The Trouble with Jinnah

On this topic, I will live up to the blog's title (which, by the way, is only 10% a pun based on the assumption that what I have to say is "just," and 90% straightforward, as in an honest admission that what I am offering is merely speculative). I don't know much about Pakistan, even less about Jinnah, and nothing at all about senior now-ex-BJP politician Jaswant Singh's new book on Jinnah that has caused so much controversy, because I haven't read it. From what I've heard, he has proposed that Jinnah was a sincere nationalist with a liberal, secular vision for Muslims whose best efforts at maintaining a united India were stymied by the intransigence of Congress leaders Nehru and Patel. Much has been made of the fact that such an argument at once united Congress and the BJP in outrage, and Narendra Modi banned his book in Gujarat not because he praised the creator of Pakistan but because he insulted the Gujarati hero Patel!

Why would a senior BJP leader praise Jinnah? For that matter, why did L.K. Advani, cheerleader of the Babri Masjid demolition and current head of the party who expelled Jaswant Singh, get into similar trouble four years ago for travelling to Karachi and saying nice things about the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan? The easy answer is that Jaswant is a "moderate liberal" member of the BJP who has always been interested in better relations with Pakistan, also the momentary goal of Advani on that particular trip. We can note that Singh is a scholar with a genuine interest in history who simply couldn't deny a valid explanation of Partition based on evidence (his points are not new in the literature, having been first articulated with great force and originality by Ayesha Jalal in her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman). But is there a Hindu nationalist case for Jinnah? What rhetorical moves can be made to arrive at such a position?

Here I want to repeat that I am not speaking of Jaswant Singh's beliefs per se, since I haven't read his book and don't want to put words into his mouth. He may very well be a liberal man who simply wants to build bridges; I wish to perform an imaginative exercise that would explain how Jinnah fits into a certain kind of Partition narrative.
Let's start with the fact of the division itself. The RSS and BJP have forever been utterly opposed to the very idea of Pakistan's existence. Indeed, one of the things that got Advani into hot water after he came back from Karachi was his assertion that Partition was "irreversible" and should be accepted. I read this statement, together with his comments about Jinnah being secular, as deeply melancholic. The old RSS man Advani is saying, "I don't like the fact that this country exists, but we have to deal with it, and anyway if it should have existed in the first place it would have been better off under secular Jinnah than as it turned out."
What Hindu nationalists don't like about Pakistan as it exists today is 1) its perceived Islamic fundamentalism (they obviously oppose the very notion of an Islamic state, and the threat of terrorism hangs heavy on their minds) and 2) its militarism (they perceive Pakistan not as a neighbor but as a permanent adversary). The distinction of an Islamic state vs. a state for Muslims is a subtle one, and for the average Hindutvavadi there may be no difference. For a sophisticated thinker like Jaswant and even for Advani, the "secular" promise of Jinnah, which included protection of Hindu minorities in Pakistan (Advani is a Sindhi Hindu born in Karachi), is a counterpoint to what they see as today's dangerous Pakistani state. The trick is that Pakistan itself is a story of failure, a grievous error that has ended badly for everyone (but especially for Hindu India, which now has to deal both with a problematic Muslim minority and with a troublesome Muslim state, two if you count Bangladesh). Where this Hindu nationalist thought differs from a liberal Pakistani intellectual in lamenting the difference between Jinnah's vision and reality is that, while it prefers Jinnah's secular Pakistan to actual Pakistan, the best thing of all would have been no Pakistan.

Here the second interesting twist happens, involving the attack on Nehru and Patel. Jaswant Singh himself has asked, "What part of the ‘core belief’ has been demolished by my book? What is core about Patel? He was the first leader to ban the RSS and imprison its leaders...but he didn’t ban the Muslim League.” This is perhaps the most un-subtle yet overlooked aspect of the whole story. The BJP in all its incarnations over time, from the BJS to the Janata Party, has first and foremost been suspicious of Congress-walas. To rehabilitate Jinnah is to redistribute the blame for Partition unto Nehru and Patel's shoulders, men who were actively hostile to the "right" kind of Hindu nationalism. After all, they were the ones who "let" the country fall apart and didn't "deal" with Jinnah properly.

To sum up, the feeling one gets is that there is a strand of Hindu nationalist thought that wishes more was done to prevent the creation of Pakistan, though at the cost of keeping more Muslims within a united India. This seems paradoxical, since the Hindu right has been trying for years to intimidate, and sometimes violently suppress, Muslims in India. But deep in the psychological recesses of that hateful chant aimed at the Indian Muslim, "Go to Pakistan!" lies this very frustration with India's division. "You have your state," they are saying, "now go to it."
What would have been the fate of Muslims in a united India? Do Hindu nationalists who oppose Partition believe they would have been swamped by numbers or "kept down" in their appropriate place?

More importantly, from "our" perspective (as scholars concerned with minority interests), how should we interpret the creation of Pakistan from the standpoint of what should be, in my view, the all-important question: what was/is best for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent? On the one hand, we decry Partition and its loss of life, and may wish that Muslims could have found a place in a united, secular India. But then what of Pakistan's intended purpose, as a safe space for Muslims? In the 1973 film Garam Hawa, Balraj Sahni's character is an aging Muslim shoemaker living in Agra who sees his family gradually disintegrate and, shunned, disempowered, even physically attacked at home, decides to make the move. The director, M.S. Sathyu, ends the film with the character changing his mind and staying in Agra to participate in a protest march. The conclusion affirms the possibility of a secular, socialist future in India that includes Muslims, and Sathyu never shows what happens on the other side of the border. Here Pakistan can appear as an option, a refuge from worsening conditions for Muslims in India. But the plight of the muhajir in Pakistan, as well as that country's turbulent history more generally, question such an assessment.
Pakistan is therefore a difficult subject for the historian, and there is no final verdict that can be rendered on a country so large and complex. Does it even make sense any longer to view Pakistan through the lens of "Muslims as a whole in the Indian subcontinent?" Separated by years of violence and miles of barbed wire, are Pakistani Muslims and Indian Muslims now two separate entities, like two species of Darwin's finches evolving on adjoining islands?

Empire and Nationalism Part II: Independence Day Reflections

Some weeks ago I wrote about why the idea of empire was, in a sense, destined to fail in its mission to supposedly bring into being a modern, secular, developed nation-state (a more technical way of summarising the laundry list of benefits that commonly goes: railroads, parliaments, laws and stock markets). On the occasion of India's sixty-second Independence Day a slew of articles appeared offering very different points of view on the meaning of a day that symbolised the triumph of nationalism over imperialism, self-rule over paternalism, and freedom over enlightened guidance. To me, accustomed as I am both to leftist-inspired denunciations of "the state" (simmering across South Asia from Kashmir to Lalgarh) and to the smug imperialist pronunciations of conservative European and American intellectuals (simmering in the halls of major universities and Barnes & Noble bookshelves), most shocking was a piece by one Aakar Patel provocatively entitled, "The British left six decades too early":

http://www.livemint.com/2009/08/13204936/The-British-left-six-decades-t.html

None of these arguments are particularly new, and I shouldn't have been surprised that an Indian had expressed them, but I was. He says, among many other things, this:"The British left in 1947, and they left too soon. We celebrate Independence Day, but another six decades of dependence as Great Britain’s colony would have been good for us. We could have learnt how to run cities. No harm in admitting what is obvious for all to see: We cannot even manage traffic." And this: "Europeans, of course, told us who and what we were. After 3,000 years of illiteracy, we learnt of the existence of the Indus Valley civilization from John Marshall in 1924. The identity of our greatest emperor, Ashok (died 232 BC), whose lion capital is our emblem, whose wheel is on our flag, was revealed to us by James Prinsep 175 years ago." Actually, I had never heard such an overt celebration of Orientalism before, at least not by an Indian and not in the last century! Usually critics of the notion that the West wrote India's history maintain that it really wasn't true, and that there was dialogue or collaboration...never that it was true, and it's a bloody good thing too. Finally, we have: "A people who block each other and themselves need a patron."

One is tempted to castigate Patel immediately as an imperialist's stooge. But there is a carefully considered rationale behind these arguments, which at times make Nirad Chaudhuri look like a Gandhian. Judging from some of his other columns, Aakar has a strong preference to the Parsi community. He has elsewhere written, "As the Parsis leave, South Bombay will become like the rest of Bombay - brutish, undisciplined and filthy...[the British] left some of their civilisation behind and the best of it remains the possession of this great Indian community." Parsis have always occupied a strange place in the mosaic of communities in India. Wealthy and Western-oriented, they profited from British contracts from the early days of the East India Company and built up an industrial empire (the Tata family has been at its forefront from the late nineteenth-century until the present day). They have also sought to stand above the fray in times of communal conflict, as shown in Deepa Mehta's heartbreaking film Earth, when the patriarch of a Parsi family in Lahore quietly exhorts his wife and daughter to be neutral "like the Swiss." None of this should be interpreted to mean that Parsis' cosmopolitanism is somehow un-Indian or anti-national. Jamsetji Tata discussed his plan to establish the Indian Institute of Science with an enthusiastic Swami Vivekananda on a boat from Yokohama to Chicago in 1893. The father of the Indian National Congress and the man who first articulated the "drain theory" was Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi. So Aakar Patel's admiration for the West, and especially his aggressive love of classical music (which he thinks, as per another column, that other Indians can't understand), doesn't neatly align with the experience of Parsis or any other group of "modernised" Indians; rather, he has taken a cosmopolitan upbringing and mutated it into a militant political feeling. He does not wish, as the family in Earth did, to merely listen to waltzes and stay out of politics. He wants to make waltzes and clean streets and nice buildings into weapons with which to bludgeon the rest of his billion countrymen, and defend empire bravely into indefensible territory. As I've written before, the British would not have given it all up voluntarily after staying a few more decades just so they could build roads and bridges to Mr. Patel's liking.
Even so, my point is that there are different ways of seeing Independence from the perspectives of different communities. For an affluent Bombay columnist who owns a media services company, the spectacle of an independent India has been more distasteful than inspiring. We may not like it, but we have to acknowledge it, and it's a perspective with far more validity than your run-of-the-mill imperialist historian in a bow tie.

Then, I read an essay that is in many ways the exact opposite: Gopalkrishna Gandhi's meditative piece in Outlook entitled "While It Rains Rose Petals." To the author, who is the Governor of West Bengal and the Mahatma's grandson, India was once "a land of abiding hope":

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?261292

He recalls a pervading sense of optimism: "There was that ‘something’ about the Nehru years which made them precious. Drawing a word from Panditji’s own masterful Hindustani, I have often asked myself: “What was the sifat of those times? What was its quality, its inner attribute, its essential nature, that made it so reassuring?” I think it was, quite simply, imaan. The trustworthiness that went with people and their word, their good faith, their honesty." But today's widespread problems place the great democratic experiment in serious danger: "Yes, and yet, that sense of pride dims even when we see the corruption and the violence that pervades our life, when we see the growing degradation of our environment, when we big-time users of precious resources go merrily on as if they live on a different planet, not our carbon-asphyxiated one. And when we see the plight of India’s vulnerable millions, especially its women. That is when the Nehru years, those rose-petalled Independence Days, seem, suddenly, like another country." The disillusionment is a profound one, even if we discount all the arguments made against it: that it romanticises Nehruvian socialism, that some things are getting better, that Congress and sarkar and democracy are not the answer anyway. Gandhi expresses, in slightly prettier language, the same problems that trouble Aakar Patel. Things aren't working, they say! We cannot celebrate when we have so much yet to do!

But there is an ocean of difference from there on. For Patel, it was all a wasted effort and the nation's failures are evidence of nationalism's inherent failure. Nothing could be achieved without the British. For Gandhi, a certain kind of nationalism, a hopeful one with the right spirit, did and may again inspire Indians as citizens and countrymen. My own sentiments have always been deeply skeptical and resistant to nationalisms of all kinds. But can we let go of the rose-petal vision of the Indian nation, Nehru on the ramparts of the Red Fort, Ambedkar's Constitution? Ranajit Guha once wrote of the nation's "failure to come into its own." This was probably a call for a new revolution, for the excavation of subaltern resistance...but whatever it was, it too begins with that promise of the nation. Sixty-two years on, Indians still have at least the promise of Independence Day, and that should be enough to never wish to go back.

Hindi Film and the World: An Alternative Globalisation

Once again, Amitav Ghosh has written an essay so thoughtful, rich and beautiful I feel compelled to react at length with my own comparatively disjointed yet (I hope) somewhat constructive thoughts. In "Confessions of a Xenophile," which appeared last year in Outlook, he puts forth something approaching a condensed vision of his entire personal and professional life, anchored in the formative experience of living in an Egyptian village in the 1980s. He begins with a revelation about Hindi films:

"My hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya – that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song – this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals. The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the fifties vintage – films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar and Babita..."

Here we have a classic case of cross-cultural exchange of the kind extensively facilitated by such products as Hindi films in many parts of the world during the 1950s and 60s- not just in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Indeed, so popular were Raj Kapoor films in my native country, Romania, that the name is still readily recognised and frequently used; for instance, reviews of Slumdog Millionaire in the newspapers referenced its hero as an archetypal "vagabond" successor of Kapoor. Of course, much was lost in translation since virtually no Hindi was spoken or understood in the many parts of the world these films reached. Thus, the 1950s Romanian crooner Luigi Ionescu recorded a version of the song "Awaara hoon" (I am a tramp) that came out through misunderstanding as "Avaramu" (it can still be widely found on the internet today under this title, and it's a safe bet almost all Eastern Europeans wouldn't know it as anything else). It's quite an amazing thing that Romanians, Russians and Egyptians were singing in Hindi words they did not know, much in the same way so many of the world's teenagers today ape American pop songs without speaking English. The phenomenal worldwide success of Hindi films at this time was a different kind of globalisation, deeply tied to a specific set of political changes in the postwar era. Ghosh explains,

"Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War. It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers - a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism. These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased."

There is much to discuss here. First, as a point of historiography we can see the organising principles behind Ghosh's tendency in both his fiction and non-fiction to explore the connections between people and places in a pan-Asian or Indian Ocean-centred arc. Thus, he has written movingly and with equal sensitivity about Egypt, the Gulf states, India, Burma, and Cambodia. Historians are nowadays setting their sights on these kinds of "comparative" and "regional" histories, but for clarity of purpose and beauty of prose none can match Ghosh. Secondly, he provides the key institutional context for understanding the spread of a cultural product. Hindi films with Raj Kapoor were not popular in Egypt or Romania because they were socialist (though the affinity of the Nehruvian ethic with the political aspirations of these other nation-states was certainly a factor). Their populism was, if not subversive of the state, certainly not dependent upon it. As Ravi Vasudevan notes, popular Hindi cinema appealed to a "mass public which lies beyond the borders of institutions legitimated by the state," and thus could "provide a distinctive route for the social imaginary." The manner of its translation abroad should not be read as a mere extension of relations between states but as a true globalisation: the spread of words, ideas, images and ways of seeing the world across vast numbers of people in many places at the same time.
Naturally, this included political ideas, and once again we are not speaking exclusively of state structures. The transnational popularity of leaders like Nehru and Nasser alluded to by Ghosh was widespread, and the sentiment is not entirely dead even today. Earlier this year, I was in an electronics store run by an older Egyptian fellow in Berkeley, just off of Telegraph Avenue. I was buying a converter to use with my laptop in England, where I was going to do research for my thesis at the British Library. The man asked me what I was studying, and I said imperialism. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed, "Do you know who the leader of Egypt was after the British left?" "Yes, Nasser." He continued with glee, "Do you remember what he did to the British? He stuck their nose in the mud!" That the Suez incident of 1956 should evoke such a passionate reaction in 2009 from someone who could barely have been a boy at the time is, if anything, a powerful reminder of the persistence with which the non-aligned moment lives on in people's minds.

Today's globalisation is of a fundamentally different kind; Ghosh refers to the alliance of "capital + empire," with fundamentalism thrown in as the third pillar of the new world order. The changes can be easily tracked in Hindi cinema. Rochona Majumdar writes, "In the six decades since the country’s independence, inaugural prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist, populist government, rooted in socialist ideals, has given way to neoliberalism and globalisation. On the screen, this evolution meant the end of the category known as 'the people'" exemplified by Raj Kapoor films. Thus,

"To Bollywood songwriters in the 1950s and ’60s, city streets were playful and teeming with possibilities. Albeit idealized, their depictions animated a then-true national identity: in 'innumerable' songs, Majumdar says, 'you see the dream of socialist India come to life.' As the global economy arrived at India’s shores in the 1980s, however, the collective people disappeared from Bollywood screens. The iconic city street darkened, becoming a 'contested space,' she says, where people from different religions, castes, and professions—criminal or otherwise—strove for dominance. Bollywood itself splintered, producing different films for distinct audiences. India’s wealthy diaspora saw movies in which characters from large, affluent families fall in love and get married, their weddings setting the stage for grand musical sequences. Often these films, which emphasize individual—rather than universal—experiences, are set abroad in places like Switzerland, Egypt, or New Zealand. These are the films foreigners consider typical Bollywood fare, and their popularity has inspired Hollywood and other film industries to use Bollywood conventions, directors, and stars for movies like Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, and Bride and Prejudice."

While Majumdar makes some great observations about the use of space (the changing meanings of the street and the choice of filming locations), what is most important here is the particular kind of globalisation processes Hindi films participate in. In the 1950s, a self-consciously nationalist Indian cultural form resonated with foreign audiences. Today, the mainstream Hindi film is a fragmented product that is slowly being woven into a truly global tapestry of interchangeable symbols. Dancing in the Alps or under the pyramids, surfing on the beach in Australia, partying in nightclubs and so on are the common aspirations of the moneyed "good life" driven by notions once viewed as typically American and Western European. It is not a question of recovering the "Indianness" of films in danger of being "Westernised," but of recognising that such categories are themselves rapidly becoming obsolete.

In parallel, the rise of the Hindu right in the 1990s and the prospect of communal violence has provoked the most sustained attempt by the Hindi film industry to address the relationship between religion and nationalism since the first few decades after the independence. Noted filmmaker Shyam Benegal speaks of a revival in recent years of "hugely successful films like Lagaan which equate an inclusive secular unity with nationalism." Other films that have appeared since then that explore urban life in contemporary India, including Rang de Basanti and Mumbai Meri Jaan, feature explicit plot lines revolving around the suspicion and hostility between Hindu and Muslim characters that is happily resolved in the end. Unlike the old days, however, when censor boards would not allow any impression of communal tension to make it to the screen, the new crop of films are didactic without being unrealistic, as they often begin by openly acknowledging mistrust and conflict. Many of these films perhaps owe more to their Nehruvian predecessors than to the homogenising tendencies of our globalisation. And Hindi films remain popular abroad, though offering a much different kind of entertainment than they once did.