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."

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

A few days ago, I was sitting on a bench in a small park behind the Jama Masjid in Delhi on a beautiful afternoon. I was talking to a young man named Mohammed Khan, a schoolteacher from the town of Jhansi in U.P. I looked up at a martial statue in the middle of the park and asked him who the figure was. Subhas Chandra Bose, came the reply. I asked my new friend what he thought of him. He nodded energetically, "Very great man." "You are a Muslim," I said, "and he is a Bengali Hindu." It didn't matter one bit. Netaji was a great man to all Indians because he fought for his country.

This conversation reminded me of another talk I had with a friend in Berkeley, who astutely complained that the problem he had with the Subaltern School historians, many of them Bengali bhadralok (I assume he was speaking of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty et.al.), was their romanticization and glorification of violence. This meant they were prone to expressing at least some degree of affection toward the ongoing Maoist Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh, but also admired that far more mainstream revolutionary, Subhas Chandra Bose (conveniently ignoring his alliance with the Axis and his un-democratic aspirations for India). In one sense, Netaji and the Naxalites are far apart on any spectrum, whether political, ideological or even from the standpoint of Bengali history. The Naxalites are leading a peasant revolt that seeks to destroy that stratum of middle-class life and culture so carefully built up by the bhadralok over the last two hundred years. They are even fiercely against the Communist government of West Bengal, who they accuse of readily capitulating to bourgeois interests (the Nandigram massacre of two years ago represents only the most visible and shocking aspect of the growing divide between peasants and the CPI(M) elite in Calcutta). Bose, while not entirely de-coupled from a kind of authoritarian socialist philosophy by his Axis alliance (a marriage of convenience), represents something totally different: he was the last vessel into which the bhadralok placed their hopes and dreams, the final attempt to rescue the leadership of the nationalist movement from its westward drift to Gandhian ashrams in Gujarat and Nehru's parliamentarianism in New Delhi. Bose, an educated, cosmopolitan, and charismatic leader, shares with the low-class Naxalite agitators only the principle of an ethics of organised violence as the solution to a political claim.
Indeed, Bose is often viewed as Gandhi's counterpart, the other side of the conventional wisdom that India's freedom was won by non-violence. He is also the alternate examplar to emerge from the freedom movement. A recent obituary in the Economist of the Tamil Tiger leader, V. Prabhakaran, tellingly noted that his hero was "not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose."

While having these thoughts, I happened to be reading Ramachandra Guha's collection of essays, The Last Liberal. Guha is one of the most (and few) popular historians in India, and he has undergone something of a transformation in his scholarly career. He made his name by writing a detailed sociological analysis of Chipko, the famed environmental protest movement in the Himalayas. This great book, hitting all the right notes in the "history from below" category, gave way to an increasing focus on individuals and a shift to politics Guha himself describes as "liberal." Aside from withering criticism of Marxist academics and the Communist political establishment in Calcutta, Guha calls himself as a Nehruvian and tries to establish the Congress leadership of newly independent India as the "Founding Fathers" of a democratic, secular and liberal country. This is all well and good, but it raises the most interesting questions when considering the relationship of the historian to social protest and resistance.

For one thing, as Guha points out, historians often confuse their scholarly methodology with their political beliefs. Someone who works on peasant rebellions in Bengal is quite likely to be sympathetic to the Naxalites, while someone who condemns the Indian Left is more likely to view history not as struggle and resistance but as other kinds of narratives, most notably a modernising and democratising trajectory that views violence and "identity politics" as obstacles to be overcome. For the Subalternists and those who Guha quite uncharitably calls "so-called feminists," it's hard to be ideological allies with bands of terrorists who have repeatedly expressed their desire to do away with intellectuals altogether. For those Subalternists working in well-funded academic establishments in the United States, the contradiction is even more glaring. On the other hand, it's hard to be a convincing critic of caste and patriarchy while reflexively reacting against any form of political organisation of the oppressed classes. Guha may have activist clearance on the environmental front, but he dismisses Dalit parties and the "so-called feminists" all too easily.

This brings us to the Indian election of 2009. The defeat handed to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in U.P. by the Congress was seen by many Western-oriented, modernising observers as a defeat of the "politics of caste" by the benign and rational considerations of economic development. Mayawati, while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster. Lalu Prasad, formerly chief minister of Bihar and railway minister, is a garish thug, who presided over the most backward and violent of all Indian states. The greatest difficulty lies here for the historian: as well-meaning and anti-caste as one can be, there is simply no way to justify or even excuse the rise of a man like Lalu in Indian politics. No amount of caste oppression can adequately explain the arrogance and venality of such a figure. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain. Dismissing them as "identity politics" isn't very useful when caste or regional identity in India cannot simply be made to go away by being wished away, or not thought of at all.

The historian of India today has few options. One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to forge this happy compromise and label oneself as "liberal," more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.