) Lao, Shan, as well as minor languages in southern China, Upper Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam are included in the Tai language family to which Tai-Ahom belongs. Interestingly while the Ahoms have made a claim to be different from the Assamese by using language to mark difference and create similarities with Southeast Asian groups, they do not speak the Tai languages and are generally illiterate. I know this first­ hand because I am from Assam and I have studied the Tai-Ahom language. To learn the Tai-Ahom language I had to adopt a circuitous way by first studying central Thai and Lao and then the Ahom script with an Aiton scholar (another related language group of Tai) in Assam. 2. J. Derrida, 1994, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York: Routledge. 3. For lack of a better word, I am using the term animist to explain the religious beliefs of communities that do not fall into the categories listed. 4. U. Misra, 2000, The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. 5. See www.assam.org/node 12373.4. Accessed on 4 January 2010. 6. In 1836, Moniram Dewan, the appointed agent of the king of Assam, outlined a definition of the Assamese community. Different groups of people professing different religions but sharing a common language, Assamese, were defined as the Assamese community in Moniram’s petition. (See Moffat Mills, 1854, Report on

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39

the Province ofAssam, Appendix ‘Translation of a Petition Presented in Person by Moniram Dutt Borwah Dewan, on account of Ghunnokanth Singh Joobaraj and Others’, Calcutta: Calcutta Gazette Office, pp. Ixv-lxxxvi). 7. Moheshwar Neog, 1979, Annals of the Assam Sahitya Sabha, Jorhat: Assam Sahitya Sabha, p. 3. 8. The Ahom Association, File No. 362, Assam State Archives, Guwahati. 9. This myth was first created by Walter Hamilton-Buchannan in his East India Gazetteer. Since then the myth was repeated in many other colonial documents and was accepted as a factual evidence of the origin of Ahom. The Ahom leaders accepted the colonial version to start a story of their ancestors’ origin in a mythic kingdom in Upper Burma. 10. The colonial and postcolonial maps of India (1899, 1954) encapsulated the ‘geo-body’ and made it into both a political entity and a socio-cultural space. To this modern notion of nation and mapping was integrated the traditional cultural-historical vocabulary, such as Aryavarta, Bharatvarsa, and Hindustan, which mediated an imagination of an entity that is called India. The classical concept of Aryavarta as the dominion of Aryavamsi (Aryan land) had gained prominence during the period of anti-colonial politics and was reinserted into history textbook by the Bharatiya Vidyabhavan scholars in the 1960s. Aryavarta was also designated to be punyabhumi, ‘the land of virtue’ and the realm of Rama rajya. The other term, Bharatvarsa, likewise, was embedded in a cultural-religious space and was designated as deva bhumi, the land of gods. Although in postcolonial narratives, terms such as Bharatvarsa, Aryavarta, and the like, were meant as markers of the cultural space of India to create pride in the past, the vocabulary (since it was steeped in the Brahmanic Hinduism of north India) skewed the imagination of modern India. The realm of Aryavarta remained narrowly defined to the Gangetic Delta of the north. The people in the regions immediately outside were reduced to the realm of mythical beasts and demons and were variously called asuras, danavas, dasyus, and mlecchas (demons, monsters, subterranean, casteless, and polluted peoples). People in Assam became the mythical outcaste within the Indian nation. 11. Tirtha Nath Goswami, 1915, Mular Para Haral Bhangoni Ripunjay Smriti Ba Prayachitta Bebhasthabidhan (in Assamese), Calcutta: n.p. 12. The Ahom Association, File No. 362, Assam State Archives, Guwahati. 13. The term Tai-Ahom was coined by Padmanath Gogoi, a historian at the Guwahati University. The term appeared in 1968, The Tai and the Ancient Tai Kingdom with a Fuller Treatment of the Brahmaputra Valley, Guwahati: Guwahati University Press. Gohain’s position as a professor of history lent credence to the newly coined term and Ahom was transformed into Tai-Ahom. 14. Confidential, MSS Eur E. 278/4(g), ‘A Note on the Future of the Present Excluded, Partially Excluded and Tribal Areas of Assam’, Robert Reid, Governor of Assam, 7 April 1941, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, London. 15. In 2006, a new political alliance was made between leaders of the Bodo movement (fighting to break away from the Assamese) and the ULFA (that

40

HETEROTOPIAS

claims to speak for the Assamese people). The temporary alliance seeks to garner support and strengthen the opposition base against their common enemy, the Indian government. Will this alliance last? People in Assam are curious and so is the government. The massive manhunt to flush out the ULFA from the kingdom of Bhutan is part of the drive to cut-off the routes of movement of the ULFA cadres from the areas of lower Assam and Bodoland to the mountain kingdom. 16. Sanjib Baruah, 1999, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 17. The people of Upper Assam refer to the Brahmaputra as the Luit. In histor­ ical literature the river is referred to by the Sanskritized term Lohit which means red river.’ According to Hindu legend the source of Lohit is Parashuramkund, the well of fratricidal crime where the mythic figure Parashuram slew his iconoclastic father to revive faith and morality in the community. People in Upper Assam however do not refer to this myth, but they do not have another one to replace it. Luit is a colloquial term and is seemingly not connected to any religious belief. Nonetheless, the sentiment of connection to the Luit is very strong. Although the area of Luit is not a spatially marked territory, the people who live by the banks of Luit (Luitpaar) claim it as their homeland and identity. In this sense Luit has become more than a river. It signifies deep passion and politics that create a Active as well as a real connection to the place and its problems. 18. The term swargadeo, literally ‘the spirit from heaven is derived from Sanskrit. It was introduced in the buranjis when Brahmins became the religious advisers of the kings of Assam. The first king who is referred to as a swargadeo in the seventeenth-century buranjis was Suhungmung (1497-1539), although he never took that title himself. He became like a swargadeo, according to his chroniclers, after defeating the Chutia king, who controlled trade and travel between Assam valley and inner Asia in the pre-modern period. With the establishment of the rule of a heaven-born king, a three member ministry was created and the first few ministers were chosen from different groups of subject communities, including Naga. From the reign of Susenpha or Pratap Singha (1603-41) the title of swargadeo became a royal prerogative. 19. In 1962, the Northeast was attacked by the Chinese. The Chinese government, which had never ratified the McMahon Line created by the British to demarcate India from Tibet and China, claimed that many villages which were under Chinese control were mapped and claimed by India. To recover their lost subjects and territory the Chinese sent their troops into Assam in November 1962. Since then the Government of India has viewed the northeast frontier as a potential ‘weak’ spot that is vulnerable to ‘foreign’ invasion and in justification has refused, until recently, to allocate financial resources for its development. The lack of contact with Delhi further distanced the people of the Northeast even further and the self-fulfilling prophecy of the national government became a reality when new identity and ‘militant’ movements emerged, presumably with ‘outside’ support. 20. J. Vansina, 1985, Oral Tradition as History, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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21. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. 22. Discourse is an intensely political act that creates frontiers between us’ and ‘them’. A discourse community is structured on this theoretical framework and draws upon past history, myths, and symbols transforming them into ‘facts’ to provide them a basis for action in the present. Such a community is structured around specific goals such as repossessions of land and territory, culture, and means of production as well as the restoration of rights, status, and power. To act on these grievances a movement needs a set of leaders to mobilize feelings of solidarity, support, and duty. It is vital to have an audience that can relate to the issues and translate ideas of the leaders into action. In other words, the leaders and groups of audiences form a ‘discourse community’ of shared objectives and agendas. 23. Here I am following David Held’s argument that citizenship is more than having a document to prove nationality. Citizenship means the right to enjoy entitlements and liberties within the context of both state and civil society. See David Held, 1991, ‘Between State and Civil Society: Citizenship’, in Geoff Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 19-25. 24. This was made evident to me in all the conversations I had with the ULFA leaders and supporters, including the surrendered ULFA, also known as SULFA. In reply to my question as to why the movement emerged in Upper Assam, one of the important ULFA leaders once told me, ‘such a fire of freedom could only ignite and burn in the villages of Upper Assam where hope had died and all that people were left with is the past; the rule of swargadeos must be revived for Assam to become truly free’. In accordance with the conventions of interview and inter­ viewee confidentiality rules in human subject research and oral history research, details have not been provided to maintain the anonymity of ULFA source. 25. For a detailed discussion of the history of the Thai and Tai projects see Charles Keyes, 2002, ‘Presidential Address: “The Peoples of Asia”—Science and Politics in the Classification of Ethnic Groups in Thailand, China and Vietnam’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 61(4), pp. 1163-1203. 26. The Nanchao theory appears in almost all standard works on the early history of Burma and Thailand produced in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. A few examples are W.A.R. Wood, n.k. 1926, History of Siam, London; D.G.E. Hall, 1950, Burma, London: Hutchinson University Library; Ney Elias, 1876, Introductory Sketch of the History of Shans in Upper Burma and Western Yunan, Calcutta: Foreign Department Press; L. Milne, 1910, Shans at Home, London: John Murray. 27. George Coedes, 1996, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Hawaii: University of Hawaii. 28. BJ. Terwiel, 1983, The Tai ofAssam and Ancient Tai Rituals, Gaya: Review Office of Southeast Asian Studies. 29. Chatthip Narthsupha, 1991, ‘The Community Culture of Thought’, in Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton (eds), Thai Construction of Knowledge, London: School of Oriental and African Studies, p. 118.

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30. In a public meeting at Guwahati on 7 February 1995, Chatthip proudly told his audience that for fourteen years he has been involved in influencing, supporting, and encouraging Ahom scholars and activists, such as J.N. Phukan, Puspa Gogoi, Ramesh Buragohain, and Kiran Gogoi to take up the task of writing, propagating, and transmitting a Tai version of Ahom history. 31. There are several Thai publications on Ahom religion and rituals. At Thammasat University a Tai-Ahom Studies project has been ongoing for a few years and every year a few Thai publications on different aspect of Ahom religion and myths appear on the subject. An English translation of some Ahom rituals based on chronicles has been done by Renu Wichaslip and B.J. Terwiel, 1992, and is entitled Tai-Ahom and the Stars: Three Ritual Texts to Ward Off Danger, Ithaca: Southeast Asia Publications, Cornell University Press. 32. An international airport connecting flights between Guwahati and Bangkok was inaugurated on 3 April 2002. On this occasion the civil aviation minister commented that the flight has an added importance because many people in the Northeast had ancestral roots in Thailand. Despite this tall claim of connecting to a past and creating possibilities for future trade and commerce between Southeast and South Asia, the international flights between Guwahati and Bangkok had to be grounded within a year for lack of commercial viability. Recently, after a hiatus of over a year, a renewed attempt has been made to reopen the route. The experiment is supposed to last for four months. 33. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar coined the term in 1923. Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Poona: Veer Prakashan Press. According to Savarkar, Hindutva is ‘not a word but a history [...] Not only a spiritual or religious history of our people as at times it is mistaken to be, [... ] but history in full. Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva. [...] Hindutva embraces all the departments of thought and activity of the whole Being of our Hindu race.’ (p. 3) Savarkar’s Hindu ideology of India made Indian identity and the country into an ethno­ religious community. This definition of community was further emphasized in Mahadeva Sudashiv Gowalkar, 1939, We and Our Nationhood Defined, Nagpur: India Prakashan. 34. ‘Lost Treasures of Assam’, Assam Tribune (online version), www. assamtribune.com. Accessed on 13 August 2002. This trend of thinking that Assam is connected to the rest of India through the medium of caste Hinduism is quite popular these days and is expressed in election results. Many BJP candidates today represent the Assamese people in Delhi. The trend has spread even into Nagaland where the BJP has found a foothold and is able to contest elections against local candidates who represent local nationalist platforms. But, so far the BJP has not succeeded in winning a seat in Nagaland, although they have won two in Assam. 35. See Sanjib Baruah, 2005, ‘Generals as Governors’, in Sanjib Baruah, Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 59-80. 36. In a recent conference in Assam organized by the Center for the North East, South and Southeast Asian Studies (CENESEAS) in Guwahati, on 17

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September 2004, Congressman and parliamentarian Jayaram in his plenary address blamed the Northeast for failing to seize opportunities and emerge as a viable and successful group of regional states. He quoted figures to establish that all the states in the Northeast receive huge sums of money from New Delhi, to the tune of 70-85 per cent of their states budget. But the lack of development, he claimed, was because the local people have failed to become enterprising citizens, develop infrastructure, and become proto-capitalists. It is true that most of the elite groups in the Northeast do not invest their money in the region; they export it to Delhi where they buy houses, and invest in business and consumer goods. Thus, instead of the Northeast developing, the heartland of north India is, once again, reaping the gains of returning capital. Maybe, one needs to ask a more probing question of Delhi, why is capital fleeing from the Northeast? How has New Delhi failed to create a system of security and build trust in order to make the region attractive for investments? 37. Stuart Hall and David Held, 1989, ‘Citizens and Citizenship’, in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 177. 38. Sanjoy Hazarika, 2000, Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India's East and Bangladesh, New Delhi: Penguin; Misra, Periphery Strikes Back. 39. Baruah, India Against Itself 40. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 1992, ‘Death of History, Historical Consciousness and the Culture of Late Capitalism’, Public Culture, 4(2), Spring, pp. 47-66.

2 KASHMIR AND KASHMIRIYAT * The Politics of Diversity in South Asia

Chitralekha Zutshi

DEFINING KASHMIRIYAT This chapter examines the origins and antecedents of the term Kashmiriyat to uncover its ahistorical and anachronistic nature, as applied to Kashmiri pre-colonial history and identity. It argues that the concept has been integral to the construction of a certain brand of Kashmiri nationalism that has, as part of its hegemonizing and homogenizing agenda and in consort with mainstream Indian nationalism, attempted to present a unified and cohesive vision of Kashmirs past. The proponents of Kashmiriyat define Kashmir as a unique region where religious communities lived in harmony since time immemorial and differences in religion did not translate into acrimonious conflict until external intervention. According to this version of Kashmiri history, Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims participated in a syncretistic culture in the hoary past, facilitated by the practice of a ‘tolerant’ Islam in the region. Kashmiriyat’s wholesale acceptance, in public discourse on Kashmir, as the defining feature of Kashmiri culture and history, regardless of historical periodicity, is central to two interlinked political projects, which alternatively overlap, diverge, or clash: first, the discourse of a unified Indian nation-state based on a unitary nationalism, and * This essay is based in part on material from Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; London: Hurst & Co., 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

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second, a highly federalized nationalism based on regionalized and plural identities. Both projects have an interest in maintaining the idea of the uniqueness of the Kashmiri identity, the former as an explanation for the staunch resistance to its ideals launched by the recent insurgency in the Valley since the 1990s, and the latter to promote the idea of autonomy for Kashmir. Scholarship on Kashmir, whether historical or on accession and recent political upheavals, broadly falls under these two categories.1 It unquestioningly accepts the concept of Kashmiriyat and its attendant ideas, offers no critical engagement with its origin, definition, and historically contingent nature, and as a result, remains oblivious to the critical relationship between history, identities, and nationalism. This essay, instead, locates and interrogates the term Kashmiriyat as a historical entity, while asserting that the relationship between regional, religious, and national identities in Kashmir has been far more ambiguous, and more complex, than the term Kashmiriyat would lead one to believe. It is significant to point out at the outset that the spirit of Kashmiriyat is not the original product of nationalist minds. Its antecedents can be located in colonial discourse on Kashmir that far predates the emergence of nationalism. As early as the seventeenth century, European travellers to the Valley wrote about the absence of religious discord in the region, presenting it as a place where Hindus were uncaring of caste rules and Muslims did not make the pilgrimage to Mecca,2 since they lived in what eventually came to be described as the ‘Happy Valley’.3 The ‘happiness’ of the Kashmir Valley, particularly for India’s colonial masters, perhaps had more to do with its geographical attributes, which rendered it a cool haven for the heat-weary British, than with any peculiarities of the people. The British reinvented Kashmir into a combination of a picnic spot and a sportsman’s paradise, away from the dusty plains, where the mundane business of ruling British-India could be discussed over hiking, trout-fishing, and hunting expeditions.4 By the mid­ nineteenth century, however, colonial discourse on Kashmir was deeply imbricated with the creation and maintenance of Kashmir as a princely state within the British-Indian Empire, and the exigencies of indirect colonialism. Either way, it was in the interests of the colonial state, even as it began to intervene in the political and economic affairs of the princely state, to perpetuate the myth of the distinctiveness of the historical trajectory of Kashmir and its inhabitants from British India. Indeed, it is the historical narrative on Kashmir, drawing

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significantly on colonial histories and travelogues, that has extensively bandied about the term Kashmiriyat, attempting to locate this anachronistic identity in the history of the region.5 This narrative paints all Kashmiris, from mystic poets in medieval times to common folk in the colonial period, with the brush of the unique, syncretistic Kashmiri identity. The reluctance to jettison the term Kashmiriyat in describing and understanding the history of Kashmir and the resultant emphasis on a discourse of united Kashmiri nationalism (apart from being ahistorical and anachronistic) does Kashmir and Kashmiris tremendous disservice, since it privileges a particular brand of Kashmiri nationalism. To serve its own political ends, this brand created the concept of Kashmiriyat, in the 1940s and 1950s, to obviate the need to accommodate regional and religious differences, and multiple visions of nationalism within Kashmir. Further, the legacy of Kashmiriyat has shrouded the history of Kashmir in the imperatives of the regional conflicts of the postcolonial states of South Asia. Kashmir, in many ways, was not much different from other regions in South Asia, where the discourse on religious identities and regional affiliations interacted in significant ways with political and economic formations in both the pre-colonial and colonial periods, to produce a dissimilar, although not unique, political culture. Similar to the Ahom identity claimed by the Tai-Ahom in Assam as discussed by Yasmin Saikia in the previous chapter, Kashmiriyat has no factual historical basis; it is a label created by certain groups to serve their political and other aspirations in the present, which ultimately leads to an elision of parallel definitions of Kashmiri identities and other narratives of Kashmir’s past. The idea of Kashmiriyat may have allowed Kashmiris to imagine themselves as a separate group within India, just as the idea of Tai-Ahom allowed various groups to claim an identity which could be utilized as a platform for political and social actions. However, I would argue that the label became (and remains today) a means for the central government to appropriate Kashmir into its own nationalist rhetoric by presenting it as a microcosm of the idea of unity in diversity’, thereby denying Kashmiris’ social, economic, and political aspirations.

ORIGINS Even a cursory examination of historical documents from Kashmir reveals that the origins of the spirit of the term Kashmiriyat, if not

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necessarily its letter, is a product of twentieth-century Kashmiri politics in the early 1940s. The All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, which claimed to be the representative of all inhabitants of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, performed in Kashmir a role similar to that of the Indian National Congress in the all-India context. In other words, it increasingly began to conflate region with nation (Kashmir with India) and even more ominously, struck an uneasy alliance between nationalism and religious identities. Instead of focusing on demands for a just society based on Islamic ideals (which it had done in the 1930s, when it was still the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference),6 it specifically put forward a nationalist agenda that denigrated religious affiliations as being communal. Much like its counterpart in British India, the National Conference ignored and resisted alternate visions of the Kashmiri nation and consensual schemes for the future of Kashmir that sought to accommodate religious identities and intra-regional interests.7 Its increasing moves to ally itself with the Indian National Congress and its politics in this period are also telling. However, the disjunction between the pan-Indian majoritarianism with its ‘national’ and ‘Hindu’ orientation, and the pan-Kashmiri one, with its ‘regional’ and ‘Muslim’ orientation, apparent in the 1930s, became increasingly clear in the postcolonial era, an idea I will return to later. As the popularity of the organization dwindled, even among Muslims of the Kashmir Valley, particularly after the revival of the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference in 1942, the National Conference and its president, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, resorted increasingly to the discourse of secular nationalism, which put forth an ideology that refused to acknowledge the religious and regional differences among its constituents. The critics of this discourse were many and the criticisms trenchant. The Kashmiri socialist, P.N. Bazaz, for instance, condemned what he labelled the Gandhism, Jinnahism, and nationalism being propounded by the Indian National Congress in India and the National Conference in Kashmir. According to him, their ideologies were merely communalism and capitalism masquerading as nationalism.8 The Hamdard, a newspaper jointly founded by Abdullah and Bazaz in the mid-1930s, became the strongest voice of dissent against the invasion of ‘nationalism’ and communalism’ into the body politic of the Kashmir Valley. Most significantly, it defended Kashmiris’ right to decide their own fate in the impending political transformations in

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the subcontinent. An article by a Kashmiri Pandit activist rejected the Indian National Congress as the answer to the problems of the states, since the organization would bring independence to the rajas and maharajas of the states, while their subjects continued to toil under autocratic rule.9 It is evident that by the mid-1940s, Kashmiris had become increasingly suspicious of the stance of the Congress and the Muslim League towards native states, a well-founded suspicion given future events in Kashmir. Other editorials implored Sheikh Abdullah, as leader of a Kashmiri political organization, to abandon his alignment with the Indian National Congress and choose the socialist path to address the issues facing Kashmiris. They pointed out that the economic and political reforms that the National Conference had stood for when it was the Muslim Conference, seemed to have been lost in the race to gain political power and the favour of Congress leaders. ‘Where is the revolutionary,’ asked one Hamdard editorial, who had appeared as the Prophet to lead the Kashmiris out of their oppressive conditions?’10 The newspaper and its editor still held on to the hope that Abdullah might change his ways and prove to be the leader he had set out to be during the 1931 movement. From a radically different perspective, but for similar reasons, Hindu newspapers of Jammu hailed the re-creation of the Muslim Conference (in 1942), since they felt that the term national’ in the title of the National Conference was just a means to mask the majoritarian ideologies of the organization. The newspapers Sudarshan and Amar of Jammu stated that an overtly communal organization such as the Muslim Conference was much more acceptable and far less dangerous for Hindu interests than the National Conference, where communalists had disguised themselves as nationalists. An article in Amar claimed that the sole aim of the National Conference was to replace Hindu Raj with Muslim Raj. While the Muslim Conference was also against Hindu Raj, since it was a communal organization, it would be more willing to garner the endorsement of the minorities for its programmes. The National Conference, however, by virtue of the fact that it proclaimed itself to be national, sought no such sanction. The article further questioned the dangers of the nationalism of the National Conference by pointing out that when it put forth its demands, the government regarded them as representative of all the inhabitants of the state, when they clearly were not. On the other hand,

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the government dismissed the demands of the Muslim Conference as communal.11 Several prominent Kashmiri Muslims also disputed the National Conference’s claim to be sole representative of Kashmiris, on grounds that it had betrayed their trust by aligning not only with the Dogra government, but also with the Indian National Congress. They were equally opposed to the Muslim Conferences pro-Muslim League ideology. In an article in the Hamdard, a Kashmiri Muslim eloquently defended Kashmirs right to self-determination by stating that neither the Congress nor the Muslim League could intervene in the affairs of the native states. If, he argued, Pakistan stood for the self-determination of Muslims, then why could not Kashmiris have the same right? Furthermore, Kashmiris would not simply accept the Muslim Leagues attitude whereby it ignored the interests of the people of the native states unless they joined Pakistan. Kashmiris’ right to self-determination could not, in his view, be ignored in Hindustan’s movement towards independence.12 Although the term Kashmiriyat did not appear in the rhetoric of the National Conference in the 1930s and 1940s, it is clear that the organization’s political ideology had increasingly come to be defined in terms of a secular nationalism that denigrated any expression of difference, particularly religious. Several voices of dissent were raised against its hegemonic nationalism, which refused to acknowledge other visions for the Kashmiri nation aimed specifically at charting a course for Kashmiri politics independent of the mainstream nationalism espoused by the Indian National Congress in British India. Despite the trenchant criticism, and in the context of events surrounding India’s independence, creation of Pakistan and the eventual partition of Kashmir, the National Conference’s emphasis on an ideology of united Kashmiri nationalism became more pronounced in the postcolonial period. Thus Kashmiriyat appeared in the discourse of the post­ independence National Conference regime in Jammu and Kashmir. In 1948, Abdullah took over as head of the National Conference regime with the blessings of the newly formed Indian state under the prime ministership of Nehru. Despite his and his organization’s good intentions, and Nehru’s claims that ‘the present government of Kashmir was not put down there from the air; they represented the popular organisation and remained there because of their own

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strength and not because of legal sanctions alone’13 the National Conference regime was undoubtedly an installation of the Indian government, a fact made apparent by the presence of a vast number of Indian troops in the state. By 1947, the National Conference lost its popular mandate with Kashmiris, both Muslims and Hindus. Significantly, it had never commanded the support of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs of the Jammu region, a region that now came effectively under its control. The regime was caught between preserving its own power in the face of multifarious challenges to its authority, pressure from the government to maintain the security of the newly founded state by suppressing dissident elements within the territory, and its own ideological platform that had promised far-reaching reforms in the political and economic structures of the state. Ironically, and perhaps predictably, the organization that had first demanded political and social rights on behalf of Kashmiris became their greatest repressor. The National Conference regime systematically suppressed papers and periodicals that did not agree with Sheikh Abdullah, particularly regarding Kashmir’s accession to India. The state government promulgated an ordinance entitled the Enemy Agents Ordinance that allowed for the arrest and summary trials of those suspected of pro-Pakistan leanings. P.N. Bazaz, who had spoken out during the 1947-8 crisis in favour of Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, was expelled from state territories and his organization, the Kashmir Socialist Party, was banned within the state.14 Further, the National Conference regime alienated several sectors of the population through its policies: Kashmiri Muslims, as a result of the repression of their religiously informed cultural identity and politics; Hindus of the Jammu region, who felt that the question of Kashmir’s accession to India was unresolved and the Conference was making no attempt to settle it (in general, they felt that the Conference was pro-Kashmir Valley at the expense of the Jammu region); and finally, the landed element in the state, many of whom were Kashmiri Pandits and Hindus, who lost their property as a result of the land reforms carried out by the Jammu and Kashmir state in 1950-1. In general, there were murmurings of dissent against the National Conference from several quarters in this period. Meanwhile, the Government of India had also begun to regard the National Conference and its leader with some suspicion.

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It was in response to this criticism and to counter it that the Nation­ al Conference regime drew on and continued its homogenizing discourse of a Kashmiri national identity that included and transcend­ ed religious, class, and other differences. The concept of Kashmiriyat was a neat way to propagate the idea of a peaceful coexistence of religious communities while obscuring the question of economic, material, and social differences between them. This Kashmiri exceptionalist discourse, moreover, was squarely located within the narrative and agenda of the Indian nation-state and did not allow for an expression of Kashmiri regional or religious aspirations. Abdullah’s regime devoted much time and resources to the pro­ pagation of its mantra, now reified in the term Kashmiriyat. At this stage the regime appointed the Kashmiri Muslim poet, Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, the official spokesperson of the Kashmiriyat mantra by awarding him the title of National Poet of Kashmir, although in 1947, they had imprisoned him for writing a poem that reflected his deeply ambiguous feelings about nationalism and regional identities. In this poem he wrote, ‘Though I would like to sacrifice my life and body for India, yet my heart is in Pakistan’.15 While Mahjoor’s poetry celebrates brotherly love between Hindus and Muslims of Kashmir, it also reflects a deep sense of alienation from much-touted concepts of the era, such as freedom and rights, and questions the promise of the new era. A few paragraphs from his poem ‘Azadi’, are worth quoting here: Let us all offer thanksgiving, For Freedom has come to us; It’s after ages that she has beamed Her radiance on us. Poverty and starvation, Lawlessness and repression,— Its with these blessings That she has come to us.

Freedom, being of heavenly birth, Can’t move from door to door; You’ll find her camping in the homes Of a chosen few alone.

There’s restlessness in every heart, But no one dare speak out— Afraid that with their free expression Freedom may be annoyed.16

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Although the regime labelled several Kashmiri Pandit poets as votaries of Kashmiriyat,17 many Kashmiri Pandits were clearly in no mood to be mollified by ideas of a tolerant Kashmiri culture when it seemed to them that the state government had done very little to ensure their economic and political rights as a minority. As a disillusioned Kashmiri Pandit, Jia Lal Kaul Jalali, who had retired from government service, observed in 1950, ‘I am a Kashmiri to whom Kashmir has always been the dearest of treasures, and suffered for it. To me the nationalism of today is nothing but a garbled version of majoritycommunalism directed towards a definite end.’18 Jalali was pointing to a profound schism between the National Conferences discourse and practice, implicit since the late 1930s, which pervaded and vitiated its narrative on Kashmiriyat. While the Conference propounded a secular philosophy, its regime unabashedly used religion as a tool of legitimacy. The overt propagation of a secular Kashmiri identity, while acceptable in principle to the Government of India, being closely related to its own majoritarian ideas, nevertheless threatened its sacrosanct territorial integrity. If taken to its logical conclusion, Kashmiriyat, which emphasized Kashmirs uniqueness in India, implied some kind of autonomy for Kashmir. Also, the majoritarianism implicit in this idea was Muslim, not Hindu. This, coupled with the uncertain question of the states accession to India, ensured an increasingly strained relationship between the Jammu and Kashmir government and the Indian Union by the early 1950s, eventually leading to the deposition of Abdullah in 1953. This was not the end of the popularity of Kashmiriyat in political discourse on Kashmir. In fact, the pervasiveness of this term is striking in the discourse of successive National Conference regimes, the central government, and historical scholarship from the 1950s onwards. The contemporary conflict in the region has intensified this need to define Kashmiri history in harmonious terms. So Kashmiriyat did not emerge ex-nihilo from the soil of Kashmir; it was a product of the collusion of Kashmiri and Indian majoritarian nationalisms, both of which needed to obscure the inherent contradictions in their logic and rhetoric. IDENTITIES IN PRE-COLONIAL KASHMIR A focus on defining Kashmiri history and identity through the lens of Kashmiriyat has had a powerful impact on interpretations of Kashmir s

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past. In my reading of Kashmiri history, the discourse on Kashmiriyat misrepresents the interaction between religious and regional identities in pre-colonial Kashmir. It fails to recognize that people belonging to different religious groups in pre-colonial Kashmir lived with a degree of harmony not because of an inherent tendency towards harmony in Kashmiri culture or the uniquely tolerant nature of Kashmiri Islam and Hinduism, but due to political structures that historically allowed for an accommodation of religious differences and mediated conflict. While the administrations of the Mughals, Afghans, and Sikhs in Kashmir,19 bore the mark of the rulers religious affiliation, they did not base their legitimacy solely on one particular religion while excluding others. Since these regimes did not disburse patronage solely on grounds of religious affiliation, religious identities could be accommodated more easily in political structures and political culture.20 This should not suggest that religious affiliations were unimportant or meaningless in this period, as the discourse on Kashmiriyat would lead one to believe. Rather, that the narrative on regional belonging transcended, but did not erase religious differences, since it called on all Kashmiris, regardless of their religious identity, to protect their homeland from outsiders. The concept of Mulk-i-Kashmir, redolent with a sense of belonging to the homeland of Kashmir that was in a state of unmitigated decline due to the rapacious rule of outsiders, emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In their long narrative poems in Persian, Kashmiri writers displayed an ability to glorify their regional affiliation while remaining faithful to their religious identities. Mulla Hamidullah Shahabadi (1783-1848), is the best exemplar of the deep sense of regional identification that pervaded Kashmiri discourse in this period. A Kashmiri school teacher and theologian, he wrote prolifically during his lifetime and is considered the foremost Kashmiri epic poet of his age. The numerous topics of his deeply satirical poetry reflected his rancour at the poor state of Kashmir and its inhabitants. Shahabadi introduced the tradition of writing elegies to the devastation that had befallen Kashmir. In the tradition of shahr-iashob poetry in other parts of the subcontinent, his verses celebrated his attachment to the Kashmir Valley, identified as a city, and mourned its moral and social degeneration under Afghan and Sikh rule. Several of his elegiac poems and treatises, such as Shahr-i-Ashob (The City of Tumult), Babujnama (A History of Injustice), and Napursan Nama (Story of Lawlessness), strongly condemned the rulers and the people

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for allowing the beautiful valley to slide into chaos and ugliness. He was not merely interested in recounting the vices of the ruling classes; to him the moral decay of Kashmiri society from within was partially responsible for the reprehensible condition of the land.21 Similar themes pervade the poetry of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Mirza Rafu Sauda, Khwaja Mir Dard, Akbar Allahbadi, Nazir Akbarabadi, among other Muslim poets, all of whom lamented the decline of the Mughal central authority, the consequent strife and social upheaval in various urban centres of the subcontinent, and the advent of colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22 Their lamentations, as Shahabadi’s, were not about the decline of Islam, but with the declension of their city, their home, their mulk. Significantly, Shahabadi’s call to Kashmiris regional identity did not take place in a religious vacuum, since he recognized affiliations to the religious collectivity. At the same time, he derided what he considered peoples emphasis on their religious identity encouraged by the anti­ Muslim policies of the Sikh governors: ‘There is one thing on the lips of people/Rule of religion, destruction of Mulk’.23 Himself a mullah, religious affiliation was obviously important to him but it could not override the sense of regional belonging. Shahabadi believed that Kashmir was in the throes of anarchy precisely because the religious elite did not have a larger sense of belonging to a homeland and unabashedly went about furthering their narrow personal interests. The poetry from this period criticized Muslim religious leaders, not so much because Islam was in danger (which would characterize the discourse of late-nineteenth century Kashmiri Muslim leadership), but because these leaders were corrupting what had now come to represent ‘Kashmiri’ traditions, such as shrine-worship. A theologian from the Kashmir Valley, Hajji Sayyid Nizamuddin Furahi (b. 1773), wrote a lengthy treatise in 1833 condemning the decline in the institution of pirism (shrine-worship). It is important to note that this treatise, Mulhemaat (or that which is bogus or meaningless), did not question the nature of Kashmiri Islam as being impure or meaningless, but instead lamented its take-over by pirs (Muslim religious elders associated with shrines/religious mendicants) who had led Kashmiris, both Hindus and Muslims, down the path of decadence, lies, and deceit.24 This is not to deny that treatises such as Mulhemaat were on the nature of Islam, but to suggest that they were not designed to define the boundaries of a religious community in singular terms, as with later Kashmiri Muslim political tracts.

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According to Furahi, shrine-worship was essential to the profession of Islam and indeed any religion in the Valley. Since it was a Kashmiri phenomenon, its original purity had to be maintained. This was the reason that the degeneration of pirism was having a severely unfavourable impact on Kashmiri society. As he wrote, ‘People who don’t believe in shrines are not Muslim/Those who wish evil against shrines have no righteousness’.25 Pirs, he continued, were to be found in droves in the villages and the city, but not one amongst them was a visionary who would lead the society out of its morass of immorality and decline. Instead, they were busy accumulating wealth at the expense of common Kashmiris, who were dying from famine and floods. To Furahi, as to Shahabadi, pirs were not so much profaning Islam, as they were betraying their homeland. Thus, Mulhemaat presented pirs as figures who not only fleeced the people, but also prevented them from attaining their individual and collective potential. Furahi considered these religious figures complicit with the rulers in submerging Kashmiris into backwardness and ignorance,26 since they kept the truth of religion from the people, instead of teaching them tolerance and patience: ‘They dress themselves as honest, Godly people/They misuse the name of Allah and the Prophets/They have hypnotized the people/As a snake charmer puts a spell on a snake’.27 Furahi wondered about the whereabouts of the spirits of the saints who inhabited the Valley in the past and propagated the dedication of one’s life to the service of others. Although he compared contemporary pirs to Muslim saints from Kashmir’s past, Furahi’s ululation was not about the decline of religion in general and certainly not about the decline of Islam in the Valley. Mulhemaat was most significantly about the severing of the connection that bound religious leaders to the larger society of which they were a part. Ultimately, the treatise viewed the deterioration of religion and religious leaders as part of a broader social, economic, and moral deracination of Kashmiris from their regional context.

THE POLITICS OF DIVERSITY This essay demonstrates that a regional, nationalist idea such as Kashmiriyat has not only resulted in a skewed perspective on Kashmiri history, but also allowed for the appropriation of Kashmir into Indian nationalist discourse. Although it is important to recognize the current political imperatives for presenting a harmonious picture of the interaction between religious groups in Kashmir’s past given the

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ostensibly religious conflict raging in the Valley, it is equally important to repair the damage done to the historical record by contemporary political objectives. This is necessary in light of the fact that a specific strand of Kashmiri nationalism, in collusion with mainstream Indian nationalism, deployed the idea of Kashmiriyat to elide over regional, religious, and other cleavages within Kashmiri society as part of its hegemonic agenda. This served to obfuscate the demands of Kash­ miris for political, economic, and social rights based on regional, religious, and other differences among them, particularly in the post­ colonial period. Kashmirs pre-colonial history reveals that religious groups were able to live relatively in harmony because political structures and the resultant political culture allowed for an accommodation of religious differences. Kashmiris were aware of belonging to religious groups with a certain set of rules that set them apart from those outside the bounds of those rules. Significantly, they recognized larger affiliations, such as those with the land in which they lived and its inhabitants. While clear religious affiliations existed in Kashmir, which may even have been antithetical to each other in certain contexts, the discourse on regional belonging quite effortlessly harnessed them for the greater good of the homeland. The discourse on Kashmiriyat has attempted to erase religious and other differences among the people of Kashmir rather than accept and accommodate them. Kashmiri history, in fact, provides a valuable lesson to state managers in Kashmir as well as India and Pakistan: paying lip-service to diversity through concepts such as Kashmiriyat is clearly not a solution to the existing problems in Kashmir. It is only when Kashmiris’ articulation of religious and regional differences ceases to be perceived as a threat to the homogeneity of state-sponsored nationalism and is addressed in political structures and discourse that Indian nationalism can truly claim to be secular and democratic. It will not be enough, however, to render Indian nationalist discourse more local and regional. As Saikias essay in this volume suggests, local discourses, particularly local histories, must also become more national. In the case of Kashmir, this means that we have to cease to write the history of Kashmir as a unique narrative within the history of the Indian subcontinent. Instead, the history of this region, and the articulation of identities within it, has to be seen, not unlike other parts of South Asia, as an evolving dialogue between a variety of social,

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economic, and religious groups, and a multiplicity of ideas such as those of homeland, region, and nation. NOTES 1. For instance, M.J. Akbar, 1985, India: The Siege Within, England: Penguin Books, p. 1; Verinder Grover (ed.), 1995, The Story of Kashmir, Yesterday and Today, vols 1-3, Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications; and Sumit Ganguly, 1997, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, fall in the first category. Sumantra Bose, 1997, The Challenge in Kashmir: Democracy, Self-Determination and a Just Peace, New Delhi: Sage, falls in the second category. 2. See Francois Bernier, 1826, Travels in the Mogul Empire AD 1656-1668, London: W. Pickering; rpt 1989, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers. 3. Kashmir was first described as ‘the Happy Valley’ by W. Wakefield, who visited Kashmir in 1875. See W. Wakefield, 1879, History of Kashmir and the Kashmiris: The Happy Valley, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington; rpt, 1975, Delhi: Seema Publications. 4. See Vasant Saberwal, Mahesh Rangarajan, and Ashish Kothari, 2001, People, Parks, and Wildlife: Towards Coexistence, New Delhi: Orient Longman, p. 35; and Mahesh Rangarajan, 2001, India's Wildlife History: An Introduction, Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 35-45. 5. To mention only a few instances, see P.N. Bazaz, 1954, The History of the Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir, Cultural and Political, From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, New Delhi: Kashmir Publishing Company; and G.M.D. Sufi, 1974, Kashir: Being a History of Kashmir from the Earliest Times to Our Own, 2 vols, New Delhi: Light and Life Publishers. A recent exception is Mridu Rai, 2004, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir, New Delhi: Permanent Black. 6. The All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was founded in 1932 under the leadership of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. Abdullah had the opportunity to meet Jawaharlal Nehru in the North West Frontier Province in 1937, a meeting that so impressed him that he declared at a press conference in Amritsar: ‘Our next programme will be to follow the principles of the Congress Party, and, after returning to Kashmir, I will strive to set up an organization which supports national ideology’ (Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, 1973, Flames of the Chinar: An Autobiography, New Delhi: Viking, pp. 45-6). In 1939, the Muslim Conference changed its appellation to the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. The All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was revived in 1942 under the leadership of Chaudhuri Ghulam Abbas. 7. Most scholarly works on the Kashmir issue begin their analyses with the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, which is accepted uncritically as the most popular political organization in Kashmir in the 1940s in general, and 1947 in particular. Furthermore, the National Conference is seen as pro-Congress and pro-India, while its main rival, the Muslim Conference, is regarded as pro­

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Muslim League and pro-Pakistan. See, for instance, the articles in Raju G.C. Thomas (ed.), 1992, Perspectives on Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict in South Asia, Boulder: Westview Press, most of which perpetuate these views. 8. P.N. Bazaz, 1944, Gandhism, Jinnahism, Socialism, Srinagar: Nishat Electric Press. 9. Hamdard, 15 August 1943, Srinagar. 10. Editorial, Hamdard, 16 November 1943, Srinagar. 11. Amar, 25 October 1940, Jammu. 12. Hamdard, 27 November and 8 December 1943, Srinagar. 13. Quoted in P.N. Bazaz, 1950, Truth About Kashmir, Delhi: Kashmir Democratic Union, p. 7. 14. P.N. Bazaz, 1965, The Shape of Things in Kashmir, Delhi: Pamposh Publications, 1965, p. 12. 15. Quoted in Bazaz, Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir, p. 298. 16. Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, 1972, Azadi’, (Freedom) in Trilokinath Raina (ed. and trans), An Anthology of Modern Kashmiri Verse (1930-1960), Poona: Sangam Press, pp. 74-7. These are selections from the poem, which has not been quoted here in its entirety. 17. See ibid, for a selection of the poetry of these poets, such as Dina Nath Nadim, Zinda Kaul, and Moti Lal Saqi. 18. ‘Jia Lal Kaul Jalali s letter to Kashyap Bandhu’, 3 June 1950, in private collection of Jia Lal Kaul Jalali, Srinagar State Archives. 19. Kashmir was part of the Mughal Empire from 1586 to 1758, the Afghan Empire from 1758 to 1819, and the Sikh kingdom from 1819 to 1846. 20. It was not until 1846—when the English East India Company created the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and placed it under the rule of a Dogra Maharaja—that the Dogra government of Kashmir adopted a specifically religious tenor for its rule and defined its legitimacy to rule the state based solely on its adherence to Hinduism. The political culture of late nineteenth-century Kashmir came to increasingly focus on defining the contours of religious communities and their relationship to the state. 21. Zubeida Jaan, 1996, Mullah Hamidullah Shahabadi: Hayat aur Karname (Mullah Hamidullah Shahabadi: Life and Works), Srinagar: Maqdomi Press, pp. 90-100. 22. See Ayesha Jalal, 2000, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850, London and New York: Routledge, particularly chapter 1, for a detailed discussion ot their poetry and the themes therein. 23. Mullah Hamidullah Shahabadi, ‘Babujnama (A History of Injustice), unpublished manuscript in Persian, Acc # 866, Persian and Arabic Manuscript Section, Research and Publications Department, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, p. 6. Translated by Chitralekha Zutshi and S.N. Bhatt Haleem. All Persian and Kashmiri sources used in this chapter have been translated by the present author, with the assistance of S.N. Bhatt Haleem, unless otherwise noted. 24. Sayyid Nizamuddin Furahi, ‘Mulhemaaf (Bogus), unpublished manuscript in Persian, private collection of Peerzada Mohammad Ashraf.

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25. Ibid., p. 30. 26. Furahi is referring here to the fact that there was no code of law in place in the Valley during Sikh rule, cases being left to the discretion of the local religious figures, such as qazis, pirs, and mullahs. As a result, the Kashmiris were left at the mercy of these figures who usually dispensed cases based on the whims of their Sikh masters. See P.N.K. Bamzai, 1973, A History of Kashmir: Political, Social, Cultural from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, New Delhi: Metropolitan Book Company, p. 626. 27. Furahi, Mulhemaat, p. 43.

Conversation II

On the Dreamscapes of Literary Imagining

AGAINST THE CURRENT Sita and her Foils in Modern Tamil and Telugu Short Stories

Paula Richman

Literary works, and the discourses around them, reveal a great deal about the problem-space in which we now live. The poetry of Mirza Ghalib and stories about Rama and Sita have exerted profound effects on how South Asians have perceived their past and envisioned their futures. Despite the power wielded by the nationalist narrative in modern India, alternative emancipatory narratives have circulated, and will continue to circulate. Both Ghalibs poetry and Ramayana stories predate the peak time of Indian nationalism and will provide alternative ways to think about past and present long into the future. Syed Akbar Hyders chapter in this volume, paired with this essay, demonstrates how Ghalibs poems have been viewed in multiple ways both during his lifetime and afterwards, revealing a spectrum of interpretations ranging from those of Sayyid Ahmad Khan to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ali Sardar Jafri. Ghalibs cosmopolitanism and his poetic commitment to homelessness as a productive state of mind encourage such multiplicity of perspectives, which need to be taken into account in order to understand the pluralism of South Asia. If multi-vocality has been obscured because of how recent electorallymotivated political groups have appropriated and essentialized key South Asian texts, then we need to link critiques of the derivative nature of nationalism with attention to multiple literary lineages and the diverse responses they have engendered on the Indian subcontinent. These literary texts continue to be invested with new meanings, as

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Hyder’s essay and a study of recent retellings of Ramkatha (Rama’s story) demonstrate. Many people, both in India and abroad, assume that whatever rendition of Ramkatha they know is, essentially, ‘the’ story. Homogenization of Ramkatha is more prevalent today than fifty years ago, when most people learned the story in fluid oral versions from priests, itinerant storytellers, theatrical troupes, or kinfolk. Meanwhile, especially in the last two decades, scholars have documented the extraordinary breadth, richness, and oppositional strands within the Ramayana tradition, submitting Sanskrit texts, regional literary poetry, dramatic performances, and folk tellings to close scrutiny.1 Since the 1940s, when large-scale printing in India’s regional language scripts became affordable, diversity in Ramkatha has taken yet another form: writers in regional languages have retold Ramkatha in modern prose, for their own time. Yet Ramayana scholars have hitherto given short shrift to these twentieth-century prose renderings of Ramkatha in regional Indian languages, even though some number among the most celebrated works in modern Indian literature. In earlier centuries, poets earned a name for themselves by composing a classic’ Ramayana or Mahabharata work of poetry in their mother tongue (for example, Krittibasa in Bengali, Ezhuttacchan in Malayalam). Today some of India’s most creative and talented writers have used the short story genre to develop new interpretations of Ramkatha incidents and characters. Examining the representation of Sita in modern short stories composed in India’s regional languages reveals how a crucial character from an ancient text has been recast in different locales across the country. The portrayal of Sita has generally been loaded with cultural freight, since she is often identified as the quintessential exemplar of the proper Hindu wife. Yet, Sita has been the focus of some major reinterpretations in the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century and hence the range of depictions of her in modern prose is vast. In order to show that such diversity extends beyond a single literary tradition of India, this essay analyses examples from two neighbouring languages, Tamil and Telugu, in order to highlight some common patterns in modern re-interpretation of Sita found in both literary traditions. Tamil and Telugu short story work especially well as case studies for several reasons. First, until the linguistic reorganization of Indian

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states, both Tamil and Telugu were spoken widely in Madras. Second, many whose mother tongue is Tamil live in parts of Andhra Pradesh, while a large number of Telugu speakers live throughout Tamil Nadu. Third, both regions shared certain historical experiences as part of the colonial Madras Presidency and also as sites of anti-Brahmin movements in the early twentieth century. Finally, Tamil and Telugu short stories have developed a much wider readership today than that for either poetry or novels, so short stories showcase some of today’s most innovative writing. Notable Tamil and Telugu short stories by talented authors share certain emphases and patterns. First, writers seldom emphasize Sita’s identity as Goddess Lakshmi on earth and instead tend to focus on aspects of Sita’s life as a human being. Second, since authoritative Ramkatha texts deal with only a small part of Sita’s lifespan, authors make use of space to imagine parts of her life about which little has been written in the past, such as parts of her childhood or her experiences in Valmiki s ashram. Third, new perspectives also emerge when an author depicts events from Sita’s point of view, rather than from the viewpoint of Rama or Valmiki. The most common characteristic shared by the Ramkatha short stories analysed in this essay is ‘domestication’, a quality that A.K. Ramanujan observed when he saw how folk artists retold classic Indian epics.2 Domestication occurs when characters become more subject to human limitations. For example, they get tired or blow their noses like all human beings do. In addition, the story becomes localized; village festival days, rituals, or sacred sites celebrated in the region often find a place in the rendition. Finally, the characters are viewed as living, at least to some extent, in the present time. When authors contemporize the story, their characters speak in colloquial dialect and slang of the time, and they act in ways that the audience would find familiar. Philip Lutgendorf, who studied oral exegesis of Hindi tellings of Ramkatha, provides an excellent description of how domestication works: the story is used ‘as a framework to be fleshed out with imaginary and highly colloquial dialogues containing touches of humor and pathos often missing from the original’.3 The domestication found in folk tradition and oral exegesis also appears in a number of the short stories about Sita analysed below. In addition, fresh aspects of Sita’s life also emerge through short stories focusing upon her female foils, Shurpanakha and Ahalya. Use of a foil that which sets off or enhances another by contrast, enables the

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authors whose work is analysed in this chapter to juxtapose Sita with another woman who shares some of Sitas qualities or experiences. On the one hand, Shurpanakha’s independence and bold comportment throw Sitas modesty and self-sacrifice into relief. On the other hand, both women loved Rama but were treated in a similar manner; he ordered Shurpanakha mutilated and Sita banished.4 Both Ahalya and Sita suffered greatly due to their husbands’ suspicions of their chastity. Cursed by her husband to become stone after Indra seduced her, impure Ahalya received grace from Rama’s feet, but Rama banished faithful Sita. This essay explores two questions about prominent twentieth­ century Tamil and Telugu short stories. First, how do writers create a character that is recognizable as Sita but relevant enough to reader’s lives for them to care about her? Second, how do writers envision the relationship between Sita and Shurpanakha or Ahalya in ways that question or destabilize the gendered dichotomies about good’ and ‘bad’ women and to what purpose? The chapter concludes with reflec­ tions on the resources of short stories in today’s regional languages for rethinking characters such as Sita, Shurpanakha, and Ahalya.

DOMESTICATING SITA

When a writer portrays Sita as subject to the same social pressures experienced by her intended readers, Sitas trials resonate particularly strongly with the audience. When an author imagines Sita during a part of her life not treated in other narratives, the story presents a full­ er view of her character than previously available.5 When an author gives Sita words that enable her to get the upper hand in an argument with Rama, readers encounter Sitas perseverance and intelligence in terms not dependent upon Shastraic definitions of proper behaviour. In sum, in many modern Tamil and Telugu short stories, Sita turns from a stereotypical devoted wife (pativrata) into a woman whose experiences impel her to reflect upon her life and to transform it. A Sita emerges who speaks in new ways and gains wisdom from her experiences.

Kumudini Depicts Sartorial Dilemmas In the 1930s and 1940s, Ranganayaki Thatham (1905-1986), who wrote under the pseudonym of‘Kumudini’, won a set of loyal readers for witty stories and essays that appeared in a variety of weeklies and magazines. An original thinker, spirited storyteller, and ‘home

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economist’, she married into an orthodox Sri Vaishnavite family in Sri Rangam. Educated at home in religious texts and languages, she became a follower of Gandhi and shocked her neighbours by wearing cotton khadi (homespun cloth) even to weddings. While raising her own children in a large joint-family, she secretly awoke an hour earlier than her mother-in-law (who did not approve of women writing for magazines) to compose stories before she began her daily household chores. Her masterly use of humour and brevity made her a pioneer in modern Tamil fiction, while her deep knowledge of traditional religious characters enabled her to interpret familiar tales in original ways. Her Tamil short story, ‘Letters of Lady Sita, first appeared in 1934 as one episode in Kumudini’s three-part series titled ‘Mail from the Inner Palace’, in a popular Tamil weekly magazine, Anantha Vigathan. ‘Letters of Lady Sita’ consists of correspondence that the princess ostensibly wrote from Ayodhya to her mother shortly after her marriage. Sita never acts in a way that is anything but respectful, obedient, and devoted to her husband, her parents, and her in-laws. Kumudini portrays the new bride as carefully conforming to the proper behaviour and comportment expected of a young daughter-inlaw. Yet as events unfold, the dutiful daughter feels pressure to dress so as to broadcast her marital family’s status and prestige. In her letters to her mother, she expresses deep anxiety about gendered expectations about clothing in her new home. In Sita’s first letter, Kumudini emphasizes how Sita’s in-laws ridicule her unsophisticated clothing. Cosmopolitan Ayodhya, a major stop on the north Indian trade route, boasts the latest women’s fashions. In contrast, in Sita’s conservative homeland of Mithila (in today’s Bihar near the Indian border with Nepal), clothing styles have remained relatively unchanged over the years. Sita arrives at her husband’s home with a trousseau of clothes woven by Mithila’s finest artisans, but those saris have wide borders, while current fashion in Ayodhya calls for narrow ones. Women in court mock Sita’s terribly out-of-style saris so, in her first letter, Sita asks her mother for a narrow-bordered foreign-made, blue sari, just like the one her sister-in-law, Shanta (Rshyasringa’s wife), wears. Sita’s second letter to her mother, however, records her dis­ illusionment with the blue sari because its colour bleeds in the wash. Sita labels Shanta’s sari, astiramaka, ‘not firm’ or ‘not permanent’. The term stiramaka (when not preceded by the privative ‘a’) alludes to the

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firmness of mind that a highly disciplined person gains by cultivating detachment from desires and possessions. Here Kumudini deftly transforms a seemingly trivial story of sartorial preference into a political lesson about the flaws of craving imported goods over locallymade items. The foreign-made sari acts as an emblem of consumer desires that, according to the Gandhian philosophy that Kumudini self-consciously followed, undermine India’s economic wellbeing. Kumudinis critique of over-emphasis on external appearance develops more fully in Sita’s third letter, which reveals her panic over what to wear to Ramas coronation. Practically paralysed with anxiety, Sita worries that her wardrobe is inadequate for the ritual that elevates her from a new daughter-in-law, a relatively low status, to the queen of Ayodhya. After confessing her anxiety about wearing proper garb for the event, Sita asks her mother to send the grand sari she wore at her coronation in Mithila, so that Ayodhya’s citizens will look at Sita and view her appearance as worthy of a queen. Here Kumudini shows how excessive sartorial pressures undermine Sita’s peace of mind. Sita’s hurried fourth letter indicates that Rama must depart right away for the forest and that she will accompany him. As before, Kumudini has Sita ask her mother to send appropriate sartorial furnishings. Her request for bark cloth, however, indicates a major conceptual breakthrough. Instead of worrying about what others may think about her appearance, she considers the practical function of clothing. For wandering through the rough lands beyond the bounds of settled life, she requests an outfit that will protect her from thorns and keep her dry during the rainy season. Her fourth letter’s postscript indicates what Sita has learned as a new bride and generalizes from it for others: P.S. From now on, I don’t have to think about the colour of saris. Great peace has been established in my mind. I have realized how excellent it would be if every woman went to live in the forest. The worries of life would be reduced by half.6

In a few pages of prose, Kumudini has made Sita contemporary to her readers by depicting her response to pressures that many new brides in the 1930s encountered. Kumudini depicts Sita at a time in her life about which little is recorded: her early days in her marital joint family. In addition, while the Sita of Valmiki and Tulsidas is depicted primarily as embodying a static set of ideal characteristics, Kumudinis Sita grows and matures,

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eventually rejecting treatment as a status symbol. Furthermore, Kumudini transforms a part of Ramkatha into a story about domestic politics within the home and anti-colonial politics outside the home. Finally, Sita’s story becomes a way of thinking not only about ancient times but also the present. Ambai on Sita at Mid-life

Kumudini’s story shares notable features with a more recent story by C.S. Lakshmi (1944-), a prize-winning Tamil writer and admirer of Kumudini’s work. Known to readers under the pen name ‘Ambai’, she published her first novel in 1967 and has been writing short stories and poetry in Tamil for more than forty years. Among the most prominent and widely translated female Tamil writers today, she has tackled daring and complex subjects in her carefully crafted prose. Ambai’s ‘Forest’ (Adavi) simultaneously recounts two stories: she retells the story of ancient Sita from what Ambai imagines to be Sita’s, rather than Valmiki’s, perspective and she juxtaposes it with an account of the life of a modern Sita-Iike character named Chenthiru. The story tacks back and forth between retellings of folk stories about Sita and a narrative about Chenthiru’s retreat to the forest in middle age in order to write about Sita. The interspersed narratives reflect off of each other in surprising and original ways. While Kumudini’s letters of Sita ostensibly provide an inside view of a story that readers already know, Ambai explicitly informs her readers that she tells a story that they could not know until now. In ‘Forest’, Chenthiru’s husband, who disapproves of his wife going alone to the forest, comments that in ancient days only men went to the forest on their own. Chenthiru replies, ‘The time has come to re-write the epics’.7 Later in ‘Forest’, when Valmiki encounters Sita inscribing palm leaves, he asks if she writes about the same Sita that he portrayed. She responds that he played the role of chronicler, but since Sita was an actor in the events, she has a unique vantage point so her story will differ: ‘My language is different’, she declares. By portraying ancient Sita and modern Chenthiru both writing their own account of Ramkatha, Ambai depicts Sita through the lens of Chenthiru’s concerns. At the same time, Chenthiru’s reflections upon her own journey in the forest deepen as she re-imagines Sita’s life in the forest. The culminating section of Ambai’s story presents Sita in the middle age. Her sons have returned to Ayodhya with Rama, but she

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has refused to accompany them because Rama asked her to submit to another fire ordeal. Instead, she has abandoned the security of Valmiki’s ashram to wander deep into the forest. There, following the sounds of a veena to a small hut, she encounters Ravana. When he tells her how he escaped death and has looked forward to meeting her again, exasperated Sita assumes he is still in thrall to his infatuation with young Sita. Announcing that she is over forty years old, she explains that life’s tragedies have wearied her and she now views her body as a prison. Sita discovers, however, that in Ravanas middle age, the focus of his life has changed dramatically. He dwells in the forest and devotes himself to music. He offers to teach Sita to play the rudra-veena.8 Although Ravana concedes that the body can act as a prison, he contends that it can also function as a path to fulfilment if used to make music. He encourages Sita to study the rudra-veena so she can express her creativity through music: ‘Don’t think of it as an ordinary musical instrument. Think of it as your life, and play on it’, he tells her. When he attempts to put the instrument in her lap, Sita instead insists that he place it on the ground so she can grasp it herself. When asked why, she describes herself as one with a ‘life that many hands have tossed about, like a ball. Now let me take hold of it [the veena]; take it into my own hands’. 9 The story culminates with Sita lifting up the musical instrument to begin life anew. Imagining Sita entering what we think of today as ‘middle age’, Ambai imputes to Sita a version of a mid-life reassessment. Like today’s empty nesters’, Sita’s responsibilities for her offspring have largely ended. Looking back on many years of self-sacrifice, Sita realizes how she allowed others to control her life. The tragedies she has suffered may have disheartened her, but Ravanas offer suggests a path that can lead to a new beginning. Lifting the rudra-veena, as if reconnecting with her own body, she embraces a form of creative expression not available to her earlier. Here Ambai provides a fresh way of thinking about Sita, through the prism of middle age. Ambai rewrites not only the story of Sita, but also the portrayal of Hindu asceticism in the forest. Sita speaks of feeling imprisoned in the body, a view based on the premise that one enters the forest to cultivate detachment from desires through bodily mortification. Instead of advising Sita to isolate herself and to burn off desires, however, Ravana urges her to study music. In Ambai’s forest, Sita

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submits herself to the teachings of a guru in the forest, but her focus is not to mortify the body but to master the veena. Ambai depicts the forest as providing the distance from worldly demands that enables Sita to concentrate her energies on expressing herself through music. Chalams Use of Language Gudipati Venkata Chalam (1894-1979), like Ambai and Kumudini, contemporizes Sitas experiences, but he also gives Sita new words with which to speak. Chalam, a skilled writer of Telugu prose whose originality and flair was conceded even by those who found his advocacy of womens social and sexual freedom shocking, wrote a number of novels as well as plays, short stories, poetry, and memoirs. His work proved so compelling that quite a few Telugu feminist writers today trace their direct line of descent from him’.10 Because the characters in his writings speak in idiomatic and colloquial dialogue, rather than stilted but prestigious Telugu literary prose, his characters often seem to leap across the centuries into the present. Chalams dialogue is particularly gripping in ‘Sita Enters the Fire’, a brief piece written ca. 1935. In it, Chalam imagines a conversation between Rama and Sita as they meet for the first time since Ravana imprisoned her in Lanka. When Rama and Sita begin to speak, Sita expresses her joy at seeing her husband again; by the end of their conversation, Sita has become so disillusioned that she throws herself into a funeral pyre.11 Many critics have objected to Sita’s acquiescence when Rama mistreated her. For example, Bina Agarwal’s English poem ‘Sita Speak’, which appeared in the Indian Express in 1985, refers to several key moments at which Sita remained mute, and then Agarwal asks ‘[H]ow did they silence you?’12 Such questions appear in regional language writing as well as in English. For example, each stanza in award­ winning Kannada writer Vijaya Dabbe’s poem published in 1996 ends with ‘Sita, why didn’t you speak?’13 Yet back in 1924, Chalam had already furnished Sita with words that enabled her to contest Rama’s patriarchal arguments. In Chalams ‘Sita Enters the Fire’, an example of such language appears in a rapid-fire set of exchanges prompted by Rama’s refusal to accept Sita back. Because it is possible that her fidelity to him was compromised as a result of living within the precincts of Ravana’s household, Rama refuses to take her back and views her as tainted.

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Rama’s judgements about proper behaviour for wives, the need to pro­ tect the reputation of his lineage, and the valuing of his public reputa­ tion are all based upon the framework of the dharmashastras, which prescribe and proscribe certain actions for women and kings, assess­ ing their behaviour according to whether it is pure or impure. When Rama says he cannot accept her back and remain king, Sita, who abandoned the comforts of the palace to accompany Rama into exile, suggests he renounce the throne so that he can ignore public opinion. Their exchange is played out as a tug of war over hakku, Tights’ (plural hakkulu). Hakku is a Telugu transliteration of the Arabic word haq. In Telugu, the term came into prominence in twentieth-century discourse about democracy. Chalam puts hakku at the centre of their discussion of who has rights: Rama: My dharma is to be king. And it is my hakku. Sita: You have dharmas and hakkulu, but what about me? Apparently, you have the hakku to claim me and to reject me. Why don’t you give up your hakkulu for me? Rama: What! For a woman?14

As this excerpt from their dialogue shows, the notion of rights plays a major role in Sitas rejection of Rama’s condemnation. By providing her with the term hakku, Chalam frees Sita from the fixed semantics of dharmic hegemonic discourse, by which Rama categorizes her as either pure or impure. Chalam arms her with the linguistic ammunition to reject Rama’s charges—and reject his claim that she must be subject to such charges. Subsequently, Chalam supplies Sita with another term she can use to critique Rama’s treatment of her: the term yantram (machine). Chalam depicts Sita asking why Rama bothered to marry and he re­ sponds that he took a wife to continue his family lineage. Through this conversation, Chalam criticizes men who regard women as machines (yantram) for producing children and then simply abandon them for new ones.15 Valmiki may not have equipped Sita with the language to protest against the objectification of women, but Chalam has done so. His dialogue shows Sita articulating relations between men and women in ways that free her from the constraining semantics of dharmashastra within which Rama speaks. Chalam’s pioneering writings helped galvanize a set of female writers who followed, articulating their experiences as women in effective and compelling Telugu.

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SITA’S FOILS Short story writers also present Sita in a new light by examining her relationships with Shurpanakha and Ahalya, two women associated with sexual transgression in authoritative tellings of Ramkatha. In the tellings by Valmiki and Tulsidas, for example, Shurpanakha appears as a female temptress, doubly othered as both woman and demoness, while Ahalya commits adultery with Indra, when he visits her disguised as her husband. In contrast, Sita is said to be the epitome of a dutiful self-sacrificing wife. Yet the stories analysed below depict bonds of affection and understanding between Sita and Shurpanakha or Ahalya. Some womens Ramkatha songs depict solidarity between women not found in male-authored versions. For example, a Telugu womens song depicts Sita and Kausalya uniting to curb Rama’s pride, while another portrays the wives of Rama’s brothers threatening to leave with Sita, if Rama banishes her to the forest.16 Solidarity among women in the household is one thing, but solidarity between Sita and stigmatized characters is quite different. The stories examined below consider the complex consequences of such bonds.

Bharatis Tale of Reversals According to scholarly consensus among historians of Tamil literature, C. Subramaniya Bharati (1882-1921) was the greatest Tamil poet of the twentieth century. Over the course of his short life, Bharati served as court poet for a zamindar, school teacher, journalist, and a translator. In addition, he pioneered the use and design of political cartoons as editor of the Tamil weekly, India. An assembly of poets bestowed upon him the title by which he is commonly known, "Bharati’ (a Tamil name for Goddess Sarasvati), in recognition of his literary talent. His notorious nationalist sentiment against colonial rule led to nearly a decade’s exile in Pondicherry after the British government cracked down on his seditious’ writings. During exile, he wrote many innovative plays and short stories, among them his unique treatment of Rama’s story, titled "Horns of the Horse’. "Horns of the Horse’ appropriates the narrative format of an animal fable. It depicts Shurpanakha as an ally of Sita and reverses normative expectations about gender. Bharati wrote the story for a collection named ‘navatantra, which he envisioned as an updated version of the classical Sanskrit anthology of animal fables called Panchatantra.

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Although ‘Horns of the Horse bears some generic markers of didactic fables that provide an etiology for the characteristics of particular animals, Bharatis primary motivation was satire. For example, instead of explaining how horses got horns, the story recounts how horses lost their horns. Similarly, in the fables frame story, which explains how the story came to be told, the narrator is identified as Pandit Crooked Face, a name in Tamil intended to cast doubt on the narrators reliability.17 Most central to Bharatis satire, however, is turning familiar cultural constructions on their heads. To that end, most of the major roles in the plot regarding Rama and Dashratha, and Shurpanakha’s nature and behaviour with Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita in the forest are reversed. In addition, ‘Horns of a Horse’ forcefully satirizes the peculiar logic of stereotypes about romantic love through Bharatis portrayal of the famous mutilation scene. While authoritative tellings of Ramkatha depict Lakshmana disfiguring Shurpanakha at Rama’s command, Bharati presents Shurpanakha as disfiguring Lakshmana at which point Bharati depicts Rama, impressed with her martial valour, proposing marriage.18 Bharatis reconstruction of the episode prompts the reader to consider why one should fall in love with someone because he or she performed a violent act. By reversing gendered expectations, Bharati makes visible the ‘macho’ assumptions that drive the construction of Sita and Rama as the perfect couple. The satire lampoons the normative heroic ‘script’ with its gendered expectations about capability with weapons and romantic attraction. Long before feminist writers began critiquing constructions of gender that depended upon portrayal of violence linked with sex, Bharati mocked such gendered assumptions about male prowess and female sexual attraction. Ranganayakammas Marxist Interpretation

Among modern Telugu writers who have focused upon Ramkatha, perhaps none is as famous as Ranganayakamma (1939-), a public intellectual noted for her Marxist feminist critiques of society. In addition to fifteen novels, more than 70 stories, and many essays dealing with gender equality and women’s role in the family, she wrote a three-volume Telugu opus titled Ramayanavisavrksam (Ramayana: The Poison Tree) that critiques Valmiki’s Ramayana. It mixes her own sarcastic retelling of many Ramkatha incidents with extensive socio­ political interpretative commentary to explain why certain incidents

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in the epic occurred. This lengthy work, reprinted multiple times since volume one first appeared in 1974, argues that Valmikis Ramayana functions to justify a set of values that oppress women and lower class men. Ranganayakammas aim is to demonstrate that Valmikis text validates patriarchy and class oppression. Ranganayakammas earliest short story on Ramkatha, ‘This is How it Happened’, tells of Shurpanakhas mutilation. In fact, writing this short story impelled Ranganayakamma to write her three-volume work so it is particularly appropriate to examine it closely.19 Ranganayakamma depicts the conflict between Shurpanakha and Rama in ‘This is How it Happened’ as one between those who practice differing modes of production: forest-dwellers and city­ dwellers. Ranganayakamma portrays Shurpanakha as finding forest life congenial; indeed, she has chosen to live in the forest because she prefers the peace of the woods to the pomp of the city. In contrast, Rama resents being forced into forest exile.20 This difference between thriving and suffering in the forest sets into relief the differing intellectual frameworks of Rama and Shurpanakha. As soon as they meet, according to Ranganayakamma Shurpa­ nakha feels drawn to him despite their differing values. With innocent sincerity, she confesses her love. He rejects her overtures, explaining that his ‘eka patni (one-wife) vow does not allow him to return her affection. Rama says that his citizens admire him for undertaking such a difficult vow. Shurpanakha sees how diligently Sita performs her housework, and proposes to win Sita over by assisting with domestic chores and then suggests that they become co-wives. Rama rejects the plan so Shurpanakha suggests she could be his lover outside of marriage but Rama declines the offer and offers her Lakshmana instead.21 When Shurpanakha appears to accept, however, Rama warns Lakshmana that her ‘loose’ morals pose a danger to society. At Rama’s order, Lakshmana disfigures her. Screaming in pain, Shurpanakha warns that all who see her will read Rama’s true character on her body: her scarred face testifies to his cruelty. The end of Ranganayakammas story suggests a gap between public Rama and private Rama. Ranganayakammas narrative foregrounds the values she associates with the forest and the similarities between Rama’s treatment of the two women who care about him. ‘This is How it Happened’ contrasts the forest ethos of sincerity with city values, characterized by material luxury and social conformity. Rama denigrates Shurpanakhas forest kingdom but also banishes Sita to the forest when city folk refuse

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to accept her as pure. Thus, while Sita wins Shurpanakhas admiration, Rama ultimately ends up rejecting both women. The bond between Sita and Shurpanakha solidifies around their rejection of Ramas sense of male privilege, city ways, and bondage to public opinion.

Shurpanakhas Abound according to Kavanasarma Among all the writers examined in this essay, Telugu writer Kandula Varaha Narasimha Sarma (1939—), a retired professor of civil engineering who writes under the nom de plume of ‘Kavana­ sarma, has most cleverly utilized the technique of contemporizing Ramkatha. He describes himself as using logic to tell a ‘hard-core truth’ and has won particular recognition for his satirical writing.22 and has won particular recognition for his satirical writing. His 1984 Telugu short story, ‘Shurpanakhas Sorrow’ contains details about corrupt businessmen and legal scandals that sound as if they came right from today’s headlines, but the events and character’s names signal that a Ramkatha incident provides the skeleton for the story. In Kavanasarma’s story, both Shurpanakha and Sita suffer as a result of the conflict between Rama and Ravana, but the duel between the two men plays itself out in the realm of business, rather than on the battlefield. Ravanarao, who owns a long-established business in town, resents the efforts of newcomer Ramaraju to muscle his way into Ravanarao’s market niche.23 After gaining proof of Ramaraju’s crooked transactions, Ravanarao reports the irregularities to the income tax office but Ramaraju’s uncle, who has political clout, gets the court to dismiss the case. Nonetheless, rumours begin circulating about Ramaraju’s corruption, so he distances between himself from his work by building and retiring to a ‘farmhouse’ hermitage on the outskirts of town. The forest here provides the backdrop against which the two men play out their anger towards each other by abusing women. Ravanarao vows to take revenge on Ramaraju, so he disguises himself as a holy man and comes to dwell in Ramaraju’s forest and then abducts Sita as soon as she is left alone.24 When Ramaraju discovers what has transpired, he decides to retaliate by mistreating Ravanarao’s sister in order to demonstrate his manliness and invites her to his house. When she arrives, he locks her inside the house, has Lakshmana mutilate her, and deposits her at her brother’s house. Ravanarao files a complaint

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with the police that gets Ramaraju arrested, but he is acquitted due to the sexist insinuations his lawyer makes about Shurpanakhas character.25 Accordingly to Kavanasarma when Shurpanakha sees how easily Ramaraju evades punishment, she realizes that a larger pattern is at work: men who are too cowardly to settle their own grievances manto-man perpetrate violence upon each others women. Shurpanakha recognizes the same power dynamics at work in certain recent atrocities reported in the news. As she comments, ‘When Harijans revolt, unable to face them, these heroic men invade their homes when they are not around’.26 Here Kavanasarma draws explicit parallels between mutilation in Ramkatha and frequent atrocities where high caste men raped lower-caste women whose husbands were seen as too militant about their rights. Although laws exist to punish such crimes, sexism, caste privilege, and political cronyism allow certain men to escape legal repercussions. Even Mandodari, Ravana’s faithful and devoted wife, confirms Shurpanakhas analysis, saying: ‘That’s how it is, our life as women’.27 The short story ends with a call for change. Addressing the deity who created the world, Shurpanakha asks him to enable women to conceive children without any involvement from men. If that is impossible, she asks that they have the power to give birth to courageous men rather than cowards who oppress women. In the end, Shurpanakhas sorrow turns out to be that of all women who experience sexual violence. Kavanasarma shows that an ancient story still expresses terrible truths about women’s situation today, and likens them to the experiences of Sita and Shurpanakha.

Volgas Feminist Utopia If Valmiki and Tulsidas construct Sita and Shurpanakha as polar opposites, Telugu writer ‘Volga Popuri Lalitha Kumari (1950-) radically decreases the distance between them. In ‘The Reunion, Volga imagines an encounter between the two women at a time when each is involved in fulfilling a major aspiration and has gained the wisdom to understand the other in a new way. Volga, who edited the first volume of feminist philosophy in Telugu, has also written fiction, film scripts, and lyrics for dance-dramas. In conjunction with her work at Asmita Collective, she seeks to ‘use traditional forms to subvert patriarchal agendas from a women’s perspective’.28 In a similar vein, ‘Reunion

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envisions a feminist-inspired forest alternative to urban society, examining violence against women in light of her commitment to non-violence and feminist collective action. ‘Reunion portrays the forest as a place where non-normative communities can flourish. Volga’s portrayal of Valmiki s ashram differs from that in virtually any other documented telling of Ramkatha. For example, the many women at the hermitage play a major role in the community, cultivating fruit trees, assembling garlands for evening puja, and caring for their children. Sita thus lives among sages’ wives, rather than as an isolated woman in a male-filled ashram. Shurpa­ nakha too lives according to her own ideals, growing rare and delicate flowers in her forest nursery and living with a man who respects her, as she does him. Volga depicts the forest as a space where an individual can come to terms with the past. Sita cultivates equanimity of mind, putting thoughts of Ayodhya behind her, while her boys grow up healthy in the clean forest air and hardy from their daily ambles along its many paths. After Shurpanakha’s mutilation, she dwells in the forest as she works through the anger and self-hatred she experiences, eventually coming to accept her scarred body and cultivate detachment from the social stigma she encounters. She tells Sita, ‘I carried the weight of all the strange thoughts the disfigurement and the resulting ugliness brought upon me. At times, I wanted to disfigure everything and everyone’.29 The forest landscape heals her and encourages her to put her efforts into cultivating a garden whose beauty and variety is unmatched elsewhere in the world. Each woman reinvents her life by renouncing conventional marital expectations. Forest life may lack luxuries and conveniences, but it allows more scope than the city for rethinking life’s possibilities. For example, over time, Shurpanakha comes to reject the binary opposition between beauty and ugliness. That dichotomy promotes ranking and belittling other women, according to the superficial features of outward appearance. Instead, she observes closely how the forest nurtures growth and realizes that both form and deformity play a crucial role in the generativity of the natural world. As she explains to Sita, T had to fight a great battle within myself to come out of that anger, to love beauty again, and to find the essence of form and deformity. This infinite beauty of nature helped me in that battle’.30 Shurpanakha has come to terms with her past, her body, and her need

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for a purpose in life. As Sita hears of Shurpanakhas travails, Volga shows her realizing that the demons sister also underwent her own kind of ‘trial by fire’ Sita has been utterly absorbed in raising her sons, but Shurpanakha encourages Sita to think beyond the present, to consider her own future. When Sita reveals that she has not yet told her sons that Rama is their father, Shurpanakha predicts that the boys will eventually return to Ayodhya. Even as Sita protests that the twins enjoy living in the forest, she realizes the truth of Shurpanakhas words. It will make little sense for Sita to remain in Valmiki’s ashram then, so she thinks of returning to Mother Earth. Shurpanakha objects, pointing out that in the forest Mother Earth surrounds them on all sides, and invites Sita to live in her garden, where Mother Earth is unequalled in beauty. Sita agrees, realizing it the proper place for a daughter of the Earth. Volga’s story does not end, therefore, with Sita’s tragic rejection of life. Instead, two mature and empathetic women, whom male authors of Ramkatha have set up as polar opposites, plan to live out their old age in a forest utopia, sharing a life of beauty and purpose. If Sita is to be seen as an ideal for Indian women, suggests this short story, she should not be seen as a tragic, unfulfilled woman driven to flee to her mother as a result of male cruelty, but as a woman who raised her beloved sons and then spends her mature years surrounded by the auspicious and generative soil from which she began her life.31

Pudumaippittan on Ahalyas Fury As his chosen penname, Pudumaippittan (one who is mad for new­ ness’) indicates, C. Viruttachalam (1906-1948) found modern literary forms fascinating. Although he worked in a number of capacities during his life, including as a newspaper editor and screen writer, and experimented with many types of prose, he earned his reputation as Tamil’s pre-eminent modern writer primarily for his short stories. Perhaps the most incisive, demanding, and frank interrogation of Ahalyas tale in modern Indian literature, his ‘Deliverance from the Curse’ appeared in print in 1943. Connoisseurs of modern Tamil view it as a landmark in modern retellings of Puranic tales. In virtually all pre-twentieth century treatments of Ahalya, the tale functioned rhetorically to prove that Rama brought deliverance to those in need. Her husband, Gautama, had cursed her to turn to stone when he learned she had sexual relations with Indra, who visited her

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disguised as Gautama. Therefore, Rama’s liberation of Ahalya, rather than the details of Ahalya’s life, justified the story’s inclusion in various Ramayanas. For example, Valmiki as well as Kamban, the celebrated twelfth-century Tamil poet whom Pudumaippittan admired deeply, focused upon Rama’s removal of Ahalya’s curse as evidence of his compassion and, subsequently, her devotion to him. The first words of Pudumaippittan’s story, a taunting disclaimer, indicate how self-consciously he has diverged from earlier treatments: Tor those acquainted with the Ramayana, this story might be incomprehensible; unpalatable, too. I am not concerned with that’.32 Indeed, Rama’s liberation of Ahalya occupies only a small part of ‘Deliverance’. The remainder responds to two questions presented as inseparable. First, could Ahalya and her husband Gautama simply pick up where they had left off, after such a traumatic event and years of silence between them? Second, how would Ahalya, who suffered greatly from her husband’s angry curse, respond when she learned that Rama insisted that Sita submit to a fire ordeal? Ultimately, a story that ostensibly concerns the relationship between Ahalya and Gautama also implicates Rama’s treatment of Sita. ‘Deliverance’ explores the nature and consequences of remorse. After Ahalya’s lithification, Gautama realizes that his curse, which burst from his lips as he lost self-control, dehumanized not only Ahalya but him as well. When Ahalya returns to life, his love for her is rekindled. He strives to conceptualize a philosophical stance that frees Ahalya of blame and reasons that, since Indra came to Ahalya in disguise, she violated wifely dharma without intending to do so. Thus, she was not guilty of adultery. Gautama instead judges himself in error for the curse and plunges into a whirlpool of self-recrimination. The curse has now turned back on the man who uttered it, filling him with remorse. Ahalya too finds it difficult to break free of the curse. She still loves her husband but cannot rid herself of fear that she might unwittingly err again. Worrying that she might be tricked another time, she begins to view all those around her as potential Indras. Constantly on the alert and filled with fear, she loses the natural affection for others that she once expressed so easily: ‘Before she uttered anything, she repeated it like a lesson, a thousand times in her mind, examined each word, from all perspectives, to make sure it was the right one.... The very business of living became a hellish torment’.33 Only with Sita,

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wife of her liberator, does Ahalya feel at ease. Ahalya, too terrified of scorn to mix with other women, spends hours in Sita’s company while Rama and Gautama converse about dharma. Naturally, Ahalya feels bereft when the royal couple goes into forest exile, and longs for their return. When Sita returns from exile and comes to visit Ahalya, Sita tells her friend that after her abduction and imprisonment, Rama made her enter the fire to prove her chastity. Pudumaippittan describes Ahalyas state of mind at that moment in this way: ‘Kannagi’s frenzy [is] leaping through her mind’,34 an allusion that links together three women mistreated by their husbands: Ahalya, Sita, and Kannagi. Heroine of the fifth-century Tamil epic Cilappatikaram, Kannagi had always been a faithful wife, loyal to her spouse even when he left her for a courtesan and returned home penniless. Kannagi welcomed him back and gave him her gold anklet to sell so he could restore their fortunes. Yet, when he went to Madurai to sell it, the king of Madurai wrongly executed him for the theft of a gold anklet stolen by another man. When, she learned of his death, Kannagi was filled with rage, and turned into an avenging goddess. Cursing the king and his city, Ahalya burned it to the ground in punishment.35 By comparing Ahalyas state of mind to that of Kannagi, Pudumaippittan suggests the depth of Ahalyas anger towards Rama for punishing Sita when Ravana abducted her against her will. Pudumaippittan indicates how intensely Ahalya identified with Sita in a single simple query: ‘One law for Ahalya, quite another for Rama?’36 Rama had forgiven Ahalyas transgression, but was he really compassionate if he considered his wife tainted and asked her to enter the fire? Indeed, Ahalya now doubts that she has actually been freed from her curse at all. If Sita, who was chaste, had to prove herself through a fire ordeal, what did that imply of Ahalya, who had committed adultery with Indra? Ahalya sees Rama’s treatment of Sita as a personal betrayal, one equal to Gautama’s curse. Ahalyas disillusionment plunges her into despair and Gautama, now much more sensitive to her feelings, seeks to comfort her. Think­ ing that a baby would give purpose to her life, he enters their cottage just as Ahalya is drifting to sleep. In her mind’s eye, Indra has returned and is again performing the same deed that she has tried so hard to forget. Sita’s tale revived her memory of the trauma, compelling her to experience it again, as if suffering from what today is called ‘post­

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trauma repetition syndrome’ Even though the real Gautama enters her, rather than Indra, she has internalized Rama’s condemnation of Sita so entirely that, at that moment, Ahalya turns back into stone. In ‘Deliverance’, Pudumaippittan does not openly criticize Rama’s treatment of Sita. It surfaces by means of the narration of Ahalya’s story. Pudumaippittan suggests that Gautama’s curse does not actually end when Rama liberates her from her stony state since Gautama and Ahalya never regain the trust of their early years of marriage. But Pudumaippittan goes even further: by portraying Ahalya’s return to stone, he suggests that Rama’s deliverance of Ahalya is two-faced, given the ordeal he asks of Sita. Thus, Rama’s treatment of Sita functions as the operative force in the latter part of the story, emphasizing what Sita and Ahalya both share. LARGER PATTERNS In these stories, female characters from Ramkatha—especially Sita— are not static unchanging icons. Instead, modern Tamil and Telugu writers depict them as resourceful and continually maturing women. By contemporizing Sita, the Tamil and Telugu writers analysed here take a figure often identified as an ideal for women and envision how she would act if she encountered new situations and challenges. All the writers examined in this essay portray Sita as a complex and dynamic character, rather than a mere abstract exemplar. Readers learn to care about this Sita, watch her struggle and grow, and see her as a complex woman with choices, rather than a subservient female to whom her husband dictates. In sum, Kumudini, Ambai, and Chalam depict Sita in a narrative—rather than iconic—framework. In writing about Sita, the authors analysed here employ a variety of techniques that encourage readers to empathize with her. Kumudini, Ambai, and Kavanasarma portray Sita as dealing with the kinds of dilemmas with which readers too must cope: what to wear, how to combat empty nest’ syndrome, and how to deal with social and sexual hypocrisy. Chalam, Bharati, and Ranganayakamma provide fresh terminology and perspectives that enable readers to view Sita not as an isolated example but within the context of culturally constructed norms for women. Several authors focus on the later years of Sita, a time when she has more freedom in her life because she has left the capital city, with its constant surveillance and gossip. Both Ambai and Volga present middle-age as a time when Sita can attend to matters besides the needs of her husband, father-in-law, and son.

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Furthermore, these short stories depict Sita in relation to other female characters, rather than in isolation or in relation to men only. Modern writers have submitted Sitas relationship with Shurpanakha to careful scrutiny, taking the notion of womens experience seriously. For example, Volga highlights how the experience of being rejected by Rama united Sita with Shurpanakha, a woman usually demonized and scorned. Pudumaippittan envisions the nature of a friendship between Sita and Ahalya, a woman cursed and stigmatized. In their own distinct ways, Bharati, Ranganayakamma, Kavanasarma, Pudumaippittan, and Volga portray Sita as realizing that she is not alone in suffering abuse from men. One of the achievements of feminism has been to show individual women that their experiences are not isolated ones but part of society-wide patterns of sexism. The movement from isolation to awareness of shared experience can generate collective energy to combat such mistreatment of women. Pudumaippittan’s depiction of Ahalya also suggests a new way to understand Sita’s relationship to other women. Pudumaippittan may not present Sita as criticizing Rama, but ‘Deliverance’ reports Ahalya’s disillusionment with how Rama treats Sita. Some readers might denigrate Ahalya’s criticism of Rama as the words of a ‘fallen woman, but one cannot ignore her assessment, because Pudumaippittan compares her to the deeply wronged and virtuous Kannagi. Examining Sita’s relationships with Ahalya and Shurpanakha also serves to break down dichotomies between good’ women like Sita and ‘bad’ women like Shurpanakha and Ahalya. Along with fresh characterization come innovative ways of interpreting the forest setting. For Kumudini and Ambai, the forest enhances one-pointedness of mind and filters out societal pressures. Bharati and Ranganayakamma portray the forest as Shurpanakhas home territory. For Volga, the woods provide a feminist utopia, while for Kavanasarma, it is a place staked out by those who pretend to pursue asceticism. Over the centuries, the forest has been conceptualized in many ways in Hindu texts. In the stories of young Krishna, the forest is where he and his fellow cowherds ramble freely and where he plays his flute as the gopis listen and dance. In yogic texts, it allows the practitioner to discipline mind and body without worldly distractions. In court poetry, royal parties picnic and frolic on the shores of forest lakes. All these constructions share a definition of the forest that highlights its difference from the life of the household in the town. Modern Telugu and Tamil writers continue this pattern,

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each customizing the representation of the forest as a rejection of householder life or urban culture. Finally, the authors have made masterful use of the short-story genre, which excels at unity of focus and revelation of unexpected insights about familiar situations. Dilip Kumar, Tamil literary critic and writer, calls the short story ‘the major medium of literary expression of our times’ and describes its resources as follows: ‘[I]t spurs the author to attain maximum perfection within minimum space, providing paradoxically, both a discipline and a freedom . . . The strength of the short story lies in its unity and precision’.37 Each of the short story writers examined here has managed, within the space of a limited number of pages, to present a fresh way of looking at the incident upon which they focus. Focus and unity have always distinguished the short story genre, but Ramkatha stories function even more intensely than most short stories: since the reader already knows at least one (and often many) tellings of the story, the author can count on that familiarity and devote all her or his creativity to depicting an original perspective on the incident. Telugu poet Viswanatha Satyanarayana replied in response to the question, ‘Why yet another Ramayana?’ that how one tells the tale is the key to retelling the story.38 The short-story genre provides abundant opportunity to tell it in one’s own way. Some religious conservatives have dismissed short stories of the kind analysed in this essay, claiming that the authors are ‘alienated’ from their own Hindu culture since they embrace ‘foreign ideas such as Marxism or feminism. Such a charge, however, is untrue for the writers examined here, who are rooted in, and knowledgeable about, Ramkatha and other related texts. Bharati mastered Old Tamil and was rewriting Panchatantra; Pudumaippittan knew Kamban’s Iramavataram intimately; Ambai wrote a research monograph on women in Tamil literature; Kumudini possessed an encyclopedic familiarity with Puranic literature; Chalam dwelled in a Hindu ashram during the final years of his life; Ranganayakamma spent years studying Valmiki with the meticulousness of a PhD researcher. Historians of literature rank Bharati, Chalam, and Pudumaippittan among the pioneering giants of modern Tamil and Telugu literature. Ambai and Kavanasarma have large, loyal, and discerning readership. Magazine readers of her day awaited Kumudini’s short stories with great eagerness; Ranganayakamma’s work has been reprinted again and again.

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Nor can the stories discussed in this essay be dismissed as the result of some recent and short-lived fashion for rewriting epic episodes. After all, Bharati and Chalam both wrote their short stories more than half a century ago: Bharati wrote during the first two decades of the twentieth century, many of Chalams short stories date from the 1920s and 1930s, and Kumudini authored most of her short stories in the 1930s and 1940s. Chalam revolutionized modern Telugu by writing in registers that departed from the elevated language of court poetry in order to incorporate the more informal rhythms and vocabulary of the spoken idiom. Bharati influenced the development of modern Tamil literature in writings that drew on folk meters. Many recent Tamil writers, including Ambai, have paid tribute to Kumudini s earlier and pioneering short stories. Finally, it would be inaccurate to denigrate these short stories as limited to women’s writing’. That classification is inappropriate for two reasons. First, as writers going all the way back to Virginia Woolf have pointed out, womens writing’ is a term that has functioned to denigrate the work of serious writers simply because their focus is domestic rather than about public issues such as wars and politics.39 Second, the stories analysed in this essay were composed by both men and women, testifying to the fact that Ramkatha is not the sole domain of either sex. Kavanasarma’s stories, for example, explore the construction of masculinity and femininity in ways that illuminate such gendered constructions and show how they function in the Ramayana tradition. In sum, a talented set of Tamil and Telugu short-story writers have retold Ramkatha incidents in new idioms with fresh perspectives. These writers offer depictions of Ramkatha characters that differ significantly from those found in the tellings of Valmiki, Kamban, or Tulsidas. Recognizing the originality and artfulness of such stories is part of appreciating the creativity of modern Indian literature. Scholarship on ancient Ramayanas, philosophical Ramayanas, bhakti Ramayanas, Ramayana plays, oral Ramayanas, and other kinds of Ramayanas has demonstrated that Ramkatha has been a fluid and ever­ renewing set of narratives. The short stories analysed here, and many others like them, testify that writers continue to turn to Ramkatha so they can provide their own views of its characters, incidents, settings, and meanings—a whole narrative world. Unless the Ramayana tradition is stifled or imprisoned in the past, writers will continue to compose their stories of Ramkatha long into the future. We should

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welcome that creativity as a sign of narrative health, and also social and cultural health. Looking closely at short stories from two modern literary tradi­ tions in India demonstrates the continuing generativity of the Ramayana tradition. If one goes further, bringing into the picture short stories in Kannada, Malayalam, and other regional languages, the tremendous diversity of representations of key female characters in modern Ramkatha is revealed.40 Knowing and retelling such stories allows one to play a small part in making this vital element of modern Indian culture better known. By attending to such stories, one combats homogenization of the rich Ramayana tradition. NOTES 1. Sanskrit’s most famous telling of Ramkatha is Valmiki’s Ramayana, but texts such as Bhavabhuti’s eighth-century play, Uttararamacharita, question Valmiki’s interpretations, as do a number of other Sanskrit texts. Diversity of viewpoint also occurs in works of poetry composed in most of India’s regional languages, among which Kamban’s eighth-century Iramavataram and the sixteenth-century Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas are particularly well known. In addition, when texts are recited, sung, or enacted, the event becomes an occasion for elaboration, exegesis, and counter-narratives. Also orally transmitted folk versions—especially in dance-dramas, puppetry, masked theatre, and other performance dramas— tell Ramkatha in their own ways in various regions. For two recent collections of essays on the diversity of Ramkatha, see Mandakranta Bose (ed.), 2004, The Ramayana Revisited, New York: Oxford University Press and Paula Richman (ed.), 2000, Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2. A.K. Ramanujan analysed domestication in his study of how folk performers transformed classical Sanskrit stories, observing that avataras in folk tellings tend to become more subject to certain human limitations than in classical texts. A.K. Ramanujan, 1986, ‘Two Realms of Kannada Folklore’, in Stuart H. Blackburn and A.K. Ramanujan (eds), Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 63. 3. Philip Lugendorf has also documented domestication in textual exegesis of Ramcharitmanas, during which expositors use the text as the basis of extended, usually extemporaneous commentary. See Philip Lugendorf, 1991, Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 213. 4. Kathleen Erndl, 1991/1992, ‘The Mutilation of Surpanakha, in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 67-88. She deals with the mutilation on p. 71.

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5. Most authoritative tellings present Sita primarily in ways that relate to the glorification of Rama and/or Hanuman or lead up to the battle with Ravana. For example, little information is given in Valmiki or Tulsidas about Sita’s childhood. In contrast, womens tellings such as the Bengali one by Chandrabati do include extensive material on Sita’s birth. See Nabaneeta Dev Sen, 1997, ‘Rewriting the Ramayana: Chandrabati and Molla, in Geeti Sen (ed.), Crossing Boundaries, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, pp. 162-77. Folksongs also tell of Sita’s youth as can be seen in A.K. Ramanujan, 1991/1992, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’, in Richman, Many Ramayanas, pp. 35-7. 6. Kumudini (Ranganayaki Thatham), 1934, ‘Sitaa Piraattiyin Kataitankal’, in Anantha Vigathan (9 September 1934) reprinted in 1948 in Cillaraic Cankatikal, Limitet, 74-8, Tricchi: Natecan Books Limited. For my translation of it as ‘Letters from Lady Sita’, see Paula Richman, 2008, Ramayana Stories in Modern South India ana Stories, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 46-9. Kumudinis postscript appears in the 1948 Tamil version on p. 78. 7. Ambai (C.S. Lakshmi), ‘Adavi’, 2000, Kaatil Oru Maan, Kalachuvadu Pathippagam, pp. 136-68. Chenthiru explains that it is time to rewrite the epics on p. 138. 8. In south India, Ravana is known as a master musician on the veena, as well as a devotee of Shiva. The rudra-veena is closely connected with Shiva and Parvati. 9. Ambai, ‘Adavi’, p. 168. 10. Alladi Uma and M. Sridhar (ed. and trans.), 2001, Ayoni and Other Stories, New Delhi: Katha, p. 13. 11. Gudipati Venkata Chalam, 1924, ‘Sita Agnipravesam’, Savitri: Pauranika Natikalu (Savitri: Plays from the Puranas), n.p.: Panduranga Press; rpt 1993, Vijayawada: Aruna Publishing House, pp. 50-8. See p. 58 for her entry into the pyre. Sailaza Easwari Pal translated it as ‘Sita Enters the Fire’, Richman, Ramayana Stories, pp. 58-63. 12. The poem first appeared in Indian Express, 17 November 1985. It later became the basis of skits presented by activists combating the oppression of women and was reprinted in Richman, Questioning Ramayanas, pp. 239-40. 13. Vijaya Dabbe, 1996, Iti Geetike, Manasa Gangotri: Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies, p. 51. It has been translated into English as ‘The Questions Return’ by Shashi Deshpande and Pratibha Nandakumar in Richman, Ramayana Stories, pp. 43-4. 14. See Chalam, ‘Sita Agnipravesam’, p. 58. In Arabic, the term appears in compounds such as ‘rights of man; in Telugu hakku appears in phrases such prathamika hakkulu, ‘fundamental rights’, and paura hakkulu, civil rights’. I thank Velcheru Narayana Rao for this information. 15. Chalam, ‘Sita Agnipravesam, p. 57: Nivu dharmanni jaripe yantram. Nenu pillalni kaneyantram. 16. See Narayana Rao, 1991/1992, ‘A Ramayana of Their Own, in Richman, Many Ramayanas, pp. 121,127,134nl.

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17. In Tamil literary usage, ‘straight’ refers to something truthful and fair. A crooked story, like the crooked sceptre of a Tamil king, indicates departure from the truth. 18. C. Subramania Bharati, 1938, ‘Kutirai Kombu’, Kataikkottu (Collected Stories), Madras: Parati Piracuralayam, reprinted as 1977, Paratiyar Kataikal (Stories of Bharati), Madras: Poompukar Press, pp. 285-92. trans, by Paula Richman as ‘Horns of the Horse’, in Ramayana Stories, pp. 182-6. For the marriage offer, see Bharati, ‘Kutirai Kombu’, p. 288. 19. ‘Illage jaigimdi’ appears as story three, volume one. For a summary of each volume’s contents, see http://www.ranganyakamma.org/summary_of_ vishavruksham.html. Accessed on 3 March 2003. 20. Ranganayakamma, 1974-6. Ramayanavisavrksam, 3 vols, Hyderabad: Sweet Home Publications. The author’s authorized translation is: B.R. Bapuji, R. Venkateswara Rao, Ari Sitaramayya, C. Padmaja (trans.), 2004, Ramayana: The Poisonous Tree; Stories, Essays and Foot-Notes, Hyderabad: Sweet Home Publications, pp. 262-74. 21. See Bapuji et al., Ramayana: The Poisonous Tree, p. 272. 22. ‘At Home with Fact and Fiction, The Hindu, 3 February 2003. Accessed on 4 October 2005 at www.hindu.com/thehindu/mp2003/02/03/stories . 23. ‘Rao’ is a widely-found caste suffix among Telugu Brahmins; Ravana was a Brahmin demon; The suffix ‘Raj’ is commonly used to denote the kshatriya varna, but is also used, albeit rarely, by other castes. I thank Krishna Rao Maddipati for this clarification. 24. It is beyond the scope of this essay to recount all the clever in-jokes found in this concise but humorous take-off on the story of Shurpanakha, but the conceptualization of the holy man’s ten heads is especially clever. His name is ‘dasa-kantha-swami’ (swami with ten heads). Kavanasarma tells the reader that he earned his sobriquet as a playback singer because he had the ability to imitate the singing style of ten famous vocalists. 25. ‘Kavanasarma Kandula Varaha Narasimha Sarma, 1995, ‘Surpanaka Sokam’, in Kavanasarma Kat/mZu,Visakhapatam: PK Publications, pp. 106-10. Alladi Uma and M. Sridhar have translated the story into English as ‘Shurpanakhas Sorrow’, in Richman, Ramayana Stories, pp. 188-92. 26. In Ramkatha, demons are othered, dehumanized, and battled while female demons are othered, dehumanized, and subject to sexual abuse. In caste interactions, people considered ‘low caste’ by upper castes are othered and considered polluting, and ‘low-caste’ women are othered, considered polluting and subject to sexual abuse. 27. Richman, Ramayana Stories, p. 192. 28. Volga, ‘Introduction’, programme notes for ‘Lakshmana Rekha a Kuchipudi dance ballet, staged on 7 and 8 March 2004 in Hyderabad by Asmita Collective, a resource centre for women in honour of the Andhra Pradesh International Women’s Day celebrations.

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29. ‘Volga’ Popuri Lalitha Kumari, ‘Samagamam’, 2003, Sunday Magazine of Andhra Jyothi, 4 May, pp. 20-3. Krishna Rao Maddipati has translated it into English as ‘Reunion, in Richman, Ramayana Stories, pp. 92-8. 30. Richman, Ramayana Stories, p. 96. 31. According to most stories about Sita, King Janaka found her in a furrow, when he was ritually plowing the earth to insure a productive harvest. 32. ‘Sabaavimosanarn first appeared in the May 1943 issue of KalaimakaL Lakshmi Holmstrom’s translation, based on the Tamil version in C. Virdhachalam, 2000, Pudumaippithan Kathaikal, A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Nagercoil: Kalachuvadu Pathippagam, vol. 1, pp. 527-40, appears as ‘Deliverance from the Curse’, 2002, Pudumaippittan, New Delhi: Katha, pp. 128-45. Pudumaippittan’s taunting disclaimer appears in ‘Deliverance’, p. 128. 33. ‘Deliverance’, p. 133. 34. Ibid., p. 144. 35. For an English translation of this episode, see V.R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, 1976, The Cilappatikaram, Tirunelveli: South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society, p. 296. 36. ‘Deliverance, p. 144. 37. Dilip Kumar, 2000, ‘Editor’s Note’, Contemporary Tamil Short Fiction, trans. Vasantha Surya, Chennai: East-West Press, Manas Imprint, p. i. 38. Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao, 2002, Twentieth Century Telugu Poetry: An Anthology, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 28. 39. Virginia Woolf, 1965, A Room of Ones Own, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, p. 128. 40. This essay focuses only on Tamil and Telugu stories, but for a sampler of stories in Malayalam and Kannada as well, see the translations in Richman, Ramayana Stories.

4 GHALIB AND HIS INTERLOCUTORS * Syed Akbar Hyder

Ta badah talkh tar shaved o sina rishtar bagudazam abgina o dar saghir afganam

To make the wine more bitter and the chest more sore I shall melt the goblet and pour it into my drink

Kyun na firdaus men dozakh ko mila len ya rabb sair ke vaste thori sifiza aur sahi

Why don’t we mix a bit of hell into heaven, my Lord! Let’s have a bit more space to stroll around

Kas az ahl-i vatan ghamkhwar-i man nist mara dar dahr pindare vatan nist Not a single soul from my homeland remains my consoler, It’s as though I don’t have a homeland in this world —Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’

This book is in one sense an open-ended disclaimer of regulatory schemes. Simultaneously, it is marked by the deployment of (catachrestic and disrupted) conversation in the constitution of sub­ jectivities. This essay highlights the efficacy of the Perso-Urdu literary traditions as they keep orthodoxies and exclusivities in check. I attempt to gain an insight into these traditions by studying a fragment of the discourse of Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’. * This article first appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 26(3), pp. 462-75. © 2006, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.

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Few South Asian poets have been the subject of a more robust and voluminous corpus of writing than Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869). Living in the politically volatile milieu of nineteenth-century north India, Ghalib witnessed a series of crises, precipitated by the decline of Mughal power and the onset of British colonialism. Personally he suffered the loss of all his children. Ghalib seems to have retained his gusto through good wine, a great sense of humour, and his beloved pen that helped him undermine cherished conventions of his time and hence avenge his own suffering. His popularity hinges not only on his poetry but also on the images projected by his readers/audiences after his death. His influence permeates South Asian literature as well as music, religion, and politics. The significance of Ghalibs extraordinary impact upon South Asia is suggested by a frequently quoted remark of Abdul Rahman Bijnauri, a prominent literary critic of South Asia: ‘India is home to two divinely inspired works: the Holy Vedas and the corpus of Ghalibs Verse’.1 Such an attitude towards Ghalib testifies to the almost unearthly beauty of his verses. In spite of his seemingly playful attitude towards religion, he provided inspiration for many generations of Muslim poets. Ironically, he has even been canonized in a popular Saudi Arabian journal, where he is listed as one of the forty-two most notable Muslims in human history; he is in the company of the first four caliphs who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad, Abul Qasim Firdawsi, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Muhyideen Ibn al-Arabi, Jalaluddin Rumi, Muhammad Iqbal, Naguib Mahfouz, and Malcolm X.2 I will reflect upon one of Ghalibs most illuminating Persian poems, Chiragh-i Dayr (The Temples Lamp). I am drawn to this poem written in the form of a masnavi (genre of rhymed couplets), for the synergy of cosmopolitanism that is harnessed in it. By cosmopolitanism, I mean a mode of existence in which difference is not only accommodated or tolerated but also cherished and fostered. I will explore the way in which Ghalib channels the socio-literary cosmopolitan imaginaire in ‘The Temples Lamp’ and the larger intertextual and intersubjective context in which this poem resides. Within the parameters of this study, I invoke Ghalibian words and anecdotes not directly tied to the poem, but which elicit sentiments similar to those expressed therein. Furthermore, I align Ghalib’s verses with discourses that precede his work, but constitute the poetic and mystical textscape of his world; and analyse how Ghalib figures in the literary mosaic of twentieth-century reformist Urdu literature, especially the Taraqqi

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Pasand Tahrik (Progressive Urdu Movement) which has prided itself for reading against the grain. SITUATING CHIRAGH-IDAYR

Ghalib wrote Chiragh-i Dayr in 1827, during several months sojourn in Banaras, en route from Delhi to Calcutta where he went to get his family pension restored from the British. By 1827, a rapid decline of the Mughal rule in Delhi and the gradual consolidation of British hegemony in the subcontinent had begun. Just thirty years of age, Ghalib employs the medium of the masnavi, an age-old genre fre­ quently used for didactic, mystical, historical, and romantic discourses. The masnavi genre stands out from its chief literary rival, the ghazal, because it possesses thematic unity and coherence laced with narrative tightness often missing in the latter. It is the masnavi of the Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi that till date stands as the most celebrated work of Islamic mysticism. Evoking the image of a forlorn flute, Rumi conveys the implications of the exilic soul pining for union with its reed­ bed source: Atish ast in bang-i ndi va nist bad har keh in atish na darad nist bad3 This cry of the reed is fire, not [just] wind Whoever doesn’t have this fire, should be naught

Ghalib breathes through the same symbolic instrument, he lights his temple lamp with this same archetypal fire: Nafas abrisham-i saz-i fughan ast basan-i ndi tabam dar ustukhwan ast4 My breath acts as a string on the musical organ of lamentation Like the flute, my bones are filled with fire

The first part of Ghalibs masnavi, in a tone very similar to the shahrashub genre5 (characterized by a playful, satiric lament for a city fallen to alien forces, ruined by the misdeeds of the population or even by beautiful young boys), mourns not only the poets separation from Delhi, but also the lack of empathy that had, in his opinion, become characteristic of his friends in Delhi: Ze dehli ta berun avardeh bakhtam ba tufan-i taghaful dada rakhtam kas az ahl-i vatan ghamkhwar-i man nist mara dar dahrpindari vatan nist6

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From the moment that my fate brought me out of Delhi, My goods have been scattered in the tumult of negligence, Not a single one from my homeland is my consoler, Its as though I don’t even have a homeland in this world

But this sentiment of uprootedness is swiftly met by its rejoinder: Jahanabad gar nabvad alam nist jahan abadjae kam nist nabashid qaht-i bahr-i ashiyani sar-i shakh-iguli dar gulsitani7 If Jahanabad [Delhi] doesn’t exist, no sorrow, The world still exists, so be it! No shortage of space There is no scarcity of space for a nest, any rose branch in the garden would suffice

The first Jahanabad can be read as one word, meaning a place where the world lives. Delhi, courtesy of its status as a centre of north Indian culture, was often referred to by this name. Hence the subject of the first verse is Jahanabad. When this word appears in the next line, it can be broken down into two words. The first part (jahan) means world. This constitutes the subject of this verse. The second part (abad), as a predicate adjective, connotes the existence, nay celebration, of the larger world. While coming to terms with the demise of one Jahanabad, the poet seeks consolation through an ingenious pun in the existence of another Jahan abad. Just as the nightingale of the poets cosmos is able to build its nest on any rose branch when its singular love gives way to plurality,8 the poet can find a substitute for his Jahanabad in any expanse around him. In the following verse, the poet claims that some compared Banaras to China, a land known for its beauty and considered a metaphor for that which is beyond the visible world. Banaras ra kasi goft ke chin ast hanoz az gang chinish bar jabin ast9 Someone once said that Banaras is China Till today, the Ganges flows on its forehead10 as a frown marker

Annemarie Schimmel provides insight about the importance of China as a trope of Islamic literature by quoting a verse of Ghalibs predecessor, Khwaja Mir Dard (d. 1785): And China is always connected with pictures and painting. It was the legendary home of Mani the painter, and the poets must also have seen the delicate paintings on silk that came from China.

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Oh, come, so that your picture be placed within my heart— Don’t go to China, for there they’ll paint it just on silk!

Thus says Mir Dard. When China and Rum (Byzantium) are contrasted as the farthest poles of the known world, as often happens, they are also accounted the countries where the greatest artists live—artists who approach the problem of ‘painting’ in different ways.11

Furthermore, when guiding his community on the path of knowledge, Prophet Muhammad mentioned China as that land far from Arabia that could provide knowledge for the student par excellence: ‘Seek knowledge, even if it be in China.12 Since no beloved wants to be compared to the other, nor wants to compromise its uniqueness, Banaras too frowns at this comparison. Ghalib devises another ingenious pun in the above couplet: chin in Persian means ‘China as well as ‘wrinkle’. Although Banaras might want to distance itself from its perceived rival, China, the world of language forces the ‘other’ (China) to become a part of the self (Banaras) through the very lack of distance (chin-frown) that takes place when eyebrows frown in disapproval. The rose garden that our poet is drawn to is the garden of Banaras. The garden becomes so pivotal in this masnavi that Delhi itself circumambulates around it. As the masnavi gains momentum, Banaras is conceived in terms reflective of Islamic cosmology—as the paradise promised to the righteous ones; as that sought-after place upon which Delhi’s salutations, often tinged with envy, land; as the ‘ibadat khana, the house of worship of the conch-blowers; and as the Kaba of Hindustan: ‘ibadat khana-i naqusiyan ast, hamana ka’ba-i Hindustan ast’.13 Taala Allah banaras chashm-i bad dur bahisht-i khurram ofirdaus-i mamur14 O Supreme God! Protect Banaras from the evil eye It’s an auspicious heaven and rich paradise

By invoking the images and idols of Banaras, Ghalib identifies points of correspondence between this city of conch-blowers and the fiery all-encompassing divine substance in the Islamic lore that manifested itself to Moses on Mount Sinai. From head to toe, the idols of Banaras appear in God’s light and those who behold them can only pray to keep the evil eye away from their beloved ones. The divine origins of Banaras’ idols remind one of Ghalib’s Urdu quip in the same vein:

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Go van nahin pa van ke nikale hue to hain Kabe se in buton ko bhi nisbat hai dur ki15 Although not there, they are the ones who have been expelled from there These idols are related to the Kaba, albeit from a distance!

As the masnavi continues to channel the poets imagination, the absolute symbols of Islam become relative to the non-Islamic symbols. Further, those who have been living in the city, and those believing in the transmigration of souls (tanasukh mashraban) also voice their beliefs to articulate the significance of their abode: Whosoever dies in this garden, Is liberated from [future] connection with body [cycles of birth] The fortunes of his hope turn into a garden In death, he becomes immortal What more to say about this soul-consoling abode? It even casts off the evil eye that strikes the souls It’s not a wonder, because of Banaras’ water and air [climate]: The only thing that exists in its spaciousness is life Come hither! O You who know not [Banaras’s] glory Cast a glance on the surreal beauties of this city Behold! All those lives that are bodiless Neither water nor clay constitutes their existence Their nature, like the roses fragrance, is not heavy— All life, unhindered by body Its as though the grass and straw of this city are also a garden, Even its rising dust particles are the scattering jewels of life In this ever-changing, ancient, idol-house The spring is spared the vicissitude of changing colors Be it spring, autumn, or summer Through all seasons, its climate is heavenly During frigid winters and scorching summers, The spring packs up its bags and heads to Kashi16

Whereas the larger idol-house of the world, in which this smaller idol-house Banaras is situated, confronts the vicissitudes of ever­ changing seasons, Banaras, whether it is embraced by spring or fall, intense summers or frigid winters, is spared from such vicissitudes. Even if it is struck by autumn, the earthly colours of this leaf-shedding season mark Banaras forehead as though they are sandalwood beauty enhancers. The relationship that Banaras has to its inhabitants and visitors is cultivated further when the poet evokes the image of a self­ adorning beloved, the city, gaining a glance of itself, during dusk and dawn, in the mirror-like waters of the Ganges: ‘magar goi banaras shahide hast/ze gangish subh o sham aina dar dast’.17

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Ghalib draws on age-old metaphors, such as the mirror metaphor, brought forth by, among others, the Sufi Muhyiddin Ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240) who discussed the self-disclosure of the ultimate, real existence through the mirror analogy. Adhering to the spirit of such theosophies, Ghalib presents Banaras as the epiphany of the integrat­ ed multiplicity of creation, wahdat al-wujud, the Sufi ideal so closely tied to Ibn al-Arabi, the undisputed master of theosophical Islam, who said, My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, And a temple for idols and the pilgrims Kaba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.18

Also resonating in these sentiments is the Quranic verse (49:13) that expresses the divine reasoning behind creations plurality: ‘We have created you into nations and tribes so that ye may get to know each other and compete with each other in good deeds’ This ‘we’, manifests itself to Ghalib not only in the form of the Mount Sinai flame but also as the idols of Banaras that are the products of this flame. Ghalib’s commentators also see an intertextual metrical con­ cord between Chiragh-i Dayr and Mirza Abdul Qader Bedil’s late seventeenth-century masnavi, Tur-i Marifat (The Sinai of Gnosis), in that they share the popular ecstatic and melodious’ meter, hazaj musaddas mahzuf.19 Since Ghalib, time after time, proudly allied his poetry with Bedil’s profoundly dense verses, it is not surprising that there are also undeniable parallels between some of the central meta­ phors of Chiragh-i Dayr (including that of Mount Sinai) and those of Bedil’s masnavi—a work that celebrates, among other things, the ‘divinely-sanctioned’ monsoons of north India’s Bairat hills. We must thus acknowledge here that these images of the trans-Islamic sacred geography reflected in Ghalib’s poetry have, by this time, accumulated in the literary and cultural memory of the subcontinent. Such views were borne out by the discourses of Ghalib’s predecessors—Bedil, Mir, Sauda, and Vali. Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), Ghalib’s revered spiritual and literary forebear, compares the lamps of Somnath to those that light the Kaba: Us kefarogh-i husn se chalke hai sab men nur Sham’-i haram ho ya ke dia somnath ka2Q

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From his beauty, all things radiate Whether it is the candle of Mecca or the lamp of Somnath

While discussing the general region of Somnath and Surat in Gujarat, how could one forget the lovely masnavi of Vali Dakhni-Gujarati (d. 1720), one of the forefathers of Urdu. Vali gleefully poises the Surat of his time as a centre of cosmopolitan, hybrid geography: ajab shahran men hai pur nur yak shahr bila shak voh hai jag men maqsad-i dahr ahe mashhur us ka nam surat kehjavejis ke dekhe son kadurat [.J sharafat menyeh haijiyun bab-i makka to hai sab mulkpar us kajo sikka [...] vahan sakin ite hain ahl-i mazhab, ke ginti men na aven unke mashrab agarche sab hain voh abna-i adarn, vale binash men rangarang-i alam bhari hai serat o surat sun surat, har ek surat hai van anmol murat khatam hai amradan upar safa’i vale hai beshtar husn-i nisai sabha indar ki hai har ek qadam men, chupa indar, sabha kon le adam men Kishan ki gopiyan ki nain hai yeh nasi, rahin sab gopiyan voh naql, yeh asl21

Among all cities, wondrous is one city: Without doubt, in the world, it is the raison d’etre of time! Famous is its name, Surat, From its gaze, malice vanishes. In nobility [Surat] is like the gate of Mecca, exercising its authority over the entire region. So many people of so many religions live there, their sects cannot possibly be counted. Even though they are all children of Adam, In their appearance, however, they are a multicolored spectrum. Surat [the city] is filled with numerous ways and surats [forms], Each one of these, a priceless image. Fairness reaches its perfections in the boys [of Surat] But the beauty of [its] girls is even superior. At every step, stands the court of Indra, Even though Indra hides himself, with his court, in non-existence.

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This generation is not of Krishna’s gopis, For those gopis were imperfect imitations—this, the real

As Sunil Sharma eloquently points out, Valis amorous sweep of the demography of the city results in a catalogue of beautiful and industrious beloveds among whom are Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and also Europeans, each contributing to the city’s overall prosperity’.22 In the Gujarat of 2002, Valis shrine, which stood as the object of Hindu and Muslim veneration for almost three centuries, fell a martyr to violence in the name of religion. Such a desecration can perhaps be read as a bleak metaphor for what has transpired in India under our own watch or may be heard as a clarion of the impending doom of Valis imagination. In the light of Ghalib’s Chiragh-i-Dayr it is the very sight of Banaras that delivers to the poet’s imagination a hope of holding the doomsday at bay. In spite of all the mayhem in this world, the poet is told by a wise Banarasi soul that the architect of the world cannot conceive the destruction of this multicoloured universe. For in Banaras, God’s unimaginably large universe resides in the humble microcosmic mode of a city. But as the poet basks in Banaras’s glory, he is suddenly touched by the disquieting reflection of the world he left behind in Delhi. While falling in love with Kashi, he has forgotten about the scarred and sorrowful lover he left behind in the form of the impotent Mughal capital. The thought of Delhi invites him back to his original dwelling by reminding him of all the relatives and friends that await him—all those who live helplessly and burn like silent candles without uttering a word of complaint. With the idea of responsibility at a premium, the Ghalib of this masnavi partakes of K. Anthony Appiah’s defining feature of cosmopolitanism: And the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibility to every other’.23 It is as though the Prophet realized in his heavenly journey, his mi raj, that he incurred a responsibility through his journey to those who are silently suffering on earth and not to those who comfortably dwell in paradise. Ghalib was well aware of such a sentiment commonly expressed in the mystical musical (qawwali) tradition of South Asia: Khuda ne kaha Mustafa se dulare, yeh meraj ki shab hai kyun chup hopyare, Muhammad nefarmaya, aye mere maula, mujhe apni ummat kiyad a rahi hai24

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God said to Muhammad, the chosen one, my darling! This is the night of Mi’raj, Why this silence? Muhammad replied: My lord, I keep thinking of my community!

Whether from Gods divine throne, or from Mount Sinai, or for that matter from Banaras—considered to be Shiva’s sacred abode—all prophets must return for they owe this to their community. But a return does not mean that the Prophet leaves behind what he witnesses. Instead, heavenly journeys instil in the prophets something of heaven. Ghalib too requires of himself the internalization of the heavenly gardens of Banaras so they may sail through his veins on the flowing rivers of blood. And if his passionate madness that caused him to fall for Banaras continues within himself then he claims—through resplendent alliteration—that the distance from Kashi to Kashan, a city hundreds of miles away in Iran, is but half a footstep.25 Although the geographical expanse of the outer world locates itself within the inner body, and perhaps on the outer body also (recall the chin-chin pun), this location bears responsibility and accountability to those who have been excluded from it. Even if heaven is internalized, there is a certain amount of anxiety regarding that which is missing from this heaven. In a playful address to God in the masnavi Abr-i gauharbar’, Ghalib hesitates to embrace Islamic heavens most marketed commodity, the much-talked-about sweet virgin Houris promised to righteous Muslim men: If the Houri is present, how will I think of him/her [my beloved] Neither the sorrow of separation, nor the desire for union will exist How can I expect that beautiful one, the one with whom I am not acquainted [the Houri] to bestow favors on me, How can I derive pleasure from a union that doesn’t come at the cost of waiting? How will that Houri know to teasingly flee from me when I begin to kiss her? How will she know to make false promises to me? She’ll be subservient to me, unable to utter a single bitter word, she’ll be able to quench my thirst, but she’ll thirst for nothing Neither the joy of winking, nor that of flirting Where will heaven get the holes in its wall?26

Even when the poet’s desire is transposed to the heavenly sphere, the thirst for that which is absent (holes in the wall through which the poet could gaze upon his earthly beloved, a beloved who has his/her own agency) keeps him from accepting heaven at face value. Whether

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it is the assurance of eternal bliss provided by God or the indictment launched by Gods angels, the poet struggles to put a resistive voice on his agenda: Pakrejate hain farishton ke likhe par nahaq admi koi hamara dam-i tahrir bhi tha27 Based on the account of the angels, unjustly, we face indictments Was our man present there when our deeds were being written down?

Islamic lore has it that human deeds are penned by two angels, one over each shoulder. The account of these angels will be summoned when humans are judged. But is it fair for angels, who themselves cannot err, to record the deeds of the progeny of Adam and Eve, who are distinguished from angels by virtue of their free will. God, angels, and mortal humans who take Gods word too literally are thus mutually implicated. A liberalism that values individualism without being consumed by it emerges. Ghalib is a poet, as Urdu s fine critic Muhammad Hasan Askari points out, who makes his individual self collude with the entire collective life, nay with the entire creation, no matter what the consequences of this collusion are: ‘Whatever might be, let it be from ones own existence.28 In the last four couplets of the 108-couplet masnavi under discussion, Ghalib enjoins himself through the third-persons voice to count on madness for assistance when intellect and reason fail to live up to their potential. While this masnavi fosters a certain kind of modernist and enlightened thinking of eighteenth- and nineteenth­ century Europe (accommodation of difference), it also finds ways to offset the European-derived liberalism by questioning blind faith in rationalism and positivism. Articulating a playful variation on the theme of Islams creed of unity, the poet calls for the acceptance of negation, submission to affirmation, the invocation of Allah, and a swift transcendence beyond everything besides Him: ze ilia dam zan o taslim-i la sho, ba go allah o barq-i ma siva sho’. Inscribed in lyrical language here is a symbolic microcosm of cosmopolitanism, the accommodation of uniqueness, beauty, nature, religion, sorrow, accountability, binaries, and syntheses of differenceall penned by a man who embarked on a journey from the capital of the old Mughal India, Delhi, toward the centre of the new colonial India, Calcutta; who refused to foreclose on the difference that was resonant through and through in the imagined Kashi. It was in Kashi that Ghalib gloried in the presence of dynamic interconnected

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plurality that constantly militated against any exclusivist overbearing presence. It is through the prism of lyrical Kashi that we catch a glimpse of what W.E.B. Du Bois would signify as ‘the world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of one who vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a death that is more than death—the passing of a soul that has missed its duty’29 At another level, Ghalib can be read in his masnavi as the flaneur:30 the stroller, that distinctive product of modernity who imbibes his surroundings without looking forward to intoxication: Mai se gharaz nishat hai kis ru siyah ko ek go na bekhudi mujhe din rat chahiye31

Who’s that wretched one who desires pleasure from wine, All I need, day and night, is an excuse to lose myself

The self (Delhi) must be lost so the other (Banaras) can be accorded its deserved station. The other can gain such an ethical standing that it helps find the lost self, which subsists in a more introspective mode.

GHALIB’S RECEPTION IN URDU’S PROGRESSIVE CANON Not only does Ghalib’s poetry, in its piracy of the language of religion, become a symbolic escape from various forms of orthodoxies and rigidities, but it also constitutes a much cherished cultural and inspirational space for the layout oftwentieth- century Urdu Progressive literature, much of which exists at the interface of Marxism and mysticism. Urdu’s Progressive Writers Movement, formed in the 1930s, was conceived in the spirit of ethical utilitarianism: Literary aesthetics should expand to appreciate that which has been denied entry in the past—issues of class, gender, and sexuality; it must ultimately address social ills. As Vinay Dharwadker and others have shown, several Indian literary works from 1925 to 1975 were discursively listed in the service of promulgating a city-centric Indian national space as a cosmopolitan one, mediated ambidexterously between Indian and Western cultures without committing monologically to either.. ,’32 The Progressive project, like other South Asian reformist projects (the Aligarh Movement, the Brahmo Samaj), did not believe in forfeiting the importance of history or categorically perceiving the past as wilted (like much colonial discourse did). While advocating a new course for literature, the Progressives yearned for legitimacy by appealing to those poets and writers whom they believed laid down the antecedents for their literature. Within the imagined pantheon of

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past South Asian Progressive writers, none figured more prominently than Ghalib. Ali Sardar Jafri, a prominent Progressive poet, when speaking at Harvard University on 30 April 1999 on the topic of South Asia’s composite’ culture, discussed Chiragh-i Dayr along with selected Ghalib couplets as ideal metaphors that describe the relation of Muslims with non-Muslims in South Asia. Progressives like Jafri recast Ghalib as a harbinger of ethical modernity and a spirit imbued with forward-looking cosmopolitanism. I contend that Ghalib speaks to the Progressives through the reassuring discourses of three prominent Indo-Muslim thinkers and reformers of subsequent generations—Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Altaf Husain Hali, and Muhammad Iqbal. The relationship that these three men have with Ghalib bears upon the manner in which Ghalib would be readily incorporated into Urdu’s Marxist idioms. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, in the early 1850s, asked Ghalib to assess the historical merits of A’in-i Akbari—an important account of Akbar’s rule written by Abul Fazl (1602)—by writing a short review (the equivalent of today’s jacket blurb) of this text. Cognizant of the value of this text for its own time (sixteenth century), Ghalib refuses to sing the praises of Abul Fazl’s treatise in the nineteenth century: Pesh-i in a in ke darad rozgar gashta ain-i digar taqvim-i par33 In front of the institutions that hold currency today All the other institutions of the past are like an old calendar

The gentlemen (sahibs) of England, argues Ghalib, offer much more than this outdated Mughal calendar. He enlists several British din (institutions) and traits to support his argument: First, the British are unparalleled in their knowledge of running the ‘institutions’ of the world. Second, they create a concord of intellect and justice. Third, their virtue is constituted by their invention of steamships and steam engines, telegraph, and electricity. Ain-i Akbari is thus subjugated to technological developments taking place under the British while Ghalib’s unwillingness to be tethered to historic texts acts as a nice foil to the colonial obsession with Indian textual traditions: Murda parvardan mubarak kar nist khud bago kan nizjuzguftar nist34

Worship of the dead is not an auspicious deed, You tell me, what is it besides a piece of discourse

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A devotee of the Prophet Muhammad and his family, Ghalib is careful not to forfeit his personal faith to the panegyrics for the new order. He reminds himself: ‘Dar jahaan sayyid parasti din-i tust’ (In the world Sayyid worship is your religion). Since Sayyid Ahmad Khan was a Sayyid (descendant of the Prophet), this is a clever way for Ghalib to shellack Sayyid Ahmad Khans textual endeavour while embracing him as loftier than any text from Akbar’s time. Within ten years of Ghalibs death, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, an em­ ployee of the British East India Company, founded the Mohammadan Anglo Oriental College in Aligarh, a site which afforded Muslims the space from which they could articulate reforms of their community and argue for Islams compatibility with ideas of the Enlightenment. Khan spoke to many generations who followed him as the embodi­ ment of Muslim cosmopolitanism. But Ghalibs lyrical engagement with Khan predisposes the last Mughal poet laureate to a forwardlooking existential vision, more progressive than that of the founder of the leading educational institution for Muslims. Among Khan’s close friends was Altaf Husain Hali, with whom Ghalib had developed an affectionate relationship. Hali considered himself Ghalib’s student and the memoir-biography (Yadgar-i Ghalib) he wrote in 1897 about the last Mughal court poet merited the regard of the later admirers of Ghalib. Hali, through his passionate prose and poetic works, also directed the attention of his audiences to what he regarded as the plight of existing literature. He thought it improvident of the literature of his time to disregard the concerns of the Muslim community by distancing itself from pressing socio-political concerns. While much of the literature of the subcontinent written in the nineteenth century lost its dynamic glory for Hali, he was not shy about invoking his old ustad or teacher (in the process legitimizing his own credentials) for reformist ends. Through a cluster of anecdotes that he published as Yadgar-i Ghalib, Hali advances a narrative of Ghalib’s life that defines the poet as ecumenical and epicurean; just and generous with his resources, yet brutally honest when critiquing the work of his juniors; and witty, but never at the expense of pensiveness that always engulfed him. Hali, in his Yadgar, also provides an apology for qasidas (panegyrics) Ghalib wrote in honour of Mughal princes and British authorities, including one for Queen Victoria: Ghalib penned qasidas to the rulers of his time not because he was a careerist soliciting worldly rewards, but because the art of writing good qasidas was

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crucial to prove ones merits as a great poet. Hali argues that Ghalibs qasidas, far from bearing witness to Ghalib sycophancy, actually align him with the poetic traditions of Persian masters like Sanai, Sadi, and the ‘Parrot of India, Amir Khusraw: Mile do murshidon ko qudrat-i haqq se hain yeh taalib Nizamuddin ko Khusraw, Sirajuddin ko Ghalib35

By the grace of the Almighty Reality, the two revered teachers were blessed with these students: Nizamuddin (Awliya) with (Amir) Khusraw, Sirajuddin (Bahadur Shah) with Ghalib

Through Hali, Ghalib gains entry into the South Asian secular imagination. Hali identifies Ghalibs true religion (asl mazhab) as sulh-i kull (absolute peace), an idea that finds popular expression in discourses linked to the religious policies of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Ghalibs letter after the uprisings of 1857 stands as a testament to the idea of sulh-i kull: T hold all mankind to be my kin and look upon all men—Muslim, Hindu, Christian—as my brothers, no matter what others may think’.36 Resonating in these sentiments is the decree of Ghalibs namesake and the object of his affection, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and fountain-spring of Islamic spirituality, the fourth muslim caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib. In a letter to his governor in Egypt, a country of Muslims as well as Jews, Christians, and pagans, Ali had outlined the ideal conduct of the government toward the governed: ‘Infuse your heart with mercy for your subjects; either they are your brothers in religion or your equals in creation’.37 While unequivocally devoted to Ali and Muhammad, Ghalib yet maintains a deep ambivalence toward any exclusivist reading of God or Islam, which he constantly scripts in humorous ways: Once asked by a British official if he was a Muslim, he retorted, T am half a Muslim, drink wine but refrain from swine’. He delights in trumping those who are determined to extract religious allegiances from him, while propagating the versified spaces of devotion to the Prophet and his son-in-law, in the process acting out the Persian maxim: ‘Ba khuda divana bash, ba Muhammad hosiyar bash’ (You may be crazy with God, but be careful with Muhammad). Ghalib, after 1897, is often read in light of Hali’s memoir; as the Progressive Movement of the twentieth century defined its secular trajectory, Ghalib’s ecumenism

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became instrumental to the idea of a composite religious culture that spurs the very concept of a shared cultural sphere. The third person who ensconces Ghalib in the pantheon of Progressive literature is Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal held Hali in high esteem as a reformer and brought many of Hali s concerns, especially those regarding the plight of Muslims, to the fore. By dwelling on Ghalibs supposed non-conformity that flows from the works of Hali, Iqbal advances a narrative in Javidnama (his own heavenly journey) that positions Ghalib in the company of two mavericks and martyrs of Islamicate traditions, Mansur al-Hallaj, the Sufi martyr sent to the gallows in 922, and Qurratu’l-Ayn Tahereh, the Babi poet executed in 1852. Through these three spirits in the Javidnama, Iqbal propels Ghalib to sing his Persian ghazal that would later become a special favourite of Sajjad Zaheer, a leading member of the Communist Party of India and a founding father of the Progressive Writers Association. For Zaheer, this ghazal enticingly evinces a great elemental force and joy of life’,38 Baya keh qaeda-i asman bagardanim qaza ba gardhish-i ritl-igiran bagardanim

[...] Ze haidarim man o tu zema ajab nabvad gar aftab su-e khavaran bagardanim39

Come, let us change the order of the heavens, And transform the decrees of fate with the twirl of a brimming goblet You and I are both from Haidar (Ali), so it wouldn’t be strange: If we turned the sun from the west to the east

Ali, often referred to as Haidar, is said to have performed many miracles, some in which the sun followed Ali’s orders rather than the natural ones. Alis invocation in the previous verse spawns a discourse wherein fate is subservient to that human agency which is constituted by devotion. The Ghalib of Iqbal’s Javidnama also revisits a theological debate that featured strongly in the cultural milieu of the first half of nineteenth-century Delhi: the debate over whether it was possible for God to create another Muhammad. Iqbal’s Ghalib conjures a vision of a poet whose words can be frustratingly vague but also profound. Without suffering physical martyrdom, Ghalib, in Iqbal’s heavenly journey, bears witness to the truth of martyrdom through his words. While intimating in his Persian poetry that Ghalib

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stands with prominent martyrs of the East, in his Urdu work Iqbal reconciles Ghalibs poetry with that of Goethe: Ah tu ujri hui dilli men aaraamiidah hai gulshan-i weimer men tera ham nava khwabida hai40

Alas, you rest in the desolated Delhi Your soulmate sleeps in the garden of Weimer

Through this comparison, Iqbal raises Ghalib from his narrow linguistic and cultural context and universalizes him so as to posit him as the best source of Eastern poetry and imagination. By pointing to the desolation of Ghalib s city, Iqbal critiques the decay and downfall of the once great culture of the subcontinent. Ghalib, within this poem, stands as that most desirable element of the past whose spirit has been betrayed in Iqbals time, while his dynamically soaring imagination has been reduced to dust. Iqbal, along with Hali and Khan, is crucial in helping win Ghalib affection and esteem in the Progressive circles. It is mainly through these three people that the Progressives are able to claim Ghalibs legacy as progressive and revolutionary. Such a view of Ghalib camouflages the resolutely aristocratic social code that had prescribed the poets own life. One has only to turn the pages of his letters and other writings to see how far he was from the rough and tumble of any laborious task, save for the dexterous crafting of Urdu and Persian. He coveted royal titles and honours, relished courtly patronage, and derived pleasure from the most exquisite opulence. But Ghalibs playful poetic subversion was what the Progressives are overly prone to see. The verses of this nineteenth­ century poet have been dynamic enough to easily gain contemporary valence and rhetorically suit multiple, even conflicting, agendas at once. However, according a uniquely political, activist, and revolutionary role to Ghalib also works in tension with what Michel Foucault would consider the Ghalibian dispositif, the reigning regulatory institutions and textscapes of the multivocal ghazal and masnavi worlds wherein one idea is offset by another.41 The point of congruence of the two poetics, the Progressive revisionary and the pre-twentieth-century ghazal-masnavi, lies precisely in the suppression of the multivocal lyrical universe. The Progressive invocations owe less to the totality of Ghalibs ghazal themes than to the careful selection of those verses that could be interpreted as undermining the status quo for example, Ghalib writes in a ghazal:

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Kahte hainjite hain ummidpa log ham kojine ki bhi ummid nahin42

It is said that people live on hope We have no hope even of living

But in a different ghazal life yields a different value and affords a perspective that competes with resignation as well as existentialism: Tire vadeparjiye ham to yeh jan jhut jana keh khushi se mar najate agar etebar hota43

If we lived on your promise, darling, then we knew it to be false If we lived on your promise, know: We knew it to be false Had we believed in it, wouldn’t we have died of happiness

Eluding rigid categorization, Ghalib himself deliberately provided the multivocal ideological parameters and a negotiable hermeneutic province wherein his words could be subjected to ever-new interpretations: ‘Old words given new meanings on my page I like the autumn-struck world, infused with spring’ From physical optics to the theory of relativity, Har qadam duri-i manzil hai numayan mujh se meri raftar se bhage hai biyaban mujhse44 At every step, the distance to my destination becomes evident Upon witnessing my speed, the desert flees from me

from a prognosis of heartburn to the marvelling at the process of evaporation, Zbfsegirya mubaddil ba dam-i sard hua bavar aya hamen qatre ka hava ho jana45

Due to weakness, [my] wails were transformed into cold sighs I gained faith in the process through which a drop of water turns into air

Ghalibs verses, to many of his scientifically-inclined devotees (for example, Wahab Quaiser), signify the anticipation of technological progress that defines the West as advanced. Through the figure of Ghalib, the collapse of East-West, traditional-modern civilizational differences becomes possible. The Urdu Progressive and reformist writings of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Sahir Ludhiyanvi, Kaifi Azmi, and Ishrat Afreen invest Ghalibs legacy with ideals of possibilities and potentialities. Even M.F. Hussain, the most eminent painter in India today, savours

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Ghalib as a poet who not only anticipates Iqbal, but also Faiz, the most famous of the Progressive poets who levelled harsh criticism against various forms of oppression in his native country of Pakistan and in other parts of the world, especially Vietnam and Palestine. In Ghalib, the traditional and the modern interact and intertwine in a forwardlooking existentialist mode that respects history without validating the present by making it subservient to the past. Ghalib shows Faiz how to draw an ocean from a single drop of water: Qatre men dajla dikhai na de aurjazv men kul khel larkon ka hua deeda-ye beena na hua46

If the eye cannot see the Tigris in a drop, or the whole in a part, Then it is the game of young boys, and not a discerning eye

Not only is his first poetry collection (Naqsh-i Faryadi) inspired by the first two words of Ghalibs Urdu divan, but in the preface to his second book of poetry (Dast-i Saba), Faiz builds upon this privileged Ghalibian sight by bestowing upon the poets eye the responsibility of making all other eyes see what it is seeing. For Faiz, the poet must move from the station of mere mushahada or witnessing to mujahida or actual struggling for the just cause.47 The spark of this struggle, according to Ali Sardar Jafri, was kin­ dled when Ghalib started relying upon the sun instead of the moon, thereby reconstituting traditional reliance upon fate and spelling the doom of the old ways of might. Ghalibs faith in the sun assisted the nineteenth-century poet when he decided to transform spears into pens. In pursuing this line of thought, Jafri quotes the following Persian ghazal as facilitating a new brighter beginning from the dark­ er alleys of history: Muzhda-i subha dar in tira shabanam dadand sham’ kushtand ze khurshid nishanam dadand guhar az rayat-i shahan-i ajam barchedand ba evaz khama-i ganjinafishanam dadand sokht atashkada zatash nafasam bakhshidand Rikht butkhan, ze naqus fughanam dadand43

In this dark night, I have been given the glad tidings of dawn The lamp has been extinguished, now the sun serves as my signpost Jewels from the banners of the old Persian kings have been snatched away In return, I am endowed with a jewel-sprouting pen The fire temples have burned down, having blessed me with their breath The idol-houses have been razed, having granted me the cries of their conches

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To Jafri and his comrades, Ghalib, through his masnavis and ghazals, serves as a touchstone to the tradition of speaking truth to power. Jafri brings this point to life in this hagiographic passage: Ghalib s early life had taught him to taste a little sugar but never to settle on honey like a bee.. ..else the power of flight would be sapped. And so he became the poet of the uphill trek, not of destination, of non-fulfillment rather than consummation. The urge of the unattainable introduces one to the pleasure of lonely highways. This has enriched his poetry with a sense of movement, a concept expressed through a fusion of such images as the waves, storm, flame, mercury, lightning and flight. Movement has become a part of Ghalibs aesthetics. His beloved in his poetry is also swift and mercurial like flame and lightning....The printed world dances under the spell of his novel metaphors and similes. Characters become fluid; abstract thought turns into a figure of life and colour. Arid wastelands steam up under the frenzy of his wanderings. The wilderness begins to run ahead of the wayfarer. Unsculptured idols begin to dance within the heart of the stone. Mirrors dissolve into eyes.49

Even within the economy of films, for instance in Sohrab Modis Mirza Ghalib (1953)—the script of which was written by Sadat Hasan Manto, a member of the Progressive Writers Association at one time—Ghalib emerges as a maverick. He essentially walks out of Bahadur Shahs court with the comment ‘kya na-qadrdanon ki mahfil haf (how wanting in appreciation is this gathering), when his poetry is not applauded. Of course, in reality, Ghalib could have never acted in such a way, especially considering the high regard in which he held Bahadur Shah as the spiritual master of the age. Furthermore, such an action in the 1850s would be considered bad-tamizi (crude disrespect) and not baghavat (rebellion). The themes and issues that are important to the Progressives provide a connective not only between the past and the present, but the past and the future. What they draw from Ghalib is a vision of the future that presents itself as a creatively emancipatory rendition of the past—a mutually illuminating vision that is both the product of and an aid that actively shapes a cosmopolitan ethos or ethics. The politics of the present moment, to the Progressives and those drawn to them, hold up a dark mirror to the Ghalibian imaginaire and it is only when this perpetually expanding imaginaire is accommodated in our cultural memory that we will realize: ‘My Lord, where is the second footstep of desire/For the entire realm of possibility constitutes only the first one’.50 Within this realm of possibility, in the first imprint of desire, Ghalib sings—as the poet of the future, the poet from whose

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view absences and alternatives do not recede, the poet who brings imagination into the forefront of human existence: Hungarmi-i nishat-i tasavvurse naghma sanj main ‘andalib-i gulshan-i na afridah hun51 From the heat of the joy of imagination I keep singing I am the nightingale of the garden that awaits its creation

This couplet insistently recalls Appiah’s celebrated journey from the local to the universal that art makes possible through ‘imaginary connections’: One connection—the one neglected in talk of cultural patrimony—is the connection not through identity but despite difference. We can respond to art that is not ours; indeed, we can fully respond to bur’ art only if we move beyond thinking of it as ours and start to respond to it as art. But equally important is the human connection. My people—human beings—made the Great Wall of China, the Chrysler Building, the Sistine Chapel: these things were made by creatures like me, through the exercise of skill and imagination. I do not have those skills, and my imagination spins different dreams. Nevertheless, that potential is also in me. The connection through a local identity is as imaginary as the connection through humanity. The Nigerians link to the Benin bronze, like mine, is a connection made in the imagination; but to say this isn’t to pronounce either of them unreal. They are amongst the realest connections that we have.52

As I conclude this study, especially in the spirit of the larger work that it accommodates, I wish to draw attention to the rigid readings of culture that threaten the celebration of Appiah’s ‘connections’, the Progressive refashionings of Ghalib, or the multiplicity of the Ramayana tradition that Paula Richman highlights in her essay in this volume. The very notion of connectivity ‘despite difference’ threatens the exclusivist domains that various modes of nationalism and other parochialisms wish to safeguard. For the past eight years, I have been teaching ‘Introduction to India’ at one of North America’s largest universities. Most of the students in the class hail from families that have migrated from South Asia. When teaching this class in which I include Paula Richmans work on the multiplicity of the Ramayana tradition as well as the constantly-refashioned Ghalibian ghazal and masnavi world, I am repeatedly expected to focus on the urtext, with a clear implication that the multiple readings of South Asia that Richman, myself, and many other colleagues wish to emphasize are but distractions. This fetish for neat monological readings vies for intrusion upon the strategy of dissipating the exclusivist readings of

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culture. In a world where differences born of rigid categories break out with virulence while our geography shrinks, where civilizations are made to clash, and where the multivocal traditions of the past become interchangeable with a recalcitrant present, we must reclaim poetic and cultural spaces of imagination and cosmopolitanism, lest these spaces suffer the same fate as the shrine of Vali.

NOTES 1. Abdul Rahman Bijnauri, 2001, Mahasin-i kalam-i Ghalib, Islamabad: Abdul Rahman Bijnauri Trust. 2. Saudi Aramco World, May/June 2002, (53)3, pp. 2-3. 3. Jalaluddin Rumi, 1974, Masnavi-i maulvi-i manavi, Qazi Sajjad Husain (ed.), Lahore: Hamid and Company, p. 32. 4. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, 1967, Kulliyat-i Farsi, vol. 1, Sayyid Murtuza Husain Fazil Lakhnavi (ed.), Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-i Adab, p. 258. 5. The best discussion of this genre and its poetics can be found in Sunil Sharma, 2004, ‘The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24(2), pp. 73-81. In this article, Sharma, although focusing on a separate set of issues, also discusses Vali Dakhani’s masnavi in praise of Surat and Ghalibs Chiragh-i Dayr. 6. Ghalib, Kulliyat-i Farsi, p. 258. 7. Ibid., p. 259. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. The river Ganges that flows on the edge of Banaras is compared to the lines on Banaras’ unhappy face. 11. Annemarie Schimmel, 1992, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 149. 12. Ibid., p. 189. 13. Ibid., p. 261. 14. Ghalib, Kulliyat-i Farsi, p. 259. 15. Imtiyaz Ali Khan Arshi (ed.), 1992, Divan-i Ghalib, Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-i Adab, 1992, p. 324. 16. Ibid., pp. 260-1. 17. Ibid., p. 263. 18. Muhyi’ddin Ibn al-Arabi, 1978, The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq: A Collection of Mystical Odes, Reynold A. Nicholson (trans.), London: Theosophical Publishing House Limited, p. 67. 19. Abdul Ghani, 1982, Faiz-i Bedil, Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-e Adab, p. 93. 20. Mir Taqi Mir, 2002, Kulliyat-fMir, New Delhi: Aakif Book Depot, p. 210. 21. Sayyid Zahiruddin Madani (ed.X-1967, Intikhab-i Vali, Lahore: Maktaba-i Adab-i Urdu, pp. 147-50. 22. Sharma, ‘The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape, p. 77. Sharma also remarks on the contextual significance of this poem: ‘The remarkable

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poem on Surat was composed at a charged moment in the history of Indo-Persian literary culture, when Urdu was primed to claim and eventually occupy the space left by the closing of the literary borders between the Iranian lands and India, as the larger Persian world fragmented into separate cultural regions dominated by local traditions’ 23. K. Anthony Appiah, 2006, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World ofStrangers, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, p. xvi. 24. Aziz Ahmad Khan Warsi, private recording, 3 April 1967, Hyderabad. 25. Ghalib, Kulliyat-i Farsi, p. 264. 26. Ibid., p. 346. 27. Arshi (ed.), Divan-i Ghalib, p. 186. 28. Muhammad Hasan Askari, 1998, Askari Nama: Afsane, Mazamin, Lahore: Sang-i Mil Publishers, p. 381. 29. W.E.B. Du Bois, 1969, The Souls of Black Folk, New York: New American Library, p. 241. 30. See Margaret Cohen, 1993, Profane Illuminations: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press. 31. Arshi (ed.), Divan-i Ghalib, p. 284. 32. Vinay Dharwadker, 2003, ‘Formation of Indian-English Literature’, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 248. 33. Ghalib, Kulliyat-i Farsi, p. 317. 34. Ibid. 35. Altaf Husain Hali, 1986, Yadgar-i Ghalib, New Delhi: Ghalib Institute, p. 77. 36. Ralph Russell (ed.), 2003, The Oxford India Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 167. 37. See Syed Akbar Hyder, 2006, Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 81. 38. Sajjad Zaheer, 1969, ‘Ghalib and Progressive Urdu Literature, International Ghalib Seminar, New Delhi: All India Ghalib Centenary Committee, p. 119. 39. Muhammad Iqbal, javidnama ed., 1993, Yusuf Chishti, New Delhi: Etaqad Publishing House, p. 92. 40. Muhammad Iqbal, 1997, Kulliyat-i Iqbal, New Delhi: Markazi Maktaba-i Islami Publishers, p. 24. 41. Michel Foucault, 1980, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), Brighton: Harvester, p. 194. 42. Arshi (ed.), Divan-i Ghalib, p. 225. 43. Ibid., p. 186. 44. Wahab Quaiser, 2000, Science aur Ghalib, Hyderabad: Science Awareness and Promotion Trust, p. 69. 45. Ibid., p. 116. 46. Arshi (ed.), Divan-i Ghalib, p. 194. 47. Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Nuskhha-i vafa, Lahore: Maktaba-i Karvan, p. 103.

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48. Ghalib, Kulliyat-i Farsi, pp. 136-7. 49. Ali Sardar Jafri and Qurratulain Hyder, 2002, Ghalib: His Life and Poetry, New Delhi: Sterling Paperbacks, p. 13. 50. Arshi (ed.), Divan-i Ghalib, p. 13. 51. Ibid., p. 66. 52. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, p. 135.

Conversation III

On the Heteroscapes of History

5 MUHAMMAD IQBAL AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION IN BRITISH INDIA *

Faisal Devji

RELIGION, NATIONALISM, AND THE LIBERAL ORDER Well, it may be so, yet the talk of a united nationalism is futile and will perhaps remain so for a long time to come. The word has existed on the lips of the people of this country for the last fifty years and like a hen it has cackled a great deal without laying a single egg.1

This passage, from a speech by the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal to the Punjab Legislative Council in 1927, displays a distrust of any politics that assumed the existence of an Indian nation. Such distrust was not uncommon at that time. It was expressed, for very different reasons assuredly, by groups as diverse as the British government, Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League, and by Dalit and Dravidian movements. Whether or not the partisans of Hindu, Muslim, Dalit, or Dravidian forms of nationality thought, as did Iqbal in the passage quoted above, that a united Indian nation was a future possibility, they all based their distrust of it on the grounds of political reality. Given the historically entrenched and often legally sanctioned nature of the differences and disparities between various caste, religious, and other groupings, how was it possible to think about the political representation and interaction of India’s various parties in the absence of nationalism as a unifying factor? Could a workable set * This article first appeared as ‘Illiberal Islam’, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, London, New York, New Delhi: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Groups, 2009, pp. 234-63. Reprinted with permission.

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of political relations emerge in such a situation? What kind of state would they give rise to? Indian nationalism was distrusted by men like Iqbal not only as a bad idea, but also an unrealistic one. It was to avoid the political consequences of this idea that these men questioned the very language upon which such nationalism was based. In essence, this was the procedural language of liberalism, made up of a few fundamental categories including interest (the basic political fact), representation (the institutional organization of interests), and contract (the rela­ tionship between interests), all to be legitimated and guaranteed by a national state. If there was no Indian nation, interests could only be autonomous and formally unrelated entities, representation could only be organized on transient and ephemeral grounds, and contractual relations could only be held together merely by contingent imperatives. Naturally the kind of state that governed such a situation could only be some replica of the British Raj. This possibility raised very serious questions concerning the representation and interaction of India’s political units for Iqbal, as indeed for many of his countrymen, in the four or five decades before the Partition in 1947. Unfortunately this entire period is today held hostage by the fact of this Partition, so that it is only allowed to pose the following kinds of questions in the historiography: was the division of India inevitable? Did a Muslim nation actually exist before the creation of Pakistan? I do not think these retrospective questions are particularly interesting. They certainly do nothing to illuminate the vibrant political culture of India before Partition, which I believe subjected the basic categories of liberal thought, interest, representation, and contract, to an un­ precedented interrogation. It is important to note that it was over these procedural categories, rather than some merely academic definition of nationhood, that Indian political debate occurred then. I am interested here in the category of representation, which I will argue was taken up so differently and by such multifarious groups in British India, especially religious ones, as to be stretched quite out of European recognition. In fact, the whole lexicon of liberalism was expanded to breaking point in the Indian empire, undergoing perhaps its severest political test to manage the representation and contractual agreement of conflicting regional, linguistic, religious, and caste interests of continental proportions. It might well be the case that no group in British India stretched the liberal category of representation as far as the Muslims did, particularly

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those associated with the Muslim League. Here we have a gargantuan population of some 70 million that was yet conceived of as a national minority. And what kind of minority? One dispersed throughout the country, belonging to different sects, ethnicities, language groups, social classes, and professions. No wonder the leaders of the Indian National Congress found it so difficult to take the claims of such a group for representation seriously. Particularly when this claim did not stop at separate Muslim electorates and administrative zones, but entailed demands that went beyond the demographic strength of the Muslim population. For instance, demands for parity with the Congress in constitutional decision-making, as well as for weightage, a principle according to which Muslim or Hindu populations in certain regions were to be given legislative seats more than their proportional share in the population so as to allow them to constitute politically effective majorities or minorities. Muslims justified these demands by highlighting the important role they played in India’s history, one that did not bear any proportion to their numbers. Even now, argued the League, they continued to play this role by their disproportionate representation in the imperial army. Finally, the demand for disproportionate political representation was justified to prevent poverty and backwardness from depriving them of the fruits of democracy. For, in a purely demographic democracy, Muslims supposedly ran the risk of being crushed by a hostile Hindu majority. Such justifications, began from the brute facts of demography but moved beyond them to other ways of conceiving representation. Whatever the merits of this position, which would, in Iqbal’s phrase, ensure the substance of democracy even at the expense of its conventional form, it clearly brought the language of liberalism to breaking point. And this was the case, argued Iqbal, because the realities of India demanded a radicalization of liberal categories. In his presidential address to the AlLIndia Muslim Conference, in March, 1932, this is what Iqbal had to say about the nature of India’s struggle for freedom: The present struggle in India is sometimes described as India’s revolt against the West. I do not think it is a revolt against the West; for the people of India are demanding the very institutions which the West stands for. Whether the gamble of elections, retinues of party leaders and hollow pageants of parliaments will suit a country of peasants for whom the money-economy of modern democracy is absolutely incomprehensible, is a different question altogether. Educated urban India demands democracy. The minorities, feeling themselves as distinct

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cultural units and fearing that their very existence is at stake, demand safeguards, which the majority community, for obvious reasons, refuses to concede. The majority community pretends to believe in a nationalism theoretically correct, if we start from Western premises, belied by facts, if we look to India. Thus the real parties to the present struggle in India are not England and India, but the majority community and the minorities of India which can ill-afford to accept the principle of Western democracy until it is properly modified to suit the actual conditions of life in India.2

Iqbal makes three points which question the liberal enterprise of Indian nationalism. The national struggle exists not between India and Britain, but between India’s majority and minority communities, with the latter standing to lose all their historical and juridical privileges in a singular nation-state. Furthermore, the kind of democracy espoused by the nationalists works to the advantage of the urban and educated classes like them, because its freedoms of interest, representation, and contract are characteristic of a money economy that is foreign to India’s peasant majority. Finally, the nationalist project not only ignores, but actually destroys the religious landscape of the nation. Politically, then, Iqbal followed the Muslim League, supporting either a federal India divided into Hindu and Muslim majority provinces, or a united India with a system of separate electorates and weightage. Unlike the League’s president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Iqbal did not support these options for purely negative reasons, because the special historical and constitutional conditions of India did not permit the coming into being of a unitary nation-state. Rather he saw the League’s curious politics of representation in an entirely positive light because they seemed to stave off the nation-state in its liberal incarnation. Iqbal opposed this latter for several reasons. He disapproved its glorification of territorial belonging and its metaphysical rather than merely functional division of society into realms of the public and the private, on the same model, he thought, as the Christian separation of the material and the spiritual. Thus the following passage from Iqbal’s Presidential Address in 1930 to the Muslim League: Europe uncritically accepted the duality of spirit and matter probably from Manichaean thought. Her best thinkers are realising this initial mistake today, but her statesmen are indirectly forcing the world to accept it as an unquestionable dogma. It is, then, this mistaken separation of spiritual and temporal which has largely influenced European religious and political thought and has resulted practically in the total exclusion of Christianity from the life of European states. The result is a series of mutually ill-adjusted states dominated by interests not

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human but national. And these mutually ill-adjusted states after trampling over the morals and convictions of Christianity, are today feeling the need of a federated Europe, i.e., the need of a unity which Christian church-organisation originally gave them, but which instead of reconstructing it in the light of Christs vision of human brotherhood they considered it fit to destroy under the inspiration of Luther.3

Iqbal maintained that territorial belonging, in the populist form it assumed with the nation-state, destroyed or, at the very least, enfeebled all ethical or idealistic imperatives in political life, making for an international regime of parochial and so continuously warring interests. This condition, he believed, was brought into being with the Protestant Reformation, whose individualization of religion and revolt against the universality of the Roman Catholic Church spiritually ushered in the reign of the nation-state. Moreover, territorial belonging brought into being the dominance of property over all the relations of social life, such that all interests became interests of ownership. Indeed the nation-state could even be characterized by a mode of knowledge for which the world was composed entirely of things that had to be grasped proprietorially, by discursive reasoning alone. Representation, whether epistemological or political, was the very model of discursive reason because it grasped both persons and objects as forms of property, to be weighed, counted, and worshipped not only in the practices of democracy, but also in those of knowledge. This criticism of the liberal nation-state is similar in many respects to its Marxist analysis which Iqbal recognized, dedicating a number of fine verses in admiration of Marx, Lenin, and Bolshevism. Indeed, for Iqbal, Communism was religions (and especially Islams) only rival in the criticism of a liberal state and its order of representation, although infinitely worse than the latter. According to Iqbal, by transferring all property to the state, Communism, actually made it an oppressive presence in public life, and even more destructive of ethics as conviction and ideal. In this sense, atheistic materialism necessarily smuggled back into everyday life the very functions of property that it ostensibly criticized.4 Regarding the liberal order of the nation-state, its unhappiness for Iqbal was made possible by the metaphysical division of society into public and private realms, with the ideal the spiritual and everything that was not tied to property being confined to a private life where it could function only as ineffective moralism and mere ideal. This specifically metaphysical division of liberal society into public and

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private posed the greatest danger to the citizens life since it transformed political relations into a set of instrumental transactions by robbing them of what Iqbal variously called idealism, conviction or faith, as in the following passage from a lecture delivered in 1934: Humanity needs three things today—a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and basic principles of a universal import directing the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis. Modern Europe has, no doubt, built idealistic systems on these lines, but experience shows that truth revealed through pure reason is incapable of bringing that fire of living conviction which personal revelation alone can bring. This is the reason why pure thought has so little influenced men, while religion has always elevated individuals, and transformed whole societies. The idealism of Europe never became a living factor in her life, and the result is a perverted ego seeking itself through mutually intolerant democracies whose sole function is to exploit the poor in the interest of the rich. Believe me, Europe today is the greatest hindrance in the way of man’s ethical advancement.5

Iqbal deplored the liberal state as a soulless system of interests driven entirely by the greed for ownership. He feared that the formation and representation of India’s religious groups as interests in its terms would end up eliminating whatever remained of the ideal or ethical in them, thus giving way to the malign instrumentality of discursive reason operating in Imperialism, Communism, and Fascism alike. The extreme gravity of this situation, in the period leading up to the World War II, is clarified in his New Years message broadcast in January 1938 from the Lahore station of All-India Radio: The rulers whose duty it was to protect and cherish those ideals which go to form a higher humanity, to prevent man’s oppression of man and to elevate the moral and intellectual level of mankind, have in their hunger for dominion and imperial possessions, shed the blood of millions and reduced millions to servitude simply in order to pander to the greed and avarice of their own particular groups. After subjugating and establishing their dominion over weaker peoples, they have robbed them of their possessions, of their religions, their morals, of their cultural traditions and their literatures.... As I look back on the year that has passed and as I look at the world in the midst of the New Year’s rejoicings, it may be Abyssinia or Palestine, Spain or China, the same misery prevails in every corner of man’s earthly home, and hundreds of thousands of men are being butchered mercilessly. Engines of destruction created by science are wiping out the great landmarks of man’s cultural achievements. The world’s thinkers are stricken dumb. Is this going to be the end of all the progress and evolution of civilization, they ask, that men should destroy one another in mutual hatred and make human habitation impossible on this earth?6

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For all these reasons, great and small, Iqbal celebrated the lack of national identity in the Indian empire and approved of the curious forms that the language of liberalism assumed there, because he thought that India could develop a new political language of worldhistorical importance. He mentioned India’s exemplary political role in his Presidential Address to the Muslim League in December 1930: India is Asia in miniature. Part of her people have cultural affinities with nations in the east and part with nations in the middle and west of Asia. If an effective principle of co-operation is discovered in India, it will bring peace and mutual good will to this ancient land which has suffered so long, more because of her situation in historic space than because of any inherent incapacity of her people. And it will at the same time solve the entire political problem of Asia.7

Islam occupied a privileged role in this world-historical project, especially in India, where an infinitely diverse and dispersed Muslim minority allowed it to become purified of the kind of regional, linguistic, racial, or class identity that might otherwise permit Islams representation as a liberal interest. Indeed, the fact that the Muslims of India constituted a political interest despite their diversity and for apparently idealistic motives made them intractable to the propertied order of a liberal state, or so Iqbal seemed to suggest in his address of 1930 to the Muslim League: It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity—by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal—has been the chief formative factor in the life history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups and finally transform them into a well-defined people. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal.8

Iqbal felt it was the abstract nature of Muslim cohesion that made it a concrete force. Islams unreality became the most potent of realities, born of the sheer vulnerability of its abstraction, as he claims in a newspaper article of 1934 written to counter the new religious movement of the Ahmadis: Islam repudiates the race idea altogether and founds itself on the religious idea alone. Since Islam bases itself on the religious idea alone, a basis which is wholly spiritual and consequently far more ethereal than blood relationship, Muslim society is naturally much more sensitive to forces which it considers harmful to its integrity.9

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It was precisely as this sort of entity that Islam was threatened by liberalism, which finally made Iqbals engagement with the nation­ state more than a merely parochial and theoretical enterprise, indeed into a life-and-death struggle. The kind of Islam he described, however aberrant it might be politically, had to stand against liberal nationalism if it was to survive at all. This meant that no matter how benign the latter’s intentions, a liberal order could only triumph in India by eliminating Islam as a social reality. The claims of Iqbal’s Islam put liberal representation itself into question as an inclusive process, exposing it instead as a practice of violence: It is my belief that Islam is not a matter of private opinion. It is a society, or if you like, a civic church. It is because present-day political ideals, as they appear to be shaping themselves in India, may affect its original structures and character that I find myself interested in politics. I am opposed to nationalism as it is understood in Europe, not because, if it is allowed to develop in India, it is likely to bring less material gain to Muslims. I am opposed to it because I see in it the germs of an atheistic materialism which I look upon as the greatest danger to modern humanity.10

Such are the broad political outlines of the crisis of representation in British India. Whether or not Muhammad Iqbal engaged in any special pleading for his community, it is clear that he consistently criticized liberal representation. Unlike many other such critics he was also realist, for Iqbal accused precisely the liberal state of idealism by calling attention to the non-liberal actualities of political life in India. In his Presidential Address of 1930 to the Muslim League, he quoted Ernst Renan’s famous essay on nationalism, pointing out that nationality is not some fact of nature but a political project neither suited nor acceptable to India: ‘Man’, says Renan, ‘is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation.’ Such a formation is quite possible, though it involves the long and arduous process of practically remaking men and furnishing them with a fresh emotional equipment.... The formation of the kind of moral consciousness which constitutes the essence of a nation in Renan’s sense demands a price which the peoples of India are not prepared to pay.11

Based on such realities Iqbal went on to rethink the relations of social difference in India beyond simply calling for separate electorates, weightage, or federation. Indeed, the reality that he dealt in could only be approached by a thinking that abandoned the ephemeral

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and opportunistic calculations of party politics, which was, in his words, ‘incapable of synthesizing permanence and change in a higher political concept’ and thus ‘driven to live from hand to mouth’12 What kind of thought, then, approached the realities of Indian politics, as Iqbal saw them, to conceive of social difference outside liberal categories? Religion, precisely because it was the one phenomenon not proving amenable to the liberal imperative of nationalism in India, offered the only position from which the latter’s order of interest, representation, and contract might be countered. Therefore, much like his contemporary, Gandhi, Iqbal wanted to make the problem of religion that history had bequeathed it, productive for India’s politics. Like Gandhi, he meant to do this by inserting religion into public life in such a way as to limit the instrumental violence of liberal politics and make place in it for what he called conviction, idealism, or ethical life. One such way was to continue the colonial system of separate electorates and weightage, although it forestalled the liberal categories of nationalism in a merely negative way while giving rise to communal acrimony. Another way of approaching the problem (which, let us be clear, was one not of Muslim or even minority interests, but precisely the possibility of disinterest in a liberal order) was to work towards a federation that would allow for the expansion of religion’s ethical or idealistic qualities in public life. As far as Islam was concerned, Iqbal proposed the following solution in his Presidential Address of 1930 to the Muslim League: I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interest of India and Islam. For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power; for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilize its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.13 The political bondage of India has been and is a source of infinite misery to the whole of Asia. It has suppressed the spirit of the East and wholly deprived her of that joy of self-expression which once made her the creator of a great and glorious culture. We have a duty towards India, where we are destined to live and die. We have a duty towards Asia, especially Muslim Asia. And since 70 millions of Muslims in a single country constitute a far more valuable asset to Islam than all the countries of Muslim Asia put together, we must look at the Indian problem not only from the Muslim point of view but also from the standpoint of the Indian Muslim as such.14

Iqbal describes what this new political order might look like in his Presidential Address of 1932 to the All-India Muslim Conference,

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situating it in the historical context of nationalist agitation and religious conservatism in India: These phenomena, however, are merely premonitions of a coming storm, which is likely to sweep over the whole of India and the rest of Asia. This is the inevitable outcome of a wholly political civilization which has looked upon man as a thing to be exploited and not as a personality to be developed and enlarged by purely cultural forces. The peoples of Asia are bound to rise against the acquisitive economy which the West has developed and imposed on the nations of the East. Asia cannot comprehend modern Western capitalism with its undisciplined individualism. The faith which you represent recognises the worth of the individual, and disciplines him to give away his all to the service of God and man. Its possibilities are not yet exhausted. It can still create a new world where the social rank of man is not determined by his caste or colour, or the amount of dividend he earns, but by the kind of life he lives; where the poor tax the rich, where human society is founded not on the equality of stomachs but on the equality of spirits, where an untouchable can marry the daughter of a king, where private ownership is a trust and where capital cannot be allowed to accumulate so as to dominate the real producer of wealth. This superb idealism of your faith, however, needs emancipation from the medieval fancies of theologians and legists. Spiritually we are living in a prison house of thoughts and emotions which during the course of centuries we have woven round ourselves.15

It is important to note that Iqbals solution to India’s religious problem was intensely patriotic without being in the least nationalist, even going so far as to give India a world-historical role in the making of a new Asia. Though a Muslim solution, it was one that presupposed and indeed called for the equal, if not greater, participation of Hindus in its enterprise, for the establishment of Islam in the public life of India automatically brought into being the presence of Hinduism as well. While he did not write much on the political role of Hinduism, he made it abundantly clear that nationalism and its liberal dispensation were more dangerous for Hindus than they were for Muslims, since ‘the process of becoming a nation is a kind of travail, and in the case of Hindu India involves a complete overhauling of her social structure’.16 Further, Iqbal was adamant that religious toleration was only true of those who were themselves Hindus or Muslims. In an exchange with Jawaharlal Nehru, after approving Gibbon’s dismissal of the Enlightenment’s tolerance as an attitude either of indifference or of weakness, Iqbal writes: It is obvious that these types of tolerance have no ethical value. On the other hand they unmistakably reveal the spiritual impoverishment of the man who practices them. True toleration is begotten of intellectual breadth and spiritual expansion.

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It is the toleration of the spiritually powerful man who, while jealous of the frontiers of his own faith, can tolerate and even appreciate all forms of faith other than his own. Of this type of toleration the true Muslim alone is capable. His own faith is synthetic and for this reason he can easily find grounds of sympathy and appreciation in other faiths. Our great Indian poet, Amir Khusro, beautifully brings out the essence of this type of toleration in the story of the idol-worshipper. After giving an account of his intense attachment to his idols the poet addresses his Muslim readers as follows:

Ay ke za but tanah ba Hindu bari Ham za we amuz parastish gari

(You who condemn the Hindus idolatry Learn from him the meaning of worship) Only a true lover of God can appreciate the value of devotion even though it is directed to gods in which he himself does not believe.17

Like Gandhi, Iqbal believed that faith alone could recognize itself in others and so be taken seriously without being merely represented and thus destroyed in a liberal order of interest and contract. While we have been looking at the ways in which Iqbal thought such recognition might be possible in realms historical and political, it is in his strictly philosophical and literary work that this recognition receives perhaps its lengthiest analysis. Like Gandhi, again, for Iqbal philosophy and literature were important because they were democratic, being not only themselves part of everyday life, but also dealing each in its own way with the problems of everyday life. This was especially true of Iqbals poetry, which enjoyed enormous popularity at all levels of society even then. How, then, did Iqbal reflect upon what I have been calling the crisis of representation in the philosophy and literature of everyday life?

THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE "I do not wish to mystify anybody when I say that things in India are not what they appear to be’.18 This sentence, from Iqbals Presidential Address of 1930 to the Muslim League, is just one of many statements he made about what might be called the invisible realities of Indian politics. What could this language signify for a man who spent his whole career inveighing against the mysteries and raptures he thought had sapped India’s peoples of all sense of reality? Iqbal called invisible those everyday social relations that were not represented in the categories of liberalism and not amenable to its politics of interest and

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contractual agreement. Such relations did not simply exist in some space beyond these categories, but rather formed a kind of relationship with them. Iqbal always referred to them together, with the Quranic tag ‘the visible and the invisible’, as in the following passage from his Presidential Address of 1932 to the All-India Muslim Conference: In view of the visible and invisible points of contact between the various communities of India I do believe in the possibility of constructing a harmonious whole whose unity cannot be disturbed by the rich diversity which it must carry within its bosom. The problem of ancient Indian thought was how the one became many without sacrificing its oneness. To-day this problem has come down from its ethical heights to the grosser plane of our political life, and we have to solve it in its reversed form, i.e., how the many can become one without sacrificing its plural character.19

But what were these invisible points of contact, and how could they even be described politically without being quite betrayed in the process? The quotation above, dealing with politics as a process of philosophical reversal, provides a clue. In it, Iqbal reverses Hegel’s celebrated statement in the Phenomenology,20 where he describes the problem of ancient thought as the movement from particular to universal and that of modern thought as a reversed movement from the universal to the particular. Whereas Hegel maintained that both contemporary thought and politics had to begin with the idea of the universal (for instance the nation-state), which alone gave meaning to particularity (for instance, classes, races, and religions all regarded as interests), Iqbal insisted on deferring the moment of universality in order to foreground particulars that should not attain meaning only in its terminology. In the nation-state as such a universal, this meant relying upon social relations that were invisible because unrepresented as interests. Invisible social relations, perhaps, were important because unlike interests they attended to the singular nature of particulars, making one neither equivalent nor substitutable with another. While this discussion of invisible social relations might seem arcane, it is important to remember that for Iqbal such relations were far more real than the abstractions of liberal thought, with which they nevertheless interacted. One of the ways this occurred was in the practice of everyday life, at least that part of it that was not consumed by the language of representation, interest, and contractual agreement. In the passage above Iqbal suggests translation between the political and the philosophical, the particular and the universal, the ancient and the modern, as a metaphor by which to conceive this

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sort of practice. Relations between the visible and invisible were made thinkable only in the language of translation as a kind of conversion, one whose transformative operation precluded the substitutions and equivalences of representation. After all, translation permitted intimate relations between different languages without calling for their representation, in fact by destroying representation altogether is a sort of conversion. Translation plays a large part in Iqbal s work— from English and German poetry into Urdu and between Asian and European thought. Of particular interest is Iqbals effort to think through the relations between Hindus and Muslims, by using the metaphor of translation. In a letter written in 1921 to Reynold Nicholson, an eminent Orientalist, who translated his long narrative poem, Asrar-i Khudi (Secrets of the Self) into English, Iqbal noted that reviews of this translation had either attributed an exclusively Muslim character to his work or, on the contrary, linked it exclusively to European thought. Rejecting both these opinions, Iqbal remarked, ‘It is unfortunate that the history of Muslim thought is so little known in the West. I wish I had time to write an extensive book on the subject to show to the Western student of philosophy how philosophic thinking makes the whole world kin.21 The book Iqbal imagined writing was meant not to represent Mus­ lim thought as something external, but to make it available to the West as thought in a purely internal sense. It was this translation of difference into thought that made the whole world kin, and it did so by depriving difference of all its alien particularity—historical and ethnographic—so that it might be apprehended without the mediation of the Hegelian universal. Thought, in Iqbals sense, moves beyond an order of representation to one, let us say, of conversation since it takes the form of kinship. The universe itself was a collection of sub­ jects engaged in an infinite conversation—this being the only way in which it could have meaning for ethical life.22 Philosophy manifestly acknowledges this kinship by making historically impossible conver­ sations possible between thinkers from completely different periods and contexts, and in this way relinquishing the representation of their particularities for a translation into thought. The conversational nature of philosophical thought directly links it to the relations of everyday life. For example, Hindus and Muslims could not conduct their daily interactions by continuously representing each other in liberal fashion as Hindus and Muslims, but

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only by destabilizing, if not altogether relinquishing, representation and translating their relations into the languages of commerce, sexuality, friendship, each one presupposing the singularity rather than equivalence of the parties concerned, and therefore deferring the moment of Hegelian universality. It is the very proximity of the interlocutor in conversation that deprives him ofvisibility and prevents his being grasped, defined, and classed as an interest. This closeness makes for relations between persons that might be philosophically incomplete or unsystematic and socially prejudiced or stereotyped, since without the moment of universality they exist only partially and as fragments. Such closeness also makes for a conversation that is both philosophical and mundane and without the visibility of representation. It is this kind of conversation that characterizes Muhammad Iqbals politics of translation. Having shown the virtues of liberal representation, including even historical and ethnographic particularity, to be abstractions of and impediments to relations of social proximity, it was left for Iqbal to demonstrate the salience of what I am calling his politics of transla­ tion. This he did primarily in his poetry, which was and continues to be enormously popular in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. It is evident that Iqbal used the kind of philosophical translation discussed above in many poems where he sets up conversations among the most disparate historical characters, who are able to relate one to the other not because they all agree or have the same thoughts, but precisely because they have been denuded of the historical or ethnographic particularity that makes them prey to the universal. This translation of difference into thought by no means renders the former less his­ torical, in fact the opposite. In his epic Persian poem, the Javidnama, for instance, Iqbal has Pharaoh speak to Lord Kitchener, among other curious combinations. This not only shows in an almost virtuosic fashion how historical differences can become kin by being trans­ lated into thought, but also how the very scandal of a conversation between such characters makes the reader even more aware of their historical differences. More interesting than these conversational pieces are those poems in which Iqbal performs what I want to call a complete translation of difference, which is thus apprehended as such without representation and without any exotic particularity being left over from the process. A poem like Aftab’ (The Sun), from Iqbals first collection of Urdu verse,

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the Bang-e Dara (Call of the Caravan-bell), translates the Gayatri, a Sanskrit hymn to the sun, in such a way that without an authorial parenthesis it is impossible to identify it as one. There is no attempt at capturing what for the Urdu language would be the exotic or ancient flavour of the original by any peculiar use of syntax or borrowing from commonly understood Sanskrit vocabulary. Apart from a single poem, ‘Naya Shivalay’ (The New Temple), from his brief period of infatuation with Indian nationalism, all of Iqbal’s verse dealing with non-Muslim subjects performs a complete translation. Among these are ‘Swami Ram Tirth’, ‘Ram’, and ‘Nanak’, from Bang-e Dara. Also present in this collection are several untitled poems of a satirical nature in which the Hindu and Muslim communities are represented by a cow and a camel, respectively. The absurd conversation among these beasts has the effect of sending up representation itself, as well as its processes of substitution and equivalence, in even greater absurdity. There is still something representative in the titles given to many of these poems, which mark them out as ‘Hindu’ or ‘Sikh’ insofar as they are separated from other poems marked similarly as ‘Muslim’. After his first Urdu collection, Iqbal stops partitioning his poetry religiously and puts Hindu and Muslim terms in much greater proximity. In the Javidnama not only do figures like the Buddha and Bhartrihari appear side by side with Muslim personalities, but they interact even more invisibly. For example, in the Javidnama a narrator moves from planet to planet, seven in all, meeting various historical and mythical characters. The plan of this work is always compared both to Dante’s Divine Comedy and to the legend of Muhammad’s ascent through the seven heavens, the miraj. A more likely model might be Nizami’s Persian epic, the Haft Paykar or Seven Bodies, where a hero is similarly depicted travelling not from planet to planet so much as from medieval clime to clime, each under the influence of a particular planet. Iqbal modernizes this plot by introducing planetary travel. But this whole genealogy of influences and models changes when we consider that one of the first figures Iqbal’s narrator meets, who will be his guide to the planets, is Jahan-Dost or World-Friend, a literal translation of the Sanskrit Vishvamitra, who was the spiritual guide of Rama, hero of Ramayana. If Jahan-Dost is, as Iqbal told some of his friends, the sage Vishvamitra, then the Javidnama or Book of Javid is a kind of Ramayana, which is also a narrative of search and travel.23

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But in what does all this secrecy result? Has it moved past the criticism of political representation to become just an elaborate literary game? Not quite. What appears to us as a difficult and elaborate literary game was in fact Iqbals attempt to perform his criticism of representation by writing about Hindus and Muslims in a completely different yet comprehensible and popular way. The role of the Hindu in his writing is of some importance; it cannot be detached from that of the Muslim, to which it relates as the thought of difference as such. The thought of ancient India, particularly as manifested by figures like Krishna (in the Bhagavad Gita) and the Buddha, Kapila and Bhartrihari, Ramanuja and Shankara, weaves its way in and out of Iqbals philosophical work, even that which deals explicitly with Islam. It does so in a very specific way. On the one hand there are detailed comparisons between Hindu and Muslim thinkers, for instance in the introduction to the Asrar-i Khudi, where Iqbal praises Krishna’s philosophy of action in the Gita and lauds Ramanujas commentary on it, but is highly critical of Shankaras apparently beautiful but purely theoretical interpretation. Shankaras enormous and according to Iqbal, deleterious influence upon Hinduism, he then compares to the influence of the mystic Ibn Arabi on the world of Islam. Another example is the following footnote in his doctoral dissertation published as The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, where the thought of the Muslim thinker Jili are made inseparable from those of Hindu philosophers: This would seem very much like the idea of the phenomenal Brahma of the Vedanta. The Personal Creator or the Prajipati of the Vedanta makes the third step of the Absolute Being or the Noumenal Brahma. Al-Jili seems to admit two kinds of Brahma—with or without qualities like the Samkara and Badarayana. To him the process of creation is essentially a lowering of the Absolute Thought, which is Asat, in so far as it is absolute, and Sat, in so far as it is manifested and hence limited. Notwithstanding this Absolute Monism, he inclines to a view similar to that of Ramanuja. He seems to admit the reality of the individual soul and seems to imply, unlike Samkara, that Iswara and His worship are necessary even after the attainment of the Higher Knowledge.24

On the other hand, there are comparisons between Hindu and Muslim thought where the former is seen as being systematic and the latter fragmented. The most remarkable feature of the character of the Persian people is their love of Metaphysical speculation. Yet the inquirer who approaches the extant literature of Persia expecting to find any comprehensive systems of thought, like those of Kapila or Kant, will have to turn back disappointed.... In fact the Persian is only

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half-conscious of Metaphysics as a system of thought; his Brahman brother, on the other hand, is fully alive to the need of presenting his theory in the form of a thoroughly reasoned out system. And the result of this mental difference between the two nations is clear. In the one case we have only partially worked out systems of thought: in the other case, the awful sublimity of the searching Vedanta.25

Iqbals task is to translate Muslim thought into modern language in a systematic way, as he claims in the introduction to his dissertation: ‘I have endeavoured to trace the logical continuity of Persian thought, which I have tried to interpret in the language of modern Philosophy. This, as far as I know, has not yet been done’.26 Muslim thought is therefore modelled upon Hindu thought, although not without a certain rivalry, as in the following passage from an essay of 1900, ‘The doctrine of absolute unity as expounded by Abdul Karim al-Jilani’, published originally in the Indian Antiquary: While European scholars have investigated ancient Hindu philosophy with an unflagging enthusiasm, they have, as a rule, looked upon Muslim Philosophy as only an unprogressive repetition of Aristotle and Plato .... This comparatively indifferent attitude towards Arabic philosophy has been evident, perhaps, ever since the discovery of Sanskrit literature. We admit the superiority of the Hindu in point of philosophical acumen, yet this admission need not lead us to ignore the intellectual independence of Muslim thinkers.27

Yet Iqbal, as we might expect, was no lover of the universality of fully worked-out systems, which he frequently criticized, especially with regard to Indian thought, as being inhuman and uninspiring: ‘Semitic religion is a code of strict rules of conduct; the Indian Vedanta, on the other hand, is a cold system of thought’28 In his essay on Jilani, Iqbal tells us why the system as a form of the universal is necessarily abstract and life-denying: We know much in theory and our belief in this kind of knowledge depends on the force of the number of arguments advanced in its support. The detection of some logical flaw in our argument, or the force of the arguments in favour of the opposite view, may at once induce us to abandon our theory, but if the ego has realized’ the theory, if the theory in question has been a spiritual experience on our part, no argument, however forcible, no logical flaw, can dispose us to abandon our position.29

We come back to what Iqbal elsewhere calls the ideal, conviction, or faith; something that, while real indeed, cannot be represented in terms of the universal and the particular. In philosophical language such conviction occurs as incomplete or unsystematic thought, and in political language it occurs as a prejudice or stereotype, neither being

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dependent on any worked-out logic. Iqbal tried to explore this convic­ tion both philosophically and politically, because he thought that it alone made a purely human, as well as egalitarian, existence possible, being something both singular and common, phenomenally real, and intellectually fragmentary One of the ways he conducted his explora­ tion was by translating the terms Hindu and Muslim philosophically and observing how they entered into a conversation. In this case, the invisible because unrepresented particularity of Muslim conviction was to be made systematically visible on the universal model of Hindu philosophy, with which it in fact changed places. This immediately put the Hindu in the position of the Muslim, since it was Indian thought that then became invisible in Iqbals work. In other words, we have a classic form of Hegelian reversal, with the universal and particular, in Iqbals language the visible and the invisible, coming to mediate or rather convert each other, so that Islam becomes the secret of Hindu­ ism and Hinduism of Islam, without either being made equivalent to or a substitute for the other, both having being robbed of all ethno­ graphic particularity and rendered into metaphysical categories. Now the Hindu-Muslim dyad we have been looking at is in fact only one of a series of couplings, all illustrative of the relations between the visible and invisible, universal and particular. The most important of these pairs in Iqbals work are those formed between men and women, reason and passion, the material and the spiritual. Given the stylized nature of these dyads (derived possibly from Nietzches coupling of Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy, though the influence of Persian and Urdu poetics should not be underestimated either), it is obvious that they have no ethnographic reality because they have been translated completely into thought. Representation, therefore, has been as effectively demolished as it was in Iqbals satirical verse, since these pairs drift one into the other without being mutually substitutable. As with Hinduism and Islam, Iqbal works with everyday prejudices and stereotypes to build a relationship between the units of each pair. Women, passion, and the spiritual constitute the invisible, unrepresented, or fragmentary parts of social relations whose systematic portions are defined by men, reason, and the material world. It is because the units of these pairs are not set up as alternatives to one another but are related as a series of translations that Iqbal can move from one to the other in an apparently contradictory fashion. For instance, he famously pours scorn upon the mysteries of Sufism,30

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accusing it of a retreat from material existence, yet continues to use its concepts and language, not least those of secrecy and mystery. Iqbal similarly criticizes the vulgar representation of history in what, after Bergson, he calls serial time’31 but writes great narrative poems in which Muslim history is plotted precisely in that manner, for example the celebrated Shikwa (Complaint) and Jawab-e Shikwa (The Complaints Answer).32 The most common way in which scholars have dealt with these apparent contradictions in Iqbals thought is by positing strict divisions between its early and later periods.33 We are told that Iqbal’s early period was characterized by an infatuation with Sufism and Indian nationalism, while his later period tended to be dominated by an anti-mystical and even pan-Islamist religiosity. I believe that while there is development in Iqbal’s thinking, its continuities are far more remarkable. The strict division of Iqbal’s early and later periods is everywhere belied by his writing; even in a late work like the Javidnama we see the very Hindu, Indian, and Sufi themes that were present in earlier works like the doctoral dissertation. The appearance of contradiction in Iqbal’s thought is due to the complicated politics of translation he sets up between Hindus and Muslims, men and women, the spiritual and the material, in which no term can be reduced to another, and where each is translated into a thought well beyond the historical or ethnographic status of liberal interest, thus becoming philosophically kin to the other. Is it possible that this arcane theory of social relations, and its literary practice in Iqbal’s poetry, actually reflected in some way the realities of everyday life in British India? It might prove instructive in this respect to study the way in which popular prejudices, then as much as now, also move beyond the historical and ethnographic terms of liberal interest to operate at least in part amidst another politics of social difference: a politics in which the inevitably fragmentary nature of prejudice cannot represent either itself or its object as an interest. Perhaps it is only when such prejudices come systematically to represent both themselves and their objects as interests that they become politically instrumental, which is the same thing as saying that they become liberal. Iqbal, like his contemporary Gandhi, was concerned with social relations that seemed to exist beyond the procedural language of liberalism, which was made up of terms like interest, representation, and contract. The Mahatma dismissed history as a narrative that

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represented the interaction of interests to focus on what he considered to be the invisible but far more real relations of everyday life. While these relations, especially the religious ones, were seen equally by nationalists and imperialists as a threat to liberal politics (justifying for the latter the temporary withholding of political responsibility from Indians), neither Iqbal nor Gandhi saw religious or non-liberal social relations primarily as threats of this kind. On the contrary, such relations were for them not only inevitable, but also valuable because they prevented the complete dominance of liberal principles, which both saw as a far greater threat to humanity than these prejudices. In his own way, each tried to develop those social relations that liberalism had confined to the realm of stereotype into a kind of ethical criticism of liberal politics. Given the nature of religious relations in India, ethical criticism here could by no means be defined in anaemic European terms as a despairing or nostalgic and, in any case, politically inconsequential practice. For Iqbal and Gandhi, the very problem that religion posed for liberalism in India constituted the country’s greatest contribution to ethical and political thought.

THE SUBJECT OF REPRESENTATION In ‘Islam as a Moral and Political Ideal’, written in 1909 and published in the Hindustan Review, Muhammad Iqbal wrote: The central proposition which regulates the structure of Islam...is that there is fear in nature, and the object of Islam is to free man from fear. This view of the universe indicates also the Islamic view of the metaphysical nature of man. If fear is the force which dominates man and counteracts his ethical progress, man must be regarded as a unit of force, an energy, a will, a germ of infinite power, the gradual unfoldment of which must be the object of all human activity. The essential nature of man, then, consists in will, not intellect and understanding.... Give man a keen sense of respect for his own personality, let him move fearless and free in the immensity of God’s earth, and he will respect the personalities of others and become perfectly virtuous.34

With this quotation we return to Iqbal’s criticism of intellect and understanding, which is so frequently counterposed to what he calls faith, conviction, or idealism. Iqbal suggests that the fear resulting in unethical or violent action is fostered rather than denied by intellect or understanding. For the use of representation, whether political or epistemological ends up strengthening divisions between the human and the non-human, as well as between human beings themselves.

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Representation, in other words, depends upon the epistemological separation of subject and object together with the political separation of public and private, both divisions that it intensifies by limiting the bounds of individual and other human action to the purely instrumental. These sets of limits, argues Iqbal, rather than confining the destructive potential of human action, actually expands it by making human beings prey to fear, especially the fear of what lies outside oneself, on the other side of liberalisms various separations. Such limits and the fear that attends them can only be surmounted by removing human action from the operations of representation that characterize intellect and understanding, both of which Iqbal thought had adopted a fundamentally passive attitude towards reality seen in purely external terms. In trying to exit the language of separations and limits that characterized a liberal order of representation, epistemological and political, Iqbal had recourse to the notion of will, for which he famously used the abstract Persian noun khudi (instead of iradah, more commonly used for will, but only as a quality). Of course khudi, which had the virtue of doing away with notions of agency relying upon intellect or understanding, could not itself constitute some substance that might be represented, as Iqbal explained in an essay explicating his use of the term and distinguishing it from Nietzche’s: According to Nietzche the ‘I’ is a fiction. It is true that looked at from a purely intellectual point of view this conclusion is inevitable.... There is, however, another point of view, that is to say the point of view of inner experience. From this point of view the ‘I’ is an indubitable fact [...] which stares us in the face in spite of our intellectual analysis of it.35

By settling upon a phenomenological definition of will as some­ thing insubstantial and even fictive, Iqbal returns to his old concerns with the superiority, or at least intractability, of what he variously calls faith, conviction, or the ideal to the intellect’s order or representation. ‘Will’, as he defines it, has more in common with the popular prejudice that exists somewhere below the liberal order of representation than with the latter’s politics of interest, not to mention its epistemological concept of a subject. That Iqbal was very clear about the fictive and insubstantial nature of the will made possible by faith, conviction, or idealism is evident from the notes he collected as Stray Reflections, of which the following piece of irony is characteristic: ‘Belief is a

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great power. When I see that a proposition of mine is believed by another mind, my own conviction of its truth is thereby immensely increased’.36 Returning to his explication of khudi, it is evident that Iqbal’s notion of "will’ can be represented neither as subject nor as interest, but occurs (rather than exists) in a sort of eternal becoming: The question, therefore, which should be raised in regard to the human T is not whether it is a substance or not. This question was raised by our theologians, whose philosophical discussion achieved nothing. The question which ought to be raised in my opinion is whether this weak, created and dependent ego or T can be made to survive the shock of death and thus become a permanent element in the constitution of the universe.37 Thus metaphysically the word ‘khudi’ is used in the sense of that indescribable feeling of T which forms the basis of the uniqueness of each individual.38

It should be obvious that the universality of liberal representation, which would make all particulars equivalent and substitutable one with the other either as subjects or as interests is being undermined in the quotation above by a singular infinity. An expansively horizontal concept of universality, is being displaced by an intensively vertical notion of infinity: one with no links to representation, whether political or epistemological. Having (at least in his work) extracted Indians from a liberal order in which they existed as subjects by being represented as equivalent and substitutable particularities, Iqbal is extracting them from another form of this order, where the subject represents others in the same way as it is represented. And it is to will or khudi that this work of extraction is entrusted. Iqbal’s life work may be seen as an effort to think outside or at the edges of liberal categories like interest, contract, and representation, not necessarily to destroy their malign visibility but to take into account the invisible social relations that these categories left out. Iqbal tried to move beyond such demarcations by rethinking relations among Indians (I have focused in this essay on Hindus and Muslims) in terms that were simultaneously philosophical and popular, these terms being linked to prejudice and stereotype as intractable and finally ethical qualities. Not only did he move away from conceiving of India’s religious groups as ethnographic particularities and therefore as interests, he distanced himself from liberal ideas of the epistemological and political subject as well, by rethinking the notion of will phenomenologically, as an occurrence without substance, khudi, which he also linked to the realities of everyday life.

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Just as Iqbal transformed Hindus and Muslims into metaphysical rather than ethnographic categories, relating to one another in metaphors of translation instead of representation, similarly the Indian subject is transformed by him into a phenomenological will, which breaches all the separations and limits of a liberal order based on intellect or understanding. Indeed, this will performs the final ceremonies of translation as a social practice, its task being not to observe limits and respect differences, but to destroy their externality in translation as an act of creative absorption, for as Iqbal puts it: To permit the visible to shape the invisible to seek what is scientifically called adjustment with nature is to recognize her mastery over the spirit of man. Power comes from resisting her stimuli, and not from exposing ourselves to their action. Resistance of what is with a view to create what ought to be, is health and life. All else is decay and death. Both God and man live by perpetual creation.39

Iqbal comes back in this passage to the visible and invisible relations of social life, recommending the destruction of external reality by its translation into the inner life of the will. The close similarity this idea bears to that celebrated section in Hegel’s Phenomenology on the dialectic of master and bondsman is probably not accidental, and Iqbal discusses its implications repeatedly. He decries the masters merely ideal command over external objects through the instrumental action of his bondsman and glorifies the latter’s manipulation and ultimate destruction of all externality including that of the master. Iqbal calls this external world an idol that must be destroyed, thus making use of a Muslim stereotype to indicate the fetishistic quality that externality assumes in everyday life. As in Hegel’s dialectic, the negation of such externality then makes it a part of inner life, which is where it partakes of the will as faith, conviction, or belief, no longer having any connection to intellect and understanding as forms of representation. In this sense idol breaking as a quintessentially Muslim way of relating to the Hindu ends up lodging the idol and idolatry at the very heart of Islam (something that is true enough given the pride of place the idol enjoys in Persian and Urdu literature, often representing God Himself). It is this quality of negation, that makes Islam into what Iqbal repeatedly calls a synthetic religion, allowing Muslims to recognize the apparently alien as part of their inner selves, but as faith, conviction, or the ideal rather than as something merely represented. Iqbal’s lauding of what I have been calling negation, destruction, or translation by no means indicates his advocacy of violence. On

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the contrary he is simply pointing out that even a metaphysics of conflict or annihilation is capable of approaching difference in a far more hopeful and proximate way than the instrumental logic of representational thought. In the case of Hindus and Muslims Iqbal seems to be suggesting that precisely the invisible relations between the two, tied to popular prejudices and not to liberal categories like representation, contract, and interest, make a genuine and productive coexistence possible. In other words, the very fact that everyday relations among Hindus and Muslims cannot be entirely mediated by liberal categories but exist in the realm of prejudice and stereotype, allows them to be rendered into forms of thought and assimilated beyond the facts of ethnography. It is at this point that it becomes possible for such groups to enter into relationships not reduced to those of a liberal order of representation, making each available to the other metaphysically in a translation that retains all the fire of faith, conviction, and idealism. NOTES 1. Muhammad Iqbal, 1992, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, edited with notes by Syed Abdul Vahid, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, p. 321. 2. Ibid., p. 211. 3. Ibid., pp. 163-4. 4. For this see especially the sections on capitalism and communism in Iqbal’s Persian work of 1932, the Javidnama. 5. Muhammad Iqbal, 1986, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture, p. 156. 6. Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, pp. 373-4. 7. Ibid., p. 168. 8. Ibid., p. 162. 9. Ibid., pp. 248-9. 10. Ibid., pp. 196-7. 11. Ibid., pp. 167-8. 12. Ibid., p. 204. 13. Ibid., p. 173. 14. Ibid., p. 193. 15. Ibid., pp. 212-13. 16. Ibid., p. 190. 17. Ibid., pp. 261-2 (parenthesis mine). 18. Ibid., p. 194. 19. Ibid., p. 197. 20. G.W.F. Hegel, 1977, trans. A.V. Miller, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 19.

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21. Ibid., p. 102. 22. Iqbal, 1962, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, p. 71. 23. Ibid., p. 227. 24. Muhammad Iqbal, 1959, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia: A Contribution to the Study of Muslim Philosophy, Lahore: Bazm-e Iqbal, p. 125. 25. Ibid., ‘Introduction’, pp. ix-x. 26. Ibid., p. xi. 27. Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, p. 3. 28. Iqbal, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, p. 83. 29. Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, pp. 4-5. 30. See for instance, his early Persian poem The Secrets of the Self (Asrar-iKhudi), trans. Reynold Nicholson, New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 2000. 31. See for instance, Iqbal’s, 1990, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, pp. 35-6, 46-8, and 52-5. 32. Muhammad Iqbal, 2001, ‘Shikwah’ and ‘Jawab-e-Shikwah’ in Kulliyat-eIqbal Urdu, Delhi: Educational Publishing House, pp. 163-9 and 200-8. 33. See for instance, Annemarie Schimmel, 1963, Gabriels Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Leiden; EJ. Brill. 34. Ibid., p. 35. 35. Ibid., pp. 239-40. 36. Ibid., p. 90. 37. Ibid., p. 240. 38. Ibid., p. 243. 39. Ibid., p. 145.

THE STRANGE VIOLENCE OF SATYAGRAHA * Gandhi, Itihaas, and History Ajay Skaria

Mahatma Gandhis book-length account of his early satyagraha in South Africa is titled, in the original Gujarati, as Dakshin Afrikana Satyagrahano Itihaas (A History of the Satyagraha in South Africa). But the English version is marked by the curious disappearance of any equivalent to the word itihaas, usually translated as history: it is simply Satyagraha in South Africa. This disappearance could have been because, as Gandhi insisted on one occasion during a conversation with Romain Rolland: ‘Whatever conclusions I have reached have not been through historical studies at all. History has played the least part in my make’.1 The preface of Dakshin Afrikana Satyagrahano Itihaas2 indicates this works divergence from history in the conventional sense of the word. That is the beauty of satyagraha. It comes to us; there is no need to go searching for it.... such a dharmayudh [religious battle; ‘righteous struggle’] comes unsought, and a religious person is ever prepared for it. A struggle that has to be planned beforehand is not a righteous struggle. The righteous struggle is planned and conducted by God himself/itself. That struggle can be waged only in the name of God, and it is only when the very foundations of the satyagrahi become unstable, when the satyagrahi feels weak and finds utter darkness on all sides, that God comes to the rescue.3

* For their extensive comments on and questions about an earlier version of this paper, I would like to thank Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Disch, Vinay Gidwani, David Hardiman, Qadri Ismail, Uday Mehta, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Babu Suthar. This essay was substantially completed by 2005.1 have resisted the temptation to revise it, since that would have resulted in quite a different paper.

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Setting aside for later consideration some of the other questions that this passage raises, note that in this itihaas of satyagraha there is no contextualization and territorialization of satyagraha within secular historical processes. To the extent that this passage refers satyagraha to God, and to a religious battle or righteous struggle, it produces a time and sensibility inconsonant with history as conventionally understood. This circumspection about history was accompanied by a similar reticence to affirm another category—autobiography. In the preface of Satyana Prayogo Athava Atmakatha, Gandhi writes that a friend asked him: ‘Why are you writing an autobiography? This is a western practice. I know of no one in the East who has written one.... Don’t you think it would be better to be cautious and not yet write anything like an autobiography.. .?’4 Gandhi addresses the question: But why would I wish to write an autobiography? Using the excuse of an autobiography, I want to tell the story of my numerous experiments [prayogo] with truth [satya]. As my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that this story will become like an account of life. But if only my experiments emerge from every page of it, then I would consider the story to be innocent [of being an autobiography?].5

Here, atmakatha or autobiography is only an excuse, or as in the official English translation, a pretext’: the constitution of his writing by experiments with satya makes it something else. As these formulations suggest, it is by no means the case that itihaas and atmakatha are unique genres, distinctively Indian ways of narrating which Gandhi finds more appropriate because they are more attuned to the genius of Indian culture. Nor is it just that there is a multiplicity of ways available of thinking times and lives, and that Gandhi has chosen ones distinct from history and autobiography. It is rather that satyagraha, and atmakatha to the extent that his life was one of satyagraha, are so heterogeneous to history and autobiography as to be invisible to and through these categories. Thus the formulation in chapter 17 of Hind Swaraj. There the Reader asks: ‘This satyagraha or soul-force of which you talk—is there any historical evidence of it?’6 The Editor replies: You ask for historical evidence. So we have to know what we call itihaas. The meaning of the word itihaas is ‘thus it happened’. If we work with that meaning, then [I can] give you copious evidence of satyagraha. If we interpret itihaas by the meaning of the English word, which concerns the doings of emperors, then there can be no evidence of satyagraha. How can you expect to find silver ore in a tin

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mine? In ‘history’ [English word in original Gujarati text] we find only the stories of the noise of the world.7

Throughout the rest of the chapter, the word itihaas is never used by the Editor, only the English word ‘history’ in quotes. The critique, clearly, is of history, not of itihaas (though that distinction between history and itihaas is attenuated in the English translation). If we adhere to the commonsensical understanding of the word ‘happening’, then this simply does not make sense. By this understanding, ‘history’ is nothing if not the taking note of happenings. Even if ‘history’ in Gandhi’s time was concerned with only those happenings that concerned emperors and wars, surely the emergence of social history, and its concern with even the lowest levels of everyday life, indicates that history is now concerned with every happening? But the absence of satyagraha in history is not this commonsensical matter of levels. The focus in this argument is on happening: if history cannot take note of satyagraha, this is because satyagraha is a happening, and ‘history’, can only take note of noise (kolhaal) and not of happening. These arguments are further elaborated later in chapter 17 of Hind Swaraj: Thousands, even lakhs, live their lives bound to love [premvash]. The quarrels of crores of families are accommodated in the thought of love. Many peoples have lived in togetherness [samp-thi, ‘in peace’], and ‘history’ [English word in original] does not take note of this, ‘history’ [English word in original] cannot even take note of this. When the course of this compassion, love and truth [daya, prem, satya] is blocked, when there is an interruption in it, only then does it get notice in the chronicles. Two brothers in a family fight. They use satyagraha against each other. They again fall in together. Who takes note of this? But if the hostility between the two brothers increases through the instigation of lawyers, or for some other reason, and they resort to weapons or courts (courts are a form of weaponry, of brute force), their names would appear in the press, and all and sundry [aadoshi-paadoshi] would know of it, and in time it would be noted in the chronicles. As it is for families, communities and associations, so it is for peoples. There is no reason to believe that there is one law for families, and another for peoples. History [English word in original] is a record of incidents that are against our proper orientation [aswabhavik], Satyagraha is swabhavik, so it cannot even be noted.8

Taking cues from these formulations, I would like to explore two questions in this chapter. The first, more preliminary, one: what is the history and autobiography that Gandhi describes as not able to take note of happening, as noting only as ‘noise’, as being against our proper

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orientation? I would like to suggest that initiated here is a critique of the modern agent, the figure who would be emperor of his everyday life. He attacks the life that he identifies with modern civilization — what Charles Taylor describes as the ‘human life concerned with production and reproduction, that is, labour, the making of the things needed for life, and our life as sexual beings, including marriage and the family.’9 Gandhi insists that the life which is produced and sustained by modern civilization is not proper to the human. This life does not break enough with the animal; indeed, it is found and founded on the modern concept of animality. In this life, the animal is the figure who the human always is and yet transcends. And since the line between the animal and the human always passes through the human, this distinction between the animal and the human always justifies colonialism, imperialism, and domination, with howsoever anguished a conscience these are practised. The questioning of the category life in ‘modern civilization is perhaps why Gandhi does not attempt separate critiques of autobiography and history (which for him are primarily genres which narrate this life). Second, and more pressingly, this essay will explore: what ‘is itihaas (if indeed it ‘is’)? I suggest that itihaas involves nothing less than ask­ ing the question of haas—the question of what ‘is/was’. Symptomatic of this question is the insistence that the ‘thus it happened’ of itihaas cannot be part of history. To insist on itihaas is to displace profession­ al history—which treats the happening of events as transparent and seeks only to determine the context of this happening—by insisting on a prior question: what is ‘to happen, ‘to be’? In this insistent ques­ tioning, itihaas reveals an other everyday life—one heterogeneous to the history’s everyday life, one that is the happening of satyagraha. This happening occurs, note, in a different place and time from the noise of history. Thus, satyagraha and itihaas involve an everyday life heterogeneous to the ordinary life of ‘modern civilization. I would like to approach the Gandhian thought of the happening of itihaas through attentiveness to two sets of terms that recur in Gandhi’s discussions of it—satya and swabhav. Gandhi describes the other everyday life of itihaas as swabhavik and history as aswabhavik. This word swabhavik he translates as ‘natural’. But swa is also a cognate of the family of words involving se, ‘proper’, bwnmost’ Bhav. orientation. Swabhavik: ‘of one’s proper (or ownmost) orientation. Swabhavik is not ‘natural’ in a commonsensical English sense of the

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word: involved in it is nothing less than the question of the proper orientation. Gandhi ventures, through the term swabhavik, another thinking of the distinction between the animal and the human. This thinking, insists on an abyssal gulf between the human and the animal, and on the basis of this gulf also insists on a unilateral and immeasurable obligation to the animal, and more broadly to the stranger. The swabhav of the human is to be constituted in a relation of towardness towards the strange. The second word is satya. This is translated quite inadequately (perhaps with an unavoidable inadequacy—Gandhi was also a victim of the very colonial epistemic violence that he identified and criticized) and conventionally by Gandhi as ‘truth’. It is also a component of the word satyagraha, a word coined during the South African struggles that Gandhi led, and usually etymologically rendered (resigning ourselves for now to an inadequate translation) as the desire (agraha) for satya or truth. Satya is not representational truth, nor even a substantive truth: inseparable as it is from the thought of sat or being, satya is that which gives the very possibility of truth and untruth. As such, to desire satya intimates a politics beyond the measure intimated in representational or empiricist understandings of truth. It is precisely in this that the radicalism of itihaas and satyagraha lies. Symptomatic of this is the insistence on practising resistance—the most intense and essential moment of politics—through satyagraha. Through satyagraha, there is initiated a politics that, never claiming agency, essentially thinks resistance. In the encounter of agents—an encounter necessarily constituted by measure—there is always in principle the possibility of perfect justice, of the socius as a totality without remainder, not haunted by the spectre of the margin. Resistance remains empirically rather than constitutively political: if it is occasioned by a particular grievance, then resistance will go away once this grievance is dealt with by the proper measure of justice. In the thinking of resistance through the subject, the order of domination is reinscribed. Satyagraha, by contrast, is premised on the acknowledgement of a constitutively political resistance—a resistance that, because it emerges in the encounter of incommensurables, stubbornly persists even after the justice of measure. As such a resistance, satyagraha attempts the practice of a politics that remains outside domination. What is this politics outside domination? In what sense is it ‘non-violent? What is

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its relation with the liberal concept of non-violence?—these are some of the questions broached here. REPRESENTING HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSAL AND THE SPECIFIC

‘... But why would I wish to write an autobiography?’10 Here, an exclamation mark poses as a question. Gandhi treats it as self-evident that he would not wish to write an autobiography (or, we might add, history). The heterogeneity between these practices and satyagraha seems so strong to him as to not require any elaboration, as to peremptorily foreclose these practices as options. But what was the history and autobiography that he was rejecting? To approach this question, let us take our first cues from Gandhis interlocutor’s remarks in the English translation of the Atmakatha: T know of nobody in the East having written one [an autobiography], except amongst those who have come under Western influence’.11 Nobody is named here. But the reference could have been to works such as what is conventionally regarded as the first autobiography in Gujarati—Narmadshankar Lalshankar’s well-known Mari Hakikat (My Truth/Events).12 It begins: That somebody like me should himself write his hakikat and, what is more, publish it himself in his own lifetime—this will seem indiscreet to people: I am not a pundit, not a warrior, not a religious leader, not a philanthropist, etc. From my writings many people feel that I talk a lot about myself, and this feeling is correct, because when they do not understand the true core of my writings, when they do not take into account my night-and-day work, and they ridicule and insult me, then I get very irked...J3

By the early twentieth century, there was a well-established tradition (put in place partly by the later Narmad) of understanding the early Narmad as a liberal who was profoundly influenced by western literary traditions and practised a modernist individualism. For the purposes of the argument, we do not need to concern ourselves with the validity of such an understanding. Suffice is to say that to the extent that Narmad as this sort of subject must retain his calculable permanence, the narrative cannot allow for the event as the ‘happening that must surprise both the freedom and the will of every subject’, that must rend this subject.14 The event it allows for can only be subordinate to the subject Narmad, and refer to its experience—as for instance the most urgent reason for the hakikat, the ire that he feels at those who ridicule and insult him. The everyday life of Narmad as such a figure

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consists in traversing and taking the measure of this subordinate realm of events. Perhaps thinking in this vein of the autobiography, Gandhi s interlocutor protests: the autobiography is a western practice. Such protests were not uncommon by the early twentieth century. But they usually identified the western nature of autobiographical practice with individualism rather than with agency, and went on to affirm a more collective agent. Symptomatic of this move is the autobiography attempted by Indulal Yagnik, an early follower of Gandhi who later became a critic, but nevertheless continued to occasionally describe himself as Gandhian. When, some decades after Gandhis atmakatha, Yagnik wrote the preface to his own Atmakatha, he too insisted that he was not writing an atmakatha. As a shy person, he had no desire to write about himself. ‘The thought of writing not of my individual life but of the lifeworld of the people of Gujarat increasingly became an inspiration...’ Yagniks Atmakatha, thus, is not about the individual subject Yagnik; as it unfolds, it is about the common names Gujarat, Bharat, and khedut or peasant.15 Two inseparable registers of such common names, and indeed of agency, are particularly relevant for our purposes—their specificity, and their activity. In presenting common names, the Atmakatha presumes a socius—an entity marked by specificity. The search for specificity, it has sometimes been claimed, is constitutive of the historical discipline: History is interested in individualized events ... but it is not interested in their individuality; it seeks to understand them—that is, to find among them a kind of generality or, more precisely, of specificity ... (this is why ‘specific’ means both ‘general’ and ‘particular’). Such is the seriousness of history: ... it is not a vast collection of biographies ... it does not deal in individuals but in what is specific about them for the good reason that, as we shall see, there is nothing to say of individual singularity.16

Put differently, the criterion of historicity is the specific. In any strict accounting, it is this socius (and not the past) that is the object of history in our modern sense. Central to this thinking of specificity is measure. Only measure— exemplified in the measure of a homogenous time—can distinguish between individual singularity and generality and produce a context in which to determine the specificity of events. In this very introduction of measure, what is also made impossible is the happening as the singularity that is immeasurable. In the discourse of specificity,

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an event can only be that which departs from a measure, and is yet returned to that measure. An event that does not return, that exceeds the measure—of this all that can be said is that there is ‘nothing to say’ Could it be such a thinking through the socius that produces Yagnik’s insinuation in the Atmakatha that what he is writing is not so much an autobiography as a history? By his own account, he adopts a historical perspective because he adheres to historical protocols of verification. But there is a more serious sense, suggested by Veyne, in which Yagnik’s Atmakatha is historical (rather than only a source for the writing of history): Yagnik describes his life primarily to the extent that he is part of a socius. In the first volume, for instance, many of the early chapters are about persons and institutions in the town of Nadiad (where he was born) that were important in the making of modern Gujarati identity. Yagnik’s birth and youth, in this account, is not that of a proper name; it is that of a socius called Gujarat. By a similar logic, no account of his marriage was provided in volume one. Faced with charges after its publication that he had suppressed unpalatable facts, Yagnik provided an account of the marriage in a separate chapter in the second volume.17 Defending his decision to not provide an account in the earlier volume, Yagnik insisted that he did not see its relevance to readers. At issue here is the question of the measure of relevance for his Atmakatha. By this measure, even the individual subject is not in itself relevant (‘there is nothing to say of individual singularity’); what matters is its ability to become the particular—that is, to establish a relation with the general, and produce the specificity of the socius. The account provided of his marriage is also framed by the second register—the activity which is necessary to claim the status of an agent. Betrothed when his wife was three and he thirteen, he was later enthused by the idea of independence for women. ‘I would rejoice in seeing the new women of Bombay, practicing equality with men both inside and outside the home, mixing in a carefree way at meetings’. But fearing the shock that his aged mother would receive if he broke off the betrothal, he reconciled himself to the marriage: ‘why then could I not ... have a traditional [roodhigat] marriage and reform an already given situation?’ But sudhaar (reform) of his wife into a more active figure proved more difficult than Yagnik had anticipated. He had hoped that by mixing with more independent women, his wife, Kumud, would read

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and ‘become intelligent and eloquent’ But she would not fly at all on her own wings. That she would cling to me with her strong affection for her entire life—this I found intolerable’ She ‘would not understand anything of my work, could not take any interest in it’ As relations became strained, she attempted suicide. Her relatives took her back to Nadiad; a little while later, Yagnik wrote a letter to Kumud breaking off relations with her. Kumud began a ‘new chapter’ in her life. ‘By now she had realized that I ... would only give respect to a wife who ... [was] an equal and a helper’. She began to acquire new skills in order to become ‘selfreliant’ [swashraya]—learning English, Sanskrit, music, typing (‘in order to be helpful in my correspondence’), eventually taking up a job as a teacher in Nadiad. Despite her several letters and repeated efforts, Yagnik refused to meet her. In 1929, she died of tuberculosis. By the criteria of nationalist sudhaar, Kumud’s initial failure lies in her passivity and inertia. She fails to constitute herself as a figure capable of activity—as an intelligent and eloquent woman, as somebody who would fly on her own. She fails also to establish a relationship with Gujarat, kisan, or Bharat, to depart from or return to these common names. And it is on the register of the active that nationalist sudhaar’s distinctive violence against Kumud takes place: Yagnik’s effort is to make Kumud a rights-bearing subject—just like the socius of the new women of Bombay. It is because she cannot become an agent that Yagnik had to abandon Kumud. AN EMPIRICIST HUMANITY Apart from Gandhi, there was a tradition of uneasiness about the profound violence involved in producing the subject on the registers of specificity and activity. This uneasiness is evident in Yagnik’s own writings. By the time he writes the second volume of the Atmakatha, Yagnik is remorseful about his violence towards Kumud, and describes it as his ‘hidden sin, ‘serious crime’, and ‘terrible mistake’. Let us not get sidetracked by the question of whether Yagnik meant this. More pressing is another question: what is the perspective from which Yagnik criticizes the violence of sudhaar? Unable to affirm roodhi or ‘tradition (retaining—though only for the limited purpose of reprising Yagnik’s arguments—the commonsensical understanding of that word as a hermeneutic that, staying with the past, resists the modern), which he continued to be critical

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of, Yagnik locates his criticisms in manavta, humanity. He was bound to her after the marriage by the knot of humanity. Yagnik developed the category manavta through an emphasis on irreducibility, which was used by him to reject invocations of manavta derived from the common name. ‘I had not done an experimental marriage, nor had I begun an experimental life together. But in thinking, deep down in my mind, of my relation with Kumud as an experiment, I practiced a wrongful conduct’. Experiment: the paradigmatic practice that produces conceptual knowledge. An experiment engages with the empirical only to abstract from it, to draw out its specificity rather than treat the empirical as irreducible. In its own terms, an experiment is not a violence: it merely teases out the proper form of the empirical. To characterize experimental practice as violent is to deny these terms, to insist that the object, which the experiment addresses, is irreducible, that it cannot therefore be abstracted from. Yagnik’s marriage with Kumud is of this order: an irreducible event. As such an irreducibility, it resists the order of the specific and the socius: it produces another every­ day life. To abstract from this irreducibility is the sin which Yagnik has committed. On the next page, Yagnik reflects again on how this violence of abstraction had run amok: I had made a soul-less idol of stone out of progressive thought on married life.... My worship of this thought, rather than following my humanism, became devoid of humanity and took a soul-less form. Obedient to this form, I became a traitor to humanity and Kumud.

An abstract concept has become stone. As a stony, irreducible concept, it liquidates the solidity and irreducibility of that which is rightfully irreducible: humanity. Retrospectively, Yagnik feels that he should have opposed this misplaced irreducibility by following the command of the truly irreducible, humanity. ‘From that time [of the marriage], I was forever bound to her by the knot of humanity. By breaking that, I committed a serious sin. There is a name for this attempt to think opposition to the concept through the irreducible. Derridas remarks of Levinas’ thought (when it thinks the Other through irreducibility) are especially salient: the true name of this renunciation of the concept... is empiricism. For the latter, at bottom, has ever committed but one fault: the fault of presenting itself as a

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philosophy. And the profundity of the empiricist intention must be recognized behind the naivete of certain of its historical expressions. It is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference. Empiricism is its philosophical name, its metaphysical pretention or modesty.18

As the dream of a purely heterological thought, empiricism proceeds by insisting on the heterogeneity of the concrete to the generality of the concept. Such empiricism has constantly insisted on the Other— that which resists the socius, and does not return to it, that experience which cannot be subordinated to the subject and thus threatens it. Yet, Yagniks empiricist insistence on irreducibility (what for Veyne would be ‘individual singularity), and on opposition to the concept, remains anomalous. To begin with, there is the very positioning of the chapter—it occurs out of chronological order, as the very last chapter in the second volume. Furthermore, the chapter remains isolated in its insistence on irreducibility—the rest of the Atmakatha, both before and after the chapter, adheres by the logic of the socius, which in its concern with specificity belongs to the order of the concept. Perhaps this is not a mere failure on Yagniks part. It is symptomatic also of the limits of thinking irreducibility in this manner—through the empirical. Yagniks insistence on irreducibility cannot address two questions: it does not think of how an irreducibility would encounter the concept and, consequently, of how two irreducibilities might encounter each other without the mediation of the concept. These two questions constantly undo any affirmation of the irreducible. Though rejected in this chapter of the Atmakatha, the concept of the socius remains constitutive of Yagniks Atmakatha, as of empiricism itself. THE LIFE OF MODERN MEDICINE ‘... But why would I wish to write an autobiography?’ Encountering Gandhis treatment of this self-evident matter, we have, through attentiveness to Narmad and Yagnik, teased out presumptions about the specificity and activity of history and autobiography, and have also encountered Yagniks argument about the violence of these practices. This is not Gandhis argument, even if he never broke from it systematically. For the itihaas that he affirmed was not an empirical concreteness that was liquidated by specificity and activity. It was rather another everyday—that of a world invisible to (and also made invisible by’), and which could not be apprehended by history and autobiography.

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Before we attend to this other everyday (which is the happening of satyagraha), we need to ask: why was it self-evident to Gandhi that he would not write an autobiography or history? It would be hasty to think of this as a lacuna or lapse, as a failure by Gandhi to think his argument about history. If he did not develop separate arguments about history and autobiography, if he could treat his position on these practices as self-evident, this was because he had already developed a critical argument about the category that made possible the subject of history and autobiography—life. This argument is developed most systematically in the course of his consideration of modern civilization (his translation of the words aadhunik sudhaar or aajkalnu sudhaar). Unlike Yagniks Atmakatha, for which the critique of reformism or sudhaar that attempted to modernize Gujarati society comes at a moment of retrospective remorse, Hind Swaraj is organized as a critique of modern civilization, and as an attempt to provide an alternative to it.19 In chapter 6, the Editor describes object of life’ (purusharth) of modern civilization as the care and comfort of the body’.20 Four chapters later he considers various dimensions of aadhunik sudhaar: its annihilation of space and time’ (exemplified, for him, by the railways), its law (exemplified in Pax Britannica and the rule of law), its distinctive sociality (exemplified in Hindu-Muslim relations), and its life (exemplified in modern medicine). The most relevant of these for our purposes is the one on medicine—chapter 12, two pages in Gujarati. It argues that the English ‘have certainly effectively used medical knowledge to consolidate their hold over us’.21 Making first the point that the British used their influence with the Mughal emperor to further their hold in the subcontinent, it quickly moves beyond this external relation between medicine and power, and argues The [modern] doctor’s task is only to take care of the body. Vali, [‘properly speaking’], it is not even care of the body. Their task is rid the body of its diseases. How do diseases occur? Through our own negligence. I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me pills, I am cured, I overeat again, and again take pills. What has happened here is this. If I had not taken the pills, I would have suffered the punishment of indigestion, and I would not have eaten beyond my limits again. The doctor came in between and he helped me eat beyond my limits. Through this my body received relief, but my mind became weakened [maaru man nabdu thayu]. Consequently, my condition will be such that I cannot keep the slightest restraint over the man [‘mind’]’ ... Had the doctor not intervened, nature would have done its own work, my mind would have become firm, and eventually I would have been free of poison and content.22

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The pervasiveness of Cartesian habits, combined with the peculiarities of Gandhis English translation (which draws on a vocabulary conventionally associated with communitarianism and organicism) usually prejudice our understanding of this argument. On a less than meticulous reading, we might think that the argument draws on the mind-body distinction only to insist on the need to transcend it. The chapter argues that the failure of modern medicine lies in its lack of holism, in focusing on the body to the exclusion and detriment of the mind. And properly speaking’, modern medicine does not treat the body as a whole, but only systems within the body. Furthermore, the chapter seems to call for a holistic response that unites the unfortunately sundered mind and body. But, if this is the critique, then Gandhis extreme hostility to medicine is simply misplaced, even embarrassing. When he says in his English translation that ‘hospitals are institutions for propagating sin, we are compelled by the logic of this critique to discreetly dissociate ourselves from such excessive remarks. Surely, we might then remark, this is simply ill-considered and unjust; all illnesses are not caused by indulgence or negligence; in some situations modern medicine does some good, saves some lives? These are questions that dogged Gandhi, and that critics repeatedly raised. He had to respond to them often, and to some extent Hind Swaraj itself already answers these questions. It will be necessary one day to attend to his response to these questions. Before doing so, we need to produce his argument about modern medicine more carefully. I would like to suggest that rather than being a holistic critique of modern medicine, the stakes of the Gandhian critique lie rather in identifying the emergence of this holism, in specifying its inseparability from modern medicine. Gandhi found it difficult to develop the vocabulary to think systematically through the revolutionary moves he had made, and often had to draw on the very language out of which he already worked himself. His argument has to parsed out carefully. To begin with: here is an T that is neither body nor mind, and that both restrains and can be undone by them. This I—who is this I, whose concept Gandhi does not explicitly name? Here the T names nothing less than that which gives the possibility of I-ness—the atman?3 Towards the end of Hind Swaraj, in chapter 20, in response to a question from his interlocutor about what Indians should do to have swaraj (‘home rule’) he remarks: ‘If a doctor, he will give up medicine, and understand that rather than mending bodies,

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he should mend the atman’24 Without getting into an extensive consideration of the philosophical traditions around the atman, we might note the significant role that it plays in his politics. In Hind Swaraj, one chapter is titled darugodo (ammunition: Gandhis English title is ‘Brute Force’) and questions violence as a means of achieving swaraj. The next chapter titled ‘Satyagraha-Atmabal’, advocates soul force or satyagraha (in the English, ‘more popularly, but less accurately, passive resistance’; ‘passive resistance’ is the title of the chapter in the English version) as the only means of achieving true swaraj. Gandhi translates the word atman, in keeping with conventional practices, as ‘soul’. But it is by no means a soul, and even less is it a self in the sense of subject—the auto of autobiography or atmakatha. Rather the atman (a cognate of ‘atmos’, which survives in words such as atmosphere) is that which gives the originary possibility of selving. He often posits the atman as that which governs the mind (man) and the body (shareer, at places also deha). Where such governance—what he sometimes describes as self-discipline—-is attenuated, the atman itself is attenuated. Thus, the three sentences: ‘my mind became weakened’, consequently T cannot keep the slightest control over my mind’, and had I not taken medicine ‘my mind would have become firm’. When we read these carefully, an apparent paradox becomes evident: the weakened mind is that over which ‘I’ or the atman can keep no control, which will overcome the atman, and the firm mind would heed the T’ or be mindful of the atman. The weakened mind is thus not the same mind become weaker: it is rather the emergence of another mind, which can set itself in opposition to and even overcome the atman, and which in its ability to sustain this oppositional relation to the atman is stronger than the firm mind. This leads to two questions. First: what is the life that is produced by the failure of restraint by the atman over the mind, or by the emergence of this ‘weakened mind’ that is not heedful of the atman and can oppose the atman? The point of the Gandhian critique of modern medicine is that this is an extremely productive failure (therefore, a failure only in Gandhian terms), that leads to the emergence of a new kind of life, one characterized by an inclusion that operates through the location of mind within body. The question of animality—who has a mind? and how much of a mind?—is the spectre that long conditioned the exclusions of western philosophy. In his Politics, Aristotle begins with the distinction between voice and speech. Animals have voice, man

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has speech; the voice can express only pleasure and pain, while speech considers good and evil. It turns out as we go on with the Politics that the question of who has speech remains indeterminate. Maybe the demos has only voice?—this is the basis of its criticism of democracy. The spectre of the voice and the resultant contingency of speech produces a exclusionary transcendence where the mind transcends the body, which is excluded as irrelevant to politics. In the emergence of life in the new sense of inclusionary transcendence that Gandhi identifies, modern medicine is a especially important site. With no restraint over it, the man becomes part of the body of modern medicine, producing its true object—mind in the body, or more precisely, the body characterized by the location of the mind within it. In this sense, the primacy that Hind Swaraj accords to the body is not a primacy in relation to the man. Where it is written only the body’, we read: only that body produced by the location within it of the mind’. Modern medicine could produce its isolates by separating mind and body, and its holism by uniting them. But isolates and whole—all three are, within the terms of the Gandhian critique understood thoughtfully, equally the objects of modern medicine. For the Editor, a most dramatic symptom of the emergence of this new body is the constitutive (rather than merely episodic or separable) role of vivisection in medicine. As a practice, vivisection is revealing of the curious duality of modern medicine. It is concerned solely with animals because of their common biological life with humans—this was what made experiments on animals relevant for the human body. Yet, in making animals into objects that can be experimented on in order to develop medicines that treat the human body, it also makes clear the particular nature of that common biological life: a life transcended by the human as a category. At work here is a logic of inclusionary transcendence rather than exclusionary transcendence, where the body is not simply excluded but is both retained and transcended by the location of the mind within it. The weakening of the mind, the loss of restraint over it, is what leads to life in the modern sense, where the mind is now in the body. As such, life in the new sense both transcends common biological life and affirms it by locating the mind within it rather than above it. Such arguments make possible a concluding sentence that other­ wise seems disconnected and excessive: ‘To study English or European medicine is only to tighten the bonds of our slavery [...]’.25 How does

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modern medicine get connected with colonialism in so fundamental a manner? Gandhi does not elaborate on this. But it would perhaps be faithful to Gandhis thought, especially given the contrast we encountered elsewhere in Hind Swaraj between two concepts of everyday life, to suggest that, from the perspective of this text, life in the new sense is inseparable from and perhaps productive of the everyday life of modern civilization. Not only does this life make possible every modern thinking of autobiography and history; with it, modern politics itself is transformed. The difference (which Schmitt notes, though without recognizing its connection with a new thinking of everyday life) between classical democracy’s concern with discussion (a practice which affirms mind over body and refuses the possibility of ordinary life) and modern democracy’s concern with negotiation (a practice where ordinary or everyday life can be played out as interest) is exemplary of this transformation.26 And this life founded on inclusionary transcendence is, by the terms of the argument of Hind Swaraj, inescapably colonial, even more systematically than the life founded on exclusionary transcendence. Once the modern concept of animality—of the inclusionary transcendence involved in a shared biological life, where this life is both included and rendered subordinate—is allowed a legitimate domain, then it can no longer be limited to animals’. To accept modern civilization’s’ category of life was to accept the rightfulness of colonialism in principle; all that could then be debated was whether this or that colony could rightfully be a colony, whether it was still animal or had become human enough to not be a colony. A similar critique of liberalism organizes, as Faisal Devji’s fascinating essay on Iqbal in this volume powerfully suggests, several other postcolonial thinkers too. The category of interest was always marked by reason—it was rational interest which liberal thought privileged. In this association of reason and interest, the distinction between the animal and the human always insinuated itself. Gandhi and Iqbal, like many other postcolonial thinkers, could scarcely affirm the life constituted by such interest, for colonialism was always just by its criteria. Questioning this liberal life, Gandhi and Iqbal proceeded to conceptualize another life. While their conceptualizations diverged in significant ways, for both this other life was invisible to liberalism, and yet undid liberalism.

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KINSHIP WITH THE STRANGE

The second question: what is the life that Gandhi affirms in opposition to this modern life? An approach to this question can be initiated through a more careful consideration of his formulation of the swabhavik and aswabhavik in chapter 17 of Hind Swaraj, which was pointed to earlier: As it is for families, communities and associations, so it is for peoples. There is no reason to believe that there is one law for families, and another for peoples. History [English word in original Gujarati] is a record of incidents which are against our ownmost orientation [aswabhavik]. Satyagraha is of our ownmost orientation [swabhavik], so it cannot even be noted.27

By insisting on continuity between peoples and families and communities and associations, what is initiated is a fundamental questioning of the social constituted by specificity and agency. The emergence of population as a category, we have learned from Foucault, involved a repositioning of the idea of the family. Population now had its own regularities, ones that could be revealed by statistics, ones that organized communities and families. And the family itself was now considered an element internal to the population; apart from this, the family could only be the realm of the particular. To insist, in opposition to this repositioning, on continuity between family or community and peoples: what does this entail? If we quickly accept Gandhis own translation of the term swabhavik as natural’, it would easy to think of this insistence as privileging blood before sociality, the immediate over the mediate, or the private over the public sphere. A careful consideration of the term suggests other possibilities. While there is no further discussion of swabhav or swabhavik in Hind Swaraj Gandhi did revisit these terms in two essays written over sixteen years later. One of these was in Gujarati titled ‘Swabhavik etle kevu (with the translated caption, ‘What is natural’), published in Navjivan, originally started by Yagnik and taken over by Gandhi. When that essay was published in an English translation in Young India, it occasioned a response by a reader that led to a second essay, this time possibly first written in English. The first essay begins with a questioning of the tendency to understand the ‘natural’ in terms that we might describe, following Kant, as anthropological:

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Nowadays the word swabhavik is much misused. One [person] writes: ‘just as drinking and eating is swabhavik to humans, so too is anger’ Another writes: ‘... just as ahimsa [‘non-violence’] is a dharma [duty], would not himsa [violence] too be a dharma? ’... If we place humans in the same row as animals [pashu], then many things which we consider swabhavik can be proven to be swabhavik. But if we accept that there is a difference of type between these two animals [praani], then what is swabhavik for the animal [pashu] cannot be said to be swabhavik for the human. The human is an animal oriented towards ascension [udhvargitpraani]. In him there is considerable discrimination. He has the ability to discriminate between good and bad. He worships God through reason, tries to know him, and considers this knowledge to be the object of life [purusharth]. Whereas if it said that an animal [pashu] worships God, then it does so without wishing to, not from its own wish. We cannot even imagine the wish to worship with regard to animals [pashu]. Man in contrast can of his own wish worship even Satan [shaitan]. The swabhav of the human has to be, and is, to know God.28

In the second essay, responding to a letter in Young India from a doctor who had questioned Gandhi’s concept of the natural’ here, Gandhi returned to some of these issues. He reproduced a condensed version of the letter, remarking that while the confidence with which it is written takes ones breath away’, its view nevertheless represents a large number of educated men. The doctor defended the anthropological understanding of the natural by rooting it in evolution and science, and argued (going by Gandhi’s condensed version): Man is animal [pashu] first and human afterwards. Just think of the ancestor of the Australian savage [jangli] and his times when there was no art, no literature, no science ... Our ethical code is a thin veneer and the passions of the brute are still lurking within us. It is not natural [swabhavik] to man to find and know God, much less to worship him. In an individual naturally brought up, educated in an unbiased and non-theological atmosphere, the idea of worshipping God will be quite unnatural.... God-worship is an acquired habit. The question of virtue and vice has nothing to do with God. Morality arises from the necessities of group life, and it has its sanctions in the social needs of man rather than in a capricious divine will. Man is not made in the image of God; it is God who is made in the image of man. Your moral code would not be debased if you regarded the ape as your remote cousin.... Ahimsa is the creed of civilization, but is not man’s nature.29

Note the distinctive way in which the doctor’s critique is formulated. There is no rejection of ahimsa itself; rather, as with the pervasive liberal tradition of thinking universal peace, ahimsa is affirmed. But it is situated not in swabhav or nature but in civilization as an

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evolutionary category. In the doctors formulation—which invokes the socius and draws on the very life that Gandhi criticized in Hind Swaraj—the category ‘man is constituted by that same process of transcendental inclusion that produces art’, ‘literature’, and ‘science’ as categories. Here, man is natural in the sense that he shares a common base with the natural world, and even greater commonality with advanced sections of it such as apes. At the same time, another natural transcendence—where man has a history, and is characterized by the faculty of reason—also placed him above the natural world. It was this transcendence—produced by the interplay of the natural and the historical—that constituted the modern brotherhood of man, and authorized those ‘rights of man that we know now as human rights. Only this latter man, produced by the historicist process of civilization, is capable of ahimsa. In his response, possibly written originally in English, Gandhi rejected the category ‘man and the logic of inclusionary transcendence that it rested on. Hitherto one has been taught to believe that a species is recognized and differentiated from the rest by its special marks [khaas lakshan]. Therefore, it would be wrong, I presume, to say that a horse is animal [pashu] first and horse after. He shares something in common [saamanya ... lakshan] with the other animals, but he dare not shed his horseliness and yet remain an animal. Having lost his special virtue [khaas lakshan], he loses also his general [saamanya] status. Similarly,... I would suggest to the medical friend that man can be classed as animal [pashu] only so long as he retains his humanity.30

The Gujarati translation of this letter makes more explicit the work done by this passage. First, both ‘special characteristic’ and ‘special virtue’ are rendered as khaas lakshan. Lakshan: mark. Khaas: a term that can be used to name both the specific, and the singularity of an entity. Second, samanya: a term which designates both the general as shared substantivity, and being in common as that which is outside substantivity. In the Gujarati translation, the evolutionary theory loses its firm mooring in speciation. Perhaps because of this, Gandhi is able to produce an astonishingly productive misreading of evolutionary theory, focusing on precisely that which it sought to repress and render marginal. Here, man is not an animal in the social-evolutionary sense, where the relationship is that of a shared common substance which man transcended. Rather, he is constituted by his ‘special virtue’ in relation to the category animal: what man as an animal has in common with

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other animals is that he is not the same animal as them. Man cannot transcend his animality to become that higher animal, man—if he did, Gandhis argument suggests, he would cease to be man by the logic of speciation itself. By foregrounding the centrality of the khaas or singular to evolution, Gandhi refused any legitimate space to logic of transcendental inclusion. Unlike the latter, where animality was organized hierarchically, Gandhi proposed a scheme of animality that could never be brought to completion. We are introduced to a distinctive thinking of a singularity. This is no longer (as it is with Yagnik, or Veynes ‘individual singularity’) about the empiricist insistence on something irreducible and unique. Nor is it singularity in a performative sense—where there is recognition that the logic of speciation is only constative, and that a more apposite way to recognize diversity would acknowledge that the very performance of these constative hierarchies results in a proliferation of singular identities. Such a thinking of singularity, even when it questions the order of constative knowledge, remains within the order of representation. Rather, Gandhis own argument, as it unfolds, is marked not by a better or more adequate classification (as though the problem was one of classificatory categories) but by a intransigently political insistence on unilateral obligation (ekpakshi farj) as constitutive of the swabhav of the human. The correspondent apologizes for suggesting that I might regard myself as a remote cousin [pitrai; paternity] of the ape’. The truth is that my dharma not only permit me to claim but require me to own kinship [sagpan; kinship] with not merely the ape but the horse and the sheep, the lion and the leopard, the snake and the scorpion. Not so need these kinsfolk regard themselves. The difficult dharma which rule my life, and I hold ought to rule that of every man and woman, impose this unilateral obligation [ekpakshi farj] on us. And it is so imposed because only the human is the silhouette of God [manushya-j ishwarnu pratibimb che]31

This centrality of obligation had been stressed also in a crucial passage in chapter 13 of Hind Swaraj when he moved from his critique of aadhunik sudhaar or modern civilization to an exploration of kharu sudhaaro or true civilization. True civilization is that conduct [vartan] through which man carries out his obligation [farj, ‘duty’]. To carry out obligation is to nourish ethics. To nourish ethics is hold in control the mind and the senses [indriyo]. By doing this, we know ourselves [apan-ne olakhiye chiye]. This is su or good dharo [conduct]. It is opposed to kudharo [bad conduct].32

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Two points are especially noteworthy. First, farj, which Gandhi translates as ‘duty’, works not within the realm of the identical (as in the duties required by ‘tradition) but in the realm of the strange— the ape and even all animals, as he suggests to the doctor. In the chapter on modern medicine in Hind Swaraj, similarly: Te dhandama paropkar nathi e to hun batavi gayo. Tethi lokone nuksan chhe. To translate for ourselves: T have already shown that there is no paropkar in that business [modern medicine]. Through it, people will suffer’.33 Paropkar: not simply beneficence, as the usual understanding of the word goes, but also etymologically: upkar: to do good to. Par: strange, alien, other, not ones own. Again the figure of the strange, and an obligation to it. It is swabhavik or of one’s ownmost, in other words, to be constituted by an obligation to that which is not one’s ownmost. Second, this insistence on obligation produces another thinking of responsibility. In a liberal thinking of responsibility, to respond is to insist that the other cannot remain a stranger, must have a face. The strange is what such responsibility must marginalize. Encountering the faceless, this thought of responsibility is compelled—since responsibility can only be to the face, since it is the face of the Other that produces the injunction ‘thou shalt not kill’—to either give it a face, or practice a responsible violence towards it. But what has been said of the secret could be said of the strange too: it ‘never allows itself to be captured or covered over by the relation to the other, by being with or by any form of “social bond”. Even if it makes them possible, it does not answer to them, it is what does not answer. No responsiveness’.34 The persistence of strangeness—and what is the strange if not ‘that radically other which cannot even have (or be) a face’?35—marks the limits of liberal responsibility, marks the moment at which violence becomes legitimate for such responsibility. Subjected to the responsible violence of colonialism (for it is to let liberalism off too easily to see colonial rule merely as an irresponsibility), Gandhi questions liberal responsibility by thinking a radical form of responsibility—responsibility as unilateral obligation. We might, following Spivak, formalize this other thinking of responsibility ‘in the following way: it is that all action is undertaken in response to a call (or something that seems to us to resemble a call) that cannot be grasped as such’.36 Thought this way, all responsibility involves the strange. Gandhi thinks this responsibility by thinking what liberal thought cannot—the obligation to the strange and the other. The paraya, faceless, does not call, speak, or address. To the

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paraya, there can only be a unilateral obligation—a responsibility that is not in response to the speech of the other, but to the experience or call, which is always from within, of being addressed by the other. The paraya owes nothing, too, to an anthropological thinking of the stranger. Rather, Gandhi thinks this responsibility or obligation as kinship with the strange (‘my dharma not only permits me to claim but require me to own kinship with...’). This insistence on kinship is quite in contrast to the liberal thinking of responsibility. For the latter, just as the strange comes after responsibility, and marks that to which one can be responsibly violent, so does kinship come before responsibility. For the latter, the kin are those whose faces come prior to the third party, who do not accept the order of the third party; kinship as a category thus refuses justice. In this sense, the kin are those to whom one is bound before responsibility, without limit, without the measure of justice. Hence the suspicion with which liberal discourses of responsibility have looked at the contamination of kinship—if this relation terrifies the discourse of responsibility, it is because it does not follow the latter’s measure. Kinship with the strange: in this binding of the before of libera] responsibility with its after, kinship is transformed. To venture a binding with the strange, the realm of that which can be known has to be abandoned. Nor can this kinship then inhabit the realm of the strange—as that which has no face, the strange resists inhabitance. Neither in the same nor in the strange, neither of the subject or of the object, neither a response to nor from: here then opens up the towardness that is the originary space of Gandhis politics. To be towards: this is not to be in the strange, but to be outside and yet bound to it—the combination that Gandhi describes through the term samp or togetherness. To be towards: here is a with-ness that is not inert but an opening that nevertheless remains heterogeneous to that which it opens to. To be towards: this is what was at stake in the description of the human relationship with God through the term pratibimb or reflection. Prati—towards, but also against; bimb—the disc of the sun. The pratibimb as reflection is that doubling which is constituted by a relation of toward-ness: set against the sun, ever outside it, it is also ever oriented towards it. This kinship with the strange as toward-ness refigures the question of the human and the animal. The Editor thought of ‘life’ ‘modern civilization, as operating without absolute distinctions. Inclusionary transcendence reduces the distance between ‘man and ‘animals’ by

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insisting on their common evolutionary ancestry. It also opens the space for another kind of distance—one produced by a logic of inclusionary transcendence that separates man from animal, and civilized man from savage man. Consequently, even though the distance it allows between human and animal is not absolute, it authorizes and naturalizes the human use of life for human ends alone, as in vivisection. This relative, shifting distance necessarily infuses the thinking of the human: while there is a shared common base with primitive or backward humans, they were ancestral figures in the same sense as apes—which is to say that they had already been transcended (it is this thinking, of course, that the discourse of human rights has sought to fight, though in the very language of this ‘life’). Even contemporary humans can always slip back into the animality that they had transcended, or become base and evil—in a word, inhuman. The point, however, is not that the line between the animal and the human is always blurred but rather about how that blurring occurs— in the liberal thought of life, blurring occurs through inclusionary transcendence of the animal that humans always are. Gandhi instead insists on an absolute distinction between humans and animals: the Australian savage was fundamentally different from the brute, because the brute always will remain brute, whereas the savage has in him the capacity for developing to the fullest height attainable by man.... Even in our so called civilized state, we are not far removed from savages’.37 But the apparent anthropomorphism of this absolute and unbridgeable chasm is undone, simultaneously, by that which constitutes the human: the farj of kinship with the strange. As such, the absolute distinction between human and animal can be maintained only in the practice of obligation towards the animal or pashu; in fighting the use of the pashu’s life for a human end, or for ends. This obligation defines the human not as a substantivity, but as a opening, as a relation of being towards the pashu.38 Necessarily, this claim of absolute affinity and distance extends to relations between humans—between savage and civilized, between good and evil. Given both the pervasiveness of the strange, and the kinship with the strange that constitutes the human, there can be no inclusionary transcendence at work between humans. These relations too now have to be sustained in the immeasurable toward-ness of unilateral obligation. The etymology of the term paadoshi carries intimations of this immeasurable toward-ness, derived as it is from the Sanskrit prati, towards, and vasin, to reside, stay.

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ANOTHER NAME FOR GOD In insisting on kinship with the strange and the toward-ness that it involved, Gandhi had turned to God: the unilateral obligation was so imposed ‘because only the human is the silhouette of God’ Gandhi turned over and again to God in his arguments. Of satyagraha itself: ‘The dharmayudh is planned and conducted by God himself/itself. Of swabhav: ‘The swabhav of the human has to be, and is, to know God’ And the farj and satyagraha too were inseparable from God. Of the farj or obligation: ‘And it is so imposed because man alone is made in the image of God’. Who is this God? Or, more precisely, what is the work done by God in Gandhi’s argument? Note that God is thought here not as an entity, not in its godliness (indeed, it is precisely because of this that Gandhi is never a spiritual thinker, despite his pervasive invocation of God), but as a way of thinking the human—the human is the figure whose swabhav it is to know God. Furthermore, God is a shorthand for satya, a shorthand required because of our statist and substantivist predilections. As he wrote in the first of a series of letters from jail devoted to the vows that ashram inmates should take (later published as a book, Mangalprabhat, translated into English as From Yeravda Mandir): The word satya is from sat. Sat means to be [hovu]. Satya is Being [hovapan]. Save for satya, nothing exists [hastij. The right name of God [Parmeshwar] is sat, that is satya. That is why it is more appropriate to say that Truth is God than to say that God is Truth. We cannot do without a ruler [rajyakarta], a leader. This is why the name God is more prevalent and will remain so. But on thinking, sat or satya is the true name, and only this conveys the full meaning.39

Tn fact it is more correct to say that Truth is God rather than God is Truth’ [Mangalprabhat].4® Here satya, the thought that thinks sat or being, emerges as that which, in shorthand, is named God. And the human?—the human is the figure whose swabhav it is to know sat or satya. But as the term pratibimb or silhouette implies, the human is the figure who is always in a relationship of intimate exteriority to sat—both constituted by sat and outside sat. As such, the relation to sat or satya cannot be a matter of knowing entities. In discussions of sat and satya, Gandhi returns repeatedly to the phrase neti neti (not this, not that). ‘The seers have described God as “Neti, Neti” (Not this, not this). Truth will elude you’.41

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Neti neti: without attempting an account of that most difficult phrase from Indian debates on God and Being, let us note for now that with it Gandhi introduces a not-ness in Being. This not-ness has nothing in common with the liberal emphasis on the unknowability of truth. For the latter, unknowability is a consequence of the new criterion of knowledge, factuality, which brackets off questions of truth. Truth is now a weak substantive, a construct or regime best understood in terms of what is outside it and what produces it, the socius. But neti neti is not about the weakening of the substantive: it is a refusal of the substantive, an insistence that there can be no substantive, an attempt to think Being without Being, absent Being. As neti neti, never a substantive, satya could only be in the striving for it, not in substantive ends. Gandhi argued of swaraj or independence as follows: swaraj is nothing but the true effort to get it. The more we run after it the more distant it will seem. All ideals are thus. As a person becomes more true, so does satya run away from him, for he now understands that what he had hastily thought to be satya is actually untruth [asatya].42

Satyagraha: satya, Being or Truth; agraha: desire for. Desire for Being or truth. The desire for satya involved in satyagraha could not ever lead to a relation of being in satya. As pratibimb, marked by neti neti, it was always to be towards and yet outside satya—this was the relationship of being towards satya. Could this be why part of the English title translation of the autobiography’s title—Experiments With Truth— foregrounds a relation of both being towards truth and outside it? In thinking of satya through neti neti, the stakes of Gandhis politics emerge even more forcefully. From the perspective enabled by satyagraha, a problematic resolution marks the categorical imperative to treat every man as an end. When faced with conflicting ends, this latter tolerance can, because of its commitment to the thought of ends, at best defer judgment, resort to a disengagement. And deferral gives way, when necessary, to violence as the means to protect or promote the most just end. There can thus be ends substantive enough to justify violence. By insisting on the impossibility of any substantive end, by insisting that truth could not be substantive, Gandhi makes a just violence impossible. Always outside sat and yet striving towards sat: this made means always more important than ends. In Hind Swaraj,

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in the chapter ‘Brute force, Gandhi had privileged means over ends in opposing armed force to drive out the British: You believe that there is no connection between means [sadhan] and ends [sadhya, murad]— this is a great mistake.... The means is the seed; and the end—the object to be gained—is the tree. As much connection as is there between seed and tree is there between means and end.43

The insistence on neti neti was a further radicalization of this argument, insisting not only that there could be no ends, only means; but insinuating a departure from the framework of means and ends. This departure, and the toward-ness which it required, imposed the unilateral obligation to ahimsa: ... without ahimsa it is impossible to search for satya. Ahimsa and Truth are as inseparable [othproth] as two sides of a coin, or smooth disc. Which is the obverse and reverse in this? Nevertheless, ahimsa may be thought as the means [sadhan] and satya as the end [sadhya]. The means are within our reach, and so ahimsa becomes a supreme obligation [param dharm]. Truth becomes God [parmeshswar].44

In this formulation, while means are privileged as the point that is ‘within our reach’, means and end can no longer be separated out; they are held together even in the words for them—saadhan and saadhya. Perhaps (though that argument is not explicitly made here, and will have to be elicited on another occasion), their very separation is part of the problem? THE VIOLENCE OF AHIMSA

But what is involved in ahimsa? In what sense is it ‘non-violence’ (to go by the commonsensical translation of the word which Gandhi too resorts to)? In order to consider these questions, it is helpful to counterpoint the thought ofahimsa to the apparently similar Levinasian argument about the Other. To the face of the Other, as Levinas points out, there can only be infinite submission. But inasmuch as I have to respond not only to the face of the other but alongside him to the approach of the third party, the justice of measure—and the state that it necessarily involves—become inevitable. In the meeting with the face, it was not one’s place to judge; the other, being unique, does not undergo judgment; he takes precedence over me from the start; I am under allegiance to him. Judgment and justice are required from the moment the third party appears. In the very name of absolute obligations towards

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one’s fellow man, an abandonment of the absolute allegiance the face calls forth is necessary.45

Justice cannot be attentive only to the face—it must calculate, compare, and judge. While the insistence on its secondariness displaces justice from the centrality it is granted in ontological narratives, even the affirmation of the Other requires a return to just violence. But justice never displaces the concern for the Other. Levinas argues for an aporetic relation between the Other and justice, or between ethics and politics. For Levinas, just as ethics needs justice in order to be responsible to the third, justice needs to be constantly interrogated by an ethics that is attentive to the face, and that points to what such a justice leaves out. Or, as he puts it in Otherwise than Being: ‘in no way is justice a degradation of obsession, a degeneration of the forthe-other, a diminution, a limitation of anarchic responsibility’.46 This insistence on a justice that was responsive to ethics led to his insistence that the liberal state is more moral than the fascist state, and closer to the morally ideal state. As he remarks in an interview: I’ve told you that justice is always a justice which desires a better justice. This is the way that I will characterize the liberal state. The liberal state is a state which holds justice as the absolutely desirable end and hence as a perfection. Concretely, the liberal state has always admitted—alongside the written law—human rights as a parallel institution. It continues to preach that within its justice there are always improvements to be made in human rights. Human rights are the reminder that there is no justice yet.47

From the postcolonial perspective that avows satyagraha, such an affirmation of liberalism, such an attempt to institute a clear divide between fascism and liberalism, remains within a deeply humanist understanding of both ethics and politics. To begin with, there is the curious innocence of ethics. Ethics practises only infinite submission to the other; it is never itself violent. But when faced with the third, ethics is not enough; ethics must itself give rise to justice. It is justice that practises what Levinas describes as the ‘first violence’.48 Ethics, remaining in an aporetic relation with justice, constantly queries justice because it is inattentive to the face. All the violence is on the side of justice, which ethics gives rise to and also questions. Here, ethics is in what, if one may only slightly misdirect a phrase that Levinas uses sometimes to describe his own thinking, in a ‘utopian and ‘Platonic’ relation with justice. It is the ideal by which justice must constantly be reworked, and from which justice is always separated.

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This innocence of ethics also presumes a distinctive way of thinking non-violence. Ethics is non-violent because it abjures any attempt at domination. Paradoxically it does so through an infinite submission that continues to be conceptualized as a form of subordination so radical that it does not encounter domination. What is an ethical submission that is not a subordination, that can resist what it submits to?—this question cannot be raised in a sustained manner in this ethics. This is why when the question of how to resist injustice arises, ethics cannot itself resist. Rather, it must enact a transitive move from submission to justice—where love now takes the form of justice, trucking explicitly in power, to resist the third. From the postcolonial perspective that avows satyagraha, this curious conjoining of the innocence of non-violent ethics with the violence of justice entails an ethnocentrism that thinks itself an antiethnocentrism. This is not only because the innocence claimed for ethics is reminiscent of the innocence that liberalism claims for itself, treating its colonial genocides and brutality as only tragic deviations from its norms rather than constitutive of it. More importantly, and on a more conceptual register, both ethics and justice are necessarily marked by a certain civilizational hierarchy. What justifies the violence of the judge (what, for example, sets it apart from the violence of the Other who attacks the third, or of the third who attacks the Other) is precisely that the judge is the figure who is open to being interrogated by ethics, who has initially subordinated himself or herself to the Other, who is pained and anguished at the violence that s/he practises as a judge. The ability to suffer pain for the Other not only offers proof that the judge practises a just violence, but places the judge at a different and higher level than the Other to whose violence the judge responds. Implicitly, that Other (fascist for Levinas, terrorist now?) does not experience this anguish, which is why that Others violence is never just, and must be put down by a just violence. Concomitantly, the anguish of the judge (the ability, say, of Americans to defend the human rights of terrorists, or the often-reported anguish of Israeli soldiers over their violence in Gaza) as opposed to the presumed inability of the terrorist to feel such anguish—also absolves the judge or the revolutionary.49 Involved in satyagraha is quite another thinking of violence. Gandhi uses the word satyagraha in two related senses. In its restricted sense, satyagraha is the resistance that is offered to injustice. But there is also

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a broader sense of the word, where Gandhi uses it interchangeably with ahimsa. Through this later emphasis on satyagraha, Gandhi transforms the tradition of thinking ahimsa. This transformation is not only a matter of introducing ahimsa-satyagraha as a political strategy to be used against the British or the state. It also forcefully reworks the stakes of ahimsa as a concept-word that he receives from Jain and Hindu traditions. Most strikingly, in Gandhis formulation, satyagraha or ahimsa are not at all innocent of violence. It turns out that a complete eschewal of ‘brute force’ is impossible. ‘I cannot escape the himsa which is inevitably involved in the processes of eating and drinking’.50 At the time of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi focused primarily on this residual impossibility of ahimsa. But quite soon afterwards, he came to argue in even stronger terms for the violence involved in ahimsa. Exemplary of this is a letter that he writes in 1918, possibly originally in English. In that, he acknowledges that his decision to campaign for the recruitment of Indian soldiers for the British Indian army had upset many for both political and religious reasons. But he defends it as in keeping with his longstanding views: It is my practice of ahimsa and [my] failure to get our people even to understand the first principles of ahimsa that have led to the discovery that all killing is not himsa, that, sometimes, practice of ahimsa may even necessitate killing and that we as a nation have lost the true power of killing. It is clear that he who has lost the power [‘shakti’] to kill cannot practise non-killing. Ahimsa is a renunciation [‘tyaag] of the highest type. ... a mouse cannot be properly said to renounce [‘tyaag’] the power of killing a cat. It may look terrible but it is true that we must, by a well-sustained, conscious effort, regain this power, and, then, if we can only do so, deliver the world from its travail of himsa by a continuous abdication [‘tyaag’] of this power.51

What do we make of all this? It is clearly inadequate to think of what is going on as the statist argument that just violence, such as the state’s, is not really violence because it is organized by what are ultimately non-violent ends.52 This after all is the argument that the doctor makes in the passage discussed earlier, and Gandhi repudiates it quite emphatically. Nor can we understand the argument here to be the easy alternative, sometimes described as anarchist, which rejects state violence but affirms individual violence. Indeed, the letter goes on to insist that such an opposition is untenable: It is not possible to make a distinction between organized warfare [vyavasthit yuddha] and individual fighting [vyaktigat ladai]. There must be an organized

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[sanghatith] opposition and, therefore, even organized bloodshed, say, in the case of bandits. The noblest [uttam-ma uttam] warrior is he who stands fearless [nirbhay] in the face of immense odds.53

What then is going on? Perhaps we can start by returning to Hind Swaraj. One of the most important terms is bal—force. In chapter 2, both the Reader and the Editor agree that petitions must be backed by force’ The opposition in Hind Swaraj is between two kinds of force— darugodo (the title of chapter 16, translated into English as ‘brute force’ and elsewhere in the text sometimes as ‘force of arms’) or shareerbal (‘physical force’) on the one hand and satyagraha-atmabal (the title of chapter 17, translated into English as ‘passive resistance’, though elsewhere in the text atmabal is translated as ‘soul force’) and dayabal (‘force of love’). Within the terms of Hind Swaraj, the opposition is best described not as one between non-violence and violence but two forces—the force of love and the force of arms. In the conceptual order of satyagraha, as for the Levinasian thought of the Other, such love is heterogenous to the justice of measure, or to what the Editor calls the force of arms. But unlike Levinasian thought, the conceptual order of satyagraha presumes a certain ineradicable violence already in every relation, even before any third arrives on the scene. For it recognizes unilateral kinship as owed to the stranger, paraya, the figure who constitutively lacks a face. With a figure who lacks a face, non-violence in the conventional sense—where the Other’s sensibilities, desires, and requirements are respected and deferred to (and Levinas’ argument about the encounter with the Other before the third arrives on the scene remains organized by such a concept of non-violence, despite its radical incongruence with his concept of the face)—is no longer possible since the Other constitutively cannot be known. This is the constitutive violence of satyagraha, a violence that it can never disavow: it can never address the other, for the other is always opaque. Nor can this violence be attenuated by insisting on the good intentions of the satyagrahi-self, for the self here as unknowable as the other. If the argument for satyagraha were to privilege intentions, it would return to the same affirmation of the sovereign subject-agent that it tries to break from: after all, both the Nehruvian state and colonial officials in India justified their violence by invoking either the larger good, or at least good intentions.54 This opacity of self and other and related unconcern with intentions is symptomatic of the constitutive violence of satyagraha. It is true enough that Gandhi stressed

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repeatedly his spirit of compromise’. The emphasis on compromise was one way of acknowledging the necessity of recognizing the desires of the stranger-other as a subject-agent. Nevertheless, satyagraha became necessary at the moment that compromise was no longer possible. This impossibility of compromise was not only empirical. It did not occur only when there was conflict. Rather, the opacity of the other was constitutive of every relation. Indeed, in some relations, there could only be opacity. With the animal, for example, there can be no compromise based on the animals desires. Thus, Gandhi s non-violence can be constituted neither by reference to the justice of the end (an objective non-violence, such as would be legitimated by historicism, or by every statist claim to justice) nor by reference to the intentions of self or other (a subjective non­ violence). By the conventional terms of subject and object, Gandhis non-violence not only cannot know whether it is violent or non­ violent; it is violent, period. Yet it is a strange violence, for even as it questions the sovereignty it encounters, even as it fails to recognize the intentions of the other, it seeks not to become another sovereign, or to impose its intentions. So not only is satyagraha violent, but it eschews just violence, or a justice conceptualized in terms of the state. (This eschewal should not be confused with the conceptualization of the state as an empty place that can be occupied by various contenders—in the latter, what is conceptualized is a circulation of sovereignty, not its eschewal.) It remains always an unjustifiable violence, even when and where the most scrupulous calculations have rendered it necessary. Perhaps indeed this is its greatest violence—that it can never claim to be a just violence. The indistinction of the line between himsa and ahimsa is something that Gandhi repeatedly returns to, as when he concurs with a questioner who asks him whether ‘God alone knows what is himsa and what is ahimsa.55 So the question arises: in what sense is Gandhi s non-violence non­ violent, or in what sense is satyagraha ahimsak? Its non-violence, I suggest, is only the relation of the gift that it sustains. The love or daya involved in satyagraha involves a giving of the self, and only the self. This insistence on the giving of the self is one way of understanding Gandhi s insistence on the vows ofbrahmacharaya and non-possession. In chapter 17 of Hind Swaraj, for example, the Editor says that those who wish to become satyagrahis will have to observe perfect chastity (brahmacharya) [and] adopt poverty (garibaiY Again, in a discussion of the vows that ashram inmates should take, Gandhi writes:

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If we look at it from the standpoint of ahimsa, we find that the fulfilment of ahimsa is impossible without perfect brahmacharya. Ahimsa means universal love. If a man gives his love to one woman, or a woman to one man, what remains for others?56

Gandhi interprets brahmacharya broadly, insisting that it is requires also vows such as those of asteya (control of palate) and aparigraha (non-possession). While it would be quite accurate to understand much of Gandhi s emphasis on brahmacharya and related vows as the enactment of a repressive ascesis, the association of brahmacharya with ahimsa as universal love suggests that more is going on than just that.57 For here vows such as brahmacharya seek to create and sustain—in ways that exceed the specific content of the vows themselves—satyagraha as a distinctive form of personhood: the personhood of those who give nothing but themselves. In this, there emerges also a sharper indication of what is distinctive about satyagraha-ahimsa as universal love—here the self gives nothing but itself. But what does it mean for a self to give nothing but itself? To revisit on another register what I have argued elsewhere,58 to give oneself is, first, to refuse to be an agent. An agent is marked by sovereignty over the self. A gift is necessarily marked by the givers relinquishment of sovereignty over what is given—in this case oneself. This relinquishment of sovereignty is enacted over and again in the submission of the satyagrahi to the laws of the land, or to the other. To make oneself into a self capable of such relinquishing of sovereignty, into a self capable of separation from (not mastery of) the oneself who is sovereign—is this the stake that vows such as brahmacharya struggle to conceptualize? Second, to give oneself in this manner is to refuse to accept the agency or sovereignty of the other to whom one gives oneself—whether that other be the oneself that the satyagrahi separates from, the one that the satyagrahi encounters face (less) to face (less), or the laws of the land. A gift, after all, remains marked by the giver—the receiver of a gift never owns it as an object, and a gift transports receivers and givers out of themselves. Thus, when satyagrahis submit themselves to the sovereignty of the other, they do so in order to point to the limits of the other s agency and of the law that enshrines this agency. They point, in other words, to what the others sovereignty cannot subdue, and what is nevertheless not another sovereignty.

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Third, to give oneself in this manner is to receive the other in a distinctive manner—as a gift. For that remainder which the others sovereignty cannot subdue is never only the satyagrahis. It is also the other s—that is what makes satyagraha possible in the first place. Between these remainders, there can never be a relation organized by intimacy (the primordial relation before sovereignty, of which empiricism is exemplary), sovereignty (the unity of the third, of agents); rather, the relation between the self and the other is organized by an essential and inescapable resistance. This resistance is not one of two agents to each other (the Hobbesian moment before the state), but something quite different—the resistance involved in the other equality where each is given to the other. This essential resistance involved in the giving of the self, this violence before justice involved in the non-agential relation between self and other—this is what Gandhi calls daya, satyagraha, ahimsa, atmabal. If the word ahimsa occurs here, it should never be treated as a reference to non-violence in the metaphysical sense; rather, it names the seizure of those terms, their appropriation to another politics. In sum, satyagraha, ahimsa, and daya sought to transform its interlocutor into the stranger, to introduce obligation where there was responsibility, to sustain a figure to whom response is impossible, and to whom submission in agential terms is impossible. Thus, its toward-ness was never a relation of subordination to or domination of the stranger. Rather, to be towards was to submit to the unilateral obligation of kinship and its originary equality. Unilateral obligation involved ceaseless political confrontation with the other, it involved the effort to make the interlocutor into the figure who was simultaneously neighbour and stranger. The unilateral obligation also involved a compulsion of the other: the latter had to be compelled to abandon their agency.59 Satyagraha: the compulsion that, through submission to the unilateral obligation of kinship, produced and sustained the neighbour-stranger. As such, in its confrontation with domination or subordination, it sought to marginalize the equality of measure— justice—with an other equality that did not allow for measure. It is this fidelity to another equality, an equality that Gandhi considers originary, that he refers to as ahimsa, satyagraha, or non-violence’. THE INVISIBILITY OF SATYAGRAHA

But why should the word non-violence, ahimsa, be used to describe satyagraha, to describe relations of essential resistance? What is

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the strange return that ahimsa stages here, where the conventional distinction between non-violence and violence is overturned. In order to attend to this question, perhaps we can return to the implications of the invisibility of satyagraha—to the remark that history cannot ‘take note of satyagraha.60 ‘The meaning of the word itihaas is “thus it happened” [aam thai gayu], If we work with that meaning, then [I can] give you copious knowledge [pramaan] of satyagraha. If we interpret itihaas by the meaning of the English word, ... then there can be no evidence of satyagraha’.61 By now, we have already parsed out a first argument in this passage: that ‘history’ cannot (not does not) even take note of happening. The happening or the event is possible only by rending the subject and producing the khaasiyat (the singularity that refigures the species, and in this sense claims a relation with the general)—singularity outside the specific, which is to say outside measure. This happening or event cannot belong to the realm of objective facts (which, as specificity, is already known even when new) or subjective experience (which, affirming the sovereignty of the subject, can know only itself). ‘History’, concerned with these two realms, turns away from the fundamental historicity of the happening; it resolves the happening into the homogeneous time of socius, context, and subject. We still have to elicit the argument in the first sentence—about why satyagraha is necessary for itihaas. Leaving for another occasion the task of a sustained elicitation, I shall for now only indicate its protocols. Itihaas. Iti-so; ha: truly; aas: was—from as, to be. When Gandhi explains what the Gujarati word itihaas means, he writes, we saw, aam thai gayu—thus it happened. Thai: again, from the root asti, to be. Thus it happened. But is the happening of thai gayu to be thought as we would think an uncontrollable natural disaster that happens unexpectedly to unsuspecting persons? Not at all—such events, to the extent that we think of them as natural, belong within an order of measure, however immense that measure be. Rather, the etymology of thai signals the concern with the question of being, sat. Sat is the happening—the event outside measure. If, looking for happening, we find satyagraha—in all its pervasiveness, practised by ‘thousands, even lakhs’—, this is because satyagraha is the desire for, and the effort to produce the happening. But why and how does satyagraha attune itself to the question of sat, the happening of being? Though Gandhi does not explicitly address

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or answer this question, his arguments are suggestive: the happening of sat is not possible without satyagraha, without the simultaneous farj and khaasiyat involved in satyagraha.62 Khaasiyat: satyagraha, because it was unilateral and obligatory, defied measure by referring to measure. Indeed, satyagraha was required precisely when the normalcy of measure is found wanting. ‘Petitions, etc., are a good remedy [ilaaj] for bearable suffering [sahya dukho]. For unbearable suffering, the only remedy is satyagraha.63 This is why, as Gandhi remarks earlier in the same essay, ‘whether or not satyagraha should be started is not dependent on any mathematical rule [ganitna niyam\\ As such, satyagraha itself was outside measure, or more precisely its own measure: Satyagraha is the way of ahimsa [ahimsadharma]. Therefore it is justified [dharmya] and right [isht] at all places and all times. ... Even the advocates of armed force impose bounds [hado baandhe che] on the use of arms. Satyagraha has no bounds [seema]. Or rather if it has then they are those of the satyagrahi’s tapascharya, strength to bear suffering’.64

In this defiance of measure emerges the khaas: the effort of satyagraha is to establish a singular relation towards those against whom satyagraha is practiced. Farj: what is singular does not essay a relation beyond itself only subsequent to the assertion of its singularity or khaasiyat. Because this singularity is produced in the acceptance of a unilateral obligation, the singularity of satyagraha is constituted as an opening beyond itself. As a command from elsewhere, as an insistence on toward-ness, the unilateral obligation is possible only by giving up on the register of the active which is exemplified in the liberal concept of agency. Thus, the chapter ‘Satyagraha-Atmabaf (satyagraha or soul force) in the Gujarati Hind Swaraj carries, in his English translation, the title ‘Passive resistance’. What is this passivity that rejects agency? This passivity is not simply the inverse of the agential concept of activity: When friends told me here that passive resistance was taken up by the people as a weapon of the weak, I laughed at the libel, as I called it then. But they were right and I was wrong. With me alone and a few other co-workers it came out of our strength and was described as satyagraha, but with the majority it was purely and simply passive resistance what they resorted to, because they were too weak to undertake methods of violence.65

What is rejected here is passive resistance as inertia, as springing

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from a lack of potentiality for the active. This, Gandhi insisted, was what ahimsa had degenerated into in Indian tradition. Rejecting such ahimsa, Gandhi insisted that only where there was a potentiality for being active could there be satyagraha, the term that had been coined during an early South African struggle to describe the form of ahimsa he argued for. ‘You cannot teach ahimsa to the man who is not endowed with the strength to kill. You cannot teach a dumb man the beauty and benefits of silence’.66 This inadequacy of the English term passive resistance’ to describe satyagraha was a matter to which Gandhi reverted on several occasions. In the Gujarati Hind Swaraj, one of his earliest mentions of satyagraha goes: ‘Call this force daya-bal [love-force], call it atmabal [soul force], or call it satyagraha} Gandhi’s English translation of this introduced the term passive resistance: ‘The force implied in his may be described as love force, soul force, or, more popularly but less accurately, passive resistance’.67 In trying to describe this passivity, he often fell back on the term ‘active’, as in his essay ‘Not passive resistance, [but] satyagraha: It is said that passive resistance’ [English term in Gujarati/Hindi text] is a weapon of the weak, but the power [shakti] which is described here can be used [prayog] only by the strong. This power is not passive resistance; the use of this power requires intense engagement [bhaare pravruti]. The struggle in South Africa was not passive [nishkriya] but active [sakriya].68

Although the English term ‘active’ is used in the Gujarati/Hindi text, this activity is outside the agential problematic of the active and the passive. The activity involved in satyagraha is perhaps best described as a radical passivity, a passivity where the action is not autonomous but the enacting of the unilateral obligation. It was to describe this kind of radical passivity that Gandhi used the term prayog, the word he translated into English as experiment. Hence the title, and also: ‘Using the excuse of an autobiography, I want to tell the story of my numerous experiments [prayogo] with truth. As my life consists of nothing but these experiments...’.69 Here, the Atmakatha is no longer an account of life but an account of prayogo. Gandhi insisted that in order to carry out these ‘scientific experi­ ments [shastriya prayog]’ it was necessary to be bound by vrat or vows—primary amongst them those of satya as neti neti and, there­ fore, ahimsa. It was such a bound figure—a figure as such profoundly distinct from the autonomous subject pursuing ends through the modern experiment—who pursued, through prayog, not falsifiable

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hypotheses or new knowledge, but practices that would better sustain the vows. Note Gandhis formulation: e aarth kariye: if we work with that meaning, or give that meaning to itihaas, then I can give pramaan or evidence’ Here itihaas is not an inert field in which evidence can be found; a working or a giving has to produce its meaning. Which raises the question: how is this meaning given? Could the unarticulated argument here be that this giving is the work of satyagraha? That satyagraha, in this opening-giving of the farj, sustains and gives itihaas—happening? Is this the sense in which satyagraha involves ahimsa, non-violence? If so, another question emerges: clearly, itihaas cannot erase or transcend what we conventionally think of as historical happening. If it did, then it would itself be modelled on a historical happening, become a historical happening. It has to establish another relation with the historical happening. What can this relationship be, and how would it convert the historical happening? Satyagraha enacts, one might venture to say, the conversion of the historical happening into the happening of satyagraha. How this conversion happens, where it leaves the historical happening—these are concerns that a thinking of satyagraha must address. NOTES In these footnotes, I will cite Gandhi s writings first in the language in which they were originally written. Gandhi insisted on writing in Gujarati as far as possible. In some cases (as with Hind Swaraj) he translated these writings himself into English; on other occasions, he supervised the translation by associates. Suffice for now to say it would be misplaced to treat either his Gujarati or English writings as more true or accurate in representing his politics; rather, I have proceeded by being attentive to the gap between them. 1. ‘Discussion with Roman Rolland’, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (henceforth CWMG), 6 December 1931, vol. 54, p. 260; see also Mahadev Desais diary for an extended Gujarati transcript of these remarks, including Romain Rollands remarks to Gandhi: Mahadevbhaini Dayari, 1976, vol. 15, Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, Ahmedabad, pp. 425-7, 435. 2. Gandhi began writing Dakshin Afrikana Satyagrahano Itihaas in 1923. It was initially published in two parts in Gujarati by Navjivan Press, Ahmedabad in 1924 and 1925. An English translation by Valji Govindji Desai with Gandhis advice and input, was published by S. Ganesan, Madras, in 1928. In this essay I draw on the editions of these books reprinted in CWMG. 3. Mahatma Gandhi, Dakshin Afrikana Satyagrahano Itihaas, in Gandhijino Akshardeha (Gandhis collected works in Gujarati, hereafter Akshardeha), vol. 29,

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p. 25. This passage has been translated in ‘Satyagraha in South Africa, CWMG, vol. 34, p. 5, as follows: That is the beauty of satyagraha. It comes up to oneself; one has not to go out in search of it. This is a virtue inherent in the principle itself. A dharmayuddha ... comes unsought; and a man of religion is ever ready for it. A struggle which has to be previously planned is not a righteous struggle. In a righteous struggle God Himself plans campaigns and conducts battles. A dharma-yuddha can be waged only in the name of God, and it is only when the satyagrahi feels quite helpless, is apparently on his last legs and finds utter darkness all around him, that God comes to the rescue. 4. Satyanaprayogo, Athava Atmakatha, in Akshardeha, vol. 39, p. 2; An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated by Mahadev Desai, in CWMG, vol. 44, p. 89. 5. Ibid. The friend was obviously not referring to an empirical East: there were by the early twentieth century already several major autobiographies even by Gujarati writers and thinkers. The English translation goes: ‘What has set you on this adventure ?’, he asked. ‘Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the East having written one, except amongst those who have come under Western influence.... Don’t you think it would be better not to write anything like an autobiography, at any rate just yet ?’ ...But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But I shall not mind, if every page of it speaks only of my experiments. 6. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 50; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 291. 7. Gandhi’s English translation goes: You ask for historical evidence. It is, therefore, necessary to know what history means. The Gujarati equivalent means: ‘It so happened’. If that is the meaning of history, it is possible to give copious evidence. But if it means the doings of kings and emperors, there can be no evidence of soul force or passive resistance in such history. You cannot expect silver ore in a tin mine. History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the world. 8. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 51; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 292. Gandhi’s English translation goes: Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of very interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul. Two brothers quarrel; one of them repents and re-awakens the love that was lying dormant in him; the two again begin to live in peace; nobody takes note of this. But if the two brothers, through the intervention of solicitors or some other reason take up arms or go to

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law—which is another form of the exhibition of brute force,—their doings would be immediately noticed in the Press, they would be the talk of their neighbours, and would probably go down to history. And what is true of families and communities is true of nations. There is no reason to believe that there is one law for families and other for nations. History, then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul force, being natural is not noted in history. Two modifications I have made in my translation may require further remark. First, I have translated aadoshi-paadoshi not as neighbours, which would perhaps be more literal, but as all and sundry’—I would argue the aadoshi transforms the paadoshi from a singular entity to a general quantity. Second, sampi and sampthi have been translated not as ‘in peace’ but as ‘in togetherness’. The translation of samp as just ‘peace’ does not emphasize the modality of this peace enough. The usual rendering of samp in dictionaries as unity is equally misleading. Etymologically, sam refers to a togetherness. In the emphasis on samp as peace, it will later become clear, what may be involved is a reading of samp not as unity, but as a togetherness that is nevertheless marked by a constitutive separation. 9. Charles Taylor, 1992, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 211. 10. Akshardeha, vol. 39, p. 2. Satyanaprayogo, Athava Atmakatha; An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth in CWMG, vol. 44, p. 89. 11. Ibid. 12. Mari Hakikat, though written in 1866, was published posthumously in 1933, well after Gandhi’s autobiography. The reference is thus unlikely to have been to Mari Hakikat. Nevertheless, there is the intriguing possibility that, both here and elsewhere, Gandhi cast his politics in opposition to Narmad’s, especially the early Narmad. While Narmad emphasized hakikat, or truth as verifiable fact, Gandhi’s Atmakatha was concerned with satya as Being, as outside the realm of verification or falsification. Narmad also campaigned in his early years for a sudhaar that would adopt crucial values from the British. And in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi implicitly distanced himself from such a project by drawing a distinction between aadhunik sudhaar (modern civilization) and kharu sudhaar (true civilization). 13. Narmadshankar Lalshankar, 1994 [1933], Mari Hakikat, Surat: Kavi Narmad Yugavart Trust, p. 21. 14. Jacques Derrida, 2005, Politics of Friendship, George Collins (trans.), London: Verso, p. 68. 15. Indulal Yagnik, 1955, Atmakatha, vol. 1, Jivanvikas, Ahmedabad: Ravani Prakashan Grah, pp. 7-13. The potential tension between these two subjects remains a troubling concern for him. See Ajay Skaria, 2001, ‘Homeless in Gujarat and India: The Many Loves of Indulal Yagnik’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, (38)3, pp. 271-97. 16. Paul Veyne, 1984, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, p. 56.

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17. The discussion here of the relationship between Indulal and Kumud draws on that chapter. See Indulal Yagnik, 1970 [1955], Atmakatha, vol. 2, Gujaratma Navjivan, Gurjar Granthratnak Karyalaya, chapter 13. All references in this and the next three paragraphs are to passages from this chapter. 18. Jacques Derrida, 1978, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 151. 19. Gandhis use of the term sudhaar was a critical reworking of the term ‘modern civilization’ of post-Enlightenment European thought. By the time Gandhi wrote, there was already a tradition of using the term sudhaar in this European sense. For instance, Narmad argued in his Narmagadhya that reform— sudhaar or sudhaaro—was needed to produce swadesh-abhimaan (respect and pride in one’s country). Gandhi broke from this tradition by redesignating this sudhaar as kudhaar—treating the term dhar as path, which could then be prefixed with either the good (su) or bad (ku)—or describing it as aadhunik (modern), paschimni (western), and aajkaalni (of these days). In opposition to aadhunik sudhaar, Gandhi affirmed kharu (true) sudhaar. Kharu sudhaar was not a return to tradition or a revival of it; Gandhi affirmed kharu sudhaar through a notion of the new—thus the title of his journal, Navjivan (literally new life). Second, while he sometimes used the phrase ‘western civilization' as a substitute for ‘modern civilization’, he was quite insistent on the difference between the two. For him, it was not western civilization that was ruling India but modern civilization. England too, he insisted, was ruled by modern civilization just like India. As such, though this is not an argument explicitly made by Gandhi, it too was colonized by ‘modern civilization’. 20. Hind Swaraj in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 26; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 259. Such a purusharth could only produce a people who completely forget the really important matters’, who ‘stay neither with the way of religion nor with the way of the world’. Elsewhere, Gandhi questioned the common rendering of this term as ‘the meaning of man’, and drew on its etymological root—puru as body—to insist that it referred to both men and women. Perhaps because of this, he translated it into English as the ‘object of life’. See letter to Narandas Gandhi, 12 August 1930, Akshardeha, vol. 44, p. 80; CWMG, vol. 49, p. 437. This letter is part of a series of weekly letters to Narandas that Gandhi wrote, when he was imprisoned in Yeravda jail in the wake of the Dandi March. In each letter, always dated as on a Tuesday, Gandhi included an exposition of one of the vows of the ashram. These expositions were collected and published in 1930 by Navjivan Press under the title Mangalprabhat. It was translated into English, perhaps in 1932, and published by Navjivan Press with the title, From Yeravada Mandir. The letter above was devoted to the vow of aswad, control of the palate’. 21. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, pp. 26 and 39; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 277. The English version has ‘the medical profession’ for daaktari vidya, which I have translated as ‘medical knowledge’. 22. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 40; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 277f. Gandhi’s English translation goes:

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The business of a doctor is to take care of the body, or, properly speaking, not even that. Their business is really to rid the body of diseases that may afflict it. How do these diseases arise? Surely by our negligence or indulgence. I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby certainly felt more at ease; but my mind became weakened. A continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind.... Had the doctor not intervened, nature would have done its work, and I would have acquired mastery over myself, would have been freed from vice and would have become happy. 23. I thank Gayatri Spivak for a very suggestive and helpful discussion of the atman. 24. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 64; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 309. 25. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 40; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 278. 26. Carl Schmitt, 1988, The Crisis ofParliamentary Democracy, Ellen Kennedy (trans.), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 27. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 51; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 292. 28. ‘Swabhavik Etle Kevu’, Akshardeha, vol. 30, p. 552, 13 June 1926; CWMG, vol. 35, p. 358. The terms praani and pashu, both of which I have translated into English as animal, carry quite different connotations. Pashu as a term usually excludes humans, and usually refers to the larger domestic animals. As such, pashu does not carry the connotations of derogation that its English translation ‘brute’ does. Praani includes all living beings—all those with praan, life. In another essay, I hope to turn to these terms, and also to a third term which is translated as animal—jaanvar. 29. ‘More Animal than Human, CWMG, vol. 36, p. 3, 8 August 1926; Akshardeha, vol. 31, p. 95. 30. Ibid., p. 4; ibid., p. 96. 31. Ibid., p. 5; ibid., p. 97. 32. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 41; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 279. Gandhi’s translation of this passage goes: Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means good conduct’. 33. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 40; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 278. Gandhi’s English translation goes: ‘I have endeavored to show that there is no real service of humanity in the profession [of medicine], and that it is injurious to mankind’. 34. Jacques Derrida, 1992, ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering’”, in David Wood (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 29. This convergence of the secret and the strange is not accidental. The non-agential secret, to the extent

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that it can never be known and is thus constitutively secret, is inseparable from the strange. 35. Gayatri Spivak, 1994, ‘Responsibility’, Boundary 2, 21(3), p. 21. 36. Spivak, ‘Responsibility’, p. 22. 37. ‘More Animal than Human, CWMG, 8 July 1926, vol. 36, p. 3ff. 38. Gandhi’s thinking of swabhav here is open to questions similar to those raised by Derrida of Heidegger’s thinking of Dasein. As Derrida points out in Of Spirit (1991, Chicago: University of Chicago Press), Dasein is thought as the entity which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its being. To think Dasein in this manner, however, is to treat the animal and the vegetal as impoverished in that spirit of Dasein. A similar consequence follows from the insistence that only manushya is the pratibimb or silhouette of God, that the animal cannot of its own wish or desire worship God. But there is also another moment in Gandhi: that of the figure who is a satyagrahi without measure and will not be afraid of, nor be feared by animals. The fascination with this argument led Gandhi to return repeatedly to the figure of St Francis of Assisi; Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, also wrote an essay on St Francis for Navjivan. 39. Letter to Narandas Gandhi, Akshardeha, 18-22 July 1930, vol. 44, p. 39; CWMG, vol. 49, p. 383. See note 20 for Mangalprabhat and from Yeravda Mandir. 40. Ibid. 41. Discussion with D. Ramaswami on or around 3 August 1944, CWMG, vol. 84, p. 266. 42. Akshardeha, vol. 22, p. 383, ‘Gebi Avaaj’ (Divine Warning), Navjivan, 19 February 1922; CWMG, vol. 26, p. 184f. 43. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 47; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 286, Hind Swaraj, p. 287. Gandhi’s English translation goes: Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake.... The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. 44. Letter to Narandas Gandhi, Akshardeha, vol. 44, p. 60, 29-31 July 1930; CWMG, vol. 49, p. 409ff. The letter cited was part of the Mangalprabhat series, and was devoted to the first vow, that of ahimsa. 45. Emmanuel Levinas, 2000, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-other, Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. 46. Emmanuel Levinas, 1981, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, Alhhonso Lingis (trans.), Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 159. 47. Emmanuel Levinas, Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley, 1988, ‘The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’, Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright (trans.), in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, New York: Routledge, p. 178. 48. Emmanuel Levinas, 2001, Is it Righteous to be: Interviews, Jill Robbins (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 51 and 56.

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49. Gil Anidjar has written powerfully of such absolutions provided by ethics in his 2009, ‘Gaza: Banality of Morals’ Economic and Political Weekly, 44(6), pp. 18-20. Perhaps it is not entirely accidental that the violence of the Other to which the judge responds should be invisible to Levinas, and that it is the violence of the judge which counts as the first violence—could it be that the violence of the Other, precisely because it is not marked by justice, is not quite human enough to be violence? 50. ‘Rosary or the spinning-wheel [renti]’, Akshardeha, 10 August 1924, vol. 24, p. 505; CWMG, vol. 28, p. 461. 51. Letter to Hanumantrao, 17 July 1918, CWMG, vol. 17, p. 131; Mahadevbhaini Dayari, vol. 4, Ahmedabad: Gandhi Smarak Sangrahlaya, 1950, p. 154. 52. Surprisingly enough, Hannah Arendt makes an argument along these lines in her 1970, On Violence, New York: Harvest Books. 53. Letter to Hanumantrao, 17 July 1918, CWMG, vol. 17, p. 132; Mahadev­ bhaini Dayari, vol. 4, Ahmedabad: Gandhi Smarak Sangrahlaya, 1950, p. 154. 54. On a related note, which merits a separate exploration on another occasion, when Gandhi in his interpretations of the Gita stresses nishkamakarma, the stakes for us might lie precisely in the relation to intentionality that emerges here: an action done as nishkamakarma is not driven by good or bad intentions towards the other. 55. CWMG, vol. 79, p. 174, Harijan, 8 September 1940, Discussion with Bharatanand. See also Gandhis response to Lala Lajpat Rai’s attack on his notion of ahimsa. ‘On Ahimsa: Reply to Lala Lajpat Rai’, 16 October, CWMG, vol. 15, p. 251. 56. Letter to Narandas Gandhi, 2/5 August 1930; Akshardeha, vol. 44, p. 69; CWMG, vol. 49, p. 420. This letter, part of the Mangalprabhat series, was devoted to the second vow, that of brahmacharya. 57. For an extended discussion of brahmacharya that takes up themes only tangentially touched on in this essay, see Ajay Skaria, 2010, ‘Living by Dying: The Obligation of Satyagraha, in Anand Pandian and Daud Ali (eds), Genealogies of Virtue: Ethical Practice in South Asia, Indiana University Press (forthcoming). 58. In that essay, I had explored this theme through a focus on the giving proper to the swa. See Ajay Skaria, 2006, ‘Only One Word, Properly Altered: Gandhi and the Question of the Prostitute’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41(49), p. 5070; also reprinted in 2007, Postcolonial Studies, 10(22), p. 232. 59. For a somewhat preliminary account of the Gandhian category of the neighbour, see Ajay Skaria, 2002, ‘Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), pp. 955-86. 60. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 51, CWMG, vol. 10, p. 292. We should not take the argument in this passage (which we encountered at the close of the first section) to be that history cannot take note of a harmonious togetherness and resolution. Rather, in light of Gandhi’s remarks in several other contexts satyagraha is practised at all times, the passage seems to imply that satyagraha is not resorted to only when there is an interruption in samp or togetherness.

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Rather, satyagraha is practised before, during, and after the fight between the two brothers. As such, the argument in that passage, is that history cannot take note of this Being because the togetherness of this Being is produced by satyagraha, by the practice of unilateral obligation. 61. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 50; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 291. 62. Similarly with the term atmakatha. Its appropriateness emerges most forcefully, given Gandhis explicit rejection of the commonsensical meaning, in the potentialities sustained by its etymology. Atmakatha: the Katha or Story of the Atman. The atman was central to life in Gandhis sense, and thus to satyagraha: it is surely not accidental that the chapter which discusses satyagraha is titled ‘ Satyagraha-Atmanbaf. Satyagraha could only be possible through the strength of the atman. 63. Akshardeha, vol. 13, p. 486, 2 September 1917; Letter to Shankarlal on ‘ideas about satyagraha, CWMG, vol. 16, p. 8f. 64. Ibid. 65. Letter to C.F. Andrews, CWMG, vol. 17, p. 122,6 luly 1918. Gandhi insisted on several occasions on this distinction between satyagraha and passive resistance. See, for instance, his ‘Not Passive Resistance, [but] Satyagraha’, Akshardeha, vol. 13, p. 89, original Hindi; CWMG, vol. 16, p. 10. 66. Mahadevbhaini Dayari, vol. 4, 6 July 1918. 67. Hind Swaraj, in Akshardeha, vol. 10, p. 49; CWMG, vol. 10, p. 290. The Gujarati text goes: Aa balne dayabal kaho, atmabal kaho, ke satyagraha kaho (Call this strength dayabal, atmabal, or satyagraha). 68. ‘Not Passive Resistance, [but] Satyagraha’, Akshardeha, vol. 13, p. 89; CWMG, vol. 16, p. 10. The Gujarati original of this essay is not available. It has been translated back into Gujarati in the Akshardeha from the Hindi translation. The English words ‘active’ and ‘passive’ occur in the Hindi/Gujarati text. 69. Satyanaprayogo, Athava Atmakatha in Akshardeha, vol. 39, p. 2; CWMG, vol. 44, p. 89. An Autobiography.

7 * CONCLUSION The Post-history of Communalism

Gyanendra Pandey

I undertook to write on the post-history of communalism partly at the bidding of the organizers of the conference where this essay was first presented.1 The title came to mind in response to some suggestions they had sent to me, and I impulsively proposed it as the theme of my presentation. One advantage of such rashness may be that it enables us to rethink the history of certain fairly well-known concepts and propositions in a time when politics are beginning to look very different indeed from the politics of the period when these concepts and propositions first arose. It is such a rethinking that I hope the present essay might provoke. It will hardly count as a great discovery to note that the category of communalism is no longer as central to Indian (and, more widely South Asian) political discourse as it was even a couple of decades ago. Political assertion and political commentary presently speaks more forcefully about majoritarianism, minorityism, and the appeasement of minorities than it does about communalism. There is widespread talk of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. And critics (rightly) point out that much of the violent fall-out of recent sectarian politics has taken the form of pogroms and not communal riots, even if the * A slightly different version of this essay first appeared as ‘Afterword: Communalism after Communalism’ in Gyanendra Pandey s The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, second edition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 262-82.

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term communal riots continues to be used. I want to argue that this change in vocabulary tells us more than we have recognized about the condition of contemporary politics, and of our awareness (or lack of awareness) of it. Let me turn then to the title I have chosen. What would constitute a post-history of communalism? When C.A. Bayly published his now widely cited essay on ‘the pre-history of communalism’,2 many of us observed that the search for eighteenth century precursors of communal conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was anachronistic. This was not simply for the reason that the term did not exist in the earlier period. Rather, it was because the context, the discursive space, and the social-political arrangements for the emergence of the category were just not there.3 By the same token, I think it is possible to speak of a post-history of communalism, because that context and discursive space no longer exist. What I wish to present here is not a subsequent (or late) examination of the history of communalism, but an examination of a history of so-called religious or sectarian violence at a time when the term communalism’ no longer readily applies. This is an exercise that we might undertake with some advantage, for it speaks of major transformations in political relations and activities, past and present, that need to be understood—and that relate closely to the themes and concerns of this volume. This is a parochial history in some ways, as all histories must be, relating to the career of a concept and its attendant politics in a specifically South Asian context. Yet, I would submit, it has wider ramifications and implications, for this history speaks of developments that are far from being limited to that region. THE PROVENANCE OF ‘COMMUNALISM’

Communalism in the peculiar colonial usage that we adopted in South Asia referred to political movements and activities based on the pro­ claimed common interests (economic, cultural, political) of members of a religious community, in opposition to the politics and activities of members of another religious community (or communities), and to the real or imagined threat from these. Of necessity, it referred also to the condition of suspicion, fear, and hostility between people belong­ ing to different religious denominations that commonly accompanies or follows from these politics. Yet the significance of the concept was hardly exhausted by such definitions. What gives to the term ‘commu-

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nalism’ its particular resonance and force is a certain relation to ideas of nation and nationalism, to the notion of community, and to the position of the state. Let me try to separate these out—even though they are not easily separable—and deal with each of them in turn, beginning with the relation to nationalism. There are two ways in which the connection between communalism and nationalism may be seen to operate. First, the politics of communalism and that of nationalism arose in tandem, in a relation of interdependency. Communalism, communalist parties, and communalist politics were implicated centrally in a debate about nationhood—the character of the claimed political community, the emphasis to be placed on its different parts, the safeguards or special support needed or claimed by particular segments of the population, and so on. Second, communalism sought to approximate nationalism. It appeared in a similar guise. Perhaps, communalist politicians had no choice in this matter. Since the triumph of nationalism in nineteenth century Europe, and the emergence of the nation-state as the sole legitimate form for the political existence of people in the twentieth, all political movements that have claimed the rights of historical communities have had to cast themselves in the likeness of national movements. This explains also why communalist movements of this kind have gone on, in many cases, to demand the creation of separate provinces and states; and why no communalist or communalist party ever describes itself as communalist. On the contrary, one party’s communalism commonly appears as another’s nationalism. I suggested in my book on the construction of sectarian politics in colonial north India that communalism’ was a category of colonialist knowledge.4 The irony of the situation was that anti-colonial com­ mentators and publicists, fighting for the establishment of an Indian nation-state, did more than anyone else to propagate it. The category of communalism appeared in colonial discourse as a means of dealing with the political needs and aspirations of the subject population, and of making sense of the new kinds of plural societies that colonial rulers encountered in the colonies. In many of these, major world religions continued to exist side by side, and religion remained a major presence in daily life as well as public affairs. While the latter was not entirely dissimilar to the situation in Europe and North America, the former opened up a whole new world and new possibilities of interpretation— often leading to curious propositions about a hierarchy of religions, as

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well as about the Otherness and the lack of ‘development’, not to say primitive character, of many of these societies. Anti-colonial nationalists, in their turn—schooled in the virtues of European style nationalism, and in European histories that presented rosy accounts of the complete separation of church from state in their countries—used the category of communalism to portray a certain position in debates on the political future of these societies. They appropriated the term and exploited it as a weapon to tar the politics of those who made diverse claims on behalf of different religious, ethnic, or caste communities. In India, the politics of religion (as it was sometimes called) came to be labelled as communalism from the 1920s, and communalism came to be represented as the chief obstacle to nationalism. Sectional demands for a share in public affairs and state power, based on the alleged interests of people of particular religious denominations, began to be branded ‘anti-national’. Nationalism was declared as modern and progressive, reflecting the spirit of the age. Communalism was its opposite—reactionary and backward-looking, even a relic of ages past. The snag was that what was communalism to some was nationalism to others. This was after all the claim that Jinnah and the Muslim League made on behalf of the subcontinent’s Muslims in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, one might argue, it was the nationalist claim, rather than a communalist one, that the establishment of the independent state of Pakistan in 1947 seemed to uphold. A similar claim was made by the right-wing Hindu parties that gained power in India in the late 1990s: and it is notable that a wide array of commentators described them in the terms they themselves favoured—as Hindu nationalists. For all their violent and unfortunate consequences—and these were not trifling—communalisms, no less than nationalisms, had their life in the context of a vigorous debate about political futures— Indian, Nigerian, Malaysian, Sri Lankan, or other. What was called communalism acquired its meaning in a contest over the nature of an imagined, national community. What was the character of that political community to be? Should it be unitary or federal; what power should the federating units have; what was to be the basis of elections and the delimitation of constituencies? What should be the language (or languages) of the nation, its history, its culture, its flag, and its anthem? What its civil code, marriage and property laws, and character of the economic development that it would seek?

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Should there be special safeguards for minorities and marginalized communities—in education, public service, the electoral arena, and in the matter of religious and cultural practices? Recall that, in the subcontinent, the term communalism was commonly applied in colonial times to describe the conflict between Brahmans and non-Brahmans and the emergence of a powerful non­ Brahman movement in southern India. Likewise, the debate on the communal question at the Round Table Conferences of 1930-2 and the Communal Award that followed was concerned with the political weightage to be granted not only to religious minorities and the Anglo-Indians, but also to the so-called Untouchables (the Scheduled Castes and Tribes of the Government of India Act of 1935 and the Indian Constitution of 1950). What was at issue in this politics of communalism was the place that would be found for diverse social­ political communities in the affairs of the larger political community, itself claiming the status of nation-statehood. Today, that relation to nationalism has disappeared. For one thing, nationalism no longer inhabits the same kind of imaginative moment. This is mainly because nation-states, even pretend nation-states (if you will allow the term, although I recognize that it applies to almost all existing nations and states), are well entrenched—as states. In our times, therefore, different versions of communalism have either become nationalisms in their own right, or else, they have to function in a far more subordinate and defensive capacity than before, in the shadow of a dominant nationalism. The Indian example illustrates the point very well indeed. All nation-states announce their birth with the unfurling of a national flag, the singing of a national anthem, and the visual representation of the national territory. Along with that, there is the gradual, and sometimes not so gradual, unveiling of an officially sanctioned account of the national past, culture, good and the national interest. Disseminated in the press and on the platform, on television, and in textbooks, these often turn out to be only a little less sacred and unchallengeable than national flags, anthems, and maps. With the establishment of the independent state of India, the boundaries of the new national community were clearly established, and marked and described in official maps. Its origins were now portrayed as being already known: at the dawn of history; in the achievements of the Mauryas, the Guptas, and the Mughals; in the

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beautiful languages and poetry of early modern bhakti traditions; and in the glorious anti-imperialist struggle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its exceptional culture was celebrated: unity in diversity’; the coexistence of Hinduism and Islam and other world religions; the spirit of accommodation (as if this were unique to this land, and as though there wasn’t a great deal of counter-evidence); and even the existence of secularism’ from a hoary past. Its constitution was held up as an extraordinary achievement, which it certainly was in important respects, and was represented as the infallible foundation of its democracy and secularism. Steadily, and almost unwittingly, we have seen in India a considerable consensus develop over many of these propositions among circles that have had a major influence over the regulation of public life: political parties, the national media, and leaders of industry, commerce, and intellect. Numerous issues relating to the nature of the national political community, and the rights and obligations of its constituent communities, continue to be debated, but the debate takes place largely within the confines of this national’ consensus’: this is a Hindu country, even if only by virtue of numbers; it is secular—and has always been; Kashmir and the Northeast are an integral part of the nation—and have always been; the Constitution provides foolproof guarantee against any injustice to minorities; and so forth. The vocabulary of communalism, communal movements, com­ munal riots, and such terms, has not altogether disappeared, of course.5 But wherever it is employed, it conveys a sense of being in­ creasingly tired. Its use continues in part because earlier debates and conflicts (relating to the place of different minority’ communities in the political arrangements of the nation) still go on; in part because of intellectual inertia—because this is a language that is understood and apparently evokes, at least, some understanding. At the same time, communalist (or shall we say sectional) demands that appear as a threat to the position and politics of those in power are now much more easily and unhesitatingly condemned as anti-national’, seces­ sionist’ (which they may or may not be), and more recently ‘terrorist’. I shall return to some of the more recent examples of change in the state’s political vocabulary, and to their significance for contemporary politics. Before that, we need to dwell a little on the character of the communities that were (and sometimes still are) supposed to be the agents of communalism.

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SUBALTERNIZED COMMUNITIES: US AND THEM

The notion of the community, which was crucially linked to the concept of communalism, requires some unpacking. It is important to note that the communities we speak of, as participants in a debate about the character of public life, must already be politicized in order to appear as communities. Whether these be religious, regional, caste­ based, or indeed national, they are the politicized communities of the colonial and postcolonial periods. For, until that is condition, the socalled communities’—of religion, caste, language, whatever—would appear to be rather too differentiated and unorganized to enter into the kind of dialogue or conversation in the legal-constitutional domain of the state that we have referred to above. What marked out all such communities in the era of anti-colonial struggle was an aspiration to citizenship and democratic rights. What marked some of them more than others was an anxiety about the conditions of this future citizenship, leading them to organize and agitate to turn those conditions into the most favourable ones possible. This gave force to what was called communalism and communalist demands. The situation has since changed. While the ideals and images, policies and practices ofthe nation and its state continue to be contested, the nation-state now exists as a powerful and tangible, material, intellectual and spiritual force. It lays down altered terms of debate, changing the boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable, moral and immoral, legal and illegal. What emerges in this context are new notions of good’ and ‘bad’ community. The nation of course becomes the supreme example of the good. People may still belong to sundry communities, apart from the nation, but permission to belong and to proclaim such belonging depends to a large extent on the ‘lesser’ community’s conformity or lack of conformity with the current state of the national project or, to put it more bluntly, on whether it is seen as threatening to the nation(al) community or not. Members of marginal, subordinated, or politically disadvantaged communities, who were, and often continue to be, the proponents of communalist standpoints and the makers ofcommunalist demands, are now formally citizens. At the same time, they are seen as belonging to pre-constituted, and sometimes constitutionally recognized, ‘minority communities’. These communities continue to be participants in political affairs, but in conditions that are very different from those

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that obtained before. They come to be treated as fixed entities, and become the object of governmentality in novel nationalist’ ways. In moments of heightened political tension or agitation, the citizenship of men and women of these communities may easily become suspect. Which particular groups are affected depends on the issues involved. The case of the Muslims of India is paradigmatic: for, given the partition of the subcontinent, they have lived almost continuously since 1947 under the shadow of a suspicion—the suspicion of harbouring loyalties to Pakistan. During times of tension, the members of minority communities are always in danger of losing their rights as citizens, and of emerging as populations’ to be managed by the government. Curfews, imposed neutrally over particular territories, towns, and villages, affect these suspect citizens more than any others;6 surveillance procedures apply primarily to them. The point about citizens’ and populations’, as bodies of people who are very differently treated, requires some clarification. It will help for this purpose to say a word or two about the relation of modern states, colonial and postcolonial, to the populations they govern. The colonial state everywhere worked with a sharp distinction between subjects’ and citizens’. The former, who comprised the vast majority of colonial populations and indeed of the population of the world until the middle of the twentieth century, were in the colonial dispensation supposedly being trained for the conferral of citizenship—presumably in the rather distant future. They were, in Foucauldian terms, populations to be disciplined, educated, fashioned so that they might be infused with increased productive capacity and a greater respect for law and order. The early nationalist states of the postcolonial era announced their arrival by granting citizenship rights to all who inhabited their territories, with the occasional question mark that we have noticed over the status of marginal individuals or groups. These were classically developmental states, under which all citizens were to be made ready (and equal) for the modern world. The focus was very much on education and on all round economic growth, as a means to establishing the essential underpinnings of democracy and development. By contrast, the neo-liberal regime of our own time appears to have reverted to a colonial conception of productive citizens’ on the one hand, who provide the elements of enterprise and modernity in

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our societies, and populations’ on the other, lacking in resources, education, and initiative, and to that extent unworthy of the privileges accorded to proper citizens.7 This is not a developmental state any more. Indeed, terms like poverty, the poor, universal literacy, and economic democracy (or economic and social justice), have largely disappeared from ruling class discourse. This version of the postcolonial state proceeds to render large sections of the population as fundamentally without rights. ‘The rights of... the poorest and longest oppressed in the land’8 no longer appear quite as important as they once did. This is one reason why any proposition about continuing struggles between different visions of the imagined national community now appears anachronistic. Another is that it does not seem to be the case any longer that the rights of the individual’ (poor or otherwise) are quite so centrally at stake everywhere in the world, in the continuing political debates about justice and the good life. Rather, the world seems to be divided again, more and more—both internationally and within nation­ states—between individuals who are citizens, members of civil society, capable of independent thought and action, and populations that are not any of these things: between the Western world and the world of Islam, between Israelis and Arabs, between Hindus and Muslims, and so on. These are effectively different worlds, with different kinds of inhabitants, in which the practice of governance functions in very different ways. The point is perhaps best illustrated by the manner in which suffering and loss is reported in the context of natural disasters or political conflict in different parts of the globe. Consider the official response to the lives lost in the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. One aspect of this response that I found especially moving was the refusal for a good length of time to provide any estimate of the total number of people killed. ‘Whatever the final number turns out to be’, the mayor of New York, Rudolf Giuliani declared, ‘it will be too much to bear’. There was in this refusal to hurriedly name a figure an important sign of respect for the dead, and for the very large number of people who had lost loved ones. For those in the position of the latter, it goes without saying, even one death is always ‘too much to bear’. It may help to stay with this sensitive suggestion to reflect upon how governments and publicists have represented and understood situations of brutal violence in other parts of the world.

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In the Western press and Western writings more generally, a clear distinction emerged in reporting of this kind between our’ casualties and ‘theirs’, between the handful of Americans reported lost in the ‘war on terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the ‘uncounted’ natives; between the ‘hundreds’ of Palestinians killed in the latest intifada and the two (or 10, 16, or 32) Israelis. In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US Secretary of State, was asked in a television interview what she thought about the allegation that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. While it was ‘a very hard choice’, she said, ‘all things considered, we think the price is worth it’. In 2002, US officials made an argument of a similar kind on the question of civilian casualties or collateral damage’ in the ‘action in Afghanistan. Pentagon spokespersons sought to clear themselves of responsibility by saying that they did not keep track of civilian casualties in that country. At the same time, the commander of the US forces there said that he did not wish to prejudge the results of an investigation ordered, apparently on the intervention of Hamid Karzai (then the leader of the interim government in Afghanistan), into a raid that killed at least 15 Afghans. ‘The thing I don’t think we’ll do is be quick to rush to a judgement that takes as truth information that may be provided by sources who do not share the same value of human life that we share in this country"9 This is a distinction—between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’, mere ‘bodies’ as opposed to ‘human beings’—that human beings have long lived with. It is a distinction that is made, quite unconsciously, in the visual representation of the war in Afghanistan, or Palestine, or Rwanda, or Zimbabwe—where the ‘madness’, the collective horror, the dirt and the utter hopelessness of the other’ is regularly counterposed to the individuality, the identifiable wounds, the pain, and the suffering of survivors among ‘us’. Think of the number of occasions on which we are faced with pictures of mourning relatives and bystanders, of surviving toddlers participating in a funeral; or, to take a different example, the long series of moving obituaries published by the New York Times of those who lost their lives in the attacks on the World Trade Center—an extraordinary number of them (as one colleague pointed out with fascination) apparently sports persons, all of them, in their different ways, brimming with life and hope and desire and laughter, and bringing these qualities to the lives of others. These are portraits of people who live on: alive even when they are dead. Compare this with pictures of captured Taliban prisoners, or

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the victims of Hutu atrocities in Rwanda—pictures of faceless hordes, lifeless, wild, and indistinguishable (even when photographed alone): dead even when they are technically alive. The point is simple: our losses, our suffering, our individuality, our history, are narratable—and must be narrated. ‘Theirs’ belong to a world that is frankly incomprehensible, that is in a sense simply like that. This is a world that evidently has no history; there is nothing here that we can recognize as politics, and individuality counts for little, if anything. This applies to populations’ within nation-states— the Muslims of Gujarat are only one recent examples—as much as it applies to populations’ seen from afar, in distant countries. Witness, one can almost hear expert’ right-wing commentators say in India as in the US, the identical burqas of all those Muslim women, and the identical beards of all their men. These are populations that were once given the status of communi­ ties’, and were allowed their say in debates about political futures. The state now returns to them with a vengeance—to destroy them as moral/ethical communities and networks of sustenance—because they are collectivities with ‘different’ (not to say, abnormal) values, customs, and practices; people with a peculiar (and obviously unwarranted) sense of independence and pride. It seeks to ‘discipline’ these collectivities in the midst of much rhetorical talk of richness and variety, the co-existence of cultures and multiculturalism. These are populations that are viewed—once more?—as people (at home or abroad) who are utterly unlike us, modern individuals: bodies of people that are not used to the practice of reason, and that cannot control their passions or their primitive beliefs. This is not altogether different from the condemnation of communalists’ and communalist politics’ found in high nationalist discourse in the era of anti-colonial agitations, but this representation of difference, and of different political perspectives, now has other names and other political consequences. A PARTISAN AND ‘SECRET’ STATE The point about other names and consequences may be clarified by turning to the last facet of the communalist (and post-communalist) world that I want to consider—the resources and position of the state. Implicit in much of what I have said above is a recognition of the significantly altered situation of the state in recent times. Two aspects of this altered situation should perhaps be underlined. First, there is

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clear evidence of the increased, and increasing, power and reach of the state and its various arms—military, police, bureaucracy, intelligence. Even as the sovereignty of numerous states has been eroded in the context of globalization, their ability to maintain ‘discipline’ in terms increasingly dictated by a new international order, but willingly accepted by diverse national elites, is in many instances greatly enhanced. National governments and ruling classes continue to specify the rules and conditions of political activity and debate within their borders. However, many of them do so more and more openly in concert with what might be called an international ruling class. The anti-imperialist content of twentieth century nationalisms has largely disappeared, even from the ex-colonial countries of Asia and Africa. The nation-states of what were called the First, the Second, and the Third Worlds seem now to work together to keep up production for the international economic order, to hold labour costs down, and to prevent major threats to security and property. Secondly, the contemporary state and its several arms appear far less neutral, or at any rate, far less cautious about adopting a partisan position in relation to differences and conflicts within the countries that they govern. It bears reiteration that the modern state made its appearance as a more or less self-consciously ‘neutral’ force—that stood above society, abstracted from it. For a long period in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the state’s claim to neutrality formed a large part of the argument for the perpetuation of colonial government in Asia and Africa. It is a claim that many postcolonial regimes have continued to put forward with even greater insistence, and for a while in democracies like India and Sri Lanka, perhaps with somewhat greater success. Once the republic was in place, elected representatives and governments were meant—in classical republican terms—to speak not for specific constituencies, but for the nation as a whole. They were supposed to represent the abstract will of the republic, rising above the fray of sectional interests, including the interests of class, community, and region. So the theory went! In fact, as subsequent events in both India and Sri Lanka have shown, history has taken a rather different path, and it has been difficult to sustain the myth of an abstract national will or a universally agreed national interest. Electoral imperatives, the need for rapid accumulation of wealth and power (whenever opportunity has arisen), the aim of making good quickly and at any cost, all of this has led over time to the consolidation of ruling class power through the

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whipping up of a diehard majoritarianism. Since the 1980s, in India, and somewhat earlier in Sri Lanka, arguments have been advanced about how the Hindu majority and the Sinhala majority, respectively, must unite to avoid being overwhelmed by the minority, how the minority (tied to international forces of various kinds) must not be allowed to hold the nation to ransom, and how it must no longer be appeased. In India, the immediate context for this was provided by the collapse of earlier constituencies (most notably, perhaps, the alliance between the highest castes and the lowest, along with the Muslims, that had brought the Congress back to power in several elections), and by a new politics of coalitions, black money, and muscle power. In this situation, Hindu right-wing forces—but not these forces alone, for the entire political spectrum has shifted to the right, in India as in other parts of the world—were able to generate a heightened rhetoric of ‘natural’ national unity, based not on a political vision and programme for the future, but on religious symbols described as the nations fundamental heritage. The new commercialism and the much more evident flattening of cultures that came with liberalism contributed to this. An increasingly influential group of non-resident Indians, seeking identity and self-definition, became ardent, long­ distance nationalists—fervent supporters of the battle for new Sikh and Muslim homelands and the destruction of a disused (but beautiful) sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya—not on the basis of any historical debate or political struggle, but rather of the most readyto-hand and reduced symbols of nation, community, and religion.10 Given such support, and the backing of well-entrenched and welltrained police and para-military forces, on the one hand, and of major international states on the other, and faced by widely scattered, poor, and largely unarmed minorities, right-wing parties in India have sought to reinvent the nation-state in a chauvinist Hindu image and to cow down the minorities—though their success has been limited in the border regions of Kashmir and the Northeast. Along with Trades Unions, secessionist movements, and other disruptive opposition moves (all equally disliked by the new globalizing and liberalizing international order), minority groups were quickly condemned as anti­ national for any ‘deviation’ from the so-called national ‘mainstream’, be this in a dispute over the site of the temple/mosque in Ayodhya or over the results of an India-Pakistan cricket match. Muslims in India, and increasingly the minute community of Christians too,

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came under suspicion because of their links to "foreign (anti-national) religions, hence "foreign (anti-national) forces, and more recently in the case of the Muslims to what is widely proclaimed as a worldwide network of terrorism. All this has substantially altered the world of communalism. In the new circumstances, the state has become a much more active (and partisan) party to ‘communal’ conflicts that, once upon a time, it was supposed to have mediated. If communalism refers to a state of conflict and negotiation between two or more politicized religious communities, the state—or, at least, important parts of the state—have in recent times acted rather like a politicized religious community themselves. And the "communal riot’, once thought of as the quintessential expression (and upshot) of communalist politics, has given place to a very different kind of violence. On the question of partisanship, let me cite the testimony of a senior officer of the Indian Police Service. "Since 1960, in almost all [communal] riots that have occurred’, he writes, "the same picture has been painted in the same colours, a picture of a helpless and often inactive police force that allowed wailing members of the minority community to be looted and killed in its presence, that remained a mute witness to some of their members being burnt alive’. ‘For an average policeman, he goes on to say, "collection of intelligence is limited to gathering information about the activities of communal Muslim organizations. It is not easy to make him realize that the activities of Hindu communal organizations also come under the purview of anti-national activities.... Similarly, preventive arrests, even in riot situations in which Muslims are the worst sufferers, are restricted to members of the minority community’.11 As to "communal riots’, it is necessary to note that the worst examples of violence against minority religious communities, over the last two decades and more, fail to fit the description in any commonly understood sense of the term. It is unnecessary to recount details of the carnage that occurred in Delhi in 1984, in Bombay and other places in 1992-3, or in Gujarat in 2002. Suffice it to say that, in these as in other instances, hundreds if not thousands of people from the majority community congregated at will for days (sometimes weeks) on end, to attack and loot the persons, property, and wealth of the targeted community. The habitations, houses and shops, vehicles and machines, fields and handpumps, belonging to members of the minority community were identified and marked out in advance,

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with the assistance of electoral registers, tax rolls, census data, and local informants. The attacks took place with the acquiescence (if not the active encouragement) of the police, the political leadership, and even leading ministers in the government, and with almost no fear of counter-attack or loss of life (since the police is ready at hand to ward off and shoot any counter-attackers), or indeed of punishment (since the police and the existing political leadership is on their side, and even the judiciary seems to be mindful of the views of the political leadership, if not in agreement with them). These were certainly not ‘riots’. They were organized political massacres, feeding on and fanning the hatred and prejudices of a growing segment of the majority community; pogroms; and examples of a new brand of state terrorism. The ‘war on terrorism’ following the events of 11 September 2001, has provided a fresh justification for this kind of violence. Gujarat provides the most brazen example. Not surprisingly, there has been little discussion of communalism’ in this instance, even if the term surfaces periodically in the writings and in oral commentary on the Gujarat violence. Far more sinister has been the widespread talk of ‘terrorism’—in relation to Muslims alone. A press note issued by the state government after the attack at Godhra on 27 February 2002, described the torching of the train and the killing of passengers as a ‘pre-planned inhuman collective violent act of terrorism’. Chief Minister Narender Modi spoke of Pakistan’s proxy war and its clandestine role ... behind the Godhra genocide’, and referred to the latter as ‘the pre-planned collective terrorism against Gujarat’. In his turn, one might add, he has been hailed as ‘the Sardar opposed to terrorism’.12 Six months later, following what might much more reasonably be described as a terrorist attack on a Hindu temple in Gandhinagar, the then Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, declared from the Indian Ocean island of Male where he was attending a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) meeting that terrorism was on its last legs’, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were finished, and there was a global war against terrorism in which India was fully playing its part.13 The rhetoric of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld has clearly captured the imagination of interested parties in many places. Since September 2001, the ‘war against terrorism’ has become an instrument in the hands of numerous powerful groups and states in different parts of the world (India, Israel, and Russia among them) to settle old scores

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and make easy (financial and political) gains. Opposition to the steps they have taken in doing this has been muted at best, and there has been little challenge to the nationalist, and even ‘humanitarian, arguments advanced in justification of their actions. States and bureaucracies appear to have increasing power to do what they want, largely unquestioned—because of their invisibility, their access to information, and an easy recourse to arguments about the sanctity of national interests, above all, the interest of national security. This has clearly been the case in the US, and it has been a notable condition of politics in that other great democracy’, India, too, where opposition— especially from the organized mainstream political parties—is often restricted to condemnations of government for its poor timing or its failure to follow ‘nationalist’ policies (such as anti-terrorist measures, or nuclearization!) vigorously enough. Anyone or any group that mounts a challenge to the proclaimed national interest may be denounced as an enemy’. Commonly, the charge is laid on members of‘minority’ communities that tend to have ‘foreign links. No particular argument is required to demonstrate their enemy status. It comes from their very being, their ‘foreign religions or languages, by the mosques they congregate in, by their links with people (sometimes relatives) in other countries, and by the simple fact of loud, and repeated, assertion. These become enemies and terrorists, almost by definition, wreckers of peace in the nation (‘in every country they inhabit’, it is quietly said), and wreckers of the nation. It is up to them—as it was up to Saddam Hussein—to prove that they no longer harbour weapons and drugs, that they have given up criminal intentions, and that they will now begin to be like us. As a result of the rapid advance of such arguments about threats to our nations, frequently portrayed as threats to civilization, the ground for any politics of ‘difference’, not to say the practice of democracy in general, has shrunk considerably.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS In the plural societies of many parts of Asia and Africa, where neither absolutist nor conquest state had emerged in the early modern period to homogenize religious traditions and cultural practices, the politics of communalism—or what has been called communalism—arose in the colonial period to become a major factor in political debates. Such a politics was often seen, justifiably, as disruptive of emerging struggles for nationhood and independence, especially since there was always

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a danger that communalist campaigns would sprout separate national movements of their own. But movements of this kind were also a part of emerging political contests in these complex, multilayered, plural societies—one element in the negotiation of political futures, the outcome of which was hardly predictable in advance. The increasingly centralized nationalist states that have arisen all over the world since then have altered the political equation almost beyond recognition. The statist chauvinisms that have often followed the establishment of these nation-states have refused to enter into any dialogue with the kinds of sectional, sectarian, or cultural movements that were once labelled communalist’. In addition, the collapse of socialism’, as it has been called, the emergence of a unipolar world, and the onset of an aggressive globalization, has further eroded the grounds of contestatory democracy. ‘Not so very long ago’, Jean Paul Sartre wrote in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnes de la Terre in 1961, ‘the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives’.14 A half-century later, the distinction between ‘human beings’ and ‘natives’, or what we might call citizens’ and ‘populations’, is beginning to reappear in insidious ways, almost as sharply as it did during the European conquest and colonization of large parts of the planet. And the space for the imagination of alternative futures, and for the very recognition of difference, appears to be shrinking once again. The world is perhaps a messier place than it was 150 years ago. There are many more sovereign nation-states, or at least nominally sovereign states; the vast majority of people are recognized as citizens of one state or another (even if there is, once more, an increasing number of refugees and migrants without any surety of this); and there is increased talk, in many countries, of multiculturalism, of the contributions of privileged migrants and diasporic communities, and of the fundamental rights of all men and women in all parts of the globe. It is in the rhetoric of sovereignty and human rights, in the disorder of our political world, and in the messiness of our search for new intellectual/political vocabularies, that we may still find ground for struggle. NOTES 1. Symposium on ‘The Dynamics of Diversity: Narratives of Pluralism in South Asian History’, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (22 February

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2003). I am grateful to Manu Bhagavan and other organizers and participants for their comments and suggestions. 2. C.A. Bayly, April 1985, ‘The Pre-History of “Communalism”? Religious Conflict in India, 1700-1860’, Modern Asian Studies, 19(2), pp. 177-203. 3. See Gyanendra Pandey, 1990, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 15-16. 4. Ibid., p. 6. 5. While this is true for some South Asian countries like India and Bangladesh, in others like Sri Lanka, a different vocabulary of ethnicity’ and ethnic conflict’ emerged fairly early as American social science took a new hold from the 1960s. 6. See the powerful testimony of the Indian police official Vibhuti Narain Rai in his fictionalized 1987, ShaharMein Curfew, Delhi, 1987. 7. It is necessary to note that there is generally no escape from these populations—unwelcome, and sometimes illegal or barely legal, immigrants; slum dwellers, restless minorities, and so on. They cannot easily be moved out: indeed, they have often been invited in—to meet the needs of rapid industrialization, to service the growth of the cities and the middle classes, to provide essential menial or technical support. All that the state can do, therefore, is to try and ‘discipline’ them in such a way as to maintain, and if possible improve, conditions for the security and rapid economic advance of the country and its citizens (that is to say, of its more prosperous and privileged classes). 8. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, p. 261. 9. New York Times, 8 February 2002, p. A14 (emphasis added). 10. For the Gujarat case, see Upendra Baxi’s comments on ‘cosmopolitan versions of Gujarati asmita, 24 August 2002, ‘The Second Gujarat Catastrophe’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(34), p. 3523. 11. Vibhuti Narain Rai, 2002, ‘An Open Letter to my Fellow Police Officers’, reprinted in Siddharth Varadarajan (ed.), Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, pp. 211-12. 12. Editors Guild Fact Finding Mission Report, p. 13. 13. The Hindu, 25 September 2002. 14. Preface to Frantz Fanon, 1963, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, p. 7.

CONTRIBUTORS

Manu Bhagavan is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY). Faisal Devji is University Reader in modern Indian history at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, UK.

Syed Akbar Hyder is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University, USA.

Paula Richman is William H. Danforth Professor in the Department of Religion at Oberlin College, USA. Yasmin Saikia is Associate Professor in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Ajay Skaria is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, USA. Chitralekha Zutshi is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.