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The paedophile charge

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Debunking ancient myths about Prophet Muhammad and his child bride

A Christian friend asked me once, "Will you marry your seven-year-old daughter to a 50-year-old man?" I kept my silence. He continued, "If you would not, how can you approve the marriage of an innocent seven-year-old, Ayesha, with your prophet?" I told him, "I don’t have an answer to your question at this time." My friend smiled and left me with a thorn in the heart of my faith. Most Muslims answer that such marriages were accepted in those days. Otherwise people would have objected to the prophet’s marriage to Ayesha.

However, such an explanation is credible only to those who are naive enough to believe it. Unfortunately, I was not satisfied with the answer.

The prophet was an exemplary man. All his actions were most virtuous so that we Muslims can emulate them. However, most people at our Islamic Center of Toledo, including me, would not think of betrothing our seven-year-old daughter to a 50-year-old man. If a parent agrees to such a wedding, most people, if not all, would look down on the father and the old husband.

In 1923, registrars of marriage in Egypt were instructed not to register and issue official certificates of marriage for brides under 16 and grooms under 18 years of age. Eight years later, the Law of the Organisation and Procedure of Shariah courts of 1931 consolidated the above provision by not hearing marriage disputes involving brides under 16 and grooms less than 18 years old (Women in Muslim Family Law, John Esposito, 1982). This shows that even in the Muslim majority country of Egypt child marriages are unacceptable.

So I believed, without any solid evidence other than my reverence to my prophet, that the stories of the marriage of seven-year-old Ayesha to the 50-year-old prophet were only myths. My long pursuit in search of the truth on this matter proved my intuition correct. My prophet was a gentleman. And he did not marry an innocent seven or nine-year-old girl. Ayesha’s age has been erroneously reported in Hadith literature. Furthermore, I think that the narratives reporting this event are highly unreliable. Some of the Hadith (traditions of the prophet) regarding Ayesha’s age at the time of her wedding with the prophet are problematic. I present the following evidences against acceptance of the fictitious story by Hisham ibn ‘Urwah (prominent Hadith narrator) and to clear my prophet’s name as an irresponsible old man preying on an innocent little girl.

Evidence 1: Reliability of source

Most of the narratives printed in the books of Hadith are reported only by Hisham ibn ‘Urwah, who was reporting on the authority of his father. First of all, more people than just one, two or three people should logically have reported here. It is strange that no one from Medina, where Hisham ibn ‘Urwah lived the first 71 years of his life, narrated the event despite the fact that his Medinan pupils included the well-respected Malik ibn Anas. The origins of the report of the narratives of this event are people from Iraq, where Hisham is reported to have moved after living in Medina for most of his life.

Tehzibu’l-Tehzib, one of the most well known books on the life and reliability of narrators of the Hadith, reports that according to Yaqub ibn Shaibah: "He (Hisham) is highly reliable, his narratives are acceptable except what he narrated after moving to Iraq" (Tehzibu’l-tehzi’b, Ibn Hajar Al-Asqala’ni, Dar Ihya al-turath al-Islami, 15th century, Vol. 11, p. 50).

It further states that Malik ibn Anas objected to those narratives of Hisham which were reported through people in Iraq: "I have been told that Malik objected (to) those narratives of Hisham which were reported through people of Iraq" (Tehzi’b u’l-tehzi’b, Ibn Hajar Al-`asqala’ni, Dar Ihya al-turath al-Islami, Vol.11, p. 50).

Mizanu’l-ai‘tidal, another book containing life sketches of the Hadith’s narrators, reports: "When he was old, Hisham’s memory suffered quite badly" (Mizanu’l-ai‘tidal, Al-Zahbi, Al-Maktabatu’l-athriyyah, Sheikhupura, Pakistan, Vol. 4, p. 301).

Conclusion: Based on these references, Hisham’s memory was failing and his narratives while in Iraq were unreliable. So his narrative of Ayesha’s marriage and age are unreliable.

Chronology: It is vital also to keep in mind some of the pertinent dates in the history of Islam:

  • pre-610 CE: Jahiliya (pre-Islamic age) before revelation.
  • 610 CE: First revelation.
  • 610 CE: Abu Bakr accepts Islam.
  • 613 CE: Prophet Muhammad begins preaching publicly.
  • 615 CE: Emigration to Abyssinia.
  • 616 CE: Umar bin al Khattab accepts Islam.
  • 620 CE: Generally accepted betrothal of Ayesha to the prophet.
  • 622 CE: Hijrah (emigration to Yathrib, later renamed Medina).
  • 623/624 CE: Generally accepted year of Ayesha’s coming to live with the prophet.

Evidence 2: The betrothal

According to Tabari (also according to Hisham ibn ‘Urwah, Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Sad), Ayesha was betrothed at seven years of age and began to cohabit with the prophet at the age of nine years.

However, in another work, Al-Tabari says: "All four of his (Abu Bakr’s) children were born of his two wives during the pre-Islamic period" (Tarikhu’l-umam wa’l-mamlu’k, Al-Tabari (d. 922), Vol. 4, p. 50, Arabic, Dara’l-fikr, Beirut, 1979).

If Ayesha was betrothed in 620 CE (at the age of seven) and started to live with the prophet in 624 CE (at the age of nine), that would indicate that she was born in 613 CE and was nine when she began living with the prophet. Therefore, based on one account of Al-Tabari, the numbers show that Ayesha must have been born in 613 CE, three years after the beginning of the revelation (610 CE). Tabari also states that Ayesha was born in the pre-Islamic era (in Jahiliya). If she was born before 610 CE, she would have been at least 14 years old when she began living with the prophet. Essentially, Tabari contradicts himself.

Conclusion: Al-Tabari is unreliable in the matter of determining Ayesha’s age.

Evidence 3: Ayesha’s age in relation to Fatima’s age

According to Ibn Hajar, "Fatima was born at the time the Ka`bah was rebuilt, when the prophet was 35 years old… she was five years older than Ayesha" (Al-isabah fi tamyizi’l-sahabah, Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani, Vol. 4, p. 377, Maktabatu’l-Riyadh al-haditha, al-Riyadh, 1978).

If Ibn Hajar’s statement is factual, Ayesha was born when the prophet was 40 years old. If Ayesha was married to the prophet when he was 52 years old, Ayesha’s age at marriage would be 12 years.

Conclusion: Ibn Hajar, Tabari, Ibn Hisham and Ibn Hanbal contradict each other. So the marriage of Ayesha at seven years of age is a myth.

Evidence 4: Ayesha’s age in relation to Asma’s age

According to Abda’l-Rahman ibn Abi Zanna’d: "Asma was 10 years older than Ayesha" (Siyar A`la’ma’l-nubala’, Al-Zahabi, Vol. 2, p. 289, Arabic, Mu’assasatu’l-risalah, Beirut, 1992).

According to Ibn Kathir: "She (Asma) was elder to her sister (Ayesha) by 10 years" (Al-Bidayah wa’l-nihayah, Ibn Kathir, Vol. 8, p. 371, Dar al-fikr al-`arabi, Al-jizah, 1933).

According to Ibn Kathir: "She (Asma) saw the killing of her son during that year (73 AH), as we have already mentioned, and five days later she herself died. According to other narratives, she died not after five days but 10 or 20, or a few days over 20, or 100 days later. The most well known narrative is that of 100 days later. At the time of her death, she was 100 years old" (Al-Bidayah wa’l-nihayah, Ibn Kathir, Vol. 8, p. 372, Dar al-fikr al-`arabi, Al-jizah, 1933).

According to Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani: "She (Asma) lived a hundred years and died in 73 or 74 AH" (Taqribu’l-tehzib, Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani, p. 654, Arabic, Bab fi’l-nisa’, al-harfu’l-alif, Lucknow).

According to almost all the historians, Asma, Ayesha’s older sister, was 10 years older than Ayesha. If Asma was 100 years old in 73 AH, she should have been 27 or 28 years old at the time of the Hijrah.

If Asma was 27 or 28 years old at the time of Hijrah, Ayesha should have been 17 or 18 years old. Thus Ayesha, being 17 or 18 years of age at the time of Hijrah, started to cohabit with the prophet at somewhere between 19 and 20 years of age.

Based on the narratives of Hajar, Ibn Kathir, and Abda’l-Rahman ibn Abi Zanna’d, Ayesha’s age at the time she began living with the prophet would be 19 or 20. In evidence 3, Ibn Hajar suggests that Ayesha was 12 years old and in evidence 4 he contradicts himself with a 17 or 18-year-old Ayesha. What is her correct age, 12 or 18?

Conclusion: Ibn Hajar is an unreliable source for Ayesha’s age.

Evidence 5: The battles of Badr and Uhud

A narrative regarding Ayesha’s participation in Badr is given in the Hadith of Muslim (Kitabu’l-jihad wa’l-siyar, Bab karahiyati’l-isti‘anah fi’l-ghazwi bikafir). Ayesha, while narrating the journey to Badr and one of the important events that took place on that journey, says: "when we reached Shajarah". Obviously, Ayesha was with the group travelling towards Badr. A narrative regarding Ayesha’s participation in the Battle of Uhud is given in Bukhari (Kitabu’l-jihad wa’l-siyar, Bab Ghazwi’l-nisa’ wa qitalihinna ma‘a’lrijal): "Anas reports that on the day of Uhud, people could not stand their ground around the prophet. (On that day,) I saw Ayesha and Umm-i-Sulaim, they had pulled their dresses up from around their feet (to avoid any hindrance in movement)." Again, this indicates that Ayesha was present in the battles of Uhud and Badr.

It is narrated in Bukhari (Kitabu’l-maghazi, Bab Ghazwati’l-khandaq wa hiya’l-ahza’b): "Ibn `Umar states that the prophet did not permit me to participate in Uhud, as at that time I was 14 years old. But on the day of Khandaq, when I was 15 years old, the prophet permitted my participation."

Based on the above narratives, (a) children below 15 years of age were sent back and were not allowed to participate in the Battle of Uhud, and (b) Ayesha participated in the battles of Badr and Uhud.

Conclusion: Ayesha’s participation in the battles of Badr and Uhud clearly indicates that she was not nine years old but at least 15 years old. After all, women used to accompany men to the battlefields to help them, not to be a burden on them. This account is another contradiction regarding Ayesha’s age.

Evidence 6: Surah al-Qamar (The moon)

According to generally accepted tradition, Ayesha was born about eight years before Hijrah. But according to another narrative in Bukhari, Ayesha is reported to have said: "I was a young girl (jariyah in Arabic)" when surah Al-Qamar was revealed (Sahih Bukhari, Kitabu’l-tafsir, Bab Qaulihi Bal al-sa`atu Maw`iduhum wa’l-sa`atu adha’ wa amarr).

Chapter 54 of the Koran was revealed eight years before Hijrah (The Bounteous Koran, MM Khatib, 1985), indicating that it was revealed in 614 CE. If Ayesha started living with the prophet at the age of nine in 623 CE or 624 CE, she was a newborn infant (sibyah in Arabic) at the time that surah al-Qamar (The Moon) was revealed. According to the above tradition, Ayesha was actually a young girl, not an infant, in the year of revelation of al-Qamar. Jariyah means young playful girl (Lane’s Arabic English Lexicon). So Ayesha, being a jariyah not a sibyah (infant), must have been somewhere between six and 13 years old at the time al-Qamar was revealed and therefore must have been between 14 and 21 years at the time she married the prophet.

Conclusion: This tradition also contradicts the story of Ayesha’s marriage at the age of nine.

Evidence 7: Arabic terminology

According to a narrative reported by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, after the death of the prophet’s first wife Khadijah, when Khaulah came to the prophet advising him to marry again, the prophet asked her about the choices she had in mind. Khaulah said: "You can marry a virgin (bikr) or a woman who has already been married (thayyib)." When the prophet asked about the identity of the bikr (virgin), Khaulah mentioned Ayesha’s name.

All those who know the Arabic language are aware that the word bikr in the Arabic language is not used for an immature nine-year-old girl. The correct word for a young playful girl, as stated earlier, is jariyah. Bikr, on the other hand, is used for an unmarried lady without conjugal experience prior to marriage, as we understand the word "virgin" in English. Therefore obviously a nine-year-old girl is not a "lady" (bikr) (Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Vol. 6, p. 210, Arabic, Dar Ihya al-turath al-`arabi, Beirut).

Conclusion: The literal meaning of the word, bikr (virgin), in the above Hadith is "adult woman with no sexual experience prior to marriage". Therefore Ayesha was an adult woman at the time of her marriage.

Evidence 8: The Koranic text

All Muslims agree that the Koran is the book of guidance. So we need to seek guidance from the Koran to clear the smoke and confusion created by the eminent men of the classical period of Islam in the matter of Ayesha’s age at the time of her marriage. Does the Koran allow or disallow marriage of an immature child of seven years of age?

There are no verses that explicitly allow such a marriage. There is a verse, however, that guides Muslims in their duty to raise an orphaned child. The Koran’s guidance on the topic of raising orphans is also valid in the case of our own children. The verse states: "And make not over your property (property of the orphan), which Allah had made a (means of) support for you, to the weak of understanding, and maintain them out of it, clothe them and give them good education. And test them until they reach the age of marriage. Then if you find in them maturity of intellect, make over to them their property." (Koran, 4:5-6).

In the matter of children who have lost a parent, a Muslim is ordered to (a) feed them (b) clothe them (c) educate them, and (d) test them for maturity "until the age of marriage" before entrusting them with management of finances.

Here the Koranic verse demands meticulous proof of their intellectual and physical maturity by objective test results before the age of marriage in order to entrust their property to them.

In light of the above verses, no responsible Muslim would hand over financial management to a seven or nine-year-old immature girl. If we cannot trust a seven-year-old to manage financial matters, she cannot be intellectually or physically fit for marriage. Ibn Hanbal (Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Vol. 6, p. 33 and 99) claims that nine-year-old Ayesha was rather more interested in playing with toy horses than taking up the responsible task of a wife. It is difficult to believe therefore that Abu Bakr, a great believer among Muslims, would betroth his immature seven-year-old daughter to the 50-year-old prophet. Equally difficult to imagine is that the prophet would marry an immature seven-year-old girl.

Another important duty demanded from the guardian of a child is to educate them. Let us ask the question, "How many of us believe that we can educate our children satisfactorily before they reach the age of seven or nine years?" The answer is none. Logically, it is an impossible task to educate a child satisfactorily before the child attains the age of seven. Then how can we believe that Ayesha was educated satisfactorily at the claimed age of seven at the time of her marriage?

Abu Bakr was a more judicious man than all of us. So he definitely would have judged that Ayesha was a child at heart and was not satisfactorily educated as demanded by the Koran. He would not have married her to anyone. If a proposal to marry the immature and yet to be educated seven-year-old Ayesha came to the prophet he would have rejected it outright because neither the prophet nor Abu Bakr would violate any clause in the Koran.

Conclusion: The marriage of Ayesha at the age of seven years would violate the maturity clause or requirement of the Koran. Therefore the story of the marriage of the seven-year-old immature Ayesha is a myth.

Evidence 9: Consent in marriage

A woman must be consulted and must agree in order to make a marriage valid (Mishakat al Masabiah, translation by James Robson, Vol. I, p. 665). Islamically, credible permission from women is a prerequisite for a marriage to be valid.

The permission given by an immature seven-year-old girl cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be valid authorisation for marriage.

It is inconceivable that Abu Bakr, an intelligent man, would take seriously the permission of a seven-year-old girl to marry a 50-year-old man.

Similarly, the prophet would not have accepted the permission given by a girl who, according to the Hadith of Muslim, took her toys with her when she went to live with the prophet.

Conclusion: The prophet did not marry a seven-year-old Ayesha because it would have violated the requirement of valid permission clause of the Islamic marriage decree. Therefore the prophet married an intellectually and physically mature lady, Ayesha.

Summary

It was neither an Arab tradition to give away girls in marriage at an age as young as seven or nine years nor did the prophet marry Ayesha at such a young age. The people of Arabia did not object to this marriage because it never happened in the manner that has been narrated.

Obviously, the narrative of the marriage of nine-year-old Ayesha by Hisham ibn ‘Urwah cannot hold true when it has been contradicted by many other reported narratives. Moreover, there is absolutely no reason to accept the narrative of Hisham ibn ‘Urwah as true when other scholars, including Malik ibn Anas, view his narrative while in Iraq as unreliable. The quotations from Tabari, Bukhari and Muslim show that they contradict each other regarding Ayesha’s age. Furthermore, many of these scholars contradict themselves in their own records. Thus the narrative of Ayesha’s age at the time of the marriage is not reliable due to the clear contradictions seen in the works of classical scholars of Islam.

Therefore there is absolutely no reason to believe that the information on Ayesha’s age is true when there are adequate grounds to reject it as myth. Moreover, the Koran rejects the marriage of immature girls and boys as well as entrusting them with responsibilities. n

www.ilaam.net

Archived from Communalism Combat, November-December 2007 Year 14    No.126, Gender Jihad Cover Story 5

The growing ‘democratic deficit’

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Sixty years of indifference and the throttling of the public sphere in India

Democratic deficit is American linguist Noam Chomsky’s term for describing the fatal inability of institutions within a democratic state to contribute positively towards sustaining democratic principles; indeed, systems that perform the opposite function by choking information, dialogue, dissent and crucial sharing of opinion. 

Within a worldwide emerging doctrinal system, democratic agencies that deliver educational, administrative, electoral, judicial or communicational and media functions turn sclerotic and conspire to cook up a ‘permitted democracy’ where crucial subjects hardly enter the realm of public discussion, depriving the public largely of the opportunity to form considered opinions. 

A system of shadow-boxing emerges, within which democracy is acceptable only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests. The day-to-day engagements, so necessary to create a functioning democratic culture within which the public can play a role in determining policies, is effectively throttled. This means a deliberate rollback of the state and the active promotion of social buccaneering. 

Since the ‘public sphere’ is already an integral element of the bourgeois state, any dent in the role of the state can only lead to a guillotining of the idea of the ‘public sphere’. 

The emergence of ‘public sphere’ as a notional device during the long passage from a monarchical to a more open, democratic form of society was conceived as a level playing field for plural and contesting interests to enter into dialogue. It was premised upon the abstract existence of an independent ‘critical-rational’ space within daily life, which took one to social commons like the market, the theatre, the media, the library, the public transport or the club. 

The manner in which scholars of the Frankfurt School posited the idea, there was an emancipatory aspect to the notion of the ‘public sphere’, as it opened out hitherto closed or controlled areas of a citizen’s life under more totalitarian systems and thereby tended to extend the formal limits of democracy.

Within the binary counterposing of ‘state’ and ‘society’, the ‘public sphere’ found legitimisation as a site for contestatory public opinion that would provide the check and balance against arbitrary exercise of the state’s authority or a deviation from any rule of law. 

Thus, in an ideal sense, the ‘public sphere’ necessarily encourages both, a diversity of opinion and practice as well as the conditions for dissent from majoritarian pressures. The theorists, however, failed to sufficiently delineate the nuances between, say, a bourgeois ‘public sphere’ and a socialist ‘public sphere’. 

The distinction would have been both substantial and significant. It would have alerted us to the trajectory of the ‘public sphere’ over at least the past fifty years, as having been a flight path that successfully achieved a high degree of information denial, advertisement induced consumer slavery, mass surveillance, media generated dumbing down and collective hysterical behaviour thriving on pathological violence.  

It would also have emphasised the need to comprehend the idea of the ‘public sphere’ as a dynamic and constantly forming one, and not as something frozen in time and space as an institution ‘out there’ and to be taken for granted.

It would have further informed us of the recurring possibility of the vitiation of this sphere every time the state undergoes corporatisation, meaning, when the democratic agenda is hijacked in a unidirectional manner towards solely serving the purposes of the elites. 

Right from the outset of the Indian nation state, the public sphere has been a stillborn baby. If, even after sixty years, our statistics throw up absurd figures like 44 per cent of the population living on less than US $1 a day or, in other words, 440 million people (double the population of America) living on less than Rs 40 a day, the notion of the ‘public sphere’ becomes largely abstract. It, in fact, becomes a space from where they can mount an attack on the infructuous state. It becomes a site for both lumpen and elite vigilantism, for mystical revivalism, for majoritarian fascism and for militant Maoism. 

The cultural commons and the discourse within it has now been systematically usurped by mainstream cinema with its cynical messages on the status quo or glorification of the violent hero or neurotic appeals to the divine. This has become the staple mass consumption. Supplementing it is the contagion of mass mysticism. Satsangs and bhajan mandalis have become the new polluters of the public mind where literally millions of people are administered their daily dose on the virtues of conformism to the brutal, savage society they live within.  

The fight against Maoist resurgence takes the form of private landlord militias like Salwa Judum on the one hand and massive state mobilisation on the other to "flush out" the "Naxalite menace". The entire language is as if that of mosquito eradication with not even a token concession to the possibility that this movement (albeit violent) from below might be a marker, a window to the real frustrations and exhaustion of patience of a large number of people. Instead, almost one third of India running vertically "from Pashupatinath to Tirupatinath" is dubbed a "red corridor" and a staggering budget of some Rs 12,000 crore is earmarked to carry out "aerial assaults" on them with devices including ‘Agent Orange’ – last heard of being used in the killing fields of Vietnam. 

Or take the consequences of some five decades of annual floods in Bihar, brought about by the entirely non-democratic mechanism of building embankments to contain the north to south flowing rivers in that state. The whole exercise has turned monster and systematically submerges thousands of villages every year, taking lives and snatching livelihood. Over 2.5 million people in Bihar today reportedly live on top of these narrow embankments, as they have nowhere else to go. The rest of India perhaps doesn’t even know this. And this is boom time for the media, with papers and channels sprouting faster than scruff on young chins. But the Indian media has collectively decided that it will now stay entirely with ‘good times’ India. As a crucial player in the ‘public sphere’ it will operate within a cordon sanitaire and insulate its middle class consumers from disturbing realities.  

Take the other monstrosity, Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Extensive areas, which were once rural districts, are being turned into SEZs. This again is one of the most un-debated and undemocratic activities of our times, where large chunks of land and other resources like water, power, labour, etc are written off in favour of single-minded economic extraction. People living in such zones then get recalibrated as criminals or lawbreakers if they make any claims to a sense of ‘residence’. 

Or consider the deafening national silence over the proposals of the National Commission on Creative and Cultural Industries – total silence in the media and in every other public sphere. Not even a single editorial in any language or a public symposium in any language on a proposal that promises to mop up Rs 60,000 crore by parasitising on the crafts and artistic base of the nation. This can only be construed as a victory of the market management of the ‘public sphere’ within which large-scale silence can be interpreted as consent and artificially manufactured opposition can be interpreted as ‘public will’. 

The past weeks must have been particularly difficult and alarming for all those who put store by the growth of democratic institutions and the consolidation of a healthy, supple, responsible ‘public sphere’ in India. A wave of vigilantism seems to be mobilising and replacing the existing spaces of political negotiation.

And the cascading violence has also turned unrepentant. A lad in Palanpur is lynched for eloping with a girl. In Bhagalpur a petty thief is beaten up by a mob and then, in full view of television cameras, tied to a police motorcycle and dragged through the streets until he falls unconscious.  

Principals and professors of colleges are dragged out, assaulted and killed. Fatwas are issued for cross-dressed religious leaders in Punjab or feminist writers like Taslima Nasreen. The Bhandarkar Institute in Pune ends up endorsing the violent censorship that wrecked its own research library. Media institutions like Dinakaran in Madurai and Outlook in Mumbai are ransacked and torched for ‘opinion polls’ that disseminate results unpalatable to some parties. Caste panchayats across the country now increasingly determine how people should live or dress or love or marry.  

Films like Fire, Water, Parzania, Jo Bole So Nihal, Rang De Basanti, Jashn-e-Azadi, etc are attacked; plays like Ponga Pandit, The Vagina Monologues, etc are threatened, artists like MF Husain, Surendran Nair, Bhupen Khakhar, Arpita Singh, etc are pilloried. 

In the most bizarre of these incidents, the dean of the faculty of fine arts at the MS University, Vadodara, Prof Shivaji Panikkar is suspended for having upheld the law by supporting the fundamental and artistic rights of his student, Chandra Mohan, who was attacked by a mob that illegally entered the university premises.  

In an equally bizarre manner, Leela Samson, director of the Centre administered Kalakshetra, the revered school for Bharatanatyam and other arts in Chennai, is at the receiving end of an anonymous campaign vilifying her and insinuating that a ‘Christian’ director is bound to be detrimental to the ‘Hindu’ character of the institution. 

Since the deliberate ravaging of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 in full media glare, and with absolutely no one being brought to book for it, one can trace a new era of right wing activism that has been set in motion, in which strategic mob action unleashes rounds of violence in the public sphere, claiming injury to specific honour or pride or identity. 

Of course, it must be mentioned that the blueprint for this was drawn up earlier, in 1984, during the all India anti-Sikh riots in the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. That is when the Indian state officially decided that it would henceforth speak through the mobs. 

Since 1992, however, the Hindutva brigades, proclaiming themselves custodians of social morality, have conducted several operations against beauty pageants, Valentine’s Day events, cricket matches with Pakistan, Michael Jackson and the Spice Girls, the Pakistani ghazal singer Ghulam Ali and so on.

The domain of artistic expression, in fact, has come in for special attention. Art criticism in India now comes with a cutting edge. Literally. Pens have been replaced by penknives. The new critics swing together in shoals of thirty, forty, hundred connoisseurs. They pay periodic visits to art galleries (like the one in Surat a few years ago) where they display equal interest in the works of pioneers of contemporary Indian art like the late NS Bendre, radical pioneers like KH Ara and MF Husain and young modernists like Chittrovanu Mazumdar; to stage plays (like Habib Tanvir’s Ponga Pandit in many towns of Madhya Pradesh); or even libraries of rare manuscripts (like the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune).  

Even as mainstream Indian media seems to collectively shut out serious arts coverage, comment or critique (rendering the individual ‘critic’ redundant), a new cabal of critics has taken to the streets. They fly diverse flags – the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena, the Sambhaji Brigade. Yet their critical sensibilities are distinguished by suspicious similarities. They believe in instant judgement and in swift enforcement of aesthetic yardsticks (and stones). Scar, tar, mar, is their preferred mode of critical practice. 

It is not an entirely new approach to art. Many hatchet men have romped through the portals of history, slashing a canvas here, lopping off an exposed breast there, hammering a sculpture elsewhere. The Taliban even carried out, with great success, missile target practice on the Bamiyan Buddhas. The complex structural and technical features of those awesome giant sculptures or even Buddha’s own beatitude seemingly had no calming influence on the rubble-masonry experts of artistic fundamentalism. 

The new Indian aesthetes (who seem to have no qualms about emulating the deep cultural tutelage of the Taliban) do not place much value on what ‘pleases’ in art. They focus selectively on what ‘offends’. And that’s a pretty broad criterion to apply. For, one can offend with anything. Humour, irony, sarcasm, candour, irreverence, imagined insults to imagined cultural values or traditions; anything can instigate their critical faculties. In the blink of an eye they can pull out their idle kerosene cans and matchboxes and apply their well-practised pyromania on the offending object. 

These ‘cultural zappeurs’ are forever alert and active. They track individual artists. They ambush auditoria. They throttle theatre. They are cynical of serious cinema. They dread documentaries. They get into hysterics with history. They cannibalise canvases. They gherao galleries. They parade their penchant for pinch-hitting. "Apologise, or else!" becomes their magic mantra for regulating a compliant art. 

Their steady list of victories, over the past decade and more, includes corralling individual artists like Husain while thoughtfully torching the Husain-Doshi Gufa in Ahmedabad which housed the Chester Herwitz collection of Husain’s works; amputating the work of leading Indian historians in exhibitions like Ham Sab Ayodhya in Faizabad and Delhi; terrorising scores of individual artists and writers; censoring filmmakers like Deepa Mehta or Mani Ratnam or even an entire festival like the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF). 

The ‘little man’ that political psychologist Wilhelm Reich so beseeched us to beware of has now turned critic. We are squarely into the era of an aesthetic of erasures where it is not creativity that will evoke pleasure but destruction. Here, destruction is the magical antiseptic in the hands of necrophilic agents, to be used on what seems "offensive and impure" in order to maintain social hygiene.  

Perhaps the day is not far when a casual tourist to our cities will be able to identify the location of a handful of art galleries there by the quantum of police bandobast around them. 

The more worrying issue is about the artists who have not been singled out and targeted or whose works are ‘non-objectionable’. What are they to make of themselves? Should they now preen at being certified ‘safe’ artists or should they voluntarily consign their works to the flames for not being good enough to provoke anyone? The essential premise of the post-classical foundations of art in modern times has been about the individual artist’s sacred right to self-expression – often against the grain. If classical art was considered divinely ordained and canonical, resulting in it becoming over-decorated and decadent, modern art has sought freedom to turn the canons upside down, to seek a more liberating human content.  

Poets, painters, playwrights, dancers, filmmakers, have functioned on the premise of an imperative need to assert their personal insights on the inner universe of the mind on the one hand and the outer world of social practices on the other, often coming up with views quite divergent from accepted beliefs or familiar and comfortable positions. Artists have claimed a space that has the potential to undermine, disturb, subvert, the status quo. In fact, their art consists in their very ability, in Italian semiotician Umberto Eco’s words, to perennially "carry out a new and subtle guerrilla warfare at the borders of meanings". This has been construed as their valuable civilisational contribution which, in turn, confers an aura upon the arts and artists.

 But violent chastisement for having transgressed imagined boundaries of the permissible is now considered a legitimate activity within parties of the Right. Way back in 1993, senior ideologues of the sangh parivar like LK Advani, KR Malkani and others attempted to publicly instruct MF Husain on how and what to paint. In 1996, VHP president Ashok Singhal cautioned Husain to "ceremonially burn" his "offending" paintings of Saraswati to demonstrate his "good intentions". A far more belligerent Uma Bharti had also recommended "psychiatric treatment" for Husain. 

Since those days in 1993, the art appreciation brigade of the Hindutva flank has not missed a trick in drumming up the bogey of uncontrolled art leading to social prurience, erosion of cultural values and, more significantly, simply being critical. It is hardly surprising now to hear Mr Advani doling out artistic advice to students of the Vadodara school of art, on the "limits of artistic freedom". 

There is a well-articulated middle class conceit that the cut/slash/rip/dig formula of art appreciation is the dark hubris of a loony fringe of the sangh parivar. They would assure us that these are small and isolated incidents whose perpetrators are mere lumpen madcaps and should not be confused with the otherwise sane and cultured lot of the parivar. Well, perhaps the news needs to be delivered to these worthies – the fringe has, in fact, usurped the field. 

The pleasures of destruction are unquestionable, as any child psychologist will corroborate. But extended into adulthood and the public sphere these merely become self-indulgent pleasures. As a society grows, it needs to find filters to curb this destructive tendency. All residues of it can only be termed malignant.  

What they surface as then, to the eternal shame of any claims to a democratic ‘public sphere’, is the kind of state instigated/supported genocide that we witnessed in Gujarat. For parties intent upon aggrandising the ‘public sphere’, one of the advantages of encouraging such deviant violence in citizens transformed into mobs is the well-known psychological fallout – Guilt. Their silence in the face of injustice and their complicity in guilt merely propels them into further cycles of escalating violence. Only this can explain the totally remorseless and sullen non-acceptance of the ‘Best Bakery’ savagery or the videos of the brutalities of the riots now circulating through video libraries in the state as ‘home entertainment’. 

It is clear that the existence of a supple and robust ‘public sphere’ has always been a well-nurtured myth of Indian participatory democracy. It is a myth that conflates the principle of ‘voting rights’ of citizens with the idea of ‘janata janardhan’ (people power), making out as if the sheer exercise of casting votes ensures the nurture and amplification of the ‘public sphere’. 

No one has explained more clearly than Herbert Marcuse (German-born philosopher, sociologist and member of the Frankfurt School), the blinding fallacy of this premise. Marcuse said, "Free election of masters abolishes neither masters nor slaves."  

Indian democracy has enabled a rapid formation of this ‘master’ class, which has successfully violated every principle of democratic politics. It has also substantially reneged on the idea of a ‘democratic commons’ that can not only inform democratic practice but create a community of activist-citizens who fiercely defend the systematic throttling of the ‘public sphere’. 

"I am tired; tired of the patience of my people," the ‘nightingale of India’, Sarojini Naidu had exclaimed in exasperation a decade before independence.

Six decades after independence, the marker of that collective ‘patience’ progressively translates as an increasing silence over the daily encroachments into the public sphere.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Polity
 

Redefining public space

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Ushering in the age of portable new publics

Recently, I was invited to speak at a seminar about ‘Media in the Market Place versus Media in the Public Sphere’, which gave me a chance to interrogate the limitations and possibilities of both "public" and "market" in relation to the preposition "versus". While I was thinking through the two words, I received an email from a former student of mine working for a leading television production company. The mail read as follows:

"Dear Shohini,

I am going crazy working in a news channel… not that it’s not good work. But there is a lot of false glamour attached to a job on television. Apparently [Channel X] is the number one channel… I don’t believe the TRP game since the entire thing is lopsided. But anyway, having said that, all the creative, experimental ideas are now being shelved because they fail to generate numbers for the channel. And being [Channel X] there is focus first on profit and then if there is scope for creativity, they’ll give it a go! I did, early in the channel, get an opportunity to do a lot of exciting things but the days of glory are officially over and a lot of saleable things are being solicited. Unfortunately, I know that channels are not meant to be creative, they are mostly commercial. And my expecting something outstanding from a news channel is immature."

This email is typical of the emails that I receive almost every week from former students who have found employment with various television channels jostling to become number one in the TRP (television rating points) race. The email sums up perfectly the compulsions and aspirations of media in the marketplace. But I must clarify at the outset that my critique and reservations about the corporate media never makes me nostalgic for a pre-liberalisation era when the state had monopoly over the airwaves. Doordarshan’s political dishonesty combined with its spectacular lack of imagination is a chapter that needs firmly to be put in the past.

But both Doordarshan and the corporate media have used the term "public" to justify their politics and functioning. Doordarshan’s selective reporting and repressive culture was perpetuated in the name of "public interest" while corporate television claims to cater to "public demands" as testified by TRPs. Both state and corporate media liberally use terms like "public concern", "public issue", "public interest", "public service" and "public morality".

In the last decade, "public interest" has been cited as the guiding principle behind corporate media’s spectacular intrusion into private spaces through "sting operations" using hidden cameras and a range of entrapment strategies. The most high profile sting operation, Operation West End, was conducted by the web portal, Tehelka, where hidden cameras and ‘set-ups’ were used to ‘expose’ corruption in defence deals.

Two journalists posing as agents from a fictitious arms company called West End hawked a non-existent product to the defence ministry and paid money to the president of the (ruling) BJP, bureaucrats and army men in order to push the deal through. All transactions were recorded on spy cams and the footage was released at a press conference. Operation West End created a sensation and came to be reported widely in the print and electronic media.

Tarun Tejpal, editor of the web portal, Tehelka, and mastermind behind Operation West End, justified the use of spy cams by insisting that "extraordinary circumstances demanded extraordinary means" and argued that by exposing corruption in defence deals Tehelka had served "public" and "national interest". Unfortunately, the extraordinary means did not yield extraordinary results as the "entrapped" politicians went largely unpunished and were eventually reinstated in public life. Tehelka, on the contrary, had to provide lengthy explanations to the enquiry commission appointed to investigate the Tehelka exposé until finally the web portal had to be shut down.

The spate of sting operations that followed amply illustrated the lack of consensus in interpreting "public interest". In 2005, India TV conducted a "sting operation" to prove the existence of the ‘casting couch’ in the Bombay film industry. A 21-year-old reporter pretending to be an aspiring starlet solicited the mentorship of Shakti Kapoor (best known for playing the villain in Bombay films) to make a career in films. She pursued the actor, invited him to a room and offered him a drink. Predictably, Shakti Kapoor offered his mentorship in exchange for sexual favours at which point the ‘hidden’ camera crew barged in, claiming to have "exposed" the "casting couch" and the "sexual exploitation" of young women in the film industry.

Even a cursory telling of the story reveals how flawed the ‘rationale’ for such an exercise is. Coercion and violation of consent are central to the definition of harassment, none of which existed in this case. This was a case of two consenting adults agreeing to indulge in unethical business practices of which the exchange of sexual favours was a part. Moreover, corruption, unethical negotiations, the exchange of favours (both material and sexual), are not exclusive to the entertainment industry but rampant in all professions and institutions including supposedly ‘respectable’ professions like law, medicine, education and even journalism! Money, privilege and sexual favours have always been staple ingredients of bribery and corruption. Consequently, the sting operation achieved nothing apart from making invasion of privacy synonymous with the ‘right to know’.

During a recent debate on the ethics of using hidden cameras, Tehelka editor, Tarun Tejpal wrote, "Every responsible journalist believes that stings should not cross into private lives" and that "every sting should be tested on the anvil of public interest". Were we to take stock of the entire gamut of sting operations carried out after Operation West End, we would find them to be poised precariously between private lives and perceived public interest. Where does public interest end and private life begin? For instance, does the planting of spy cams in the homes of public officials constitute public interest or violation of privacy? The line between the two is as slippery as the one that divides pornography from erotica. As the old saying goes, "what I like is erotica and what you like is pornography."

We need to remember that the acceptability of such intrusive strategies in the name of investigative journalism comes from being embedded in a larger culture of surveillance that has become endemic to our urban existence. Security cameras in public and private spaces, wiretapping, citizen journalists brandishing phone cams, information supplied to banks and credit card companies, and legislations like TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act) routinely violate our privacy. Research done by friends at Sarai: the Old and New Media Centre in Delhi reports that the Ministry of Home Affairs has a proposal for a multi-purpose national identity card system that will probably house the largest collection of biometric data the world has seen and will include information on health, medical services, education, lifestyle, economic status and transactions, fingerprints and retinal scans. It will not be long before we hand over to the state an enormous slice of our private lives imagining that we have "nothing to hide". The long shadow of surveillance will soon be cast over the many overlaps between our private lives and public selves.

Most importantly, private spaces are not just for the playing out of personal lives but are integral to the nurturing of political thought and the contemplation of social action. Take, for instance, the attempt to stifle the circulation of Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom), Sanjay Kak’s new documentary on the Kashmir crisis. On July 27, 2007 the Mumbai police stopped a preview of the film for an invited audience at the Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan in Prabhadevi.

Notwithstanding irate protests from the audience, the police seized and confiscated copies of the DVD. Next, they issued a notice to Prithvi Theatre where a subsequent preview had been scheduled, warning them of consequences were they to show the film. The justification for this unwarranted intervention arrived in the form of a letter dated July 29 that senior inspector of the Dadar police station, MG Sankhe, wrote to Sanjay Kak. Quoting Section 7 of the Cinematograph Act in defence of the seizure, the letter directs Kak to apply for a censor certificate because "the film contains inflammatory and provocative scenes based on terrorism in Kashmir". It further states that "there are certain scenes that are objectionable and if the said film is shown to public (sic), it may create law and order problem".

Jashn-e-Azadi has had a number of previews across the country and has not caused any "law and order" problems. Made over two years, the 139-minute documentary is a meditation on the political crisis that has gripped the valley for over a decade and is an articulation of the disillusionment and alienation that the Kashmiri people feel at this historical juncture. One may reasonably ask why Sanjay Kak is being difficult and not applying for a censor certificate. The answer is obvious. He will never get one. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) will insist on cuts that would defeat the very purpose of the film. Besides, the granting of a censor certificate would not guarantee safety for either film or filmmaker.

The extra-legal censoring of Deepa Mehta’s Fire despite a censor certificate is one such instance. The "law and order" argument has always functioned as a veiled threat. Paraphrased, it means, "If some individual or group does not agree with your work and puts your life and work in danger, don’t count on us for protection. On the contrary, we may press criminal charges against you for causing such inconvenience." This argument is akin to the ‘tight-sweater excuse’ that sexual harassers resort to when they declare that the victim of harassment "had asked for it". Painter MF Husain and more recently, writer Taslima Nasreen, are victims of this twisted logic.

In the last decade, documentary filmmakers have persistently campaigned against censorship, and demanded an urgent review and amendment to the Cinematograph Act under which the CBFC was set up in 1952. The three amendments urgently proposed have a direct bearing on the Jashn-e-Azadi case. The first proposed amendment seeks to make the CBFC an autonomous body free from the stranglehold of the government. The second amendment demands that the CBFC have powers of certification (through ratings and classifications) and not the power to censor. The third and most urgent amendment proposes that non-commercial public screenings be decriminalised.

According to the existing law, screening a film without a censor certificate, even within educational institutions, classrooms, clubs or private gatherings, is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment (for up to three years) and a minimum fine of one lakh rupees. All three amendments are long overdue and essential for upholding the constitutional right of free expression. Demanding the decriminalisation of non-commercial public screenings will be an important step in creating a strong civil society that is not threatened by cultural experimentation, dissident expression or new and outrageous ideas.

The 21st century confronts us with both utopian and dystopian possibilities around the access and circulation of information. The dystopian impulse of allowing our lives to be subject to increasing censorship and surveillance needs to be resisted by the creation of "new publics" that lie outside state control and corporate interests. These new publics may not reside within concrete venues but may appear anywhere, albeit temporarily, as people and ideas converge.

Take the independent documentary film, for instance. In the absence of television broadcasts and theatrical releases, documentary films are screened in spaces where people and ideas converge and "new publics" are born. These new publics are created, dismantled and endlessly recreated in a multitude of spaces as the documentary film travels from one place to another.

The power and potential of this new public was not lost on those who stopped the screening of Jashn-e-Azadi. Which is all the more reason why we should fight for our right to occupy such spaces. This holds true for all writers, artists and media practitioners whose work may not find circulation through mainstream distribution channels. Every film, media product or artwork should be able to carry with it possibilities of its own exhibition and circulation.

The age of portable new publics has finally arrived.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Media
 

Two images

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Minorities and Bollywood

Two images.

One:

I am watching Black Friday (2007, dr Anurag Kashyap) in a Muslim-dominated area of the city in which the film is set, Mumbai. There is a tense silence as Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) tells Badshah Khan (Aditya Srivastava) what he thinks of him and those who were inveigled into the plot to set off bombs across the city. It is such a cold silence that I go to see the film again in a more mixed setting. The same scene evokes another response. There are cheers and jeers until someone from the audience shouts, "Yahaan bhi to hai (There are some morons here too)."

Two:

In a discussion group I led at a girl’s college in Mumbai, a young Muslim girl stood up to accuse Fanaa (2006, dr Kunal Kohli) of representing Muslims unfairly.

"They show [the character played by] Rishi Kapoor drinking," she said.

I was somewhat taken aback by that.

Did she mean, I asked, that no Muslim drinks?

"No, but why should they show like that?" she asked.

It was a good question and a bad question. Good because representation is increasingly important in a country where symbols have more power and potency than in many other lands. Bad because it inaugurates a process in which every maker of art will be called on to be responsible for every character she or he creates and will have to consider whether each character has the potential to hurt someone’s feelings.

This is perhaps not the place to discuss whether Bollywood is or is not art. But one has to admit that some creativity is involved in its creation and therefore perhaps it should have all the protection other art forms are offered at least in theory.

The question is: does the character played by Rishi Kapoor stand for the Muslim man? No one seemed to think so in the reviews. But then why did Kajol saluting the flag in the beginning seem to stand for the Muslim girl? It was mentioned often in the reviews, sometimes slightingly and sometimes with deference.

If Rishi Kapoor’s character is only a single heartsick character reacting to his circumstances, nothing can be wrong with that. But besides the intention of the filmmaker, there is also the way in which it is consumed. And today consumption patterns are no longer as predictable as they once were.

***

Our relationship with Bollywood has always been a complex one. It is only quite recently that we have begun taking it seriously or looking at the material with any attention. This is partly because of the remnants of our leftist-brahmanical contempt for anything by way of bread and circuses. All India Radio, as we all know, wouldn’t play Hindi film music and drove all the real comrades, the bhai bandhu of the mills of Mumbai into the arms of Radio Ceylon.

But now that there is a non-Indian academic turning up every week to study the films of Manmohan Desai, we have started wondering whether we should have been doing the spadework already. This is not to offer any disrespect to the non-Indian academic. Dr Rachel Dwyer of the School of Oriental and African Studies, for instance, knows Sanskrit and reads and writes Urdu and Gujarati as well. I don’t know any Indian academic who has done as much work in order to get to know Hindi cinema.

Everyone’s a Hindi film buff now that popular culture has become a ticket to a series of conferences in different parts of the world. This has resulted in much half-baked information and very little understanding of how Bollywood actually operates.

I believe Bollywood’s relationship to the minorities depends on commercial arithmetic of the most basic kind. Bollywood is an industry, even if it is a chaotic, ill-regulated and ignored industry. It produces a certain kind of product and it wishes to maximise profit on that product. Hindi cinema had no simple equation with the religious communities of India. On the surface, this should have been simple since it should not have mattered. The religious identity of a villain could scarcely matter; there would be bad eggs in every basket.

As I wrote in Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (Penguin India, 2006),

"But the early filmmakers knew that they were not simply making films. As the only valid pop culture, they believed that they were creating texts to help build society. Since they were men, these texts were largely patriarchal, probably not out of enlightened self-interest but probably because they genuinely believed that benevolent male despotism was good for society as a whole. The theme of the ‘educated wife’, for instance, was oft repeated and each time disaster would follow her inclusion into the family. Later, this theme would change to become the ‘westernised wife’, anathema in her own right. However, in the fifties, the patriarchs were concerned about the nation that was being crafted. They often sought the blessings of political figures although a good word from Jawaharlal Nehru was not likely to increase ticket sales significantly.

[Gandhiji simply thought cinema was a waste of time; it might surprise the Mahatma to know how firmly his legacy is being appropriated both by art house and mainstream cinema.]

"They were aware as few others could be of the scars left by partition. Some had lost their families, their hometowns. Others had watched friends depart. Still others had arrived as refugees from the newly formed state of West Pakistan. They felt the need, as a community, to emphasise the importance of coexistence and of mutual tolerance, if not respect, of India’s diverse religious communities. Yet there were still some liberties that could be taken as long as these were taken with the communities who had no hand in deciding the fate of the product that Bollywood was making.

"If political secularism arises out of arithmetic, the secularism of cinema arises out of commerce. When Kaagaz Ke Phool flopped, Guru Dutt went out and made a Muslim social, Chaudhvin Ka Chand, although he did not do it under his own name. When he was asked why, he said that he needed a hit. Segmenting the market works. Think of Coolie and Pakeezah and Nikaah, all hits.

(As in everything that one says of Hindi commercial cinema, one might, on the other hand, point to Deedaar-e-Yaar, one of the biggest flops of 1982, but then it had Jeetendra playing a nawab.)

"However, there are certain limits to this secularism. For instance, Hindus and Muslims don’t marry on screen unless it is an overt act of political significance (Bombay). Too many people might be offended and secularism had to be measured against what the audience would accept. Since Hindi cinema, like most popular culture, is majoritarian, it also managed to maintain a subtle power balance within the caste system. When the hero was a romantic and a scholar, he could be a Brahmin, even if it was the Muslim, Dilip Kumar, playing him. When the hero turned into a warrior, his identity turned Kshatriya. Secular gestures had to be similarly calibrated since a sizeable proportion of the Hindi-speaking audience was Muslim. The Muslim characters were, therefore, rarely shown in an unfavourable light. They were honest friends, loyal soldiers, good policemen, bluff Pathans, friendly uncles. But unless it was a Muslim social (which was another kind of commercial gamble), there were no Muslim heroes."

Recently, we have had some discussion about whether Kabir Khan in Chak De India is a Muslim. It seems an odd moment in our history. Anti-Muslim hysteria is at an all-time high. In a personal conversation with the novelist, MG Vassanji, I was told that Gujarat continues to be a fascist state in which the Muslims are tense and even the moderate Hindus unwilling to speak for fear of being "overheard". This should have been no surprise to me for Communalism Combat arrives every month with more news from the war against ‘othering’. At the same time, we have four Khans (Aamir, Saif, Shah Rukh and Salman) who rule Bollywood. None of them has ever played a Muslim character except in a Muslim context.

With Hindus representing the mainstream and Muslims in the audience, there were two communities who could be mocked without any economic repercussions.

Again, if I may be allowed to quote from my book on Helen, these were, "the Christians and the Parsi. For one, they were perceived as ‘westernised’, which was tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. For another, they could be offended without upsetting the box office since they rarely patronised Hindi cinema anyway.

"So Parsis figured as stereotypical eccentrics with walk-on roles. Christians got more screen time but were used in strange ways. In the odd hierarchies that custom and power have established, a heroine could be Christian. Liz (Waheeda Rehman) in Baazi, Miss Edna (Madhubala) in Howrah Bridge, Bobby (Dimple) in Bobby, Jenny (Parveen Babi) in Amar Akbar Anthony and Annie (Manisha Koirala) in Khamoshi – The Musical all marry their men without trouble. In Bobby, the hero’s parents only object to her social standing and her lack of wealth. There is no mention of a different religion. There were some startling positive images of older Christian characters (Lalita Pawar and Nadira, both as Mrs D’Sa in Anari and Saagar; Premnath as Mr Braganza in Bobby; David as John Chacha in Boot Polish) but by and large the community was seen as degenerate. In Mome Ki Gudiya (1972) a Christian family has a mother played by the obese Tun Tun, the father played by a midget, and in order to win their daughter and to fit in with them, the hero’s sidekick claims that he has started drinking, smoking, going to mujras and even eating non-vegetarian food.

"But perhaps the classic encapsulation of Hindi cinema’s attitude to the morality of the young Christian community can be seen in a single song from Swarg Narak (1978). Briefly, the story deals with two marriages. The feminist, Shobha (Moushumi Chatterjee!) marries college lecturer, Vicky (Jeetendra), while the traditional Indian doormat, Geeta (Shabana Azmi!) marries playboy and businessman, Vinod (Vinod Mehra). The latter marriage fails from the very beginning since Vinod who, as an act of rebellion against a marriage into which he was forced, spends his wedding night dancing with an unnamed mistress (Komilla Virk).

"One night, when Vinod tries to go out, his mother (Kamini Kaushal) stops him. He almost slaps her, then pushes her out of the way. She runs after him and falls down the stairs. Vinod and his unnamed mistress go out dancing. Helen is the floor show, singing the ‘English song’ mentioned in the titles. The unimaginative lyrics include lines like ‘Love you, come hold me’ interspersed with some Aah-ing. However, this is enough to attract Vinod, who callously pushes Virk out of the way and makes his way to where Helen, dressed in High Arabian Fantasy, bathed in red light, is singing, ‘I am lonely, come hold me/ Life is so dreary, come, come, come.’

"Director Dasari Narayan Rao intercuts this sequence with scenes of Vinod’s mother dying, of the doctors giving up, of the dutiful daughter-in-law reciting the Bhagavad Gita. At the nightclub, Helen and Vinod are now in a clinch. The scene is bathed in red light as she pours alcohol into his mouth. A church appears in silhouette against the walls of the nightclub and church bells begin to ring. It is true that few filmmakers have gone so far in their association between degeneracy and Christianity but it was a statement they felt free to make."

So it was with villains. You could name the moll Lily or Rosy, you could name the henchman Robert, but where would your villain come from? It is no accident that many powerful villains have had no Indian caste identity at all. We do know where Gabbar Singh came from – we even know that his father’s name was Hari Singh – but we have no idea where Dr Dang (Karma, 1986, dr Subhash Ghai) came from or Shakaal (Shaan, 1980, dr Ramesh Sippy) or Loin (Kalicharan, 1976, dr Subhash Ghai) or Mogambo (Mr India, 1987, dr Shekhar Kapur) for that matter. They were villains who were free-floating signifiers. Dr Dang could be Chinese if you wanted him to be Chinese. He could be South-east Asian or even from a tribal belt in India. It did not matter because he could not be located and so could not become an insult to any community. Henchmen were also given ur-names: Jagga, Raaka, Kaalia, Saamba.

Things changed radically when Pakistan became a name that was allowed. It should be remembered that for very long we did not name names of other countries since our censor code actually had a clause stipulating that nothing in a film should harm the nation’s friendly relations with other states. We were so careful about names of other countries that From Russia with Love (1963, dr Terence Young) was only released in India when its distributors agreed to change the name to From 007 with Love and the title song was dropped. When Pakistan became a name that we could say, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001, dr Anil Sharma) happened. It was a loud hysterical film and since the mood was loud and hysterical, it worked magically, becoming one of the top earners of all time. A spate of ‘Pakistan’ films followed, some of which were hits and some of which failed.

In some ways, Godhra proved to be a watershed for the Hindi film industry as it did for the country. (Now, if only Parzania (2007, dr Rahul Dholakia) had been a good piece of cinema instead of a film with good intentions.) The new verities were suddenly looking shaky. The Urdu title of the film name, missing in action for many moons, began to come back. Cynics might claim that this is the possibility of Pakistan as a legitimate market as opposed to being the place where Hindi cinema sells on pirated DVDs. Cynics might be right. It is still a product, still an industry.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Cinema
 

Another stage

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IPTA, the Indian People’s Theatre Association turns 65 

In May this year, the Indian People’s Theatre Association completed 65 years. There was a gathering of litterateurs and theatre people celebrating the event and discussing the growth and achievements of the unique organisation. A large part of the evening was spent in nostalgia, listing the luminaries associated with IPTA, the great plays staged by them reaching out to the common citizen as opposed to the theatre going elite, and so on. There was a small note of self-criticism as well, a brave admission of the fact that while IPTA may not have lost its initial purpose of putting up socially relevant plays, it had perhaps failed to keep up with the times.  

Notwithstanding constant accusations of being old-fashioned, mediocre and unable to reach out to contemporary urban audiences, IPTA still remains the oldest and only organisation of its kind – one that functions like a democratic community of like-minded people rather than a personality driven group, the kind that dies down once its leader is no longer active. IPTA has a presence in 22 states of India with more than 12,000 members in its various units.

IPTA was set up by KA Abbas, Anil de Silva, Ali Sardar Jafri, Dr Bhabha and Dada Sharmalkar during the Quit India movement in 1942, when a group of writers, artistes and activists felt the need to reach out to the masses with nationalistic (the independence movement was at its peak) and progressive ideas through drama, music and dance. IPTA workers fanned out all over the country, performing in remote villages, outside factories and in bastis on makeshift stages.  

The association not only went on to become a significant cultural institution, it also had a great influence on the cinema of that period for several people associated with the group also worked in Hindi films, including writers and poets belonging to the even older Progressive Writers’ Association established in 1936.  

The draft resolution of the IPTA conference in 1943 stated: "The immediate problems facing the people are external aggression by the fascist hordes who are the deadliest enemies of freedom and culture; internal repression by an alien government which seeks to hold our people in subjection and prevent them from organising an effective defence of their homeland; rapid disintegration of the entire economic life of our people and particularly the havoc wrought on the morale and the health of our people by the shortage of food and other essential articles; and lastly the absence of sufficient unity among the people’s forces which alone can compel the imperialist to retire, stop the economic disintegration of the country and defeat the fascist aggressors."

Important among the early plays was Navanna (New Harvest), about the 1943 Bengal famine, and Yeh Kiska Khoon, Gandhi Aur Goonda, Zubeida, Basti, Danga and Mera Gaon – all based on social problems of the time.  

A member of the group for several years, Bengali composer and poet, the late Salil Chowdhury said in an interview that IPTA had a "tremendous impact on society, a lot of things that are available today were made possible by the contribution IPTA made. The IPTA cultural movement and the peasant movement were mainly responsible for the rights that the peasants and workers enjoy today. The kinds of rights that a peasant couldn’t enjoy even 20 years ago, they have got those rights these days, both the peasants and the workers, thanks to such movements… If we staged a play among the peasants, they would take care of us, provide food and raise money for us." 

For a while after independence, IPTA lost its focus but then regrouped in various places and continued the work started by its pioneers. Some IPTA plays that are still remembered by old-timers include Kafan (based on the story by Munshi Premchand), Africa Jawaan Pareshan, Lal Ghulab Ki Wapsi, Ek Chadar Maili Si, Election Ka Ticket, Bhagat Singh, Mahanirvan, Bakri and Sufaid Kundali. 

Plays such as Shatranj Ke Mohre, Ek Aur Dronacharya, Moteram Ka Satyagrah, Aakhri Shama, Tajmahal Ka Tender, have lived on for years even as newer plays like Raat, Kashmakash, Chaubees Ghante, Sarphire and Ek Baar Phir did not find much patronage among today’s entertainment-seeking audiences.

However, IPTA’s current general secretary, Shaili Sathyu feels that comparisons between the old and the new are not quite fair, as issues have changed from the forties to the present day. "What we need to do today is not just reach out to people who agree with us anyway but to put thoughts into the heads of people who don’t go by our democratic beliefs… as long as there is segregation of people for any reason – caste, religion, money or gender – theatre can be used to mobilise opinion and make an attempt to uplift the marginalised."

Current causes like communalism, farmer suicides and loss of idealism in today’s youth may not have found their way into IPTA plays the way issues like corruption, political and bureaucratic ineptitude, and rural oppression did in the past. But in Mumbai, as elsewhere, IPTA still has a dedicated set of workers who keep the group going. Attempts are made to reach young people through the children’s wing, IPTA Balmanch, and the Inter-Collegiate Drama Competition, an institution in itself, which was started in 1972 and has been held every year for the past 35 years.  

Towards the end of the year IPTA will host a three-week long All India People’s Theatre Festival to showcase talent from the group’s units across the country. This may well be a good time to regroup, gather strength and plunge into the deteriorating cultural scene with ideals refreshed. A group that survives 65 years could, perhaps, aim for immortality.

Playgroups

"When we catch children young to make them better human beings through entertainment and games, plays and songs, we transform ourselves also. We receive the innocence of children in our soul and feel happy."

– Ismat Chughtai’s message for IPTA Balmanch in 1984

IPTA Balmanch, the children’s wing of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, was started with a view to inculcate in young and growing minds a sense of appreciation and understanding for the performing arts.

It all began with a theatre workshop production of Munshi Premchand’s short story, Idgah, which premiered at Prithvi Theatre on September 16, 1984. Idgah was adapted as a play by Ranjeet Kapoor and directed by Madhu Malti. The play featured over 30 child artistes including Rajeshwari Sachdev and Shaad Ali among others. Balmanch’s second production was PL Deshpande’s Naya Gokul, also directed by Madhu Malti.

IPTA Balmanch was instrumental in the early years of artistes and theatre personalities like Lubna Salim, Rajeshwari Sachdev, Sagar Arya, Shaili Sathyu and others.

Balmanch has organised theatre and music workshops over the past few years and is planning to make this a regular activity for its young members. In 2006, IPTA Balmanch premiered Gulzar’s Agar Aur Magar, directed by Salim Arif. The play has also been staged at the Jashne Bachpan 2006, National School of Drama, New Delhi, and at the Mumbai Theatre Festival 2007 in Mumbai.

IPTA Mumbai hopes that it can continue its efforts in sensitising children about the world around them through the medium of theatre and performing arts.

http://www.iptamumbai.org/bal.html

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Theatre

The gifts of the magi

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The birth of the Progressive Artists’ Group

Unlike the bombs that devastated the planet as the second world war blurred the lines between East and West, civilian and combatant, honour and terror, the bombs that exploded in the salons of colonial Bombay’s art scene in the late 1940s were crisp and bright, smelling of fresh paint and fresh ideas.

Many of Bombay’s art lovers, brought up on the genteel aridities of academic realism, found themselves grappling with shock. What did they find on these canvases bearing unknown signatures? Statuesque women modelled in planes jagged enough to draw blood, strangers to the sedate portraits favoured by the patrons of the age. Landscapes laid in impasto thick enough to chew, startling when mounted beside the delicate vistas and faux Mughal-Rajput miniatures approved by prevailing taste. Voluptuous nudes that had cast aside the coyness of their demure life class counterparts, to delight in the immediacy of skin and breath.

A new group of painters had made up their minds to seize centre stage, convinced that they alone could pick up the storyline of the Contemporary in India from where it had been dropped in 1941, after the deaths of the brilliantly idiosyncratic Rabindranath Tagore and the flamboyant but demon-haunted Amrita Sher-Gil.

Souza and Ara, Raza and Husain, Gade and Bakre: these young men were "strange and powerful animals", as one of them recalled fondly, in the course of a conversation with this writer some years ago. They were intense; and intensely frustrated with the canons that guided the practice of painting and the conventions that conditioned its reception in society. They were eager to record unfamiliar sensations, to grasp new and vibrant ways of putting brush and knife to canvas.

Even as India attained independence, they banded themselves into the short-lived but legendary Progressive Artists’ Group. Husain, the oldest, was slow to come on board; Souza, the youngest, was the febrile leader and ideologist. Amazingly, and this is a tribute to early post-colonial India’s – and specifically to early post-colonial Bombay’s – inclusive spirit, most of them belonged to religious minorities that had been shaken and dislocated during the partition that had been the dark twin to independence, their sense of self challenged and their reasons for belonging questioned.

Between the 1940s and the 1980s, the Progressives established themselves as the standard-bearers of India’s first post-colonial generation of artists and dominated the art scene in this country. They decided to explore a path distinct from the indigenously achieved modernism of Santiniketan, the utopian forest-university that Tagore had established in Bolpur, in the tribal heartland of eastern India. For the brilliantly eclectic Santiniketan artists, the toy-making and bell-casting techniques of tribal shamans went into the same crucible as Brancusi’s sculptures and Picasso’s epiphanies.

But the Progressives were Bombay artists. Although they were later to change their minds, the hinterland of India represented all that was to be left behind; the future lay elsewhere, in the metropolitan centres of the West. They were intense in their engagement with Art (they always speak of pictorial practice in the upper case), certain that it should be autonomous (even if they were not always certain of what it should be autonomous of), and quick to dismiss many who did not belong to their circle as social decorations, charlatans, or simply, as ‘non-artists’. They were convinced, also, that they should aim for standards of excellence that were international rather than merely local. And yet, these firebrands may never have been transformed into the sophisticated and magisterial figures that they later became without a crucial encounter that stimulated their energies, catalysing their enthusiasm into achievement.

The volatile Souza may well have wasted his life in prolonged tirades against god, the state and society, like many other Goan cranks. Husain may have hesitated, despite his resourcefulness and pragmatism, to break free of his anchorage in the Muslim artisanate and upper working class and redefine himself as an international nomad. The cautious Raza may not have received the impetus, so early, to book a passage to France and devote himself to a switching between the parentheses of Indic metaphysics and European urbanity.

These young men may not have transformed themselves so radically without the gifts of three eastward bound magi of Central European provenance answering to the names of Rudolf von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger. Without this troika of expatriate patrons who introduced them to the powerful languages of European modernism, the Progressives may well have remained raw, troubled rebels with the vaguest glimmering of a cause. And how intriguing that these magi should themselves have been affiliated to a minority group that had been stigmatised in Europe, herded into annihilation or driven into exile.

***

This meeting between the Central European magi and the future masters of post-colonial Indian art is a classic example of the enabling fortuity of the great city, the serendipity with which a global metropolis can nourish intercultural encounter. Von Leyden, Langhammer and Schlesinger were refugees from a Europe overshadowed by the Third Reich, who had made Bombay their home. Situated safely midway between the embattled harbours of the second world war’s eastern and western theatres – with Marseilles and Suez at one end, and Shanghai and Singapore at the other – Bombay played host to a varied cast of characters transiting from one uncertainty to another.

In this exodus were men and women who had narrowly escaped the SS, leaving behind sumptuous apartments or villas in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, Budapest, Prague and many other glittering cities that had fallen under the jackboots of Hitler’s armies. Like their diasporic forefathers, who had been forced from their homes first in the Levant and later in Reconquista Spain, these representatives of the refined German-speaking Jewish elite had carried into exile what was most precious to them: their culture. Theirs was a connoisseurial heritage, its amplitude measured in musical scores and instruments, paintings and books.

Von Leyden, Schlesinger and Langhammer had arrived in Bombay at various points after the Nazis had seized power in Germany in 1933 and re-established their interrupted lives. Each had prospered reasonably by the mid-1940s and found a place in their host society: Langhammer was art director of The Times of India; von Leyden was a senior executive with the Swiss-Jewish firm of Volkarts and also art critic for The Times of India; Emmanuel Schlesinger owned a pharmaceuticals firm. Together, they had formed a circle into which they gradually invited some of the most gifted young artists who had appeared on a scene benumbed by British colonial taste. The Progressives were invited to the Sunday morning meetings that Langhammer held at his home, which von Leyden and Schlesinger also attended. Here, these transplanted Europeans would open before their protégés the sophistications of the Eden they had known and from which they had been expelled.

For the Progressives, whose knowledge of modern Euro-American art came mainly from art books printed on war quality paper and confined to black and white reproductions, the full-colour amazements of Schiele, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Rouault, Modigliani, Klee and Picasso, these were invaluable lessons. In retrospect, it also seems clear that the troika also infected their acolytes with a nagging sense of discontent and dislocation, the belief that the horrors of experience could only be healed by the affirmations of art, which could only be found in the lost Europe of their nostalgia.

To the Progressives – both the nucleus of founder members and their associates, Akbar Padamsee, VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Krishen Khanna and Mohan Samant, life could no longer go on as before. They were seized by a yearning to travel, to unchain themselves from the familiar. Despite Nehru’s stirring evocation of the "soul of a nation, long suppressed, [finding] utterance" at the threshold of independence, the new India had begun to devote itself obsessively to the practical rather than the imaginative aspect of collective life: while culture was celebrated and even institutionalised as a monopoly of the dirigiste, developmentalist state, cultural practitioners did not necessarily receive support unless their activities could be brought into the ambit of an official national art. If they could paint murals and produce public sculpture, this was acceptable; more conceptual, experimental or private departures were not regarded as pertinent.

The Progressives, like many other young artists elsewhere in India at this time, wanted to remake themselves in societies that were hospitable to the imagination and where they did not have to assert their preference to be artists rather than engineers, social workers or medical practitioners dedicated to the task of building a new nation. Most of them went westward: some to Paris, others to London, one or two brave souls to New York. Some settled in their new homes; others returned after varying periods of residence abroad; and yet others among them have shuttled back and forth for decades.

***

The trouble with latter-day magi, as O. Henry’s Christmas parable suggests, is that their gifts can go tragically awry. While the Central European troika gave the unruly talent of the Bombay artists a sense of direction and purpose, their patronage also had a certain negative and even limiting effect. The acolytes, flying on their guides’ instructions to Europe, missed the transatlantic flight of talent, capital and knowledge that had already taken off during the war. Painters and critics, collectors and dealers, museum specialists and historians had all escaped the Nazi onslaught to settle in the USA, mainly in enclaves on the east coast. Apprenticing themselves to the School of Paris, which was already fading before the School of New York, some of the Progressives condemned themselves to years of epigonic work justified by an exhausted rhetoric of originality and heroic quest; a fate from which they were not released until changed historical or personal circumstances allowed them to grow beyond the context of their apprenticeship.

Fortunately, some of the Progressives and their associates took up the challenge of formulating an artistic language that addressed its immediate location and yet could communicate across borders without restricting itself to the auto-Orientalism of ethnic or nativist choices. As the impact of personal encounter and the charisma of their European mentors faded, the Progressives could discard the biases and preferences they had imbibed, and distil the lesson of transcultural receptivity from their encounter with the magi.

Over the decades they have opened themselves to diverse artistic lineages, becoming attentive, variously, to impulses that came from T’ang painting and the Japanese ukiyo-e prints, from Gupta sculpture and the Rajput raga-malika paintings, from cinema and mathematics, Sanskrit grammar and Santhal mythology. The leading spirits of the Progressive Artists’ Group emerged strengthened from this confluence of lineages and have remained committed to a lifelong quest for the crucial rather than the alluring image, seeking it through the icon of the heroic survivor, the allegorical tableau, the visionary landscape and the symbol that mediates between time’s decay and the luminosity of the eternal.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Art

 

Hamara Shaher

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Mumbai is sinking into a sea of narrow-mindedness, insecurity and exclusion

Recently, I was scanning the lanes of Mumbai to look for heritage buildings as part of a consultancy on behalf of the Mumbai Heritage Committee. The objective was to enlarge the scope of ‘heritage’ beyond architectural monuments to include locations of cultural importance as well. Working together, my friend, Rafique Baghdadi and I decided to include in the list the residence of writer Saadat Hasan Manto while he lived in Bombay.

We arrived at a middle class housing colony located in the heart of Central Mumbai, inhabited predominantly by non-Hindus. Beyond the closed gate we could see a large central open court surrounded by a cluster of modest Art Deco buildings. One of them could be the place where Manto once lived and wrote. The security guard at the gate refused to let us in unless we told him which colony resident we wanted to meet. Unable to provide him with a satisfactory answer, we requested him to let us speak to the men chatting in the courtyard, who, as luck would have it, turned out to be office bearers of the society.

With the locked gate between us, we explained the purpose of our visit and asked them to please allow us to enter. Yes, they had heard of Manto a few years ago when a foreigner came looking for Manto’s former home but failed to locate it. But now we know the exact apartment in which Manto lived, Rafique told them, so could they please let us in? No. We pleaded with them, we even tried to force our way through in desperation and things finally ended just short of a physical fight before we were thrown out of there.

This was the changing face of Bombay for us, post 1992-1993. Over the last decade and a half, the city seems to be reverting to its early character of being a cluster of islands. Islands of glittering steel and glass towers to keep up with global imagery, islands of sprawling housing complexes with private gardens and swimming pools, islands of slums and chawls locked in terror by the real estate mafia, islands of educational institutions controlled by politicians built on caste, community, language and religion, islands of majority and minority ghettos, and the high status island called the ‘town’ associated with the colonial past. These are the new islands with their own fortifications turning Mumbai into a multi-fortressed city. The causeways that connect these islands seem to be sinking into an ocean of unprecedented intolerance and insecurity.

This new environment has adversely affected the physical and social mobility of citizens at large but particularly its women and now, surprisingly, the city’s youth. I teach as a visiting faculty member in a college of architecture located in Mumbai’s richest suburb. I notice a wide rift between the students from South Mumbai, who are called ‘townies’, and those from the suburbs. I have also observed that today’s suburban youth rarely travel to ‘town’. In the past, students, their parents, chose a college based on its reputation rather than its proximity to their home. Today the position has been reversed.

It is surprising to learn that, on an average, 50 per cent of the students from well-to-do backgrounds seeking admission into architectural colleges have never visited public monuments like the Town Hall, the university or the museum located in South Mumbai. Safety and security are the current mantras for parents who also support moral surveillance by the state police, never mind if their children’s mobility and exposure is limited to their own PCs and neighbourhoods. This anxiety is no longer restricted to women alone. I know of a parent from the distant suburb of Borivali who, after last year’s train blasts, made her son give up his admission to a prestigious college near Churchgate and settle for a college in their own suburb instead!

The suburbs began to grow enormously in the seventies, responding to the emerging aspirations of nuclear families. This also coincided with the government’s realisation that its future lay in real estate development. The prestigious Nariman Point and Cuffe Parade areas were developed by reclaiming the sea at the city’s southern end, a clear indication that the city’s politicians had no real intention to reduce the commercial and administrative importance of South Bombay whose claim to fame is its cultural links to the colonial period. Developed by real estate investors, the new suburbs of Andheri, Malad and Borivali, to name but a few, encouraged the movement of the middle classes from the crowded chawls of South Bombay to self-contained flats.

Initially dependent on South Bombay for their social and cultural ties, over the years the suburbs generated their own commerce and culture. The eighties saw an increasing number of migrants – many of them single women – from professional fields like the law, media, art and culture who found that this city offered them the freedom, mobility and safety they were denied in most other urban areas of India. The suburbs grew in density of population, property development being facilitated by an increase in the FSI (floor space index) through changing urban policies, but without their due share of physical and social infrastructure.

Today malls and multiplexes are the landmarks of post-industrial suburbs that once were marked by industries and working class settlements. In the absence of adequate public spaces like parks, playgrounds, libraries and cultural centres, these malls and multiplexes are promoted as places for family recreation although not without their class-based exclusivist norms for entry.

Last Christmas, as I was waiting by the entrance of a mall enticingly decorated with a super size floating Santa Claus and various toys, I saw a working class father awkwardly entering the foyer with his young son. The security officer stopped them at the door and on learning that the father wanted to buy the boy an ice cream, promptly directed them to a roadside stall. When some of us lodged a strong protest, the mall authorities drew our attention to a board which clearly stipulated that right of entry was reserved. While we were busy arguing, the family had quietly walked away.

There was a time when Mumbai’s industrial character kept it alive, 24×7. Even late at night and in the wee hours, local trains would be bustling with workers, men and women, working various shifts throughout the day. The post-industrial landscape has affected life in the city in more ways than one. The vibrant community life that once characterised working class chawls and city slums is getting trapped in the high density ‘free’ housing provided in multi-storey towers with virtually no open space on the ground. Industrial disputes in the early eighties, the closures in the nineties and the resulting unemployment often supplied the cadres needed by emerging mafias.

If the state housing policy is an indicator of the future, the working classes will soon be housed in large townships outside the city and only be brought in to work by a rapid mass transport system. Is this not reminiscent of a time when blacks required an entry pass to remain in the city after sunset during the years of apartheid?

The growing paranoia about safety and security in the city has given rise to an unprecedented territorial claim made by the elite middle class on their respective neighbourhoods. Known as Advanced Locality Management or ALMs, these neighbourhood citizens’ groups have, as an interface of civil society initiatives, taken it upon themselves to save their own neighbourhoods by cleansing and beautifying them. More often than not they do not represent all the voices in the locality. In such initiatives ‘ugly encroachments’ of hawkers or slums are replaced by beautifying elements such as flower planters along the pavements and decorative fencing around playgrounds, parks and waterfronts to keep away the unwanted ‘others’. This ‘othering’ on the basis of class, caste and religion has shaken the very foundation of urbanisation.

I recall an event that the cultural centre, Majlis, had organised as part of a youth festival called ‘India Sabka’, held a few months after the Gujarat riots. We announced a competition for city students to create a design intervention in a playground located between a Muslim and a Hindu settlement that had become a battleground during the riots. One of the more striking proposals was a plan for a community centre designed as a composition of carefully fragmented built forms loosely assembled together. The line below the model read, "Reclaiming our common space".

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Architecture

Thoughts in a temple

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The growth of Hindutva; the demise of Hinduism

Two weeks ago, I went for a walk with my daughter to the Birla temple. It is not far from where I live and I have seen it coming up for years, from a time when I did not actually live in Calcutta but when, during long or short periods of transit, would look at it from the balcony of this flat. It was built – this plush Orientalist artefact – by the family after which it is named: the Birlas, whose forefather moved from Rajasthan to Calcutta and made his fortune here.

I can’t say I unreservedly enjoy going to this temple; there are, however, only so many places to walk about in Calcutta. My daughter, though, does enjoy going there, without reservation, and this was both her second visit and mine. The first time must have been almost exactly a year ago. I remember the warm marble floor under our bare feet from that excursion, the floor that must have absorbed the heat all day to give it out in the evening. I can also remember my daughter, a year younger, running across the space before the main shrine. On our second visit, the marble was warm again beneath our feet.

On this visit, the precincts of the temple were more crowded than the first time I went there. It was a site of recreation – men and women, and some children, sat in the large space before the steps that led to the sanctum in which the arti (evening prayers offered to the deity) was being performed. They looked content, like people at the seaside. My daughter, easily frightened, was alarmed at the sound of the bell and did not want to investigate the arti – the familiar tune, which one can hear these days even when certain domestic water filters are used, was being played on a tape – and so we roamed around the premises. A thought came to me: would these people condone, or at least defend, what was happening in Gujarat?

The question was probably grossly unfair but impossible to keep out of my head or leave unasked. In the last ten years, gradually, the idea of the ‘peace-loving Hindu’ has been turned inside out. The most innocent-seeming of activities appear to be charged with unarticulated violence. To walk in the Birla temple was to sense – perhaps to imagine, but to imagine powerfully – that subterranean violence which Hinduism is now charged with in its totality: because you cannot isolate one kind of ‘religious’ activity from another.

Perhaps it was the location; perhaps I wouldn’t have felt this discomfort if these people had gathered at a more ancient, less ostentatious, place of worship. I have never really cared for the Birla temple, for its security guards who hover not very far from you once you enter, its marble floor and enormous chandelier, its expansive air of a lobby in a four star hotel, its spotless, garish, unimpeachable idols.

This spectacle is part of the production of a version of Hinduism that has been a steadily developing enterprise in independent India: Hinduism as a rich man’s, a trader’s, religion. Although aggressive exhortations are made on behalf of Lord Ram, the principal deities of this religion are Ganesh and Lakshmi: not Ganesh, the wily and rapid transcriber of the Mahabharata, but the bringer of good fortune to the black marketeer; not Lakshmi, the agrarian goddess, but the goddess who presides over the urban dowry system. As ever, our divinities bless their devotees indiscriminately.

I have heard Hinduism celebrated for the resilience with which it, unlike other religions, has embraced capitalism, but perhaps it has embraced capitalism a little too well. It has left the Hindu with an importunate will to fit into the modern world, and without a social conscience.

Hindutva – the BJP’s frequently used ontologically and culturally assertive term for ‘Hinduness’ – does not so much promote religion as it does material success for the followers of the Hindu religion. Success, in the nineties, has been its keyword, but success for the majority only. It will not barter or share it with anyone else; it will even pretend no one else exists. If they do, it will see to it that they cease to. I presume it is not a coincidence that the extreme measures of ethnic cleansing in Gujarat should be undertaken by those who have been the most effective proponents of the new Hinduism’s mantra of material well-being. Many of the sources that fund our new kitsch Hinduism are also those that fund, or quietly encourage, a government that has a chief minister who defends and protects murderers, and a prime minister (Atal Bihari Vajpayee, this piece was written in 2002) who defends and protects that minister. Then there is the largesse that flows in from overseas, from businessmen in London, from expatriates in England and America. Does it only take an arti to keep our gods happy?

Hinduism was never in the past (unlike Christianity) at the heart of a revolutionary political movement precisely because it was never an evangelical religion; it had no word, or truth, to spread. The killings done in its name today are not part of a jihad and nor are they the residue of a misguided evangelism. They are a brutal and calculated exercise of power in a moral vacuum: Hinduism as the punitive instrument of the powerful.

Christianity has often had a quarrel with modernity and the materialism it denotes in its eyes; Islam has a related quarrel with the West, modernity’s synecdoche. That is why Islamic militancy, even at its worst, has the dimensions of an ideology albeit a distorted one. Hindutva, on the other hand, has no problem with modernity or with the West and it rushes to embrace the latter’s material benefits. This happy concordance, in Hindutva, of cultural extremism and materialism makes it less like a ‘fundamentalist’ religious movement than like fascism.

‘Hinduism’ and the ‘mainstream’, how frequently are these words juxtaposed and made synonymous with each other by the ruling political party! ‘Mainstream’: the word that would mean, in a democratic nation, the law-abiding democratic polity, is cunningly conflated, in the newspeak of our present government, with the religious majority and those who don’t belong to that majority become, by subconscious association and suggestion, anti-democratic and breakers of the law.

Ironically, saffron is the colour of our mainstream. Saffron, or ‘gerua’ in the Indian languages: its resonances are wholly to do with that powerful undercurrent in Hinduism, ‘vairagya’, the melancholy and romantic possibility of renunciation. At what point, and how, did the colour of renunciation and withdrawal from the world become the symbol of a militant and materialistic majoritarianism? Gerua represents not what is brahmanical and conservative but what is most radical about the Hindu religion. It is the colour not of belonging, or fitting in, but of exile, of the marginal man. Hindutva, while rewriting our secular histories, has also rewritten the language of Hinduism and purged it of these meanings; and those of us who mourn the passing of secularism must also believe we are witnessing the passing, and demise, of the Hindu religion as we have known it.

We perhaps owe the politicisation of the colour saffron, its recent use in India as a sign of national pride, to the Hindu revivalist, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). We largely owe to him too (more than we do to any other single person) the notion of ‘Hinduness’. Vivekananda is a curious figure and an exemplary one; his story is inflected with the conflicts of interest, the contradictions, of the emergence of Hinduism into modernity.

Vivekananda’s real name was Narendranath Datta. He was a graduate of Calcutta University and had studied European religions carefully. Like many other middle class, educated men of his generation in India and elsewhere, he was a seeker after metaphysical and religious truth, but his search was related to the self-awareness of a colonial subject. After rejecting the major religions and philosophies he was surrounded by, Datta finally found his master in a rustic visionary and saint, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who was a priest in a town north of Calcutta, who spoke in parables and homilies and claimed to have ‘seen’ Ma Kali. Ironically, and characteristically of the time, he first heard of Ramakrishna from an Englishman, Professor WW Hastie. And it was Ramakrishna who reportedly identified Datta’s spiritual potential and named him Vivekananda – ‘the one who exults in a clear conscience and in discernment’.

Ramakrishna was an extraordinary man himself. He had experimented, literally, in varieties of religious experience. He could practise, for periods of time, faiths such as Islam and Christianity. His immersion, during these trance-like periods, in these alternative modes of worship was so complete that he would begin to internalise the habits and customs of other religions, to spend, for instance, long spells inside a mosque and eat beef; he’d even experience a sort of revulsion towards his beloved deity, Kali. His experiments led him to conclude, influentially, that all paths led to god (‘jata mat tata path’ – ‘there are as many paths as there are faiths’).

This, then, was part of Vivekananda’s liberal inheritance but it was an inheritance quite different from that of the liberal humanism that had come to exist in Bengal by this time, and which Vivekananda, as Narendranath Datta, would probably have subscribed to had he not met Ramakrishna. It was a middle class humanism that decreed tolerance towards all faiths regardless of whether or not you adhered to one yourself.

Ramakrishna, on the other hand, located these various religions not in the society or nation he lived in but in himself. It was here they coexisted and competed with each other, often annihilating each other temporarily. History animated him from within.

The liberal humanism of the Bengal Renaissance formed the basis of the secular Indian state. The experiments of Ramakrishna, in which different ways of seeing existed in a sort of tension within oneself, formed the basis of the creativity of the modern Indian. It is no accident that every significant Indian writer or artist has negotiated seemingly antithetical world views or languages in his or her work.

But the relationship that the BJP and the new BJP-governed middle class have with Hinduism is prescriptive, not creative. For years now, the BJP’s satellites of the far right have imposed a violent if illegal ban on imagined offences to the Hindu religion, and abused and harassed artists and writers for their supposed transgressions. This is not only a failure of secularism; it speaks to us of the imminent death of Ramakrishna’s inheritance: leaving us unable to negotiate any more the different ways of seeing in a way that might create rather than destroy.

In 1893, a penurious Vivekananda travelled to Chicago to attend the Parliament of World Religions. By this time he had abandoned the white apparel of the brahmachari, the celibate devotee, for the saffron of the sanyasi, the wandering holy mendicant. As a follower of Ramakrishna he had graduated from brahmacharya to sanyas, from celibacy to renunciation, and yet it was now that he and his religion would embrace the world, not only in a metaphorical and metaphysical but in a new, global, sense. His address in Chicago, in which he announced a resurgent Hinduism to the West, made him famous and made, by association and almost by chance, the colour he was wearing the sign of that resurgence rather than of liminality.

We might think we see some of the lineaments of today’s Hindutva in Vivekananda’s revived faith and while it is hard to deny the lineage, it is important to distinguish between the two.

Certainly, Vivekananda wanted Hinduism to stand on its own two feet, to become less inward-looking, and exhorted it to become a more ‘manly’ religion. Like other figures of the Bengal Renaissance, he welcomed western rationalism, science and materialism, and wanted Hinduism to enter into a transaction with these things. Hindutva continues that journey westward but the West itself has become a different entity from what it was in the late 19th century. Vivekananda could not have foreseen a West that is synonymous, principally, with the benefits of the free market, which the twice-born Hindutva now rushes towards. Moreover, Ramakrishna, the rustic seer, was important to Vivekananda as the vernacular root of Hinduism. He couldn’t have known that the religion he helped revive would venture so far into the world that it would become, in essence, a globalised urban faith, in Delhi and Bombay, London and New York, divorced from the vernacular experience that Ramakrishna represented. The followers of the postmodern Hindutva still ritually, and piously, celebrate Vivekananda but, a hundred years after his death, no longer exult in conscience or discernment.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Society

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