Living Ramayanas

Title: Living Ramayanas – Exploring the Plurality of the Epic in Wayanad and the World
Author: Azeez Tharuvana
Translator: Obed Ebenezer S
Publisher: Eka, 2021 (First published in Malayalam: 2014)
ISBN: 9789390679737
Pages: 252

Ramayana is one of the original sources that make up the soul of India. Irrespective of the caste, creed, ethnicity or language of the people, this epic is known to every Indian worth the name. What is astonishing is its wide circulation even among societies which stay aloof from the mainstream such as Adivasis. Quite naturally, when an idea seeps down to every nook and cranny of the country, especially when the means and quality of communication were sparse and unreliable, a lot of subtle changes occur in the narrative as it changes hands across speakers spanning generations. Before the advent of writing or with illiterate people, the transfer of ideas happens only through the storage medium of human memory which is fallible. Besides, story tellers with a flair for the job embellish it to rivet the attention of the listeners. As a consequence, numerous variations of the Ramayana core tale occurred over the millennia. Ramayana continually adapted itself to the nature of the times, the people and the culture in which it has been produced. This work is translated from the Malayalam text ‘Wayanadan Ramayanam’. It examines the different versions circulating among tribal communities of Wayanad, in other states of India and also among overseas countries. This work is a partial record of the author’s research conducted under the guidance of Dr. A. Nujum. Azeez Tharuvana is a native of Wayanad and served as assistant director of the Institute for Tribal Studies and Research. He is currently professor and head of the department of Malayalam at Farook College, Kozhikode.

Among the tribal communities of Wayanad, there exist unique beliefs relating to the Ramayana story. Even within the same tribe, there are many different versions of the same legend. The tribal people use these versions of the Ramayana to justify their ritual beliefs, to trace their ancestry and to glorify their lineage. The book introduces three variations in common use in Wayanad and condenses the stories. There are similarities between them. The Adiya Ramayana, popular among the Adiya community, places the characters in Wayanad and the story unfolds there. Lanka is also in Wayanad. Ordinary human emotions and actions are attributed to the divine characters. In one of these, a dispute breaks out between Ram and Sita when the former discovers stones and sand in the gruel prepared by the latter! The native narratives link various locations like Sitakulam, Ashramkolly, Sasimala, Ponkuzhy, Thirunelli etc. in Wayanad to particular episodes in their version of the epic. Sitayanam and Wayanad Chetty Ramayana are also examined, where the latter is not much different from the standard version. In various regions of Wayanad, Lava and Kusa (Ram’s children) are called by different names such as Lavakuchan, Muriken, Atharvalar and so on. Many legends exist that link geological features such as streams, waterfalls, natural springs and rocks with the characters of Ramayana. There is a tributary of Kabani named Kannuneerpuzha (stream of tears) which is believed to have been formed by Sita’s tears at her abandonment by Ram.

Even though the author constantly endeavours to portray Dalits and Adivasis as separate from the Hindu fold, the nature of their beliefs and rituals scatter his arguments to the winds. Eventually, he helplessly concedes that savarna gods were incorporated by the Adivasis into their songs, but still raises a feeble caveat that these were modern. On the ground, the influence of Ramayana is genuine and rock-solid. The folk interpretation of mythological tales in Wayanad are inseparably linked to its landscape. This is similar to the relationship Indian epics have with Mount Kailash and the Himalayas and with the forest and forest-dwellers. Each tribal community appears to be a part of the Hindu caste hierarchy and aspires to rise higher by using legends, exactly like other castes do. Each community believes themselves to be noble. The genesis myth of Kurichyas claims that the Brahmins and Kurichyas are the noblest of Brahma’s creations. They are the only two pure castes on earth (p.61). Kurichyas believe themselves to be Ram’s soldiers. The Adivasis further believe that the traditional healing methods they use were taught to them by Shiva himself. And, Azeez treats them as non-Hindus! The book notes that Kerala was a stronghold of Buddhism in the ancient times and Wayanad was especially raised under the umbrella of Jainism. If these assumptions were true, we should have seen the Ramayana stories in Wayanad interspersed with Jain themes or at least influenced by them as seen in other parts of India. However, Azeez fails to mention any specific sway in the Wayanad folk tales that can be attributed to Buddhism or Jainism.

The book is very informative and provides many original snippets of knowledge regarding how Ramayana is so closely woven into the social fabric of Wayanad tribals. In spite of this, a wicked agenda is clearly discernible in the narrative. The author treats Dalits and Adivasis separate from Hindus and lets out comments like ‘the Hindus and Adivasis here both believe that this is the place where Sita devi disappeared into the earth’ (p.45). There are several references like this inserted casually into the text which try to drive a wedge right through the heart of Hindu society. In another instance, the book observes that several insertions have been added to the text of the Valmiki Ramayana to buttress and reinforce the concept of caste or Brahmin supremacy. Even though couched differently, the objective is the same. This is no wonder if you look back to the pre-partition days in India when the Muslim League was using the same technique using the same words. According to the author, the Adivasis seem to be oppressed and exploited only by the upper caste Hindus whereas all religious communities, including the Muslims and Christians in Wayanad do so. The foreword provided by K N Panikkar praises the author for ‘conducting the study by closely interacting with the tribal-Dalit-religious communities’. See the Left-Islamist cabal of historians harping on the same disruptive tune again and again? The author’s project guide for the research was Dr. A Nujum of the Aligarh Muslim University. He concludes that ‘when a dominant society gains the tendency to swallow up other smaller civilizations and sub-cultures, they resist by producing a thousand oral traditions’. The author is employed as a teaching faculty of the Farook College which is managed by the Islamic Rouzathul Uloom Association. Being so, Azeez should have shown a bit of decency and courtesy in denigrating the religious sensibilities of Hindus with statements like ‘Ramayana is not a historical text. It is a myth’.

The book introduces multiple versions of the Ramayana in vogue in other countries such as China, Japan, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Whichever land had any interactions with India, possess a piece of Ramayana story as a relic of the relationship. It is interesting to learn that Muslim communities in these nations also have internalized this story. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Allah, Adam, Gabriel and others from Islamic lore and faith figures are seen in the Ramayana versions. They assume the positions of Brahma, Vishnu and other deities of the Hindu faith (p.157). The chapter titled ‘Muslims and the Ramayana’ tries to reconcile Islamic tenets with Hindu ones to suggest a syncretic product. In a veiled reference to the famous Gita couplet sambhavami yuge yuge, the author claims Muslims believe that ‘whenever righteousness is threatened and society suffers moral and spiritual decay, prophets make their appearance in different parts of the world’ (p.149). This appears to be a deliberate falsehood to gain acceptance among other communities. Finality of the prophecy of Muhammad is a fundamental and irrepudiable concept of Islam. This means that there will be no prophets after Muhammad even if righteousness or morality is compromised.

Azeez provides a good simile to the spread of Ramayana far and wide. As water flowing through different lands mingles with the colour of soils along the way, our legends and myths too, as they travel across lands and communities, mingle with their environs and sensibilities. True to the title, the book surveys Ramayanas in the major Indian languages as well as Persian and Urdu. Ramayanas composed by Muslim poets in Kerala’s mappilappattu style and Arabic are also introduced. A determined effort was made in the Mughal times under Akbar to translate Hindu holy texts to Persian. He employed Badauni to translate Ramayana who modified some parts of it with the result that it came to be called ‘Akbar Ramayana’. Azeez describes the project as a happy labour of love but hides the real purpose of Badauni who undertook the work and his personal motive behind it. Without going into the details, let me say that it is not at all music to the ears and reflects exactly what we would expect from a bigot even today. To know more about Badauni’s attitude, see my earlier review of Audrey Truschke’s book, ‘Culture of Encounters – Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’.

The included creation legends of various tribes indicate the presence of Muslims in their midst and appear to be quite modern (p.58). Anyhow, the trait of inclusivity which it witnesses is compatible with the Pan-Indian spirit of tolerance. Even then the author uses his argument to find holes and widen the fault lines in Indian society. The focus of the book centres on the unfinished agenda of the Left-Islamist nexus to project the Ramayana not as a religious text with an authentic version, but instead as numerous versions of secular folk literature that reflect the life of the communities in which these tellings are created. Azeez tries to harp on the differences and variations in the narrative and claims the reason to be the exploitation of these communities by upper castes. He fails to see – or more probably, pretends not to see – that these slightly different versions unite them all together with the main text since these modifications are the earnest effort of these communities to partake a share of the epic poem that binds the nation together on the cultural sphere. This is also an attestation that whether hill or dale, tribal or city-dweller, every part and person in India is tied one way or the other to the national psyche through the Ramayana legend. It’s somewhat amusing that the author still believes in the Aryan invasion theory which speculates that the Aryans invaded India and destroyed the Dravidian-built Indus Valley Culture. This notion is long discarded by eminent academics, particularly in the wake of genetic analyses. Moreover, he treats Dravidian as a human race, rather than a language group – another capital mistake on the part of a serious scholar. The book includes a big glossary. Apart from the chapters on Wayanad and its tribal groups, the other parts feel like a handbook where the information is simply copied from other texts without any value addition.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

A Walk up the Hill

Title: A Walk up the Hill – Living with People and Nature
Author: Madhav Gadgil
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9780670097043
Pages: 424

In Kerala, Madhav Gadgil’s fame is similar to the character of Mr. Frankland in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ – he is ‘either carried in triumph down the village street or burnt in effigy’. The report of the Western Ghats expert panel which he chaired recommended stringent rules on human habitation in the ecologically sensitive spots and as a consequence became a harbinger of bad times for the settler community in these zones who have been carrying on agriculture for a living for decades. Meanwhile, he is a hero of the environmental activists and the Left-leaning science awareness body called Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP). Madhav Gadgil is a scientist well-versed in theory and quantitative methods and is an excellent field ecologist-cum-field anthropologist fascinated by the natural world and people and culture. I had initially thought that this book was an autobiography but this is only a memoir and that too, practically devoid of any kind of personal facts. In fact, this is a summary of the projects undertaken by the author – effectually a curriculum vitae. The book is graced with a foreword by M S Swaminathan.

The first few chapters of the book are biographical and tells about the author’s education in India and the US. On return, he joined the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, as a faculty along with his wife. This association (with IISc, of course!) lasted for 33 years till his retirement. Gadgil was very keen in field work unlike most of our established scientists. He initiated his career as a field anthropologist-cum-ecologist working on the sacred groves of Ambi Valley in Pune district, his home town. His greatest contributions came while working as a faculty at IISc, which the author says remains to this day the only place conducive to the serious pursuit of science in a free atmosphere and in the company of many bright and committed scientists. Gadgil developed contacts with the tallest political leaders soon after. He was a member of the small group of people invited by Indira Gandhi to discuss the modalities in setting up a new department of environment in her cabinet. What made the author controversial was his association with conservation of ecology in the Western Ghats. He chaired an expert panel to examine the status of the Western Ghats and recommend appropriate conservation and governance mechanisms in 2010. Unlike the other projects of the author, this book is silent on the recommendations of this committee. But we know that the panel submitted its report containing severe restrictions on economic life in the sensitive areas. Jairam Ramesh, who was more militant than a street activist as far as environment was concerned, was the minister who constituted the panel. But he found himself too big for his boots and was shunted out of the ministry. When the final report was submitted, the climate ‘changed’ and the government refused to accept its findings. Then it constituted another high-level committee headed by Kasturirangan to re-examine its findings. The new committee watered down the recommendations and the author alleges methodological faults in its working.

The author is wary of forest departments of all states in India. He is pessimistic about the officials, their policies and functioning. The book claims that village communities in the pre-British times maintained village woodlots and grazing lands in good condition. Britain had the distinction of wiping out its own forests and wildlife and abolishing community-based management well before any other country in the world. After 1857, the need of forest management was felt and the British half-heartedly copied some European methods. The powers of the forest department to subjugate the common people of India were enhanced by the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. This act criminalized hunting, which surprisingly Gadgil opposes, claiming that hunting for meat was very much a part of human evolution. However, this act criminalized the livelihood of many hunter-gatherer tribes. The human-wildlife conflict in the form of wild animals raiding human habitats is precipitated by this act. At this point, the author notes with relish that Kerala’s forest officials are much more upright and spoke to their superiors somewhat as equals. This was recorded in 1975 and says that he instantly fell in love with God’s own country (p.82)!

This book consistently argues that we have been implementing a system of passing on the benefits of development to those already well off and costs of development to the weak and the poor. This forms the basis of the author’s quite openly visible tendency to oppose and create obstacles to every developmental project on environmental lines. He even objected to the EIA study of the Konkan Railway alignment in Goa. The reason cited for this resistance was that the project would ‘merely protect vested interests, damage the environment, hurt the poor and divide the society’ (p.172). Did it? After several decades of the Railway’s successful operations and the revolution in transportation it had brought to India’s western coast, we can conclude with certainty that the author’s observations were wide off the mark. For some other projects, the role of Gadgil was to act as part of an arbitration on the desirability of a project which he usually used to scuttle. He served in the advisory committee set up by Indira Gandhi to scrutinize the Silent Valley hydel project in Kerala. The committee promptly decided to shelve it. The book includes a chapter on the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad and its early leader M K Prasad, who were dead against the Silent Valley project. The author had a long and fruitful association with both. The author’s staunch objection is most vociferously directed against mining projects in the Deccan. However, his reasons for opposition to mining is laughable. He claims that mineral resources are non-renewable and cannot be replenished once they are exhausted. The value of these ores will only increase in future with mounting worldwide shortages of mineral resources and we lose nothing by not exploiting them in a great hurry (p.177).

Even though informative and providing guidance, it is to be suspected that the book might serve to radicalise young, impressionable minds on hard-line environmental activism. It addresses pollution in a big way and demands stringent rules. The logic is that if pollution is allowed to go unabated, the industry would make undue profits but remain inefficient in the global market. However, this legitimate concern turns very sensitive and intolerant even to minor offenses. Sound pollution from running trucks when they carry mined produce on the road and formation of waves in water bodies due to barge movements (p.309) are raised as big concerns the administration should address immediately. As an alternative, he suggests mining rights to be given to the local community with government’s financial support that should also be labour intensive. Can such ventures compete effectively in the market? As usual, economic viability is not a concern for the author. In the 1970s, the author and his wife Sulochana Phatak were among the very few Indian students at Harvard and MIT choosing to return to India. The reason he gives is a bit funny though: they did not want to further strengthen the white-supremacist American government by helping enhance its scientific abilities! There are some peculiar aspects of the author’s food habits which would surely amuse the readers. He was always willing to consume whatever his hosts ate. This was sometimes extended to strange preferences. Gadgil’s mother was raised on donkey’s milk as an infant because her six elder siblings had died within a week of birth. The author took inspiration from this and went to a donkey bazar near Pune and tasted fresh donkey’s milk. He claims that it was pretty good (p.344). On some other subjects, the book demands unnecessary secrecy in what should have been open knowledge. Government rules on People’s Biodiversity Register stipulate that the knowledge be made public. This is opposed on the flimsy pretence that ‘the communities may not wish to make public the knowledge of the medicinal use and properties of biological resources’ (p.230). His real concern is that pharma companies may utilize them.

The harsh wildlife protection act is causing animal numbers to go up considerably, leading to attacks on human habitats on the fringes of forests. The stringency of the act was conceptualized by urban nature conservationists who are alienated from the common villager and having an elite mindset. The author notes that even Salim Ali shared this prejudice. The system criminalizing activities in wildlife parks was set in place by Ali and some maharajas of erstwhile native states who were entrusted by Nehru to formulate rules on wildlife in the 1950s. Mainly because hunting is banned for almost half a century and animal numbers have greatly increased which lead to raids on farmland and conflict with people, Gadgil boldly suggests legalization of hunting on a limited scale as in Sweden where wildlife is deemed a renewable resource that should be managed through regulated systematic hunting while consuming the meat and utilizing other products of economic value such as hides or antlers. No country other than India bans hunting outside national parks or wildlife sanctuaries except for endangered species. Since the author is much interested in anthropology, we get to know some interesting facts as well. A study under the well-known Harvard leader of human population genetics Cavalli-Sforza found that there was a large overlap of genetic makeup of two groups from Uttara Kannada district in Karnataka, namely the Brahmin Haviks and Dalit Mukris (p.47). The study found that it is impossible to assign any particular individual with certainty to one or the other group. All talk of any one caste group in India being genetically different or superior to others is just nonsense.

Each chapter in the book begins with a short poem of four or five rhyming lines, related to the topic which is discussed in that chapter. Nothing is mentioned about their authorship, but it’s possible that Gadgil himself has penned these lines. The book is somewhat large with around 400 pages that focuses on technical aspects on ecological conservation that demands readers’ unwavering attention. It includes long explanations involving technical terms about the projects coordinated or assisted by the author while at IISc. This becomes a trying experience for ordinary readers after some time. In one such instance, the book lists out 21 problems specific to the Chilika lake in Odisha along with solutions proposed by the local people. Such elaborations are frequent and tiresome for the readers.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Autumn of the Matriarch

Title: Autumn of the Matriarch – Indira Gandhi’s Final Term in Office
Author: Diego Maiorano
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 (First)
ISBN: 9789351774709
Pages: 261

Just as Margaret Thatcher is called the ‘Iron Lady of UK’, Indira Gandhi more than deserve the epithet ‘the Iron Lady of India’. In fact, the five major policy changes she had initiated – termination of privy purses, bank nationalization, Bangladesh war, the Emergency and Operation Blue Star – ended up with far more consequences for India than what Thatcher had made in her tenure for her nation. Most books and articles on Indira Gandhi concentrate on the Emergency and how she stifled free speech and put democracy on ventilator for eighteen gruelling months. This book concentrates on the final five years in her office which she won by sweeping the polls in 1980 which, in a sense, was an indication that the populace had forgiven her for the excesses of the Emergency. The research for the book is part of a PhD scholarship of the University of Torino, Italy, granted to the author. Diego Maiorano is a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He has written several articles on Indian politics and society. He was associated with very prestigious academic institutions where his main topic of interest was contemporary Indian history and politics.

It feels like Maiorano have no exposure to India other than academic or personal interactions with the prominent personalities who had a role to play during the period under discussion. This brings in a refreshingly neutral feel to the narrative while exhibiting a few glimpses here and there of the ‘white man’s disdain’ of India and its society. A primer on Indian politics after 1947 is condensed into a brief section which covers Indira Gandhi’s ascent to power. This was different from that of her father and first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. A combination of genuine popularity with the party’s remarkable ability to extract votes in exchange of patronage distribution ensured the Congress’ dominance over India’s political system in the first two decades after independence. However, after Indira became prime minister, corruption was institutionalized in the early-1970s. Industrialists factored in the cost of ‘donations’ to Congress party as any other cost involved in an investment. Indira was riddled with a sense of insecurity right from her childhood, which made her look at her rivals – whether in politics or party – with unease and hostility. She destroyed her own powerful party leaders who could eventually turn into enemies. State chief ministers were handpicked and nominated by her. With the suspension of internal party elections in 1972, she controlled the key positions in the party apparatus. Loyalty to the Gandhi family was an essential pre-requisite to guarantee a plum position in the party as well as the state.

The early-1970s was a restive period both in terms and national and global politics. The oil shock had set in motion a huge inflation. In Nehru era, higher education had received a disproportionate amount of resources as compared to primary and secondary education. This led to high enrolment of students in colleges. Employment for these became a problem and large scale student protests erupted everywhere. The quality of Indian democracy had steadily deteriorated since Indira came to power and the Emergency was only just another nail in the process. Indira destroyed her own party as an instrument for information gathering at the local level and was not aware of the resentment brewing in the countryside in 1977. She lost the election and was even jailed for misuse of power. However, the internal dissensions in the Janata party was unmanageable. Everyone wished to have a slice of power and had no compunction to backstab anyone who obstructed their way. Within two years, the Janata experiment failed and the party exploded into several fragments. Hence in the 1980 election, Indira and her party was the only alternative to chaos. She offered stability in the face of the disastrous economic and social situation brought on by the mismanagement of her adversaries. The electors bought her argument and she swept the polls. Her modus operandi remained the same as before. Most of her colleagues in the Cabinet were long on loyalty and short on original thinking and administrative ability.

Then comes the first half of the 1980s which is the area of focus of this book. The pyramidal system of corruption that had come into being in the early-1970s scaled newer heights. Many chief ministers were removed because their incompetence and corruption had become too much even by the prevailing permissive standards. The party high command continuously intervened in provincial affairs and direct involvement of central ministers in the administration of a state became quite common. They were haughty towards local leaders as exemplified in Andhra where Rajiv Gandhi’s chiding of state chief minister T. Anjaiah provoked N T Rama Rao to float a regional party to restore ‘Telugu pride’. Law and order situation severely deteriorated in the early-1980s. Punjab and Assam erupted into violence. The irony was that the rebel sponsored by Congress as a counterweight to Akali Dal in Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, turned a Frankenstein that ultimately led to the assassination of Indira herself. High-handed tactics employed in removing Farooq Abdullah in Kashmir might have had a role in fomenting militancy. The personalist conception of the Congress party became clear when following Sanjay Gandhi’s death, his brother Rajiv was inducted into politics. From that moment on, dynastic succession became the universally accepted rule, not only in Congress, but in most other parties too. A whiff of fresh air was also felt on the economic side. Indira took a radical departure from the past as she gave up efforts to bring about social changes through land reforms, progressive direct taxation, measures to restrict conspicuous consumption and control over monopoly. Seeds of liberalization were thus sown in this term.

Maiorano presents a closer picture of the socio-economic transformation Indira Gandhi was attempting to bring about. She tried desperately to woo the middle class. The party proclaimed her as a strong leader the country invariably needed. It also tried to substantiate the modernisation dream of the middle class and to stimulate its sense of national pride. Then she promoted the interests of the upper castes (p.121). The book alleges that the RSS actively supported Indira in her final years. Its workers campaigned for Congress and refused to support BJP (p.134). The author claims that her political message on the country’s unity was in many ways identical to that of the Hindu right-wing. The support of big businesses and kickbacks on foreign contracts ensured a huge availability of funds for the prime minister’s party (p.136). The author observes that the Punjab problem was completely avoidable and easily manageable if Indira had negotiated with those parties who did not share her own political objectives. To break Akali unity, Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi financed and promoted a hard-line preacher Bhindranwale who in fact campaigned for Congress in three constituencies in the 1980 elections. He was arrested for the murder of Lala Jagat Narayan but ignominiously released soon after, because the Delhi Gurdwara management committee threatened to withdraw support of the Congress in Delhi.

The book focusses on the somewhat irrevocable damage Indira Gandhi had inflicted on democratic institutions of India. The judiciary strenuously fought for its independence and eventually resisted to a large extent the attacks of the executive. Indira superseded the seniority of three judges and appointed A N Ray as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. All the three judges promptly resigned in protest. However, the parliament and the president surrendered without fighting. The author remarks humorously that the bureaucracy split into three groups – ‘the wives’ (those officers who are attached to only one party), ‘the nuns’ (officers who remain unattached to any party) and ‘the prostitutes’ (who attach themselves to whichever party is in power and switch when there is a change of government), the share of the last being quite high (p.167). Indira left behind three destructive legacies – she institutionalized corruption as a key feature of India’s polity; entry of criminals into politics which was started and legitimized by Sanjay Gandhi (p.211); and state institutions became a vehicle for pursuing personal and partisan ends coupled with the institutionalization of dynastic politics. The book concludes that Indira left behind a divided nation, though not in the physical sense of disintegration. India’s social fabric was badly cracked in the mid-1980s.

The author’s unfamiliarity to India is almost tangible in the narrative as he relies solely on newspaper reports and personal interviews. This is accentuated by lack of comparison to modern Indian politics which he seems not to have followed in detail. At some points, the coverage is totally dependent on interviews with some of the prominent figures held a quarter century after the incident. It feels like the opinions they expressed are taken at face value. Indira’s attempts to subjugate India’s institutions for personal domination is a self-professed recurring theme in the book. Maiorano focusses only on politics and leaves out the economic aspects of her rule. This is a great drawback as her U-turn from the socialist path is not sufficiently elaborated. It is true that the author has provided some coverage on this topic and remarks that the government’s focus shifted from the rural poor to the urban middle class in the 1980s. Indira’s encounter with the judiciary is also only glimpsed at. This may be because the most dramatic period of the tussle happened before the Emergency. The lack of coverage on the personal aspects of the prime minister such as her itinerary in the final weeks and the repercussions in the country after Operation Blue Star are glaring. Written from a typical European perspective, the author trivializes the aftereffects of illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India’s northeast, specifically Assam. For the Assamese middle class, he says, what was at stake was control over the state institutions which in turn were the key to the allocation of most middle class jobs (p.114). The grave Assamese concerns over the takeover of their state by illegal Bangladeshi Muslims goes above the author’s head probably because he was not aware of the deeply religious nature of India’s partition and how the district of Sylhet was taken away from Assam to merge with Pakistan because the Muslims had by then become a numerical majority in the district as a result of unchecked immigration.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Father Tongue, Motherland

Title: Father Tongue, Motherland – The Birth of Language in South Asia
Author: Peggy Mohan
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670099740
Pages: 361

There is a famous truism called the ‘Law of the Instrument’ which says: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. Though unfortunate for the author, this book is a shining validation of the unedifying principle in that ‘law’. The author is a person of Indian origin residing in Trinidad and is an expert on the mixed or creole languages spoken in those islands. She very clearly understands how these languages originated and developed through the murky episodes of plantation slavery. However, she falls into the trap of believing that the same mechanism was repeated everywhere else in the world and churns out high-sounding theories on how the modern Indian languages came into being from a local substratum that mixed with Sanskrit of the elite newcomers. Essentially, she uses Trinidadian creole English as a compass to hold on to for the journey into language evolution in the Indian subcontinent. Needless to say, she tries miserably to clothe her outlandish concepts in the straitjacket of social dynamics among Trinidadian slave colonies. In the meanwhile, several prejudices of the author also tumble out of the closet. Peggy Mohan was born in Trinidad and studied linguistics at the University of the West Indies. She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ashoka University and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Mohan assumes without any rational justification that what happened in the Caribbean, associated with slave labour from Africa, occurred in India too. This posits an all-male migration of settlers arriving one fine morning from the land to the north without their womenfolk and going on to have children from local women creating a bilingual generation that knew both its mother tongue and Sanskrit. This produced a number of intermediate languages called prakrit which remained in vogue till the twelfth century when Muslim invaders occupied India. The author claims that the Muslim occupation did well for the underlying languages when it suppressed Sanskrit and its associated prakrit varieties. This led to the development of modern languages. Mohan tries to establish two points here – that the modern Indian languages are totally delinked with Sanskrit in the initial stages and that the Muslim sultans deserve the credit for the growth of modern languages in India. The basic presumption is that the north Indian languages have words drawn from local prakrits, but their grammar had a number of features that are derived from older languages of the area.

Theories of Dravidian origin of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) flourished in India till DNA analysis came in vogue which convincingly ruled out any sudden variations in genetic material in the entire subcontinent, including Pakistan. A Dravidian language called Brahui is still spoken in Baluchistan while a language called Burushaski is spoken in an isolated outcrop of Swat region. The author accepts that the speakers of these languages are not genetically different from their neighbours (p.113). But she again claims that it always made sense that the route used by the early Dravidians into the subcontinent should run from the Northwest to South India via the Indus valley (p.90). Again, this attests to her fallacious intuition that the Dravidians are a human race and IVC was their creation. Both these wrong concepts are long discarded by the academic community. Ignoring the glaring inconsistencies in her argument, she proceeds to test her creole model on India. All-male migrants arrive in a new land and marry local women. Their children and some elite local men pick up a close approximation of the migrants’ language with essentially no change in the grammar. Later on, other local people join the community and soon a version of the language develops with a number of grammatical features from the local languages. Grammar comes from local, but vocabulary is from the migrants. This is the significance of the book’s title, Father tongue, motherland. At this point, she presents another inconsistency in her theory that the IVC was Dravidian. A grammatical feature called ergativity is strongly seen in the Northwest where IVC once flourished. This is conspicuously absent in all Dravidian languages in the South and Magadhan languages to the East, including Sanskrit and all Aryan languages.

A major weakness in the book’s research is the highly subjective nature of the references and the casual way of obtaining information that does not stand up to the minimum rigour expected from a serious academic treatise. Some of the author’s observations are self-delusional and outright misleading. She discusses Brahui and Burushaski languages in the guise of an expert, but her only source of info regarding the latter is a Japanese ‘expert’ who himself did not have much grounding in that language. One of his replies was that he doesn’t ‘think’ that there were compound verbs in Burushaski. Such is the level of understanding among the sources! She further claims that a lady software developer from Bengaluru has deciphered the Indus Valley script which she claims to be notes concerned with currency and the sort of license documents that allowed them to practice their trade. It is not literature at all (p.100). She in fact likens it to a QR code. Another mistaken comment is that the old IVC did not have a sense of social hierarchy (p.143). The findings of archaeologists suggest a contrary picture in the presence of citadels in many Indus sites such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Dholavira. Apart from wishful thinking, isn’t it naïve on the part of a scholar to assume a civilization which existed several millennia ago that did not have social hierarchies? Another erroneous inference – either accidental or deliberate because of the author’s association with the Jamia Milia Islamia – is that the Islamic occupation of India was some sort of a blessing in developing the modern languages by destroying Sanskrit influence and Islam offered a path to equality to the country’s downtrodden masses. Both are maliciously crafted perfidies. Forced conversions were the norm during Islamic expansion in South India, but the author asserts that lower castes were attracted to Islam because of the equality it offered through the teachings of Sufis (p.47). She seems to have no sense of what was going on in India. This observation was made regarding the appearance of a mixed elite in Hyderabad in which the lower castes in fact did not find entry.

The author then attempts to make a guess on the basic features of a primitive language X which was spoken at IVC sites when the supposed Aryan invasion took place and which was the prototype that mixed with Sanskrit. She compiles thirteen features of the hypothetical language, compares these to Tamil and appears surprised to find that Tamil matches them. Again, this is just another vent to her overheated fantasy that IVC was Dravidian. Then she emits the offensive and unsubstantiated observation that ‘Punjabi, Tamil, Burushaski, Bhojpuri and Brahui, together with Language X look like one big extended family and Sanskrit the foreign guest who came to stay’ (p.150). Read that sentence again and note with consternation the lethal venom this Trinidadian scholar conceals in it. She goes on further to claim that Language X would sound like a hypothetical Punjabi song with Tamil words. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE, Prakrit languages were replaced and our modern languages are claimed to begin appearing in the documents. Never for a moment she considers the rather plausible alternative of the prakrits metamorphosing to the modern languages. Sultanates are said to be the reason for giving space to local languages in place of Sanskrit and related prakrits. However, this is just another hallucination as there were no sultanates that spread across the whole of India in the tenth to twelfth centuries. The author’s conclusions are often shocking because of their glaring disconnect from objective truth. One of her references clearly state that the Turks destroyed the Buddhist Pala kingdom in Bengal and the religion declined. But she demurs and asserts instead that Brahmanism assimilated the people and Brahmins imposed taxes in the kingdom at Malda (p.203). She then turns the screw a bit tighter and claims that the ‘Sufis arrived in Bengal well in advance of the new rulers (Muslim sultans) and encountered a restive population of Buddhists, unhappy with Brahmins and orthodox Hinduism and ready to turn to Muslims for protection’.

Peggy Mohan’s idea of India’s pre-history is childishly simple which can be summarized as follows - 65,000 years ago, people speaking Munda languages left Africa and settled in India. About 9,000 years ago, there was a migration of farmers from Zagros mountains in Iran and they interbred with Mundas, creating a hybrid race called Dravidians. Around 4,000 years ago, a large number of Austro-Asiatic men reached Gangetic plains and introduced a hybrid variety of rice that enhanced productivity of cultivation and population levels. Then came Vedic men with Sanskrit. The ridiculousness of this argument is on what happened next. After all these encounters, the Mundas promptly retreated into forests and became tribal!

What is remarkable throughout the narrative is the author’s inveterate hatred towards Sanskrit and Hinduism though she cleverly vails it in attacks against ‘Brahmanism’. The fundamental premise of the book that only males form migratory bands does not hold water and the entire logical edifice is built up on this shaky ground. Her example of gazelle herds in Masai Mara in support of this ridiculous proposition is made all the more comic by the fact that she found this idea about gazelles during one of her pleasure trips to that place, probably from a tour guide. Fact and truth are at a discount in the entire text and hearsay and opinion of dubious academics are assigned utmost credibility. An email from a correspondent is enough to convince the author to declare some preposterous idea as gospel truth. Her conjectures are marked by their weirdness and naivety. She once remarks that ‘perhaps Brahmin men had begun to secretly dislike the verb conjugations in early Sanskrit’ (p.81. This is the only reason she can think of regarding the disappearance of this feature in Sanskrit!

This book lacks sincere research and is a pure waste of time. Hence it is not recommended to any class of readers.

Rating: 1 Star

Lords of Earth and Sea

Title: Lords of Earth and Sea – A History of the Chola Empire
Author: Anirudh Kanisetti
Publisher: Juggernaut, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789353455606
Pages: 343

The Chola dynasty is historically and emotionally very important to South Indians and Tamils respectively. It was the only Indian lineage that carried our culture towards the distant shores of southeast Asia and even China. Indian mainstream historians generally assume an unmindful attitude towards this South Indian dynasty and focus entirely on the Delhi sultanates and Mughals. Partly to rectify this bias and set the record straight, our new parliament building houses the spectre (chenkol) of the Cholas as a symbol and continuity of the authority and fountainhead of Indian culture. The book’s front cover shows a chenkol. This book lacks historical rigour, but is an attempt to fill the void. The story is generated from inputs of 30,000 inscriptions in the Chola land. Names of minor dignitaries who had dedicated grants and gifts to the temples are also woven into the story. The unfortunate part of the whole episode is that the author has made a lot of warps and wefts coloured by his ideology while weaving the parts into the general skeleton of Chola history. Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specializing in ancient and early medieval India. It is not clear whether he has any academic background in history but has received grants for his work from prestigious institutions.

The book opens with a clarification that the Cholas who originated in the Kaveri floodplain is not genetically linked to Cholas of the Sangam era. The new kings were only slightly more powerful than the landed magnates who were their allies. They developed political power by matrimonial alliances with powerful families and other royal houses. The book tells about Kokkilan Adigal, a Chera princess married to Parantaka I. While describing her imaginary journeys across the vastness of the Tamil plains, the book resembles a movie script. These queens were very social, not quite unlike their modern counterparts and greatly contributed to temple worship as part of an effort to justify their rule to a peasant subject class. Sembiyan Mahadevi was a Chola queen who commissioned and popularized Shiva’s worship as Nataraja. This iconic figure of Shiva was first crafted around 970 CE. Sembiyan Mahadevi built as many as eight temples. She handpicked a team of sculptors from the Kaveri delta, binding all their families and villages to her. All her temples had a signature style, with Nataraja facing the south. Slowly, under the velvet glove of Shaivism, the Chola court extended its iron fist and controlled the floodplain. One of their initial defeats in 949 at Takkolam was soon gotten over with and the empire was crowned in all its glory by the end of the first millennium CE.

Kanisetti provides some interesting details which put the Cholas in a class of its own among medieval and pre-medieval kings. Succession to the throne appears to be smooth and orderly, without fratricide or patricide. The ascent of Prince Arulmoli (regnal title Rajendra Chola) shows a marked contrast to the bloodstained machinations of many dynasties, especially the Mughals. Again, Rajaraja was ordained as a co-ruler to his uncle Uttama Chola and he assumed sovereignty when the elder died of natural causes. Construction of the Brihadiswara Temple at Thanjavur gives an absorbing aside to the story. The architects needed to design a temple at least 40 times larger than the average Tamil shrine. It had to be done in a single stroke, without experimenting with buildings of intermediate sizes. Excepting the pyramids of Giza, it was the tallest structure on earth in the eleventh century. The interior of the superstructure can still be glimpsed today. It is an astounding and somewhat eerie sight, an empty, silent pyramid of granite ascending away into the darkness. Cholas heavily depended on the merchant guilds such as the ‘Five Hundred’ to project their power overseas. The Cholas had no navy, contrary to popular perceptions, but the merchant ships carried men and materiel to the places as needed. They also acted as spies and gathered information on numerous occasions. They tipped Rajaraja of the power vacuum in Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka which led to a Chola invasion and annexation. In return, the Cholas helped the guild by destroying their trade rivals. When Rajaraja stormed Kanthaloor in Kerala, he burnt the merchant ships moored there in an uncharacteristic departure from the rule of leaving commerce unmolested during war. This is thought to be a strategy to cause crushing losses to the Chola guild’s competitors. Further, the book notes that the Cholas established new centres through conquest, but they did not wipe out the older cultures and thrived from diversity. Rajendra made a plundering raid to Kedah in Malaysia in 1025, but he did not establish suzerainty over it. A network of Tamil merchants was established from mainland India deep into southeast Asia. Remains of brick temples were found there, containing Tamil-style stone idols of Buddha, Shiva linga and sculpture of Vishnu were cohabiting harmoniously (p.145). Read William Dalrymple’s excellent work ‘The Golden Road’ which presents a sweeping coverage of southeast Asia’s cultural links to the Tamil country (read my review here). Some fundamental changes were happening in the palace around this time. After Rajendra followed his father Rajaraja to the crown, purse-strings were tightened and the royal ladies ceased patronizing temples for half a century since the 1020s.

The most unfortunate thing about the book is that Kanisetti tries to sneak in his liberal ideology onto medieval treatises in claims such as the Chola empire was great only for the upper classes of the Kaveri floodplain; for the people on the frontier it meant that their homes were looted, fields burnt and women captured. Not only the Cholas, in any period in history including our own, the upper classes always have a great time. It provides no new information such as redundant statements like ‘it was the sun which rose in the day and the moon shone in the night during the Chola period’. The author plays up the atrocities during Cholas’ military campaigns as if to blame them. During Rajendra’s Ganga campaign, he attacked temples. The author then admits that a number of spectacular idols were carried back to Chola territory (p.19) and placed in minor shrines. He says that this was very much par for the course in medieval south Asia. Now, compare this to what Ghaznawi did to the Somnatha idol at around the same time. Readers also get a taste of the author’s socialist turn of mind while describing events occurred in the eleventh century. He complains that most of what the Paraiyar cultivators grew went to landowners. The unmentioned labour of the Paraiyars was the foundation of the medieval period’s urbanism and complex exchanges, but the people were shorter, wirier and more wrinkly with prolonged exposure (p.164). These are lofty, elegant ideas but applied here a bit anachronistically. This book also takes references in contemporary texts at face value ignoring the exaggeration of many orders of magnitude. He considers Sekkilar’s Shaivite work on the history of sixty-three gurus. They entered into a religious discourse with the Jains and when the latter lost, 8000 of them is said to have impaled themselves. Kanisetti then cheekily suggests that this was based on a historical event even though he has no references to support this claim. Another story in the same book is that of a devotee of Shiva named Kannappa plucking both his eyeballs and offering it to a linga. Was that too based on a real incident?

The book gives a prominent place to the changes that occurred in Tamil society along with Chola decline and how the caste system solidified thereafter. As the centralized monarchy weakened, power was gradually seized by those who controlled military labour and agrarian production at the source. Tax evasion from within by gifting land to temples and foreign invasions weakened the Cholas. Caste is often thought of as an ancient, immutable system imposed from the top by kings and Brahmins, but in south India, it was a medieval system shaped by medieval classes in response to an absence of royal authority, rather than a preponderance of it (p.255). The book explicitly narrates the Cholas’ war-time atrocities, but a marked difference of their modus operandi to Islamic invasions is clearly discernible. The Hoysalas ransacked Kaveri temples but did not destroy them. The Palli people under the Cholas ransomed the idols and re-consecrated them (p.200). This is how true economic interest on the part of invaders works. On the other hand, whenever we read of destruction of temples, a clear religious motive lies behind the act. The author presents the ways in which palace women were sexually exploited in needless detail. These are unquestioningly taken from the eulogies of fawning poets living on the largesse of their patrons.

The entire book employs a clever stratagem to paint the greatest Chola kings as villains or at least as those who do not deserve appreciation or respect. To bolster his point, he alleges them to have carried out the most outrageous crime imaginable in today’s Tamil Nadu – patronization of Brahmins! The book is written in dramatic prose with characters displaying emotions and capable of thinking like ordinary people. It is probable that the author might have desired to provide the seed for a movie script on Cholas out of this book in the future. Even though this book is historical fiction for the most part, he paints a picture designed to accentuate the fault lines in present-day society and deliberately plays up discrimination and violence which might have happened in the distant past. Instead of naming the princes directly, the uses their battle honorifics like ‘Madurai-destroyer’ or ‘Kerala-destroyer’ in a wily attempt to scratch long-healed scabs in order to reopen the wound. This would also make the people from these regions remain slightly peeved that would prevent them from identifying with the kings and queens in this book. Mass rape is accused in a Chola-Chalukya war. It might’ve occurred, but what is hypocritical is the total tactical silence of such liberal authors when the winning side is Mughal or Central Asian, as we have seen many times in the past. In such cases, they shut up like a clam on battlefield violence and tyranny on captured women. Examples of the author’s colourful language describing Cholas’ atrocities are: ‘hands reddened with blood and mud-stained sweat of thousands’; ‘loot and pillage of undefended villages’; ‘sawed off the nose of the daughter of an enemy general’; ‘The Chola imperial temples only served to distribute war loot to Kaveri gentry and warriors’; ‘Chola court was imagined as a cut-throat world in later centuries’.

Winston Churchill once pejoratively remarked that India was no more a single country than the equator – that is, India was only a geographic term. But Kanisetti goes one step further in the detestation of his homeland by removing all references to the Indian subcontinent and replacing it with South Asia. However, South India remains as such without any modification. Taking into account the disdain and apathy Kanisetti shows to all things Indian and his uncanny knack in always digging up the unpleasant, this man may rightly be called the ‘Wendy Doniger of India’.

The book lacks serious research and feels like fiction. Serious readers of history would do better by avoiding this book.

Rating: 2 Star

Allahu Akbar

Title: Allahu Akbar – Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India
Author: Manimugdha S. Sharma
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2019 (First)
ISBN: 9789386950536
Pages: 305

History is written by the winners. That’s the only certain truth as far as historiography is concerned. India was reeling under the yoke of Islamic imperialism for nearly eight centuries. They conquered us, destroyed our temples, killed millions, took many millions of both sexes as slaves, forcibly converted several millions and did one other thing that was more shattering and everlasting than the others. They tampered with our cultural DNA and created a class of people who actually believe that India benefitted from the above-mentioned bouts of extreme repression. In the present day, the Left-Islamist nexus bankrolls them and offer them plum positions in academia and pliant journalism. The Mughals was just another Muslim dynasty that produced two centuries of hell in India’s long history. But one thing must be admitted here. Of the six monarchs who are considered Great Mughals, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar’s rule was the most tolerant. If you scour Islamic history for tolerant kings, perhaps Salahuddin al-Ayyubi might be the only other person you’d find. This book is an effort to understand Emperor Akbar in today’s India. This is a highly censored version which is laudatory to Mughals and worthless as history. The book projects many medieval events onto modern sensibilities and raises political propaganda to claim that the present prime minister, Narendra Modi, is not fit to rule India which was once reigned by such greats as Akbar. Nehru and even Rahul Gandhi is favourably compared to Akbar in this book, but it claims that in view of the Gujarat riots of 2002, Modi broke India while Akbar united it. The book’s title signifies the Muslim battle cry which means that ‘God is Great’. By a clever twist, this also means that ‘Akbar is God’ which was used as a term of salutation by Akbar’s cronies. In that sense, the title is apt for the book because the author practically treats him as divine. Manimugdha S. Sharma is a Delhi-based journalist. He takes a keen interest in politics, military history, the Mughal and British empires and the two world wars. This is his first book in English.

The author confesses that this book was indebted to critical input from the Islamist historians Irfan Habib and Ali Nadeem Rezawi. This makes the author’s pitiable attempts to glorify the Mughals at least comprehensible. A crucial finding in the book is the intellectual and ‘rational’ bend of the Mughal mind. When Hamida Bano, Akbar’s mother, went into labour, court astrologers wanted to prolong it till a later propitious time. But the courtiers rebuffed them saying that ‘things would happen when God willed it’. This fatalistic remark is exalted as a ‘glimpse of the rational minded high society the Mughals had’. However, he notes that Akbar was born at the exact moment the astrologers predicted! Just a few pages later, he concedes that Humayun assigned commands and offices based on the star sign of officers (p.8). The irony is that on the same page he makes this observation, he cannot help remark that ‘Islam condemns soothsaying and endorses natural sciences’ (p.8). It’s a fair guess that it is in such innocuous-looking comments that we see the influence of Habib and Rezawi. The author disgraces himself by praising slavery which was rampant in Islam. He claims that a slave in an Islamic society could rise to become master one day and that slaves were often raised by their masters as their own children, giving them education, training, grooming and teaching them every skill required to rise high in society (p.256). Readers should keep in mind that he is simply sugar-coating the heinous institution of slavery! On the other hand, the author himself may be thought to signify how such a slave would look like in modern times – in the intellectual sense at least. There are several fabricated stories in the narrative such as Humayun recoiling in disgust from a dish of beef and Babur prohibiting cow-slaughter because he was a pragmatic king!

What makes this book not even worth the paper on which it is printed is the political and Islamist propaganda it carries against the present Narendra Modi government in India. You can of course criticize the government for whatever reason, but what does a history book on Mughals has to do with present-day party politics? This book seems to be part of a paid effort that works with political targets in mind written to coincide with the 2019 general elections in India. The author claims that BJP’s election campaigns since 2014 have hinged on Goebbelsian propaganda (p.20). Akbar’s birthday is not certain. He compares this to Modi and says, “Narendra Modi himself has been in the eye of the storm throughout his term for alleged discrepancies in his date of birth as well” (p.7). And, ‘Modi government has a medieval impulse on vilifying opposition’ (p.61). Babur and Akbar erected towers of skulls of enemies vanquished in battle. This is compared to the Modi government’s alleged tendency to seeing minorities as the ‘other’ (p.75). As you can see, the examples are not congruent with the argument but the author compulsively makes these deranged exercises like an obsession. Moreover, he cites several episodes from history and concludes that ‘Akbar was not doing anything that hadn’t been done before and wouldn’t be done again’ (p.78), probably meaning the erection of skull towers. Modi’s scrapping of the outdated and anachronous Planning Commission and putting in NITI Aayog in its place is compared to Akbar’s regent, Bairam Khan, assuming more powers to himself (p.87). Another allegation is that exaggeration is seen in Modi regime’s success stories (p.82). Modi issues ‘diktats to schoolchildren, bureaucrats or factory workers to show up at state or party events since 2014’ (p.14). Also, mass killings were not acceptable in Mughal times as it is now (p.111). Akbar captured Delhi defeating Hemu, who briefly held Delhi by ousting Humayun’s army. Hemu rose from humble origins and the author remarks that ‘one doesn’t get too many instances of someone rising through the ranks like this’ (p.51). However, he does not make the obvious comparison to Modi at this point, who had also risen from a very poor and socially backward family. Graciousness is not a virtue of this wily and partisan journalist who had written this book.

This book glorifies the invaders and slave-masters and vilifies the hapless natives who went down fighting these monstrously destructive powers. Sharma has no compunction to portray an act of blood-curdling cruelty as necessary for a monarch. He claims that Humayun fought his brothers without hating them (!); he loved all his brothers; he had a guilt complex in fighting them (p.28). But in reality, the incident of Humayun blinding his brother makes a terrible read. He pierced a sharp, hot needle through his own brother Kamran’s eyes after capturing him. Dirk Collier notes in his excellent book The Great Mughals and Their India that ‘the lancet was pierced into both eyes about fifty times to make the deed fool proof. The prince bravely withstood the torture, but at the end of it when a mixture of lemon juice and salt was sprinkled on the wound, he broke down and cried out loudly in pain’ (read review here). The author berates the Rajputs entirely as a class – those who fought the Mughals to the last man committing jauhar and saka and those who submitted to them and gave away their daughters to the Mughal harem. Sharma notes with contempt that Rajput ruling families managed to survive until modern times by bowing to every ascendant star on the political horizon, just like grass blades that weather every storm by bending. Some Rajputs fought on the Mughal side against fellow Rajputs. It is interesting to observe how the Mughal chroniclers viewed these fratricidal contests. Badaoni, the Mughal biographer of Akbar through his book Muntakhab ut-Tawarikh, claims that this was a ploy to get kaffirs (infidels) killed by their brethren and to save Muslims the trouble (p.207). But our journalist author chips in with a salvaging comment that Badauni’s remark ‘was not the Mughal state’s view’. How does he deduce this against the written word of a contemporary who knew things better?

Manimugdha Sharma quite literally imagines or wishes that the Mughals gave strict punishment for rape. This ruse is only to make them more appealing to modern sensibilities. He claims that Jahangir demoted Muqarrab Khan, the governor of Gujarat, because he raped a Hindu woman. He is not able to find a reference for this assertion on the period texts, but suggests that his patron, Prof. Ali Nadeem Rezawi of the Aligarh Muslim University, had told him so (p.144). It is amusing that on the immediate previous page, it is asserted that the Mughal Islamic state mandated the testimony of four witnesses to attest to the victim’s version to award sentence to the offenders (p.143). He then maliciously compares the rape of a minor Muslim girl at Kathua to this incident and implies that Hinduism is involved in this brutal incident. To establish the culpability of patriarchal polytheistic religions in sanctioning rape, he describes the story of Medusa from Greek mythology. Medusa was raped and then punished by the gods. Akbar promoted eunuchs in bureaucracy much unlike his predecessors. Those outside the court was still treated with contempt. Even today, Indian politicos and the society at large have not been able to do better than Akbar (p.122). After several rounds of grandstanding, the author ruefully admits that Akbar mercilessly slaughtered tens of thousands in the siege of Chittor in 1568. The emperor then went straight to the shrine of Moinudeen Chishti in Ajmer and proclaimed that his mujahids (holy warriors) defeated kaffirs at Chittor. To iron this out, Sharma slyly assures that this was only a ‘religious rhetorical invocation’ (p.168).

Make no mistake about it that I fully share the author’s conviction that Akbar was the most tolerant of the Mughals – especially in the latter half of his reign. He built the ibadat khana for religious discourse which admitted only Muslim theologians at first. When the emperor realised the hollowness of their arguments, he invited speakers from other religions too. He never joined any of them, but introduced one himself called din e-ilahi, which was nothing more than a kind of personal worship of the emperor. A doubt which is usually pointed at Akbar’s religiosity (or the lack of it) is that whether he had turned ex-Muslim (in the modern sense of the term). The author does not even pronounce it, because his Islamist mentors would not allow it; but gives subtle hints that it may be so. He remarks that since Akbar didn’t go through the formal education process of the time, which involved theological lessons, he had a relatively unencumbered mind that was open to receiving different ideas (p.239). The author quotes Badaoni in such a way as to hint that the emperor had become an apostate. Badaoni sullenly points out that ‘His Majesty had the early history of Islam read out to him and soon began to think less of the companions of the Prophet; soon after, he felt the five prayers, fasts of Ramadan and the belief in everything connected with the Prophet were vain superstitions’ (p.218). When Jahangir rose in revolt against his father, one of the accusations was that Akbar had converted many of the mosques into storehouses and stables. Badaoni also mentions that Akbar dropped all references to the name ‘Muhammad’ and shortened his own name to ‘Jalaluddin Akbar’ (p.227). He assumed the title of amir ul-Mominin (commander of the faithful) which was a break from tradition and a snub to the Ottoman caliphs. The author then argues that ‘this was the reason why Muslim soldiers of the Indian army had no qualms about going to war against the Ottoman empire and Indian Muslims never bothered about the Ottoman caliph’ (p. 222). This is a plain falsehood and raises the question whether he had heard about the Khilafat agitation, which was a bloody episode in India’s freedom struggle and the only instance when Muslims came out in support of Gandhi and his party.

This book is a feeble attempt to understand Akbar in his own time and examine his relevance in our own time. Unfortunately, the author has made the latter part a political slugfest on Narendra Modi. He admits that he has picked some episodes from Akbar’s life story and left out some others (p.xxv) which means that it is a sanitized, if not censored, version. This is a fairy-tale book on Akbar fit for indoctrinating young minds who have not developed the faculty of critical thinking. The author claims himself an Ekalavya and the Islamist historian Irfan Habib as his Dronacharya and consoles that he has not lost his thumb at the end of it. He may have retained his thumb, but certainly has lost common sense and self-pride. This book pompously describes battle stories from European wars in a bid to compare them with Mughals’ experiences and to appear erudite. Most of these stories are irrelevant and uninteresting. They seem to be selected by AI. Sharma calls his detractors ‘weekend historians’ and ‘Twitter professors. He himself fits the bill. His logic is preposterous in the case of many observations. The book declares that Rahul Gandhi comes close to Akbar in unconventional ways because ‘he has ridden bikes and ate with Dalit families’ while Modi has not (p.252-3). The book also includes a discussion on movies such as Jodhaa Akbar and TV serials depicting the Mughal emperor.

This petty political baggage of a book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star

The Conscience Network

Title: The Conscience Network – A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
Author: Sugata Srinivasaraju
Publisher: Vintage, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670096787
Pages: 554

If you are in the habit of judging a book by its cover, this one would look like another run-of-the-mill product on Emergency for which there is no dearth. It describes the organisation and the methods through which Indians in the US – staying there for study or employment – resisted the Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India in Jun 1975 to Mar 1977. The organisation followed a path independent of Cold War leanings and was guided by nonviolent Gandhian action. It recounts a nearly forgotten story of resistance to the Emergency, its manner of construction, its philosophy and pursuance which is fascinating and a compelling read. This story is put together by a string of individuals in the USA. The role of Gandhians and Socialists and the networks they ingeniously made possible in the US to fight the Emergency have been underplayed and unrecorded and this book claims to endeavour a correction on this aspect. Sugata Srinivasaraju is an independent journalist, author and columnist who has written for nearly three decades at the intersection of politics, culture and contemporary history. In the past, he has edited newspapers and run television channels and digital news platforms. He has four other books to his credit.

The business of the 1970s Emergency is still an unfinished business in India because the Congress party, which declared the Emergency and suspended democracy in this country for 21 months, have still not owned up the culpability nor regretted it. In other words, Congress still has not accepted the mistake of Emergency. In Jan 1978, Indira Gandhi herself took the entire responsibility for all the mistakes and excesses committed, but she caveated it by saying she did what she did to save the nation. In Mar 2021, Rahul Gandhi admitted that the Emergency was a mistake, but again qualified it by saying that the Congress at no point had attempted to capture India’s institutional framework. This was a plain lie because the Emergency saw the worst corruption and capture of India’s institutions. Raju observes that it was the dynastic succession of the Congress party that prevents it from fully owning up and regretting the Emergency which should have elicited an unqualified apology in any other civilized context. In fact, the political dynasty itself was a product of the Emergency. This book does not cover the excesses committed during that dreadful period in India where tens of thousands of innocent people were imprisoned for no reason and without trial. The repressive measures adopted by the Indira regime against overseas Indians who were part of the resistance movement such as revocation of their scholarships or impounding of passports are described in good detail. The book also indicates that Nehru had also exploited this provision in the Constitution for his political expediency. Nehru imposed the Emergency in 1962 during the China invasion and did not lift it for many months even after the ceasefire. It was also misused to repress citizens for innocuous and unconnected acts after labelling them as anti-nationals (p.150).

Even though the book is fairly huge at 554 pages, it is eminently readable and a pleasant experience. The resistance movement in the US was powered by a few individuals – S R Hiremath, his wife Mavis Sigwalt, Ravi Chopra, Anand Kumar, P K Mehta and Shrikumar Poddar. The first two chapters describe their backgrounds and how they ended up in America. It also discusses the political situation in India and the US in the 1970s. Jayaprakash Narayan (hereafter JP) started a movement called Citizens for Democracy (CFD) to fight the rot in economic and social spheres in India under Indira Gandhi. The expatriates created another organisation to mirror it and named it Indians for Democracy (IFD) which consolidated support and spearheaded the resistance program in the US. Despite the contradictions in the ideologies of the IFD constituents, the organisation firmly decided to adopt the Gandhian model and were not caught up in petty streams of power games back home. Amidst all the currents and undercurrents of ideology circulating around IFD, it remained steadfast to Gandhian ideals and methods. It could build support among pacifists, Quakers and the enlightened civil society of America only because Gandhi and his non-violent methods had cast a total spell in those circles. Noted Quaker leaders like Horace Alexander who had enjoyed a warm friendship with Gandhi and Nehru, intervened on behalf of the protestors and sent fact-finding teams to India. Indira allowed herself to be interviewed by them but nothing much came out of these meetings. The western press saw JP as another Gandhi-like figure and his was another freedom movement to rid India from corruption and dictatorship. There was a Cold War angle too, as JP was fighting Indira, who was a bosom friend of Moscow.

Emergency was a heinous assault on our democracy and there is absolutely no doubt that it should have been avoided. Still, the role of the Opposition in fomenting violent protests which were encouraged to be verging on open rebellion is traditionally not examined seriously. This book also follows this paradigm. Probably if Indira Gandhi had restricted the arrests to some leaders and refrained from muzzling the media, she might’ve had a presentable case. This book describes some activities of the Opposition leaders which would make us think that they were exceeding the limits of democratic decency. JP’s exhortation of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution) was an indirect call to arms, even though he later wriggled out of such interpretations. He has been making revolutionary utterances on a continuous basis for a year before the Emergency. In June 1974, he demanded closure of all schools and colleges in Bihar for a year. He encouraged a no-tax campaign to paralyse the government. In July 1974, he exhorted the police personnel in Bihar to be guided by their conscience rather than illegal orders from their superiors. In Oct 1974, he directed student volunteers to set up parallel, ‘revolutionary’ peoples’ governments. In the same month, he threatened to hold parallel elections in Bihar if the elected assembly was not dissolved. On June 25, 1975, he repeated the threats he had been using in Bihar in Delhi and the police scooped him out to jail on the same night. George Fernandes was a firebrand trade union leader who led a 20-day railway strike in May 1974. He asked the railway workers to realise their collective power. A 7-day strike by them would close down every thermal power plant in the country. 10-days’ strike would shut down every steel plant which would then take up to a year and considerable expenses to restart. Moreover, L N Mishra, who was the Union railway minister and a crony of Indira Gandhi, died in a bomb blast at the Samastipur railway platform in Bihar. The perpetrators were not found. In view of all these, the ethics of the Opposition protests should be re-examined by a neutral party now – at a distance of fifty years chronologically from those fateful incidents.

The book provides a good coverage of the activities of the Indians for Democracy (IFD) organisation in the US. Several times they marched to the Indian embassy or local consulates holding placards and raising slogans. Official propaganda meetings were intercepted and tough questions asked to the local or visiting dignitaries. They also organised a 200-mile walking procession to rouse awareness of India’s fall along a slippery slope to authoritarianism. With press censorship in full throttle in India, the only arena left for the counterargument to exist was the international stage, especially the US and the UK. However, the monotony and low-key of the protests turned even the ardent volunteers off. About seven months after they had begun, the program slowed down because they were only repeating the speeches and was far away from home. All of them had other regular and full-time academic and professional duties to attend to. The regime retaliated with brutal swiftness. Scholarships of several students who participated in the protests were revoked and several passports were impounded. Anand Kumar of Chicago had a tough time managing a year without financial support. When the Janata government came to power after the Emergency, his scholarship was restored with retrospective effect. The year 1976 was not like the previous year for the protestors in America. The Western press took a graver turn when the general elections scheduled for that year was indefinitely postponed. It was a kind of confirmation of dictatorship. Some Indian leaders escaped from India through adventurous means to reach the US. Their work on foreign soil are also catalogued in the book. Subramanian Swamy set up the Friends of India Society International (FISI) which had RSS links. IFD had an uneasy relationship with it due to its socialist bias, but they got on well in view of the common enemy who was browbeating both. Ram Jethmalani also escaped to the US and obtained political asylum there in 1976, becoming the first Indian to get asylum from the Indira regime.

We also read about some eminent individuals who either came in support of the Emergency or were not vocal enough in opposing it. Non-political scientists and other professionals were understandably reluctant to take the plunge which was sure to divert them away from their academic pursuits. However, the leaders of the IFD were also professionals or scientists, so there was no hard and fast rule on who could qualify for volunteering for democracy. Noted physicist S. Chandrashekhar, later a Nobel laureate, and A K Ramanujan, eminent linguist and litterateur (not to be confused with the famous mathematician) were in the University of Chicago at that time engaged in research, but they were not interested in supporting the protests. There is a chapter on T N Kaul, who was India’s ambassador to the US during the Emergency, and was personally so close to the prime minister as to address her ‘Indu’, stoutly defended the Emergency at every step as directed by Indira. But after a few years since stepping down, he changed tone and admitted that Indira was surrounded by self-seeking sycophants and democracy was indeed in danger at that time. Powerful Christian groups in the US wholeheartedly supported the Emergency and came out in vocal agreement with it when the US Congress constituted a committee under Donald Fraser. James K Matthews, Bishop of the Washington area of the United Methodist Church and Charles Reynolds, secretary of the Ludhiana Christian Medical College, took the trouble to testify before the Congressional committee to extol the Emergency, but the prudent committee did not take them seriously.

Raju has followed a non-partisan approach throughout the narrative with a distinct negative bias. He includes the arguments against a particular organisation or individual without bothering to look deep into it or attempting to verify it. However, he leaves no party untainted and in that sense, keeps a fair and neutral stand. His characterizations are stellar and deeply convincing. He claims that the police ran the country during the Emergency and each police station was an independent republic with its own set of arbitrary rules, applied differently to different people. His observations on the extreme left faction, who were called Naxals, are noteworthy. Organisations like the IPANA were Naxal-minded. They were not angry with Indira Gandhi alone for having proclaimed the Emergency; they were angry with everything connected to the freedom struggle and since India’s independence. The book sports excellent diction. Rarely do we come across books of this genre. It was a pleasure to read Raju’s turns of phrase and assimilate the fine nuances. The book was written based on personal interviews conducted during the early-2020s, but the passage of half a century has not dimmed the colour nor dulled the pungency of the narrative of the protests which was a labour of conscience.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

India@100

Title: India@100 – Envisioning Tomorrow’s Economic Powerhouse
Author: Krishnamurthy Subramanian
Publisher: Rupa Publications, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9789390260836
Pages: 497

India’s stature on international platforms post-independence was that of a pygmy because of its poor economic clout. Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister, self-delusively believed that the circus he set up – called Non-Aligned Movement – would guide the world into new paths in international relations. But the plain fact was that nobody took any serious note of a block of nations which struggled even to feed its people. The stark truth in global power dynamics is that unless you are economically well off, you are nothing. At the most, a poor country can hope to be a pawn in the power play and get some crumbs off the table. After the 1991 reforms, India grew in size financially and she is perceived as such by the great powers. Trump’s additional tariffs for India’s purchase of Russian oil is an unwilling recognition of this truth. The country is on its way to become viksit (fully developed) by 2047, when it celebrates a century of political independence. The 2047 target has catalysed policy formulations at the government level and a distinct push towards that goal is clearly perceptible in the economy. This book explores the strategies India must pursue to achieve the target of 8 per cent growth in the next two decades to reach the target of a 55 trillion-dollar economy when India is at 100 in 2047. The book suggests the four pillars of macroeconomic focus on growth, inclusive growth for a large middle class, ethical wealth creation and a virtuous cycle ignited by private investment. The entire book illustrates these four concepts in good detail. Krishnamurthy V. Subramanian is an executive director of the IMF and professor at the Indian School of Business (ISB). He was the chief economic advisor to the government of India from 2018 to 2021. He was born in a Tamil family.

To be able to see the country blossom into the dawn of developed status in one’s lifetime is an unalloyed bliss for any citizen. Subramanian makes a painstaking analysis of the factors which guide this transition. Its greatest asset as the most populous country in the world is the people itself. Fortunately for us, India has entered the demographic phase in which a large share of the population is working age – between 15 and 64. India will remain in this demographic dividend zone for over two decades. In 2011, the working age population was 50.5 per cent of the overall; in 2041, it is expected to raise to 60 per cent. The author’s estimation of reaching 55 trillion dollars in 2047 looks like the height of optimism, because some reputed rating agencies approximate the size to only half of this figure. However, the author is quite persistent and fairly convinced that the country can achieve this goal if it necessarily grows the GDP at a rate of 8 per cent per year for the next two decades. India is at the position where China was in 2007. They grew at 7.7 per cent thereafter for 16 years. Given India’s demographic dividend, it has the potential to achieve similar growth rates, provided there is a supportive economic policy. Another factor which can help make the switch is that about half of India’s economy is still informal. Formalization of this sector can provide growth through productivity improvement.

The book discusses about some of the blunders of India’s socialist-era economic policy promoted by Nehru and Indira Gandhi and dismantled by P V Narasimha Rao. A relic of this socialist era is the perception that creation of wealth is somehow immoral and evil. This mindset still remains in some of the influential circles and must be shed, the sooner the better. India must also boldly jettison anachronistic ideologies about the large and pervasive role of the state as the provider of employment and producer of goods. Except for some strategically critical sectors, where the state’s role cannot be ceded to the private sector, the government needs to get out of business to enable better business. Subramanian also advises the government to adopt protectionist measures if it would help local industry even at the cost of stoking ire on the part of developed nations. Before attaining economic advancement, these same advanced countries used the same insular policies for which they shun the developing economies now. In the present day itself, when they face financial difficulties, they resort to the same tariff- and non-tariff-barriers in trade. This book was written last year in 2024, but Trump’s tariffs vindicated this prophecy. The author also calls out overzealous thrust for equity which is prevalent in social circles. While we desire an equitable society, excessive redistribution can dull incentives. In most cases, inequality of opportunity is much more objectionable than inequality of outcomes. Perfect equalisation of outcomes after the efforts have been exerted to obtain those outcomes, can reduce individual’s incentives for work, innovation and wealth creation. Inequality is not poverty; in fact, increase in inequality is most often accompanied by reduction in poverty. This book suggests that poverty alleviation through growth should be India’s central strategy. High growth rate will lead to lower debt-to-GDP ratio. So, government should borrow more to fund investments in digital, physical and human capital, where the human capital encompasses investments in healthcare and education. The directive to borrow more may run counter to established wisdom in this regard.

Subramanian was chief economic advisor of India in the Covid period and it is natural that he reminisces about it and brags a little about his achievements in that difficult and unprecedented period. India’s economic policy during the Covid 19 disruption is compared to its response to the 2008 global financial crisis. The Covid response was well-conceptualized and ab initio for the needs of the economy rather than a copy-paste of policies implemented by advanced nations. This was not so in 2008 and that was why India soon ended up in the ‘fragile five’ list by 2013. The author also advises about the Middle Income Trap which is usually encountered by rapidly expanding less-developed countries in their stride. This arises when fast-growing economies experience rising wages and struggle to sustain an economy that is based on labour-intensive manufacturing and export-led growth. However, he finds a ray of hope through which India might evade this trap. The productivity improvements driven by reforms suggest that the necessary conditions for avoiding the middle-income trap is being fulfilled in India. This is because India’s growth since the 1990s manifested more from growth in capital and productivity, with labour contributing very little. However, it may produce other problems such as an exacerbating inequality in societies and may create fault lines. The final two sections of the book are dedicated to healthcare and education that should develop a labour force which will take India to prosperity.

The author looks into every aspect of the economy and administration and suggests sweeping reforms in many sectors which would ease the way to India@100. The suggested judicial reforms skip all contentious issues regarding the appointment of judges. To clear pending cases and to ensure a 100 per cent clearance ratio of new cases, he suggests that more judges are to be appointed. The book recommends movement of professionals from private sector to middle-level government bureaucracy and vice versa. The government should simplify the regulations and allow some discretion in decision-making. Ex-ante accountability and ex-post supervision should be strengthened. The book also calls for agricultural reforms that benefits the small, marginal farmers who constitute 85 per cent of the households. The vocal minority of rich farmers in Punjab and Haryana earn most of the government’s largesse. These vested interests oppose real farm reforms. Profits of these farmers are also tax-free as agricultural income is not taxed. It is obvious that this observation was formulated in the wake of the repeal of government’s farm laws in response to the high profile agitation engineered by the rich farmers around Delhi. It is also suggested to relax restrictions on agricultural land conversion for alternate uses. Currently, these restrictions depress the value of agricultural land and pose obstacles to transitioning out of agriculture. This rule prevents other types of land to be converted to farm use. Aggressive privatisation of public sector enterprises is advised because it unlocks the potential of PSEs to create wealth.

It’s a no-brainer that private enterprise should be encouraged to the maximum to bring out the best in the economy and to reach fully developed status by 2047. The author makes some prescient observations in this regard. Private investment is the key driver that drives demand, creates capacity, increases labour productivity, introduces new technology, allows creative destruction of uncompetitive enterprises and generates jobs. India’s economic prosperity till the eighteenth century and her economic progress post-liberalization in 1991 demonstrate that the secret to sustained prosperity lies in enabling private enterprise in sectors where government has no business to be in business. A policy stance in favour of competitive markets and free enterprise – in short, pro-business – is often confused with a pro-cronyism stance. Competition will lead to creative destruction of some companies and generate more wealth for the whole sector. When creative destruction is fostered, sectors as a whole will always outperform individual companies within the sector. R&D investment is another area that needs to be strengthened. India’s R&D expenditure at 0.65 per cent of GDP is very low as compared to 2.5 – 3 per cent of advanced economies, primarily because of the disproportionately lower contribution from business sector. Government alone does the heavy lifting in this field and this should change. Manufacturing is also an essential sector India must accord priority to. Higher wages and lower uncertainty in this sector increase aggregate consumption more than service sector jobs.

Frankly speaking, this books flies over the heads of most readers who are not so familiar with the vocabulary of macroeconomics. The author uses a top class methodology of sophisticated charts and diagrams to prove the truth in his line of thought. These diagrams are too small in most cases and monochrome print has robbed some of its relevance. These look best if presented on to a big screen in full colour display. The publisher could have set up an online resource page to access these diagrams dynamically and in higher resolution so that some of the readers could follow through the argument. This book targets pragmatic administrators, visionary politicians and patriotic influencers who want to bring in change for the better. The targets Subramanian has chosen are very ambitious and there is every likelihood that they may be missed. Still, getting somewhere ahead and within a short range of the ultimate aim would itself be a tremendous achievement that will transform the lives of Indian society for the better.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star