Ziauddin Sardar, a prolific left-leaning political writer based in London, has been going after Salman Rushdie lately, calling him a “brown sahib” — the postcolonial equivalent of an Uncle Tom. I find Sardar’s attacks upsetting (I side with Rushdie here, as I’ll explain below), but more generally I am so over this habit of brown intellectuals tearing each other to shreds on the question of their loyalty to the “cause.” Just because someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean they are a traitor or a coconut, needing to be “flushed,” as a certain desi blogger is fond of saying. There’s something pathological and deeply self-destructive about the way minority writers do this to each other, and I wish it would stop.
The current feud is a bit of a convoluted story, starting most recently with Sardar’s review of a book on Islam/terrorism by Anthony McRoy called From Rushdie to 7/7: The Radicalisation of Islam in Britain. It looks like your basic, “Watch out, Muslims in Britain have become very radicalized!” type book.
In the review, Sardar says some harsh things about McRoy’s book that might or might not be accurate, as he tends to argue more from insinuation than evidence. I don’t know, as I haven’t read McRoy’s book. But he says this about Rushdie:
For example, he suggests I labelled Rushdie as a “brown sahib” because I feared that the new generation of Muslims would become “contaminated” with “infidel ideas”. This is laughably absurd. The “brown sahib” is a recognisable sociological type on the Subcontinent: an uncritical Anglophile. My point was that Muslims should not be surprised by what Rushdie had done. A brown sahib, somewhere, sometime, was bound to do just that. (link)
Now when this story broke last week, I searched the papers looking for what Sardar had originally said about Rushdie, and why. I couldn’t find it — it could either have been Rushdie’s approving noises on the War in Iraq, or the act of writing The Satanic Verses itself. (But do you ever need substantial justification to call someone a race traitor? No — you just do it, and you expect it will stick.) Rushdie wrote an incensed reply to the Independent here:
There is much in this review that is, to use terms of which Sardar himself is fond, “skewed”, “ludicrous” and “half-baked”. His assertion that “jihad is never offensive” will come as a surprise to those of us who live in the real world, not the ideological fantasy-universe he prefers, in which language loses its meaning, aggression becomes “defence”, and aggressors become victims. His claim that “all Muslims see themselves as part of the ummah” could have been uttered by a dedicated clash-of-civilisations hawk, and blithely ignores the profound divisions, political, intellectual, tribal, nationalist and theological, within the Muslim world, and the struggles of genuinely courageous Muslim writers and intellectuals against the repressive Islam that is so much in the ascendant everywhere in that world.
As for his cheap shots at me for being a “brown Sahib”, something I have never been called, to my knowledge, by anyone in India, where, Sardar tells us, it is a “recognisable sociological type”, I wonder if you would so readily publish an attack on a well-known black writer which used the term “Uncle Tom”?>
Sardar describes me, bizarrely, as an “uncritical Anglophile”, which suggests that it is he, not Mr McRoy, who “needs to read much more widely”. By the immoderation of his tone and his argument, he goes some way to proving McRoy’s point that “Islamic radicalism has become mainstream”, which was not, presumably, his intention. (link)
To my eye, Rushdie is ‘housing’ Sardar here, calling him on the doublespeak of victimization as an excuse for random violence (Jihad can never be offensive, because that’s not what the Quran says, so terrorism in the name of religion is by definition defensive); on the pathological use of “brown sahib”; and on his refusal to distance himself from radical Islamist positions. (Sardar, incidentally, has published several books pleading for a “moderate” interpretation of Sharia.)
Ah, but it isn’t done yet, is it? Nope. Sardar then writes another column, this time in the New Statesman, replying to Rushdie’s letter. This column spends about five paragraphs defining the “brown sahib” along the lines laid out by Sri Lankan journalist V. T. Vittachi in his 1962 book The Brown Sahib. In brief: cooperation with colonialism out of self-interest, gymkhanas, English mission schools, acceptance of the superiority of European civilization, lingering colonial mentality after independence. There’s your brown sahib.
On how this applies to Rushdie, Sardar has only an assertion, not an explanation:
Now, I put to you this simple thesis: Rushdie fits the bill.
Alas, Rushdie is not the most prominent brown sahib on the planet. The top dog is the even more legendary V S Naipaul. One of the principal characteristics of brown sahibs is that each one considers himself to be the only authentic article, the true representative of the ideology of the colonial masters. So they direct most of their venom at each other. As Vittachi put it, the brown sahibs love nothing better than to indulge their fancy for “tearing their own kind apart, limb from limb, skin from bone, with finger-licking tooth-sucking glee”. (link)
I can’t imagine that Sardar is aware of the irony of his own perpetuation of this cycle of desi intellectuals destroying each other to get ahead. It’s also deeply unfortunate that he doesn’t acknowledge all the ways in which Rushdie’s novels do challenge the “ideology of the colonial masters,” and critique (gently) the “Chamcha” position that Vittachi and Sardar are ridiculing. It’s as if he hasn’t read The Satanic Verses, and so is forced to repeat it — he as Gibreel, and Rushdie as Chamcha. (Guess who survives the fight?)
I have two concluding thoughts:
First, can we get over the idea that to establish yourself, you have to go after a brown figure who has become successful before you, and accuse him or her of being a sell-out?
And secondly, people, can we just flat-out stop using “brown sahib”/”uncle tom” as a kind of in-house racial slur? Can we actually accept diversity of opinion within the South Asian/ diasporic intellectual world?
So you do feel that the British were better. There !!! was it hard to admit?
Hmm.. I thought I admitted it in my first post. Compared to the kings/sultans/nizams/nawabs Brits were better.. Check the political rights offered to the people in British India to those in the princely states..
The maps that you are linking are during the time of British India, which on the west spanned from Afghanistan to the east Bangladesh and some part of Myanmar (Burma). In this expansive area, Hyderabad is a little bity town.
ROFL.. sounds very lame..
I did link to an older discussion about what could have happened if the British didnt occupy India. But if you are convinced that British came as messiah to save India from the Nizam, you are entitled to your view.
You have a peculiar way of comprehending things.. Did I say Brits are the messiahs?.. I said Brits are relatively better. Nothing more..
OMG, you think they are messiahs ?? I insinuated that they were .. in your POV. (There is a difference .. a huge one) Anyways, to each their own.
Saying the brits were better than the sultans/nizams/rajas is like saying the rapist was one of the better kind cause he didn’t beat the victim to death.
Have some brown pride, already. A rapist is a rapist is a rapist
I have to agree with Ponniyin Selvan that the Nizamate of Hyderabad was a very large kingdom…it included portions of today’s Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Karnataka. I also agree that the British were better than many Indian rulers. Post-independence BROWN governments in India have also been rapists for that matter.
Uh huh. Democratically-elected BROWN governments are rapists just like the British – that’s why the literacy rate has gone from 5% (when the British got their sorry white asses out) to over 50% under the brownies. That’s why there’s been so many man-made famines, like the Bengal famine (when Churchill basically said he didn’t care if the streets of Kolkata were littered with corpses), under the brownies. That’s why from being an utter basket-case economically (happens when a parasite colonial nation is draining a third of your national product), India’s become an economic powerhouse under the brownies.
There’s a difference between a BROWN elected government pursuing misguided economic and social policies, and a parasite foreign government existing purely to garner wealth for its own citizens off the backs of the ‘natives’. Like I said, have some brown pride already.
Okay, the following sentiments have been preying on my mind for a while.
I have read Tariq Ali, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Qureshi, Sardar. I love all their work– fiction, political and social commentaries, themes related to the Desh (albeit some of Rushdie’s latest political essays). But I can’t help noticing a certain trend: why, why, why, do all these writers most of the time (not always) focus on Islam and Muslims, as if being a writer of Muslim background signifies identifying primarily with Islam and its issues?
Here is an example: I had gone to see Tariq Ali speak on campus. I would like to reiterate that I simply love his work. Anyway, during the conference, he spoke eloquently about the wars, US policies, and so on in such an accurate, logical, and passionate manner that several people would even applaud him throughout the course of his talk. I wholeheartedly agreed with his assessments of the ongoing, bitter conflicts raging in South Asia. But towards the end, he lapsed into speaking about how the Muslims in Baghdad, centuries ago, were benevolent, that they were a truly inclusive and pluralistic people, etc. My friend sitting next to me, who is a Turkish Muslim, started shaking her head in displeasure. This is certainly good stuff to know, and for anyone who has an ounce of historical knowledge about the Muslim empire knows this. But why bring this up, about something centuries ago?
This is NOT to say that these writers shouldn’t be able to address the issues surrounding Muslims and Islam. But many times, their work tends to focus so much on Islamic identity and religion that I can’t help but sort of cry out in despair: “Can’t we speak about something else? Or approach things from another perspective?” I’ve tried to work out the reasons as to why this happens, and here they are:
With all of the above, in the end, these writers on the one hand, address the rhetoric against Islam and Muslims so as to dispel popular beliefs (which politicians stroke and nurture) yet they seem to confirm that Muslims, of any ethnic background, see themselves primarily as Muslims first and foremost, with the other identities trailing behind. Perhaps they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
NOTE: I am NOT saying that writers shouldn’t address and discuss Islam and Muslims; I am saying that it would be nice to read writers who despite the fact that they are of Muslim background, they converse with other topics, approaches and viewpoints that don’t exclusively and primarily deal with Islam.
Or maybe I don’t know of many writers of Muslim background that do this, and if any of you know of some, let me know!
Notice in the Hitchens/Rushdie debate how no one would ever dream of calling Hitchens a “race traitor”– despite his many criticisms of his own– nor would anyone ask him to have any “white pride,” obviously.
In todays world, this is the true “white superiority”. They allow themselves to express a variety of opinions w/o any reference to their race. They can transcend race. A white person could embrace–say Chinese culture, language, art, etc—and even consider this culture to be superior to others including his own, w/o anyone batting an eyelid. No one will accuse them of self-hatred.
While most on this site would balk at using such mean-spirited terms as “brown sahib”; desi/brown pride, like black-pride; but unlike white-pride is quite mainstream. But, like black pride, it is born out of weakness, not strength. Philosophically, it makes no sense unless one embraces racist notions that “race” is something to be proud of. Its obviously some sort of affirmative action program meant to correct the notion of “brown shame” by overcompensating. But does this reflect our pride, or is it ultimately a manifestation of our inferiority complex?
Manju,
No doubt the term ‘brown pride’ comes from a different social/psychological standpoint than the neutrality most whites speak from. I wouldn’t call it ‘weakness’. Until it became taboo in the West, Europeans would talk of their ‘pride as an Englishman’, their ‘honour as a Frenchman’ etc. If you read Somerset Maugham and others, there are plenty of references to the ‘prestige of the white race’. This sort of phraseology does not necessarily come from a stance of ‘weakness’.
I would argue that the extreme sensitivity in the West to concepts like ‘white pride’ dates largely from the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. A powerful group that faces the grisly, nightmarish consequences of its ‘pride’ is going to have a radically different reaction from, say, a historically marginalized group that realizes it has a tendency to cannibalize its members through criticism and put downs, and elicits the ‘pride’ concept to counter this.
The Germans still say, “Alles in Deutsche Hande” meaning everything is A-Okay – even after the Holocaust.
The point Manju may be making is (Manju, correct me if I am wrong) that must we take the fruitless and possibly a dangerous route of uber nationalism and ethnic pride which the European grandstanding and arrogance ought to have taught us? The world is very different from what it was a hundred years ago – geographic and cultural walls are breaking down rapidly. Too much focus on identity politics is a sure fire way to either neo-colonial tendencies (eg. Bush-Blair misadventurism in the middle east) or fascistic ones (Al Qaida and its offshoots). Dharma Queen, the very advances that you cite – literacy, self suffciency and and impressive growth rate, shouldn’t that be the quiet revenge in upending all unfair stereotypes?
Like Cheap Ass Desi I have also wondered about the tendency of many moderate Muslim writers and intellectuals to hark back to the glory days of Islam – of its tolerance and great strides in mathematics, philosophy and architecture – blah, blah, blah ad nauseum. I guess they do it out of a sense of shame for what Islam is associated with in the current world stage. However, I am impatient with such nostalgic ruminations. It doesn’t in the end matter what the Quran REALLY says about such and such. Or that Islam REALLY is a religion of peace. What matters is what is being perpetrated in the name of Islam NOW. And what other Muslims are doing about it. Not bloody much from what I have seen. Every brave voice raised is driven into hiding by a swiftly issued fatwa.
And the same goes for the Hindu fundies whenever the subjects of caste, mistreatment of women come up. They find it necessary to quote ancient scriptures to gilt edge the tarnished reality on the ground.
I can not help you with writers writing in English, but the Muslim writers writing in Bengali on both sides of the border do deal with every facet of human experience. My favorites would be Abul Bashar, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Samshur Rahman, Hasan Azizul Haque and Taslima Nasrin, but I am sure there are a plenty of significant writers I have never read. Some of their works have been translated in English, not sure if the translations are easily accessible.
And how about this for revenge?
“Despite the urge of fans to invoke national mythologies from a distant past, many European national teams now reflect the continent’s increasingly cosmopolitan makeup. Thanks to postwar economic migrations into Europe from former colonies, many of the best players available to a European national team are second- and even third-generation immigrants. France fields a team in which all but one, sometimes two, players are of African or Arab origin. The racist politician Jean Marie Le Pen actually complained in 1998 that the World Cup winners were “not a real French team.” Some English fans are more accepting of their cosmopolitan fate, as reflected in one of their chants that extols Britain’s new national cuisine: “And we all love vindaloo…”
what do rushdie and naipaul both have in common?? they both criticized the oh so sacred mujahidi islam.
Don’t be so sensitive and defensive. Brown governments have raped brown people – witness Gujarat and 1984. Indian politicians raping and carrying out genocide against their own people. Have some humility and introspection and maybe we can stand up against these rapists who feed off the Indian people to get fat themselves, for goodness sake.
Ruchira,
I appreciate your point but France, and European countries in general, are terrible examples of national barriers ‘breaking down’. France’s soccer team is about the only arena where non-whites have a chance of making it. Discrimination against Arabs and Blacks is legion (see the recent MSNBC series on Islam in Europe for more info). I met a couple of French Arab guys the other day, young guys, who told me that their resumes were regularly disqualified purely on the basis of their Arab names. They are now working in Canada. This is an oft repeated story. France made headlines recently because the first Black anchorman had just been hired. Whoop de dooh! When I lived in Belgium a few years ago, I repeatedly heard that Arabs just ‘didn’t go to university’ and that’s why I never saw any of them in the university town I lived in.
After two hundred years of being told our culture, religion, literature, people sucked, we surely have the right to some brown pride. I’m not suggesting this means go do something mean to Whitey. I just mean, stop internalizing the colonial legacy – don’t start glorifying the British and putting down everything Indians do.
After two hundred years of being told our culture, religion, literature, people sucked, we surely have the right to some brown pride. I’m not suggesting this means go do something mean to Whitey. I just mean, stop internalizing the colonial legacy – don’t start glorifying the British and putting down everything Indians do.
Well, why stop with 200 years.. you can go back to thousands of years.. Victors have historically nothing good to say about the losers’ religion/culture/literature.. and vice versa.. Check Babar’s Babarnama.. Generally Tamil scholars talk ill about “kalappirar dynasty” (a mysterious tribe that ruled from 2nd – 4th century AD) and talk about them as barbarians.. Tamils probly got their a** kicked by “kalappirars”.. 🙂
Take all this things in the right spirit and move on. Yes, it is true that Brits did a lot of bad things, but on balance I’d treat their rule as better than the other Nizams/kings/Sultans..
CAD, “5. These writers enjoy popularity with readers precisely because these writers do address the issues that relate to and fit into the current framework, thereby tapping into existing sentiments (ie “clash of civilizations, or politics as the culprit of the anger many around the globe”?)”
I don’t know exactly what reasons may prompt authors to have such a focus on Islam, part of it may be what you wrote above. Readers want to find “explanations” of what is going on and these books try to provide it. These explanations have to be somewhat safe though and these authors often dwell on the humanitarian and progressive traditions. Books that try to discuss the mindset of terrorists for example would probably be so uncomfortable that they would be ignored, or they would be religious tracts and thus would be ignored. As to other books that may have a different focus. I think “In the Walled Gardens” by Anahita Firouz or “Salt and Saffron” by Kamila Shamsie might be good reads. The second does have a food fixation though, so be warned. They weren’t earth shatteringly great but they were just good to read when you have time.
Some insufferable smartass once said: “The test of first class mind is the ability to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Since I am also an insufferable smartass, I’ll sum up:
1) Pre-colonial Indian rulers sucked. 2) Colonial British rule sucked too, but the degree of suckitude was less by a non-trivial amount. 3) The British get no props for sucking, since the non-sucking attributes of their governance were accidental at best. 4) But however self-satisfying, uncritical hatred of everything British and uncritical admiration of everything in the name of “brown pride” is infantile. The historical reality is so much more complicated.
Speedy
Dharma Queen: I have no illusions about “liberal” Europe – England is a bit of an exception, not by much. I have lived in Europe. I hope Amardeep won’t kick me off for plugging my own blog post here. Please see what I had to say when the Danish cartoons kerfuffle took place. I initially decided to give that topic a wide berth. But my blog post actually resulted from a bitter argument I had with a Danish man at another site.
I was born a few years after the Indian independence when Chacha Nehru was promising us a shiny new progressive India and we and our parents believed him – it proved to be a pipe dream. I know a Brown Sahib when I see one. They are a dying breed, believe me. Look at Dinesh DeSouza and Michelle Malkin for its current prototype. Rushdie is not one of them. I also grew up during the student turmoil of the seventies. My generation was the first to break several taboos – social and political. Campus politics ran along ideological lines not communal ones. It breaks my heart to see identity politics at the forefront of Indian politics and without apology. Regional politics is almost tribal. And believe me, false ethnic pride and past historical grievances have much to do with it.
I hope my children’s generation (to which you may belong) in India and in the US is much more comfortable in its own skin than that of my parents who were products of colonial times. Perhaps I am being Pollyannaish but I do not wish to see them spend their precious energies in an unnecessarily militant mentality of identity politics – focused too much on the brown/white thing. Their social and cultural concerns I hope will be focused on fairness, justice and sanity across color and ethnic barriers. I hope that they are cosmopolitan enough and confident enough to know racism when and wherever they see it and to deal with it without fear or pulling their punches. At least that is how I hope we post independence era parents have brought up our children.
Ruchira Paul:
I think you misunderstood me. My point wasn’t that writers of Muslim background hark back to the glory days of Islam, and I disagree with your assertions here. I was trying to say that well published writers are often those whose reference point is Islam and continue to invoke it endlessly, and all its entailing implications that I chewed out in my above post. And the more I think about it, the more I feel like this says something more about the publishing industry, rather than a lack of writers who write about issues other than Islam exclusively.
At first I was thinking maybe all this has to do with the “burden of representation”. After I posted my comment, it occured to me that writers of Muslim background aren’t the only ones to do this. Hindus do it too. Like Pankaj Mishra, for instance. Again, I enjoy his writing greatly, particularly his sensitivity and clarity re: political and social dynamics. But he too situates many things within the context of Hinduism, and he often compares incidents to the Hindus that occupy a position similar to his (lower middle class Hindu). Come to think of it, most Desi writers famous in the West that I know of tend to bring in a lot of religious elements, and perhaps because the Western publishing gatekeepers choose these writers precisely for that reason: Desis are a religous people,and we code everything according to religion– so the stereotype goes. How many Desi writers would get published if they didn’t write about religion, food, and, arranged marriages? And yet this trend confirms and feeds that stereotype that this is how Desis see the world. But it’s difficult to get published if you don’t write within this framework. It’s a vicious, endless cycle.
Dipanjan: Thank you for the list. I have taken note, and I will see if I can get them in English.
Sleepy:
“Safe”: that’s a good way to put it.
Cheap Ass Desi:
It is absolutely essential to speak of the history of Islam in a multifacted way when people are too quick to draw sweeping, inaccurate generalizations of Islam and Muslims. Most people find it more convenient to entertain essentialist notions of Muslims and Islam, than delving into the politics of the faith and separating strands of orthodox Islam from moderate/liberal Islam. It’s just easier to think of Muslims as ahistorial and unchanging -essentially Bedouin tribes raging their war against modernity. This climate is dangerous. It is essential that intellectuals step up to the task of debunking such crude notions identity and history.
And quite frankly, I donÂ’t really understand the frustration towards historians like Tariq Ali who clearly condemn Islamic fundamentalism while giving sound historical reasons for its development and presenting more liberal and open accounts of Islam. He’s not doing the latter at the expense of the former. If he was, he would be an apologist, but he’s clearly not.
Ruchira,
Your last comment was quite beautiful. My parents are post-Independence children who came to Canada – as I like to think of it, they fell out of the hands of Gandhi into the lap of Trudeau’s Just Society. They were young, strong, and very idealistic. I do remember them being extremely upset if I picked up any sort of discriminatory or racist ideas. My first massive run in with my Dad was after I used the n-word at age five (not knowing what it meant). Their close friends were the young Pakistani couple across the street. My birthday parties were mini-UN meetings. You get the picture.
I don’t know if my generation, and younger, have the same source of idealism. The world right now is increasingly divisive on ethnic/tribal lines. I do not enjoy being asked repeatedly whether I am Muslim, as though I have to be nailed down before I’m approached. Nor do I enjoy the widespread assumption that my culture of origin is intrinsically unjust/oppressive/repressive. I’ve been friends with, dated, trusted, lived with white people all of my adult life. And I can tell you, very few of them don’t have prejudices against minorities. Occasionally, I worry about what will happen here if there is a terrorist strike. In short, it’s not all nicey-nice anymore, and people aren’t singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ all over the world.
I know this isn’t the answer you wanted to hear. But it’s what I see happening.
Neha, The article by Tarek Fateh is quite good. Don’t you find it kind of contradictory towards the end ? He wants politics to be kept strictly out of the mosque and yet he wants the mosque to be an atmosphere of political debate and contestation….? I find that kind of puzzling. He should be advocating for more room in political dialogue without exactly being against ‘politics’ ..no?
Dharma Queen: No, that is indeed not the answer I wanted to hear. But if you say so, it must be so. That is the part of the frustration I am expressing. That your parents and I, growing up in the sixties and seventies, the decades of upheaval and love, did not envisage a world which would be so divided again along ethnic identities. We had hoped and still hope that our children would be the global citizens that we and our parents were not.
I know very well that many whites are prejudiced against minorities. I live in Texas. As are also some minorities against whites and each other. You speak of a possible terrorist strike in Canada. We have seen the aftermath of that in the US since 9/11. That is in fact my whole point of reference. Faced with the trouble that it has caused for Asians and middle easterns, I would have hoped for a joint front in repudiating this destructive behavior. It did not happen. The Asian community broke along religious lines – Muslims and the others. The debate too was along religious lines with community leaders at pains to explain what their respective religions REALLY mean. For me, all that was irrelevant. I had hoped for political discussions rooted in individual, civic and human rights. Why must I have to understand theology to decide that some things are just plain wrong? After the Gujarat earthquakes, Houston Indians raised large sums of money for relief. But after the communal violence in Gujarat when too many, especially poor Muslims were left destitute, no such effort took place. When a suggestion to that effect was made, it was met with stony silence.
No, I am not given to criticizing everything brown and looking up to any thing white. On my own blog, I devote very little energy to discussing south Asian matters. The main focus there is to express my extreme displeasure and considerable anger with the Bush administration and its increasingly divisive politics. Yes, much of that too exploits the racial, ethnic and religious fautl lines.
CDA: So you and I were making two different points. Your concern seems to be the literary efforts of south Asian writers. Mine was a more generalized one – that we do not need to evoke religion to communicate across cultural lines and to make persuasive literary statements. Why then ARE the Asian writers churning out books to appeal to the western gatekeepers of the publishing houses? Why are we as Asians flocking to see movies that exploit the very stereotypes of ourselves that we are trying to jettison? Who is responsible here for perpetuating the myths? By the way, I have read some great Muslim writers (not of recent vintage)in Bengali – no such dogged identification with Islam in their works. One particular writer Syed Mujtaba Ali is (was) a favorite writer of mine in any language. He held forth on subjects as diverse as the history of Afghanistan, rise of the Nazis in Germany, Tagore, the religious / linguistic history of south Asia with equal aplomb and not an iota of narrow, self serving communal commentary. You get my point. I am not a fan of the ever narrowing concentric circles of identity politics – be it Hindu, Muslim, Jewish or Christian.
Ruchira:
You said “That your parents and I, growing up in the sixties and seventies, the decades of upheaval and love”
Can I ask you a bit more about all this upheaval you refer to? Are you talking about India? My parents were born a few years before Independence (1943/1944), so probably they are somewhat older than yourself. Both parents English-medium educated professionals from urban backgrounds. They lived in India until 1972. But I have never heard anything about upheaval or breaking social taboos or protests, etc. nor do I think they (or any of their peers who I am aquanted with, which is a fairly large number) were involved in any of that. So, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that what you are referring to was a phenomenon fairly limited in scope, and probably affecting a tiny portion of the most ‘liberated’, westernised, urbanised folk, of the highest economic strata, in only a handful of the absolute biggest of Indian cities. Please let me know if I am way off base with that assertion.
RP:
Because that’s the only way to get published sometimes. Look, here’s a quote from an article entitled: “Wanted: Exotic Beauties to Pen Delicious Tales of Kitchen Squabbles and Sparkly Saris” by Noy Thrupkaew:
I imagine that this may be the predicament that Desi writers are in with regards to religion as well.
Here, I think it’s the gatekeepers. There are plenty of gifted writers who have Desi and religiously based names but explore life in its innumerable facets. Yet we don’t hear of them, because they aren’t published by big wigs and don’t get mass marketing. This isn’t confined only to Desi writers, but to Black, Latino, etc (“ethnic”) writers as well.
Anuja:
I absolutely agree with you. This is why in my post #56 I wrote, “Because of ideological warfare and this political propaganda about the “clash of civilizations”, these writers feel somewhat impelled to address these issues, in which case it makes perfect sense”. What I am saying is that there are two implications of Desi writers pursuing this track. One, there is the common charge that is often levelled at Muslims (both suggested implicitly and explicitly) that their primary identity is Islam, and then the other identities (ie Indian, or Chechnen, and so on) are secondary. But this is not true, in my opinion. Yet when writers are recalling Islam over and over– even if to debunk and dispell popular beliefs– it simply confirms the stereotype that individuals are Muslim above everything else. I suppose this is a catch 22 situation. Two, the entire ideological framework is exactly what you have pointed out as well as a “clash of civilizations” schema as I have noted. Based on the knowledge that I have, I do not believe that the current problems are attributed to “Islam” or the “Muslim world”; rather, these problems are the products of politics (US foreign policy, etc). There are many non-Muslims who share similar political sentiments with Muslims (ie, Latin Americans, certain segments of European populations, and so on). But the publishing gatekeepers allow those writers who fit into this schema, and this displaces and diverts the general population’s attention to the REAL roots of current events: politics (geopolitics, occupation, economic and political neo-imperialism), not religion per se (not to say that there aren’t individuals/forces who utilize religion as a vehicle for political expression). People are led to believe that they need to “understand Islam”, that they need to “learn about Islam and the Muslim world”, that there needs to be a “dialogue between religions”, and then everything will be ok. No. It’s a matter of politics. People can understand Islam and dialogue as much as they want, but it’s not going to solve the problems that are afflicting the globe.
“People are led to believe that they need to “understand Islam”, that they need to “learn about Islam and the Muslim world”, that there needs to be a “dialogue between religions”, and then everything will be ok. No. It’s a matter of politics. People can understand Islam and dialogue as much as they want, but it’s not going to solve the problems that are afflicting the globe.”
I wonder how much of this “dialogue” is actually a dialogue. Since the content of so many of these books is censored/controlled by what will appeal to the reading public, its hardly real dialogue. The discussion of the political causes of what’s happening seems to be ignored. The books instead contain apologies and quaint anecdotes about how great things were before the fundamentalists took over. That’s not really learning anything about the here and now. I felt so frustrated when I read “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” It was a great book but I felt like the author couldn’t decide whether to write on politics or on literature. Her views on literature were great but her political comments seemed a little half-hearted, she wanted to make a point but would inevitably start talking about how great pre-revolution Iran was.
Amitabh: The upheaval was everywhere – all over the world. Yes, I am talking about India. Just take the decade from the late sixties to the late seventies.
Start with the the Naxalbari movement which began as a rural Marxist backed peasant uprising in northern Bengal. It soon permeated into active student politics and university life in West Bengal and to some extent Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. It was not limited to the class of people you refer to. Bengali students from all social strata were either involved or affected. Hundreds of young students, mostly boys and young men died. Strikes, bandhs, killings, gheraos, bus burnings and a lot of angst. Student politics all over India were influenced. Many among our teachers in schools and colleges had come of age during India’s freedom movement. They were idealistic and political. Their and vision of India and message to us did not gel with how the elected leaders of newly independet India behaved. The hypocrisy gap was huge and the disillusionment sharp. Loud and often violent discourse about fairness, authority etc. that was generated by the student movement was real and rules were changed to accommodate changing times. In states like West Bengal, unemployment was high. Labor unions were active all over India – often with the participation of student leaders.
In 1971 came the genocidal atrocities and subsequent liberation of Bangladesh, followed by a war with Pakistan. We were first hand witnesses to horrendous, government sponsored human rights transgressions in a neighboring nation whose politics spilled over into India across the borders. Soon after her valiant efforts in Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi declared the state of emergency and tried to position her younger son Sanjay as her heir. Editors, journalists, political rivals, intellectuals, student leaders and anyone that she saw as a threat to her hold on power, were thrown into jail. An uncanny air of fear pervaded India. Many rural folks were targeted for coerced sterilization in another gross example of the government’s high handed intrusion. Raw governmental power, political thuggishness and corruption for the first time came clearly to the surface in the post-independence Indian political scene. In 1977 the first multi party coalition government, Janata Party came to power ending Congress’ long reign in a show of public anger.
That is a whole lot of upheaval I am talking about in a mere decade’s time. Younger people were very politically aware. All this does not mean that we didn’ have fun. We played cricket, soccer, sat for hours in coffee houses talking of politics, enjoyed music and the movies. Apart from Satyajit Ray who wasn’t overtly political in his art until later, directors like Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and M.S. Sathyu started making movies like Padatik, Ankur and Garam Hawa. Folk theater was vibrant. Literature reflected the sign of times.
No, it was nothing like what happened in China under Mao or in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge if that is the impression I gave you. Did most people go about their routine lives through all this? Sure. But that is not to say nothing was happening. Your parents must have experienced at least some of it. Ask them.
Ruchira:
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I overlooked (or was not aware of) much of the stuff you mentioned.
Given Dr. Singh’s permission, I will steer this thread off-topic to the colonial period again.
Ponniyin Selvan:
No, I am not surprised by that collection of elementary facts about Indian colonial history in your comment. However, in your eagerness to parade a few well-known facts about that period, you managed to entirely miss the point of my comment.
My counter-factual scenario envisaged the existence of truly independent states, with a ‘cultural’ sphere not dominated by the West (among directly or indirectly ruled Western states). There were no such states in the colonial period (as I pointed out in my earlier comment). You also hasten to add the same point (contradicting yourself in a single sentence, which is record of sorts).
This state of affairs is not commonly called independence, but I take it you’re a chela of Humpty-Dumpty in that words mean whatever you want them to mean.
You have made an elementary mistake here, something you might have avoided if you had bothered to actually read my comment before posting. Remember, I was positing a counter-factual scenario, along the lines of ‘What if X, instead of Y, had happened?’ My comment did not revolve around the quality of governance in directly vs. indirectly British-ruled Indian states.
To expand on my argument, the seeds of pre-modernity in India in fact developed outside the ambit of the court (and before the development of substantial Western influence in Indian ‘culture’). Perhaps the earliest example was the development of Navya-Nyaya. So what the Nizam did or did not do is not directly relevant to my scenario–political developments can be influenced or caused by developments in non-political arenas.
Briefly, a necessary (though not sufficient) pre-requisite for a ‘modern’ outlook is the conscious acknowledgement that there is a ‘past’. For example, the very term Navya-Nyaya or New Logic (as opposed to the Old Logic) is suggestive of such a development. Further work in this area (by Sheldon Pollock, among many others) has shown that indeed such a spirit towards the past spread from Navya-Nyaya to other schools of thought in India.
The reason for the withering of these schools of thought in India is not clear. With the proviso that counter-factual speculation is risky, it is not unreasonable to speculate that such thought might have flowered in truly independent Indian states not dominated ‘culturally’ by the West. Such states would have been more conducive to the development of a distinctly Indian modernity.
Kumar