Dealing with Darlymple, or the Prude Critics

William Darlymple's popularity as a writer of travelogues and popular histories about India in the West is no great mystery; he is a charming, erudite writer with a keen sense of narrative and literary presentation. Why an expat who knows no Indian languages and has arrogantly dismissed Indian historians for not doing enough research (in Urdu!) on the Mutiny Papers in the National Archives, for not writing well enough, and for not selling enough books, should command such astronomical credibility and popularity in India can be more difficult to understand. His Jaipur Literature Festival, incidentally coming up again this month, is a tremendous success that manages to bring together both Indian and Western literary heavyweights. As anyone who's wandered a bit through the bazaars, he sells. A lot. Dalrymple's books are everywhere, and he has become something of an authority of Indian history, much to his own self-satisfaction. And, if he tells a neo-colonial fantasy tale that may be attractive to his Indian middle-class readership, he also is a great lover of Urdu and Muslim culture, which makes him an unusual and welcome voice of reason in the Indian media.

But I digress, because my post is not actually about Dalrymple himself. It's about this essay by Hartosh Singh Bal in OPEN that tries to explain the Darlymple "phenomenon." Indeed, the curious fact of a foreigner's success (and a British one's, to boot) in the post-colonial Indian literary scene troubles Bal. How could Dalrymple have become "the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India?" Mostly, the answer comes down to a lingering cultural hierarchy whereby the approval of British publishers and critics is fawningly sought after by Indians. The Jaipur Festival, according to this view, is only successful because Ian McEwan shows up, not because it showcases good Indian writing. This critique makes a lot of sense, if only because there is still a difference between the audience, resources, and critical attention received by Westerners or expats who write about India and authors who write from within India. With increasing access to media, the Indian reading public may just be accepting a set of standards without much thought. The problem is, however, that good Indian writing is starting to get out through these channels, much of it encouraged by Dalrymple and the Jaipur Fest.

What really gets me about Bal's critique is his astonishing prudishness, otherwise surprising for someone making an argument that might be termed "nationalist" or even somewhat Marxist in its attention to the aftereffects of colonialism. He believes, perhaps rightly, that "constant need for British approval allows writers from the UK to produce and sell books that should be junked in India." He uses the example of Jad Adams's book on Gandhi, Naked Ambition. He doesn't like it because of this quote: "‘When Gandhi was tormented by sexual thoughts, perhaps his impacted colon was pressing on his prostate gland and stimulating him sexually. This would explain why some diets, by reducing his constipation, would help him feel less sexual.’" Essentially, Bal is shocked that a Founding Father of the nation, the most sacred of cows, is being smeared by *gasp* talking about sex. And it's a foreigner who's doing it!

I can't really say what Bal's motivations are - maybe I am misreading his intentions. But it looks like a subconscious prudishness has reared its head. It's a sentiment echoed by the vehement denunciations of Jeffrey Kripal's book on Ramakrishna (which used psychoanalysis to explore the homoerotic dimension of tantric practice) and the hysterical reactions by Hindus to Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History, again because her analysis was deemed "pornographic." We might also see this in the attacks on James Laine's biography of Shivaji, which was banned in Maharashtra from 2004 to 2010. The chief accusation against Laine was that he was spreading "injurious gossip" by proposing that Shahaji was not Shivaji's biological father. In other words, sex and family drama as neo-colonialist backdoor. In each case, the critic assumes that the objectionable parts of Western scholarly books are deliberately sexually titillating in order to symbolically and politically debase a community under siege: Hindus, Hindus who are devotees of Ramakrishna (or maybe even Bengalis as a whole), and Maharashtrians. This is exactly the kind of reaction Bal has to Adams' discussion of Gandhi's sexuality - it's all part of the same old colonialist plot to discredit Indians, successor statements to Churchill's famous condemnation of Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir."

The larger problem is that, even if a Western author makes scholarly errors, particularly linguistic ones (as both Kripal and Doniger were credibly charged with doing by fellow scholars) or displays a more or less subtle Orientalist bias (as both Dalrymple and Adams may very well do), he or she should not be condemned on the basis of a prudish and defensive reaction concerned with upholding Indian-ness, or Hindu-ness, or Marathi-ness. Indeed, if these books were simply bad scholarship the battles would be fought on the pages of specialist journals. They become the focus of popular and media attention only when they are attacked for explicitly or latently chauvinistic reasons. I am not suggesting Western scholars who are being deceitful, careless or even deliberately provocative should get a pass. But they should be evaluated by Indian critics calmly, dispassionately and above all on a case-by-case basis. Sure, Adams's book contains a maybe silly passage about Gandhi's sexuality. But what about the rest of it? Is it a good book on Gandhi, should be the question. We know that Dalrymple's book is mostly a good book on the Mutiny, some would say even a great one. Maybe that's more important than the colour of his skin, his personality, or how much money he makes.

"The State of Pakistan," a new genre of journalism

I don't know what it is about the piece I am about to comment on that made me finally write this post; it could have been one of hundreds of others that have appeared in print and online, from both Western and South Asian sources, over the past few years. Perhaps it is because I am so used to dismissing them as temporary effluvia from the security politics crowd lacking the requisite sense of history, but this time something in me responded to the message. This is Aaatish Taseer's recent article in Mint, entitled "Losing faith in Pakistan."
http://www.livemint.com/2010/08/06210142/Losing-faith-in-Pakistan.html

The interesting thing about this article is that it manages to be half remarkably insightful and half pernicious nonsense. Let's start with the good: Taseer's basic claim is that contemporary religious extremism in Pakistan aims to "cleanse the Islam of that country of its cultural contact with the Indian subcontinent." In practical terms, this refers to the imposition of Saudi-derived ideological puritanism and the political programme of Maududi's Jamaat-e-Islami set up against "the full world, the world of culture, of stories, of songs, of dress, of ornate ritual" epitomised by the "syncretic" Sufis. Taseer is undoubtedly right in saying that the societal conflict tearing Pakistan apart has far, far less to do with clashes of civilisations between West and East than with the largely internal political struggle over the forms public religion should take in Pakistan. Such a position compels us to understand the different fractions and cleavages within the various Muslim movements within Pakistan, as Manan Ahmed pointed out during the height of the "failed state" hysteria in the Western media, aka that "the Taliban are 20 miles outside of Islamabad" time:
http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/just_a_thought_v.html

The recent attacks, first on the Ahmadi mosque, then on the Data Darbar Sufi shrine in Lahore, seem to have awakened even the most hopeful and progressive commentators to the existence of a very real threat. If the country as a whole is in no immediate danger of being "Talibanised," still the audacity and increasing frequency with which the attacks are coming raises the question: who is not a kafir now? Alarmism may not be such a bad word anymore. See Raza Rumi's impassioned appeal:
http://lahorenama.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/stop-lahores-talibanisation/

Taseer also very justly points out that far more of an outcry followed the Sufi attack, even among the lamenters. In the official media, of course, passing off the Ahmadi attack as a Zionist conspiracy was not only easier but also de rigueur. On the other side, with the exception of Manan Ahmed's excellent series on the history of anti-Ahmadi legislation (archived here: http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/category/homistan), the debate is dangerously close to reproducing a "good Sufi"/"bad Wahhabi" dichotomy that has plagued the literature on Pakistan for quite some time.

One take-away point from Taseer's piece is that historians need to pay more attention to the "Islamisation" of Pakistan under General Zia and to the connections, especially via labour migration to the Middle East, between Islam in Pakistan and outside. But we should avoid imposing a dualistic frame over all past events, as William Dalrymple does when he recasts even the history of the 1857 Indian Mutiny as a struggle between the tolerant Sufis of Bahadur Shah's court and the North Indian rebel forerunners of Osama bin Laden. Such wishful thinking avoids the uncomfortable questions about Sufis' role in upholding the feudal order in Pakistan, somewhat forcefully asked in the following article with the provocative title, "The Bad Sufi":
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-the-bad-sufi-ss-02

To better grasp what made me uncomfortable with Taseer's presentation of the story, I re-read the introduction to his otherwise excellent translations of Manto, where he claims that he is rescuing Manto for India out of the ghetto of being considered a "Pakistani writer." By implication he is doing the same thing for Urdu. Similar to his suggestion that Pakistan's problems could be resolved by a rapprochement with some forgotten essence of "Indianness," or as he puts it, the "Indian pink" underneath the "black Arab abaya," this claim has the air of denying the validity or legitimacy of the Pakistani nation itself. Towards the end of the article, the argument gets more and more intense, and in one sentence the problem of Kashmiri azadi is thrown away as a mere fixation of insecure Pakistanis in search of an identity -- which is remarkable, even offensive, considering the massive violence and curtailment of freedoms unleashed by the Indian Army in Kashmir even as we speak. The flavour of the month:
http://kafila.org/2010/07/10/curbs-continue-on-kashmir-media-is-it-martial-law-in-srinagar/

I am, first of all, no nationalist, and least of all a Pakistani nationalist. I have repeatedly said in various conversations on the topic that Pakistan, "moth-eaten" as it was at birth and caught in the paradox between being a "state for Muslims" that was not meant to be a "Muslim state" (Jinnah's utopian dream), divided between Punjabi elites and waves of regional separatism from Bengalis to Balochis, crushed by the army and the centre, has had a sorry run of historical luck. But all that has been over the past 60 years, sab ho gaya and we cannot un-wish Pakistan out of existence. Every single time a Western or Indian commentator suggests that Pakistan is facing an "existential" crisis and goads this enormously diverse and stratified population to breezily "re-think" the basis of their country and to learn "new narratives," the implication remains that the people of Pakistan are somehow a "problem people," engaged for over half a century in the illicit enterprise of having a country. History can't be re-written overnight; as Marx once wrote, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." In Pakistan's case, the fight for social justice, democracy, and pluralism can only start from the rubble around us, brick by brick. It might also have to happen under the same green-and-white flag at the end of the day.

Ayesha Jalal began her Manzur Qadir Memorial Lecture of 1989 in Lahore, by saying that she loved Pakistan "with the same complicated and consuming passion" with which Braudel loved France. The problem with most of the purveyors of the "State of Pakistan" brand of journalism in India and the West is that they wish to save Pakistan without ever having loved it, at least a little bit.

Technologies of Non-Violence: Bayard Rustin in India

After Proposition 8 passed in California last year, there was much discussion about the "black vote" and how it had damaged the cause of gay rights. Here was a sad case of two kinds of minority politics clashing with each other amidst a dizzying variety of overdetermined oppositions (black v. white, urban v. suburban/rural, middle class v. working class, religion v. secularism).

The figure of Bayard Rustin, civil rights leader and organiser of the 1963 March on Washington, as a black, gay, and labour activist all in one, is occasionally brought up as a hopeful reminder that we can live outside these binaries. Rustin is often quoted in the service of "coalition building," particularly this 1986 speech: "The new 'niggers' are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. … The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people."

But Rustin's life is exemplary in one more sense, demonstrating how certain organisational methods for social movements, particularly techniques of non-violent protest, circulate across borders. We are told that the civil rights movement was "inspired by" Gandhi's efforts against the British. But how did this transfer actually happen, and what tensions did the process reveal? Rustin's trip to India in 1948 provides a sketch of the painstaking ways in which the transfer of ideas happens "on the ground."

Rustin's visit must be placed in the context of a decades-long relationship between African-Americans and India, cultivated by prominent figures like W.E.B. DuBois, and of international pacifist networks in which Rustin participated. He was there for the precise purpose of drawing some lessons from the Indian experience with a view to applying them to the U.S. In other words, Rustin did not come as a wayward traveler: he had a definite agenda and mission, and he was immediately critical toward nationalism and militarism in India as he saw them. John d'Emilio's book Lost Prophet reveals how Rustin was severely disappointed that the Gandhian cause had ultimately served nationalism, and concluded that it was "non-violent in its means, but essentially violent in its ends." At the same time, Rustin tried during his stay to influence Nehru to move in a more pacifist direction (this is, we must remember, the high point of the nation-state's birth, the time of Kashmir and Telangana).

Where should these technologies of non-violence be situated? Did they happen "in India" and were then "brought over" to the United States? Were they located instead in the insitutional workings of international pacifist organisations, or in the very minds of individuals like Rustin, in their ideologies and convictions? We should be aware of the conditions that give rise to certain openings for communication, to exchanges of people and ideas that can be traced, to use that ugly term, "transnationally." The many possibilities of the postwar moment to forge such links, whether in the service of anti-colonialism, anti-racism or anti-nationalism, can serve as examples and warnings for the fractured resistances of today.

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.