Martin Luther

Title: Martin Luther – Visionary Reformer

Author: Scott H. Hendrix

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2016 (First published 2015)

ISBN: 9780300166699

Pages: 341

Most people associate the name ‘Martin Luther’ to the well-known leader of American civil rights movement – Martin Luther King Jr, who had made the memorable ‘I have a dream’ speech that awakened blacks in America. The American owes his name to another reformer who had lived in sixteenth century Germany. It was a dangerous period to propose reforms, especially to confront papal authority, as Giordano Bruno learned with his brutal death at the stake fifty years before and Galileo did fifty years later, but with less remarkable consequences. Martin Luther stood up against the degeneration and corruption in ecclesiastical circles and held the papacy responsible for the rout. He preached reforms of a kind the society was looking for. It was the so-called idea whose time had come. Luther’s theories withstood tribulations and his devoted followers stuck to their beliefs in the face of great privations. Unknown to Luther, the schism he produced in Roman Catholicism was long-lasting and turned out to be a milestone in world history. It engendered the Protestant faction of Christianity that went on to conquer Britain and America. This book is a biography of the great German reformer. Scott H. Hendrix is a James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation history and Doctrine at Princeton Theological Seminary and an ordained minister. He has authored another book on similar topics and serves on the editorial committees of religious journals.

Hendrix takes enough pains to explain the significance of Luther and his ideology. The man is to be best understood not as a reformer of the church, but as a reformer of religion who strove to replace bad religion with a faith that valued freedom and justice instead of narrow orthodoxy and moralism. Luther came at a time when faith was giving way to mechanical action to placate the divinity. Instead of taking their sins earnestly, being contrite and then receiving forgiveness, people were ordered to perform routine rounds of penance, alms-giving, fasting, saying the rosary, or making a pilgrimage. It was the sixth century Rule of St. Benedict that made good works tools of the spiritual craft. By Luther’s day, it had become well entrenched. The church found a new way of amassing wealth by selling indulgences for a price. Indulgence is not remission of sin; that is guaranteed by belief in Christ’s sacrifice. This was only a relaxation of the penalty. In 1506, the cornerstone of St. Peter’s Basilica was laid in Vatican. Pope Julius II authorized an indulgence to finance its construction. In exchange for a contribution to the building fund, the papal indulgence offered forgiveness of future sins and release of loved ones from purgatory. Luther firmly believed that salvation came by faith alone and not by works.

Propagating an idea was easy enough even in the sixteenth century, but standing up to it in the face of violent persecution is quite another thing. The book introduces the novel ways in which the reformer made his voice heard. Luther compiled a list of points called ‘Ninety-five Theses’ questioning the power and efficacy of indulgences and sent them to Archbishop Albert of Mainz. Some historians say he pinned them on the door of the church in Wittenberg. The printing press with movable type was an invention that was put to good use. Many copies were made and circulated in the popular movement that neither the church nor civil authorities were able to stop. Luther justified his actions before Emperor Charles V, but was overruled and outlawed as heretic by the Edict of Worms in 1521. He was saved from arrest by the skin of his teeth, when the ruler of Wittenberg, Elector Frederick of Saxony, implored Charles not to publish the edict in Wittenberg where Luther was residing. Martin Luther was a scholar in the Latin language, but widely used German, his mother tongue, for disseminating his ideas. This was immensely popular and contributed to the mass appeal of his ideology. “I find my God in the German language”, he thundered and published devotional and instructional tracts. At the same time, he continued to use Latin for correspondence with other scholars and church authorities.

We are familiar with the coercive measures forced on Galileo Galilei for his belief that the earth moved around the sun. This was contrary to a theological dogma that postulated the exact opposite. Galileo was forced to recant upon threat of excommunication and probable death by torture. This happened almost a century after Luther’s successful defying of the pope. How did Luther manage to wriggle out of the papal net? Unfortunately for us, Hendrix is silent on this point and does not make it a topic of observation. It is left for the readers to make their own conclusions from the hints thrown here and there in the narrative. First of all, Galileo happened to live in Pisa, Italy, which was very close to Rome where papal writ was law. But his long tentacles reached Germany as well in the past. John Hus and his followers, who were known as the ‘Bohemian heretics’, denied the divine origin of papal authority and was burned to death in 1415 through a decision taken at the Council of Constance. By Luther’s time, German city states had earned much power through trade and a strong wind of nationalism was blowing over them which shook papal authority to the core. Martin Luther was a torch-bearer of German nationalism. The Holy Roman Empire was also reluctant to invite the wrath of German states by going against Luther, who was emboldened by the wavering of the imperial administration. He openly defied the pope, burnt papal Bulls and called him antichrist with impunity. The pope gritted his teeth, but let matters rest at that. The Ottoman Muslim invasions of Hungary and Austria in the 1520s also played a part. The Christian forces could not have afforded to alienate German military power in their united fight against the Turkish sultan. The Peace of Nuremberg of 1532 was announced as a ceasefire between the Christian factions.

The reforms put forward by Luther lasted long and deep. Not only on the birth of Protestantism, its impact had caused renovation to gradually embrace the Catholic Church too. The Reformation prompted priests, monks, nuns and bishops to renounce their vow of celibacy. Marriage was not simply allowed, but in fact encouraged for all those not having the mental stamina for abstention. Even in their case, abstention was not touted as a virtue. On the side of religious practices, it did away with private masses, withholding wine from the laity during communion, praying to saints, venerating their relics and visiting their shrines and monastic vows. Luther himself married a former nun and had many children with her. He was a prolific writer and polemicist who knew where to bridle up ideology and let loose pragmatism. When the ruler Philip of Hesse contracted a second marriage while the first wife was still alive, he requested Luther, who was also his spiritual preceptor, to condone the bigamy. Luther quietly acquiesced to this strange request, observing, no doubt, that the ruler was quite free to take the woman as a concubine in case marriage was not permitted. He also asked his consent to be kept confidential. Luther’s works are also fed from a powerful source of anti-Semitism which was successfully employed four centuries later by the Nazis for their sectarian propaganda.

This book assumes prior familiarity with Martin Luther, Protestantism, and European history of the sixteenth century. It is not for those who want to know, for the first time, who Luther was or what he has done. It points out the flows in some established concepts on Reformation rather than explaining it to novices. It sports a diary-like appearance with precise dates given even for trivial incidents. This hinders smooth reading of the book as does its extremely small print. A good point to note is that it has turned its back to unnecessary discourses on the finer points of religious fundamentals on which the two sides differed.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Half Lion

Title: Half Lion – How P. V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India

Author: Vinay Sitapati

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780670088225

Pages: 391

Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao (1921 – 2004) was the first Indian prime minister outside the Nehru family who had lasted a full term in office. He assumed office at a time of great upheaval not only in India but abroad too. Kashmir and Punjab were rife with militancy and LTTE cadres were treading roughshod over Tamil Nadu as part of their insurgency in Sri Lanka. The country’s foreign exchange reserves were at the very bottom of the pit. Its long term ally, the Soviet Union, was visibly crumbling under the crushing weight of communism. The Shah Bano alimony and Ayodhya issues had vitiated the atmosphere. It was a tough time even for a politically strong man to start. Rao was not one, yet when he demitted office five years later, India was a far better place. The central theme of this book is about understanding how Narasimha Rao achieved so much despite having so little real power and influence. It also explains how Rao tweaked the right knobs of the system to bring about the world’s second largest middle class. Vinay Sitapati is a political scientist, journalist and lawyer. He teaches at Ashoka University and writes for the Indian Express.

Narasimha Rao is remembered for his procrastination and indecision in matters of vital interest. Humorous epithets were cast on him such as ‘analysis till paralysis’, ‘when in doubt, pout’, ‘symbol of procrastination, delay and the status quo’, ‘charisma of a dead fish’ and ‘death is not a precondition to rigor mortis’. Sitapati has been successful in dispelling such long accumulated cobwebs on Rao’s intellectual caliber. He was quick and sharp in making a decision and when he dithered, it was not because he was unable to tell good policy from bad, but because sometimes the correct policy didn’t make good politics. This is especially poignant in the Ram Janmabhumi issue. Constitutionally, Rao had to heed the advice of the governor and chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who were insistent that the disputed structure at Ayodhya would be safe and there was no need of enforcing central rule in the state. But when it was demolished by karsevaks a few days later, politicians accused him of inaction and bayed for his blood. On the economic sphere too, as protests mounted, the pace of reforms slowed by 1995 in view of the elections scheduled for the next year. The insurance reform bill had to wait twenty years to see the light of day when Narendra Modi made it into his kitty of reforms in 2015. Rao’s triple mantra of devaluation, trade liberalization and delicensing became tainted with corruption scandals by mid-1990s. Harshad Mehta and Enron scams took place. Mehta in fact alleged that he had paid Rs. 1 crore directly to Rao. The welfare, power and labour sectors were where Rao could not do anything. India’s foreign policy was, however, moved away from Nehruvian idealism to a more realist and pragmatic pursuit of national self-interest. He was also instrumental in developing the nuclear devises and keeping it ready for testing. Sitapati argues that logistical and technical issues prevented him from testing it.

Narasimha Rao was not a charismatic leader. Never in his career did the crowds eagerly thronged the maidan to listen to him. He was always in a half-smirk, neither fully committed to a smile nor fully to a frown. His political weakness endeared him to the Nehru family who wanted a protégé. He was made the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh to run Indira’s writ. But when he overstepped his mandate and announced land reforms, he was summarily thrown out to political exile for a while. Rao personally lost 1000 out of his 1200 acres of ancestral farmland due to the ceiling on individual possession envisaged in the act. When he was made the home minister in Rajiv’s cabinet after Indira’s assassination, he was bypassed in the measures to suppress anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. Rajiv’s office directly controlled the police while Rao was forced to keep a studied silence. A large part of the blame for the riots which killed 2733 Sikhs must thus be apportioned to Rajiv Gandhi.

When one considers how Rao transformed India, it is imperative that a clear view of what existed before and what he brought in should be presented. The author makes a brilliant assessment of India’s economic woes in the pre-Rao era. He claims that it was Indira Gandhi and not her father who was responsible for the economic disaster. Nehru’s policy was somewhat agreeable in the post-World War period. However, by 1965, the thinking had changed when national economies began to open up in East Asia. But India remained impervious to ideas from abroad. Indira thundered on the economic front with three draconian measures designed to thwart entrepreneurs in the country – large parts of the economy was reserved for public sector enterprises, limited the size of business houses so that they did not threaten the hegemonic power of the Congress party through licenses, anti-monopoly laws, harsh labour laws and nationalization of banks and finally by isolating India from the global market. The hallowed term ‘self-reliance’ had also become a byword for mediocrity. The economic collapse caused the growth rate to tumble leading to welfare schemes getting unable to make a dent in poverty. This was not missed by experts in the government. By the mid-1980s, policymakers had become convinced of the need for economic liberalization. What was sorely missed was a political environment to support them. Rajiv Gandhi had begun some reforms in 1985, but that sputtered to a stop two years later when he became embroiled in the Bofors corruption deal.

The book ruefully portrays the morass the country had fallen into by the early 1990s. Rajiv’s lavish policy of deficit financing required overseas short-term loans to be taken and repayment was due. By mid-1991, the country possessed foreign exchange reserves worth only two weeks of imports whereas the minimum safe level was funds for three months of imports. A default on external debt obligations was round the corner. To add insult to injury, the IMF required India to physically transfer 21 tons of solid gold from its coffers to that of the Bank of England in London as surety to a loan. Contrary to many people think, the ‘solution’ to the economic problem was not devised by Manmohan Singh who was Rao’s trusted finance minister and a world-renowned economist. Sitapati claims that the blueprint for economic reforms was prepared by senior bureaucrats and handed over by Naresh Chandra, the Cabinet secretary, to Rao a day prior to swearing in. It talked of fiscal discipline, dismantling trade barriers and removing the licenses, permits and anti-monopoly laws that tightly bound domestic entrepreneurs. Not only that, Manmohan Singh was only the second choice of Rao. I G Patel, a former RBI governor and director of the London School of Economics, was the first, but he politely declined the offer. Thus the mantle fell on Singh who got a free hand to dislodge arcane regulations which he himself was also partly instrumental for implementing in the Indira era. The Rao-Singh team did wonders. Within just a month after swearing in, the currency was devalued by 20 per cent, a new industrial policy that scrapped the license-quota-permit system was announced and the first budget did away with many controls that unnecessarily throttled the economy. In ten months’ time, reserves grew to comfortable levels, enough for six months of imports.

The change in fortunes of a politician happens fast and totally unforeseen. This book narrates it in good detail. Rao was denied a party ticket to contest the 1991 elections. That also meant the end of his political career – he was already seventy. He was to turn to spirituality as the head of a Hindu ashram at Courtallam in Tamil Nadu. Then everything changed on that fateful night of May 21, 1991. Rajiv Gandhi’s death by a suicide squad of the LTTE catapulted Rao to the most powerful chair in India. However, managing his widow Sonia Gandhi was a tiresome task. Not content with donating Rs. 100 crores of tax payers’ money to the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, Rao conferred the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour on Rajiv and even extended elite commando protection to Sonia’s family. As prime minister, he spoke to her on phone twice a week, visited her every week and obliged her whims in the party and government. However, by mid-1993, rifts developed. When Sonia accused him on the slow progress of the investigation into Rajiv’s death, he stopped meeting her altogether. After Sonia became Congress president in 1998, Rao – the person and his legacy – was wiped clean from its history books. He was denied a party ticket for the 1999 elections. When Rao died in 2004, the Nehru family plotted to deny him a place for eternal rest in Delhi. Even his body was not given a chance to lie in state in the Congress party headquarters.

The book neatly argues its case for rehabilitating Narasimha Rao to the rightful place he deserves in the pantheon of Indian leaders. This is mostly hindered by the opposition from the Congress party – Rao’s own party – which is motivated by spiteful sycophants of the Nehru family who cannot digest the fact that Rao was the only Congress prime minister not from the Nehru family, yet managed to complete his full term in office. The author had access to the diary and personal recordings of Rao, which helped him bring out a book that presents some new facts unknown to anybody. A good number of photographs are included, as also a comprehensive section of end-notes and a good index.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

India Moving

Title: India Moving – A History of Migration

Author: Chinmay Tumbe

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670089833

Pages: 285

India’s northeastern state of Assam was recently in the news when a process for identification of illegal immigrants found four million people who had infiltrated from Bangladesh in this state with a total population of 30 million. Assam is heavily scarred with the ill-effects of migration. Its Sylhet district had to be ceded to East Pakistan in 1947 as decades of immigration from East Bengal had made the district a Muslim-majority one and consequently was annexed to Pakistan. The same game is repeating there, with constant flow of people from Bangladesh which is changing the demographic pattern of the state that can cause great havoc in the near future. However, migration in India is not limited just to Assam and it is not always a bad thing. The lure of better economic prospects drives people from their hearths and homes to seek gainful employment in other provinces or even other countries. India is greatly benefitted by the remittances these people make back home and also by the entrepreneurial spirit exhibited by some of them. In politics also, migrant leaders excelled as seen in the best example of them all – Gandhiji, who had lived in South Africa for two decades before steering the freedom movement to victory in India. Not much research has gone into this phenomenon of migration in India yet and the author rectifies this anomaly with a good comparative survey of the causes and effects of migration from and to India. Chinmay Tumbe is a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is passionate about migration, cities and history and was a 2013 Jean Monnet Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, Florence and the 2018 Alfred D. Chandler Jr International Visiting Scholar in Business History at Harvard Business School. He had published widely on migration for a decade and has served on policymaking groups. This is his first book.

Even though India was well known in the ancient world, there was practically not much outmigration. The history of migration from the middle of the first millennium BCE to circa 1300 CE is one of immigration mainly from central Asia, instances of emigration to the west and the east and internal migration accompanying urbanization, colonization and deportation. The foreigners gave the name of India to the land east of the river Indus, and the Indians named the foreigners yavana and mleccha in the medieval period. This later changed to firangis to denote people from Europe. Curious it may seem, but the word came from the root term ‘franks’ which was an ancient Germanic tribe. Indians were not very particular in the racial profile of those coming in. In the sixteenth century, the Habshi slaves from Ethiopia were brought to Deccan states, who were later merged into the mass of Indian society.

Thumbe identifies a phenomenon known as the ‘Great Indian Migration Wave’ around the nineteenth century. By that time, the economic might of the country had fallen through the relentless conquests and invasions from Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia and also a century of colonial rule. The land and society were impoverished on all counts. It is said that Nadir Shah carted away so much treasure from India in 1739 that he remitted the entire taxation in Persia for three years! Around the first half of the eighteenth century, slavery was outlawed in most British colonies and the slaves were freed. The sugar plantations needed an alternate labour force for their fields. Indentured labour was introduced as a substitute in which the workers toiled in the farms for a fixed tenure. Thumbe enumerates the characteristics of this migration wave as male-dominated, remittance-yielding and semi-permanent. Almost 70 per cent of them were male workers who had to undergo decades of separation for supporting their families back home. Railways and postal services aided in this process. The money order was the financial lynchpin of migration. Postal money order traffic constituted 2-3 per cent of GDP between 1900 and 1960. Eventually, this was lost to banks and private money transfer operators. The book then makes a summary review of Indian migration in various countries around the world. The wave of migration was cut across regions and communities. Marwaris, Chettiyars and Gujaratis were a few societies specifically mentioned. The Indian diaspora is now 25 million strong and it can be safely surmised that the sun does not set on them. This has reached considerable proportions in some countries such as Mauritius where two-thirds of the population is of Indian origin.

The author jestingly identifies two common practices followed by Indian communities residing anywhere in the world. Use of water in toilets and pressure cookers in the kitchen are two characteristics we seem unable to live without. Even though casteism is a bane of Hindu society in India, the caste system has dissolved itself in the case of expatriates of the second or third generations. In that sense, migration has changed the leopard’s spots. Thumbe illustrates this with examples from Fiji and Guyana. The indentured labourers who arrived in Fiji were called girmitiyas. They belonged to all castes and became jahaji bhais during the month-long sea crossing, a bond that lasted for a long time in the remote islands where caste identities would eventually fade away (p.124). In Guyana too, on the face of common adversities encountered by Indians as a whole, the caste system began to disappear as identities were reshaped along racial lines.

A good description of internal migration inside the country is given in the book. India’s position is unique in the global migration map. It sustains considerable volume of immigration, emigration and internal migration alongside involuntary transfer of populations as seen in the partition days and communities dislocated by developmental projects such as construction of dams or factories. Hindu Pandits who had to flee Kashmir in the early 1990s is a case in point. The stereotypes associated with internal diaspora are also identified, such as Bengali economists, Kerala nurses and Odiya cooks and plumbers. Thumbe also makes some guess about future migration patterns in the country. A wave of migration from the north of India towards the south is probable on account of the large wage differentials existing in those regions. While the history of the twentieth century was essentially a clash between capitalism and communism, the role of antagonists in this century might be taken up by cosmopolitanism and nativism because the large inflow of cheap labour from abroad is bound to instigate resentment in the native population.

The book is neatly and lucidly argued with clear logic and a lot of illustrative examples. It is graced with a foreword by Arvind Subramanian, the economic adviser to the prime minister of India, in which he comments that the book should be read, savoured and applauded. These words are never far from what it actually deserves. It includes a comprehensive collection of end-notes and a commendable index. Some photographs are also included which serves the requirement of form rather than utility.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star