The Caravan - May 2020 8688065543, 9529020226

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Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath

VOLUME 12 • ISSUE 5 MAY 2020

cover story / history 28

The Forgotten Holocaust Witnesses remember the Bengal famine 77 years later kushanava choudhury

28

The Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated 3 million people died, is one of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century. It was the mass destruction of a population, with millions of witnesses. It should be impossible to write of the Second World War, or of India’s Independence, without stories of the famine. And yet, the famine simply does not inform our sense of collective history or our national imagination in quite the same way as, say, the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh or the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The names of the famine victims are not etched into any monument, nor written down in any archive. But in the villages of the two Bengals, across the largest delta in the world, sits what could perhaps be the world’s biggest living archive. There are hundreds of thousands of voices, waiting to be heard.

perspectives agriculture

16 Bitter Harvest

Farmers suffer under the coronavirus lockdown

ramandeep singh mann law

19 Prison Outbreak

How India is endangering vulnerable prisoners amid the COVID-19 pandemic

shivkrit rai and nipun arora health

22 The Long Arm of Hunger

62

History suggests deprivation will be an ally to COVID-19, and both must be stopped

nikhil eapen education

25 Lessons Not Learnt

religion

62 Voices of Reason

The rationalists fighting superstition amid growing threats of violence

The World Bank’s disturbing push to privatise Indian education

archana nathan

anjela taneja MAY 2020

3

books

the lede

8 arts

8 Dalit Rhapsody

76

An anti-caste collective challenges oppression through music

s senthalir

politics

76 The Strange Case of Barrister Savarkar

arts

12 False Steps

What Savarkar’s early autobiography reveals about his thinking

abhay regi

The commercial roots of a “traditional” folk dance

mahima jain communities

14 Streets Behind

Rome’s homeless population bears the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic

lorenzo fargnoli and maurizio franco

88 98

literature

88 Blind Spots editor’s pick 4

98

Caste in contemporary Muslim autobiographies

shireen azam THE CARAVAN

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contributors THE LEDE

8 12 14

S Senthalir is an independent journalist based in Chennai. He is currently working as an external consultant for the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Mahima Jain is a Bangalore-based independent journalist and editor. She writes on environment, gender, culture and socioeconomic issues. Lorenzo Fargnoli is an independent journalist and a member of the Permanent Journalism Centre, a consortium of freelance journalists. He has collaborated with publications such as L’Espresso, Left and Fanpage. Maurizio Franco is an independent journalist and a member of the Permanent Journalism Centre. He has collaborated with publications such as L’Espresso, Slate and FQ Millennium.

PERSPECTIVES

16 19

REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS

28 Kushanava Choudhury is a former books editor at The Caravan. He is the author of The Epic City: The World On The Streets of Calcutta. Soumya Sankar Bose is a photographer represented by Experimenter Gallery. He has previously received grants from Magnum Foundation, India Foundation for the Arts and Goethe-Insitut, among others. He lives and works in Kolkata. 62 Archana Nathan has worked as a journalist for the past six years in Bangalore.

BOOKS

76 Abhay Regi is an editorial fellow at The Caravan. 88 Shireen Azam is a freelance writer. She is due to start a PhD, on caste among Indian Muslims, at the University of Oxford later this year.

COVER

Photo: Soumya Sankar Bose for The Caravan

Ramandeep Singh Mann is a farmer and activist working in Haryana and Punjab. Shivkrit Rai is a law researcher in the Delhi High Court. Nipun Arora is a lawyer practising in the Delhi High Court and trial courts. 22 Nikhil Eapen is a freelance journalist and a researcher at Equidem, a labour-rights organisation. 25 Anjela Taneja leads the work on education, health and inequality at Oxfam India. She is one of the founder members of the RTE Forum, India’s largest education network, and coordinates the Fight Inequality Alliance in India.

Note on cover image: Kunti Manna is a survivor of the Bengal famine of 1943. Her daughter died last year, age 82. She witnessed history, she said. She remembered the 1942 Midnapur rebellion, the martyrdom of the revolutionary Matangini Hazra, and hiding from the police in a loft full of dried dung when they came to seize her cattle. Correction: “Speaking in Tongues,” published last month, inaccurately stated that Konkani was primarily spoken by the Bunts. The community primarily speaks Tulu.

edited, printed & published by Paresh Nath on behalf of Delhi Press Patra Prakashan Pvt. Ltd. E-8, Jhandewalan Estate, New Delhi - 110055 and printed at PS PC Press Pvt. Ltd., DLF 50, Industrial Area, Faridabad, Haryana - 121003 and published at Delhi Press Patra Prakashan Pvt. Ltd. E-8 Jhandewalan Estate, New Delhi - 110055 editorial, advertisement & publication office E-8, Jhandewalan Estate, Rani Jhansi Marg, New Delhi - 110055, Phone: 41398888, 23529557 email: [email protected] Other Offices ahmedabad: 31, Ground Floor, Narayan Chamber, Nehru Bridge Corner, Ashram Road, Ahmedabad - 380009 bangalore: Flat No. 001, Ravi Kiran Apartments, No. 12, Plain Street, Off Infantry Road, Bangalore - 560001 chennai: 14, First Floor, Cison’s Complex, Montieth Road, Chennai - 600008 Phone: 044 - 28554448

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editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior associate editor Roman Gautam deputy political editor Praveen Donthi books editor Maya Palit creative director Tanvi Mishra senior assistant editors Martand Kaushik and Puja Sen copy editors Ajachi Chakrabarti and Akash Poyam web editor Surabhi Kanga assistant editors (web) Arshu John and Tusha Mittal contributing editors Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury, Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume, Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat Peer, Samanth Subramanian and Salil Tripathi staff writers Atul Dev, Nikita Saxena, Sagar and Kaushal Shroff reporting fellow (north india) Tushar Dhara reporting fellow (government) Nileena MS reporting fellow (south india) Aathira Konikkara reporting fellows Sunil Kashyap and Lalnunkimi Colney editorial fellows Amrita Singh, Mehak Mahajan and Abhay Regi multimedia producer Shaheen Ahmed multimedia editor Nabeela Paniyath fact-checking fellows Ahan Penkar and Armanur Rahman social-media management and engagement fellow Karishma Koshal senior software engineer Anjaneya Sivan assistant photo editor Shahid Tantray graphic designers Paramjeet Singh and Sukruti Anah Staneley hindi translators Vishnu Sharma and Parijat P editorial manager Haripriya KM editorial assistant Appu Ajith luce scholar Lewis James Page editorial interns Ankita Chauhan, Vinayak Dewan and Charu Pragya photo intern Utkarsh legal interns Abhay Singh and Padma Venkataraman multimedia intern Benjamin Brink

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I think that there will come a time when people will ask of the Indian media: What were you doing in those five years when a government came to power that spread hate and poison, that controlled the media, what were you doing then? And very few in the Indian media will be able to hold their heads up and say that we were calling the powerful to account. I think Caravan is one of the few magazines that will be able to hold its head up, if it stays afloat. And I hope it stays afloat, which is why I’m saying, please read Caravan. ARUNDHATI ROY, Author

I love reading The Caravan, because the kind of reportage it does, is away from the din of fast news, of something which is out there, every news hour to debate upon. It’s delivery of news which takes two steps back, goes back to the basic principles of reportage. Yes, sometimes I do not agree with the ideology, the ideological slant that the stories take. But overall, the way in which the reportage is done is something that one really looks forward to. SHUBHRASTHA, Political Strategist, BJP

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THE LEDE Dalit Rhapsody An anti-caste collective challenges oppression through music / Arts / s senthalir On the evening of 6 January 2018, about five thousand people trickled into the grounds of the CSI Bain Matriculation Higher Secondary School, in the Chennai neighbourhood of Kilpauk. The rows of chairs in front of the stage quickly filled up, leaving the open ground for the rest of the audience to occupy. It was the

8

Tamil month of Margazhi, which lasts from 16 December to 13 January. In Chennai, this “auspicious” month is synonymous with the Carnatic music season. Scores of music lovers from around the world, most of them from the Brahmin community, throng the concert halls of southern Chennai to listen to their favourite classical musicians, who are also mostly Brahmin.

THE CARAVAN

That year, however, a 19-member musical group called the Casteless Collective, composed of artists from marginalised communities, set the stage for a different sound. With instruments considered “impure” solely because they are played by the Dalit community during funeral processions, the band fused gaana songs—a genre of Dalit urban folk songs, sung on the streets of northern Chennai—with

the lede

rock and rap music, and belted out 20 songs of resistance in front of a mass audience. The mere physical presence of the band, all clad in tailored grey suits, sporting ostentatious hair colour and playing “inauspicious” music, made a statement: annihilate caste, and its rules that accord purity and superiority even in music. Their songs themed on beef and reservation have since gone viral, with over two million views on YouTube. After their first event, the band has performed at least fifteen shows in both urban and

Pa Ranjith envisioned an independent musical group, with gaana at its core, that would rail against all forms of oppression and convey BR Ambedkar’s ideology through music.

m palani kumar / pep collective

ww rural areas, including a three-day mega event—the Vaanam Arts Festival—in December 2018. “The objective of forming this collective was to create a counterculture,” Pa Ranjith, the renowned contemporary Tamil film director and producer who has been the driving force behind the Casteless Collective, told me. Ranjith came into the limelight for his portrayal of northern Chennai in his movies Madras and Attakathi, which represent gaana music. “There is a notion that Dalits are devoid of any cultural identity, but the reality is contrary,” he said. “Music and art are omnipresent in their lives. It is not something that they acquire, but it is inbred. It is evident when you visit a cheri—where Dalits reside—and ooru— where upper castes live—in the villages.” The idea of forming the Casteless Collective picked up pace when a gaana event was held on the last day of a week-long art exhibition organised by the Neelam Cultural Centre at Chennai’s Lalit Kala Academy in November 2017. The exhibition by the photographer Palani Kumar, titled Naanum

Oru Kuzhandhai—Even I Am a Child—portrayed the lives of manual scavengers. When the musical evening turned out to be a success, Ranjith, who runs the Neelam Cultural Centre, quickened the process to organise bigger events. Ranjith roped in the music composer and producer Tenma, who had founded the Madras Indie Collective, a space for independent artists to collaborate and showcase their work. When the two met, they were clear not to lean towards cinematic music and to retain the original rawness of independent music. Ranjith emphasised on foregrounding the casteless politics in Dalit identity. “The politics of Dalit identity is not confined to a particular caste, but is the politics of a casteless identity which is for everyone to embrace,” Ranjith told me. Tenma auditioned the artists for Ranjith’s band by breaking groupism within bands based on class and caste. Ranjith envisioned an independent musical group, with gaana at its core, that would rail against all forms of oppression and convey BR Ambedkar’s ideology through music. African-American culture has had a great influence on Ranjith. “Black Americans were able to gain wide acceptance through their music,” he said. “Rap music has had great influence on me, especially the manner in which it reflects the lives of blacks. I always thought of emulating it here with gaana music.” For gaana singers, a majority of whom work as daily-wage labourers, the music form is a legacy passed on through generations. Gaana singers are usually called on to sing an elegy, and it is common for most of them to sing after a hard day’s labour or when at leisure. Some of them—such as Chemancheri Gaana Stephen, Gana Achu, Royapuram Vinod and Gana Bala—have gone on to record albums and start YouTube channels for their music. The members of the Casteless Collective, most of whom are residents of northern Chennai, include four gaana singers: Muthu Pandian, Balachander G, Isaivani S and Chellamuthu E. The group also includes the lyricist Arivarasu Kalainesan— MAY 2020

opposite page: The 23-year-old gaana singer Isaivani performs with the band. Women are not encouraged to sing because of the prejudice that only young, unemployed and unruly men sing gaana songs.

9

popularly known as Arivu, now a famed rapper—a few trained musicians such as the folk musician Nandhan Kalaivanan, the guitarists Saheb Singh and Tenma, the drummer Manu Krishnan and percussionists Sarath Kumar and Gautham A, who played at funerals before joining the band. The Casteless Collective’s first show turned out to be a life-changing event. Being scorned at for singing gaana in their localities and humiliated for playing instruments at funerals, the loud cheers of the audience boosted their self-esteem. “I felt accepted,” Isaivani, a 23-year-old gaana singer from Royapuram in northern Chennai, told me. Before joining the band, she used to sing for the local orchestra. A majority of gaana singers are men. Women are not encouraged to sing because of the stigma associated with it and the prejudice that only young, unemployed and unruly men sing gaana songs. When Isaivani got an opportunity to be part of the Casteless Collective, she faced stiff resistance from her parents. “It was only after they watched the reception to our songs at the event that we reconciled.” She felt that she has now set an example for other female gaana singers to dream big. More women have since come forward to join the team. Arivu told me that the Casteless Collective provided him a stage to talk about issues that he feared even discussing at his college campus. “In the collective, I was able to openly talk about my liking for beef,” he said. “It freed me. The subjects that were confined to political discourses became part of our music.” Besides releasing an album, he is also writing lyrics and rapping for commercial films. Not everyone has gained from this stardom, however. The visibility and fame that these shows brought turned out to be a double-edged sword for Gautham, who plays a drum called the kattamolam. While it was a morale booster to play on the stage, the opportunities to earn his living playing at funerals dwindled. Growing up in a house located in front of a graveyard in the northern Chennai neighbourhood of Otteri, Gautham was enticed by the instrument played at funeral 10

m palani kumar / pep collective

dalit rhapsody · the lede

Balachander G, among the four gaana singers in the Casteless Collective, has gotten the opportunity to sing in Tamil movies after the band’s popularity grew.

processions. He began to play—at first, because he was mesmerised by the beats, and later, at the age of seven, to earn his living. “People would hurl abuses when I played the instrument for funerals,” Gautham said. “My parents felt proud when I stood on the stage playing for the band.” Seeing his suave attire on stage, people in his neighbourhood stopped calling him to play at funerals, which was his main source of income. The large size of the band and their antiTHE CARAVAN

caste lyrics have not made the band attractive for sponsors. Not many organisers invite them to perform shows, and many of those who make enquiries turn them down at the end. Ranjith’s Neelam Cultural Centre continues to be their only sponsor. Despite all these hurdles, Ranjith remains optimistic. “It will take some time, but we will get there,” he told me. “The collective will continue its work to not just empower the artists, but play the music of resistance.” s

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the lede

False Steps The commercial roots of a “traditional” folk dance / Arts / mahima jain Whether or not you have been to Rajasthan, you have probably seen the famous Kalbeliya dance of the desert state. Visuals of Rajasthani women twirling at a dizzying pace, their carefully crafted black skirts a circular blur, are etched into our collective memory. At festivals, in folk-dance competitions, on television, the dance can be seen everywhere. You probably believe that this is the “traditional” dance form of the nomadic tribes of the Thar. Well, not quite. According to Ayla Joncheere, a Belgian anthropologist who has spent the past decade researching the Kalbeliya community, this hugely popular dance form is an “invented tradition.” The term was first popularised by the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger in their 1983 book, The Invention of Tradition. They noted that many traditions are recent creations, often invented to express the social cohesion of nations and communities, or to legitimise an existing order, institution or authority. From the foundational myths of nation-states to the pageantry of the British monarchy, from the Kechak dance of Indonesia to the Scottish tartan, there are many examples of inventions of recent vintage masquerading as traditions passed down over many generations. The Kalbeliyas, most of whom are poor and uneducated nomads, have traditionally made a living as snake charmers and itinerant performers. They play musical instruments such as the pungi or the canga, and Kalbeliya women may sing from door to door. “They were little-known and marginalised before,” Joncheere told me. “The story of the Kalbeliya dance begins in the global music industry and India’s cultural policies in the 1980s.” The 1980s saw the evolution of “world music,” a broad genre including all forms of non-Western interna12

tional music, whether indigenous or not. Western audiences were deeply invested in the historical journeys and marginalised positions of nomadic peoples, and the idea of the gypsy as global citizen was exoticised. “If you see the documentaries of the 1980s, there is a lot of interest in the nomads of Rajasthan,” Joncheere said. “There are so many films that popularised the idea that the Romas in Europe are descendants of the Indian gypsies.” Joncheere studied several documentaries of the past forty years, such as the 1981 film Romany Trail, Latcho Drom and Ancient Poets of Rajasthan: Of Sand and Stars from the 1990s, and Cobra Gypsies and The Rajasthani Gypsy Caravan in the 2000s. All of them popularised the Indo-European link, the trope of gypsies as gifted musicians and dancers living marginalised lives. They swept their cameras from the Thar Desert to Spain, drawing links between the nomadic peoples of Eurasia and ignoring academic debates, which were inconclusive about such an origin story. The films coincided with several world-music fairs, concerts and records, which forged a thriving cultural scene that romanticised a fantastical migration—epitomised by a shared intangible culture of music and free spirits. “When I was young, living in a village just out of the city of Ghent in Belgium, I was deeply interested in gypsy dance,” Joncheere, who is now 31 years old, told me. “There were two Kalbeliya musicians and a few classes in town, and I started learning from them. It was hugely popular in Europe. Troupes toured across cities in the summers.” Her appetite whetted by this early encounter, Joncheere came to India, in 2006, to learn the Kalbeliya dance. She eventually decided to study the community itself. Having completed her PhD from the University of Ghent, she is currently pursuing post-doctoral research on the export of the Kalbeliya dance to the international market, THE CARAVAN

while also performing in a Bollywood dance group in Belgium. During her research, Joncheere found that the Kalbeliyas, like many other communities, used to dance at communal gatherings or festivals. Women, in fact, were not allowed to dance in public—until Gulabo Sapera came along. In 1981, Tripti Pandey and Hanumat Singh, who worked in the Rajasthan tourism department, spotted Sapera casually dancing outside her family’s encampment at the Pushkar camel fair. They invited her to perform at the fair. Within a year, she was performing nationally. In the 1980s, Joncheere said, the Indian government’s mantra of unity in diversity led to a focus on three categories of art—classical, folk and tribal—with everything else consigned to the “dustbin category” of entertainment. Before Sapera’s breakthrough, the Kalbeliya dance was not considered part of any of these categories. The then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s desire to market Indian culture abroad, as well as the Rajasthan government’s commercial interest in promoting tourism in the state, led to the dance being heralded as an “undiscovered” folk-art form of India’s gypsy community. In 1986, Sapera performed at a government-produced “Festival of India” tour in the United States. She would go on several international tours, billed as “the gypsy dancer from India.” In 2016, she was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honour. Sapera’s success led to more Kalbeliya women taking the stage. There are over fifty women from the community pursuing full-time careers as professional dancers, while several others perform during the tourist season. “In many large shows with a large group of Kalbeliya women, they just bring in women who rarely perform,” Joncheere told me. “They are easy to spot, often dressed in either an ill-fitting borrowed costume or a newly stitched one. They just copy the steps from the more experienced dancers who front the show.”

the lede

example, with many of them training under her. They would improvise their own steps, and popular dancers were promoted to give more performances. Many performers have said that their movements were inspired by snake-charming, which was banned in

anchit natha

Joncheere found that the women consider themselves the first generation of skilled Kalbeliya dancers. Older women of the community told her that they never performed as dancers and had not taught their daughters how to dance. Most women followed Sapera’s

MAY 2020

below: Most Kalbeliya dancers followed Sapera’s example and improvised their own steps.

1991. However, Joncheere’s research has found that this self-exoticisation was also a myth. “It is very contrived,” she said. “Not all of them were snake charmers in the first place. It is such a generalisation. Many of the Kalbeliya women don’t even come from snake-charmer families.” Joncheere added that interest among the international dance community continues to this day. “The Kalbeliya women continue to perform abroad, and a lot of foreigners come to these women to learn gypsy dance,” she said. In 2010, UNESCO included Kalbeliya dance in its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Joncheere spent years tracking down the organisations and people from the Kalbeliya community involved in the nomination process. Many of the members did not know they were signatories and were largely unaware of the dance’s “heritage” status. Moreover, only a small section of the Kalbeliya community performs the dance, and its musical repertoire is shared by other communities of Rajasthan, such as the Manganiars and Langas. Although the dance subsequently became a matter of pride and fuelled their social mobility, Joncheere’s investigation of the nomination process has revealed how the Kalbeliyas’ past was manufactured to suit the commercial interests of folklorists, the state and the tourism sector. “UNESCO is supposed to recognise intangible heritage under threat,” she said, “but the Kalbeliya dance is exactly the opposite—this is ‘heritage’ that is actually appearing and bursting out on the international stage. Now, with the UNESCO accreditation, they are restricted from improvising, which they have always done. If anything, the Kalbeliya dance is contemporary and ever evolving.” s 13

the lede

Streets Behind

marco mastrandrea

Rome’s homeless population bears the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic / Communities

/ lorenzo fargnoli and maurizio franco The buses that pass the Piazza dei Cinquecento, in front of Rome’s Termini railway station, have been running almost empty ever since the Italian capital went under lockdown, on 11 March, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The few passengers who do alight, their faces hidden behind masks, walk quickly, as though they could flee the coronavirus as they would a predator. Those who cannot run are vagrants. There are almost a hundred of them in the piazza, nearly all of them Italian. One of the vagrants, who wished to remain anonymous, told us that he used to work at a golf resort in Tuscany, a region in central Italy. After losing his job in March, he was rendered homeless. He came to Rome hoping to earn some money panhandling. When we met him, he was waiting for a permit to go back home. “We’re all nervous,” he told us. “The situation has become dangerous. Some of us have been fined by the police, and we don’t know if and 14

when volunteers will come and hand out food.” With around five thousand cases in Lazio, the region in which Rome is located, the contagion in the capital is still relatively under control when compared to northern Italy. Nonetheless, the city is almost empty. The 29 million tourists who visit every year have stopped crowding the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain. Rome’s streets, usually packed with traffic, are deserted. The millions of commuters who passed through the bus and train stations are staying home. The only people remaining on the streets are those who do not have a house in which to spend the quarantine. According to data provided by Caritas, a charitable association funded by Italian bishops, around eight thousand homeless people live in Rome. If you add the people living in economically precarious situations, such as those who own a home but live from hand to mouth, this number grows to around fourteen thousand. People who used to get by through panhanTHE CARAVAN

dling, or by earning just enough to feed themselves, face enormous hardships due to the decrees enacted to contain the pandemic. Those who did not find refuge in homeless shelters are now sleeping in hedges, on sidewalks, in shacks under ancient Roman aqueducts or, more often, around railway stations. They rely on charities to get by, but social-distancing measures have restricted even this vital source of support. “At the beginning, many associations, due to a lack of sanitary protection and authorisations, stopped providing their services,” Claudio Campani, the secretary of an association of volunteer organisations working with the homeless, told us on 6 April. “Now, the region has issued a decree that safeguards volunteers operating on the streets and

LETTER FROM ITALY

the lede

opposite page: Around eight thousand homeless people live in the Italian capital.

officially allows us to work on the street even during the lockdown.” About twenty years ago, organisations providing food to homeless people in Rome began coordinating their efforts. Over forty organisations have banded together so that no area is left unserviced, or has more than one association working in it. “In some ways, we’re exploited by the municipality, because we act as a sort of social peacemaker,” Campani, who was a volunteer at his local church before taking on his current role, said. “They can’t look after these thousands of people, but they’ve also implied that we’re on our own. They didn’t provide any sort of sanitary protection from the infection. Tomorrow, I’ll go ask the Vatican if they can give us something by way of protection.” He later told us that the Vatican authorities gave him masks, gloves and hand sanitisers, and promised to send more if needed. Stepping through one of the secondary exits of the newly renovated Tiburtina station, the second-largest station after Termini, you reach the Piazzale Giovanni Spadolini. In what is little more than a parking lot, several migrants have found shelter in recent years. Some are in transit, hoping to make it to other European countries, while others have come back after being rejected by those countries. Still others have been expelled by the network of shelters and associations set up by the Italian government to manage refugees. All of them are young, having migrated either from sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia. They sleep on makeshift beds, with grimy blankets and rags, beneath the station’s porch, huddling together to shield themselves from the cold. Some volunteers from Baobab Experience, an organisation that has been helping homeless migrants for the past five years, provide

them with food. The volunteers have put up fliers in different languages to inform the migrants about the new health regulations. “These guys have been living on the street for years,” Andrea Costa, the president of Baobab Experience, told us. “It’s not easy to explain to them the need to wash their hands when they don’t have access to basic hygiene services. We’re talking about an emergency within an emergency, a true healthcare bomb.” Costa said that volunteers from Baobab Experience and other organisations have provided the migrants masks, gloves and disinfectants. “Nobody within the local government thought about it,” he added. “The town hall’s response wasn’t enough at all,” Valentina Calderone, the director of the NGO A Buon Diritto, told us. “There is no plan for safeguarding public health, and, most importantly, people living on the streets are not getting tested. So even the setting up of spaces to accommodate homeless people who have to adhere to the lockdown are useless.” On 31 March, A Buon Diritto and other voluntary organisations wrote an open letter to Rome’s mayor, Virginia Raggi—who represents the anti-establishment Five Star Movement—and other civic authorities, asking them to work with volunteer organisations to enact a plan for Rome’s homeless population. “We’ve asked the town hall to find accommodation for all of the capital’s homeless people,” Calderone said. “The council member for social policies has promised to increase the number of spots available in hostels by five hundred, but no progress has been made in this regard. It’s politically short-sighted to think that homeless people are invisible to the virus as well.” Caterina Bocca, a member of Rome’s second municipal council as well as of Caritas, told us that the requests to the city administration had fallen on deaf ears. “Caritas’s soup kitchens have MAY 2020

recorded an increase in their workload that ranges between thirty percent and fifty percent,” she said. “This emergency has destabilised the less affluent segment of the city’s population. We need to think of when the health emergency will end and we’ll find ourselves in an economic one, when the number of poor people increases a hundred times.” Among those lucky enough to find a place in the few accommodations available was Tomasz, a Polish migrant who had been living on the streets for years. Last year, he was involved in a serious car accident, which caused him to lose his job. A friend helped him find accommodation in a shelter located in the suburbs, which was originally meant to help homeless people fend off the cold during the winter months. His stay has now been extended indefinitely because of the pandemic. Tomasz’s time on the streets has made him wary. He does not talk much with the other residents and is always afraid that his few belongings might be stolen. “There were a lot of us before,” Tomasz said. “Now, with the new regulations concerning the virus, we’re only 13. We can never leave, except for a cigarette just outside, and other people do grocery shopping for us. It’s not as terrible as when I was living on the street, but I’m worried because everything has stopped, both my physical therapy and the lawsuit regarding my accident.” Janek Gorczyca, another Polish migrant, and his Italian partner are worried too. They were both alcoholics, and the twenty years they have spent on the streets have left them with serious health problems. They are spending the lockdown as guests in a friend’s house. “I’m not afraid of getting sick,” Janek told us. “What scares me is the lack of future prospects. I used to work occasionally, helping an electrician friend of mine and doing other odd jobs. Now, I’m using the money I saved to move to the Netherlands.” s 15

PERSPECTIVES Bitter Harvest

bharat bhushan / hindustan times / getty images

Farmers suffer under the coronavirus lockdown / Agriculture

/ ramandeep singh mann

above: A man uses a hand plough to dry wheat on day fifteen of coronavirus lockdown to in Patiala. 16

At the beginning of this year, things looked good for Indian farmers. As per advance estimates of the agriculture ministry, the country was expected to produce a record 106.21 million tonnes of wheat in 2019–20, 2.61 million tonnes more than what was produced the previous year. This increase was mainly attributed to increased acreage under wheat production and optimum soil THE CARAVAN

moisture on account of a good monsoon between June and September 2019. The first blow to farmers was unseasonal rains and hail storms in mid March. Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh saw severe damage to their crops. Around seven hundred thousand acres of land under wheat cultivation was affected in Punjab alone. Even as farmers were in the process of claiming insurance and compensation from the state government, it

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announced a 21-day lockdown from 24 March to 14 April in light of the COVID-19 outbreak, which was later extended until 3 May. The economic impact of the lockdown has been so enormous that the losses caused by unseasonal rains pale in comparison. While the pandemic entered India in January this year, the government seemed to have realised the magnitude of the threat only in March. Addressing the nation at 8 pm on 24 March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave India less than four hours notice, announcing that “there will be a total ban on venturing out of your homes.” He did not explain what this meant for essential services, or what steps the government intended to take to protect people economically in a country where millions lead financially precarious lives. Ever since, the country has been simultaneously dealing with two disasters: the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown itself. The lockdown seems to have been announced without having been given a single thought to what it might mean for farmers. Initial announcements by the government did not bring up agriculture at all, even as the police went about enforcing the lockdown violently, thrashing the poor on the streets. Farmers could not attend to their fields, harvest their crops or bring these crops to mandis— markets for agricultural produce. Even as the government woke up to the calamity it had caused, a shortage of labour has since driven up costs, while a fall in demand has caused market prices to crash. While poultry and dairy farmers have been hit badly, the lockdown has critically endangered the wheat-procure-

ment season, which not only threatens farmers’ livelihoods, but might also create an artificial shortage. On 24 March, guidelines were issued on how the lockdown would be implemented. These guidelines all but ignored agriculture. The government provided a list of places exempted from the lockdown—ration shops under the public-distribution system, as well as establishments dealing with food, groceries, fruits and vegetables, dairy and milk booths, meat and fish, animal fodder. But there was no mention of farmers, mandis, agricultural labour or machinery, which made farmers anxious. When the lockdown was announced, wheat and channa were being harvested in Madhya Pradesh and mustard in Rajasthan and Haryana. The wheat harvest was due to start in the first week of April in Haryana and in the second week of April in Punjab. Vegetable farmers were also left clueless on how they would harvest their vegetables. The government failed to consider that no food would reach consumers if farmers could not harvest their crops and mandis remained shut. The lack of specificity in the exemptions also led to the harassment of farmers. The first set of guidelines on 24 March said that animal fodder sellers were exempt from the lockdown. However, the police treated only cattle fodder as exempt. Thus, Haryana’s poultry farmers found themselves out of feed and ingredients, which come from states such as Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. State authorities were left to sort out the mess created by the centre. Even as MAY 2020

state governments showed sympathy, from 24 March to 27 March, the police still came down heavily on farmers given the diktats that had been issued by the centre. On 27 March, the home ministry issued an addendum to the lockdown guidelines, which finally exempted farmers, agricultural labour and machinery, government-sanctioned mandis and agencies that buy farm produce at the minimum support price. But even after the addendum, farmers have had difficulty accessing mandis in the rural areas and most mandis remain closed. For the large part, mandis that cater to cities are open, but there too trade has reduced drastically. Farmers are

The lockdown seems to have been announced without giving a single thought to what it might mean for farmers. Initial announcements by the government did not bring up agriculture at all.

ww not getting decent prices and sometimes have no option but to dump their produce. Several instances have been reported in social and mainstream media where farmers have dumped hundreds of quintals of grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbage and other vegetables. The Financial Express reported that there was a significant fall in the arrival of crops into mandis. Data from states, excluding Maharashtra, showed that a 17

bitter harvest · perspectives total of 467,000 tonnes of onion arrived in markets during March 2020, against 1.21 million tonnes in March 2019. Similarly, the arrival of potatoes slumped from 1,234,000 tonnes to 650,000 tonnes and the arrival of tomatoes from 211,000 tonnes to 170,000 tonnes. A major issue affecting supply has been paucity of labour. Police brutality ensured that labourers were hesitant to come out for work. It forced many to flee back to their home towns or villages. These difficulties raised labour costs for farmers. The Indian Express reported that the average countrywide wholes prices of potatoes and tomatoes jumped 37.5 percent and 46.6 percent, respectively, between 1 March and 31 March. At the retail level too, prices have increased sharply during the period. Prices of potatoes increased by 30.5 percent, while tomato prices rose by 32.6 percent. This has meant that while farmers are unable to realise fair prices of their produce, consumers are still having to pay more. The lockdown hit the poultry industry badly. Not only have restaurants and hotels put down their shutters, there have been widespread rumours that COVID-19 could be transmitted through eating chicken. In Haryana, farmers were not able to sell their poultry for around twenty rupees per kilogram, less than a third of their costs. The demand for eggs fell as well, forcing farmers to reduce the price from four rupees to one or two rupees per piece. The estimated loss to the poultry industry is around two thousand crore rupees per day. There were reports that farmers had to bury alive thousands birds, unable to afford their feed costs. While the rumour had been going around since February, the central government did nothing to address it for more than a month, even as it was rubbished by the World Health Organisation in early February itself. Finally, on 30 March, the centre wrote to the Haryana government that COVID-19 is not spread by poultry or poultry products, adding that since chicken and eggs are cheap sources of proteins, the state should spread awareness and encourage their consumption. The central and state governments’ delay in rubbishing these rumors has endangered the livelihood of 18

Punjab depends on around four hundred thousand migrant labourers in its roughly four thousand mandis and grain-purchase centres. A large part of this workforce has likely taken the journey back home to states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar because of the lockdown.

ww thousands of poultry farmers across the county. The dairy sector has not gone unscathed either. A slowdown in demand resulted in cooperatives and private companies collecting less milk than usual. Conservative estimates put the decline in milk sales in the vicinity of thirty percent. On 2 April, Outlook reported that the Rajasthan Co-operative Dairy Federation Limited had cut its procurement of milk by a quarter. This artificial reduction in demand caused prices to nosedive. Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister, Ajit Pawar, admitted on record that the COVID-19 outbreak and the resultant lockdown had hit the dairy sector hard, and that almost a million litres of milk produced in Maharashtra was going unsold. The market price had fallen to between fifteen and seventeen rupees per litre, he added. To remedy the situation, the Maharashtra government decided to procure a million litres of milk per day, at R25 per litre, for the coming two months. In Hyderabad, Dodla Dairy Ltd, which would previously sell around 1.35 million litres of pouch liquid milk, curd and buttermilk per day, saw their daily sales drop to about eight hundred and fifty thousand litres. Such losses can only be attributed to the unthinking and callous way the lockdown was announced and enforced. The wheat harvest is now underway in trying circumstances. To remedy the shortfall of agricultural labour, the Haryana government has requested that the central government include harvesting as a permissible activity under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. It has also THE CARAVAN

asked for a staggered procurement of the produce, offering a standard rate of R1,925 per quintal for wheat procured between 20 April and 5 June, R1,975 for that procured between 6 May and 31 May and R2,050 for procurement in June. A similar request has been made by the Punjab government, which is expecting wheat procurement of more than 13 million tonnes. It is expected that with these incentives, farmers will not throng the mandis in one go, but will arrive in batches, which will help in maintaining social distancing there. At the time of writing this, the centre is yet to give its approval for financial incentives for farmers to stagger the arrival of the produce. With the centre’s lack of response, the Punjab government has already changed its strategy to prevent overcrowding in mandis. It now plans to increase the number of wheat-purchase centres from the existing 1,820 to 5,000. It will also issue tokens to farmers, so that they can come on allocated days to sell their crop. Several farmers from Haryana that I spoke to have myriad concerns. Most of them said they lack the financial and storage capabilities to hold out for months before they sell their produce, and that the government’s incentives are thus of little use. They have a small window for sowing crops such as sugarcane and cotton, for which they require liquidity. With a paucity of agricultural labour, they are also depending on the return of combine harvesters, many of which have been sent from Punjab and Haryana to central states such as Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra for the harvesting season. They usually return in April to harvest wheat in their home states. Unable to find spare parts, and even fuel sometimes, the combine harvesters face an arduous journey back home. Another big concern in the wheat-procurement season is the missing “mandi labor.” For example, Punjab depends on around four hundred thousand migrant labourers in its roughly four thousand mandis and grain-purchase centres. A large part of this workforce has likely taken the journey back home to states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar because of the lockdown, and is not likely to return anytime soon. Farmers are left wondering about who would unload, clean, weigh, and bag the wheat. The government must act urgently to minimise the impact of this disaster. s

perspectives

Prison Outbreak How India is endangering vulnerable prisoners amid the COVID-19 pandemic / Law / shivkrit rai and nipun arora Indian prisons are highly overcrowded. As per the last count, put out by the National Crimes Record Bureau in 2018, the country has about four hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, a number that exceeds the official capacity by about seventeen percent. Prisons in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh have among the highest occupancy rates, over fifty percent above capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic has made Indian prisons and prisoners highly vulnerable, creating an urgent need to decongest them. Therefore, on 16 March this year, a Supreme Court bench led by the chief justice, Sharad A Bobde, took suo motu cognisance of the situation. A week later, it ordered states and union territories to form high-powered committees for determining which class of prisoners could be released on parole or interim bail. Although the court delegated the responsibility of release to the committees, it suggested in the order that “the State/ Union territory could consider the release of prisoners who have been convicted or are under trial for offences for which prescribed punishment is upto 7 years or less.” The suggestion has been implemented rather blindly. In Delhi, a high-powered committee recommended the release on interim bail of undertrials in cases where the maximum punishment is ten years or less, as well as for women awaiting trial who had been in custody for 15 days or more. The committee expects about eight hundred prisoners to be released on the basis of these recommendations. Similarly, the Uttar Pradesh government decided to release on parole or interim bail eleven thousand prisoners who are in jail for offences where punishment is up to seven years. Maharashtra and Haryana, among other states, are following a similar criterion, releasing prisoners who are in jail for crimes that are considered less serious. The criteria offered as a suggestion by the apex court and then keenly appropriated by various states seems neither reasonable nor geared towards achieving its desired objective. It seems to suggest that convicts or under-trial prisoners who have been charged with minor crimes enjoy a right to health and life, whereas those who have been convicted or are awaiting trial for major offences do not. For instance, following the seven-year classification, a 70-year-old prisoner under trial

for forgery who is highly vulnerable to the infectious disease would not be eligible for interim bail, while a 25-year-old under trial for theft would be. The criterion runs contrary to those being followed internationally. The objective should be not to pardon those who have committed lesser crimes, but to take precautionary measures in light of the coronavirus pandemic. It has been well-documented that the disease has disproportionately affected older people. Those with long-running underlying medical conditions such as diabetes and heart disease are also at risk. The first criterion, thus, should be to identify and protect the most vulnerable groups, such as convicts and undertrials who are aged above sixty years and those already in poor health. Among Indian states and union territories, only Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Ladakh have identified vulnerable groups of prisoners for special attention. In April, Delhi’s committee did relax its criteria—it made under-trial prisoners for offences where the maximum punishment is up to ten years eligible for bail. However, these prisoners need to have been in custody for over six months. This mandatory six-month custody is an illogical requirement as it has nothing to do with the main objective: protecting the vulnerable from COVID-19. It significantly reduces the number of older people who would benefit from the provision. The actions of most Indian states in the area seem to have ignored recommendations of the United Nations. “Authorities should examine ways to release those particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, among them older detainees and those who are sick, as well as low-risk offenders,” Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in late March. “Now, more than ever, governments should release every person detained without sufficient legal basis, includ-

For instance, following the seven-year classification being used to release prisoners, a 70-year-old prisoner under trial for forgery who is highly vulnerable to the infectious disease would not be eligible for interim bail, while a 25-year-old under trial for theft would be.

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amit dave / reuters

prison outbreak · perspectives

above: On 30 March, the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad released several prisoners in light of the COVID-19 outbreak.

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ing political prisoners and others detained simply for expressing critical or dissenting views.” Around the world, several countries are following the “vulnerable-groups” classification. The United States—the worst affected by COVID-19 at the moment—has also been releasing prisoners that belong to vulnerable groups. Even the Turkish parliament, not necessarily known for its protection of prisoners’ rights, has passed a law which makes women with children under the age of six, elderly prisoners and the sick eligible for early release. THE CARAVAN

While international examples are useful, India also needs to address decongestion of prisons keeping its specific context in mind. A useful additional classification would be to determine whether a prisoner once released has the ability to practice self-isolation and social distancing, which are necessary to avoid the infection. For instance, a prisoner who resides in a high-clustered slum would probably be at greater risk at the moment if released. India also needs to review cases in which detentions are wrongful or made under draconian laws.

prison outbreak · perspectives wrongly calculated the number of prisoners eligible for release under Section 436A, and in several cases the number of prisoners eligible was much higher than that officially calculated. There is an urgent need for the state to reassess the number or prisoners eligible to be released under Section 436A. The government also needs to assess the arrests of those who can be considered political prisoners. Laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which give immense powers to the police and courts, and allow for long periods of detention before an examination of the evidence, are often misused. And yet, committees for almost all the states have suggested that cases investigated by the Enforcement Directorate and the National Investigation Agency, and cases under the UAPA should not even be considered. It is alleged that the ED often investigates cases with political motivations, and that the UAPA is regularly invoked against dissenters whose liberty is simply inconvenient for the authorities. For instance, in the Bhima Koregaon violence case, widely alleged to be politically motivated, several activists and intellectuals have spent years in jail. Named as an accused in this case by the National Investigation Agency, the scholar Anand Teltumbde last week sought an exemption from arrest

Social distancing is clearly not an option in Indian prisons. For the aged and the unwell, being put in jail at this time is a possible death sentence.

ww As per Section 436A of the Criminal Procedure Code, if an undertrial has served half the maximum sentence of the offence for which they have been charged, they can be released on a personal bond, as long as the offence is not punishable with a death sentence. The apex court, in its 2014 judgment in Bhim Singh vs Union of India, called for effective implementation of the section. A 2017 report by Amnesty International highlighted that most of the prison authorities had

considering that he is nearly seventy years old and extremely vulnerable to COVID-19. The Supreme Court, however, rejected his plea, and he was arrested in mid April—the gravity of the allegation trumped over the factor of vulnerability. The 80-year-old poet and activist Varavara Rao, accused in the same case, was also denied bail. There has been another campaign to release the former Delhi University professor GN Saibaba, who suffers from MAY 2020

permanent disability and heart disease and whose health has suffered drastically since he was sentenced to life in a controversial case. While these cases have drawn some attention from independent-media outlets, many of those detained during mass arrests reported from Jammu and Kashmir since Article 370 was scrapped remain nameless. There is no count of how many from the region might be wrongfully detained. Neither the Supreme Court’s order nor the various states’ high-powered committees addresses this group. In early April, the Bombay High Court heard a plea against Maharashtra’s high-powered committee’s decision to exclude prisoners under trial for crimes under “Special Acts”—offences not in the Indian Penal Code but covered under laws such as the UAPA, the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, among others—from those eligible for temporary release in light of the pandemic. The court is yet to pass an order and, for now, the blanket prohibition stands. Even if the classification is quashed, any verdict by the Bombay High Court would only be applicable to the state of Maharashtra, and the prohibition would continue to stand in many other states. The situation is more peculiar in Delhi, where cases being investigated by the Delhi police’s special cell and crime branch have also been excluded. Thus, a person facing the same allegations as another would not be released simply because a special department of the police happened to arrest them. Clearly, any blanket prohibition based on special acts involved or a special agency investigating the case would lead to unfortunate conclusions. Social distancing is clearly not an option in Indian prisons. For the aged and the unwell, being put in jail at this time is a possible death sentence. Lack of infrastructure, overcrowding of prisons, insensitive personnel and authorities have long facilitated a violation of fundamental rights of Indian prisoners. While safeguarding prisoners from the COVID-19 outbreak should be an urgent priority, this is also an occasion to start a conversation on how grimly prisoners are treated in the country. s 21

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The Long Arm of Hunger History suggests deprivation will be an ally to COVID-19, and both must be stopped / Health / nikhil eapen

opposite page: A daily-wage labourer queues for free food at a construction site in Delhi. Historical experience and general epidemiological evidence add a medical imperative for tackling the deprivation resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown. 22

In the winter of 1908, a malaria epidemic swept through Punjab, killing three hundred thousand people in around ninety days. Although malaria epidemics were common in the region, the 1908 outbreak was the most lethal in at least forty years: 18 out of every 1,000 residents of Punjab succumbed to the illness. The death toll was even higher in the mud huts of landless labourers, artisans and servants. An official inquiry led by Major SR Christophers, a Liverpool-born doctor, found that malaria infected the rich and the poor alike, but it was much more likely to kill in poor households. “If we examine in detail any town affected by the epidemic, we shall find the heaviest mortality has been in those classes, which are the poorest and living in the greatest squalor,” the inquiry report, released in 1911, stated. It concluded that “the determining causes of the outbreak were excessive rainfall and ‘scarcity’; the former is an essential while the latter is an almost equally powerful influencing factor.” “Scarcity” was an administrative term used to denote destitution and famine. That excessive rainfall contributed to spikes in malarial infection was well known to the British administration. That destitution and starvation exacerbated fatalities from disease was not. Christophers argued that the massive incidence of death in 1908 was a function of “compromised immune competence,” which refers to a body losing its capacity to sustain an adequate immunological response under conditions of acute hunger and starvation. “What acute hunger means is insufficient food below the requirement of the basal metabolic rate—the level below which the body starts using its own storage,” Sheila Zurbrigg, a physician and malaria scholar, told me. “At this stage, the body starts to waste away because it has to survive.” As the nationwide lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic brought the economy to a halt, with no prior planning for how to mitigate its economic effects, millions who live handto-mouth as labourers faced the possibility of hunger and deprivation. The International Labour Organisation warned that 400 million Indians in the informal economy were at risk of falling deeper into poverty. Newspapers quoted many who were convinced that if the coronavirus did not THE CARAVAN

kill them, hunger would. A survey of over three thousand migrant workers from north and central India, conducted in the early days of the lockdown by Jan Sahas, a human-rights group, found that over four in ten did not have any food, and twothirds did not have cash to last a week. The relationship between undernutrition and COVID-19 is yet to be tested, but its effect on other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis is direct and clear. Undernourished people are more susceptible to acquiring the disease, to long recovery times, to treatment failure and, as a result, to death. In Chhattisgarh, a study of 1,695 adults with pulmonary tuberculosis found that severe undernutrition at diagnosis was associated with a twofold increase in mortality. Research shows there may be a broad link between poor nutrition and viral diseases. A 2016 paper in the journal Cell, titled “Opposing Effects of Fasting Metabolism on Tissue Tolerance in Bacterial and Viral Inflammation,” found significant benefits to feeding viral infections, but starving bacterial ones. The intake of food can modulate the types of inflammation in the body caused by viral and bacterial infections, the paper noted. “I am reminded of this paper in the context of SARS-CoV-2”—the viral strain that caused the COVID-19 pandemic—“and the food deprivation in this country mediated by the current lockdown,” Satyajit Rath, an immunologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, told me. “What the paper says is if you are infected with a virus and you don’t get enough food, health outcomes are likely to be worse. The paper directly speaks to the coronavirus disease and the impact of food insecurity caused by the lockdown on the vulnerable working classes in India.” Generally, Rath said, with viral infections, “immune responses are dramatically affected by severe undernutrition.” This is a serious worry in India, whose rank on the Global Hunger Index fell to 102 in 2019, lower than Rwanda and Bangladesh. The country holds a quarter of the world’s hungry, and about 195 million people in India are undernourished, according to the World Food Programme. If hunger is rising with the lockdown, as reports suggest it is, then it may well exacerbate India’s struggles with COVID-19. Historical experience and general epidemiological evidence add a medical imperative for tackling the attendant

adnan abidi / reuters

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deprivation, reinforcing the already pressing moral case for doing so. But the rise in hunger, even if it maps on to the COVID-19 outbreak now, will not retreat hand-in-hand with the disease. By all predictions, the economic fallout of the virus will outlast the lockdown and perhaps even the pandemic. COVID-19 is hardly the only infectious disease to take root in Indian soil—the country has the world’s largest burden of tuberculosis, not to mention a shocking prevalence of malaria, dengue, cholera and more. These, and many other chronic conditions, already ravage India’s

public health, and hunger only makes them more deadly. The government is trying to spare its citizens the worst damage the COVID-19 can do directly, and even at that, its performance has left much to be desired. If it does not act with equal urgency to reign in the long hand of hunger—in a country with threadbare social-security support to begin with—then even purely from a health perspective, the worst may yet be to come. Preliminary findings from the COVID-19 outbreak in New York showed that it was twice as lethal among African-Americans and Latinos MAY 2020

than white people in the city, likely a consequence of economic inequalities and poor access to healthcare for marginalised communities. In Chicago, African-Americans accounted for a disproportionate 72 percent of COVID-related deaths, and more than half of confirmed infections. They make up less than a third of Chicago’s population. “Like in the United States, we should collect data on the economic, social and health status of people who have tested positive,” Balachandran Ravindran, an infectious-disease expert and former director of the Institute of Life Sciences in Bhubaneswar, said. “Any relationship 23

the long arm of hunger · perspectives between nutrition and susceptibility to the coronavirus infection and death needs to be rigorously investigated.” The data could guide mitigation strategies to protect vulnerable individuals as the pandemic progresses, Ravindran added. Vijaylakshmi, a 65-year-old resident of Kurauni village, on the outskirts of Lucknow, joined 11 others inside their crumbling brick shanty when the lockdown began, on 24 March. On 28 March, as part of a handout by the Uttar Pradesh government, the household received two kilograms of rice and another two of wheat flour, 500 grams of dal, a kilogram of salt, 200 millilitres of mustard oil and two spice sachets. Their food stocks quickly ran dry. Earlier, Vijaylakshmi’s four sons worked as daily-wage labourers– on farms and construction sites and in brick kilns—and scraped together about R700 per day. “Now, the cash has dried

“Like in the United States, we should collect data on the economic, social and health status of people who have tested positive.”

ww up,” Vijaylakshmi said. The family used their last savings to buy some grain, but it was not enough. “We eat once a day and just enough to kill the hunger,” Vijaylakshmi said. “Some of our meals are just a chew made from wheat flour and salt.” In late March, the central government announced that it would distribute five kilograms of foodgrain and one kilogram of pulses at no cost to existing ration card holders, in addition to their regular quota of subsidised grain. But Vijaylakshmi does not have a ration card. Days after the lockdown began, she developed a fever and an incessant cough. Her health deteriorated as April progressed, but she had not been able to visit a doctor or buy medicine. “When there is no money, how can I buy medicine?” she asked. “Roughly a third of the country’s population do not have ration cards,” 24

Reetika Khera, a professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, told me. “The central government should distribute free grain to families without ration cards and to state government-run community kitchens.” Khera said this was entirely possible, because the government currently holds more than three times the “buffer stock” it is required to keep. “We have got to ensure that everyone is able to access some food at this time.” “We have epidemiologies of microbe transmission,” Zurbrigg told me. “But we don’t have an epidemiology of hunger in the human host, understood historically as meals per day, even though there was a lot of both acute and chronic hunger all the time.” In her book Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab, Zurbrigg outlines how five of the nine major malaria epidemics in Punjab between 1868 and 1908 owed to a combination of heavy rainfall and soaring food prices, translating to acute hunger. The other four were facilitated by poor economic policies and planning. In 1876, for example, though food prices were low and rainfall just above average, deaths from fever in the autumn were off the charts. Zurbrigg argues that the deaths were linked to the monsoon of 1875—a season of extremely high rainfall that caused large crop losses. The administration withheld flood relief in 1876, and denied farmers’ applications to suspend land taxes. This was despite both cattle and harvests being destroyed in some areas, farms being heavily mortgaged, and whole villages having been swept away. Yet, the number of deaths from fever did not rise considerably in the winter of 1875, probably owing to the encouraging kharif season that preceded the rains. But the toll of a failed winter crop compounded by government taxes brought marginal farmers many months of economic pain and food insecurity. In the winter of 1876, the districts hit hardest by the floods of 1875 experienced the highest malarial death tolls. Another trigger of hunger was the improper distribution of grain. In THE CARAVAN

1892, wheat exports continued to rise despite a below-average wheat harvest. The land revenue and administration report from Punjab for the year stated, “prices were generally high throughout the year, but the reason was not the scarcity of produce but heavy exports to Europe.” High prices “benefited the agricultural classes, but have been severely felt by the poorer classes.” The stage was set for a malaria epidemic that year. Malaria claimed many lives during the Bengal famine of 1943 as well. There, even if undernutrition did not depress immune response, Satyajit Rath told me “it is quite possible that anaemia was a serious problem,” and malaria added to the burden. He explained, “Making some food available to starving people made a measurable difference to their mortality simply by improving the compounding problem of anaemia.” During her research on the malaria epidemics in Punjab, Zurbrigg told me, she found in the archives occasional references to the despair and destitution that accompanied the epidemics. The archives also described a sudden rise of prostitution as well as the practice of mothers giving away their children in desperation, hoping that they might be fed. The scourge of epidemics on mental health has followed us into the present day. A paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine argued that food insecurity can trigger stress responses that may be partly responsible for anxiety and depression. Obtaining food by begging, standing in line at a charity or other socially objectionable ways can provoke feelings of alienation, shame, helplessness and guilt, all identified with depression. Thejesh GN, the chairman of the website DataMeet, has created the COVID-19 Non-Virus Deaths Tracker. According to it, by 16 April, the twenty-fourth day of the lockdown, over 74 people took their own lives—some of them driven by the desperation of hunger and unemployment. Tucked away on Page 109 of Christophers’s 135-page report are the words, “malaria merely reap[ing] a harvest prepared for it by the famine.” s

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Lessons Not Learnt The World Bank’s disturbing push to privatise Indian education / Education / anjela taneja In September 2018, the Indian government unveiled a massive three-billion-dollar project— Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States, or STARS—designed in collaboration with the World Bank to improve the country’s education system. While 85 percent of the project’s cost would be borne by the Indian government, the rest would be financed through a World Bank loan. The loan is still being negotiated, even as the Indian government prepares for the project’s implementation. But, unfortunately, the project has not seen much public discussion or scrutiny. On paper, the programme seems promising. Besides taking on some national-level initiatives, the project seeks to reform the education system in six states: Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha. It promises improvement in early-childhood education, teacher and school-leadership development, and building infrastructure, among other noble objectives. But a closer look at the project document reveals a flawed understanding of the kind of intervention the country might need. The project ignores what many experts consider the most immediate problem—an underfunded public-education system. Instead, it focusses on simply improving education delivery, through a greater inclusion of private-education providers in the sector, despite the well-known shortcomings of similar projects in places such as Liberia and Pakistan. The project ignores not only the countless failures of public-private partnerships in education, but also the abysmal track record of India’s private schools. According to the government’s own data, less than thirteen percent of India’s schools adhere to the minimum norms laid down by law. These are rock-bottom basics: a roof over children’s

heads, a teacher in every classroom, availability of basic teaching and learning material, and basic sanitation facilities in every school. In northeastern India, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, this number is lower than five percent. And yet, the political will to improve this state of affairs is virtually non-existent. According to a report put out by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in late 2017, Bihar spends only a quarter of what it needs to spend to meet these minimum norms. Jharkhand, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh spend less than half of what is needed. Without ensuring these basics, there is little chance of improving learning. Instead of taking care of these problems, governments often look for quick fixes. Turning to the private sector has remained a go-to method, despite its proven failure. The STARS project is also plagued by similar issues. It places its faith in information and technology solutions provided by the private sector. It also wants to introduce standardised international tests to evaluate students. Meanwhile, the document does not deal with the existing successes, challenges and learnings in the Indian context. No concrete steps have been suggested to address social exclusion and marginalisation faced by India’s Adivasi, Dalit, disabled and other oppressed communities—whose children are most at risk. Tried and tested solutions such as teacher circles working groups of teachers where colleagues share ideas and advise one another— have not been mentioned. What might be most damaging about the project is its approach to partnerships with the private sector—which it sees as a tool of system reform. As much as twenty percent of the funds is expected to be spent through partnerships with a variety of non-state actors. This is a highly unusual clause. STARS proposes the creation of a new national

According to the government’s own data, less than thirteen percent of India’s schools adhere to the minimum norms laid down by law. These are rock-bottom basics: a roof over children’s heads, a teacher in every classroom, availability of basic teaching and learning material, and basic sanitation facilities in every school. In northeastern India, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, this number is lower than five percent.

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PPP framework for education. It does not specify how school education would remain a not-forprofit area in line with existing human-rights laws. Much is at stake here both in terms of the work being proposed and the funds that are on the line. The project’s total worth is $3.35 billion. Accordingly, more than six hundred million dollars are expected to go to owners of private schools, private service providers, NGOs and management firms. This appears to be one of the largest instances of the transfer of public funds to the private sector in India’s education sector. The World Bank loan’s project-implementation document states that the private sector has lessons to offer the public sector in terms of management. The document lists a number of international and national experiments with PPPs which the World Bank appears to consider worthy of emulation. But looking at the track record of some of these endeavours tells a different story. 26

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For instance, the document cites the Liberian Education Advancement Partnership as a success. However, a recent evaluation of the PPP initiative by the Center for Global Development, a US-based think tank, has highlighted that while the project resulted in a slight improvement in learning outcomes, it also contributed to an increased dropout rate and failed to reduce instances of sexual abuse. In October 2018, a ProPublica investigation revealed that in a school run by the American charity More Than Me in partnership with the Liberian government, a senior staffer raped at least ten girls. Among the providers in Liberia was the for-profit multinational school chain Bridge International Academies. The World Bank’s own accountability body is investigating investments made by one of its affiliates, the International Finance Corporation, in the school chain. Allegations against Bridge schools in various countries include that they violate laws and do not meet guidelines for low-cost private schools. Complaints have been raised regarding

john birdsall / dinodia photo

lessons not learnt · perspectives

lessons not learnt · perspectives working conditions for teachers, including hours of work, pay deductions and teachers being forced to market the schools. It would be dangerous to propose that India’s private-education providers should replicate the Bridge model. The document also cites Pakistan’s Punjab Education Foundation, also a World Bank-supported programme that aimed to enhance access to education in the country. Recent research on the project, supported by the non-profit Oxfam, found that most of the enrolled students had been pulled from existing schools. Only 1.3 percent of enrolled students had actually been out of school prior to the programme’s commencement. This was unsurprising, given that the cost for a child to attend affiliated schools was more than half of the income of a parent living at the poverty line. Students with disabilities, among the most under-represented groups in education, constituted less than 0.001 percent of the enrolment in the sample. Many schools of the programme actively screen and select children based on their academic ability through tests, leading to exclusion of those with disabilities or those lacking previous schooling. The schools

because of the exclusionary record of India’s private schools. In fact, a recent study by the World Bank itself of living standards in Uttar Pradesh showed that the gender gap in private-school enrolment is increasing, even when it is closing up in government schools. In 2014, a group of United Kingdom-based organisations released a comprehensive review of literature on the impact of privatisation on education in developing countries. The study found that “girls are less likely than boys to be enrolled in private schools.” Private schools enrol children from families that can afford to pay. Sending a child to a private school in India is approximately nine times as costly as sending a child to a government school, including all indirect costs associated with schooling, such as buying books, and transport. Reliance on the private sector for delivering education fundamentally alters the character of an education system—what should be a universal right of every child becomes a commodity that parents have to buy. In such a system parents from poorer backgrounds are pushed to make a difficult, but seemingly rational, decision not to buy that service for

opposite page: Children travel to a private school in Delhi. Most private schools in India do not provide the minimum facilities that they are required to by law.

India has vast populations of poor and marginalised people, and they start with unequal human capital from early childhood. This gap only increases as children grow into adults. India’s richest 1 percent now hold more than four times the wealth held by the 953 million people who make up for the bottom 70 percent of the country’s population. The wealth of all Indian billionaires is more than the annual budgetary outlay.

ww have also failed to achieve gender parity, as three-quarters of the schools have more boys than girls. Closer to home, the report mentions PPPs in Mumbai and Rajasthan. A review of the Rajasthan Education Initiative by the international non-profit Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative said that the project failed against many of its stated objectives. It noted that the project was “not able to address the implementation issues of co-partners, who have found it difficult to carry out their projects effectively.” Similarly, the School Excellence Programme implemented by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation was shut down as learning outcomes failed to improve. PPPs in education remain volatile, and the government needs to be careful before proceeding with them, as they often involve private players amassing wealth through public money. The faith in the private sector as a tool for reforming India’s education system is also baffling

those children—girls, children with disabilities— whom labour markets are less likely to reward for their education. A private-led system of education delivery is antithetical to the goal of a universal system of education with somewhat equal quality. India has vast populations of poor and marginalised people, and they start with unequal human capital from early childhood. This gap only increases as children grow into adults. India’s richest 1 percent now hold more than four times the wealth held by the 953 million people who make up for the bottom 70 percent of the country’s population. The wealth of all Indian billionaires is more than the annual budgetary outlay. This gap would never be closed with an educational system that is segregated by parents’ income. Thus, an alternative to squandering money on STARS would be to plug the spending gap on government schools in India’s most educationally lagging states and lifting the floor of quality among the lowest performers. s MAY 2020

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reportage

the Forgotten Holocaust Witnesses remember the Bengal famine 77 years later

COVER STORY / HISTORY KUSHANAVA CHOUDHURY

{ONE} in the autumn of 2018, on a trip to Kolkata, I walked into a bookstore in the neighbourhood of College Street, out of habit, to see what interesting gem I could find. Among the books I picked up was the July 2018 quarterly issue of the Bengali little magazine Gangchil Patrika. The magazine had earlier published issues on a wide range of topics, including refugees, pornography and the Naxal movement. This issue was devoted to the topic of famines. Among the articles was a collection of 16 oral histories with fullpage photographs of “Monnontorer Shakkhi,” or “Famine Witnesses,” compiled by Sailen Sarkar, the editor of the magazine. These were testimonies of ordinary people in the Bengal countryside who had witnessed, and survived, the Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated three million people died. Each testimony was accompanied by a simple close-up, blackand-white portrait taken by Sarkar with a camera phone. Their names, ages and where they lived were noted at the start of each testimony. Most of the men and women were above ninety. The oldest witness claimed he was 112 years old. They had hollowed cheeks—the men with faces full of grey stubble, the women with their saris draped over their heads. Almost none of them were pictured smiling. Their eyes, unforgettable, looked straight at the camera. To me, they appeared to ask questions I did not want to ask myself. 28

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william vandivert / the life picture collection / getty images

COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHS BY SOUMYA SANKAR BOSE

reportage

In each interview, Sarkar wrote an introductory paragraph, sometimes explaining where the person lived, or how he had come to meet them. The witnesses spoke of a cyclone during Durga Puja in 1942 that killed thousands in a day—men, women, cattle, fish—and destroyed the paddy in the fields. They spoke of how people fled, anywhere they could, to the towns, to Calcutta, to the Sundarbans, anywhere where there was any promise of food. Many left their home and never returned, and many died in their homes, abandoned by their families, starving alone in their huts, sick with cholera or smallpox. The stories told of how women were sold into prostitution, of how families sold what little land they had for sacks of rice, of landlords who bought up the lands of those who starved and of looting in the homes of the dead. When I read those testimonies for the first time, I felt like I was communing with ghosts. Like most Bengalis, I knew that there had been a famine in 1943, during the Second World War. Millions had died under the watch of the colonial

Like most Bengalis, I knew that there had been a famine in 1943, during the Second World War. Millions had died under the watch of the colonial government. that it was the criminal neglect of the British Raj that let this disaster unfold was an open secret. But, in a way, it seemed like ancient history.

previous spread: An estimated three million died in the Bengal famine of 1943. 30

government. That it was the criminal neglect of the British Raj that let this disaster unfold was an open secret. But, in a way, it seemed like ancient history. The famine is mentioned only in passing in school history textbooks in schools, as one among the many unfortunate disasters—earthquakes, floods, droughts—that seemed to take place regularly in colonial and pre-colonial times. So, to discover that there were living eyewitnesses to something that felt like the forgotten past came as a shock to me. I had begun my professional life as a newspaper reporter, in the early 2000s, at The Statesman in Kolkata, a city full of shuttered factories and in rapid post-industrial decline. I later returned in 2009 to conduct research for a book I wrote on the city. When I began doing interviews, sometimes the famine of 1943 would unexpectedly intrude into conversations. In one such interview, a trade-union leader, Manoj Ray Choudhury, was talking to me about factory closures and the decline of the industrial working class. By then, the ceiling-fan factory where he worked had closed and the property THE CARAVAN

had been converted into South City, one of India’s largest malls and a luxury-apartment project. He started telling me about his childhood in his village along the Meghna River in the early 1940s. He had come home from school one day to see people arriving from the other side of the river. These people had walked through the forests, hungry for rice. “How they ate and ate!” he recalled. He remembered that a boy his age had been bitten on the knee by a jackal on the way, and died, after having made it all that way across. Seeing that boy die gave shape to the choices he made in his life later. He did not join the Congress like his father and uncles. Instead, he became a communist, to fight, he told me, for another world. “I was doing a job just to do a job,” he said, about his post in the factory. “My mind was on social change.” We had been speaking all afternoon of the decline of the union, the end of factory work, of all that he had seen fail in his lifetime, and yet the union leader’s story of the famine stayed with me. But I never sought out more such stories, as I did of the factories and the labour unions, or later of Partition and the refugee colonies that came in its aftermath. I had grown up in a refugee household, and so my concerns were with the ghosts of Partition. Janam Mukherjee, who wrote Hungry Bengal, a new history of the 1943 famine, argues that to understand Partition and the riots in Calcutta in 1946, which had made Partition inevitable, one had to understand the famine of 1943—or, more precisely, 1942–46. Mukherjee has argued that “far from being a side story for special study, the Bengal famine should be understood as central to the history of twentieth-century India and even global history.” But I never delved into it. Our family had lost their home and their land in East Bengal, moved to Calcutta and survived in difficult circumstances because of Partition. Many of my parents’ friends or my friends’ parents in Kolkata had the same family history—of loss, trauma and rebuilding. We came from families that were mostly upper caste, and had been middle or upper class, before Partition. They had either owned land in the east or had held salaried jobs, and were then pauperised. Land, education, class and caste could not protect them from the displacement of Partition. But the famine of 1943 was another story. I had heard my grandmother’s stories of beggars asking for fan—the gruel water in which rice was boiled. But no one in my family died in the Bengal famine. Nor did I know anyone whose relatives had. That perhaps is a clue as to why certain stories are told and others sidelined. At the time that I discovered Gangchil’s famine issue, I was living in Delhi. I had recently moved

william vandivert / the life picture collection / getty images

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above: Women lining up for government dole in Calcutta. MAY 2020

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back from Kerala, where I had lived for over a year, traveling and doing interviews, working on a new book on the social transformation that had taken place in the state in the twentieth century. The questions I was thinking of propelled me to reconsider the history of West Bengal in a similar light. I began translating the 16 famine testimonies and, when I went to Kolkata in January 2019, I called Sarkar. “I am going to the Sundarbans tomorrow,” he told me. “Why don’t you come with me?” And so we met for the first time, at Sealdah station at 5 am on a winter morning, wrapped in scarves and woollen caps under the big departures board, waiting for a train on the Lakhikantapur line. Sarkar is wiry, with wavy grey hair that falls over his ears and frames his bearded, bespectacled

above: Bands of hungry people from the countryside walked to Calcutta in search of food. Many died on the way, or while waiting in queues outside relief kitchens. opposite page: Archibald Percival Wavell, the British viceroy and governor-general of India in 1943, talks with JK Biswas, the chairman of the Rotary Club Relief Committee, during a visit to a kitchen for victims of famine. 32

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bettman / getty images

the forgotten holocaust · reportage

the forgotten holocaust · reportage on the flatbeds of motor vans, where nights were beautiful like in a Jibanananda Das poem. In these parts, the jungle was always on the other side of the river. The marks of tigers could be seen not just in the soft earth but also on the flesh of those who had once faced death and lived to tell the tale. Most of the people who live on these islands now came here during the 1943 famine , or are descended from those who did. A majority were originally from Midnapore district, west of the Hooghly River. When they first arrived, these islands belonged to the tiger and the crocodile. They cleared jungles for the latdars and chakdars— landlords who had been given land grants in the islands during the colonial era but lived elsewhere—planted paddy and settled here. In K-Plot, we met Bijoykrishna Tripathi, whose voter card said he was 112 years old. In 1942, on the eve of the famine, an armed uprising took place in eastern Midnapore. Thanas were burned, telegraph lines cut, and several areas were declared liberated zones by the local Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar, outside colonial control, with their own government, their own guards, courts and jails. Tripathi said that he had taken part in the uprising, attacking the Bhagabanpur thana and then escaping with the help of a prostitute who smuggled him away. He remembered the cyclone in Midnapore during Durga Puja later that year, the winds and rain that felled trees and washed away mud houses, cattle and human beings.

hulton-deutsch collection / corbis / getty images

face. He laughs easily and always seems brimming with enthusiasm. With a backpack and a ready roll of bidis, he looks like a permanent student of life. Before he became an editor, Sarkar used to be a physics teacher in a government school, with a fondness for taking his students on excursions to the countryside. He was also involved in setting up football teams and taking them to tournaments throughout the state. These experiences had allowed him to travel widely across Bengal and also to build deep relationships. We traveled by train to Jaynagar station, in South 24 Parganas, the southernmost district in West Bengal, and then by myriad modes of transport—auto, motorvan, boat—to reach our destination that afternoon. Wherever we went, people greeted Sarkar, calling him “Mastermoshai.” Farmers welcomed us into their houses, some made of brick and others of mud and thatch. There were chickens, ducks and cows in the yards, groves of coconut trees and paddy fields all around. Over the next few days, Sarkar took me to remote areas in the Sundarbans, where the Gangetic delta meets the Bay of Bengal, to islands like K-Plot, L-Plot and G-Plot. Although the places we visited were half a day’s journey from Kolkata, for a city person like myself, it may as well have been the end of the earth. These were islands where electricity had arrived only a year or two ago, where there were still no cars, where people travelled mostly by bicycle or

the forgotten holocaust · reportage

above: Sweepers collecting corpses for transport to one of to one of Calcutta’s burning ghats. 34

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william vandivert / the life picture collection / getty images

the forgotten holocaust · reportage When the food shortages followed, he ventured here to make a living working for the local chakdar, overseeing his lands. Here, at least, there were rivers full of fish. Midnapore had become a disaster area. On the same island, Sarkar took me to meet Khoshen Sheikh, another of the 16 survivors interviewed in the magazine. He figured he was 91 years old and still worked his land. He remembered a childhood of extreme poverty in Midnapore. He, too, recalled the storm and the flood. There was a call from the sky that night, he said. The wind howled, “Prithibi shesh”—It is the end of the world. After returning from the Sundarbans, I travelled to Midnapore and Nadia to speak to others who had witnessed the famine. It became clear that even here, the famine had affected people discriminately. Certain families were able to profit from the tragedy, while others’ lives became even more precarious. Prahladcharan Maiti, for instance, had told Sarkar how the famine benefited his family. “Since we had money, we bought up a lot of peoples’ land for cheap at that time,” he said. “We got land for nothing in exchange for rice and dal or a little money.” Pulin Samanta, however, was one of the people who had to flee to the Sundarbans to survive. “Those among us who had managed to sell something—land or whatever else—before we left, bought some rice,” he had told Sarkar. “By ‘whatever else,’ I mean, many people had sold their children.” Sarkar has already interviewed more than fifty people across these districts, travelling alone and spending money out of his own pocket. In the countryside, such people were not difficult to find. Almost anyone over 85 who could still talk and had a good memory was a famine witness. Back in Kolkata, Gangchil released a Bengali hardcover volume, titled Witnesses of Famine: 50 Testimonies taken 75 years after the 1943 Famine, at the Kolkata Book Fair. I put the Kerala work temporarily on hold and felt compelled to translate these testimonies. What struck me more and more was the absence of these voices in our collective memories. there are various ways in which a state memorialises events that have shaped the life of a country. In the heart of Delhi, India Gate commemorates soldiers who died in the First World War. The new national war memorial—dedicated to India’s armed forces personnel killed in various post-Independence conflicts—lies a few metres away. In Amritsar, the site of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919, in which British troops opened fire on unarmed protesters and killed an estimated three hundred to a thousand people, has become one of

the most well-preserved memorials of the struggle against colonial rule. In Kolkata too, those who gave their lives in the freedom struggle are remembered in myriad forms. The large political rallies at the Brigade Parade Ground are held in the shadow of what used to be called the Ochterlony Monument, renamed the Shaheed Minar, or Martyrs’ Monument—to commemorate those who died in the independence movement. Metro stations bear the names of revolutionary martyrs such as Khudiram Bose and Surya Sen. Subhas Chandra Bose is memorialised everywhere, from the international airport to the statue above the five-point crossing in Shyambazar. There are, however, no memorials, that I know of, to the famine. In Bengali, the 1943 famine is called the “Panchasher Akal,” the famine of ’50, because it occurred in the year 1350 of the Bengali calendar. But many educated Bengalis I spoke to confused the 1943 famine with the “Chhiattorer Monnontor,” or the famine of ’76, which occurred in the Bengali year 1176, or 1770 of the Gregorian calendar, soon after the start of colonial rule. British records state that 10 million, out of a population of 30 million, died in that famine. Perhaps the reason this event is remembered, even if only in vaguely mythological terms, is because the nineteenth-century Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Anandamath is a fictional account of the failed Sanyasi Revolt, which took place in 1770, during the famine. In the novel, Bankim recreated that uprising as a proto-natioaist rebellion to save Mother India. What we remember, and memorialise, are acts of heroism and martyrdom at the altar of the nation. “Give me blood and I will give you freedom,” Subhas Bose had said, leading the Azad Hind Fauj, with Japanese support, from Singapore to Burma to attack northeastern India. In 1942, the British colonies of Singapore and Burma had both been taken by the Japanese, as were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It was widely believed that the Japanese would attack Calcutta, the centre of British war operations, and invade mainland India through Bengal. Bose regularly broadcast radio messages promising rice from Burma upon his return to Bengal. In the autonomous zone in Midnapore, activists from that time told me, people expected Bose to sail up the Hooghly River with the Japanese navy to Midnapore, where they would join forces with him and march to conquer Calcutta. It was not considered as outlandish as

there was a call from the sky that night, Khoshen Sheikh said. the wind howled, “Prithibi shesh”—It is the end of the world. MAY 2020

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the forgotten holocaust · reportage it seems today. As Madhusree Mukerjee writes in Churchill’s Secret War, the vast Gangetic delta stretching from Chittagong to Midnapore was almost impossible to defend, and the British expected a naval attack on the Bengal coast. The British instituted a “denial policy” across coastal districts, including Midnapore, sending agents to villages to seize surplus rice in order to deprive the Japanese of food if they landed. Bengal’s chief minister, Fazlul Huq, of the Krishak Praja Party, was critical of this policy and warned of an imminent rice famine. Huq had campaigned on a slogan of dal bhat—rice and dal—for everyone. By this time, the Congress leadership was being imprisoned for its refusal to support the British war effort and for launching the Quit India movement. Mukerjee writes that the wartime cabinet in London, and the colonial government in India, appeared to care for little besides the war. The British prime minister during the war, Winston Churchill, has been famously quoted blaming Indians themselves for the famine, for “breeding like rabbits.”

the Bengal famine is one of the largest crimes of the twentieth century. It was the mass destruction of a population, with millions of witnesses. It should be impossible to write of the Second World War, or of India’s Independence, without stories of the famine. Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were arriving in Calcutta and had to be fed and clothed. Industries in Bengal, including factories, railways and civil services, were repurposed to meet wartime demands. The colonial government enacted policies that diverted food to soldiers and Indian support staff in the towns and cities, even as the death toll in rural Bengal kept rising. Indeed, as Mukerjee shows, the British supplied food only to those considered essential to the war, while being indifferent to the fate of the rest of the Bengali population, ninety percent of which lived in the countryside. At the height of the famine, she notes, not only did Churchill refuse to import grain in large amounts, but rice was also being exported out of India. Officially, there was no famine in Bengal in the 1940s. The government never declared it as such. That would have required putting in place the Famine Code, a set of guidelines on how to provide relief that had been established after the late-nineteenth-century famines. But throughout its tenure, the British Raj pretended that the mass 36

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annihilation of people was not taking place right under its nose. In the end, while Japanese planes did bomb Calcutta a few times, there was no full-blown invasion. By 1943, Japan was suffering losses on its home turf, and the war on Indian soil never took place. There were no battles here, the history books say, no heroes, no martyrs. And yet, it left three million dead, like an attack by a neutron bomb. The names of these dead are not etched into any monument, nor are they written down in any archive. The Bengal famine simply does not inform our sense of collective history or our national imagination in quite the same way as the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh or the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. But it is one of the largest crimes of the twentieth century. It was the mass destruction of a population, with millions of witnesses. It should be impossible to write of the Second World War, or of India’s Independence, without stories of the famine. At the same time that people were dying of hunger in Bengal, another great human tragedy of mass proportions was unfolding in Europe. Of the 12 million people who were systematically killed in the Holocaust, six million were killed between March 1942 and February 1943, roughly the same time as the famine. They were killed mainly in the small towns and villages of Poland, where poor peasants and artisans lived. The vast majority of Europe’s Jews lived in Poland, Belarus and Russia, lands the Germans wanted for settlement. The Nazis wanted to decimate Jews because they were characterised as uberzahligen essern—superfluous eaters—as the Swedish historian Sven Lundqvist writes in his book Exterminate All the Brutes. Policemen in Germany who were too old or otherwise unfit to serve in the military were commissioned into battalions for this job, according to the historian Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Men, a portrait of one such German police battalion in Poland. They were mostly middle-aged family men who went from village to village, in some cases shooting and killing Jews, and in other cases rounding them up and then taking them in cattle cars to the extermination camps, where they were gassed. In Bengal, there are accounts of police coming and seizing rice reserves from people’s homes for the government’s godowns. In some places, no one came to take rice away. The price of rice rose eight- or tenfold until there was no rice in the village markets at all. What had not been seized by the government had been sold off to traders and blackmarketeers. The rice simply disappeared. The invisible hand took it away. And masses of people were allowed to vanish without a trace.

the forgotten holocaust · reportage The victims in Bengal did not have to be shot or gassed. These events bear stark echoes of the famines in the late nineteenth century, when market forces emptied the Indian countryside of grain, killing an estimated 12 to 29 million people. At that time too, an indifferent British government provided insufficient aid and blamed the crises on acts of nature and native overpopulation. In his wellknown book, Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis likened these deaths to the mass destruction of populations in the Nazi camps, as well as in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden. In these colonial famines, Davis writes, “imperial policies toward starving ‘subjects’ were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.” It was a “boom famine,” the economist Amartya Sen noted in Poverty and Famines, one of the early scholarly studies of the 1943 famine. There was sufficient rice to feed everyone he argued, but few could afford to buy it. In fact, in December 1943, when deaths peaked, Sen notes, Bengal had had the largest rice crop in recent history. Sen was an eyewitness to the famine as a child in Shantiniketan. “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat,” he writes. “It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” An estimated fifteen thousand people died in the 1942 cyclone that devastated Midnapore, and testimonies confirm that floods, droughts, pests and crop failure affected various parts of Bengal. But, as Sen notes, they were not the primary cause of the famine. A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, based on an analysis of soil samples used to reconstruct the record of agricultural droughts, has corroborated this. It found that the Bengal famine was the only famine in the subcontinent that was not connectted directly to a moisture deficit in the soil or the failure of crops. This dismantles any claim that the famine was a result of drought or other natural causes. Instead, it had to do with the political economy of the time. A 1944 sample survey led by PC Mahalanobis, the father of statistics in India, estimated that of the 55 million who lived in the Bengal countryside, only 3.3 million people, or five percent, were “non-cultivating owners.” This meant they had large land holdings that they did not farm themselves. Most of the rest worked as hired labourers for landlords, leased land and worked as sharecroppers, or owned small holdings, generally of five bighas or less, which they farmed themselves. Some 15 million people in the villages worked as artisans or had other jobs, such as fishermen and boatmen. Most of their families did not grow

enough rice to feed themselves all year round. They got rice from landlords in exchange for labour, or bought rice with their earnings. When the boom hit, the majority of Bengalis, fell on desperate times. Those who had some land to spare, sold or pawned it to get rice. Between 1943 and 1944, the survey estimates, almost a quarter of all small cultivators sold or mortgaged their land— over seven hundred thousand acres in total. Most of that land was bought by outsiders, meaning those with cash, from the cities. “A small number of families became richer but a much larger number were impoverished or rendered destitute,” Mahalanobis wrote. “The famine of 1943 was thus not an accident like an earthquake or a flood, but the culmination of economic changes which were going on even in normal times.” In the nineteenth century, the French had a classification system for their territories in Africa: utile and inutile. Useful and useless. In a similar way, during the war, the towns and cities of Bengal were spared because they were useful to the war effort. Traders and industrialists flourished. Most government employees received rations and were totally unaffected. All who received regular salaries could survive by buying food at high prices. Janam Mukherjee’s Hungry Bengal shows how large sections of the political elite either politicised or communalised the famine, and benefited from it. In the cities, supporters of the Congress, Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha all had a hand in the game, from the seizure or collection of rice to the distribution of relief. By early 1943, the British had toppled the Huq administration and installed a more pliant Muslim League government. Bengal had the largest Muslim population of any province in India. Most Muslims were peasants, small cultivators or artisans. But the League was largely a party of Muslim landlords and a small emerging Muslim professional and trading class. The trade of textiles or grain, meanwhile, was dominated by Marwari Hindu or Jain traders who supported the Congress. The rural landlords and salaried workers in the cities were mostly upper-caste Bengali Hindus who also supported the Congress. These groups became the prime beneficiaries of the wartime boom. They also expected to be beneficiaries of the spoils of empire in the near future. With the Muslim League in power, the state’s agents were widely distrusted by the people. There were widespread reports of grain collected by the state being sold into the black market and disappearing, of grain rotting in storage, and rumours of it being dumped into the rivers by government agents. The League’s opponents accused it of favouring Muslim traders, particularly Mirza Ahmad Ispahani, a Muslim businessman close to MAY 2020

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this spread: In August 1943, The Statesman defied wartime censors when its British editor, Ian Stephens, published photo spreads of masses of emaciated corpses on the footpaths of Calcutta. The term “Bengal Famine of 1943” emerged from those photographs.

images courtesy janam mukherjee

the forgotten holocaust · reportage Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was briefly the sole agent for procuring rice for the government. The League and the British government, in turn, accused Marwari traders—who largely controlled the grain trade and also funded the Congress—of hoarding grain. Recriminations continued even about the relief being provided by private and state agencies. With the Congress leadership in jail, the Hindu Mahasabha became a vocal spokesman for “Hindu interests.” It accused the Muslim League government of preferential treatment towards Muslims in the distribution of food in the dole kitchens. The League’s leaders accused “Hindu” relief agencies of catering primarily to Hindus. Bengal had two separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims and was careening towards political violence, communal riots and Partition. As Janam Mukerjee writes, between 1943 to 1946, the famine became a field in which to play out the larger politics of “Hindustan-Pakistan,” of who would rule, and enjoy the benefits of power, after the British left. “The fortunes that were made during World War II (and at the expense of famine), in fact, underpinned the influence that a handful of powerful capitalists exercised in the negotiations for independence,” he writes. “Moreover, viewed from a closer range, the Bengal famine was characterized by a shocking proliferation of local venalities.” As he argues, “it was at least as much profit that motivated the rapacity that ravaged Bengal, as it was the colonial creed of racial and cultural superiority.” In these churning times of economic and political change, those in the countryside with little land, cash or paddy in stock were the most vulnerable. For them, there was the dole, the cooked khichri of rice, bulgur or milo, if they could get it. Or else there was the open road, where they would walk miles on foot, looking for alms. These facts were well-known even at the time. In August 1943, The Statesman, then the largest paper in India, where I later worked as a young reporter, defied wartime censors when its British editor, Ian Stephens, published photo spreads of masses of emaciated corpses on the footpaths of Calcutta. These were people who had walked to the city begging for fan and died on its streets. The Statesman castigated the colonial government for failing to provide relief, highlighting the manmade character of the shortages. At least here, despite the rumours, accusations and denials of mass deaths by the government, the famine became reported fact. The term “Bengal Famine of 1943” emerged from those photographs published in The Statesman. 39

the forgotten holocaust · reportage {TWO} it had begun with the natural catastrophe that Khoshen Sheikh recalled as the end of the world. Perhaps no district was as badly affected as Midnapore. “Everyone in Midnapore dates the famine from the day of the cyclone, 16 October 1942,” Madhusree Mukerjee writes. In its aftermath, many people fled to Midnapore town, or Howrah or Calcutta, on foot. In Sarkar’s testimonies, many fled to the Sundarbans in boats, in the middle of the night. There, in the salty estuary of the largest delta in the world, where the Ganga meets the Bay of Bengal, on the edge between civilisation and wilderness, they found refuge and lived a precarious existence. In May 2019, Soumya Sankar Bose, a young Bengali photographer from Midnapore, and I travelled to Maipith, an island in the southwestern fringe of the Sundarbans. Shaped like Kali’s tongue, dipping down towards the Bay of Bengal, Maipith is still partly wild and untamed. To reach there, we took a boat from K-Plot. “I saw history,” Khoshen Sheikh told us, as we sat in a tea shop waiting for the afternoon kheya—passenger boat—at Bamunghat in K-Plot. He was reminiscing about his childhood days in Midnapore. “Do you know about Matangini Hazra, who was shot dead while attacking the Tamluk police station?” he asked. Hazra was one of the martyrs of the 1942 rebellion. Known as “Gandhi Buri,” or Gandhian Old Lady, her story of courage against colonial oppression is known to all children in Bengal. A statue of Hazra stands where the incident took place. Sheikh had seen a similar attack on the thana in Bhagabanpur, where he lived. Sheikh made the journey from Midnapore to the Sundarbans soon after this. When the famine struck, he was in K-Plot. “Lots of people came here from outside, from Midnapore,” he said. A younger man, my age, in shirt and trousers, who was sitting nearby, came to listen to him talk. “The famine of ’76,” he said knowingly. “Dada,” I said, “this man is talking about the famine of 1350, which he witnessed, which happened right here.” “No one died here,” Sheikh continued. A lot of people who came from outside moved on to other islands. They took the boat from Bamunghat and went to L-Plot, I-Plot, to Maipith. Until recently, there was no direct boat service between K-Plot and Maipith, until Madhu Majhi, a local football legend from Maipith, started one. Majhi is built like a bull and perhaps most well known for the marks on his elbow and forearm, from a tiger bite. At the dock, the other boatmen said, “He was on Khas Khabar in 2002,” referring to a popular right: Midnapore had become a disaster area. Many fled under cover of darkness, by boat, and sailed all night across the Hooghly river to find places of refuge, including the Sundarbans. 40

the forgotten holocaust · reportage below: Parameshwar Jana recalled how the cyclone and floods of 1942 destroyed his family’s five bighas of land in Contai, Midnapore. opposite page: In villages in Midnapore, officials gathered the scattered bones of cattle, goats and human beings, and piled them together. These mounds, sometime two stories high, were the unintended monuments to the Bengal Famine.

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Doordarshan news show. As if on cue, Majhi showed his marks. No sooner were we out in the open estuary than the boat started bouncing like a balloon in the breeze. It was the afternoon high tide. There were islands all around, places full of people on one side, and the tiger reserves of the Sundarbans on the other. I thought about Kapalakundala, that Bankim novel in which a young landlord from Midnapore sets sail on the Hooghly river from Rasulpur and is washed ashore in the jungle after his boat sinks and only he survives. The famine witnesses in their testimonies spoke

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of a journey filled with dangers, of pirates in midriver, sailing in the dead of night on waters so choppy there was a rope running down the middle of the boat that one had to grasp to not be thrown overboard. Majhi’s boat has a motor, but I imagined two days in boats like this, at night, without motors, at the mercy of the winds, and of pirates. It was a half-hour trip, in broad daylight, but when we got off at Maipith several of the locals on board swore they would never ride with Madhu Majhi again. Until a dozen years ago, Jhareshwar Duari was a fisherman. He bought what he said was the first autorickshaw on the island. He knew nothing of the flood and famine of the 1940s, but he had witnessed two floods in his lifetime on the island, in 1978 and again in 2009, during Cyclone Aila. Duari’s family was from Midnapore, however, and he remembered that his father had come here driven by hunger. We should speak to him, I suggested. But his father had been dead for forty years. Then he said, “There is a man who you can talk to.” We arrived at a mud house, in a courtyard surrounded by other mud houses. Parameshwar Jana was lying on a bed in the veranda. Someone told him we had come, and he got up. Wiry and bare-chested, Jana was born in 1925—1332 in the Bengali calendar—which made him 94 years old. I mentioned the floods of 1349, and he remembered the night of the cyclone vividly. It was in the month of Ashwin during Durga Puja. He and his brother were living with their grandmother in a village near Contai, in Midnapore district. He remembered the walls of his mud house shaking. The winds started in the morning and picked up all day until it was very strong at night. Then around midnight, there was a call three times, “Paliye Ja, Paliye Ja, Paliye Ja”—Run Away, Run Away, Run Away. “Many call it the Bhoirabir daak”—the call of the goddess Bhairavi—Jana said. Then the winds stopped. The next day, they woke up to felled trees all along the roads. “No one could cross over to see who was living and who was dead,” Jana said. “We came out and the whole country had become a crematorium. All roads were full of

water. There were fish from the fishery ponds everywhere.” The flood had destroyed their five bighas of land completely, and the family had to subsist on food from the relief operations. But Jana did not simply recall the tragic consequences of those years. He was also remembering his childhood. The river had overflowed into the village, merging with the ponds. He loved to fish. “I would take my net and set it down there and catch big river fish, then take it to my grandmother and ask her to cook it,” he said. “There were so many fish that eventually they died when the water dried. We could not catch and eat them all. There was water like that for fifteen days.” Jana’s father, Kashinath, was in Maipith at the time. His father and uncles had all left Midnapore, driven by poverty and a lack of land. His father made the long voyage by boat to Contai to come and get them. “It took a few days for my father to reach us,” Jana recalled. “When my father reached the river here, it was full of the dead.” Kashinath took a handkerchief,

put perfumed oil on it, and clamped it over his mouth as he walked past the dead. The stench, he told Jana, was unbearable. Kashinath was not able to persuade his mother to leave, despite pressing on her that the situation was better in Maipith. She remained adamant about staying; she did not want to leave her in-laws’ home. So he took his two boys back with him. On the way, Jana saw corpses all along the sand banks of the river. The police would come around looking for people on the road, he recalled, and get them to clear out the dead. I asked whether there was a lot of looting. “People were practically dead themselves,” Jana said. “Who would they attack?” He recalled, however, that there were lots of dead women’s bodies flowing down the river. “Sometimes, we

Bodies, families, communities vanished, without the proper honours due to the dead. there would be no record of their passing, neither in the ledgers of priests nor of the state. MAY 2020

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the forgotten holocaust · reportage

I asked Jabbar whether he thought those who attacked and burned the landlords were wrong to do so. “Peter jala jokhon thakbe,” he said, “kono porichoy thakbe na”—When you will have hunger burning in your belly, you won’t recognise anyone. 44

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heard that the jewelry would be stolen off their dead bodies,” he said. They took the boat overnight to Kakdwip, and then changed boats to come to Maipith. Kashinath and his brothers had all left Midnapore before the famine. Most of the land when they first arrived was wild, with no farms. The latdars rarely ventured here. Instead, they hired men like Kashinath to manage the land and the labour. “My father was the bicharak for the malik,” Jana said, meaning that he served as a kind of magistrate. “He had a benter bari”—a cane stick. “Once a thief was caught stealing rice and hiding it in the canal. I watched my father beat him with the bari.” Jana remembered his father’s caning of the rice thief with pride. In Maipith, their family prospered with 100 bighas of land. Parameshwar was the eldest of five sons. He stopped studying and started farming. He now has 18 bighas of land. He, in turn, had five sons and four daughters. I met his third son, Tapas, who had studied commerce at a college in Contai. He has a bookstore, a stationery shop and a sugarcane-grinding machine. Another son owns a paan shop in the bazaar. The Janas own much of the land along the bazaar too. His fourth son, Kamal, is a full-time farmer, he said. Kamal had a big belly above his lungi. “We grow mangos, chikoo, fish, all for eating,” he told me. “Then sugarcane for selling and rice.” When I looked around, I saw a household of plenty: grandchildren, fruits, vegetables, a family with businesses and land. Kamal said the family’s relative affluence was recent. “Now we have no shortage but, even in our childhood, we used to eat rice that came from Bangladesh when Mujib was prime minister. Now our rice yield is much much more.” Jhareshwar Duari was near Kamal’s age. He recalled eating milo from the relief even during his youth. Indeed, it might be easy to forget, looking around, the recent history of this place, that is, the history of hunger. The grandchildren gathered around us to show us their drawing books. Plates of chikoo and mangoes from the garden were served. Duari refused to

the forgotten holocaust · reportage eat. “Amar sugar dhora poreche”—I have been diagnosed with high blood-sugar—he said. One of Parameshwar’s brothers joined us, on his way back from the fields. He was in his eighties but remembered nothing of the famine. “All he knows is work,” Kamal said. The two brothers’ shirtless bodies were wiry and muscled, their limbs taut like thick ropes. The physiques of the two generations were a study in contrasts. The younger men had the luxury of carrying fat on their bones. the place where Sheikh Abdul Jabbar lives is called Hatamara—literally, “paw strike,” because of an incident, long ago, in which a man was pounced on by a tiger and taken away, never to be seen again. It is in Nagenabad, on the northeastern edge of Maipith. Across the river is the jungle, where human beings are banned. During Cyclone Aila, in 2009, the embankment along the river in Nagenabad broke, and water rushed into the fields and houses here. This was the worst affected part of the island in the last flood.

As we rode up along the water’s edge to Nagenabad, a man walked by with a handful of crabs, the pincers of each carefully tied with string, like boxes of sandesh. We saw a couple collecting shrimp spawn in a handi, small fry that they would take back home and cultivate. Sometimes, they told me, they go across the river to fish. There are no more logging permits granted in the Sundarbans. The only people who are allowed to cross are those with permits to collect honey. These rules are relaxed during the annual Bonbibi Mela, which takes place at the Bonbibi shrine across the river in what is known as tiger territory. Bonbibi, who is worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims, is said to protect humans against the tigers. During the festival, devotees are allowed to cross the boundary between human and animal worlds. “People used to come here and make salt,” Sheikh Abdul Jabbar said, when we went to meet him. He was perched on a stoop on his veranda. He spent most of his days there. Beyond his

opposite page: On K-Plot island, Sheikh Kashem is known as the man who fought a tiger. “My body isn’t like anyone else’s,” Sheikh Kashem said. “I fought with a tiger and took its strength.” Kashem was a boy during the flood of 1942 and remembers waiting for his father to bring home a bucket of milo gruel from the relief. They ate like that for ten months until the paddy crop came. On some nights, Kashem still dreams of the tiger. below: In the Sundarbans there was plenty of fish in the rivers and land for those who had the strength to work. The landlords who owned these areas rarely ventured here. Those who came here pulled by hunger cleared jungles for them and began to grow paddy.

the forgotten holocaust · reportage right: Hardly anything could be grown on this land. In the daytime deer and wild boar would come and eat seeds sown in the soil. The nights belonged to the tigers. below: On Ashtami, the eighth day of Durga Puja, in 1942, the flood that followed the storm swept away cows, goats and human beings.

stoop were fields and past that forest, leading to the river. “It was all jungle like that here,” Jabbar said, “only much more dense.” Jabbar is known in these parts as a cow doctor, a man you go to if you need a bovine’s teeth set, or to cure the inevitable rashes in their mouths. A cow can stop eating and die from such

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an illness. Even now, if you bring a cow right to his stoop, he will treat her. But he cannot get around anymore, not with his hernia. He sits on the veranda all day, surrounded by myriad medicine bottles, and reads the day’s Anandabazar Patrika. He was born in Mahabatnagar, in South 24 Parganas, on the mainland. He studied till the second standard, when the famine struck. “Otherwise, if I had studied till Class 4, then I would piss on those who have studied till Class 8 or 9 nowadays,” he said. He recited the names of his classmates as if he had seen them yesterday, and recalled his teachers, and their teachings and beatings, with relish. “They would make your thighs hot with a whack of their switch,” he said approvingly. About the days of famine, what he remembered was the rice. It was nothing like the white rice that we eat normally, he said, the mountain of parboiled rice that you will find in households and hotels across the two Bengals. “That rice used to come from Rangoon,” he said. “It was blue. Bluer than the ink in your pen. You could not eat that rice. The English government used to give it to us. It was the age of the naira mundu raja”—the bald king, probably referring to George VI. “His head was on the silver rupee coins. But who had cash back then to buy anything? We had no oil,

the forgotten holocaust · reportage no spices, no salt. For that you needed money. Then the British government started giving out blue rice. It was terrible rice. We ate that.” Many of the sharecroppers, like his parents, had no rice stored away and no cash. People were eating whatever they could find, chopping up the leaves and stems of banana plants, foraging for the bitter gira leaves that grew wild along the riverbanks and boiling them for food. Many people died from hunger. That is when the attacks started, Jabbar said. He spoke of the “dacoities” he had witnessed by peasants. Groups of men went to the houses of landlords at night with flame torches, and banged on the gates. “Come out,” they would scream. “Toder achhe, de! Toder achhe, de!”—You have food. Give it up! You have food. Give it up! Anger stemmed from the fact that the families of landlords were able to eat three meals a day, while the peasants could manage only once a day. Jabbar rattled out the names of all the landlords he could remember. They would force the door open with the dhanbhaner dhenki, which was like a heavy wooden cannon used to husk paddy. “If they did not give food, then they would stick the torch in their face. Burn you with the flame.” I asked him whether he thought those who attacked and burned the landlords were wrong to do so. “Peter jala jokhon thakbe,” he said, “kono porichoy thakbe na”—When you will have hunger burning in your belly, you won’t recognise anyone. He reflected on the time without any judgment. “At such a time, dacoity or putting a knife into someone’s heart is no matter.” Before the flood, a friend had told his father about the land that was available on the island. His father got the land in Maipith but he had no intention of moving here. The land was not fit for cultivating rice. The dense forest had been felled, but the land was full of smaller trees and stumps. “We were pulled here by our stomachs,” he said. “When we first came here there could be no crop. The water was salty. How can you have a crop on that? And if you did have a crop on

it, then the deer and wild boar would come across and eat it all. And at night, the tigers would come.” But they came because here there was land and fish, and a chance to survive. “We came driven by hunger. But that hunger lasted five years.” for most who came during the famine, the island was a place of last resort. It was a place where people came when they had nowhere left to go. There were many who never made it here, many abandoned, sold off, left behind, swept away. Then there were those who MAY 2020

above: Masses of hungry people came from the mainland to Maipith island begging for food. “Many died, but few last rites were done,” said Chintamani Mahapatra, a Brahmin priest in Maipith. 47

above: Many arrived in the islands without wives or children. They would say their families had gone “missing.” Everyone knew what that meant. 48

reached here and perished anyway. None of them received the respect accorded to the dead. Chintamani Mahapatra has always lived with a clear-eyed view of death. As a Brahmin priest, presiding over funerals was his job. He had his sacred-thread ceremony a year after the famine, when he was aged 13, so he figures he is 88 years old now. He lived his entire life on the island. When the flood came to Baikunthapur, in the southern part of the island, he said, it destroyed the crops but did not carry away livestock or human beings. “The water came and flooded our land, but then it went away by the next day.” Mahapatra remembered a few people eating at their house that first night, and then life going back to normal. Sometime later his sister and brother-in-law from Kakdwip came. Their houses were flooded, their lands too. They stayed for six months. Soon people from the west started flooding onto the island as well. Those who had relatives here came with their cattle and livestock. Others came with their THE CARAVAN

hands outstretched, begging for food because they had nowhere to go. “Many died, but few last rites were done,” he said. We were sitting in a brick-and-cement two-storey house. The front room, where we sat, was stocked with barrels of paddy, enough to last the family a year. Mahapatra’s father had come to Maipith from Midnapore. The father was one of the only Brahmins on the island. In these parts, it is rare to find a Mukherjee or Banerjee, Chatterjee or Chakraborty, or, for that matter, a Sen or Dasgupta, Mitra or Bose. Certain common Kolkata surnames, and castes, become uncommon as you venture further south away from the city and the suburbs. Poor Brahmins in these parts could find work as cooks and priests. At first, his father worked as a cook for the landlord’s manager, also a Brahmin. But that man liked his fish fried a certain way and liked to press his father’s palm on the hot skillet to show him how. His father escaped that job and started performing religious rites.

the forgotten holocaust · reportage The naib was a man from his parts in Midnapore and gave him five cottas of land to live off and farm and perform his priestly duties. He stretched that five cottas to 25 bighas, of which Mahapatra now has six bighas in his share. In good times, as a boy, he would accompany his father to funerals and get a couple of kilograms of rice for their services. During the famine, those who could gave a fistful of rice. Many who could not did not perform the last rites. Some did them later, when times were better. There were also people who were not even cremated because no one could afford it. Others lost track of their relatives. Their loved ones simply wandered off in search of food and disappeared. Bodies, families, communities vanished, without the proper honours due to the dead. There would be no record of their passing, neither in the ledgers of priests nor of the state. No one could keep track. I asked Mahapatra why so many people died. He told me that back then, people would grow only one rice crop a year. “Now, you see people raising bitter gourds, beans. You see them leaving for jobs in Delhi and elsewhere. Back then, no one left. There was no other way to earn cash. So, when the floods destroyed the rice crops, they starved.” When I asked him about the call from heaven on the day of the flood that nearly everyone I spoke to told me about, he seemed sceptical. “When a big storm happens there are many sounds,” he said. At one moment the wind suddenly stopped and went back. But he never heard a call. “They said it was a call like ‘Ja Ja Ja.’ Some say it was a bhoirabi’s call. People say such things and we have to go along. If everyone says it is a goat and you see that it is a cow, well there is not much you can do except to call it a goat.” Three years after the famine, Mahapatra took a trip to his father’s village, Ramnagar, in Midnapore district. There was one main road that stretched from Ramnagar to Egra. He stopped in village after village—Depal, Maharajpur, Jamki—to visit friends and relatives along the way. In each village, he saw mounds of bones. In each village, the police and volunteers had piled all

the carcasses onto one plot of land, and stacked them as high as a two-storey house, he said. They were the remains of cows and goats and humans, all mixed together. They had solidity and permanence, when everything else disappeared—houses, bodies, memories, the soft earth yielding to the river. Those bones were the unintended monuments to the Bengal famine.

below: Four people with cholera came to Durga Das’s house the year after the famine. They all died.

durga das received her name because she was born during Durga Puja, 95 years ago. Staff in hand, she still looks a matriarch. “I am a rich man’s daughter,” she told me, though there

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the forgotten holocaust · reportage

above: “My sons leave rice on their plates, when they feed it to the cats, when they spill it on the ground—we never got this at one time,” she said. “I have drunk salt water.” opposite page: These days, the paan leaves grown on the island fetch a good price on the other side of the Sundarbans, in Bangladesh. Growing pan can be more profitable than raising paddy for young farmers, who carry no memories of hunger. 50

was little sign of it now, except in her bearing. Onions hung on the wall, with earth encrusted on them. Das was married when she was nine years old. When the flood came, she was around eighteen. They ate the dole and boiled jute leaves. Her father-in-law sold a bigha of his land to buy rice. They survived. For them, the trouble was not in the famine year. It was the next year. By December 1943, Bengal had a bigger harvest than any in the past. That was the month, Amartya Sen notes, when the death rate in Bengal reached its peak. The starvation phase had given way to the epidemic phase. By then, people with weakened bodies were dying of diseases such as smallpox, malaria and cholera, the ripple effects of hunger. When these infections entered a household, everyone else often fled, abandoning the sick to die alone. Others ostracised the ill, throwing them out of house and home. One day, four such people came to Das’s door. “My didishashuri”—fatherin-law’s elder sister—“came with three other people from Pathar Pratima,” she said. “They all had cholera.” Pathar Pratima is an island further west toTHE CARAVAN

ward the Hooghly river. They had been pushed east, to the edge of the jungle. Her didishashuri and their group all died. Next, her father-in-law began vomiting and had diarrhoea, the telltale signs of cholera. “The day he died he wanted to eat prawns,” she said. “He could not eat anything.” No priest came to do the last rites. No crematorium wanted them. She and her husband cremated them all on their land. Soon, they both got sick as well, and were suffering alone in the house. “No one came to help us. No outsiders visited us.” But they were young and strong. They survived. The crematorium was just a patch of fallow field. The land is grassy now, there is nothing to see there anymore. Das’s only son is nearly seventy. He came over to tell us how many people had been burned there in recent years. He had no idea why there was a crematorium on his land. Five people died in the famine in this house, including his own grandfather. It almost killed both his parents too, before he was even born. But those facts seem to have nothing to do with him at all. These days, he loses money gambling. He has had to sell off ten bighas of their land. He bragged about the price at which he sold his paddy this year to the state control board. He wanted us to know he came out ahead. This would be the year he turns it around. “Are you from the government?” Durga Das’s grandson asked me, suspiciously. He was about my age, tall, dressed in nothing but a lungi, showing off his hairless chest. He works odd jobs in Chennai. No, I told him. I had come to hear her talk about the famine. “We know all about that,” he said. “The famine of ’76.” it was early morning, and we were riding on the bund along the southern end of Maipith, to Kishorimohanpur. The river here had moved a hundred yards away, creating rich swampland that belonged to no one. Pumpkin flowers grew on vines on a long net along the bund. Across the swamp, there was another net, to keep out tigers. The

the forgotten holocaust · reportage jungle was on the other side of the river. In these parts, the edge separating land and water is never fixed. Old islands go underwater and new ones emerge. In some places, fields fall into rivers and bighas of farmland disappear. In others, the water yields new land. The boundaries between village and jungle, between living beings and spirits, between the present and the past, all seemed to shift shapes. Subhadra Patra was one of the oldest people in Maipith. She had lived in Kishorimohanpur for most of her life. The house and the yard were full of men, women, children and animals. Her grandsons cultivate paan leaves, which are in high demand for weddings in Bangladesh, on the other side of the jungle, and more profitable than growing paddy. They have ponds full of fish. And they keep pet pigeons, who were creating a bustle in the yard. Patra sat in a hammock that hung low on the veranda of the mud house. She could no longer see. She was looking off into the distance, listening to the flut-

“When my father reached the river here, it was full of the dead.” Kashinath took a handkerchief, put perfumed oil on it, and clamped it over his mouth as he walked past the dead. ter. She was born in Baikunthapur, on the Janas’ side of the island. She married at the age of 11 and moved here. She had never been to school. “I used to herd 19 cows,” she said. “Me and another girl and an old lady to watch over us. Nineteen cows and two little girls.” Back then, her father-in-law, who was a gunin—a medium—could secure a whole perimeter using a mukherbera, a fence made of words. The mantra, in the name of Bonbibi, would freeze any tiger in its tracks, she said. He would utter a mukherbera each night like a watchman to keep them safe. I asked her how old she might be. “Who knows, baba, I don’t know,” she said. “Can’t you see all my grandchildren?” I asked if she remembered the flood.

the forgotten holocaust · reportage “The flood of ’49?” she said immediately. “That was just the other day, baba. Just the other day.” When the flood came, she was married, but still a girl. The water came from the river and rushed into the house and nearly drowned her. The mud walls and wooden beams began to crumble. Only her khursauri—aunt-inlaw—was home. Her father-in-law had gone to the forest. He rushed back, ran inside and pulled her out to save her. When the water receded, she recalled, they still had a dry sack of rice on the roof. “We had no drinking water. It was salt water everywhere.” Her father-in-law would boil rice in that salt water. They ate the rice plain. In her recounting, no one died during the floods, but news of deaths started coming in later. “People drank that water and swelled up and died,” she said. It was breakfast time and she was eating moori—puffed rice—from a steel bowl. Her daughters-in-law had served us moori with a fried egg. We sat on the floor of the veranda, eating and talking among the pigeons. “Obhab mane, he bhogoban, he thakur, he thakur. Ki kore ek bochhor gechhe. Ki kheye bechechhi amra,”—Oh the poverty of that time, oh god. How that year passed! The things we ate to survive— she said. They ate the ghata—a mix of rice, dal and vegetables—of the government dole. Or they ate the rengini khud from Rangoon. The khud, or broken rice, was not whole rice but little ground pieces. “You had to bring it home and boil it,” she said. “You ate it and you were hungry again.” Her khursauri would roast the khud like moori and tie a pouch of it around the little girl’s waist as she wandered in the fields with her cows. She does not understand how her children can grow paan over paddy, or waste cooked rice. “My sons leave rice on their plates, when they feed it to the cats, when they spill it on the ground— we never got this at one time,” she said. “I have drunk salt water.”

above: “Look at the latdars here. They have all gone bust!” Biren Haldar said, laughing. He listed the landlords who once owned hundreds of bighas on the island, and now had only a few bighas left. “They brought people here during the famine to say ‘farm here.’ Those people who worked 12 months a year, sweated while the landlords ruled, they are now doing fine.” During Left Front rule, he said, the land ceiling rules were enforced and the rest of the land was vested by the government and taken by those who occupied it. He owned five bighas of land. “Gotor khata”—doing labour—he said. “That’s how life passed for me.”

the elegant young woman in a red sari surprised me. “We know all about the famine of ’50 in this house,” she said. She told me how people used to chew tamarind leaves when they were 52

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opposite page: Maneka Gharami lives alone in her ancestral home. Her family used to own over 700 bighas of land, her son Tirtha says, of which she now owns nine bighas. One of her sons was killed by his buffalo 25 years ago, an incident that is known to everybody in the area. The buffalo had crossed the river and gone into the jungle. When it returned it was bloodied and ran amok in the fields. In the melee, the buffalo headbutted its young owner in the chin and killed him. Tirtha now works odd jobs in Andhra Pradesh, like so many young men on these islands who have headed south to make a living.

the forgotten holocaust · reportage

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the forgotten holocaust · reportage

above: “We know all about the famine of ’50 in this house,” Chapala Gayen’s granddaughter-in-law said. Gayen tells ghost stories of the famine to her grandchildren. 54

hungry, how they ate khud and gruel made of maize that came from the government. She laughed, wondering how anyone could eat such a thing now. She lives in a long mud house, two stories high, a house full of women. Lines of bright saris were hanging on the line along the long veranda where Chapala Gayen, her grandmother-in-law, has her bed, where she sleeps, and talks. Usually she is out collecting firewood, but she had been sick the last few days. They suspected it might be typhoid. We were sitting on Gayen’s bed in the veranda. She touched my face and THE CARAVAN

stroked my arm while she talked in a way that reminded me of my own grandmother when I was a boy. She shares the bed with her four grandchildren. They grew up hearing her tell ghost stories to put them to sleep. Aparna, who had recently passed her tenth-standard exams, said her grandmother especially liked to tell two kinds of ghost stories: banshbaganerbhoot’er golpo o monnontererporer golpo—stories of ghosts in the nearby bamboo grove and tales of what happened after the famine. Gayen had never been to school and was not sure how old she was. She got married at the age of 19, she said, so she must have been around fifteen when the famine struck. Her father was a sharecropper. They owned no land. She remembered that it was too early for the paddy crop to come in full strength. Whatever was there, the floods destroyed nearly half of it. It was their main source of livelihood. “We made money husking paddy for rich women,” Gayen recalled. “We would get one rupee a bag and you had to carry it from the landlord’s house, husk the paddy yourself and then carry it back. Sometimes you got the khud from the husking and we kept that. We made pithes”—milky sweets—“with it. I did not eat a full belly of rice for four or five years.” But they did not starve. They ate boiled vegetables and greens—shimul, chapal, gira— that grew on the riverside or in the wild, but which no one cultivated like spinach or mustard. Sometimes they had a little rice, and there were plenty of fish and prawns in the rivers and creeks around the island. They steamed it with a little turmeric and salt if they had it, and a drop of oil, which they hardly had. They ate big crabs that way too. The manager at the kacheri would give out dole, watered-down khichri, which they carried in clay pots. Sometimes the pot would fall and break and that meant a day’s hunger. Those who could not get that, ate foods that were akhaddo or kukhaddo—inedible or harmful—and died. “They came in twos and fours and eights and tens,” Chapala Gayen said. They were all outsiders, “phankerlok,” strangers with barely any stitch of

the forgotten holocaust · reportage clothing on them. No one knew them or where they came from. They ate anything they could find. You would see them eating raw vegetables in the Robibarer Bazar, the Sunday Market. They slept there on beds of straw. When they died, their bodies were dragged into the canal and washed away. There were not so many people here then, she said. The houses were far apart. Once, a man and a woman who came and stopped at a house nearby. “They looked like walking skeletons,” she said. They had two children with them. The children did not even have any clothes on. The couple left them near the house and disappeared. They never came back. Later, someone else came and picked them up. “I saw that with my own eyes,” Gayen said.

A healthy, well-fed, beautiful boy was playing in the yard while we talked. In a couple of years he would start going to school. Chapala Gayen sat on her bed watching him. “That’s my great-grandson,” the child of the woman in the red sari. Of her 11 children, eight had lived, Gayen said, and now she had grandchildren and this great-grandchild. It was a miracle in a way, this cascading of life over four generations. She had survived. Her line was not stunted or snuffed out. On nights like this, she said, when she talked about those times, she had dreams about those people. There is a bridge now that connects the northern end of Maipith to the mainland, and a bus service to Jaynagar. We were waiting at the Shonibarer Bazar, Saturday Market, in Maipith. The bus was late. There was a doctor with

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below: This was the last outpost of human habitation. Beyond here, for hundreds of kilometres, was nothing but rivers and jungle. Even today, the jungle, and tigers, are always just across the river.

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the forgotten holocaust · reportage below: For many, this was the end of a long journey. They arrived here as walking skeletons, with hardly any strength left. They collapsed of thirst and hunger, and died. No graves, no samadhis, no memorials were later erected to honour them. Their bodies were dragged into the canals and disappeared. opposite page: Sheikh Abdul Jabbar recalled raids by sharecroppers during the famine. If the landlords did not give food, “then they would stick the torch in their face.”

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us, not a real MBBS doctor—there are no qualified doctors on the island—but a man with a diploma and a bag. His father sees more than two hundred patients a day, he told us, while he has a practice here and in the suburbs of Kolkata, where he lives. His physique was that of the city, a body made soft without the labour of island life. Mentally too, he had distanced himself from this place. Everyone used to have guns here, he told us, and fought with each other. Until recently, there was no police station. Now, with the Coastal Police stationed on the island, things had improved, he said. A small plinth in the market served as a Martyr’s Memorial, honouring a Communist Party of India (Marxist) comrade who was killed by a leader of the Socialist Unity Centre of India. Such memorials are common across Bengal. Bodies drop dead and little stone plinths come up in bazaars. But, even here, there was no memorial to those walking skeletons who came to the markets in search of food, who slept and died here, and whose bodies were dragged away and disappeared. Instead, their ghosts roam freely in the bamboo groves of dreams and nightmares of the millions of people who lived through the 1943 Bengal famine.

THE CARAVAN

{THREE} “Choru kazhiccho?” “Bhat kheyechho?” In Malayalam and Bengali, respectively, that is how we ask if someone has eaten. The words literally mean, “Have you had rice?” Rice equals food in our diets. When I first visited Kerala in the early 2000s, I relished the fact that you could get an inexpensive rice meal just about anywhere. The availability to eat it twice, even thrice, a day made me feel at home. One of the things I noticed as an outsider in Kerala was that I could not tell social class by looking at people’s bodies. In Bengal, well-fed, middle-class people, looked different. They were, on the whole, taller, often wider and heavier set. Those who were poor tended to be structurally smaller. This class difference was so obvious, not only in Bengal, but in most parts of India that I had visited, that it seemed not even worth noting. When I went to Kerala, that distinction disappeared. Everyone more or less ate the same food, and seemed to have had enough to eat for at least a generation. There was evidence in the bodies of a social transformation, signs of an egalitarianism that did not seem to match other parts of the country. How had it happened? This question brought me to Kerala a decade later to live in and write a book about the place. I did not know then that the famine would be a part of that story. But in 1942, when rice prices rose, they rose all over India. The people most affected were Malayalis and Bengalis. There was no cyclone in Kerala, but the rice shortage was much worse. The state imported fifty percent of its rice, while Bengal only imported ten percent. Kerala’s rice came mainly from Burma. After the Japanese took over Burma, in March 1942, that supply was cut off. The price of rice rose manyfold, just like in Bengal, making it out of reach for most. In a population of almost 12 million people, only an estimated five hundred thousand, who had large landholdings, businesses or salaried jobs, were protected from hunger. The vast majority had hardly any land or stocks of rice or cash. If the state there had acted like Bengal, most of those people could have died. In 1942, there were

the forgotten holocaust · reportage reports of hunger, malnourishment and epidemics such as cholera in many parts of Kerala. People in the south fled their villages for the north. Others joined the armed forces or migrated elsewhere. There was a crisis. But there was no famine. Millions of people did not die. They survived. The state changed, and as a result, social relations changed. And those shifts became a template for what society would look like over the next seven decades. In 1942, the state of Kerala did not yet exist. The Malayalam-speaking regions that became Kerala in 1956 were then under the two princely states of Travancore and Cochin, and the district of Malabar on the western edge of the British-run Madras Presidency. In all three regions, people survived because measures were taken—with an eye toward what the dewan of Cochin called the man-made aura of the Bengal famine—to make sure that food was widely distributed, and that people did not starve. Earlier, the maharaja of Travancore had introduced tapioca, locally called kappa and poola, a native crop of Brazil, as a form of insurance against hunger. The root vegetable grew quickly and was a rich source of carbohydrates. In the south, many who could not buy rice ate poola to survive. The Christians who migrated north to Malabar and popularised tapioca there were called “poola brothers.” The Cochin dewan ran ninety “Cochin restaurants,” serving food made from wheat and millet from north India, which fed over a thousand people a day. Congress leaders were in jail because of the Quit India movement. But from mid 1942, the communists played a key role in demanding price controls and ration shops across Malabar, Cochin and Travancore. All paddy was to go to the state and then distributed to the public, not hoarded by landlords, traders or blackmarketeers and sold at exorbitant rates. By early 1943, both princely states in Travancore and Cochin had set up rice-rationing systems on a limited scale. In Malabar, the communists formed food committees to supervise the procurement and distribution of grain. Local zamindars joined these

the maharaja of travancore had introduced tapioca, locally called kappa and poola, a native crop of Brazil, as a form of insurance against hunger. the root vegetable grew quickly and was a rich source of carbohydrates. In Kerala, many who could not buy rice ate kappa to survive. MAY 2020

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the forgotten holocaust · reportage below: In the storm of 1942, the walls of Binodini Shee’s house in Midnapore collapsed, forcing her to move to the islands. Her house here was built with sturdy Goran wood that her husband brought from the jungle. One day, her husband left for the jungle by boat to cut timber. He was never seen again. Shee still wears shankhas on both wrists, like a married woman. The priest told her she cannot do the last rites— what if he comes back? In 2009, this house too collapsed during Cyclone Aila, but was rebuilt from the old beams—a fresh body made of old bones.

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committees and agreed to distribute rice from their reserves. By mid 1943, when millions were starving in Bengal, rations were widely instituted in Travancore, Cochin and Malabar. A public-distribution system for rice had been created and, while the amount provided per person was limited, it ensured the distribution of rice to everyone. The communist leader EMS Namboodiripad later wrote that these efforts were widely supported by people across caste, class and party lines, even by those who were not communists. The work was seen as providing a service to all.

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This became a prototype of what later developed as the “Kerala model”, according to the historian Robin Jeffrey. “Rationing forced governments into closer touch with their citizens: virtually every resident of Kerala owned a ration card.” More importantly, Jeffrey argues, “The idea that the state ought to perform functions for its people— and that such functions could be forced from the state—gained currency.” The experience of war, of hunger and the famine that wasn’t became the basis of the social transformations that took place in land ownership, education and health, once the princely states were abolished and the state of Kerala was formed. “No matter how a famine is caused,” Sen writes, the “methods of breaking it call for a large supply of food in the public distribution system.” This means organising rationing and price controls, but also ensuring that those who are hungry have money to buy what they need. In other words, it means imagining a society where everyone counts. The role of the government was only half the Kerala story. The other half was the widespread political activism by the broader public that ensured government action. A society where ordinary people can assert their power and where they can govern themselves does not need the largesse of kings, colonial masters or other benevolent elites. Even today, with each new disaster, whether it is a flood or a pandemic, in Kerala one sees a different pattern from the rest of India for how a society deals with crises. It starts with the principle that you treat all people as part of the same society, in every village, in every town, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Malayalis, migrants, rich and poor, and use the power of the state to protect everyone, not just the few. That political tradition goes back more than seventy years to the time of the Bengal famine. I had gone to the Sundarbans expecting tales of force and pillage, of the government’s men coming and snatching rice away. Those stories existed in some of the testimonies Sarkar had collected. But those were not the stories on the island. Here, the state and the police were a great distance away. And

the forgotten holocaust · reportage

the government did provide the ghata or khichri as dole. The greatest crime was not what anyone did, but what they failed to do. Here, one heard of an army of bodies that was the collateral damage of a distant war machine. The majority of Bengalis, those who were not essential to the war effort, were rendered superfluous. It did not matter if they lived or died. Their corpses were not even counted, let alone properly buried or cremated. By chance, some ended up getting refuge on this edge of human habitation, and survived. Many others did not. The famine is like our dirty secret. There are no monuments because the history is still alive, seething among the living, not safely stashed away like Khudiram Bose’s martyrdom or Surja

Sen’s armory raid. The ghosts still haunt those who witnessed those days and survived. There are 250 million Bengalis on either side of the international border between West Bengal and Bangladesh. In the villages of the two Bengals, across the largest delta in the world, sits what could perhaps be the world’s biggest living archive. There are hundreds of thousands of voices, waiting to be heard. And around them, in the towns and the capitals, in the offices and colleges and schools, on television sets and the internet, is that other Bengal, those bodies soft like the delta soil, bodies which were many lifetimes and generations away from labour, from hunger. The evidence is everywhere in plain sight, but no court is in session. s MAY 2020

above: In Midnapore, the famine began with a storm on Saptami, or the Seventh Day, of Durga Puja, in 1942. The wind raged all day and deep into the night. Many remember hearing a call from the sky when the winds stopped. It said “Ay Ay Ay,” or perhaps “Ja Ja Ja.” Others heard the words: “Prithibi Shesh.” It’s the end of the world. 59

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Voices of Reason

on the morning of 9 august 2019, a group of police constables sat on plastic chairs outside the Mahakavi Kalidas auditorium in Mulund, a suburb in northern Mumbai. The rainless morning had given a sudden reprieve to the flood-hit city. With their guns, lathis and lunch bags next to their chairs, the policemen kept a close watch on every person entering and exiting the venue. The security seemed tight for an event that had been billed as a “birthday celebration.” Metal detectors were installed at the entrance. Men, women, children and bags, were all scanned for weapons. At a desk set up opposite the auditorium, a few men and women carefully took down the contact details of every visitor, checked their identification cards and assigned each of them a badge attached to a long blue lanyard.

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rudhransh sharma / sopa images / lightrocket / getty images

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voices of reason · reportage Inside the auditorium, a harmonium and a dholak were being tuned somewhere in the wings. Finally, three men took the microphone and began singing in Hindi: “Na goliyon se darte hain, na goliyon se, dharam ki toliyon se darte hain, na toliyon se. Ladenge jaat paat, ling bhed aur dharmvaad se, qayamat, kismat, jannat, karishma ki takaton se”—We are neither scared of bullets, nor religious hordes. We will fight against casteism, gender discrimination and communalism, and against the powers of heaven, fate and doom. The packed auditorium cheered, and the applause only grew in volume when, towards the end, the song pledged to fulfil the dreams of four specific people: the activists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, the scholar MM Kalburgi and the journalist Gauri Lank-

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esh. All of them had been murdered in the last six years. It was the thirtieth-anniversary celebration of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, an organisation founded by Dabholkar, in 1989, to combat superstition and to promote rationalism. There has been a long tradition in Maharashtra, and a few adjoining states, of rationalists fighting superstition and its advocates in Indian society—babas, astrologers and politicians who use religion for political mobilisation—through lectures, workshops, cultural events, articles and books. Hindu fundamentalist groups have long detested rationalists from this region, whom they see as critics of Hindu customs and rituals. Dabholkar and Pansare were allegedly killed for their work as rationalists. Kalburgi

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and Lankesh were also sympathisers of the movement. While investigations are ongoing, the name of the Hindutva organisation Sanatan Sanstha has come up in relation to all four murders. Its members have also been charge-sheeted in cases of several bomb blasts. The four murders sent shockwaves through the communities of rationalists, progressive thinkers, activists and intellectuals across the country. Over the past six years, several rationalists have decided to back down and retreat into silence in the fear that they could be the next target. And yet, the threats and intimidation have failed to kill the movement. A section of rationalists has become even more vocal. In the auditorium, a young MANS volunteer took the microphone and invited a man he described as the “ma-

voices of reason · reportage

courtesy maharashtra andhshraddha nirmulan samiti

choman of rationalism” and a “one-man institution” to address the gathering. Narendra Nayak, a 68-year-old rationalist from Mangaluru, slowly walked up to the podium. A biochemist, consumer-rights activist and president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations, Nayak was a close friend of Dabholkar’s and has been at the forefront of the movement in Karnataka since the 1970s. After Gauri Lankesh’s murder, the Karnataka police discovered a plot to murder Nayak and has since assigned two gunmen to protect him. “The police have discovered hit lists that have the names of many of us present here in this room,” Nayak told the audience. “I, for one, am proud to be on that list, because they won’t make a list of people who are ineffective in their work, right? In fact, I told the writer KS Bhagwan that it seems you are the first name on this hit list while I’m Number 7. So they’ll get you first before they come to me. Bhagwan replied, ‘Do you think they’ll follow the list in an order or in a fair-andsquare manner?’” The audience giggled. “By the way, I’ve already donated my body to the medical hospital,” Nayak added. “That is, if I’m allowed to die a natural death. It would be difficult to donate my body after an autopsy, you see.” The event was being chaired by the current head of the MANS, a young man called Avinash Patil, who had also been assigned police protection after a plot to murder him was discovered. Patil, a 45-year-old civil engineer, was mentored by Dabholkar. “We don’t want to be martyrs,” Patil told the gathering during his address. “We want to be alive and do the work that we are doing. So, the best strategy is to not get into needless confrontations and fights. Activism and awareness is our priority. We are not going to bring about a revolution overnight.” a trained doctor, Narendra Dabholkar gave up his practice in 1971 and plunged into a life of activism, initially supporting a variety of causes: from persuading villagers across Maharashtra to allow Dalits access to public wells to the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a movement against a number of large dam projects. In the 1980s, Dabholkar became acquainted with the work of the rationalist Basava Premanand, who was known for his campaigns for the eradication of superstition and promotion of science. Inspired by Abraham Kovoor, a father figure for many rationalists in India, Premanand conducted workshops across the country, in which he replicated the “miracles” that many godmen performed. The idea was to show the deceit behind the miracle. When Premanand’s crusade reached Maharashtra, Dabholkar was among the many who

attended his workshops. “Huge crowds gathered to see them,” Dabholkar wrote in a 2007 article. “I sensed that this kind of work can take root in Maharashtra and prove quite useful. But it did not occur to me that I was the one who should take the initiative.” Dabholkar wrote that he tried to urge activists to set up an organisation in Maharashtra that could similarly promote rational thinking and scientific temper. But he did not find any takers. “So putting the work and the free time together, I started it of my own accord,” Dabholkar wrote. “There wasn’t any incident that could have jolted me into this work as people imagine. In fact, many of my friends did not approve of my way as an activist. Some of them don’t approve of it even now. They think I am wasting my time in demonstrating miracles. So this is all about my convictions.” However, as Dabholkar’s life would go on to prove, his initiative ended up saving many lives and brought about a landmark piece of legislation.

previous spread: The COVID-19 outbreak has illustrated the extent of the grip superstition has over India. opposite page: Since the death of Narendra Dabholkar, Avinash Patil has been heading the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti.

“The police have discovered hit lists that have the names of many of us present here in this room,” Nayak told the audience. “I, for one, am proud to be on that list.” In 1989, Dabholkar founded the Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, which later became the MANS. For two-and-a-half decades, Dabholkar travelled to the nooks and corners of Maharashtra, delivering public lectures and conducting workshops that debunked miracles and divine acts. In certain instances, he would even challenge godmen for an open debate. These workshops earned Dabholkar many opponents. Some obvious ones were the godmen themselves. But there were others too, including political parties such as the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party. They argued that Dabholkar was against the Hindu religion. “Narendra Maharaj”—a popular baba—“has instigated people in his public speeches to sever my limbs from my body; accused me of accepting bribes from Christian Missionaries for destroying the Hindu religion,” Dabholkar wrote in the 2007 article. “The Shiv Sena and BJP MLAs have demanded banning of [my organisation] and my expulsion from Maharashtra state in the legislative assembly. Whenever news papers or channels asked me for my reaction to it, I would only say, ‘Oh god of their faith, forgive them, for they do not understand what they are speaking.’” MAY 2020

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courtesy maharashtra andhshraddha nirmulan samiti

voices of reason · reportage

above: Narendra Dabholkar’s work as a rationalist activist would end up saving many lives and bring about a crucial piece of legislation. opposite page: Gauri Lankesh, a journalist who was a sympathiser of the rationalist movement, was killed in 2017.

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What Dabholkar saw on the ground made him realise that the scope of work for an organisation such as the MANS was huge. People believed not just in miracles but in all kinds of superstitions— from snake bites and their purported divinity to human sacrifices. In 1995, he began a campaign for an anti-superstition law in Maharashtra. He approached the state government with a draft bill. The bill saw immediate opposition from the BJP and the Shiv Sena, as well as many Hindu religious groups. Among them, the Sanatan Sanstha was the one organisation that vigorously and consistently opposed the bill. The group was founded in Goa in 1999 by a hypnotherapist called Jayant Balaji Athavale. “Members of Sanatan Sanstha told people that if this law is passed, they would not be THE CARAVAN

able to conduct pujas in their house,” Avinash Patil told me. “They also told the Varkari community, a dominant community in Maharashtra, that their annual Pandharpur pilgrimage will be banned if this law came through. Both of which were not true.” The MANS and the Sanatan Sanstha had regular run-ins with each other for many years. “When it was founded, the Sanatan Sanstha operated mainly in the Konkan area and back then itself, they used to oppose the work that we did in those areas,” Patil explained. “They would go to people and tell them that we are anti-Hindu and against religion, that we are nastiks”—atheists—“and that we are not good for society. For Athavale and his Sanstha, we were the principal ideological opposition. So, he gradually increased the gravity of blame he piled on us.” Patil recalled instances when members of the Sanatan Sanstha would dissuade—and sometimes threaten—owners of venues that had agreed to host lectures and workshops by the MANS. Sanatan Prabhat, a newsletter published by the group, would regularly carry propaganda against the rationalist organisation. Members of the Sanatan Sanstha would also protest outside workshops and lectures conducted by Patil and Dabholkar. “They have submitted letters to local authorities to urge them to take legal action against us,” Patil said. “On a few occasions, a few of our programmes have been cancelled too.” Despite sustained opposition by the Sanstha, Dabholkar persisted with his campaign for the bill and continued to rally support for it both among people as well as among politicians. In 2007, when his campaign for the law had spanned a decade, Dabholkar wrote, “Many people asked me, ‘Aren’t you frustrated that for no reason the bill is being postponed for the last 16 years?’ Of course I am disappointed at this delay; but at the same time I am well aware of its limitations and the precincts within which we can put it to use. So neither was I hurt to the core by this inexcusable delay; nor could I be provoked into some strong reaction to win. In the field where I am engaged one has to measure the success of his work not in terms of decades but in terms of centuries.” “Dabholkar would receive anonymous letters and calls threatening him and his life but he’d just tear those letters and throw them away,” Patil recalled. “We were a bit concerned, but none of us had ever thought anything would happen to him.” On the morning of 20 August 2013, Dabholkar stepped out of his flat in Pune for a walk. When he reached the Omkareshwar bridge, two men wearing motorcycle helmets walked towards him and started firing at him. Bullets pierced his temple, his neck and abdomen, killing him instantly.

voices of reason · reportage after the “sacrifice” is committed. The merit of a law specifically targeting superstitious practices is that it has the capacity to act as a deterrent and prevent such crimes. The present IPC also does not accommodate crimes committed as part of black magic and other superstitious practices. “A separate law is necessary because the relationship between a devotee and so-called godman is of a peculiar nature, often marked by violence,” Mukta argued. Even though it was finally passed, the anti-superstition law was a severely diluted version of the draft originally proposed by Dabholkar. Patil said that

the dilution was inevitable, since all political parties lacked the will to pass it from the start. Patil recalled the cancellation of a specific clause which recommended a ban on animal sacrifice as part of religious yatras. “The then home minister removed the clause because he felt that his political party wouldn’t be able to face people if such a clause was there,” he said. “When it comes to religion and god, people’s emotions flare up quite easily. Politicians, therefore, often don’t want to interfere there.” From 42 clauses, the bill was finally reduced to 12 in the final version. “We had to compromise—something is better than nothing,” Patil said.

courtesy bhanu prakash chandra / the week

The shooters hopped onto a motorbike parked nearby and sped away. That same evening, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, a group affiliated to the Sanatan Sanstha, uploaded Dabholkar’s photo to their website, with a red “X” drawn over his face. The next day, Athavale wrote on the Sanatan Sanstha’s website: “Births and deaths are pre-destined and everybody gets the fruit of their karma. Instead of dying bedridden through illness, or after some surgery, such a death for Dabholkar is a blessing of the Almighty.” Four days after Dabholkar was murdered, the Maharashtra government passed the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifices and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act. “In a way, it was the guilt associated with Dabholkar’s death and the government’s failure to protect him that finally pushed them to pass the bill,” Patil said. “It took eighteen years and one man’s life to get a progressive piece of legislation passed. Five chief ministers changed by the time the law was passed; three times the bill’s name was changed.” In an interview to The Hindu in 2017, Dabholkar’s daughter Mukta explained what the anti-superstition law had managed to achieve. “We need to understand that this is a law that addresses exploitation in the name of religion,” she said. “Opponents to the legislation in Maharashtra had claimed that the law would affect the religious practices of Hindus; that it was anti-Hindu. But after examining more than 350 FIRs lodged across Maharashtra in the last four years, we found that these claims were unfounded. Data show that the accused persons belong to various religions.” She pointed out that around seven instances of human sacrifice had been reported since the law was passed in 2013. “Before this law, acts involving human sacrifice could not be stopped as they were preceded by some puja and offerings—not banned under any law,” she said. One could argue that such human sacrifices could have been booked under existing provisions of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to murder, but those provisions can be applied only

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as recently as 2018, the Central Bureau of Investigation and Maharashtra police’s probe in the Dabholkar and Pansare cases had not made any breakthrough. The same was true of Karnataka’s Crime Investigation Department in the Kalburgi murder case. The only investigating team that finally succeeded was the Karnataka police’s special investigation team that probed the Gauri Lankesh murder case starting in September 2017. In fact, the SIT’s work proved to be immensely useful to the probes of the other three murders too—so much so that the Supreme Court handed over the Kalburgi murder case to the SIT too. Filed in November 2018, the charge sheet in the Gauri Lankesh murder case claims that a single conspiracy is 68

behind all four murders. According to the SIT, a syndicate led by men with links to the Sanatan Sanstha and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti is said to have planned and executed all the four murders. (In April this year, while defending the Citizenship Amendment Act in the Supreme Court, the Narendra Modi government cited a letter by the HJS as evidence of religious persecution of Hindus in Pakistan.) The investigation further revealed that this nameless syndicate was planning more murders and had drawn up a list of at least 36 potential targets—some of whom had been followed for days and whose houses had been surveilled.

The syndicate’s professed aim, as revealed by the investigation, is to “protect Hindu dharma” and most importantly to “kill evil doers,” which is a gospel propounded in Kshatradharmasadhana, a text published by the Sanathan Sanstha. Authored by Athavale, the text argues that “the spiritual practice of protecting seekers and killing evildoers” has become very important in “present times.” It goes on to explain that “this is a war between the righteous and the unrighteous, the seeker and the evil-doer, not between religious orders or sects.” A major portion of the text is dedicated to explaining the process of

“Only 5 per cent of the crusade against evil will be of physical nature,” Athavale wrote in the text. “5 per cent of seekers will need to undergo training with weapons. … It does not matter if one is not used to shooting. When he shoots along with chanting of the Lord’s name, the bullet certainly strikes the target due to the inherent power in the Lord’s name.” Nayak and Patil, for instance, had both been followed. According to the SIT, this syndicate, formed in 2010–11, was allegedly led by Dr Virendra Tawde, an ENT surgeon who was arrested by the CBI in 2016 in the Dabholkar murder case. Tawde allegedly oversaw the killings of Dabholkar and Pansare. His deputy Amol Kale, now arrested by the Karnataka SIT, has been charged with the murders of Kalburgi and Lankesh. According to a report in The Hindu, Kale was also allegedly in the process of planning the murder of KS Bhagwan when he was nabbed. THE CARAVAN

praful gangurde / hindustan times / getty images

Meanwhile, the investigation into Dabholkar’s murder has taken many frustrating twists and turns—and since his death, three more people have been murdered. On 20 February 2015, Govind Pansare was shot dead by two helmet-clad men while he was on his morning walk in Pune. His wife, Uma Pansare, who was on the walk with him, was also critically injured but survived. The same year, on 30 August, two men got off a motorcycle parked outside MM Kalburgi’s house in Dharwad. One of them knocked on his door. When Kalburgi opened the door, the men shot him in his chest and forehead. They fled soon after and Kalburgi was declared dead when he was brought to the hospital. Two years later, on 5 September 2017, Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and editor, was shot dead by three men wearing helmets as she was entering the compound of her house in Bengaluru. Three of the bullets pierced her head, neck and chest, killing her instantly. On 20 August 2019, the sixth anniversary of Dabholkar’s murder, the MANS ran a nation-wide campaign that centred around a single question: “Sutradhar kaun?”— Who is the puppeteer? “We want to know if the government will dare to admit the name of the group that is behind these murders,” Patil said.

voices of reason · reportage becoming a “seeker” and why it is important to kill evil-doers. Seekers are defined as those who “repose their faith in the invisible god, surrender their body, mind and wealth and undertake spiritual practice day and night.” They are supposed to be “really fearless and courageous.” Conversely, an “evil-doer,” according to the text, could be anyone—from a corrupt politician to a criminal. These “evil-doers” are characterised as “germs” invading society. Rationalists or, specifically, atheists find a mention in this category too: Those following charvak (atheist) philosophy assist those opposing seekers. In the ancient times, demons used to interrupt sacrificial fires undertaken by sages. Even today, the subtle

bodies of demons pose obstacles by operating through the medium of another being. According to the SIT, the syndicate allegedly recruited and radicalised over sixty men in Maharashtra and Karnataka and trained them to use firearms. “They targeted men from low-income families and those who ideologically lean towards the right,” a senior SIT official, who did not want to be named, told me. “They also seem to look for men who have indulged in some kind of communal violence at some point in their lives.” For instance, Parashuram Waghmore, the 27-year-old who allegedly shot Lankesh, was arrested along with six others in 2012 for hoisting a green flag with the Islamic symbol of the crescent moon at the tahsildar’s office in Sindagi,

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below: A rally in support of the Sanatan Sanstha in Thane in August 2018. Members linked with the organisation are being investigated in the murders of several rationalists.

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voices of reason · reportage in Vijayapura district, with the intention of fanning communal tensions. Waghmore was a member of the extremist Hindu outfit Shri Ram Sene. “Many of the recruits were handling a gun or committing a murder for the first time,” the SIT official said. “The syndicate trained them to use firearms. They also helped them manage stress and nervousness psychologically by teaching them meditation, showing them videos and by making them do naam jap. For instance, we found Amit Degvekar’s”—the alleged financier of the syndicate—“diary in which he wrote ‘shri ram’ over and over again in the smallest font.” Degvekar, a 38-year-old resident of Ponda in Goa, was arrested by the SIT in 2018. Originally from Sindhudurg district, Degvekar was allegedly a member of Sanatan Sanstha and was in charge of funding the murders, according to the SIT. The chargesheet claims that the syndicate “strictly followed” the guidelines and principles listed in Kshatradharmasadhana. The text seems to have laid down a blueprint for the way the syndicate allegedly executed the murders. “Only 5 per cent of the crusade against evil will be of physical nature,” Athavale wrote in the text. “5 per cent of seekers will need to undergo training with weapons. … It does not matter if one is not used to shooting. When he shoots along with chanting of the Lord’s name, the bullet certainly strikes the target due to the inherent power in the Lord’s name.” In another part of the text, Athavale rules out debate or dialogue as an option. “Who are we to change people’s minds when Rama and Krishna couldn’t change the minds of evildoers like Ravana and Kamsa etc. and eventually had to slay them?” he writes. One of the qualities of the ideal seeker, according to the text, is someone who has “less emotions such as worry about one’s family and society and less attachment for them.” According to an SIT official, when Amol Kale’s wife and children were brought in front of him, he showed no sense of emotional attachment towards them. “His wife was crying,” the official said. “We asked Kale whether he is aware that his 70

actions are making his family suffer. All he said is that ‘unko bhagwan dekh lega’”—god will watch over them. The text also recommends that seekers make lists of evildoers and argues that “since they are made by seekers, there is no question of their veracity.” It further urges seekers to consult Sanatan Prabhat, which will “publish news about evildoings.” The Kannada edition of Sanatan Prabhat for 19 to 25 June 2015 urged Hindus to conduct “kruti,” or acts, against “dharmadrohis,” or traitors of the faith, such as Kalburgi and the late writer UR Ananthamurthy. Kruti is allegedly a code word for an act of violence and, according to the SIT, THE CARAVAN

has been found in the diaries recovered from those arrested for the Lankesh murder. On the front page of the edition, the publication cites a speech made by Kalburgi during a seminar on the anti-superstition bill on 9 June 2014 as a reason for its exhortation against the scholar. However, it grossly misrepresents and misquotes the speech by saying that Kalburgi had urged people to urinate on Hindu idols. In his speech, Kalburgi had quoted a passage from Ananthamurthy’s book Bettale Pooje Yake Koodadu?—Why Not Worship in the Nude? In the passage, Ananthamurthy recounts an incident

voices of reason · reportage from his childhood when, in order to test the power of idols, he urinated on one. When nothing happened to him, Ananthamurthy wrote, he lost belief in the power of idols to either protect or curse him. Recounting this passage, Kalburgi said that Ananthamurthy’s experience gives the impression that urinating on idols is not a big deal. Unfortunately, the full clip of his speech is still not available anywhere. Available clips abruptly stop at that one inference by Kalburgi. Not just Sanatan Prabhat, many news outlets widely misreported Kalburgi’s speech. The popular newspapers Kannada Prabha and Vijayavani —both owned by BJP politicians—carried reports suggesting that Kalburgi had urged people to urinate on idols. Samaya News, a leading Kannada news channel, even invited Kalburgi on a primetime show and accused him of insulting the gods. A visibly nervous Kalburgi eventually had to pledge his belief in god. “I was only recounting Ananthamurthy’s experience,” Kalburgi told the news anchor. “When one makes a speech, as is the practice, one cites different texts. I was not suggesting that I advocate Ananthamurthy’s inference. I don’t advocate it. I believe in god.” The news anchor, however, cut him short and played the controversial clip over and over again, offering no context or nuance. The Sanatan Prabhat report erroneously claimed, “All of us therefore should continue the experiment conducted by UR Ananthamurthy, says scholar Kalburgi.” The publication added that if a person of another faith had made such a statement about their religion, the incident would not have been tolerated, and urged Hindus to act soon. Kalburgi, thus, seems to have been branded an “evildoer” despite his admission that he was a devout man. “I think the list was prepared on the basis of their perception of who is anti-Hindu,” the senior SIT official said. “I’m not sure they were aware of who is pro-superstition or anti-superstition or belongs to which part of the progressive movement.” Today, the SIT claims to have arrested most of the members in the chain of people who planned the four murders. The most recent arrest was that of Rishikesh Deodikar alias Murali alias Shiva. Another member named in the chargesheet, Vikas Patil alias Nihal alias Dada, is still at large. “This syndicate’s professed aim is to set up the Hindu rashtra and eliminate all durjans”—evildoers—the SIT official told me. “So, while we have caught a few, there may be others who might take on the mantle and initiate action shortly. It is absolutely possible that a new chain of recruits is being trained somewhere with the plan of executing a fresh set of murders.”

According to Kshatradharmasadhana, the final goal of Sanathan Sanstha is to establish a “regime of absolute truth.” The text even gives a detailed timeline for it: 1997-99: Impressing upon the mind that destruction of evildoers is a part of the spiritual practice. 2000-2006: Actual destruction of evildoers at physical, psychological and spiritual levels.

opposite page: The Kannada edition of Sanatan Prabhat for 19 to 25 June 2015 urged Hindus to conduct “kruti,” or acts, against “dharmadrohis,” or traitors of the faith, such as Kalburgi and the late writer UR Ananthamurthy.

2007-22: Generating the potential to run the kingdom of absolute truth 2023-25: Commencement of the regime of absolute truth. According to the SIT, the perception of threat for the surviving rationalists and thinkers has actually increased. “It is unlikely that they will attack when there are guards, but has the threat itself been completely neutralised? No,” the senior SIT official said. “If we were to go by the psychology of the ones we caught, these men are very very motivated towards fulfilling their dreams of a Hindu rashtra and are prepared to sacrifice their lives for it too, if necessary.” I asked the SIT official about the MANS’s campaign to ask the government to name the sutradhar. In its chargesheet, while the SIT has claimed the criminal syndicate behind all the four murders comprises members associated with the Sanatan Sanstha, it does not name the Sanstha as an accused. “Legally, it is difficult to trace the murders to the ‘sutradhar’ or prove their link to the Sanstha,” the SIT official said. “The syndicate is a nameless one. Sure, its members seem to follow an ideology that is propounded by a particular organisation. But, technically, anyone who follows the ideology can commit these murders. They needn’t be a part of any organisation. We cannot prove in court, therefore, that the Sanatan Sanstha is actually responsible for these murders.” There is another hurdle that the police in Maharashtra as well as in Karnataka is yet to cross. The police have to locate two 7.65-millimetre countrymade pistols that were allegedly used in all four murders. According to the Karnataka SIT, these pistols were reportedly dismantled and thrown at the creek in Vasai in Mumbai in 2018. An official told The Hindu that “a company from the Middle East has been roped in to probe the river bed for the weapon parts.” However, after two severe monsoons, the question is if the officials will find anything at all. MAY 2020

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contemporary rationalists live an unenviable reality. There are organisations that openly call for violence against them. Many have even followed through on the threats, as a Hindu-nationalist central government and a subservient media is happy to look the other way. Yet, the surviving rationalists remain defiant. “The murders have actually emboldened many of us and made us more determined,” Sudesh Ghoderao, the secretary of national and international coordination at the MANS told me, in Mumbai last August. “None of us is scared. When Dabholkar was murdered, MANS had 250 branches. Today, a hundred more have been added. How would you explain this? People must have thought that this movement will die after Dabholkar’s murder. But ideology and, most importantly, the ability to question is not something that can be killed with a bullet.” Ghoderao, a chemistry professor in Nashik, joined the MANS in 1991 and was groomed by Dabholkar himself. “Every time he would come to Nashik, he’d park the car outside my college, and we’d tour villages and towns together conducting workshops,” Ghoderao said. “He’d complain that I left him with no free time in the Nashik schedule.” Ghoderao was with Nayak at a workshop in Bengaluru when the news of Dabholkar’s assasination reached him. Nayak and Ghoderao were training other aspiring rationalists on how to conduct workshops that bust miraculous claims and superstitions. “We wanted to stop the workshop immediately,” he recalled. “But it was Nayak who reminded me that perhaps the right tribute to Dabholkar would be to complete the workshop, to take his work forward. It was the rational thing to do.” One of the aims of the Mumbai event was to chart the future of the rationalist movement in the country—specifically that of the MANS, which is easily the largest and most structured rationalist organisation in India. Another one of Dabholkar’s achievements is how successfully he built and nurtured a grassroots organisation with a network of volunteers in every taluk of Maharashtra. As the journalist Anosh Malekar wrote in an earlier article on Dabholkar in this magazine, “Nobody had achieved this feat since Dr Hedgewar—the founder of the RSS.” As the current head, Patil’s key focus is to find a way to increase the MANS’s membership. Patil had hoped that the membership count would touch a hundred thousand by the time the organisation turned 30. “But it has only reached the halfway mark,” he told me. “We need to attract more youth and women into the movement.” The organisation currently runs a programme called Vivekavahini, which is specifically focussed on young men and women. Once a week, MANS THE CARAVAN

members meet with college students, pick a topic and debate it. “We don’t direct the debate in any particular direction but all we want to do is encourage the idea of a debate and every person’s ability to think and question,” Yogeshwari Patil, a young MANS volunteer told me. “We don’t want to tell anyone to not believe in god, or religion or anything for that matter. All we’re saying is that every single human being has the ability to think and question and that ability should not be sacrificed in any circumstance.” Under Patil’s leadership, the MANS also successfully got the Maharashtra government to pass another progressive piece of legislation: The Maharashtra Prohibition of People from Social Boycott (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2016. Under this law, social boycott in the name of caste, community, religion, rituals or customs is a punishable offence. A prime example of a crime under this law is the boycott, and

“Remaining silent is difficult for me,” Nayak said. “Also, if I also keep quiet, then the others have died in vain, right?” even murder, of inter-caste couples sanctioned by khap panchayats. It is the only law of its kind to be passed in the entire country. The foundation for this piece of legislation, too, was laid by Dabholkar. “It is enough work for any organisation to deal with issues like different types of superstition, the psychology that produces them, faith and superstition, scrutinizing god-religion-morality and propagation of scientific outlook,” Dabholkar wrote in 2007. “But the coherent thought emerging out of it, logically leads further to rationalism, secularism, eradication of caste system and social justice.” In contrast to the MANS cadre, the “machoman of the rationalist movement” in Karnataka is a lone warrior. Narendra Nayak is not embroiled in any kind of historical conflict with members of the Sanatan Sanstha. But that has not spared him from being on a hit list too. That there is such sustained opposition to rationalists in India is not entirely surprising, Nayak said. “Organised religion has always been against rationalist thinking,” he said. “Think Galileo, for instance. But I must say that the attacks in these past six years are unexpected, especially because the police are actively assigning protection to many of us.” “Remaining silent is difficult for me,” he continued. “Also, if I also keep quiet, then the others have died in vain, right?”

mujeeb faruqui / hindustan times

opposite page: Narendra Nayak is referred to by many as the “machoman of the rationalist movement.”

voices of reason · reportage As a rationalist, Nayak operates in the region that is famously known as the communal hotbed of Karnataka: Mangaluru. Over the years, Nayak has received threats from several rightwing groups. “I’ve lost count of the threats,” Nayak said. When I met Nayak for the first time, in July last year, he was on his way to conduct a miracles-busting workshop at the Padua PU College in Mangaluru. Two of his friends joined him as he set up his presentation. Nayak carries his own projector and speakers to his workshops. As the school bell announced the end of the lunch hour, groups of students began trickling into the auditorium. The girls sat on one side of the auditorium, the boys on the other. Teachers stood guard in the aisle.

Nayak’s police-assigned bodyguard stood next to me, also listening to the speech. When he is on stage, Nayak is loud and authoritative. He began his lecture with a brief section on the scientific achievements of Indian scientists, particularly that of the biochemist Yellapragada Subbarao whose work led to the discovery of the ATP molecule, which gives energy to living cells. The children tried their best to fight sleep and keep up with Subbarao’s many achievements. Minutes later, however, their eyes and ears perked up when they heard that Nayak was about to produce a gold chain out of thin air just like the Sai Baba of Puttaparthi. Nayak first played a video of Sai Baba at a function in Hyderabad where he

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“produces” a gold chain out of thin air. He then paused the video and showed the children how the same trick is actually performed. Nayak waved his hands in air twice, made sure the children saw that he had nothing in his hands and that his fingers were apart. Then, just as he waved his hands a third time, he produced a thin gold chain out of a skin-colour thumb cap that he had covertly put on on his right thumb. The children could barely contain their glee. Through the course of the next hour, Nayak debunked the so-called miracles of many such godmen, whether it was the cancer-curing Shakti drops of Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living cult, or the cleansing powers of the gaumutra—cow urine—of Ramdev’s

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Patanjali Ayurved. Nayak also invited students on stage as volunteers for many of the acts. “This is not to entertain you,” he told his audience, which was now keenly listening to him. “This is to encourage you to do just one thing: before you believe anything from now on, question it.” Nayak’s bodyguard was smiling and applauding at the end of the workshop. “Back in my village, so many people believe in these so-called miracles performed by these gurus and babas,” he told me. “They waste so much money and time in servicing this blind faith too. Sir needs to come to my village and conduct this workshop there.” Nayak told me that he became an atheist at the age of eleven and a rationalist by the time he reached college. “Then. during my post-graduation degree in medical biochemistry, I was ex74

posed to human biology,” he said. “My understanding of the human body and all its processes served me very well in my work as a rationalist.” Nayak cites Abraham Kovoor and B Premanand as his biggest influences. At a protest rally in Bengaluru, a day after Dabholkar was murdered, Nayak said that the Karnataka government too should implement a legislation against superstition. “Gauri was there at that protest rally,” Nayak recalled. He was a member of the committee that drafted the bill. “The draft bills were made, submitted and discussed. Then the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 happened and everything was put on the backburner.” Nayak brought up the bill again at a public forum, this time when Kalburgi was murdered. “Two ministers from the Siddaramaiah cabinet”—SiddarTHE CARAVAN

amaiah presided over a Congress-led government in Karnataka from 2013 to 2018—“were there at the event and I said, ‘How many more of us do you want to be killed before you make this into a law?’ They got upset and said they are trying to pass the bill. On September 5 2017, Gauri was killed and this bill was passed in November that year.” While he has trained scores of aspiring rationalists and busted several myths—the most recent being a racket called “mid-brain activation” involving children—Nayak does admit that he could not build a movement in Karnataka similar to the one in Maharashtra. “The lack of initiative, especially by younger rationalists, is very apparent,” he said. “In Karnataka too, a few of us wanted to build a very structured set up and have volunteers in every district. But nobody took that up seriously.”

courtesy maharashtra andhshraddha nirmulan samiti

voices of reason · reportage

voices of reason · reportage over the last few months, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread around India, many of us have become aware of the extent to which superstition has its grip on the country. Even many in urban India circulated messages about “indigenous cures” for COVID-19, such as turmeric water, lemon juice or hot water. Ramdas Athavale, the minister of state for social justice and empowerment, led a group of people who chanted “Go Corona, Go.” There were others who even drank cow urine in the belief that it is a cure for the coronavirus. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked Indians to assemble on their balconies and clap or bang pots and vessels to show their gratitude to the country’s health workers, a number of edu-

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked Indians to assemble on their balconies and clap or bang pots and vessels to show their gratitude to the country’s health workers, a number of educated citizens passed on messages about how the cumulative reverberations arising from this gesture would increase blood circulation in the body or render the virus ineffective. cated citizens passed on messages about how the cumulative reverberations arising from this gesture would increase blood circulation in the body or render the virus ineffective. Another story that was circulated widely on social media at the end of that one-day curfew claimed that the virus had receded from India as per satellite data gathered by NASA. A few weeks later, when the prime minister asked citizens to switch off the lights in their houses and instead light candles, flashlights and torches in their balconies at 9 pm on April 5, it sparked a flood of messages, each claiming that this gesture too was a cure for the virus. Modi had said that it would be a gesture to mark the fight against the virus. Similar to the idea behind cumulative reverberations, another widely circulated message claimed that the virus would not be able to handle the cumulative heat produced when so many Indians light diyas, candles and switch on flashlights all at the same time. The message read: “Covid-19

cannot sustain heat above 10kcal. All viruses will probably be destroyed.” Then there was this gem that circulated on Whatsapp: April 5 is Vamana Dwadeshi. On that day, the earth gets maximum light from the sun and this empowers disease-causing virus. The virus is an evil entity and it thrives in darkness. According to Adiyogi Purana, one way to destroy such evil entities is to focus light on it like we do with magnifying glass and sun rays. It is towards this that the Prime Minister has asked us to switch off lights in our house and use a focused small light to show our support. The small focus of all our candles, diyas etc will focus into a powerful beam and strike at the heart of the Coronavirus.

opposite page: In August 2019, the MANS celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in Mumbai, where members of the organisation declared their fearless commitment to spreading the message of rationalism.

And this: 05/04 means 9 total. 9 pm means 9 again, 9 minutes means 9 again, 9.09 pm end time means 9 total. Grand total is 36 means 9 again 9 is the magical no. And it’s the last number in sequence, so this is Covid-19’s last phase. India’s turn towards irrational beliefs is not new, but it is not any less worrying. “People tend to turn to superstition and irrational thinking when they are deeply insecure or scared and this is one such instance,” Patil told me. “In a situation where a person’s fear is acute—in this case it is the fear of death—he or she often tends to take refuge in beliefs propagated by religion and that oft-used word: tradition. The problem is we don’t have alternative institutions or support systems that help us manage stress. That’s why godmen thrive during crises. The larger solution is to build that institutional support that citizens can turn to during a crisis like this.” Should the educated not know better than to believe in this kind of psuedoscience and superstition, I asked. “Well, ideally yes,” Patil said. “Unfortunately, we have little evidence to show that our present education system has actually fuelled rational thinking. We don’t actually have a system that encourages us to think, debate and question.” Marooned at my house during the lockdown, I remembered an instance from the Mumbai event. At the end of the day’s proceedings, the audience energetically chanted ‘Phule Shahu Ambedkar, amhi saare Dabholkar’—We are all Dabholkar. One of the MANS volunteers took the microphone and said, “I just want to remind everyone to think once before they declare that they are all Dabholkar. I urge you to ask yourself if you identify with his thinking? Do you agree or disagree? And then decide for yourself. That’s what Dabholkar would have wanted.” s MAY 2020

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BOOKS The Strange Case of Barrister Savarkar What Savarkar’s early autobiography reveals about his thinking / POLITICS ABHAY REGI on 28 may 2019, a video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on his Twitter handle. The day marked the one-hundred-and-eighty-sixth birth anniversary of Vinayak Savarkar, the demagogue and Hindu nationalist whose portrait the video showed Modi praying to. Savarkar “epitomises courage, patriotism and unflinching commitment to a strong India,” Modi said. “He inspired many people to devote themselves towards nation-building.” Modi added that “Savarkar was both a freedom fighter and poet, who always emphasised harmony and unity.” The prime minister is not alone in this kind of hagiographic praise for Savarkar. Perhaps one of the first articulators of modern Hindutva, Savarkar has risen to the very top of the right-wing pantheon. His portrait now hangs in the Indian parliament and his image is plastered on various posters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. In March, a road in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University was named after Savarkar. 76

(Soon after, BR Ambedkar’s name was graffitied over it, on a sign proclaiming the road’s new title.) The deification of Savarkar has been an outcome of the constant writing and rewriting of his life to fit the Hindutva politics of the time—a project that is as active today as it has ever been, as evident in two new biographies by the writers Vikram Sampath and Vaibhav Purandare. This not only includes attempting to project his notions of a Hindu majoritarian state and how to achieve it, but also attempts to connect him to a menagerie of revolutionaries and revolutionary organisations as a way of reifying the argument that he played a crucial role in India’s struggle for decolonisation. In any rigorous academic analysis of the various struggles against the British, Savarkar played only a marginal or tangential role as an ideologue. The Hindu Right further needed to rewrite Savarkar’s legacy after various mercy petitions Savarkar had sent to British authorities were THE CARAVAN

published in the historian RC Majumdar’s 1975 book Penal Settlements in the Andamans. Much of the praise and criticism Savarkar receives necessarily connects to his ideological positions, set out in the 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva. For instance, the archival work of the academic Marzia Casolari as well as Ashish Nandy’s An Anti-secularist Manifesto draw upon this text to delve into the ideological incompatibility of Savarkar’s Hindu nationalism with the idea of a secular India, as well as to explore the similarities between Hindutva and the ideology behind fascist movements in Italy and Germany. But Savarkar‘s political legacy—including his urge towards primal violence and the anti-intellectualism that undergirds his thinking—can perhaps be best understood in a 1926 book titled The Life of Barrister Savarkar. The book is hardly new, but in the present circumstances it begs to be re-read and highlighted. It reveals how Savarkar

books

courtesy nehru memorial museum & library

left: Savarkar, perhaps one of the first articulators of modern Hindutva, has risen to the very top of the rightwing pantheon in India.

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himself established a tradition of contortion that the Hindu right has since followed in its worship of him. Such is the strange case of Savarkar—a man desperate to convince himself and the world of his heroism, despite the facts of his life making him ill-fit for adulation even in his own esteem. In a preface—dated February 1986—for a republication of the book, a certain Ravindra Vaman Ramdas suggested that Savarkar wrote the book under the pseudonym Chitragupta: “Who was this ‘Chitragupta’, the author of ‘Life of Barrister V.D. Savarkar’? The pen-picture of Paris appears that Chitragupta’ is none other than Veer Savarkar.” Here, Ramdas is referring to a section of the book that describes Savarkar’s internal debate in park in Paris. The descriptions of the weather, ponds, water birds and flowers are so experiential and specific that Ramdas implies it was written by Savarkar himself. “However, why Savarkar has not disclosed it even after Independence will ever remain a mystery,” he adds. The book lays bare Savarkar’s megalomania. Within the self-aggrandising and often tangential writing lies the sense of a fundamental insecurity through which we can understand the intellectual reality of Hindutva philosophy. Savarkar was born in Bhagur, a village near Nashik in Maharashtra, in 1883. During his college years, he started two secret societies—Abhinav Bharat and Mitra Mela—driven by an aggressive Hindu revivalist ideology that sought to force the British out of India through acts of targeted violence. In 1906, he got a scholarship and left to study law in London, where he stayed at India House with others such as MK Gandhi and Madanlal Dhingra. In 1909, Dhingra shot dead Curzon Willie, who had served in the British Indian Army and been an aide-de-camp to the secretary of state for India. Anant Kanhere, a student in Aurangabad, shot dead AMT Jackson, a British civil-servant, in the same year. British authorities also implicated Savarkar in the case, arguing that Kanhere was influenced by some of his writing. Savarkar fled to Paris, fearing arrest. The next year, on his return to London, he was ar77

the strange case of barrister savarkar · books rested. While being shipped to India to face trial, he attempted to escape from his ship at Marseille, but was caught almost as soon as he reached the shore. In 1910, Savarkar was sentenced to transportation for life to the Cellular Jail in Andaman. He was transferred back to the mainland in 1921 and was released in 1924, after promising the British colonial authorities that he was a “prodigal son longing to return to the paternal doors of the government.” Life of Barrister Savarkar was published two years later, in December 1926. Savarkar tended to often switch between using a pseudonym and writing under his own name. In his most famous work, Essentials of Hindutva, he uses the pen name “A Mahratta.” In the English translation of The Indian War of Independence, he signs off merely as “the author.” In the 1925 edition of Hindu Pad Padshahi, published only a year before Life of Barrister Savarkar, he signs off as VD Savarkar. Pseudonyms were not uncommon in the literature emerging from colonised regions, where any act of resistance could mean harsh repression. The Dutch writer Eduard Dekker chronicled atrocities in the Dutch East Indies—Indonesia—under the pen name Multatuli, just as the jailed Vietnamese poet Phan Chu Trinh signed off as Tay Ho. Closer home, pen names were used when combatting social strictures too—the feminist Malayalam poet Kamala Das, for instance, wrote as Madhavikutty. But Savarkar’s use of a nom de plume for Life of Barrister Savarkar appears to have stemmed from a different impulse than those of his predecessors and contemporaries: it comes across as a genuine effort to pretend to be a contemporary thoroughly inspired by Savarkar’s irreproachable character. For instance, the book’s narrative voice frequently switches from the third to the second person to try to convince the reader that the author is not Savarkar. One passage, in which Savarkar decides to return to London from Paris, where he fled in fear of British reproach, reads: We have mentioned time and again in this sketch that ours is not the task of justifying or condemning any of Mr. Savarkar’s opinions or actions here. Here we are concerned merely to relate what actually took place, and so leaving the readers to firm their own opinions as to the expediency of the step Mr. Savarkar took in recrossing the channel … The paragraph preceding this and the one that follows describe Savarkar being dragged into court in the second person. The book also has statements such as, “We have Savarkar’s word for that,” suggesting that there has been some sort of communication between the author and the 78

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subject of the biography. At other points, the book professes a lack of knowledge about some details of Savarkar’s attempts to escape from a British steamer he is imprisoned in, stating, “These details would come to light only when Mr. Savarkar himself chooses to tell his story.” The book goes to the extent of quoting a source rather than Savarkar himself while describing Savarkar meeting a co-passenger on a ship to London: A characteristic reminiscence was related to us by one of them now a distinguished Barrister in Northern India, which will illustrate the inner working of Savarkar’s mind … We have cited this anecdote almost as the gentleman told us, so far as he could relate it recollecting Mr. Savarkar’s words. The consistent attempt to establish that the book was written by anybody but Savarkar has at least one apparent purpose: to validate the voluminous praise it lavishes on him throughout, since it is a hagiographical account of Savarkar’s life that coats all his faculties with a thick varnish of adulation. No skill does Savarkar lack in his own account, and no man—women are nearly non-existent in the account—who meets him is not immediately taken by his sheer brilliance. The book describes him as a “heroic youth,” with “remarkable poetic faculties” and “wisdom far above his age and whom men instinctively liked to listen to.” Lines such as “Savarkar had been a popular hero throughout his life” are sprinkled throughout the prose. The autobiography also gives us insights into how Savarkar viewed the people around him. He denigrates his peers in school, the people of his village and his comrades in the few “secret societies” he created, by referring to their simplemindedness, their lack of nationalistic fervour or general ability. Their presence is perfunctory in the book, serving largely to demonstrate how they hold Savarkar up as their leader. Of his school days, he says, “Amongst his schoolmates he soon came to be known as a scholar and a patriot and a fiery orator who always talked of great deed and great schemes of India and independence and how he meant to achieve it all and many other things far beyond their comprehension.” The book insists that by his early college days, Savarkar had become eponymous with resistance, suggesting that he was the most vital representative of the Indian revolution. “He was enthusiastically welcomed at Paris by all those Indians there,” it says. “His presence there naturally shifted the centre of revolutionary activity from London to Paris.” “All leading students’ associations and societies came soon to be dominated by the ‘Savarkar

the strange case of barrister savarkar · books Camp,’” the book states, while drawing a hyperbolic portrait of his colleagues’ fascination with his poetry and his speeches: When finished he recited it to his colleagues who simply refused to believe that could have been composed by him. Even those listened to him reciting this spirited narration of the deeds of the Chaphekars later on in his college days remember down to days how the recital sent a thrill through their being and how moved them to pathetic tears and then fired them to heroic resolves. At various points in the narrative, he speaks of his capacity to capture the attention of huge crowds, and his ability to draw large masses to hear him, even when he was merely an undergraduate. “When the usual summer vacation came,” he writes, “Vinayak used at times to address three to four different platforms on a single day and such was his oratorical power that mass meetings of thousands of people sat spellbound to listen to him.” The people who adore him seem to be faceless masses. Even the intellectuals who, the reader is told, hold him in high regard are nameless and ephemeral— for Savarkar, it seems sufficient to say something as vacuous as, “He received invitations from several eminent persons from far and near in Maharashtra.” It is also never made clear whom he addressed or where, nor what his oration concerned. There are scattered descriptions of his speeches about bringing rebellion to India, but these lack any analytical depth. Savarkar’s sense of self-importance characterises the descriptions of his stay in London, too. While he describes young Indians living in London as the “youngest and brightest of the nation,” he later suggests that he was solely responsible for their metamorphosis into fervent patriots: Within the short span of these four years he had transformed the crowed of nerveless ninnies and unprincipled dandies, that the Indian students in England were before generally reputed to be, into band of patriots

who, apart from their dreadful methods and questionable tactics, did undoubtedly display a heroic fortitude, a reckless spirit of sacrifice in the interests of their motherland and did indeed win the esteem and enlist the moral sympathy of all European nations in favour of the cause of Indian Freedom. Where Savarkar seems most convinced of the public’s adulation, though, is in his hometown, Nashik. There, he claims, “Few men were ever loved more devotedly by their friends and relatives than Mr. Savarkar was.” He adds that the city was full of “his followers and friends who looked upon him as a young angel.” Despite his exaggerated and selfcongratulatory prose—the very first line of the book hails him as a “distinguished patriot”—Savarkar had not achieved anything of note for the

of the Madras Presidency Congress Committee and was editing Kudi Arasu, one of the fiercest Tamil weeklies. In the autobiography, Savarkar describes his book The War of Independence of 1857 as “truly as great a discovery as any in the realms of historical scholarship.” In reality, the work is packed with inaccuracies and is, in parts, ahistorical. In Savarkar’s account of 1857, the line between xenophobic demagoguery and historical analysis ceases to exist. “For more than five centuries the Hindu civilization had been fighting a defensive war against foreign encroachment on its birth rights,” he writes. With the 1857 Mutiny, he adds, “the conqueror was conquered and India was again free, the blot of slavery and defeat being wiped off. Hindus again were masters of the land of the Hindus.” Last October, Amit Shah, the union home minister, pointed to Savarkar’s work in a speech and said, “We

Savarkar’s political legacy—as well as his internal contradictions and urge towards primal violence, and the anti-intellectualism that undergirds his thinking—can perhaps be best understood in a 1926 book titled The Life of Barrister Savarkar. Indian independence movement by the time of the book’s publication. He had been arrested for a crime he did not commit—the assassination of AMT Jackson—and had published two books that could barely withstand academic scrutiny. Meanwhile, the nationalists he critiques, such as Madan Lal Dhingra and MK Gandhi, had already set up political parties, were running newspapers and had organised mass movements. BR Ambedkar had testified before the Southborough committee and laid the groundwork for the future Indian Constitution when appointed to the Bombay Presidency Committee of the Simon commission. Jawaharlal Nehru had led the United Provinces in the Non-Cooperation Movement, while Gandhi had helped organise the Champaran and Kheda struggles, as well as his much-advertised Salt Satyagraha. Periyar had led the Vaikom temple-entry struggle, had been elected president MAY 2020

need to rewrite history from India’s perspective.” This shows a deeply obscurantist and parochial understanding of how academic disciplines function. In his essay “History as Revenge and Retaliation,” the political scientist Jyotirmaya Sharma looks at Savarkar’s historiographical approach. Savarkar, he writes, exhorts history writers of the Hindu nation to be objective and truthful, and asks them to write honestly about moments in history that were flawed, and to do so factually, he goes on to frame a different set of rules for writing the history of Hindus and their nation. In a national sense, the differences between Aryans and nonAryans, Brahmin or Shudra, Vaidik or Avaidik, Kayastha or Dravid, Jain or Bauddha, Shaiva or Vaishnava were to Savarkar superfluous. What mattered in the final analysis 79

the strange case of barrister savarkar · books was that ‘our collective lives can be described only by one word. That unique word is Hindu’.

while referring to how he lit the fire of anti-colonial revolution through secret societies, Savarkar never points to any real act of resistance. He valourises himself as being the vanguard of resistance against the British and the protection of the motherland, arguing that the freedom he seeks can only be achieved through a violent revolution, one that can only be conducted by inspired groups of youth working in secret societies. For this, he draws inspiration from Russian anarchists and the bombing campaigns against tsarist authorities. Before his travel to London, Savarkar had started two such secret societies: Mitramela and Abhinav Bharath. Nowhere in his narrative does he care to explain anything substantial about the activities carried out by either organisation. Despite referring to the society as “destined to be force to be counted within Indian politics,” he also states, “this is not the place to enter into a detailed description of the activities of this secret circle nor do we wish here to arrogate to ourselves the right of judging them.” Savarkar hides behind the pretence of the author being someone other than himself, who could not be in the know about the achievements of the organisations he valourises. It 80

fototeca gilardi / getty images

Sharma goes on to describe how Savarkar’s account of 1857 was not an attempt at historical accuracy, but instead came out of a need to create a historical dichotomy between “friend” and “foe” to serve contemporary political ends. Sharma adds that in Savarkar’s account of 1857, he writes with pride and passion of atrocities against colonialists and Christians—women and children being burnt alive, a cross being smashed or “Christians being sliced.” Savarkar’s descriptions are often celebratory not despite but precisely because of their brutality. He writes, “Pieces of flesh, decapitated heads, strands of hair, disembodied hands, broken legs, a flood of blood. The Ganga turned red… this is how the anniversary of Plassey was celebrated!”

could be argued that he did not want to undermine the secrecy of these groups by disclosing details, but this, too, does not hold water. This book, along with many of Savarkar’s other publications, were intended to be underground works. Savarkar himself boasts of the underground literature, including poems and even a bomb-making manual that he procured in London, that was circulated only among the initiated within his circles of radicalised and committed youth. In the world Savarkar imagines himself in, there seem to be only two THE CARAVAN

groups of people who do not fall into the flat category of plebeians who deserve disdain from, and feel burgeoning adoration for, Savarkar. The first consists of Europeans he meets, whose approval it is evident that he seeks. Savarkar appears to measure his merit based on how the British government viewed him. “Everyone who came in contact with him,” he writes, “even the English detectives and the editors of papers that most virulently attacked his work could not but admire and used to feel a sort of personal attachment to him.”

the strange case of barrister savarkar · books He narrates florid stories of white people being amazed by him. He seems immensely proud of the fact that The War of Independence was appreciated by Valentine Chirol, the renowned British imperialist and Islamophobe. In another anecdote, a representative of one of London’s leading dailies arrived to meet him. He saw Savarkar seated and engrossed in a book and thought nothing of it. He asked the domestic help for Savarkar, and when she pointed at him, the description goes, “the gentleman once more eyed the figure that sat reading by the table and refusing to believe that thin, young, pleasant looking person could be that much-dreaded Indian Revolutionist.” Savarkar pointedly mentions every time the British press writes about him, such as the Sunday newspaper John Bull asserting that “youth and intelligence seem stamped upon his face.” Even the opening quotes to most of the chapters in the book are from Western authors such as Thomas More, Walter Scott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herbert Spencer, against whom he claims to be fighting. The only non-Western intellectual he quotes at the beginning of a chapter is himself. Savarkar’s feeling towards the white individuals he meets, as well as the larger project of colonialism, often sharply contradicts his constant valorisation of himself as an anti-colonial revolutionary.

In parts of his autobiography, Savarkar shuttles between a puffed-up self-importance, considering himself indispensable in the anticolonial struggle, and a bitter self-hatred, stemming from his recognition of his limited impact. While Savarkar waxes eloquent about the degradations that colonialism has forced onto his Hindu nation and the need for a violent defacement of all that is colonial, he also admires the colonial state and its raw power. He writes, “Then look at the English boys: when they came to India in Clive’s time it took six months to reach our land, so that their relations in England had to wait for a year even to get news of their safe arrival in India. But that did not dismay them. They came to strange lands and amidst the hostile millions not only lived, but fought and won, and became masters of an Empire.” Such need to gain European approval was not uncommon in the colonial era, when a sense of

inferiority was often etched into the minds of the colonised. The philosopher Frantz Fanon explores the phenomenon in his seminal Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon argues that violence towards the white coloniser gives a certain sense of humanity and identity to the colonised. This thought process is evident in Savarkar’s account, such as when he attempts to justify his failed attempt at escaping from a British ship while under arrest by saying that “at least the news of the attempt itself could not fail to advertise the cause of Indian Independence all over Europe and raise the prestige of Indian manhood in their moral estimation.” But in Fanon’s writing, reverence for and rage against the coloniser do not exist at the same time—the colonised subject moves from the former to the latter. Savarkar, on the other hand, switches between a desperate need for white people’s approval and anger towards them. The second community of people who do not neatly fit into Savarkar’s portrayal of the faceless masses who exalt him are violent revolutionaries who organised attacks against the British establishment. This is visible at various points throughout his account, but is most apparent in the case of Savarkar’s relationship with Madhan Lal Dhingra. Savarkar’s book makes no mention of Dhingra being a member of Abhinav Bharath, and says only that he was a student in Shyamaji Krishna Varma’s India House alongside Savarkar. Despite Dhingra being one of Savarkar’s only contemporaries in India House who acted against the British government, Savarkar is deeply critical of him, even claiming he was part of a club of AngloIndians—who are inherently suspect in Savarkar’s ethno-nationalist world. He even claims that the club Dhingra was with was controlled by Curzon Willie, the man Dhingra later assassinated. But Savarkar does not establish his position with Dhingra either. He states that his comrades wanted to issue a vote of censure against Dhingra, but it was Savarkar who stopped them from doing so, and adds that despite his fall from grace in Savarkar’s eyes, Dhingra must be remembered for being a revolutionary in the past. After the assassination of Curzon Willie however, Savarkar backtracked and defended Dhingra, whom he previously painted as a simple puppet of the British. In a meeting the Indian community held to condemn Dhingra’s act of assassination, Savarkar claims to have been the single dissenting voice against the motion. But here, too, Savarkar covered his base, saying that he was doing so purely on the legalistic defence that Dhingra had not yet been convicted by a British court. He claims that any condemnation of Dhingra would prejudice the case against him and thus could not be allowed. MAY 2020

opposite page: A portrait of the Italian statesman Giuseppe Mazzini, during his exile in London, in 1857. Savarkar often compares himself to Mazzini in his book.

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the strange case of barrister savarkar · books opposite page: Savarkar was imprisioned in this cell at a jail in Port Blair. He was released after promising the British colonial authorities that he was “a prodigal son longing to return to the paternal doors of the government.”

It is unclear why Savarkar see-sawed on what should have been, to a committed revolutionary, the easy choice of supporting Dhingra’s actions and standing by his character. What compelled him to always deny his association with, and refuse to defend, Dhingra? The easy answer would be fear of British retribution. But if that were the case, Savarkar would hardly have spent entire tracts of the book calling for a violent overthrow of the British state. It is worth remembering again here that this book was not intended to be widely published, but was intended as an account that would remain underground. Savarkar’s time in the Cellular Jail is documented well in Trailokya Nath Chakraborthy’s memoir Thirty Years in Prison. During this period Savarkar wrote several mercy petitions to the British, in which he disavowed any desire for Indian independence. This reveals the internal contradiction in Savarkar—between the fearless freedom fighter he wants people to see and his betrayal of that goal. However, he also attempts to appropriate various other revolutionary movements. Savarkar claims that Abhinav Bharat was the inspiration behind the radical Lala Har Dayal’s largely Sikh Ghadar Party in the United States. Savarkar claims he inspired the assassinations of Curzon Willie and AMT Jackson, but he also takes pains to distance himself from involvement in them. “The new incident of Jackson’s assassination could not make matters very seriously worse as he was actually in England when the event took place at Nashik,” he writes, “and nothing showed that he had any connection with Mr. Kanhere, who was quite unknown to him.” Savarkar’s distancing from, or denunciation of, nationalists is not surprising, given that he maintained a strictly loyalist position following his release, opposing all the major Congress-led mass movements: the Non-Cooperation Movement, the Civil-Disobedience Movement and the Quit India Movement. During the Quit India Movement, Savarkar, then head of the Hindu Mahasabha, formed coalition governments with the Muslim League in Sindh, Bengal and the North West Frontier Province. He also actively called for cooperation with the British, speaking for the Mahasabha: The Hindu Mahasabha holds that the leading principle of all practical politics is the policy of Responsive Co-operation. And in virtue of it, it believes that all those Hindu Sangathanists who are working as councillors, ministers, legislators and conducting any municipal or any public bodies with a view to utilize those centres of government power to safeguard and even promote the legitimate interests of the Hindus …

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While a range of organisations, such as the Justice Party, the Communist Party and the Punjab Unionist Party, stayed away from the Quit India Movement, none had gone back on vehemently anti-British claims they had previously made. In parts of his autobiography, the reader can see Savarkar shuttle between a puffed-up selfimportance, considering himself indispensable in the anti-colonial struggle, and a bitter self-hatred, stemming from his recognition of his limited impact. He writes: But on the other hand, was it not his duty to spare himself if but thereby he could serve the cause of Indian independence better than by a rash sacrifice of his life which was surely bound to be the case if he deliberately stepped in India inspite of the most reliable information that he would be arrested as soon as he touched the Indian shores? Savarkar builds an archetype of an indefatigable revolutionary whose every moment must be a sacrifice to the great Indian fatherland and Hindu faith. When it becomes apparent that this is not a realistic or manageable role, Savarkar retreats into a self-hatred and shame. “Wouldst thou continue to enjoy these morning-walks and this fresh air and the sight of these beautiful water lilies and gay swans,” he asks, “while thy followers and friends and brothers are rotting in cells deprived of light and food, fettered and forced to bear untold hardships—canst thou enjoy this all?” In certain sections, Savarkar jumps between emotions in rapid succession. The dichotomy between Savarkar as a hero and those he degrades as cowards seems to unravel in his own telling: “You are a general and must not rush to the firing line with the rank.” But the noble and brave youth, at times as sensitive as a girl, seemed to feel the compliment to him derogatory to those who were in the firing line and replied: “But it is only by fighting first by their side in the firing line that I can prove my worth of being exalted to the position of a general: otherwise every one would think himself, by a deceptive notion of one’s self importance to be as indispensable, as a general and thus claim to remain at the Headquarters. Then who would fight? Will not, moreover, this kind of argument serve the cowards as a handy shield to hide their fear?” the society savarkar idealised and wanted to build was exclusionary not only on grounds of religion, but of gender and caste. Savarkar was a fairly prolific writer in Marathi and his work in

the strange case of barrister savarkar · books gives to Brahmins. The very first paragraph of the book reads: Shrijut Damodarpant Savarkar, the father of the distinguished patriot whose life we mean to sketch here was a cultured gentleman, belonging to the chitpavan section of the Maratha Brahmins. It is this section that has long been the eyesore of the English Imperialists of Curzon type for the peculiar guilt that attaches to it of producing men in an unbroken succession for the last two hundred years to so who ever constituted the vanguard of the Indian forces in the struggle of Indian freedom. The first Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath, was a chitpavan. Bajirao, who was one of the foremost generals India ever produced, was a chitpavan; the hero of Panipat was a chitpavan ... No wonder then that destiny should have chosen this particular caste to bring forth and nestle the child which was to be, to quote Valentine Chirol, one of the most brilliant of modern Indian revolutionalists. For it was amongst these

chitpavans that Vinayakrao Savarkar was born in 1883 A.D. Throughout Savarkar’s account, every time he refers to any South Asian, it is followed by “a devout brahman” or “a noted brahman.” When he speaks of revolutionaries, their caste identity seems as heavily weighted in his judgment of them as their actions or beliefs—they are characterised, for instance, as “Ananta Kanhere, a chitpavan Brahman youth shot the Collector of Nashik,” or “a Shakt Brahman shot the collector of Tuticorin in 1911.” Both in his autobiography and in Essentials of Hindutva, Hinduism is only defined through Brahminical practice. Non-Brahmin caste groups do not find mention. Caste itself is never directly referred to. It is in these lacunae, as much as in his writing itself, that one can understand the India Savarkar wanted to build. Just as non-Brahmins are absent from his narrative, so are women. The Indian revolution is painted as a male project. This is of course not unique

m acharya / dinodia photo

the language provides us with a deeper understanding of what Savarkar’s India would mean for minorities. That work has also allowed sympathetic historians to obfuscate Savarkar’s casteist ideology by cherry-picking from his oeuvre. When it comes to Savarkar’s view on caste, many tend to look not at Essentials of Hindutva but at his 1930s work Jatyuchchedak nibandha—Essays on Caste. Much of the Sangh Parivar’s specific position on caste draws from this text. While moderately accepting that caste discrimination must be opposed, it simultaneously valourises the history of caste and propagates the myth that the worst aspects of caste, such as untouchability, are modern phenomena. This was not a rejection of caste, but rather a counterrevolution against the anti-caste and defiantly anti-Brahmin politics of Jotirao Phule and BR Ambedkar, which was then causing shockwaves across Maharashtra. Life of Barrister Savarkar makes it clear whom his form of Indian nationalism claimed to represent. There is no ignoring the primacy of place Savarkar

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the strange case of barrister savarkar · books to Savarkar, but the sheer absence of women is noticeable in his autobiography. The few women who are mentioned, notably his brother’s wife, read as stand-ins to represent culture, motherhood or devotion. His brother’s wife is only described as grieving, lonely or shocked. She exists only to share Savarkar’s grief or strengthen the resolve of his brother. Savarkar’s wife is entirely unmentioned. A reader could finish the book unaware that Savarkar was a married man. The only vague reference to his marriage is when he mentions his father-in-law. Members of other religions, such as Muslims are clearly demarcated as aliens. Savarkar describes an episode from his childhood: In 1893 to 1895 a wave of fanaticism passed all over India. Communal riots between Hindus and Moslems were the order of the day. Soon the malady infected Maharashtra too and woeful tales of Moslem outrages of the usual inhuman type inflamed the Hindu element all over the land … The stirring descriptions and the head lines that related about the great riots at the blood of young Vinayak. He could not rest without wreaking some vengeance or other on the coreligionists in Bombay and other places in India. He summoned a council of urgency of his young schoolmates - all within 15 years of age. They decided to avenge the racial insults by-by-by, of course they could not decide exactly by what means. But why not attack that mosque that lay solitary in the vicinity of the village in retaliation of the destruction of the temples in Bombay? It was voted for. Martial terms colour his descriptions of small fights with Muslim classmates. He writes: In the pretty little verandah of the village school in Bhagoor, a great pitched battle was fought between the contending forces but as the Muslims had forgot in the heat of action to carry about their persons such deadly weapons as pins, thorns pen knives and as the Hindu Com84

mander, our young Vinayak had wisely equipped his army in all these particulars, the Muslim boys got soon routed and could find no shelter … He writes that he invented a game in which there was a fight staged between Hindu forces and English or Muslim men, and states that “it was always a foregone conclusion that the fight was bound to result in a triumph for the Hindus—if not always through their pluck then at least for the simple reasons that those who took the Hindu side must be patriotically permitted to win by us who personated the Aliens!”

crosshair shifts onto Muslims. From an account of 1857 that sometimes leans towards an apologetic acceptance of the need for Hindu-Muslim unity in the face of British colonialism, Essentials of Hindutva shifts to painting Muslims as the primary antithesis of Hindu India. An entire section titled “Foreign Invaders” does not focus on the British but describes Arab conquests marked by rapine, human misery and devastation. Another difference is in the tone Savarkar uses. By no means does the autobiography use simple language, but in Essentials of Hindutva the opacity of his language and the absurdity of his references is striking: on the first page

The political effects of Savarkar, much like those of Mazzini, were felt only on a later generation, when political organisations took their rhetoric and formalised it into political programmes. Savarkar saw Sikhs as suspect unless they fully accepted his project for the Indian state. If they are to be accepted, it is not as members of an independent religious but as a subset of the Hindus, after recognising the “heroic Hindu blood of their ancestors.” Savarkar, in conversation with a Sikh friend in his book, discusses how Sikhs are obligated to the British. “It is so hopeless to get the Sikhs to fight against the English Government,” he writes. “The ma-bap theory and the other equally slavish one of ‘Namak Khatahai’—true to the salt that we eat, is so rampant and bored so deep down into their marrow by Government propaganda that no attempts of yours can make our Sikhs fight with the Government for decades to come.” Ideologically, Life of Barrister Savarkar differs little from Savarkar’s other works. The fundamental reading of Muslims as alien and Hindus civilisation as both besieged as well as unimaginably superior is common. However, some basic differences set Life of Barrister Savarkar apart. In it, as well as in The War of Indian Independence, which he began working on as early as 1908, the primary foe Savarkar paints is British colonialism, whereas in Essentials of Hindutva the main THE CARAVAN

alone, for instance, he includes references to the maid of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, Paris, Rosalind, Jesus Christ, the Roman Empire, Madonna, Fatima, Spaniards, Ayodhya, Ghenghis Khan, Honolulu, Jews, George Washington and Muslims. umberto eco’s seminal work Ur Fascism understands fascism not as a structural and governmental occurrence similar to authoritarianism, but as a set of cultural and rhetorical elements that are timeless and applicable in a range of cultural contexts. Eco sees the “cult of tradition” and a paradoxical rejection of modernity to be the birthplace of fascism. Modernity is only valid if it serves to reaffirm the social orders of the past. Savarkar’s work demonstrates this instinct, by harbouring both a revulsion for modern traditions and also a fascination for the mechanics of bombs—he spends several sections of the book talking of how bombs, then largely a tool of the Russian anarchists, must be used to free India. He also writes about his youth organisations practising martial arts and combat with weaponry used by medieval Marathi kings. This need to return to some mythical past is also what the British

the strange case of barrister savarkar · books political theorist Roger Griffin identified as defining fascism. Savarkar’s major intellectual pursuit in his writing was to define who a “Hindu” is, but his definition remains convoluted and confused, based on othering and exclusion rather than on any positive criteria. Savarkar’s definition of a Hindu finally boils down to “he who feels attachment to the land that extends from Sindhu to Sindhu … and who, as a consequence of the foregoing attributes, has inherited and claims as his own the Hindu Sanskriti, the Hindu civilization, as represented in a common history, common heroes, a common literature, common art, a common law and a common jurisprudence, common fairs and festivals, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments.” This is a circular fallacy. He also argued that Muslims who truly believed in their faith could never be part of the nationalism he conceived of as Hindutva. Rather than creating a logical base for Hindutva, all his definition did was illuminate the prejudice underlying his ideology. By contrast, the writings of the Sangh ideologue MS Golwalkar shave off the flowery language, quixotic romanticism and circular arguments that abound in Savarkar’s Hindutva. Golwalkar stipulates the definitional building blocks of Hindutva and the modes through which they can be brought to life. His Bunch of Thoughts has become the bible of the Sangh since its publication in 1966. In his more forceful work We or Our Nationhood Defined, Golwalkar categorically sets up the internal logic and procedures for the creation of a Hindu supremacist state. He argues that the “foreign races of India … must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights.” However, he also sidesteps the problem of defining a Hindu, simply saying that while all the sects and castes of Hinduism can be defined, the term “‘Hindu” itself does not itself need to be defined. Much of Savarkar’s understanding of political philosophy comes from the Italian thinker and politician Giuseppe Mazzini, who was an intellectual precursor to Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist movement. Savarkar memorialises Mazzini in several parts of his book, even translating Mazzini into Marathi. Savarkar’s description of this project is unabashedly self-congratulatory: No sooner he reached London he began the translation of Mazzini’s writings in Marathi and within a year of his departure from India had it finished to secure a record sale in Marathi literature. All leading newspapers reviewed “Savarkar’s Mazzini” in leading articles. Students were made

by their teachers, and sons by their fathers, to commit whole passages to memories from the masterly introduction which Mr. Savarkar wrote for the book. Mazzini was vehemently against the “Rights of Man,” which was formulated during the Enlightenment. He instead believed that the individual’s rights were not given at birth, but could only be won through “hard work, virtue and sacrifice.” Like with any traditionalist thinker, in his formulation, it would have been the upper classes of a society that would define what virtue was, and whose sacrifices mattered. In Savarkar’s take on Mazzini this would have been Brahmins, as his narrative measures all patriotism against the achievements of Brahmins. The essayist Pankaj Mishra, while tracing the history of right-wing thought in his book Age of Anger, writes that “Mazzini hoped through sheer will and rhetoric to unite a hopelessly fragmented and geographically scattered country and raise it to a summit of cultural and political excellence.” But, like Mazzini, Savarkar was largely a failure at effecting any change during his lifetime. As Mishra writes, “In actuality, Mazzini failed repeatedly and disastrously as a political activist. But this remained obscure to the me-too nationalists everywhere who responded to Young Italy, the organization of self-sacrificing patriots that Mazzini created in 1831, with Young China, Young Turkey and Young India.” Savarkar often compares himself to Mazzini in his book. The political effects of Savarkar, much like those of Mazzini, were felt only on a later generation, when political organisations took their rhetoric and formalised it into political programmes that were pushed by organised militias like the Italian Fascist Party and, in India’s case, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Mazzini, though reactionary and deeply misguided, was still a political theorist who left behind him a cogent manifesto of his political vision. On the other hand, Savarkar left behind him a mere collection of accounts that paint a picture of anger and selfvictimisation. While later theorists such as Golwalkar and KB Hedgewar attempted to channel Savarkar’s diatribes into a cogent and practicable political philosophy, a good deal of present-day Hindutva has remnants of Savarkar’s contradictory and hyperbolic thought. Savarkar still plays a predominant role in Indian right-wing discourse, in part because he was constantly reimagined to serve the rhetorical purposes of political Hindutva in each generation. This is visible in the preface to the 1986 republication of the autobiography, rechristened Life of Swatantra Veer Savarkar. The preface by Ramdas tags the title “Veer”—brave—onto Savarkar’s name. It also presents Savarkar as the man who not only inspired MAY 2020

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the strange case of barrister savarkar · books right: In a preface—dated February 1986—for a republication of the book, a certain Ravindra Vaman Ramdas suggested that Savarkar wrote the book under the pseudonym Chitragupta. “However, why Savarkar has not disclosed it even after Independence will ever remain a mystery,” he adds.

the Ghadar Party in the United States, and the various assassinations of British officials in India, but also somehow led to the rise of Subash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army. It further states that Savarkar’s attempted escape from his British captors in Marseilles made Indian independence an international issue, so much so that it was discussed during the “Great German War,” and by the German emperor Wilhelm II in reply to the US president Woodrow Wilson. In post-independence India, with Savarkar’s messianic vision of a violent independence achieved by radicalised Brahmin youth having proved to be a mirage, a new Savarkar had to be invented, one that repainted his ineffectualness with elements of more successful revolutionary movements. Today, the process of recycling Savarkar is again underway, in recent biographies by Vaibhav Purandare and Vikram Sampath. Sampath’s Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past received immense praise, including from Modi, when it was published in August 2019. To serve a modern audience, Savarkar’s Hindu identity is whitewashed, with the book portraying him as a modern-day atheist—this is corroborated by Savarkar’s scattered references to anti-clericalism. Furthermore, it directly quotes praise for Savarkar from his own autobiography. By 2019, Savarkar’s embarrassing mercy petitions pledging complete submission to the British were common knowledge. Sampath 86

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argues that these were a clever ploy on Savarkar’s part to escape captivity and reignite the struggle against the British, going as far as to compare it to the medieval king Shivaji’s attempt to escape from the house arrest imposed on him by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. This is disingenuous, given that Savarkar did not play any active part in the anti-colonial struggle for the rest of his life, and actively opposed it at times. Purandare’s Savarkar: The True Story of the Father of the Hindutva was also published last August. Purandare attempts to paint Savarkar as an anti-caste reformer, and draws non-existent parallels between Savarkar and Ambedkar. Purandare argues that Savarkar “favoured a wipe-out of the caste order” and “set himself to the task of obliterating the blights of untouchability and superstition that was taking a devastating toll on Hindu society and sought to replace these with an inclusive and scientific outlook.” Savarkar’s own autobiography takes uncritical and overwhelming pride in Brahminhood, which is antithetical to any legitimate anti-caste politics. These books are true to Savarkar mainly in carrying on the obfuscation that he himself started with Life of Barrister Savarakar. So long as that legacy is kept alive, his place in the intellectual and political world of India’s right wing will remain secure—but such obfuscation cannot change the man that Savarkar really was. s

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BOOKS

BLIND SPOTS

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BOOKS

Caste in contemporary Muslim autobiographies / LITERATURE SHIREEN AZAM

MAY 2020

on a delhi playground in the late 2000s, five-year-old Azania was about to kick a football with her white canvas shoes, when a boy from the rival team screamed, “Get away from the ball, you Paki.” When the author Nazia Erum heard about this—one of several instances of Islamophobia in elite schools in the National Capital Region, she writes—she wondered whether she should give her own daughter a Muslim name. When did schools become like this? She remembered that her elder brother was called “Hamas” in the 1990s, but that had felt somewhat lighthearted by comparison. A few years before the playground incident, another child in a different part of the city found that there was an unexpected problem with her new home. After moving near her workplace in a Muslim-dominated locality near Jamia Millia Islamia, the author Rakhshanda Jalil sent handmade cards to her daughter’s classmates to invite them home for her birthday. Most of her daughter’s friends declined the invitation. Over the phone, their mothers explained to Jalil what had changed. It was different when Jalil lived in Gulmohar Park, an elite outpost where Muslims are not conspicuous, they said, but “we have no idea about the Jamia side.” In 2008, after night-time discounts for phone calls kicked in, the writer Neyaz Farooquee and his friends used to spend hours gossiping and mocking each other. They spoke about the women they were interested in, college life, and their friend Kafil’s obsession with trivia regarding guns and weapons. Days after the Batla House encounter in September that year, Farooquee deleted the numbers of his closest friends from his phone. After the 1992 Mumbai riots, when Sumaiya’s family moved to the ghetto of Mumbra in Mumbai, her parents could not arrange for her to go to school. She had to drop out. In this new place, water and electricity were always in short supply, and there was garbage everywhere. Things were not the same anymore. 89

kunal patil / hindustan times / getty images

blind spots · books

A good deal of Muslim autobiographical writing in India seems to hinge on two points: a remembered past, and a present that is worse and more difficult in myriad ways. The sense of an escalating decline is ubiquitous, but the patterns signifying that something has been lost are less linear than they may initially seem. All Muslims did not inhabit the same havens to begin with. There is a certain way in which “Muslim memoirs” are written and reviewed. The years of a writer’s life are often charted against depleting levels of secularism in the country. A few themes make frequent appearances: the pain surrounding Partition and a sense of disbelief that the Congress let it happen; the ostensible glory of the Nehruvian era—the 1960s and 1970s—when Muslims could do their jobs without being made aware of their religion, and how this started changing; the ulemas of the 1980s, who stymied attempts to reform the community and change antiquated personal laws; and the gradual institutional collapse of secularism after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But is there more to Muslim lives in India that this arc obfuscates? A wave of recent non-fiction books use the autobiographical form to tell the story of Muslims in India. Published in the last few years, faced with an escalating assault on Muslims under the Narendra Modi government, these writings provide an 90

insight into Muslims’ minds as they witness these times. The writers contextualise their experiences against the broader history of independent India. In her book Mothering a Muslim, Nazia Erum, faced with bringing up her daughter in an Islamophobic world, describes her conversations with other Muslim parents. Neyaz Farooquue, in An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism, takes us into the petrified mind of a young Muslim man who fears being labelled as a “terrorist” by a biased state and an unquestioning media. Rakshanda Jalil, in her collection of essays titled But You Don’t Look Like A Muslim, responds to the stereotypes she faces. Seema Mustafa’s Azadi’s Daughter: Being a Secular Muslim in India and Saeed Naqvi’s Being the Other: The Muslim in India compare the authors’ experiences of growing up in a secular, pluralist India to what they later witnessed as journalists reporting on events that reveal the erosion of the India they once knew. The narrative of the steady disenfranchisement and marginalisation of Indian Muslims is important and urgent, and deserves to be told again and again. But there is another story that gets neglected in this telling. Indian Muslims are constantly talked about, yet the role of caste in the Muslim community remains almost entirely secret. Islamophobes, liberals and prominent Muslims in both religious and intellectual THE CARAVAN

previous spread: The narrative of the steady disenfranchisement and marginalisation of Indian Muslims is important. But there is another story that gets neglected: the role of caste in the Muslim community remains almost entirely secret. above: In his book, Saeed Naqvi speaks of “GangaJamuni tehzeeb,” or free cultural intermixing, where Hindus and Muslims celebrated each other’s festivals.

blind spots · books spheres have consistently overlooked the issue. The dominant discourse on Muslims—focussed on discrimination, backwardness, marginalisation of women, terrorism and communal violence—sees them solely within the confines of religious politics. The questions it asks of Muslim lives are limited to ones of secularism, communalism or fanaticism. One of the primary reasons for this is the caste identity of the writers, scholars and critics who have so far formed the Muslim intelligentsia. As the scholar Arshad Alam noted, most Muslims of India are lower-caste, whereas the people who represent them are upper-caste. saeed naqvi remembers his mother’s favourite sohar—a festive song to mark a woman’s pregnancy—with sad fondness. It reads, “Allah mian hamre bhaiyya ka diyo Nandlal”—Allah, bestow on my brother a son like Krishna. Sohars in Awadh were accompanied by the harmonium and dholak, and as soon as the news of an imminent birth reached Naqvi’s family home, songs would rend the air. Being the Other: The Muslim in India, published in 2016, is part personal memoir and part commentary on the Muslim community. Although he grew up in the 1950s, Naqvi borrows memories of pre-Independence days to paint a romantic picture of ageing havelis in Mustafabad—a city he portrays as the syncretic heart of an India where poems about Allah and Krishna blended together, and the most skilled voices gathered to jam in Urdu. His Muslim mother always wore a sari, and, every week, the most coveted miriasans—professional singers—came to his house with harmoniums, tablas and dholaks, while Hindus and Muslims celebrated each other’s festivals. This culture of “Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb,” or free cultural intermixing, infuses Naqvi’s first memories, and sets the tone and context for his book. It is evident that Naqvi comes from a family of zamindars, and his nostalgia is also rooted in the conditions of their past. While he describes his book as a “lament for the vanished syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture,” intertwined with this is the “calamitous abolition of za-

mindari”—calamitous for his Shia Syed family. He posits the fall of the zamindari system as a Muslim issue, counting it among the traumas that Muslims had to bear in independent India. The reader is constantly reminded that this is a family of Sayyids—also spelled Syeds—the highest among the Ashraf, or upper castes, of Indian Muslims. Others in this strata include Shaikhs, Pathans, Moghuls and Mallicks. Narrating the search for a groom from an “impeccable caste” for his aunt, Naqvi includes a parenthesis: “The impact of the Hindu caste system on the subcontinent’s Muslims should never be overlooked.” But this passing acknowledgement should not be mistaken for introspection about being at the top of a highly unequal structure. In a later section, Naqvi justifies this social stratification when he says that, “Sayyids, like Brahmins, were theologians and generally respected for their minds.” The Naqvi family, which hosted the Nehrus and gave Rae Bareli its first MLA in 1952, had a pastime, he recalls. It involved unwrapping and spreading out its family tree on the settee in the house. The tree was impressive, but did not satisfy Naqvi as it had no geographical mapping. A few years later, his curiosity about his lineage was sated by no lesser figure than the president of Afghanistan. On a visit to the country, an armed escort drove Naqvi to Gardez in search of his “roots,” allowing him to join the dots in the story of the “qasbati shurafa”—the country gentlemen—of his lineage. His search revealed that from Gardez, groups had migrated to Multan and then to Mustafabad, Awadh. In Mustafabad, Naqvi’s family had the largest haveli in the town, with a “solitary horse” and overlooking a pond, and all the pucca houses belonged to cousins from his “own tribe”: the Sayyids of Mustafabad. It was a “settlement of equals in descent and hierarchy,” Naqvi writes, but adds that “like all settlements, Mustafabad too needed barbers, bakar qasabs (butchers), ghosis (milkmen), dhobis (washermen), and sundry others, the majority of them weavers.” There is a simple reason why caste among Indian Muslims is less talked MAY 2020

about than caste among Hindus: unlike the texts and traditions that Hindus draw from, Islamic scriptures are not based on the conception of a castestratified society. However, the realities of Indian Muslim society do not correspond to the egalitarian principles of these scriptures. References to Muslims’ castes can be found in the earliest government documents of independent India, such as the Backward Classes Commission Report of 1955. More recently, they were discussed in the 2006 report of the Sachar Committee. It reiterated in no uncertain terms that all the key features of the Hindu caste system—hierarchical ordering of social groups, endogamy and hereditary occupation—are present among Indian Muslims. According to the report, Muslim castes in India can be placed into two broad categories: “ashraf” and “ajlaf.” It explains, “The former, meaning noble, includes all Muslims of foreign blood and converts from higher castes.” “Ajlaf” means degraded or unholy, and refers to “ritually clean” but backward occupational groups such as carpenters, artisans, painters, graziers, tanners, milkmen, and also “arzals,” who are converts from “untouchable” castes such as Bhangis, Mehtars, Chamars, Doms and so on. In 2001, Ali Anwar, a journalist and the founder of the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz—a social-reform organisation— wrote a landmark book titled Masawat ki Jung. It detailed the discrimination faced by lower-caste Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in the form of casteist slurs, the denial of burial grounds, separate mosques for higher and lower castes and untouchability. In 2016, a survey of just over seven thousand Muslim households in Uttar Pradesh documented how Muslims practice untouchability towards Dalit Muslims, even as upper-caste Muslims consistently quote egalitarian Quranic verses when asked about caste. The denial of caste creates hurdles to the participation of lower-caste Muslims in emancipatory politics. While many Muslim castes qualify for reservations as Other Backward Classes under central lists (as well as those of some states), many otherwise eligible Muslim castes are 91

blind spots · books left out of the reservation system. Dalit Muslims are not entitled to Scheduled Caste status. Some studies have suggested that, in the absence of theological sanction, Muslims experience caste differently to Hindus, and with less intensity, varying from region to region. But it is important to remember that regardless of how Muslims practise caste, large sections of Muslims are lower-caste—that is, they come from families and lineages whose occupations are congruent with those of lower-caste Hindus. According to official estimates in the Mandal commission report, lower-caste Muslims comprise 52 percent of the country’s Muslim population. Other estimates by scholars such as Imtiaz Ahmad and Khalid Ansari, who have produced important work on the topic, say at least 85 percent of Muslims are lower-caste. Why, then, does caste remain invisible in intellectual discourses about Indian Muslims?

Caste among Muslims is not invisible, but invisibilised. Is there an aspect to secularism that makes us forget about caste? In the first three chapters of his book, Naqvi makes 20 references to his family being Syed. Unlike Naqvi, Rakhshanda Jalil does not tell us which of the four upper Muslim castes she comes from, but euphemises by saying—fairly periodically—that she comes from a “sharif family” (“sharif” is the singular of “ashraf”). Seema Mustafa merely hints at the “pedigree” of her Kidwai family. Nazia Erum does not mention caste even when she discusses aristocratic families. Neyaz Farooque sarcastically refers to the snooty mass-communications department of Jamia Millia Islamia university as “the ashraf” among the departments, before adding, tongue-in-cheek, “But then there is no caste or hierarchy among Muslims, you know.” I referred to six reviews of Naqvi’s book, in publications including India Today, the Indian Express and The Wire. These speak of it as a memoir about India’s and Awadh’s lost syncretism, pluralism and multiculturalism. Not one mentions caste, even though Naqvi begins the book with framing his position as a Syed and continues to refer to his heritage throughout. Naqvi’s book is at once an assertion of caste superiority and a lament about the decline of secularism. But all commentators on the book appear interested only in the latter. Caste among Muslims is not invisible, but invisibilised. Is there an aspect to secularism that makes us forget about caste? One argument, put forward by 92

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Khalid Ansari, is that following the end of colonialism, the upper castes across religions became key interlocutors for their religious communities, and set the terms of India’s contemporary debates. “One of the dominant discursive moves was the setting up of the opposition between secular nationalism and religious nationalism,” he said in an article in The Wire. The binary ends up repressing questions of caste. even where caste is not spoken of directly, it is instead sometimes couched in metaphors and nostalgia. Towards the middle of her book, Jalil writes of memories “triggered recently by a sip of amras.” She describes her childhood in Aligarh in the 1970s, when chicken was a delicacy prepared only on special occasions. These are evocative chapters that immerse readers in the “half-buried, half-forgotten memories of summer days” of Jalil’s childhood. They describe the cosiness of her family at a gharelu dawat—a feast for immediate family or informal guests, which did not require bringing out the good crockery but often involved dressing up to the nines. Jalil’s mother cooked the family’s favourites: nargisi kofte, boiled eggs wrapped in spicy minced meat and served in a thick curry; pasanda, a laborious dish that required strips of mutton to be pounded, marinated and simmered on a slow fire; and a stew made from jackfruit. In the chapter that follows, Jalil pines for this golden age of home cooking, which she sees as laid low by dreadful homogenisation and “aaj kal ke naukar”—the servants of today. To return to the business of baghaar [tempering], aaj kal ke naukar give you a standard version—over-generous amounts of zeera (cumin) that lodge themselves in your teeth and make you urgently wish to floss; un-browned onions which float about like pale wraiths; and worst of all, chopped bits of uncooked tomatoes. It is the last, actually, that evokes the strongest reaction. “Har cheez me tamatar daal dete hain,” as my mother never tires of pointing out. … And its absence from our fridges can cause our temperamental cooks to throw a mini tantrum. There was a time when the tomato [only] made its appearance in a sharif Muslim household along with sliced onions, lemon wedges and long green chillies in the form of a “salaad.” Caste is present discreetly, in the reminder to the reader of the kind of household they were hearing about all along. The nargisi kofte and the shab deg that the reader salivated over are not just products of good cooking, or good Muslim cooking, but of good sharif Muslim cooking.

blind spots · books While sharif literally means respectable, it alludes to the genealogy of the family in question. There have been attempts to delink the words “sharif” and “ashraf” from caste, and ascribe them a meaning to do merely with cultural disposition. This is one of the ways in which caste is rendered invisible, as Arshad Alam has shown. “Sharafat cannot be divorced from castes,” he writes, “and in many ways it is an embodied disposition.” Caste is again couched in metaphor and nostalgia when Naqvi speaks in his book about the decline of Urdu. The thought that the language would be ignored after Independence, he says, was nothing short of a nightmare for poets of the age, because “Urdu was the crowning glory of India’s composite culture.” They worried for the future of the exquisite culture connected with the language. Naqvi writes of the compromises the “Urdu camp” was open to in order to save its beloved language—even agreeing to contemplate writing it in the Devanagari script. He then speaks of the multiculturalism of Urdu. In urban areas like Lucknow the reservoir of composite culture was augmented greatly by Kashmiri Pandits too. A pioneering Urdu prose writer, the author of the sixteen volumes of Fasana-e-Azad was a Kashmiri Pandit, Ratan Nath Sarshar. Kayasthas, bookkeepers for the Awadh kings who had risen on the cultural scale, were also participants in this great cultural efflorescence. Any number of Brahmins, Kayasthas, even the Lalas or the more cultured Banias wrote Urdu and Persian poetry. This detail about the castes of the participants of this Urdu culture, with its courtly and feudal roots, is seemingly intended to impress the reader. But it is clear that the renowned multiculturalism of Urdu was dominated by upper-caste men. In fact, the participants of this culture were not only upper-caste, they were often overtly casteist. The Pakistani scholar Ajmal Kamal writes about the treatment of caste in Urdu literary writing, which he notes has traditionally focussed exclusively on the lives and concerns of conquerors. Names for many of the lower castes, including cobblers,

vegetable vendors and so on, feature as terms of abuse. Even in socially committed writing after the 1930s, he notes, caste was ignored in favour of economic class. Ratan Nath Sarshar, whom Naqvi celebrates, retold The Arabian Nights in Urdu. In doing so, he transformed it into a story about a lower-caste man who dreams big and is shown his place. Maroof, a meek cobbler who is regularly beaten up by his wife, is transported by a genie to a faraway land, where he deceives people and amasses a lot of debt and wealth. A king falls for Maroof’s pomp and arranges for his daughter to marry the man. But, soon enough, his “reality” is exposed. Wazir ne baadshah ki khidmat mein ja kar arz kiya ki jahaan panah, woh to mochi nikla. Uska baap mochi, uska dada mochi. The wazir went to the king and said, “My Lord! He turned out to be a Mochi. His father was a Mochi, his grandfather was a Mochi.” Once the group of sharif men find out that “he is a lower-caste idiot,” they invent every conceivable torment to show him his place. Another instance of casteism in Urdu writing can be found in Akhlaq Dehlvi’s memoir about Delhi. He remembers a “great” hakeem—medicine man—of the city: Once a Chamar came to the Hakeem and said, I have a headache. Hakeem Muhammad Ahmed Khan Sahib said, should I hit your head with my shoe? Headache is the disease of the shurafas. If you had a filthy sore in your side, say you had a sore or a boil, then I would have treated you. Headache and a chamar, what does it mean? There seems to be a difference in his sperm. Take him outside and hit him with shoes. Syed Ahmad Khan, the nineteenthcentury social reformer renowned for his advocacy of Urdu and often held up as a face of modern Islam, believed that the lower Muslim castes were not fit for modern education. He opposed opening MAY 2020

up access to competitive civil-service examinations, asking, “would our aristocracy like that a man of low caste or insignificant origin, though he be a B.A. or M.A., and have the requisite ability, should be in a position of authority above them and have power in making laws that affect their lives and property? Never!” Naqvi admits that the exquisite culture of secular Awadh did not “percolate” down to the “masses.” He includes a jibe by Akbar Allahabadi, whom he introduces as Urdu’s greatest satirical poet: “Council mein bahut Sayyid; Masjid mein faqat jumman”—The Viceroy’s executive council is full of Sayyids/ But the mosques are packed with Jummans. (Jummans, recent converts from lower castes, are a reference to the weaver caste of Ansaris, who saw a religious resurgence in the 1930s. Mocked with a range of insults and proverbs about their supposed stupidity and bigotry, and faced with the decline of the artisanal economy, they took to projecting themselves as religious, “momin,” to gain respectability.) To say that it was largely upper-caste men who partook in the multiculturalism of Urdu is not to claim that lowercaste Muslims did not have secular practices. But it is important to point out how certain practices idolised as relics of secularism were at once about caste as well. The nostalgia for these practices is also nostalgia for a camaraderie that most Indian Muslims—and Hindus—could not participate in. While caste appears constantly in Naqvi and Jalil’s memories—personal and cultural—it is not to be found in their political analysis of Muslims’ situation. Naqvi begins with his life and goes on to talk about various issues: the mass conversion to Islam of Dalits in Meenakshipuram in 1981, the massacre of Muslims in Hyderabad in 1948 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Even in the discussion of the Meenakshipuram conversions, there is no reflection on what happened to the converts’ caste status—taking for granted the comforting myth that it ceased to matter the moment they became Muslims. Jalil’s book is packaged as a memoir, but is actually a collection of previously 93

blind spots · books published essays on culture and politics, with her memories interspersed, sometimes awkwardly, between chapters. She begins with Partition, recalling that her father and grandfather did not take the train to Pakistan even though, as sharif Muslims, they had the option of doing so. In one chapter, she touches upon the “myth of the monotonous, monochromatic Musalman,” and talks about Muslims across countries and the divisions between Islamic sects. But she does not address caste divisions at any point. A chapter on Syed Ahmad Khan’s insistence that girls from sharif families need not go to school looks at this proposition only from the point of view of gender, not caste. There is not much continuity between the book’s short essays, since the ambition is to provide an overview of “Being Muslim” in India. The chapter on the inadequacy of modern cooks, in a section titled “Matrix of Culture,” also supposedly falls within this framework. Seema Mustafa, where she briefly touches upon caste in her book, seems to be in two minds on whether caste even exists in Muslim society. First, she accurately notes that “backward Muslims, who have been included in the Mandal Commission reservation for Other Backward Castes were not particularly in favour of reservation for the community, maintaining that there was the danger of the not-so-backward Muslims grabbing the spoils of reservation.” On the very next page, she tells us that “Muslims do not suffer from a caste system, making sections untouchable and unacceptable.” These autobiographies are part of a developing sub-genre that sees the memoirs of affluent, upper-caste Muslims casually blend into a commentary on the overall state of Muslims, as well as of Indian secularism. Though the authors are all distinguished in their fields, as journalists, public intellectuals and so on, it is unsettling to see their personal narratives mixing with the political experiences of poor Muslims of India. Consider this contrast: while the authors come from highly educated or politically influential families, Muslims in general have some of the lowest educational attainment in the country, and only six percent of the Muslim 94

male workforce has white-collar jobs. Large English-language publishing houses have not, as far as I am aware, published any comparable autobiographical accounts by lower-caste Muslims, let alone allowed them to comment on the predicament of Muslims in India as a whole while recounting their particular childhoods. But outside the English language, the last decade has seen at least two important works by lower-caste Muslims. Masood Falahi’s Urdu book Hindustan Mai Zat-Pat Aur Musalman—Casteism Among Muslims in India—weaves his experiences as a scholar in a madrasa together with research on the casteism of Muslim clerics. Ayub Rayeen’s Bharat Ke Dalit Musalman details, in Hindi, the plight of the backward Muslim castes, and the upper-caste denial of the problem of caste. Both were issued by lesserknown publishers—Ideal Foundation and Heritage Prakashan, respectively— and have not yet been translated into English (although parts of Falahi’s book have been translated by a website). Online portals such as Round Table India have published short memoirs by lower-caste Muslims, but they do not seem to catch the eye of publishers seeking Muslim voices. Many institutions both religious and secular that are understood to represent the “Muslim voice” are dominated by upper-caste Muslims. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the All India Milli Council, and various waqf and madrasa boards are all monopolised by Syeds and Sheiks. In 2001, the journalist Ali Anwar counted three backwardcaste Muslims among the 38 executive members of the AIMPLB, and just one backward-caste Muslim among the 19 chairmen of the Bihar Sunni Waqf Board since 1948. Aligarh Muslim University, which figures in upper-caste narratives as a citadel of Muslim scholarship, was established for ashraf men, and continues to disregard the central government’s guidelines on reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes in higher education. In his book, Falahi recounts his experience at AMU: I spent four years in that university, between 1999 and 2003, doing my THE CARAVAN

graduation, and I could not help noticing how deeply-rooted caste consciousness and other such feudal attitudes still remained. Students, especially from ashraf background, tended to treat bearers, cooks and other helpers with disdain and scorn. Even today the university refuses to allow for reservation of seats for ‘low’ castes in any important professional courses, in contrast to most other Indian universities. In the course of my interaction with some Muslim teachers at the AMU who were personally opposed to caste I learned that caste plays a very important role even in the selection of teachers in the university. Falahi recounts an interaction with a Syed professor who lets him in on how the faculty members gossip: “This person is a Julaha [a derogatory reference to Ansaris]. That person is a Kunjara [a derogatory reference to Rayeen]. And that person is a Dhuniya [cottoncarders]. Now the low caste folk have reached all the top posts, and have even become imams of mosques!” Like the English-language autobiographies, academic journals and the mainstram media have focussed a good deal on declining Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha, but without addressing caste. There are some notable exceptions. Ashfaq Husain Ansari, a former member of parliament, analysed Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha to reveal that out of the nearly eight thousand MPs elected to the first 14 Lok Sabhas, only around four hundred have been Muslims. Of these, only sixty were OBC Muslims. The scholar Gilles Verniers’ examination of the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly from 1993 to 2012 showed that while upper-caste Muslims constituted roughly twenty percent of the total Muslim population of the state, they occupied more than seventy percent of the assembly seats won by Muslims. Vernier also found that the ratio of upper-caste Muslims increased as the overall representation of Muslims improved. Discrepancies between upper-caste and lower-caste Muslims are often not reflected in official estimates, and most

blind spots · books studies continue to treat Muslims as a monolith. When studies do consider differences between OBC and upper-caste Muslims, they suffer from a lack of reliable data on the OBCs, and underestimate such things as their number and their access to education and white- collar jobs compared to upper-caste Muslims. The National Sample Survey Organisation, for example, pegs the lower-caste Muslim population at merely forty percent of the total Muslim population. Soon after India gained independence, it was decided that there will be no caste-based enumeration in the census for all castes, barring the SCs and STs. Speaking at the Census Conference in February 1950, Vallabhbhai Patel, the deputy prime minister at the time, said, “Formerly there used to be elaborate caste tables which were re-

quired in India partly to satisfy the theory that it was a caste-ridden country, and partly to meet the needs of administrative measures dependent upon caste division. In the forthcoming Census, this will no longer be a prominent feature.” However, the lack of data continues to affect all OBCs, but specifically lower-caste Muslims. Even as the over-representation of upper-caste Muslims in both religious and political spheres is apparent, caste does not ever become a mainstream Muslim issue, or part of the much-debated “Muslim question.” a 2019 study by the academics Christophe Jaffrelot and A Kalaiyarasan suggested that Muslims have fallen behind even Dalits in educational attainment. A recent paper by the scholars Sam

margaret bourke-white / the life picture collection / getty images

below: Sikh families migrating during the partition of India. Certain themes make frequent appearances in recent Muslim autobiographies, including the pain surrounding Partition and the gradual institutional collapse of secularism.

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blind spots · books Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin claims that Muslims have the lowest intergenerational mobility. Rising communalism definitely has a role to play, but it does not account for the whole truth of Muslim backwardness, in which caste plays a critical role. While the concept of “backwardness” in general is understood as having to do with caste, the concept of “Muslim backwardness” in post-Independence India has overwhelmingly been read relating to religious conservatism and cultural distinctiveness. Given this context, Muslim Women Speak, by the academic Ghazala Jamil, is a unique volume. Based on the simple premise that, in far too many books, Muslim women are spoken about but do not speak themselves, it collates narratives from lower-caste and lower-class women without rushing to analyse them. Though the individual narratives are short and the women mostly nameless, the book offers a semblance of what a lower-caste Muslim memoir might be like, though individual narratives are short and the women mostly nameless. Jamil talks to young Muslim women in 23 urban and semi-urban clusters in 12 states of India, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The book began after the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, a rights organisation, asked Jamil to conduct a study of Muslim women’s aspirations. She was given a detailed questionnaire for collecting data, but, Jamil writes, she found its questions akin to “canned recipes” in the way they attempted to understand Muslim women within preconceived parameters. Jamil felt she needed to adopt a different approach. “I argued that the main thrust of the study should be to facilitate the articulation of, the listening to, and the recording of autobiographical narratives of young Muslim women,” she writes, to create “an alternative approach to research which would make an attempt to let Muslim women register their ‘voice’.” The 2004 book Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India, by the writers Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, presents the findings of extensive 96

research on the education of Muslim women. Jamil notes that the writers did not interview a single Muslim schoolgirl or dropout. “Muslim women hushed quiet by communal violence, poverty, domestic violence, illiteracy, lack of economically viable skills,” Jamil writes, “are rendered further ‘voiceless’ by those who study them.” Jamil’s book shows a way to explore the experiences of Muslims who are otherwise often silenced, such as Sumaiya, whose Mumbai suburb Mumbra faces power cuts 12 hours a day. A woman from Ahmedabad exhibits how “Muslim issues” do not pertain only to religion, but are also issues of development and social location: When the rains start the drains and gutters in our locality begin to overflow. There is so much damage because of this. The water gets into all the houses and that makes people really annoyed and stressed. All the filth reaches people’s bodies. Because of waterlogging, sometimes people have to go hungry. It becomes difficult to live, sleep, sit. It is impossible to study during the season, but this is a part of my life. I can do nothing about it. Another woman tells Jamil of her personal aspirations: I dream a lot, I wish my husband is like a king and treats me like a queen. We should own a big garden, with lots of trees. I want that every Muslim girl should plant a tree on their name and take care of it. So that all girls feel related to the green environment. The supply of dirty water to kacchi basti should stop and we should get safe drinking water. My future husband should be friendly, he should not stop me from going out and should dislike eating chapattis because I don’t like making chapattis. In most cultures, autobiographical articulation has only been available to the powerful and privileged. Jamil attempts to invert this. The narrative method, the insistence that all participants tell their stories using the “I-voice,” opens new doors. During a THE CARAVAN

workshop in Delhi, Jamil gave a group of girls a notepad and pen each, and some time to gather their thoughts on what they wanted to say about themselves. Jamil writes: The girls seemed nervous and the atmosphere seemed a little tense. A girl gestured that she would share first. She introduced herself and said that she had dropped out of school. The one sitting next to her said that she had dropped out too. Quite a few others said that they too no longer go to school. Barely a few minutes into the introductions and many participants were crying. “Whether a girl is from a village or from an urban area,” Jamil notes, “the label ‘Muslim’ carries with it a forced sense that invokes a feeling of ‘backwardness.’ It is also the sense that is actively felt by the girls.” in 2018, the historian Ramachandra Guha published a controversial column where he equated Muslims wearing skull caps or burqas in public with Hindus wielding trishuls and dressing in saffron robes. “While a burka may not be a weapon,” he wrote, “in a symbolic sense it is akin to a trishul. It represents the most reactionary, antediluvian aspects of the faith.” Guha later apologised for this “careless” comparison but stayed with his larger argument: that Muslims need to shun symbols, thoughts, and actions that hold them back from being partners in a shared political project. He argued the need for an elite liberal Muslim leadership with “the potential to take their community out of a medievalist ghetto into a full engagement with the modern world.” Guha was criticised for his apparent contempt for overt Muslim piety, and for his belief that the fundamental problem of the Muslim masses is their own religious backwardness. One cannot help but see parallels here to Naqvi’s contempt for the “jumman.” He writes, “At the heart of it all was the tension between the liberal Muslim, Persianized and broadminded and the majority of Indian Muslims, the newly converted ‘Jummans,’ Arabized and focused on the mosque.” Apart from

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rajesh nirgude / ap photo

right: Friday prayers at a road near the Bharat Nagar slum area in Mumbai, in 2005. The city had, at the time, been hit by severe floods. Ghazala Jamil’s book Muslim Women Speak looks closely at the lives of lower-caste and lower-class women in 12 states across India. In it, a woman describes how the problems she aces are not strictly “Muslim issues,” but also issues of development and social location.

being bigoted, the statement is also misleading. It is the Muslim elites, mostly ashrafs, who have focussed Muslim politics largely on symbolic issues of autonomy and privilege—personal law, AMU, Urdu, the Babri Masjid—while disregarding the socioeconomic conditions of the vast majority of Muslims. Many elite Muslims, when faced with discrimination, cope by internalising the shame piled on Muslims and distancing themselves from religious identity. In Erum’s book, a worried father trying to fit into a posh apartment complex his family has recently moved into tells his son to change out of his Eid kurta-pyjama before going out to play. Jalil begins her book by wondering how one can look like a Muslim. She is exhausted, she writes, when after a normal evening of being considered just another “snobbish” Delhi girl, someone is surprised at finding out she is Muslim. Sometimes the giveaway is her breaking into chaste Urdu, and sometimes it is her last name. Erum, after considering whether to own up to being Muslim or be practical and obscure it, decides to give her daughter a religiously ambiguous name: Myra. These dilemmas are human and deserve empathy, and show how privilege and caste status do not grant immunity against the hatred that consumes this nation, even if they often modulate its effects. MAY 2020

No such dilemmas emerge in the lives and minds of the Muslim women Jamil interviews for her book. Their Muslim identity is too rarely forgotten for them to ever be “found out” as Muslim— they are identified by the fact that the municipality does not pick up garbage in their area, or by the absence of schools in their neighbourhoods. There has been some increase in writing about caste among Muslims. Since the late 1990s, lowercaste Muslims have been coming together under the Pasmanda movement in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and under other similar movements in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. The debates and literature they have generated are inspiring many young Muslims to take to blogs and social media to detail their experiences with caste. Hopefully, the coming years will see these accounts take the shape of books and herald a new range of Muslim memoirs. In an increasingly Islamophobic India, talking about caste among Muslims is often perceived as punching down on an already marginalised community. But conversations about caste offer the hope of engendering a new and transformative Muslim politics, which goes beyond the binary of the secular and the communal. The question of caste among Muslims needs more research, more data, arguments and disagreements. But the time for denial is over. s 97

courtesy jv pawar

Editor’s Pick

on 29 may 1972, the anti-caste activists JV Pawar—seen here being arrested, three years later, for burning a book by MK Gandhi—and Namdeo Dhasal founded the Dalit Panthers in Bombay. Drawing inspiration from the contemporary Black Panthers in the United States and building on the work of BR Ambedkar and Jotirao Phule, the revolutionary organisation defined Dalits as “members of scheduled castes and tribes, Neo-Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion.” Its manifesto promised to “strengthen this growing revolutionary unity of the many” and “paralyzingly attack untouchability, casteism and economic exploitation.” The Panthers opposed Congress rule, calling it “essentially a continuation of the old Hindu feudalism which kept the Dalits deprived of power, wealth and status for thousands of years.” They also rejected the parliamentary Left, which had “not combined the caste struggle with the strug-

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gle against untouchability,” as well as the rival factions of Ambedkar’s Republican Party of India, whose “contemptible leaders made capital out of his name” and “got enmeshed in the web of votes, demands, select places for a handful of the dalits and concessions.” The Panthers expressed solidarity with the Naxalite movement and revolutionary struggles throughout the Global South. Besides building a rich tradition of anti-caste literature, the Panthers began organising in Dalit slums and resisting caste atrocities, in the vein of the Black Panthers’ politics of “survival pending revolution.” On 5 January 1974, a Dalit Panthers meeting was attacked by rioters and the police. This was followed by violence against Dalits throughout Bombay, injuring nearly two hundred people. The police arrested over a hundred Dalits, and a subsequent protest against the police’s partisan attitude was also attacked. State repression during the Emergency and ideological schisms hampered the Panthers’ work, and the group formally disbanded in March 1977.

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