Textures of Print II: Hitler in India and the Street Book Market

The other day, I was standing in front of the haphazardly organised shelves of a respectable bookstore in Hazratganj, Lucknow's main shopping area. I spotted, cozily standing upright side by side, William Darlymple's White Mughals and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Now, apart from a snide remark one could make about Darlymple in this situation, it's still an astonishing reminder of how deeply into the mainstream Hitler's book has burrowed in this country. In the West, Mein Kampf is not only politically anathema, but also widely regarded as a pedantic and uninteresting text that has little historical or contextual value (unlike, say, the writings of other designated evil people like Lenin). In India, we are intermittently reminded by outraged newspaper articles, Mein Kampf is a self-help book and Hitler is a kind of management guru for the neo-liberal age. Explanations in these articles in the English Indian and foreign press revolve around the supposed need for stability and order amidst the chaos of India's changing economic landscape, and a bizarre but culturally innate fascination with a tale of a self-made man rising by the bootstraps to conquer the world. All of this, of course, is ultimately caused by India's continued isolation from the outside world's respectable opinion, which will in time dissipate and Hitler will be taken off the shelves. This is, for instance, what our old friend Sadanand Dhume writes in the Wall Street Journal. India, as a whole, is a country "too busy having a conversation with itself to pay much attention to what others think," and Indians have an "infinite capacity to compartmentalise" that can be extended to the "murder of six million people."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704853404575322290608186082.html

The issue has been brought into the public eye recently by the announcement of Bollywood director Rajeev Ranjan Kumar that a film entitled Dear Friend Hitler was in the works, starring none other than perennial lovable dad (DDLJ, Wake Up Sid) Anupam Kher as Hitler. Kumar's main reason for admiring Hitler relies upon a reservoir of historical memory that Dhume far too easily dismisses: Subhas Chandra Bose's and the INA's strategic alliance with the Axis against the British Raj during World War II. It is this relationship that forms an important piece of the puzzle. Bose continues to be a national hero in India, and the INA's path of violent resistance is widely credited, and not just by crypto-fascists, with providing the real muscle for decolonisation. Perhaps this should call for a re-thinking of historiographical positions on political violence, as I argued in a post last year. But it certainly is no easy issue that will go away once the average Indian learns from the pious politically correct Westerner that Hitler was evil, as Dhume thinks.

The other piece of the puzzle is the admiration of Hitler by the contemporary Hindu Right, which is also supposed to have faded as today's RSS is a great friend of Israel against the Muslims. Alarmingly, this should lead us to the exact opposite question than the one Dhume & co. ask. Why is it that admirers of fascists can today also be admirers of the state of Israel? I am not saying that Hindutva ideology is somehow behind Hitler's presence on the bookstalls. But today's Hindu Right would never call for its removal simply because they are friends of Israel. The "fetish" for fascism in India, which is of course not culturally innate but historically produced, can extend to celebrating Israel's iron boot in Palestine without shame or contradiction -- so it is, if anything, a marker of how far and fast Israel's credibility on the world stage has pummeled.

But to return to the Indian street. The most fascinating and acrimonious exchange involving Mein Kampf actually took place a few years back between Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who had unenthusiastically reviewed Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger in the LRB, and Pankaj Mishra. Mishra attacked Subrahmanyam's claim that the "subaltern" Balram Halwai, not being able to read English, could have mentioned Hitler as reading material. In doing so, though his critique is unnecessarily acidic, Mishra does successfully isolate the "mofussil bookstall" where cheap editions, in both English and Hindi, of Hitler and Kahlil Gibran or Paulo Coelho are sold side by side, as an important area of study.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/diary

Perhaps Hitler's text is not so different from the others in this specific context. The extension of cheap reading material, especially of the self-help/management kind, is an abiding feature of India's "opening up" to neo-liberal capitalism, and not a holdover of primitive beliefs. I'd wager that under Nehruvian socialism Mein Kampf was not so widely available. Furthermore, these are not locally produced or variable texts. The mass publishing industry, now extending itself throughout the country via these astounding and impressive networks disseminating the printed word, does not know the difference between Hitler and Chetan Bhagat. It is also not clear that some curious feature of consumption practices is driving this trend, as all commentators seem to think. I was in another bookstore and saw a different copy of Mein Kampf, this time featuring an advertisement for a book "countering" Hitler on the inside flap, and a bonus DVD of a critical documentary on Hitler. The text, in other words, is frequently contested within itself and we should not assume its mere presence indicates acceptance of its ideas. After all, in the United States Mein Kampf is available at Border's with a black cover and preface by Abraham Foxman.
But, in the end, Hitler's presence on the bookstalls does say something about our present, where confusion and the failure of discernment in matters of paperback consumption and more are compounded by the day by what is available and possible under "India Shining."