Jugalbandi

Title: Jugalbandi – The BJP Before Modi

Author: Vinay Sitapati

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2020 (First)

ISBN: 9780670091072

Pages: 409

 

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India is a member of the Sangh Parivar – one among the basket of organizations orbiting around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh insists on internal discipline and submission of the individual will to the collective will of the movement. Even then, the clout of the leader’s personality plays a large part in weaving together the destiny of the organization. This is more than evident in the larger than life charisma of the present prime minister Narendra Modi. Before him, it was the party’s first prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his disciple-cum-friend-cum-colleague Lal Krishna Advani who adorned that role. Vajpayee and Advani played a unique act in Indian politics notorious for its dog-eats-dog antics. These leaders worked selflessly, supported each other and let the other concentrate on the field where he had more proficiency than the other. Vajpayee was a good parliamentarian and a scintillating orator. But he had no experience in working grass roots with the masses, in which Advani excelled. He sensed the pulse of the people from the slightest ripple and accordingly guided the party. The chemistry between these two leaders is compared to a musical performance called ‘jugalbandi’ which literally means ‘entwined twins’. Jugalbandi is a performance in Indian classical music that features a duet of two solo musicians. This extends also to dance in which a competitive play develops between the dancer and the tabla player. The book describes the story of the birth of Hindu nationalism and how it came to power under the leadership of Vajpayee and ends with BJP’s electoral defeat in 2004. Vinay Sitapati is an associate professor of political science and legal studies at Ashoka University, Delhi. He has authored many books on Indian politics and his book on P. V. Narasimha Rao, titled ‘Half Lion’ was reviewed earlier here.

 

The partnership between Vajpayee and Advani lasted six eventful decades. Advani was born in Karachi in a rich family which had to abandon its wealth to flee to India after partition, while Vajpayee came from a rural background within straitened family circumstances. One was poor, the other was rich; one was provincial while the other was anglicized, but their union overlapped all shades of the political spectrum. They were born in a decade in which a new political identity covering these two contrasting characters under one single umbrella was taking birth – Hindu nationalism. The two met when Advani joined Vajpayee’s team as his secretary after Vajpayee was first elected to the Indian parliament as an MP. Advani was confined to Vajpayee’s shadow till the mid-1980s when the Ayodhya Movement gathered momentum. At that time, Vajpayee’s moderate line failed to find much takers and the mantle moved to Advani. This continued till 1995 when Advani publicly declared that Vajpayee would be the prime ministerial candidate in the next year’s elections. The book hints that Advani never recovered his stature in the party thereafter.

 

Sitapati deftly follows the trajectory of the relationship between Vajpayee and Advani which traced all shades from hierarchy to genuine friendship. The parliamentarian Vajpayee’s team in which Advani joined as his secretary transformed into his immediate family. Vajpayee groomed Advani to handle positions of responsibility in this period. One such opportunity presented itself in the 1973 Kanpur session of the Jan Sangh. Balraj Madhok, who was one of the founding members of the party, broke with Vajpayee who had assumed presidency of the party after the accidental death of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. Madhok openly criticized Vajpayee’s socialist leaning in the early 1970s. The session saw Advani being elevated as party president. These years converted their friendship into partnership. Vajpayee and Advani never let the presidency out of their hands from 1968 to 1998, with only a two-year gap in between. Advani’s raise from a cautious backroom operative to the head of the party was entirely due to Vajpayee and he never forgot the favour.

 

A good point of the book is its exposition of the rise of Hindu nationalism. It steadily grew from 1925 and poised for a big leap after India’s partition. Then came Gandhi’s assassination and its perceived links with Gandhi’s assassins denied them a place in the national mainstream until the Emergency (1975-77) when it came back to reclaim it. The author disputes this conventional narrative and argues that the mainstreaming of RSS took place during the China war of 1962. Indian army was unprepared for taking on the Chinese, and the ill-fed troops were easily outmaneuvered. The RSS fully supported the war effort and even offered its cadre to assist the troops. As recognition of this heroic effort, Jawaharlal Nehru permitted uniformed RSS cadre to march on Rajpath as part of the 1963 Republic Day parade. More than 2000 RSS volunteers in their organizational uniform – white shirt, khaki knickers, belt, black cap and full boots – took part. Congress leaders protested this in party meetings. Nehru countered that all citizens had been called upon to participate and so the RSS also did. A senior leader again asked why the Congress’ own Seva Dal was not invited. Nehru’s reply was that the Seva Dal had only 250 uniforms and knowing that the RSS strength would be much greater, he thought Seva Dal would make a poor show in contrast (p.52).

 

Sitapati pinpoints Vajpayee’s strengths and weaknesses to his sharp focus on parliamentarianism and representational democracy. He believed that the modern norm of ‘one person, one vote’ created Hindu nationalism. Contrary to Left-Islamist accounts, it was not the colonial power which midwifed its birth. The colonial regime’s doctrine of communal electorates pandered to the Islamic vested interests and ran counter to democratic principles. On the home front, it was never the hardliners who made Vajpayee insecure; in fact, he needed them to justify his own existence. It was the orators who could replace him in parliamentary debates who threatened him the most. Vajpayee’s foreign and economic policies were shaped primarily by the desire to be liked by parliamentarians. The author claims that when Vajpayee was seemed to be marginalized in his own party in the wake of the strident Ayodhya Movement, Rajiv Gandhi invited him to join Congress party. But Vajpayee, always mindful of discipline bordering on self-negation, just listened and laughed. His turn came after 1992 when the disputed structure at Ayodhya was pulled down and hardliners had to retreat for some time.

 

The founding and growth of BJP occupies a very informative part of the book. Incipient Hindu anxiety over conversions in Meenakshipuram and backlash of Muslim fundamentalism following the Shah Bano verdict catalyzed polarization among the majority community. Congress and its allies utilized caste reservation for OBCs in government jobs to keep the fault lines in Hinduism intact. The author lists a number of reasons that accelerated a consolidation of the Hindus as a vote bank for the first time in history. The factors include decline of the Congress system, reaction to backward caste reservations, polarization caused by the Ayodhya Movement, Hindu epics shown on television, the inevitability of a Hindu party winning in a Hindu-majority country and the economic liberalization and a growing middle class. Contrary to popular consensus, this book posits that it was the Congress which enjoyed the first fruits of the Hindu vote bank in the form of a sympathy wave in the 1984 elections held after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards.

 

Obviously, the last chapter in the Vajpayee-Advani jugalbandi is the BJP’s rule from 1998 to 2004 with Vajpayee as prime minister. Advani never interfered with the prime minister’s work and was always content to play second fiddle. However, he put his foot firmly down when Vajpayee seemed to be playing for the media gallery. The Agra summit between Vajpayee and Pakistan President Musharraf fell apart when Advani refused to allow any leeway to Pakistan - however minuscule - in publicly arraigning it for terrorism it exported across the border. Another event occurred after the 2002 Gujarat riots when the liberal media accused then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi of culpability in the brutal violence. Vajpayee wanted to remove Modi, but Advani stood solidly behind him. This helped to bring in a generational change in BJP after a decade. Anyhow, Sitapati does not pose to speculate on what would have happened if Vajpayee had had his way.

 

After reading this book in full and closing it for the last time, one can’t help wonder what Sitapati had done to Vajpayee’s legacy. There are of course some very good references that reiterate popular perceptions, but along with it, it creates an element of doubt with his unusually candid coverage of Vajpayee’s personal life and his uncategorical relationship with Rajkumari Kaul and her husband. This family stayed with Vajpayee till his death and he had adopted her daughter as his own. Vajpayee is claimed to have declared that though he was a bachelor, he was not celibate (p.55). Balraj Madhok once advised Vajpayee to marry after getting complaints from other RSS functionaries about the women in Vajpayee’s life. The book hints that Vajpayee was vengeful against his political rivals and masterminded Madhok’s exit from the party. At the same time, the author plays up the weak points in Advani’s character as a double whammy. Citing several examples, Sitapati accuses Advani for being indecisive on many occasions, denting his widely held image of a ‘Loh Purush’ (iron man). The book also presents some events that have not yet come into the public domain. It is claimed that the RSS wanted to remove Vajpayee from the post of prime minister in 2002 by elevating him as the President of India and make Advani step into his shoes. Eventually, it came to nothing and the noted space veteran A P J Abdul Kalam became the President.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

 

Love and Capital

Title: Love and Capital – Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

Author: Mary Gabriel

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2012 (First published 2011)

ISBN: 9780316066129

Pages: 707

 

To say that the fall of Napoleon was a turning point in European history would be an understatement. Alongside the political changes, it wrought a profound transformation on economy with the rise of capitalism. Capitalism created a class called bourgeoisie which employed its capital in enterprises that utilized the physical effort of the proletariat to generate profits. In the early stages, the working class was a thoroughly exploited lot who stood even lower in status to machines. Replacement of a machine cost money but a worker could be easily substituted because there were so many of them waiting outside the factory gate for a chance to work. Workers began to unite in many countries under various guises. In Europe, Karl Marx created a theoretical framework that tried to explain the relationship between the modes of production and its effects on the development of social classes. At capitalism’s infancy, Marx set to work chronicling its rise and predicting its fall. As we now know, he was only partly right. But this book is not about his theory – this is all about his personal life. It is the story of a love between a husband and wife that remained passionate and consuming despite the deaths of four children, poverty, illness, social ostracism and the ultimate betrayal when Marx fathered another woman’s child. Scores of biographies of Marx exist, with every possible political perspective. However, there was not one book in English that told the full story of a family that sacrificed everything for an idea the world would come to know as Marxism. This book satisfies that function admirably. Mary Gabriel worked as journalist at Reuters for two decades and authored two more biographies. She now lives in Italy.

 

Marx was the son of a Jewish lawyer who was forced to convert to Christianity to keep his profession in the face of rampant anti-Semitism in Germany. His wife Jenny von Westphalen belonged to an aristocratic family and was four years his senior. Close proximity to her younger brother enabled Marx to fall in love and obtain her hand in marriage. Undoubtedly, Marx was the lucky partner in this union. He was without work or income many times in his family life. He spent his life stressing the primacy of economics but was chronically irresponsible when it came to his own finances. Jenny never appeared to lose patience with him. Marx devoted his time to study and Jenny facilitated his work wholeheartedly. The book includes an amusing incident which throws light on Marx’s scholarly inclinations. After marriage, his mother-in-law paid for a short honeymoon for the couple in Switzerland. He went along with 45 volumes of books on Hegel, Rousseau, Machiavelli and others to read during his spare time. His honeymoon studies and reflections produced two of his most famous declarations: religion is the opium of the people and the heart of the emancipation of mankind is the proletariat. However, his literary pursuits did not otherwise seem to impede their relationship as Jenny became pregnant the next month itself!

 

Gabriel treats her subject – the giant of communist thought – with respect and sympathy but never tries to hide or obscure some flaws in his personal life. The greatest of them would be his illicit liaison with Helene Demuth, his wife’s maid, who was sent by his mother-in-law to their Brussels home. She was to help Jenny devote more time to assist her husband with his work and prepare for the second expecting baby. A son was born to Demuth whose paternity Marx was loathe to bear. As always, his dear friend and benefactor Engels came to his rescue and shouldered that vicarious responsibility. He was sent away and grew up to become a friend of Marx’s daughters. It was on Engels’ deathbed that he confessed to Marx’s daughter that her father was indeed this man’s father too. The author had made a thorough search of the extant letters and other correspondence between the Marx family members, some of which contained racist remarks which are not included in the book. She claims that they were not germane to the story and entirely consistent with the norms of that period.

 

Marx did not aspire to be a popular leader. He considered the masses ‘a brainless crowd whose thoughts and feelings are furnished by the ruling class’. But he wanted to teach them because only they could defeat the ruling class. This book is remarkable for its poignant portrayal of the first half of Marx’s wedded life. Poverty and misery were the hallmarks of their existence as Marx eagerly awaited financial returns for the articles and books he produced. Often he took advance money from the publishers and then quickly spent them only to be in hot water with the lender later. He borrowed freely from others and when that source dried out, suffered the pitiless episodes fate threw in his way. One of his infant daughters died due to disease and he had to keep her lifeless body in a room till he could find the money to buy a small casket for that unfortunate child who could not enjoy a moment of comfort while she lived. Such moving incidents there are many in this book. Once a journal under Marx’s editorship collapsed with the very first issue. Its proprietor declined to pay salary and instead offered him unsold copies of the journal. However, the Marx family entertained fellow-travelers of the movement who knocked on their doors in a dignified manner. Both Marx and Jenny were never reluctant to share whatever little they had with their friends and accomplices. When some of his wealthy relatives were nearing their end, Marx keenly looked forward to the share of his inheritance from them. Sometimes he borrowed money pointing to such inheritances as a kind of collateral.

 

An area in which this book excels in is the highlighting of Marx’s role in the organisation of working men of Europe. Marx himself belonged to the class which he pejoratively called bourgeois, but worked for the emancipation of the working class. He was a profound scholar who could not mingle freely with the workers. Despite the severe and scornful public façade, Marx had a depth of feeling for his fellow men that his detractors have not recognized. Many remark that Marx had more hate in him than love. This may not be entirely true and we might have to conclude that he had a healthy dose of each. The masses did not even recognize themselves as having a political voice much less power. They had no conception of how the economic or political system worked. Marx was convinced that if he could describe the historical path that led to their condition, he could provide a theoretical foundation on which to build a new, classless society. He believed that a sustained and successful revolution was impossible without a clear understanding of the history that had brought man to that juncture and a blueprint for the future once the old system was obliterated. Marx’s path to communism consisted of distinct phases such as the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property.

 

After reading the book one can’t help envy at Marx’s good fortune to meet two people without whom he would not have risen to the stratosphere of Leftist thought. One is his totally devoted wife Jenny and the other was his unbelievably selfless friend Friedrich Engels. Jenny was not just his wife, but acted as secretary too, copying and drafting his voluminous papers. She, her daughters and Engels were the only people who could decipher Marx’s handwriting. She helped in the editorial offices of newspapers Marx was running and took care of sundry tasks like attending to personal requests from party refugees and those in jail seeking help for their families. Jenny truly understood the needs of the rare genius she had chosen as a husband. For all his faults, she loved Marx deeply and trusted him completely. She saw his life’s work as her own. Engels was a rich man who ran a textile mill that earned good profit. He financed Marx and his family and never asked to return his money. Marx family always received a good share of Engels’ income, including that of the final settlement when Engels sold the mill off so as to be free to work in politics. When he died, a large portion of his wealth was distributed among the Marx children. Of the two men, Engels had the more successful writing career up to Marx’s move to London. But he regarded Marx so highly that he volunteered to put his own aspirations aside so his friend could write without hassles. Engels even claimed to be the father of Marx’s illegitimate child. He cared nothing about his reputation, especially with regard to women.

 

After several decades of loving companionship, Jenny died in 1881 followed by Marx in 1883. However, the book continues its narrative till 1910 when the last of the three Marx daughters died. These were the only children of Marx who reached adulthood and two of them committed suicide. These children had a very difficult childhood raked by biting poverty. Poor nutrition and unhealthy living conditions caused four children to die in their infancy. Marx needed the anchor Jenny and the children provided. All of them substituted Marx’s scholastic interests above their own preferences. He ordered his thoughts only in the midst of their disorder. Throughout his life, theirs was the society he craved. There is a moving section in the book in which Marx acknowledged the sacrifices made by his wife and daughters. In a letter to his daughter’s fiancé, Marx wrote: “You know I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle. I do not regret it. Quite the contrary. If I had to begin my life over again, I would do the same. I would not marry however. As far as it lies within my power I wish to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life was wrecked”.

 

The book has a fine diction which is witty, direct and incisive. The author possesses a fine capability to take the readers along the vicissitudes and ecstasies of the book’s protagonists. Readers get absorbed in the narrative and that’s what makes this work a page-turner. The book is somewhat big with 600+ pages, but we don’t feel the fatigue. However, the book begins with an intimidating character list of 353 individuals which even includes infants who died while four months old. Gabriel takes special care not to delve deeper into Marx’s theoretical work. She is only interested in what the man is and not what he did. In spite of this, there are concise, informative references to labour unrests in Europe and a very good description of the 1871 Paris Commune. Whatever theoretical aspects the author has handled is tempered to suit the general reader. She transforms the forbidding scholar which a portrait of Marx shows into a loving father and husband who had to rush through the backdoor of his house to fetch food and comforts for his daughter’s fiancé who was waiting in the front room to meet him. I think that if the twentieth century communist revolutions had not taken place, Marx would have been revered as a great thinker cutting across political affiliations. At least, that is the man Mary Gabriel introduces to us in this book.

 

The book is strongly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

Somanatha – The Shrine Eternal

Title: Somanatha – The Shrine Eternal

Author: K M Munshi

Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1976 (First published 1951)

ISBN: Nil

Pages: 186

 

Sometimes a place of worship is more than a location where devotees gather to offer hymns or libation to the deity and go home contended afterwards. When that place gets elevated in importance such as the direct patronage of a king or the allegiance of a large group of people, it becomes the symbol of the kingdom or nation. An attack or act of desecration of the place then becomes an atrocity against the people. Even those belonging to other religions then get offended at an affront to that shrine. The Somanath temple is one such institution that is acting as shorthand for India’s destiny in the last millennium. Coincidentally, the fall of the temple to Muslim invaders historically marks the birth of the longer of the two colonialisms that crushed India under its boots – the Muslim colonialism. The temple was destroyed many times, but the undying national spirit reconstructed it each time though on some occasions it was converted to a mosque. After India gained independence, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel intervened to reconstruct the temple under government supervision. The first edition of this book was hurriedly written to synchronize its publication with the installation ceremony of Somanatha in May 1951. This book is published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan as part of a book university series containing 100 books each in nine languages. The objectives are the reintegration of Indian culture in the light of modern knowledge and to suit our present-day needs and the resuscitation of the fundamental values in their pristine vigour. Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi, popularly known as K M Munshi, was an Indian independence activist, politician, writer and educationist from Gujarat. A lawyer by profession, he had served as a minister in Nehru’s first cabinet and later as governor of Uttar Pradesh. This book was written while he was serving as the chairman of the advisory board of Somanatha Trust which was tasked with the rebuilding of the temple.

 

Somanatha temple was well known in India in the ancient past. Prabhasa Tirtha, where the shrine is located, is mentioned in the Mahabharata. Soma, the moon god, bathes at the point where the river Saraswati joins the sea and worships Shiva at the shrine – so the legends go. To visit Prabhasa on a moonless night which falls on a Monday, to undertake a fast, to bathe where Saraswati river meets the sea and to have a darshan of Somanatha is believed to render merit equivalent to numberless religious sacrifices. It was the place where the Yadavas fought among themselves which extinguished the tribe. This was where Srikrishna died after hit by an arrow. The first temple of Somanatha was probably established by the beginning of Christian era. The powerful Pashupata sect is centred around this temple. The first epigraphic evidence of Somanatha is of 960 CE in which Ananta Deva, a northern Shilahara king, came with an army to worship Somanatha at Prabhasa.

 

Mahmud of Ghazni was the first invader who had sacked Somanatha. Munshi gives a detailed account of the invasion without going into the gory particulars. On the morning of Oct 18, 1025, Mahmud left Ghazni with 30,000 cavalry. An equal number of camels carried the supply of water. They crossed the Thar desert and reached Patan. On Jan 8, 1026, after a battle in which 50,000 Indians laid down their lives, Mahmud captured the fort, entered the temple that was sanctified by centuries of devotion. He broke the linga to pieces, looted the temple and burnt it to the ground. Munshi then claims that Mahmud quickly left the place on the news of the approach of a powerful Hindu army. But al-Biruni writes four years later that Mahmud ‘utterly ruined the prosperity of the country and Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions’. Mahmud invaded Somanatha seventeen times, but the author provides a much sanitized version in which only the first attempt is mentioned. Probably, working under Nehru must have prompted him to placate his boss’ secular image and by corollary, to be economical with truth.

 

Not only content with the ignominy of desecration they heaped on Somanath, Muslim invaders converted it to a mosque twice. In 1299, Alaf Khan, a general of Ala-ud-din Khilji, sacked Prabhasa. He broke open the shrine, shattered the idol to pieces and carried away the fragments in a cart to Delhi. In 1469, Muhammad Bedga converted Somanatha into a mosque. But the structure went under ruin with no worship whether Hindu or Muslim. In 1701, Aurangzeb ordered to destroy the temple beyond possibility of repairs. By the nineteenth century, the Nawab of Junagadh happened to be the custodian of the structure, but the ruler of Baroda, who was a Hindu, managed religious affairs. There were frequent disputes between the two princes as the Muslim Nawab still wanted to control the temple, probably deriving inspiration from his predecessors. These were adjudicated by the British who mostly favoured the Nawab. After partition of India, the Nawab suddenly acceded to Pakistan. But the state was not geographically contiguous with that country and the population was overwhelmingly Hindu. The people rose in rebellion and the dog-loving Nawab fled with his kennel while leaving his wives behind. The author remarks that even in 1948, the gudhamandapa (central hall) was partly covered by a mosque-like dome. The structure was demolished and a grand temple erected in its place.

 

Munshi spends some time in listing out reconstruction efforts that had taken place on the temple. In fact, it was repaired and reconstructed immediately after Ghazni’s first attempt in 1026. Heroic action followed each successive raid. But the most magnificent was by Kumarapala who reconstructed the temple in 1169, which was the Fifth Temple. Aged, infirm, desecrated, it stood till Sardar Patel rescued it from neglect and pledged himself to its reconstruction. The decision to rebuild the temple was announced by Patel on Nov 13, 1947. Foundation was laid for the Seventh Temple (historically) on May 8, 1950. Installation of idols took place in May 1951 in the presence of Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President, under fierce opposition from Nehru who feared that secularism would be eclipsed by the republic’s president attending a religious ceremony. Prasad did not cave in to Nehru and boldly attended citing national honour. Munshi does not elaborate on this issue. The construction of the temple was completed fourteen years later in 1965. The overall height of the structure was 155 feet. No temple of this size has been built in India for the last 800 years.

 

After the Indian government started the activities for reconstruction with privately subscribed funds, suggestions arose to retain the old ruined temple as such. The author accuses them of worshiping dead monuments. However, the committee ruled out the idea as the temple lived in the sentiment of the whole nation and decided to rebuild it at the same place. After all, if the archeologists wanted a ruined temple for academic purposes, they are spoilt for choice among thousands of such dilapidated shrines destroyed by Muslim invaders elsewhere in India. In a lighter sense, it was a forerunner of the rallying cry of mandir wahi banayenge by about four decades. An intensive excavation by professionals brought to light material remains of earlier temples buried below. Centuries of vandalism has left nothing but traces of the great temple to testify to its ancient grandeur.

 

The book is confessed to be hurriedly written to coincide with the installation of idols in 1951. All the data was collected in the short period and much referential depth is lacking in the narrative. A part of the book titled ‘History of Excavation’ is written by B K Thapar of the Archeological Survey. There is much repetition between the different parts of the book. Verbatim reproduction of long epigraphic texts adds no value to the readability of the book. Several rare photographs are included in this small volume which are not available from other sources. Altogether, the book is a fine example of a first attempt to recreate history of a monument that is indistinguishable with national pride.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

 

Explaining Life through Evolution

Title: Explaining Life through Evolution

Author: Prosanta Chakrabarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9780670095100

Pages: 232     

 

We are said to be living in a post-truth era where truth is not deemed something absolute. People accept anything as truth which they wish it to be. Social media makes a celebrity’s truth the same for all his followers. However, these are philosophical concepts open to interpretation at many levels and ways. I don’t know how scientific concepts which are always true can be reconciled with the concept of post-truth I mentioned above. Touching an electrically live object causes a painful experience is a proposition that is true whether you believe that there is such a thing as electricity or not. But facts in natural sciences cannot be expressed in such outright terms even though a large number of researchers have studied the phenomena and are convinced of its merit. Evolution is one such fact of the development of life on this planet. Since it runs counter to the fundamental postulate of Abrahamic religions on the creation of life, there is widespread opposition to it. We have seen similar resistance in the past when the Church opposed Galileo’s heliocentric theory and know what has come out of it eventually. Till that time, evolution will continue to be resisted by believers who propose comic alternatives such as Creation or Intelligent Design. This book is intended to explain the topic of evolution ‘to anyone with an open mind to learning’. It is also meant to be a tool to aid those who themselves want to explain the topic to others. Prosanta Chakrabarty is an evolutionary biologist at Louisiana State University where he is a professor and curator. He was born in Canada and brought up in the USA.

 

Creationists often ridicule evolution as ‘just’ a theory of the development of life. The author accepts that but adds the clarification that a theory in science is an overarching term that has stood the test of time. A theory is often interchangeably used with ‘law’. But in everyday parlance, ‘theory’ is something questionable that remains to be proven. It is this misconception which serves as a perfect opportunity for religion to teach creation and intelligent design in US schools as ‘alternatives’. Chakrabarty then explains Darwin’s ideas on what happened on earth. There is a single origin of life here. That was a huge leap forward in thinking. Natural selection is the causative mechanism to explain the diversity of all life. This idea was far ahead of its time when Darwin first introduced it. Most scientists then was of the opinion that different human races originated in distinct ways and places in the long past.

 

The book glances upon the period when Darwin’s “Origin of Species’ first appeared. Though Darwin had postulated that species groups mutate over time, he had no idea of how it actually came about. Unknown to Darwin, the ideas of genetics were just taking shape in the garden of Gregor Mendel and anything like DNA was not even dreamed of. That is the beauty and power of Darwin’s theory. Later discoveries corroborated its hypotheses and strengthened it on the face of severe criticism on the spiritual front. The zeitgeist of the time was that offspring were a mix of their parents, which is called blending inheritance. If this was true, variation would be lost in each generation due to the indiscriminate mixing. Mendel’s experiments proved this wrong and established that genetic traits are carried to future generations in discrete form rather than continuous. But Mendel did not know how variation was maintained in the gene pool. Mistakes in copying billions of DNA pairs cause mutations and change in traits. The author also explains how different groups in a species who are separated by geographical barriers change into different species in a process called speciation. Here, isolation and time is the key formula. The gene pool of separated groups will diverge through non-adaptive forces (neutral mutations, genetic drift) and adaptive forces (natural selection) due to the different environments these populations find themselves in.

 

A notable feature in religious revelations of the origin of life is that Man is the perfect creation of God. The Semitic religions claim that Man was created in God’s image. This book punches holes in this argument by highlighting evolutionary accretions in the human body that denigrates God’s talent as a craftsman, not to say of the blunders He has committed in ‘designing’ the human body. Several examples are given, of which the kneecap is one which is a troublesome set of tendons and ligaments where a ball-and-joint like the shoulder would have been a better design. The blood pressure in human body is more than other animals as we took to bipedalism later in the series and a higher pressure is required to pump against the force of gravity. But, only one coronary artery is there to supply blood to heart’s muscles to do the job. Several animals have more. Fish hearts are more foolproof that don’t get easily clogged with fat. As a land animal, we have the advantage of getting more oxygen directly from air than from water, but gas exchange is more difficult through lungs than with gills. Moreover, we use the same tubing for breathing as well as feeding with the attendant risk of choking.

 

The author has not been successful in achieving his objective of making evolution easily understandable to lay readers. But he has made it a guidebook of Wokeism by unnecessary tirades against supposed social injustices that are irrelevant in a book on evolution. In an instance of extremely perverted sensitivity, Chakrabarty advocates that humans don’t need genders. This is not due to any scientific or survival imperative, but due to some individuals in the LGBTQ community show deviant behaviour from their assigned genders. He then picks bones at the scientific community which usually represents a white man on the node to represent all humanity in the tree of life. He argues that representation matters and seeing the same subgroup represented as the ideal human is damaging. He doesn’t mention what it damages – probably wokeism, extreme liberalism or leftism? What in fact is the harm done if a person drawing the tree of life put the image of a person who looks familiar (or similar) to him? If evolution was discovered by African scholars, a black man would have appeared there and the world would have accepted that too. The author brings in Donald Trump into this book by quoting one of his speeches confusing viruses and their supposed vulnerability to antibiotics. Even Narendra Modi is there at the receiving end of the author’s barbs because he and his party are accused to be promoting ‘eugenic-themed pseudo-science’. He then calls Henry Ford ‘Hitler’s Hero’. He even manages to include Hindutva and Dalit-Brahmin hierarchy in this book. This is good political propaganda but a poor scientific treatise. He is more kind to the creationists than the political right.

 

The book is a total disappointment as it is ill-focused on all important topics and dwells too long on side-issues. Each chapter is practically independent of each other and hence the entire ensemble lacks coherence. Here you see the individual VIBGYOR colours but not the composite white light. Concepts are explained by illustrations that are complex, intimidating, not self-evident and probably created by a person who finds evolution confusing to himself. Each of them includes a half-page caption to make it appear intelligible. The book incorporates an irrelevant comic strip on Darwin’s life that is totally redundant with nothing new or interesting. Some illustrations printed in monochrome with detailed captions are repeated as colour plates with the exact same captions. Altogether, this is a miserably failed attempt to explain the subject in a meaningful way. Obviously, the author has wasted much time in this effort and the readers are advised not to repeat the same folly.

 

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star