City on Fire

Title: City on Fire – A Boyhood in Aligarh
Author: Zeyad Masroor Khan
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9789356998247
Pages: 294

In 2017, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman vowed to make Saudi Arabia ‘a bastion of moderate Islam’. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan retorted that ‘Islam cannot be either moderate or non-moderate. Islam can only be one thing’. Of course, he didn’t specify which one. When a terrorist attack takes place, or more commonly when jihadist propaganda is loosened on social media, we wonder why the ‘moderate’ Muslims are silent or inactive in the face of effervescence on the extremists’ part. Instead of addressing the social evils associated with the community such as polygamy, arbitrary termination of marriages at the husband’s whim, discriminatory treatment of women in distribution of family property and a host of other such issues, the so-called moderates blame others for offending the hardliners through any real or imagined action. The true fact is that notions of religious supremacy and the desire to dominate over the other religions are what make the hardliners restless, but the moderates adroitly obfuscate it and loudly play the victim card to find justifications for the physical or ideological violence exerted by the jihadists. This leads us to conclude that Erdogan is, after all, quite right in what he said. This book from Zeyad Masroor Khan is about his life in Aligarh which is marked by frequent skirmishes and riots between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Khan finds the conditions repeated in Delhi as well where he worked as a journalist. The author is a journalist, writer and documentary film-maker based in New Delhi. He has worked with national and international media companies like Reuters, Vice, Brut and Deccan Herald. This is his first book.

Surprisingly for a native, Khan is unusually circumspect and subdued in extolling the legacy of Aligarh in deciding the destiny of the subcontinent. Aligarh was the epicentre of the Pakistan Movement and the nerve centre of the seditious campaign that ended up in the partition of the country. Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan were carried on the shoulders of students whenever they visited the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) which was their intellectual headquarters. Yasmin Khan notes in her book ‘The Great Partition’ that there were student leaders in AMU who openly boasted to have killed Hindus in riots (read my review of ‘The Great Partition’ here). Aligarh Muslims voted en masse for the Muslim League and thronged in support to its policies. The polling data leaves no doubt on the total support the League enjoyed. But when Partition actually came, they chose to happily stay back in India. The author says that after Partition, his grandfather ‘believed in Gandhi and wanted to stay in a secular India’. The author also comments on the violent methods used by the Pakistan supporters: ‘riots were taking place, people were butchered on the streets, trains were robbed and houses set on fire’ (p.21). With this truculent past behind their back, Zeyad Khan is acting astonished that the Hindus were not on friendly terms with them after partition. Communal riots were very common in Aligarh. The book talks about secret electric switches wired in Muslim areas for sounding emergency alarms to quickly gather people for fighting the Hindus.

This book is thoroughly hostile to Hindus and contains unmitigated hatred towards them. All Hindus are straitjacketed to be antagonistic towards Muslims. Some quotes from the book would help to uncover the fangs of venom concealed in the text: “Even the Hindus respected Ishrat Bhai for his honesty” (p.31), “Even the Hindus here are nicer than those from other neighbourhoods” (p.12, speaking about Uparkot), “During riots, Rasool’s house was attacked first, even if they acted all friendly with their Hindu neighbours” (p.32), “In my dreams, I’d see Hindus entering my home and setting it ablaze” (p.247). Muslims living among Hindus on very friendly terms were said to be mercilessly and treacherously assaulted during riots. The constant refrain of the book is that Hindus cheat. If the word ‘Hindu’ was replaced by ‘Jew’, this book would’ve been proscribed as a classic case of anti-Semitism. Beneath all these charades, the author’s real intention to play the victim card on Muslims comes out in the open. Khan is also careful to distinguish Hindus into upper caste and rich businessmen, lower caste labourers who are as poor as Muslims and Dalits (p.14). This newfound sympathy for the oppressed is just another masquerade for cutting down the tall poppy rather than upliftment of the downtrodden. Whenever a riot occurs, it is the Hindu who is on the other side, without any subtle caste demarcations.

The extraordinary effort exerted by Khan in appearing temperamentally indistinguishable from a boy who grew up in the 1990s elsewhere would’ve been appreciable had it not been used for giving respectability to his sinister and vicious narrative. His interest in comic books as a child helped to foster his faculty in handling languages. But the places to access these books were in Hindu areas and Khan narrates going about these places in trepidation that the Hindus may attack him. On the other hand, comic books were considered ‘the pinnacle of wise’ in his family. Drawing or seeing pictures is frowned upon in Islam. Practising music also infuriated some of his family members. Muslim children dutifully attended local madrassas while the author enjoyed reading comic books in Hindu areas. The comics told the story of a detective duo Ram and Rahim who intervened to save the country from aggression. Even though these books thus carried the rudiments of secularism and living in a pluralistic society, the author is anguished that “Muslims were never the central characters in any comic books. They were only the sidekicks and villains, a trend that continued in almost all the ones I read” (p.66). That’s simply because most of the Muslim children didn’t read them! In the books they actually read at madrassas, infidels were the villains. You get heroes in books who appeal to the bulk of its readers. As years go by, Khan tries his best to look and sound like a regular, mainstream school-going boy interested in Cartoon channel and video games. His discusses about a lot of cartoon characters he found attractive on TV. At times, he appeals to reason, ridiculing Muslims’ belief in djinns and spirits. He even pretends to be rational, but beneath this thin veil lurks his poisonous divisive agenda of being victimized in spite of holding all these ‘modern’ habits and tastes. He even feigns that he didn’t know how to offer namaz though he joined the hard-line Tablighi Jamaat a few years later. Khan also confesses that Osama bin Laden was a hero for him after 9/11 and dreamed of the Arab terrorist defeating the US in Afghanistan and then taking over Pakistan and India. He also dreamed that it would lead to Islam’s domination over the whole world. All this is written in a half-humorous way designed to disarm sceptics who might not read the whole book and to wriggle himself free of allegations of vituperation. A careful scrutiny will expose the vicious payload of communal hatred cloaked under the blanket of superficial humour.

Khan’s reproduction of communal unrest in Aligarh is deviously and shamelessly partisan. It serves only to bolster the Left/Islamist propaganda that Muslims are scared to live in India. Such an argument strengthens only the anti-national narrative. Mindless exaggeration oozes out of assertions like “all people in Muslim neighbourhoods lived in anticipation of the bad times that were always round the corner”. Communal tension is said to be a part of existence for Muslims around which the lives of everyone were moulded. This book narrates fine details of violence in which Muslims got killed or injured. These are so one-sided and quoting abuses verbatim that they appear to be insinuations for taking revenge. Aligarh has a history of communal rioting going back several centuries but for the author it mysteriously starts only in 1984 following the build-up of the Ayodhya temple movement. The narrative maliciously and cleverly omits the Rushdie ‘Satanic Verses’ and Shah Bano agitations in which Muslims went on the rampage. At one point, the author is forced to admit that Hindus also were killed in the riots but he rues that they were “fewer in numbers than the Muslims” and makes a sneering comment that “these were small sacrifices to achieve larger goals” (p.172). All the violent scenes portrayed in the book appear to be concocted fantasies and they always take place ‘a few feet away from a police station’ where the policemen ignored appeals for help. On the other hand, he proudly describes how BJP leaders were killed in retaliation (p.180) who were suspected to be behind attacks on Muslims. Khan notes some curious characteristics of AMU professors. Most of them have an ancestral connection to nawabs, zamindars or rich families. Only a few have risen from underprivileged backgrounds. Most are anti-student and part of regional lobbies. Occasionally, there were professors who became goons themselves and carried country-made guns in their pockets (p.188). This confirms Yasmin Khan’s observations referred to in Para 2 above.

It is astonishing that the author maintains his sentiment of hate for most of the narrative. He has packed that much malice in this book. Many a times the readers vainly hope that the verbs and adjectives are being used in half-jest, but it’s not so. Like a guided missile evading and going around obstacles to home in on the target, Khan is very focussed and totally dedicated to deliver his communal payload even though sometimes he acts like a rationalist or a leftist. Any Muslim reading this book will naturally feel pain and get offended. This is quite expected as the story is carefully crafted to produce this effect. Only the last five pages of the book are free from spite. In fact, this portion which tells about the author’s long walks in Aligarh after abandoning his job in Delhi in the aftermath of Covid, is the only saving grace. Then the author observes Hindus living alongside Muslims – as if for the first time – and realizes that they too belong to the Homo sapiens species. Like a flash of lightning suddenly illuminating a dark landscape, his bigoted mind escapes its shackles for a brief moment to realize that ‘forgiveness, coexistence, compassion, empathy and respect’ are the characters which are required to be instilled in every person for a harmonious communal life in India. At this instant, the author acknowledges workers everywhere in the world for giving him hope through their resilience and courage. This looks like a weak strategic ploy to appear leftist rather than borne from any genuine conviction or empathy.

In the beginning of the book, Khan records that ‘slight exaggeration is an inextricable part of Aligarh’s culture. If somebody from Aligarh tells you a story, take it with a grain of salt’ (p.4). Readers are advised to keep this confession in mind while reading through the author’s communally prejudiced rant. However, the exaggeration in this book is not at all slight and you require a full chest of salt to make it palatable. The author has a western audience in mind, possibly of the NGO variety, while telling his story. Usual tropes of foreign authors in India such as pot-holed roads, open drains, nightly power outages, stench from drains and garbage accumulated in streets are mentioned many times for effect even though not exactly suited or even relevant in the context.

This book is a piece of Islamist propaganda and it’s astonishing why HarperCollins chose to publish it. The book is not at all recommended.

Some other books which features Aligarh in a prominent way and were reviewed earlier here are

a)    Aligarh’s First Generation by David Lelyveld (read review here)
b)    Separatism among Indian Muslims by Francis Robinson (read review here)
c)    The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan (read review here)

Rating: 1 Star

Nationalism without a Nation in India

Title: Nationalism without a Nation in India
Author: G. Aloysius
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998 (First published 1997)
ISBN: 9780195641042
Pages: 265

When the British established their colonial supremacy in India, they brought into being the political unification of the country the scale of which it had not witnessed in several centuries. When the time came to say goodbye to the empire, they were apprehensive about the future of this political unity. Amazingly for them and other Eurocentric doomsayers, India exhibited a remarkable coherence and integrity. There were Western observers who wondered how Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu remained part of the same nation while comparable entities in Europe such as France and England are articulated into mutually hostile nation-states. The prime reason for this harmonious existence is the cultural unity of India that binds varied ethnicities, religions, languages and customs to fuse together. Liberal – especially of the Left-leaning type – scholars find this difficult to swallow and come up with theories which speculate about an impending fall of the Indian nation because of the incongruence of its subject parts. This book is one among this genre that attempts ‘a sociological study of nationalism using the two central theories of social structure and social change as a framework for investigating different spheres of nationalism’. It then concludes that instead of giving birth to one national society, nationalism seems to have delivered a whole litter of communities divided from one another in terms of language, religion, region or caste. G. Aloysius studied at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and is widely known for sociological studies on Indian society and research on social and tribal movements of India.

Aloysius starts with a rhetorical observation that pan-Indian nationalism is elitist, false and insensitive to regional variations. Caste system and its ideology permeated the entire region as the clearest form of hierarchical structuring of society. Brahmins and other upper castes dominated all others and maintained hegemony in the unchanging rural landscape. This was upheld by the political power, both native as well as imperialist. Despite the rise and fall of dynasties and change in political boundaries, the social order remained stable as a ‘universalized norm of custom and tradition’. Resistance to this order was also part and parcel of the tradition from the beginning. The Brahminic system was resisted by heterodox sects like ajivikas and shramanas in the ancient period and sects such as Vira Shaivism, Sikhism and Kabirpanth in medieval times. Contrary to the nationalist claim that the British occupation messed up the natural societal order, Aloysius absolves the imperialists of any such responsibility. The British did not and could not effect any serious change in Indian society and the old order won in the end (p.34).

The book then makes some serious audit of the British Raj in the nineteenth century. It claims that the British only wanted to ensure sufficient revenue for themselves and enjoined the upper castes to be a part of the governing structure. Colonial rule only strengthened the existing caste hierarchy by channelling it into the newly created power machinery. Entering the bureaucracy was through modern education which was monopolized by upper castes. There was no change in agrarian relations too as the government chose not to intervene in social issues. Lower caste movements took part in nation-making at this point by fighting for the concepts of equal social rights leading to citizenship, mass literacy and social-spatial mobility as a new principle of social life. Jotiba Phule elaborated the ideology of Dravidian origin to counter the prevalent Aryan theory of race among Brahmins (p.61). Here the author forgets to mention that the Aryan invasion hypothesis was invented by the British and not the Brahmins. By pushing in the concept of race with this false statement, Aloysius makes an outrageous assessment that the birth and growth of Indian nationalist movement was tinged with racist sentiments and overtones (p.94) thereby making it palatable to his European audience. The 1857 rebellion is said to be based on antagonism with the British largely based on race, religion and colour. In fact, this trope is first introduced in the preface itself which claims that discussions of nationalism in India ranged between sheer xenophobia and ‘sacred patriotism’. This is totally wrong and against the Indian spirit of toleration and assimilation which was never xenophobic. Aloysius seems to be confusing xenophobia with self-defence against foreign invaders.

The book makes a critical study of the religions in India and identifies Hinduism as the root and sole cause of the nation’s backwardness and social oppression. However, in order to appear objective, he cleverly calls it Brahminism when it suits him and goes all out in criticising it. He vacuously asserts that other religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are egalitarian but Brahminism alone was exploitative. He enthusiastically lauds the missionaries and evangelists since “the evangelists were ferocious in their attack on the inegalitarian nature of social Hinduism” (p.47). Aloysius suggests religious conversion as a way to gain strength and respect for the lower castes. As an illustration, he claims that “Shanar movement [in Kerala and Tamil Nadu] gained additional strength through mass conversions to Christianity in their civil disabilities” (p.56). If the Shanars turned en masse to Christianity, they were no longer Shanars as per caste custom. The author drops an unintended hint that these people continued to be looked upon with their previous caste identity even after conversion. Aloysius then proudly lists conversion to Christianity as a good alternative to ‘caste slavery’ and fumes at those who call the converts ‘rice Christians’ (p.70).

The burning issue in the years leading to independence in 1947 was whether Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct nations who cannot cohabit together. A lot of heated discourse and human blood flowed to finally settle this issue by partitioning the country. In this context, it is astonishing that Aloysius has totally ignored this point in this work on ‘creating the Indian nation’. Apart from some half-hearted comments on the Muslim elite creating a constituency of their own, this book skirts this crucial subject. The reason is only too obvious. Like all Leftist scholars, he doesn’t want to invite the ire of Islamists and thereby forego their patronage. Instead, he clubs Muslims along with Dalits and other lower castes and depicts them as equally suffering from the atrocities of the upper castes. This leads him to suggest harmony and alliance between them and the lower castes which forces him to invent excuses when such camaraderie was not actually seen anywhere in practice. The Nama Shudras and Muslims were said to be allies in East Bengal against the higher castes. However, in communal riots which frequently occurred, the Nama Shudras were at the receiving end of the violence along with the upper castes in equal measure. Aloysius lightens this contradiction with the remark that it was only the result of ‘near-equal communities competing for the same set of opportunities’ (p.65). But when Kshatriya landlords attacked Noniyas who were their tenants, it was not a local landlord-tenant issue, but an example of caste oppression (p.66). The author also narrates some lofty daydreams on Muslim political awakening. The deprivation caused by the new dispensation of power in favour of upper caste Hindus led to the birth of Muslim nationalism. This author never suspects Muslim exclusivism or plain religious fanaticism behind it. In fact, the alliance between Muslims and the lower castes was only a temporarily prudent strategy to dent the numerical superiority of Hindus and to divide and weaken them further. The so-called upper caste ideology talked about the nation and not about religion, but the author castigates it to be communal. On the other hand, the Muslim demand for Pakistan was openly based on religion but Aloysius finds true national spirit there which was antagonized by Hindu separatism. The Moplah riot of 1921 in Malabar which was an ethnic cleansing of Hindus is presented as an agrarian rebellion in which ‘the polluted castes were spared as a rule while murderous attacks were against oppressive upper castes’ (p.88). Apart from the moral question of justifying violence directed against a community on ideological grounds for being ‘oppressors’, this statement is totally false. There were numerous instances in the riots in which lower castes were also targeted (see my review of Beyond Rampage: West Asian Contacts of Malabar and Khilafat here for more details on this).

Aloysius’ theory of the birth of Indian nationalism can be condensed in a nutshell: the upper castes devised it to maintain their monopoly on state power when the ‘benign’ British gradually began to accommodate the interests of the lower castes. When the share of land revenue in national income dwindled in the 1870s, the British extended protective measures, education and employment to lower castes. Resentment on this count caused the germination of nationalism. Aloysius wastes no opportunity to drive a wedge between the upper and lower castes of Hinduism and to destroy the very fabric of Indian society in the resultant conflagration he thirsts to witness. In response to the British challenge on upper caste monopoly of power, they introduced reforms and revival of the Brahminical ideology. This helped it to settle on reincarnating itself as pan-Indian political-national Hinduism. This provided a context for the politico-economic interests of the same social forces to transform itself as nationalism. By the term ‘they’, the author means Brahmins and a small circle of upper castes centred around them. Moreover, cultural nationalism was constructed in India by the deep commitment and contribution of imperialist and orientalist scholarship (p.135). With this statement, Aloysius transfers the credit for creating nationalism back to the British and alleges that India’s national leaders were afraid of the masses they were supposed to be leading. Due to this mortal fright of the masses, they sought British protection from them (p.117). This set of conclusions is natural as most of the sources and references of this book’s research are colonial scholars. It is true that there was reaction from Orthodox sections against the concept of equality extended to oppressed castes. This does not include the core group of nationalism. But Aloysius maliciously club them together to claim that all of them worked to sabotage the concept of equal rights to subaltern people.

Gandhi’s devotees would cringe with unease at the level of criticism this book levels against him. Aloysius acknowledges that the Gandhian era (1920-1947) of the national movement was multi-class and mass-based. It gained politico-moral legitimacy and achieved enormous power. The author proposes five factors that elevated the image of Gandhi as an ‘event’ or phenomenon, which are a) Congress which was symbiotically related to Gandhi b) the colonial rulers who magnified the Gandhi image c) the support of Gujarati and Marwari communities d) private army of ashram members and volunteers who provided a spiritualist aura to what Gandhi said and did and e) multiplicity of local interpretations of the Gandhian national message. Gandhi functioned as an intra-party dictator and demanded absolute loyalty from other members. His constructive programs, such as eradication of untouchability, were cul-de-sacs that diverted the attention of lower caste reformers and channelled their energy away from the national movement. This is alleged to have helped ensure upper caste monopoly of the new power structure that was emerging with the British exit. Gandhi offered religion to the lower caste masses and politics for the upper caste nationalists. Aloysius never stops to answer the obvious question of why then, did a Brahmin shot him dead. By adopting khilafat and anti-untouchability programs as separate effort for the communities, the author claims that Gandhi destroyed the unity that was developing between the lower castes and Muslims.

Though the purpose of this book is to destroy or prevent whatever unity exists among Hindu communities. He attempts this by harping on the refrain that upper castes still continue to wreak any social improvements. The author considers the lower caste leaders to be not worthy enough to fight the upper castes on their own strength. Incompetence of lower castes is a recurring theme in this work that crops up at several places in the narrative. In fact, it is the narrative. His temerity to downgrade luminaries such as Jotiba Phule, Sri Narayana Guru, E V Ramaswamy Naicker and B R Ambedkar is galling. He does so with the comment that ‘though these people articulated against the cultural nationalism of dominant castes, since ideological articulation was not the forte of subaltern people, the writings and speeches of their spokesmen are not to be taken as the sole source from which to interpret the subaltern weltanschauung’ (p.146). In short, this is like saying “you are good for nothing; but don’t worry, we’ll do your work for you”. This author seems not to have encountered even one of Ambedkar’s works which are brilliantly argued with logic and backed by facts. It was not for nothing that he was trained in constitutional law! Aloysius’ subtle hint to the subaltern people is to wait for a messiah to arise from among the liberals. Probably he fancies himself for this role? Otherwise, they will forever by branded with the oppressed identity and myopic view which can’t see past their communal framework. Aloysius’ evil intent is discernible at another place in which he declares that the ‘golden age of Paraiahs was the eighteenth century when Brahmins and respectable people were murdered in their beds and chased by marauding armies’ (p.32). This does not mean that the Paraiahs did it, but suggests that since the Brahmins suffered, the lower castes enjoyed it. This is nothing short of an evil attempt to perpetuate caste rivalry. Rajiv Malhotra’s comments in ‘Breaking India’ (reviewed earlier here) are noteworthy in this context. Malhotra proves that Leftists and neo-colonial scholars strike at every fault line in Hindu society in an attempt to forestall unity of purpose among the various communities comprising it.

This book by G. Aloysius is nothing but an unalloyed long polemic not only against Indian cultural nationalism but against our entire politico-social norms as well. This brings to mind Macaulay’s quote that the real purpose of colonial education in India is to ‘create a people Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect’. Reading this book of unabashed eurocentrism, readers wonder not that the author is Macaulay’s child, but his clone! Recently, a British financial journalist remarked that ‘it can often seem a triumph that India exists at all’. It is indeed so, if you pause to observe that spiteful scholars such as this one are continuously chipping away at the foundations of the Indian nation and society with their classist falsehoods. What the author accepts as reliable are quotes from Marx and missionaries only. Some of the corrosive remarks found in the book may be listed below. This list is not comprehensive.

a)    India’s centralizing state is armed to the teeth against its own people (p.2)
b)    Pan-Indian polity no longer attracts the allegiance of the majority of the masses (p.2)
c)    The cleavage within the hierarchical, pre-modern Indian society are at least as important a contradiction as the cleavage between the Indian and the British (p.18)
d)    India’s nationalism is merely a tactical cover up for individual and group pursuit of power, position and profit (p.96)

The book is full of heavy academic jargon and is a burden to read. The author’s condescending attitude to the subaltern people and the air of being their all-knowing guide who knows their things better than them is irritating as well as illogical. Altogether, the reading experience was a waste of time.

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star

Academic Hinduphobia

Title: Academic Hinduphobia – A Critique of Wendy Doniger’s Erotic School of Indology
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher: Voice of India, 2017 (First published 2016)
ISBN: 9789385485015
Pages: 426

Rajiv Malhotra is a lone knight fighting for the honour of everything Indian – our culture, language, religion and way of life – in the western world. If gullible Indians can be metaphorically thought of as an old man with poor eyesight and Western scholarship on India as a book with a very fine print, Malhotra is the magnifying glass which sharpens the vision of the naive and also exposes what is written between the lines which one cannot see otherwise. This book explains about the secret agenda of woke scholars of Sanskrit and how they deconstruct India’s religion and philosophy to make it appear exploitative and repressive. Another deviant trait observed in Western scholars such as Wendy Doniger is the excessively overt and bordering on the vulgar sexual vocabulary which permeates their work but which does not faithfully describe the original. Such pathetic exposition of Hinduism and Sanskrit is a clever strategy of these neo-colonial academicians to drive away new initiates and to create revulsion among practicing Hindus about their religion which would make them ashamed of it as a first step to further long-term targets like conversion on a massive scale. No other major world faith is studied by outsiders with the same authority, power and negative perspective as Hinduism is. All academic conferences and seminars are dominated by Western ‘experts’ rather than practicing Hindus. The distortion caused by these influences are identified by the author and presented in a clear and easily understandable form. This is a collection of various essays and articles written by the author against specific books and authors as a part of argument and counter-argument. The period of activity is generally the first decade of this century.

Malhotra identifies the fundamental problem of Indological studies as compared to other cultures. Even though Indians routinely occupy high positions in science, technology, business and other professions, Indology remains the last stronghold of colonialism. It is only a layer of elites from within the colonised culture who are groomed to become proxies for the tradition. They often consider biases against Indic traditions as a great compliment to their own sense of modernity and also as a great Western gift to the Indians. When this mental colonialism is pointed out to them, it evokes severe anger and defensiveness. This engenders a peculiar situation in which a culture is being represented by people who are mentally alien to it. In the West, neo-colonial scholars and their Indian proxies have created a playground which is unfairly tilted against India. To have a genuine dialog of civilizations, the ‘other’ side must be present as itself and not in proxy. It must be able to use its own framework to represent itself and must be free to criticize the dominant culture without fear of undue censorship or academic reprisals. But in the West, especially the US, leading professors of Sanskrit wield tremendous power over the students in controlling their career both pre- and post-college such as withholding research grants or denying the chance to participate in academic conferences which are handsomely financed. This makes all the students to toe their guide’s line. This is analogous to the sepoys and coolies trained and employed by the English East India Company in colonial times to do their dirty work.

It is essential to understand the origins of this estrangement of Indian elite with Sanskrit and the ritualistic practises of Hinduism. This developed in the colonial period when the British faced an urgent necessity to understand Sanskrit scriptures. However, these texts were detached from the realm of secular scholars who were immersed in the prevailing court language of Persian in all the Muslim states. This left only a few priests or religiously-minded people who had mastered the Sanskrit texts available to the British. The British stepped into the shoes of the secular scholar, mastered the ancient rule books and statutes and reinterpreted them to suit their immediate need to administer the country without upsetting the delicate socio-religious pivot. Due to reasons of presumed racial superiority or evangelism, they continued to harbour a clear disdain to the philosophy at the same time. This was in turn taken up by secular Indian scholars after independence. On the political front, the British managed the native states and facilities for the Indian princes. Likewise, they also became trustees of scholarship and thereby to control the intellectual representation systems of India. The technique was to master Sanskrit texts first, then to translate Indic texts while reinterpreting them using the Western narrative. It ensured to maintain the aura of authenticity by using enough Sanskrit verses. Even now, Indians show great respect and favour to Westerners who read or chant Sanskrit hymns and assume them to be masters in a language which they have neglected to learn. This is the primary source of exploitation for agenda-driven scholars such as Wendy Doniger.

The author also tries to understand why such a discriminatory sheen was applied to religious studies in India, whereas in science and technology the country aspired for the best in the world. This deficit came about in post-independent India where religious studies were looked down upon on the basis of the ideal of secularism. The hallmark of a good education in an American liberal arts college involves the study of ancient Greek and Semitic thought, classical Roman, modern European and finally, American thought. This intellectual foundation is deemed essential regardless of one’s religious beliefs. The justification given for the study of Greek classics is not that they are perfectly correct in their worldview or that advancement in thought has not superseded them. These are rightly considered to be essential to understand the history of the Western mind. But Indian classics are equated with religion and hence shunned. Academics won’t touch them even with a very long pole. In the name of modernity and political correctness, Indian classics are virtually banished from India’s higher education. Malhotra comments that this policy would have made Macaulay – the British administrator who formulated the empire’s education system in India to create a set of zombies who would be ‘Indian in blood and colour but British in taste, opinions and morals’ – proud. This produced a strange circumstance in which one has to go to a British, American or German university to get an internationally competitive Ph.D in Sanskrit, Indian classics, Hinduism or Buddhism.

The book then goes on to dissect the works of some Western scholars who had made a mockery of their scholarly credentials by churning out outrageous assessments on their objects of study. The foremost in this group is Wendy Doniger whose book, ‘Hindus – An Alternative History’ created much indignation in India due to its salacious remarks about innocuous matters narrated in Indian sacred literature (reviewed earlier here). The author uses the epithet ‘Wendy’s Children’ to denote other scholars who follow her line. Doniger’s predilection for street language in Vedic translations/interpretations is widely criticized. She merely adds a Freudian coating to bring in a sleazy narrative. She is always obsessed with only one meaning for a Sanskrit term which would be the most sexual imaginable, obtained by stretching the imagery, overruling all other interpretations and varied aspects of meaning. Doniger’s books are fast-food like publications designed to attract attention, readership and sales but are devoid of meticulous scholarship or authenticity (one of her books which exhibit this point, ‘The Ring of Truth’ which purports to examine myths of sex and jewellery, was reviewed earlier. The areas of her real interest can also be gleaned from her book, ‘On Hinduism’ which was also reviewed earlier). Malhotra exposes the academic weaknesses of other scholars of Wendy’s genre such as Jeffrey Kripal, Sarah Caldwell, Paul Cortright and others. Kripal’s work, ‘Kali’s Child’ which portrays Ramakrishna Paramhamsa as a homosexual, works up only filth. Kripal doesn’t know Bengali and the author cites several fundamental errors.

Rajiv Malhotra postulates that the intentions of at least some of the Western scholars on attacking Indian belief systems and attendant philosophy are not so benign after all. He traces the parentage and source of funds of two prominent academicians to Western missionaries who worked in India or to Christian evangelical missions in the US. The Christian conditioning received as part of their religious education as a young student might have moulded their outlook of other religions. He points out a fundamental divergence in a critical aspect between Christianity and Indian religions. The Biblical myths subconsciously drive scholars’ behaviour. In the West, every human being is born sinner because of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve. Similarly, the cosmology of God vs Satan divides everything into Good/Evil essences that play out on earth. By contrast, the Self is the original divinity in Hinduism and so there is no external enemy. In the Mahabharata, the enemies are not evil but had only violated the dharma. Christianity glorified victimhood. Most Christian saints were martyrs who were killed by evil ‘others’. This also is a corollary of the good vs evil narrative. A good victim is glorified and becomes a role model. Jesus is history’s most famous victim. This archetype has played out in Western society in the form of praising victimhood as a sign of being good. These scholars’ denigration of sacred Indian symbols serves to embarrass impressionable Indians so that they feel pressured to dilute their Hindu identity. This does not mean that Indian society didn’t have its share of abuses or oppression like any other society does. The problem is when Western scholars point out Hinduism alone as the cause of this.

I had first thought this book to be a critique on Indian academia which is an unfettered theatre of Left-Islamist activists masquerading as professors but exhibiting an equally strong, if not harsher, Hinduphobia than their American counterparts. But this volume is concerned only with Western universities and the prejudices being nurtured in their precincts. This work is a little dated too, as the action and events referred in the text happened in the years straddling the new millennium. Some ideas, which we take for granted because it is so common, are analysed by Malhotra which convince the reader how much leeway is being granted to scholars who want to wreck the Indian culture from within. These people refer to Hinduism as Brahmanism. The author points this out as a pejorative name because by the same token, Christianity should be referred as ‘Popeism’ or ‘bishopism’. A major part of the book is concerned with the author’s arguments and correspondence against or with anti-Hindu scholars and his defence against their attacks. Some of the articles are unfortunately directed at a personal level. Harping on the Roma (gypsy) ethnicity of Jeffrey Kripal and the sexually abused past of Sarah Caldwell are two cases in point. Besides, the author’s defence of New Age Hindu gurus in the US over their sexual abuse of devotees are not warranted just because they are also targeted by the anti-Hindu academia. This is more fitting for anonymous social media chatter than for serious discourse. The book also includes several caricatures and cartoon depictions of the points detailed in the book which is very enlightening.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Communalism and Sexual Violence

Title: Communalism and Sexual Violence – Ahmedabad Since 1969

Author: Megha Kumar

Publisher: Tulika Books, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9789382381907

Pages: 255

 

Indian society is ruled and regulated by religion. Even though the country avows secularism, the dictates of religion often influence government action. India also allows its citizens to follow their own religious personal codes in matters of marriage, property and inheritance. Consequently, the Muslims still practice polygamy and denial of rights to women on their father’s property with the full support of the state. Till a decade ago, Christian women also had had no equal rights on their parental property if there was a male sibling. In such a powder keg of incompatible religious sentiment, even the slightest provocation has the potential to incite a communal riot in which men would be killed and their womenfolk sexually violated. Former Justice Markandeya Katju once remarked that one could foment communal trouble in Delhi for as little as Rs. 2000. With such a background in mind, we need to look back to the morning of Feb 27, 2002, when the Sabarmati Express carrying – among others – kar-sewaks returning from Ayodhya, stopped at Godhra station in Gujarat which was a Muslim-dominated area. There seemed to be a minor altercation between a few kar-sevaks and platform vendors. As the train started to move a little later, it was stopped and an angry Muslim mob armed with weapons and sticks surrounded the S-6 coach. They quickly doused the compartment with petrol and set it alight. Nobody was allowed to jump out. 58 Hindus, including women and children, were roasted alive in a few minutes. The nation was stunned at the unprecedented level of brutality from the minority community. The retaliation was swift and massive. Hundreds of Muslims were killed in Gujarat, many of them burnt alive and a lot of women paraded naked or gang-raped. Incidents that shocked human sensibility occurred in a few days after Godhra. This book is an analysis of the violence spearheaded by communalism. In addition to 2002, the riots occurred in the years 1969 and 1985 in Ahmedabad are also covered in this book. Megha Kumar is deputy director of analysis at Oxford Analytica, the global analysis and auditing firm. She has also studied in Oxford University.

 

The book blames Hindu nationalists on every page and devotes some care to their alleged propaganda against Muslims. The Muslim male is portrayed as a violent iconoclast, proselytizer and a sexually promiscuous rapist. The Muslim female is stereotyped as immoral, perverse and violent. By contrast, the Hindu male is described as peaceful, sexually abstinent, monogamous and civilized and the Hindu female as a chaste and devout mother and wife. But what the author describes as the cause of the 1969 riot seems to endorse a part of this stereotyping. It also shows how easily the Muslims get provoked and how fast a communal riot could break out in Ahmedabad of the 1960s. In March 1969, a police officer in Kalupur locality moved aside a handcart packed with books which was obstructing the road. In the process, the cart toppled over and a copy of the Quran fell to the ground. The owner alleged sacrilege, an unruly mob of 2000 gathered and pro-Pakistani slogans were raised (p.69). The police promptly issued a public apology on loud speakers on behalf of the commissioner of police. But the mob turned violent and a full-scale communal riot ensued in which 660 people were killed! Hardly four months later, far away in Israel, an Australian Christian who was later identified as mentally unstable, set fire to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Muslims in Ahmedabad rioted against this too.

 

While it is true that Muslims were at the receiving end of the majority of the violence, a considerable number of equally heinous acts came from them against their Hindu neighbours. This was true even in 2002 when the Hindu nationalists controlled the government and police. Hence the Muslim belligerence in 1969 and 1985 can only be imagined. However, Kumar takes a highly biased view, completely ignoring the violence on Hindus. The gravity of the situation could be understood from one or two sentences which inadvertently slip out of the strategic narrative. She admits that “it is possible that during some attacks, Muslim men raped Hindu women” (p.82). After the 1985 riot, “both Hindus and Muslims were so anxious about their safety that they sold their houses in mixed neighbourhoods at throw away prices” (p.143). Regarding 2002, the author admits that ‘of the 150-200 women who were sexually brutalized, the majority were Muslims’ (p.1, 9), which means that Muslims indulged in exactly the same kind of violence against Hindu women. But where are their stories, Ms. Kumar? As per official records, of the 1044 people killed in the riots, 790 were Muslims and 254 were Hindus, which clearly shows that the riot was not one-sided or of the scale of genocide as claimed by anti-India groups. Kumar apparently does not seem to be concerned about their stories or perhaps does not find them worthy enough for consideration. In a riot, several rumours and pamphlets demonizing the other community usually circulate. This book collects such vicious propaganda but ensures that only those against Muslims are reproduced. The rhetoric in them is so full of hatred and violence that it is possible that even moderate Muslims would feel embittered against Hindus. Probably that is the author’s intention in producing these anonymous leaflets of only one community in the book.

 

The 2002 riot was ignited by the inferno at Godhra in which 58 Hindus were incinerated alive by a Muslim mob. But the author sidesteps this issue by offering three probable causes for the train fire, each more outrageous than the previous one. The first is that the kar-sevaks harassed Muslim women on the Godhra station platform and the Muslims retaliated. This is highly unlikely as the Sabarmati Express stops here for only five minutes. Then she claims that the fire may have started accidentally! Yes, she wants us to believe that the victims stayed glued to their seats without making any effort to get out of the burning train. And the last is that the Hindus deliberately caused the fire to kill their own people. Believe me; this woman has done her research in Oxford, no less! And then she concludes that ‘even after a decade, no consensus was reached’. Do you need an academic consensus about an incident in which many tens of people were killed by a mob many hundreds strong and watched by a few thousands of mute spectators? This is the touchstone of the level of falsification employed in this book. She always treats the Hindu community separate as upper castes, OBCs and Dalits, but singles out the OBCs and Dalits for carrying out the actual violence. In 1969, most of the violence was done by Dalits and OBCs while in 2002, tribes-people also joined this group. However, the author remains silent about the caste background of those people killed in the Godhra train.

 

This book purposefully attempts to foment trouble between communities by incorporating one-sided, provocative slogans and inserting photographs of such pamphlets. It tries to stoke Muslim anger with sentences like ‘the perpetrators sought to impregnate Muslim women with the seed of the superior Hindu race; evisceration of the Muslim women’s reproductive organs was in order to diminish Muslim population’. In one instance, the boast of a Hindu goon as to the step by step acts by which he raped a Muslim girl is reproduced verbatim. Here, the deplorable crimes committed by a few people are attributed to the entire community. If this false logic is extended to terrorism, the entire Muslim community would have to be held responsible. Kumar frequently asserts that Hindu nationalist propaganda involves ‘imaginary history of Muslim atrocities’. Is it really imaginary? You only have to open your eyes to see signs of the atrocities of Muslim invaders around you – in the form of a broken idol, a fully or partially demolished temple, an area of the town you can’t enter in a procession with music playing or even in place names. The Sabarmati Express itself passes through Muzaffarpur, Hajipur, Muhammedabad, Azamgarh, Shahgunj, Akbarpur, Faizabad, Daryabad, Mahmedavad and finally, Ahmedabad. One unintentional slip of the author is that she claims that the caste system is not so rigid after all and upward or downward movement is possible along the ladder. The Kshatriya Rajputs in Gujarat accepted into the Kshatriya fold the backward-caste Koli community in the 1940s to increase their electoral clout and since then, the Kshatriyas are seen as a backward-caste group in Gujarat (p.103).

 

Kumar admits that many Muslim women were sexually exploited by activists and Muslim religious leaders in the relief camps in which they stayed after the riot. Even well-known Maulanas asked for sexual favours in lieu of much sought-after relief material. The author stoops so low as to differentiate between the unwelcome sexual episodes and claims that in the maulana’s case, ‘despite the coercion and abuse of power, his proposal created a scope for agency and choice for the woman’ (p.194)! Everybody turned a blind eye to this depredation. The head of the women’s wing of the Jamaat e-Islami Hind justified it like this: “if you put so many women in front of a man, of course he will take advantage of it. That is his need” (p.197). Were they running relief camps or harems?

 

The mere fact that a large part of the research for this book is facilitated by Teesta Setalwad proves its partisan subjectivity. Kumar claims that ‘in Mumbai, Teesta and others welcomed me into their homes and lives in a way I thought only family could. Teesta also generously shared with me her boundless knowledge on Gujarat and gave me access to critical sources’. This book accuses patriarchy in many places for all the ills of Indian society and claims that ‘the brutal sexual violence against women is a patriarchal idea of sex’ (p.5). She compares the 2002 rape cases to the 2012 Delhi Nirbhaya case and claims that while Hindu nationalists targeted Muslim women in the former, the Nirbhaya victim and assailants were Hindus. As a matter of fact, this too is wrong like many other claims in this book. The juvenile who inflicted the most brutal violence on the Nirbhaya victim was a Muslim. Clever tricks to fool the readers can be seen in this book with selective disclosure of data. It is stated that “Muslims were badly affected in the 1985 riot: of the 220 estimated fatalities, 100 were Muslim” (p.96). Read this again. This really means that the number of Hindus killed is 120, which is much more than the Muslim toll. If you had read that sentence casually, you might have missed it and bought the author’s false claim. Another ridiculous finding is that the Ramayana is revered only by upper caste Hindus (p.40). This book is based on interviews made by the author in 2007-8 in which people remembered and duly told her about their experiences in 1969 and 1985.

 

The book is full of half-truths and plain lies. Moreover, the communal venom it spreads unsettles readers. It seeks to drive communities forever against each other rather than forgetting the past and reconcile in the future. It nourishes Muslims’ sense of isolation and insecurity by feeding it tales of victimhood. It contains implicit incitement to violence and needs to be tackled accordingly. Regarding Hindus, the author tries to push through three simultaneous wedges between the upper castes, OBCs and Dalits. What is masqueraded as research is in fact just hearsay and urban gossip. In fact, it contained so much filth that I was reminded of an incident in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Devil’s Foot’. In the story, Holmes and Watson came across a fumigant toxic powder which was used to kill several members of a family. Holmes decides to test how powerful it is and sprinkles some on an open flame. In no time, the vapours surrounded them causing deadly suffocation and horrific visual experiences. In the nick of time before permanently losing mental balance, Watson regains his senses for a moment, throws away the fuming lamp into a trash bin and took his friend along to dive on to the outside meadow amid clear daylight and pure air.

 

That’s why I threw this junk book into a waste basket.

 

The book is not recommended.

 

Rating: 1 Star