Sixteen Stormy Days

Title: Sixteen Stormy Days – The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India

Author: Tripurdaman Singh
Publisher: Vintage, 2020 (First)
ISBN: 9780670092871
Pages: 268

When the newly independent India’s Constituent Assembly put up the new constitution for the nation’s approval, they had every reason to cheer. Their magnum opus contained the finest liberal notions guaranteed as inalienable fundamental rights to the new republic’s citizens. The world congratulated the Constitution-makers with a tinge of respect and amazement. However, the rulers who were tasked with the administration of the nation’s most sacrosanct document were pygmies in real stature even though with an expansive ego duly massaged by sycophants. Jawaharlal Nehru, who continued as the unelected, caretaker prime minister till the first general elections were held, found the Constitution constraining his party’s social policy. His ire was turned towards the fundamental rights, which Dr. Ambedkar had termed the ‘heart and soul of the Constitution’. Barely a year after January 1950 when the Constitution came into effect, the very makers of the Constitution railed against too much liberty granted by it. Nehru found the combination of fundamental rights, tenacious citizens, a belligerent press and a resolute judiciary determined to vigorously uphold fundamental freedoms as roadblocks on his path to continuation in power. Nehru’s solution was to bend the Constitution to his government’s will to overcome the courts and preempt any further judicial challenges according to his firm belief that wider social policy was to be determined by the government alone and neither the courts nor the Constitution could be allowed to stand in the way. This book tells the story of events that led to the first amendment of the Constitution and the stormy days in which it was hotly debated in parliament. Tripurdaman Singh is a PhD in history and is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. This enchanting book is an indicator of more to come in future from his pen.

Singh explains the reasons which goaded Nehru to curtail constitutional privileges in a well-planned and interesting way, like an absorbing movie script. Court rulings against press censorship, communal reservation and taking over zamindari property clashed with the Congress’ social reform agenda. Just fourteen days after 26 Jan 1950, the Bombay High Court struck the first judicial blow by releasing suspected communists who had been detained indefinitely. Nehru countered this by bringing in a central legislation two weeks later enabling the government to continue jailing people without charging them or presenting them in court, or even inform them of the reasons for their arrest. Three months later, the Patna High Court held the Bihar Management of Estates and Tenures Act null and void by infringing on the right to property and taking over assets without just compensation. Congress had initiated land reform legislation in UP and Bihar in a big way. This sought to appropriate land from zamindars and to distribute them among the landless. A differential compensation scheme was envisaged in which big landowners received lesser amount of cash as the size of the estate grew bigger. The Bihar judgement put the UP legislation also in disarray. Bihar politicians clamoured for the subordination of the Constitution to the Congress party’s election manifesto. But on this issue, the Opposition too sided with them. Socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan demanded that the Constitution be scrapped and a new one drafted. In July 1950, the Madras High Court set aside the state’s communal reservation order on the grounds that it discriminated against citizens. Two months later, the Madras High Court quashed the Criminal Law Amendment Act also as unconstitutional. The verdict alleged that the act was an illustration of naked arbitrary powers to ban organisations and imprison people in the name of ‘public order’.

The book neatly summarizes the autocratic tendency in Nehru after Sardar Patel’s death when he had unrivalled mastery over the party. Nehru was stung by adverse court verdicts and blurted out that ‘it was impossible to hang up urgent social changes because the Constitution comes in the way’. The First Amendment tabled by Nehru himself in Parliament on 12 May 1951 contained such profound and pervasive changes that legal luminaries called it ‘the Second’ or ‘Nehruvian Constitution’. The whole process was especially jarring as the Parliament itself was provisional and unelected. Moreover, this body had only the lower house. Nehru ignored these procedural niceties and quickly formed a 21-member select committee headed by himself and fixed a timeframe of five days to examine the proposed bill. Many Congress MPs were mentally against such shameful appropriation of power. While the bill was under parliamentary scrutiny, 77 Congress MPs presented a petition to Nehru asking for conscience vote on the issue. The cabinet was also split. Nehru sensed the danger and agreed to mellow the restrictions he intended to place on fundamental rights by introducing the qualifying term ‘reasonable’ before it. He then issued the whip and all Congress MPs promptly fell in line. On May 31, 1951, the resolution was put to vote and declared carried by 228 in favour, 20 against and 50 abstaining. Close on the heels of this far reaching change, sections 124A and 153A of the Indian Penal Code were revalidated. This brought back the British-made sedition law and any activity promoting ill-will between communities into major criminal offences. Parliament soon passed the Press (Objectionable Matter) Act penalizing the publication of material it did not like.

A detailed description of the damage done by the First Amendment is given in the book. Article 19 offered freedom of speech and expression which was curtailed only by considerations of libel, slander, defamation, contempt of court and undermining the security of the state. The new law criminalized anything the executive deemed to be upsetting ‘public order’ and jeopardizing the nation’s relations with a foreign state. This may seem surprising to us now, but what Nehru was seeking was to throttle criticism against his humiliating concessions to Pakistan which was highly disadvantageous to India and directed only to attract the Muslim vote bank to the Congress party and probably a Nobel peace prize for Nehru himself. The First Amendment also introduced the Ninth Schedule to the Constitution as a repository of unconstitutional laws that put them beyond the purview of courts. Former Chief Justice and later Vice President of India, Mohammad Hidayatullah, caustically observed that ‘ours was the only constitution that needed protection against itself’. The Ninth Schedule contained a total of 284 laws in 2006!

The author analyses why the icons of our freedom struggle turned distrustful of its citizens within just a year of the establishment of the republic. As the sole inheritors of the British Raj, India’s post-colonial Congress leaders had assumed the same sense of entitlement to stifle dissent, to censor adverse opinion and muffle all opposition. But to their surprise, they realized that unlike their colonial predecessors, they could not do as they wished and would be forced to endure their opponents. Furthermore, they would have to submit to and be bound by constitutional restrictions. Having enjoyed disproportionate and unchecked power since 1947, they were reluctant to cede ground to democracy. It was the provincial high courts that ruled against Nehru’s agenda and here too they were not unanimous. The Bihar High Court turned down the state’s zamindari abolition act while the Allahabad High Court upheld Uttar Pradesh’s similar law. Nehru could have appealed to the Supreme Court for a ruling to clarify the legal position but instead of deferring to the apex court he made them follow his own commands by changing the Constitution.

Nehru’s personal beliefs on socialism might also have played a role in the shaping of things. The right to personal property was effectively curtailed. Article 31, which restrained the state from acquiring property except by the authority of law and on payment of compensation, was coolly swept aside. Articles 15 and 29 were diluted to allow reservation to backward classes in education and government employment. The Constitution had originally planned to extend reservation only to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/ST). The overall impact of the amendment is also examined in this book. Nehru provided a constitutional infrastructure for his successors to be unleashed on the country’s hapless citizens. This loophole was later frequently exploited to overcome court judgments. Nehru’s justification for the amendment smacked of a tyrannical bend of mind. He castigated the fundamental rights as obsolete remnants of the ideas of the French Revolution and argued for the superiority of the constitutional section on Directive Principles of State Policy over the chapter on Fundamental Rights. This truly deliberate strategic assault on the Constitution and fundamental rights tampered with the nation’s primary document to suit the transient whims of every clique in power for the time being.

The book is a delightful read. Rarely have I seen Indian authors handle English in such an appealing way. A lot of tasty and colourful phrases and idioms are included as adornment to the fine diction. The research that has gone into the preparation of the book is truly impressive.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star

 

The Harappans and Aryans

Title: The Harappans and Aryans
Author: M K Dhavalikar
Publisher: Aryan Books International, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9788173056123
Pages: 227

 

When John Marshall unearthed the remains of Harappan civilization in the 1920s, he found – or rather thought he had found – clear elements of non-Aryan characteristics such as the absence of horse and iron and also an urban setting for the culture. Clever intervention by missionary-turned-anthropologists had successfully established an Aryan-Dravidian dichotomy by the end of nineteenth century. This led Marshall to propose that the Harappan civilization was engendered by the Dravidians on the laughable logic that whatever is not Aryan must be Dravidian. This assertion had no basis in fact. Archeologically, no trace of artefactual continuity is established between Harappa and the supposedly Dravidian-populated South India. The Harappan language, though not yet deciphered, stands no comparison at all with the Dravidian languages. The Harappans ate wheat and barley while the south Indians continue to eat rice. Even in the face of these logical arguments, a few scholars support Marshall’s cause and claim that the Dravidians established the Harappan civilization. The controversy still rages and we need many more scholars to put in their contribution to the debate. Madhukar Keshav Dhavalikar is a retired professor of archeology at the Deccan College, Pune. He is a field expert, having carried out excavations at many ancient sites which include Inamgaon, Prabhas Patan and Kuntasi among others. He has published over one hundred research papers and thirty books on archeology. In this book, Dhavalikar argues that the Harappan civilization was an Aryan construct and after the breakup of the civilization due to environmental factors, the Harappan-Aryans spread to other parts of north, central and eastern India and launched the second urbanization during the beginning of the historic period in the lifetime of Buddha and Mahavira.

Dhavalikar’s aim is to establish the connecting link between the proto-historic Harappan and the early historic Aryan urbanizations separated by a thousand years. His arguments are logical and may be plausible. He has explained away even the toughest challenges like the absence of horse and iron in a convincing manner. The horse reached India by the Late Harappan stage from west Asia and that’s why it is not depicted in seals made in the Mature Harappan phase, but found in large measure in Vedic texts composed in the Late Harappan period. The downfall of the urban phase is attributed to desiccation caused by global cooling that set in by about 2000 BCE and lasted for a millennium. At the same time, some hypotheses seem to be out of order. He postulates that Harappa was probably a monarchical state with a large, well-defined territory spanning 1.5 million square km. It exhibited occupational specialization in society with a variety of crops. The uniformity of customs at different ends of the land attests to a uniform state. The author also thinks that a rudimentary caste system was in existence at Harappan sites, judging from the demarcation of urban real estate into citadel and different shades of lower towns. This is a little farfetched. Some form of separation based on profession is seen in all societies and the dwelling places mirror this division. But arguing that the division into classes was sealed by birth in a specific class – as in caste societies – is not proven by available evidence.

This book introduces a plausible yet highly speculative sequence of events that led to the downfall of the Harappan civilization. Around 2200 BCE, a cataclysmic tectonic movement took place in the Himalayan foothills. This changed the course of rivers. The Sutlej river diverted its flow from Saraswati (present day Ghaggar-Hakra) and emptied its discharge to the Chenab river. Meanwhile, Yamuna also changed its course to withdraw from Saraswati and link up with Ganga further east, as it still does. This made the Saraswati go dry and the towns on its banks lost their vitality. However, this does not explain why other centres like Harappa or Mohenjodaro declined. To compound the misfortune, from around 2000 BCE, environmental degradation set in on a global scale and many parts became arid due to global cooling. Harappans were then scattered to distant corners of India and west Asia. Societies in other regions of India were still in the Mesolithic or even Neolithic stages at that time. Harappans taught them plough agriculture, cultivation of wheat and barley, copper-bronze technology, wheel-turned pottery, cremation of the dead and also Prakrit, an Indo-Aryan language.

In his bid to prove the identity of Harappans as Aryans, Dhavalikar examines a few aspects that are seemingly pointed against his theory. There are no confirmed traces of the horse in the Mature Harappan phase. It was a rarity in the Late phase too, since there was no agricultural use for the animal. Its use became more widespread in the era of migration to the Ganga basin. Scholars associate the horse inseparably to Aryans and the Rig Veda mentions it 215 times while the bull finds mention only 176 times. However, the author points out that the Aryans did not bring the horse to India, but was traded with west Asia by the end of the third millennium BCE. Fire worship was fairly common in India even in pre-Harappan sites like Mehrgarh in Baluchistan. Its universal adoption in Mature Harappan period is attested by the elaborate fire altars with remains of animal bones found in Kalibangan. In the Rig Veda, the largest number of hymns is addressed to Agni (fire). Anyhow, this book does not pursue the lead of fire worship to Zoroastrianism in Persia which looks like a serious slip.

The author’s credentials as an accomplished archeologist are beyond doubt, but his attempt to combine fact with fiction casts a shadow of inconsistency to the whole effort. Dhavalikar tries unconvincingly to reconcile ancient Indian concepts of chronological phases like Kali Yuga to historical notions. He calculates the beginning of Kali Yuga to 3110 BCE by counting 95 generations of kings from Puranic genealogy. In this irrational attempt, he arbitrarily assigns a regnal term of eighteen years to each king so as to coincide the beginning of Kali Yuga to the date of scholarly consensus of the onset of Harappan civilization. Interestingly, this date is extended to supposed references in the Bible too. This book wonders at the coincidence of the year 3104 BCE mentioned in the Bible as the year of God’s creation of the world. This assertion is quite strange as there no such references in the Bible. Bishop Ussher of England in the early modern age had estimated the Creation as happening in 4004 BCE from the genealogical lines listed in the Bible. This is far too distant from the author’s estimation.

The spread of Harappans/Aryans from the land of five rivers to the east and west is covered in some detail. They established their prominence as far as west Asia and Iran. The treaty between Hittites of Anatolia and Mitanni in Syria of fourteenth century BCE, found and known as the Boghazkoi Inscription of central Turkey mentions Rig Vedic gods such as Indra, Mitra, Nasatya and Varuna. This migration phase in India is characterized by the Rig Vedic picture of a rural society featured by subsistence farming, stock-raising and hunting-fishing. The fall from the great urban period cannot be more striking. Dhavalikar takes a dig at the Aryan invasion theory with an analysis of ancient languages. Prakrit was the language of the Harappans and it is an Indo-Aryan tongue. Rig Veda has borrowed many words from it. He also claims that Dravidians too had migrated to India from Elam in Persia in the fourth millennium BCE. He accepts that the Aryans had come from central Asia, but affirms that they made the Harappan civilization in all its glory.

The book includes some references to the author’s political opinion which is to be highly deplored in an academic treatise such as his hostility to communal reservation in government jobs in India. He terms it an irony of fate that people of the upper castes now want to turn into backward castes. At the same time, he makes a prescient observation that innovation had never been an Indian quality. The artifacts stood unchanged for thousands of years with no change for the better. There is no difference in bullock carts as depicted in Harappan terracotta seals and the modern ones still used in Indian villages.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Babur – Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor

Title: Babur – Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor 1483-1530

Author: Stephen Frederic Dale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781107107267
Pages: 242

Zahir al-din Muhammad Babur (1483 – 1530) was a prominent invader of India in its millennia-old history, He established the Mughal dynasty that lasted for only three centuries, but offered lasting contributions to India’s society as a whole. As a conqueror, Babur’s legacy is surprisingly scant and he had not left behind many monuments that evoke his memory. Rather, he is still remembered for the destruction he had caused in India. Babur suddenly acquired relevance in the last decade of the twentieth century for two contradictory reasons. In India, a sixteenth-century mosque attributed to him was razed to the ground by militant Hindu nationalists in 1992 which they claimed was built on top of a destroyed temple dedicated to Lord Ram, one of Hinduism’s most revered divinities. Even though the temple destruction was masterminded by Mir Baqi, Babur’s local commander, the mosque was named in honour of his master. At the same time, the Soviet Union disintegrated into several national republics that quickly faced an urgent need to stitch together a national narrative to bind their people together. The newly formed Uzbekistan found its rallying cry behind its medieval heroes like Timur, Ulugh Beg and Babur. This book is a toned down version of one of the author’s thoroughly researched book that was difficult for ordinary readers to enjoy. Stephen Frederic Dale is Professor Emeritus of South Asian and Islamic History at Ohio State University.

Babur inherited the most exalted ancestry imaginable to a medieval central Asian warlord. He descended from Timur on the father’s side and from Chingiz Khan on the mother’s. This gave him legitimacy in the fiercely tribal society of those times. At the same time, Dale narrates characteristics of a barbarian polity showing no respect for kinship relations. When Babur’s father Umar Shaikh Mirza died in 1494, Babur became the ruler of Ferghana with his capital at Andijan. He was soon attacked by close relatives on all sides. Ahmad Mirza of Samarqand, who was his own father-in-law, attacked from the west; his maternal uncle, the Chaghatai Mongol Mahmud Khan of Tashkent, attacked from the northwest and a Mongol kinsman and ruler of Kashgar Abu Bakr Dughlat, from the east. Babur repulsed all of them, but this lust for power cast a long shadow on the dynasty he founded in India. Their affections often followed personal whims than paternal obligations. Muhammad Baranduq Barlas, Babur’s ancestor, much loved the hawk such that if a hawk died or was lost, it would have mattered more than if one or another son had died or broken his neck (p.74).

The author describes the sorry plight of Babur in his native Ferghana and Samarqand against powerful enemies. Babur occupied Samarqand three times – which he considered to be his legacy attributable to his Timurid ancestry – but lost out to Uzbeks on all three occasions. Babur fled each time he had had to cross swords with Shaibani Khan Uzbek. Finally, he occupied Kabul as to make the best out of a hopeless situation. He conquered Kabul not by conquest, but by legitimacy. His Timurid uncle Ulugh Beg Kabuli who had ruled there had died in 1502. But he found the Afghan tribes too independent as to refuse taxes or tributes. Compared to the economically poorer province of Kabul, the wealthy plains and compliant farmers of India was a very alluring prospect. However, Babur matured in Kabul and enjoyed a considerable degree of stability for the first time in his life. The two decades he spent there was full of great personal and intellectual accomplishment. In that congenial life, eighteen children were born to him of his four wives! The poor resources of the province comprised only of custom duty. Dale presents a comparison of Kabul with Agra. While the latter collected 2.9 million shahrukhis in taxes, Kabul could produce only 0.8 million. Still, Babur loved life in Kabul so much that he regretted ever leaving Kabul’s cool forested countryside and its cascading streams for the hot, humid and arid planes of India.

However hard you may analyse the impact of Babur on India, the modern Indian society think of him as another marauding, nomadic barbarian from the central Asian steppes. The feeling of ill will is mutual. Babur found Indians black and ugly. He viewed India with contempt and he does not even allude to Indo-Muslim clerics in his religious musings. As compared to the slave lineage of Delhi’s first sultanate dynasties, Babur trumpeted his heritage and resultant legitimacy derived foremost from his prestigious Timurid lineage. As a true Hanafi Sunni Muslim and a representative of Perso-Islamic society, he criticized the lack of social life in India and the isolating Hindu ways of caste which in his view lacked the civilized traits of congenial social intercourse. In a sustained effort of cultural imperialism, Babur worked constantly to Persianize India.

In his later years, Babur stuck to a puritanical way of life, giving up intoxicating drinks and opium as a thanks-giving offer for victory against Rana Sanga at the Battle of Khanwa. Anyhow, he was a rank opportunist when he could enjoy power by compromising on his religious beliefs or morals. Shaibani Khan was an Uzbek warlord who scattered Babur’s troops whenever they met in battle. This Khan was killed by Shah Ismail Safawi of Persia who offered a gift to Babur which he could not refuse – the rulership of Samarqand. Babur readily reciprocated with fealty and submission to the Shah and his Shii faith. When he took Samarqand, the Shah’s name was read in Friday prayers and the Shii profession of faith ‘Ali wali Allah’ was stamped on coins. But the people of Samarqand rebelled against this apostasy, which was one of the reasons for his getting ousted from the city. Babur also continued to use the name of the Turko-Mongol pagan god Tengri (blue sky) as a synonym of Allah. In fact he uses the term Tengri more often than the Islamic god (p.130).

Dale gives pride of place to Babur’s literary achievements like poems and ghazals. Most of them are of the expected variety of unrequited love or frustrated infatuation. However, he does not enjoy an exalted poetic reputation but his poems are important as evidence of his literary ambitions and cultured personality. Many character sketches of the Timurids in Afghanistan as Babur consolidated his position in Kabul are given. A long list of poets and philosophers are also included. The discussion loses focus here and falls to the level of a summary of Babur’s autobiography called Baburnama.

The author marvels at the candidness with which Babur had approached his own self and at the objectivity of his observations of others. He also hints at the trait of homosexuality seen in the Mughal founder. Babur talks about his infatuation with a youth he calls Baburi. His emotionally affected prose depicts a distant and unresolved infatuation as if from the side of a girl. He writes that he was ‘tongue-tied when he met Baburi in the bazaar out of modesty and bashfulness’. In this case, Babur is unable even to open a conversation with the young man who aroused in him emotions of ‘desire’ and ‘love’. Dale opines that all these references generate unanswerable, psychological questions in readers. Another instance that pointed to this trait of Babur’s personality occurred in 1519 when we see him write a two-couplet verse a few days after he sent his long-term companion Khwajah Kalan as the governor of Bijaur. It contains the same imagery of separated lovers found in ghazals.

This book takes Babur at face value as far as his autobiography is concerned. It provides such an uncritical evaluation of the historical text that had Dale been alive in Babur’s time, he would have honoured the American professor with a khilat (honorary robe) and perhaps several villages as tax-free grant! This book always refers to India as Hindustan even in contexts not related to the descriptions in Babur’s text. This feels awkward with an impression that the modern Indian state does not faithfully reflect the legacy of the medieval country. Dale is a Turkish language scholar too, but his frequent use of Chaghatai Turkish words from the original text is troublesome for easy readability. This makes the book appear scholarly, but without much use for ordinary readers. The author takes extraordinary care not to disclose Babur’s religious bigotry and sanitizes such references as temple destruction and forced conversions. He uses the word ‘pagan’ instead of ‘kafir’ even though he liberally quotes from the original text.

To sum up this review, let me reproduce a quatrain from Babur.

‘O Breeze, if thou enter the sanctuary of that Cypress
Remind her heart of the wound of separation
May god have mercy; she does not recall Babur
God grant mercy to her heart of steel’

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

 

Armed Struggle for Freedom

Title: Armed Struggle for Freedom – 1857 to Subhash

Author: Balshastri Hardas

Publisher: Jagriti Prakashan, 2016 (First published 1958)

ISBN: 8186719091

Pages: 439

 

Indian students who study their country’s history of the freedom struggle from their school textbooks are led to believe that India became independent through the struggles of Congress entirely through non-violent means suggested by Gandhi. The Congress party which ruled the country for sixty years after independence has comprehensively scrubbed down all traces of effort put in by other organisations in achieving freedom. This has cast an air of inevitability on the British government’s actions after 1900 as it is observed that the constitutional process kick started by the 1909 reforms gradually blossomed into full independence by 1947 in the face of Congress struggles which were mostly exaggerated and generally insignificant. A clear line of thought existed in India that sought to wrench freedom from the colonial masters through violent means. The British government handled them mercilessly. Innumerable martyrs were hanged on the gallows and many were transported for life to the Andamans or Aden. All these known and unknown sons and daughters (yes, there were a few brave women too) of India who suffered, sacrificed and died for the freedom of their motherland cannot be denied their credit. This book corrects the psychological bias of Indians towards non-violent means and explains the brave deeds through which the revolutionaries sometimes shook the British power to its roots. Balshastri Hardas was a renowned scholar of Sanskrit and ancient Indian studies. He was a prolific author who had 27 books to his credit. He died in 1968 at the age of 50. This book which tells the story of the armed rebellion from 1857 to 1947 was published to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the first war of independence in 1957.

 

Hardas explains the sanctity of violence in a nation’s fight for freedom from bondage by an external power. Acts of terror is required to warn the administration and to arrest the course of oppressive policy. It creates self-confidence among the silent masses along with the moral courage of resistance to the tyranny. Here, the subtle difference between the word ‘terror’ used in the book to its modern meaning is to be clarified. Terrorism, especially Islamic terrorism, is the use of excessive force in which the target is destroyed along with an equally huge collateral damage, like the thousands of innocent victims of 9/11. It also aims for the killing of ordinary people without any specific target in mind as seen in 26/11. Indian freedom fighters never resorted to such inhuman ways. They targeted much-hated officials of the administration who themselves had blood of innocents on their hands. Bombs were sometimes used, but on highly specific targets such as the Viceroy’s railway cabin or the Governor’s car. The fact that the violent strikes did play a part in granting independence is amply clear by the debate in the House of Commons on the Indian Independence Act. When Churchill asked why freedom is conceded to India, Prime Minister Attlee attributed two reasons for that decision. One was that the Indian mercenary army was no longer loyal to Britain and the other was that Britain couldn’t afford to have a large British army to hold down India (p.403). It is remarkable that he made no reference to the kid gloved programs of the Congress party!

 

The book starts the narrative from the 1857 Rebellion which is disparaged by most British historians and some of the Indian ones who take inspiration from the former. Contrary to British claims, the author argues that if the rifle cartridges greased with cow and pig fat was the sole problem, it would have remained confined to the circle of sepoys who were asked to use them. Moreover, the Governor General had assured the soldiers that these cartridges won’t be used in the army and the sepoys will be permitted to make their own cartridges. 1857 was also the time when Hindus and Muslims came closest in relations in the entire history of their interactions spanning 1200 years. We find letters written by Hindu war leaders describing the British as kafirs (infidels in the Islamic sense) and highlighting the need to oust them for the protection of both religions. The two major religions came together under the tutelary figure of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah and cried ‘maro firangi ko’ (down with the foreigner) in unison.

 

The 1857 war was a crude wake up call for the British. The Crown took over the administration of India from the trading company which had conquered it and opened up new programs to prevent recurrence of such feared resurrections in the future. It disarmed the natives by taking away their right to carry arms through the notorious arms act. Another Britisher founded the Indian National Congress to open a safety valve to give vent to pent up discontent. The government encouraged Congress by letting many of its mild demands to be accepted. The Maratha country saw the birth of some noble souls who engaged the British in armed conflicts around 1900.

 

A curious orientation seen in the book is its antagonism against social reformers who did their work in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hardas accuses them of being dazzled and charmed by the glitter of western culture and civilization that they forsook the ideas of freedom and preferred the act of blind imitation. They were accused of believing that if we could reform our social and cultural order of life on the lines of the ruling English people, then freedom will flow automatically as a gift from the democratic English. This leadership honestly but foolishly believed that our fall was due to our social backwardness. They believed in flirting with and flattering the English as demigods and beseeching them for rights and privileges (p.106). The author thus arraigns Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Gopal Hari Deshmukh, Jotiba Phule and M G Ranade as having fallen in this British trap. The preaching of these people almost destroyed the pride of Indians in its own ancient culture, civil and social structures.

 

The history of the revolutionary Gadar movement is actually hidden from public view by academic historians. Hardas makes a valiant effort to remedy this deficiency. Gadar was a party formed overseas for an armed uprising in India. It smuggled men and material to India for a rebellion during the First World War when the British troops were occupied elsewhere in the empire for the war effort. Due to lack of strict discipline, spies leaked the assault plans to the authorities. Hundreds were hanged in the legal process which followed. This book’s greatest contribution to public knowledge is the detailed report it provides regarding the revolutionary war effort in Punjab in 1915-16. A decade later, the Hindusthan Socialist Republican Army struck in Punjab and North India under Chandrasekhar Azad and Sardar Bhagat Singh. Numerous other incidents are also narrated. Many young students, who had just completed their graduation, wielded a gun during the convocation ceremony to make an attempt on the life of the dignitary who was attending the function which usually was the provincial governor who was also the chancellor of the university.

 

The book is written with a strong, nationalist bias. The author becomes quite emotional at times while describing the great sacrifices of the revolutionaries on the altar of the nationalist spirit personified as a mother. The book’s foreword is written by M S Golwalkar, the supreme leader of the RSS at the time of publication. A drawback of the author’s narrative style is the assumption of cowardice on the enemy. Many examples can be cited in which the English are lampooned for running away from the scene of an attack to protect their lives and property. This attitude is incorrect and provides a fictional sheen to the narrative. The English are well known for their bravery during the world wars. However, this was for protecting their own homeland rather than an overseas colony. The author is also somewhat careless about dates, omitting them at many places.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

 

Veer Savarkar

Title: Veer Savarkar

Author: Devendra Kumar Sharma

Publisher: Nisha Publications, New Delhi, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789385621376

Pages: 280

 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883 – 1966) was an Indian politician, freedom fighter and social reformer who developed the Hindu nationalist political ideology, Hindutva. He is the central icon of modern Hindu nationalist political parties. His last years were clouded with accusations of involvement in Gandhi’s assassination by a member of the Hindu Mahasabha which was led by Savarkar. Though he was acquitted for lack of evidence, the slur on his reputation remained. At the age of 83, he refused to take food and elected to die peacefully at the hour chosen by him. This book looks like a biography, but it is not. It appears that his biographical details are obtained from free sources like Wikipedia with no research or elaboration. A large part of the book contains Savarkar’s writings. Devendra Kumar Sharma was an archivist at National Archives of India and a former professor of history at the University of Allahabad.

 

Sharma provides a very brief narrative on Savarkar’s life which helps only to whet the reader’s appetite. He craved for freedom from foreign rule and was ready for armed conflict to achieve this. He formed a secret society called Abhinav Bharat for waging war against the British. In his drive to promote Swadeshi clothes, he made a bonfire of foreign cloth amid Dussehra festivities in 1905. After completing his B.A degree in India, Savarkar went to England to pursue studies in law. He pined for guerilla warfare while in England and learned bomb-making from a Russian revolutionary. His elder brother was also an ardent supporter of armed conflict against the imperial masters. His brother, Ganesh, organized an armed revolt against the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909. Both the brothers were booked for sedition. Savarkar made a daring attempt to escape from the ship that was carrying him to India. He jumped out of the bathroom porthole while it was berthed at Marseilles, but the French police caught and handed him over to the British. He was sentenced for fifty years of imprisonment as double transportation. He was lodged in the Cellular Jain in the Andamans in 1911. He was moved to Ratnagiri jail in 1924 and interned in a house with the proviso not to leave that district. He was finally released in 1937, after serving a 26-year sentence in one form or the other.

 

Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’ and so it had become necessary to define it. According to this ideology, a ‘Hindu’ is any patriotic individual of India, venturing beyond a religious identity. You are a Hindu if your forefathers belonged to this land, you find yourself connected to this land and your religious commitments evolved from this land. Not only the Hindus – in the current narrow religious sense of the term – as well as adherents of all Indian religions are readily in this fold. With a little wrestling with facts, the others could also be brought within it. Savarkar wants every person belonging to Hindutva to treat India as a holy land. As per this definition, the Muslims and Christians can also be a part of it, if they impart the same respect they bestow on places in Arabia or Israel on an equal measure to India too. However, this argument is rather untidy and one is left to wonder if Savarkar indeed wanted them out of his domain – in spirit, and not in the physical sense.

 

This book explains the factions among freedom fighters and indicates Savarkar’s locus standi. In 1906, there were moderates and militants among the people who opposed the British. The first wanted to appeal to the better nature of the British, while the second felt that passive resistance would achieve their aim. Neither party was concerned about the British military might as they never had any plans to engage them on the battlefield. The revolutionaries distanced themselves from the other two and opted for violent conflict with arms. They knew the consequences too well. They were going to fall victim to the bullets and bayonets and their families are to be ruined. Still they held firm and Savarkar belonged to this group. Savarkar warned his own members that they would have to forego their houses, property, pleasures of life, reputation, affection of the beloved or even face death. The Revolutionaries demanded absolute political independence when the others were not even requesting for dominion status.Moderates tried armchair politics and considered it to be appropriate and honourable. Savarkar was involved in the murder of Sir Curzon Wyllie, a British MP, by Madanlal Dhingra and also in the assassination of A M T Jackson, the collector of Nashik. Savarkar was arrested for abetting the crime and also for illegal transportation of weapons.

 

The author gives only a cursory glance on Savarkar’s work in England. He organized Indian youth, inspired and converted them to the revolutionary path by individual dialogue. He delivered public speeches, wrote books and trained in making and using explosive devices. His literary career is as illustrious as his political work. He produced a biography of Mazzini, the revolutionary Italian leader of nineteenth century whose work liberated Italy out of the Austrian empire. The British promptly banned the book which was revoked only four decades later in 1946, on the eve of independence when Congress assumed control of the provinces. Savarkar’s greatest contribution to Indian historiography is his deep research into the 1857 rebellion and projecting it as a war of independence rather than a petty mutiny, as pejoratively called by the British. Till that time, even educated Indians had thought that the native soldiers who fought in 1857 were brutes and a disgrace to Indian culture by killing innocent Englishmen and violating their women. The hardworking and kindhearted English government was leading India in the path of progress and these stupid, fanatical sepoys created a great obstacle in that path. This was the common reading of the 1857 events. Savarkar undid the web of lies by thoroughly studying the original records available in the India Office library in London. The moment the librarian came to know of his real intention, he was thrown out of the institution. This book was also proscribed and later editions of it were published by such eminent personalities as Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

 

Left historians and social media portray Savarkar as a Hindu fundamentalist fanatic. They would be astonished to learn that he was a rationalist. He denied divinity in the scriptures and argued that they should be understood only in consonance with present conditions. He was dead set against caste based discrimination and untouchability. In a revolutionary move, he exhorted all Hindus to marry across caste! He wanted those religious vows that have no material benefit and are solely popularized on the basis of Puranic fables to be reinvented and given a different form. He claimed that in ancient times, certain incidents and lifeless objects were considered as living gods purely due to ignorance regarding the science of creation. Those vows which were popularized merely to appease such gods should be considered worthy of rejection in the present time. In a rhetorical flourish, Savarkar asks that if we thank god for saving us from a calamity, we should also consider who had brought that calamity on us in the first place (p. 238). Savarkar’s progressive mind is revealed in his assertion that a custom that brings only harm on humanity instead of benefitting it even to the slightest extent is adharma. He demanded the conservatives not to raise the bogey of sanatana dharma to stall reform (p.240). Changing a tradition is not an insult to our forefathers. On caste, Savarkar raged incandescent, asking to discard those 5000-year old superstitions of untouchability and scripture-based caste discrimination and also unshackle the bonds that stem from literalist belief in shrutis, smrutis and Puranas that hinder one’s duty (p. 245). He built a temple called Patitpavan Mandir at Ratnagiri which was open to all Hindus irrespective of caste.

 

This book does not serve its purpose as a biography of Savarkar. Its only saving grace is his writings quoted verbatim for nearly two-thirds of the volume. Scant attention has been given to the content. Running against the general trend of the narrative, unnecessarily sharp criticism against the protagonist is also seen at two places which could well be sabotage considering the overall carelessness and pathetic proof-reading of the author and publisher respectively. Sharma claims that Savarkar’s literary work is an ‘extraordinary embodiment of utter mediocrity’ and that the literary corpus does not suggest a creative mind (p.13). After this scathing remark, he revises his opinion a few pages later saying that Savarkar was a great scholar full of originality (p.36). Pages 12 to 18 include undiluted criticism that is incompatible with the spirit of the book’s arguments. Overall, the book looks like it was written by several novices with little communication between them as seen in the multiple repetitions of ideas and total absence of a viable structure for the book. This book is also not well researched.

 

The book is recommended only to those who want to read a summary of Savarkar’s thoughts in his own words as this volume has simply copied many of them intact.

 

Rating: 2 Star

 

Caste

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Caste – The Lies that Divide Us

Author: Isabel Wilkerson

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2020 (First)

ISBN: 9780241486511

Pages: 476

Caste is a social marker in India as the inalienable category into which every Hindu is born. This accident of birth into a particular caste then moulds the choices that person has at his disposal later in life. This is the academic aspect of caste. There have been concerted efforts since independence to equalize opportunities available to people as a whole, without reference to the caste into which they were born. Reservation of seats in government bureaucracy and legislature to people of the depressed castes is the world’s most successful affirmative action barring violent revolution and resultant turmoil. With this in mind, I opened the book and was shocked to find that a similar, if not more discriminative, caste system is prevailing in the US even though it is not called as such. Caste system is a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the inferiority of other groups. In this sense, caste is at the centre of American society and maintains the 400-year old social order. This book explains the segregation and discrimination the blacks had to endure for nearly 250 years till the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century and the invisible yet subtle ways in which the old prejudices spring forth even at present at the slightest trigger on presumed racial attitudes. Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American author of the bestselling book The Warmth of Other Suns and has won the Pulitzer Prize. She has taught at Princeton, Emery and Boston universities and has lectured at more than 200 venues across the world.

The word ‘caste’ originated from the Portuguese term ‘casta’ meaning race or breed. The Portuguese were the earliest European traders in South Asia and applied the term to the people of India upon observing the divisions in Hindu society. The sense of ‘breed’ is especially fitting as each caste is endogamic in nature. The Indian caste system is several millennia old, but it is not racial in nature. There is a wide chasm between the highest and lowest castes, but genetic studies reveal that all of them belong to the same race. Well, scientific studies do not pronounce judgment on race, but tell instead that there are very few genetic variations among them, which is essentially the same thing. However, caste system solidified in the US along racial lines with the arrival of African slaves in the American south in 1619, which became the birthplace of the caste system where it was most brutally enforced. It spread to other places from here, but nowhere as harsh as in the South. Wilkerson proposes that three caste systems can be discerned in human history – that in India, the US and in Nazi Germany where the Jews were evicted from all positions of honour and dumped at the bottom ladder virtually overnight. This classification is preposterous as the German case revolved around the social ideology of a political party which could be easily disposed of once that party was ousted from power. It sought to wipe off the Jews who were deemed lower caste. This doesn’t compare with the Indian and American instances which are more rugged. Anyhow, the book is structured around this artificial divide. The author also claims that even with her minimal exposure to Indians, she is able to tell upper and lower castes apart in mixed social gatherings. She comments that the upper castes display certitude in bearing, demeanour, behavior and a visible expectation of centrality (p.31).

Wilkerson dwells on the development of slavery, and by corollary the caste system too, in some detail. The inhuman condition the slaves were forced to live on is a painful reminder of an incredibly cruel era in American history. The white masters exerted absolute ownership on the body and mind of the slaves. They could kill them with impunity, have sexual relations with any slave woman they chose, break up a family by selling off one or more members to different buyers and demanded unconditional loyalty in return. It is hard to imagine the numerous ways in which men lorded over other men upon the flimsy pretext of skin colour. The colonists were unable to enslave the native population and they solved the resultant labour problem by importing Africans in large numbers. With little further use of the original inhabitants, the colonists exiled them. Some measly laws were enacted in the interim period to lighten the burden on slaves. In 1740, the work hours of slaves were limited by law to fifteen. This was no great concession to them because prisoners on hard labour were required to work only ten hours at that time. Even after Abolition and Civil War, the physical plight of slaves did not markedly improve as the occupying unionist forces returned power back to the confederates after a few years of ‘Reconstruction’. The period from this moment to the Second World War is known as Nadir. The blacks had acquired education by this time and were unified enough to feel collective outrage at the naked discrimination. With the enactment of civil rights reforms in the 1960s, equality was achieved in law even though some amount of casteist exclusionism is still prevalent.

This book portrays the brutal conditions that existed in American society to keep the blacks firmly under the yoke. American laws on immigration and marriage restrictions in the 1920s were models for the Nazis. It provided segregated facilities for coloreds and whites in waiting rooms, train cars, sleeping cars, street cars, buses, steam boats and even in prisons. Race was indicated in birth certificates, licenses and death certificates. In many jurisdictions, interracial marriage was a crime punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment. Ban on intermarriages stayed in the law books for long. Alabama was the last state to repeal it – can you believe it? – in the year 2000.There was a referendum to settle the issue and 40 per cent still voted to keep the rule in the statutes. Most whites refused to associate with a black. Shaking hands with a black man caught on camera made a candidate lose the mayoral polls in Birmingham, Alabama as late as 1961 (p.54). Blacks and whites were permitted to go to the same schools only in the 1970s. The caste system elicited extraordinary effort from the lower castes just to stay afloat in society. A black man who managed to become an architect in the nineteenth century trained himself to read the blueprints upside down because white clients would feel uncomfortable by having him on the same side of the desk as themselves. Wilkerson recounts many instances of racial abuse in the book.

The author analyses the common factors of all caste systems and presents eight of them in some detail. The foremost among them is divine sanction and permissive sacred texts. In the case of India, the Shudras – the lowest among the four Varnas – emanated from the Creator’s feet while Brahmins originated from his face. The colonists likewise found appropriate verses from the Bible to justify slavery. Noah is said to have cursed his grandson Canaan to slavery while piqued by the boy’s father, Noah’s own son, chancing to see his nakedness while sleeping. Leviticus specifically permits the believers to take slaves from religious heathens.

A peculiar characteristic of the racial segregation in the US was the graded differentiation it extended among whites also. Southern and Eastern Europeans were left out of the top tier as also all Asians. In a Japanese man’s case, the US Supreme Court decreed that ‘white’ meant not skin colour, but the race ‘Caucasian’ which present more inconsistencies. People residing at that time in the Caucasus regions were actually deemed lower in the hierarchy.

The author brings out strident arguments to exhibit the amount of injustice still prevailing in American society. However, she seems to cross the line of objectivity at times and provide a biased review of things. Even with the brutal system of slavery in place, it cannot be denied that the impetus to discard the system was kick started and sustained by whites. When the South refused to accede to laws abolishing slavery, it was again the whites who embarked on a civil war to bring the South in line with a loss of 7,50,000 lives in that war. This means that the way forward is one of reconciliation and assimilation and not by seeking reparations from the whites now living in the US for crimes committed by their ancestors. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first black to become President by riding on the back of large scale support from whites. But the author claims that Obama won ‘despite the bulk of the white electorate’ (p.314). This is simply mean. Whites constitute 76 per cent of the population and they traditionally vote for Republicans, but Obama obtained 43 per cent of the white votes. This is more than the support garnered by Bill Clinton, another Democrat candidate, when he managed only 39 per cent of the white votes. Does the author demand that every white should vote for a candidate without considering partisan loyalties, if the candidate happens to be black? In another chapter, she puts up another disgraceful remark that Obama was elected because he was the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a white woman and hence was not a descendant of the slaves. Some of the examples of the present day discrimination tends more towards the fictional as in the case of an Indian PhD holder wearing an oversized shoe because he was afraid to ask the upper caste salesman to search for and find a fitting size.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

 

Economic Sutra

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Economic Sutra – Ancient Indian Antecedents to Economic Thought

Author: Satish Y. Deodhar

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9780670092864

Pages: 199

 

The field of economic theory and ancient India was long thought to be an oxymoron as the latter was well known for its overarching spirituality in all walks of life. References to ancient non-Western antecedents do not find mention in mainstream literature on the history of economic thought. This is actually an error in perception of the nature of ancient Indian thought which was secular in all aspects affecting ordinary life. This book examines the antecedents of modern economic thought, behaviour and policy as found in the treatises of the ancient Indian subcontinent. This is a part of the IIMA book series on relevant economic concepts organized by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA). It offers an engaging perspective on ancient Indian economic thought by focusing on original and secondary sources. Satish Y. Deodhar teaches economics at IIMA. He is the author of the bestselling book ‘Day to Day Economics’.

 

The first glimpse to ancient Indian thought was facilitated by colonial scholars who learnt Sanskrit as part of their official work. Enquiries in the Islamic period were sporadic and few, like in the lifetimes of Akbar or Dara Shukoh. In that sense, it was the English scholars who lifted the veil on ancient India after a gap of eight centuries. However, they focused only on the other-worldly stream of Indian thought. They interpreted this to be instrumental in the denial of economic betterment and alleviation of poverty in India. Marx was also influenced by this biased opinion, arguing that lack of class conflict prevented India from progressing. As a sequel, Indians were stereotyped as highly spiritual people with a fatalistic outlook. This helped to explain away the abysmal rate of GDP growth in post-independent India as almost a genetic trait inherited from the ancients. This was also disparagingly called the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ when the reason for the slow growth was Nehru’s flawed economic policy which engendered an all-pervasive, state-controlled command economy that shackled the country. When these policies were scrapped in 1991, economic growth shot up to world standards.

 

Deodhar makes a detailed analysis of ideas in ancient Indian thought that specifically deals with economic concepts. Buddha comments householders to acquire wealth through lawful and honourable means. He advised shopkeepers to be shrewd, alert to market conditions and to make a morally justifiable profit (p.31). Even before that, Shukla Yajurveda recognizes four types of commercial activities – agriculture, trade and commerce, animal husbandry and lending at interest. Kautilya, the great political economist of ancient India argued that the ruler must protect the choices of the people in the attainment of purusharthas (goals of man at different stages of life), of which artha (amassing of wealth) was the foremost in his opinion. A charming feature of this book is the great care it lavishes on Tamil classics, which boast of a pedigree comparable to Sanskrit. Thirukural has 700 aphorisms related to wealth. Thiruvalluvar reiterates the Sanskrit purusharthas of dharma, kama, artha and moksha (rightful living, accumulation of wealth, love and happiness and salvation). The idea that wealth brings about further accession of wealth expresses the importance of capital as an input to create more wealth.

 

A superficial discussion on varna and jati and the way Indian society was categorized into numerous jatis (castes) is seen in this book. Varna system was not based on birth and Deodhar claims that it was not hierarchical (p.72). It was the teacher who initiated his pupils into different varnas after studies which the children underwent for many years. Megasthenes, who served as Greek ambassador in Mauryan India mentions that all Indians were free and they did not even consider using foreigners as slaves. This was in stark contrast to Aristotle’s world view which held that some men are by nature slaves and that slavery is both expedient and right. When various crafts and guilds developed, the technology had to be guarded as a secret. This was conveniently done by way of intra-class marriages and dining restrictions. Over time, it got cast into vocations and jatis. Law books such as Manu Smriti caused degeneration of varna system into endogamous groups. It made families perform upanayana (initiation) at an early age of the child rather than a teacher performing it as a commencement ceremony at the end of a 12-year study. The British mixed the concept of race into jati and made them watertight in the bargain.

 

Any discussion on economic thought in India would sooner or later delve into the rich compendium included in the Arthashastra of Kautilya. Luckily, the author spends only a cursory look at the injunctions of Kautilya. He also correlates the concepts with modern society. The ancient preceptor recommends that taxes should be collected the way bees collect honey from flowers. It is also seen that a large differential existed between the top and bottom rungs of imperial jobs. The wage of a minister was 48,000 panas a year while the lowest level public servants received only 60 panas a year. This ratio of 800:1 is an indicator of the large asymmetry in household income. Some amount of state intervention in trade can also be discerned in Arthashastra. It stipulates that the director of trade is to ascertain the cost price after taking into account investment, production, rent, interest, duty and others. For determining the sale price of goods, a 5 to 10 per cent profit for domestic and foreign trade respectively is recommended. Penalties were in place for sale price greater than the permitted markup. Such close intervention in the functioning of markets, if it was indeed in existence, would have resulted in corruption rather than the common folk getting a fair deal.

 

‘Sutra’ is a Sanskrit word that means a string or a thread that holds jewels together. In ancient times, philosophical thoughts, principles and rules were expressed in the form of aphorisms and were written on palm leaves sewn together with a thread. Thus, both figuratively and literally, these writings were called sutras. This book provides a bridge between the elements of pre-Kautilyan economic thoughts and Kautilya’s Arthashastra which is the usual starting point for most researchers on economic theory. Thus we see Panini (700 BCE) mentioning debt and repayment with interest. The notion of expressing interest as a ‘per cent’ of the principal originated in India. Kautilya also talks about varying interest rates for various modes of trade. Higher interest rate was prescribed for money borrowed for risky ventures like overseas trade.

 

The author claims expertise in Sanskrit which he learned at school. This does not seem to be sufficient to extract ideas from ancient texts. In that sense, the author’s claim that he has referred original texts would be in doubt. Still, the amount of research Deodhar has done with secondary sources is impressive. The book takes care not to make the discussion too technical which would have scared the readers away. Readers are also advised not to put too much a premium on the opinions expressed in this book as it is oriented more towards lay people. It includes a crossword at the end in which the clues refer to concepts enunciated in the narrative. Readers are encouraged to try it before and after reading the book and compare the results. Though it looks like comprehension questions in a text book, this provides a measurable parameter of the book’s utility.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star