Soon after Samuel Paty incident in France, something similar is happening in the UK. A school teacher, in a Religious Education class, decided to show the cartoons of prophet Muhammad. The incident has led to protests from Muslim parents, who mobilized other Muslims, gheraoed the school and are now demanding the dismissal of the teacher. In the wake of these protests, the Batley Grammar School has suspended the teacher, instituted an enquiry and even apologized to Muslim parents. While such Muslim outrage and mobilization led to the murder of Samuel Paty; in this case fortunately it has not come to such a pass. The teacher is currently in hiding and in police protection. But just like in France, Muslims in the UK are accusing schools of deliberate Islamophobia and being insensitive to their religious feelings. The underlying issues therefore, in both France and UK are the same: the Muslim community seems to be arguing from the position of being the victim but at the same time demanding a special and privileged treatment of their religion. In both places, there is a renewed focus about the place of Islam in modern democracies. And there is a wider concern about liberal democracy and how Islamic exceptionalism is in the process of whittling that away.

If the Muslim (or any other) mob gets the power to define what is taught in schools and how teachers should conduct themselves in class, then it is perhaps time to write the epitaph of liberal schooling itself. Muslims have argued against the use of such materials in class. But then, if one is teaching about blasphemy and free speech, one of the most important materials to do so would be the cartoons which have generated so much debate and violence worldwide. And in that sense, the use of such cartoons is legitimate and there is nothing wrong in what the concerned teacher did. Teachers often use challenging materials in lessons to explore ideas and provoke discussion amongst students. The freedom to use certain materials should always be with the teacher and should never be dictated from outside. But then, some Muslims, who might not even know the basics of the craft of teaching, become super charged and think it is within their domain to tell schools and teachers what should be taught and what should be avoided. 

If such things cannot be discussed in a classroom, then where else can they be discussed? The boundaries of free speech cannot be circumscribed by the normative demands of a particular religion, in this case the Islamic blasphemy taboo. Moreover, if there is such reverence for one religion, then why should the sensitivities of other religions not be taken into account? And if there is an agreement that religious sensitivities should not be hurt at all, then what happens to the promise of liberal education? Because surely, even teaching evolution and heliocentrism is against the tenets of most religions.

One can certainly argue that the whole issue should have been handled sensitively. Those students who do not want to see such cartoons must be given the option of not being part of such a pedagogical exercise. But it goes without saying that teachers must have the freedom to explore hot button issues and enable students to think critically about them. Not doing so would amount to a religious veto over children’s mind. If this religious veto continues, then centuries of intellectual progress will be negated. There was a time when Christianity had this veto and now it is increasingly looking like Islam is exercising that veto even though it is no where as powerful as the Church once was. Muslims need to think if, in the name of ‘protecting’ their religion, they want their children to become unfit in negotiating the structures of modernity.

Parents can certainly protest about the content of education but then there are appropriate forums to do so. They cannot march on the school and force the school to suspend a teacher, which is what happened in this case. The response of the school in this case has been timid, to say the least. Instead of fronting this as an attack of the freedom of a teacher, it has miserably succumbed to the Islamist mob. Similar incidents have taught us that appeasing the fanatics only emboldens them. The only way to fight such tendencies is to call out this act of religious bullying and confront them. If the primary concern of the school is the feeling of the protestors, then certainly its priorities are misplaced. The real issue should have been the intimidation of the teacher rather than posing super sensitive to fanatical Muslims in order to be politically correct. If the school has withdrawn the lesson altogether, as appears to be the case, then it has already lost the right to be called as a center of learning.

Those who are siding with the protestors in the name of combating Islamophobia and showing sensitiveness towards such Muslims are making a grave error of judgment. Such actions will only fuel a climate of censorship and exceptionalism around Islam which certainly does not do any favour to ordinary Muslims. It is rather patronizing to assume that all Muslims will take offense over the use of cartoons, no matter how insensitive they might be. It is gross to assume that such protestors are the representatives of Muslim community. And playing along any such assumption would only amount to strengthening the unhealthy stereotypes about Muslims. Mollycoddling to such protestors is nothing but trying to appease the most fanatical section within the Muslim community. The incident is perhaps the clearest example of how the school and the left-wing eco-system is privileging orthodox Muslims over the moderate ones. 

It is heartening to note that some Muslimshave protested against this caricaturing of their community by the school. They have condemned the protestors who are demanding the sacking of the school teacher and have argued that as Muslims, they have nothing against the particular teacher. The school will do itself and others a favour if it listens to such saner voices within the community.

Arshad Alam is a columnist with NewAgeIslam.com

This article was first published in New Age Islam and may be read here

The post Why Islamic Exceptionalism Does not Serve the Muslim Cause appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image courtesy Amazon

Back in 2012, when the cartoon controversy erupted, I attended a meeting at the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), headed by Sukhdev Thorat at the time. The Thorat Committee had been set up to review all cartoons featured in NCERT textbooks. S Anand, the publisher of Navayana, took me to the meeting as a subject expert on colonial Indian cartoons. 

The debate at the time was around a single cartoon of Bhimrao Ambedkar. Why not first look at other cartoons on him, I thought, and then came to a conclusion about his representation. I had already researched on colonial Indian cartoons and had naturally decided to archive the “Ambedkar cartoons”. When it started off, I was the only researcher working on this topic.

My journey began with a Navajivan Trust publication from the 1970s, featuring cartoons about Gandhi, after which I came across Don’t Spare me Shankar, a book dedicated to the cartoons of Jawaharlal Nehru. This is when I strongly felt that academic research had conveniently ignored Ambedkar all these years. Therefore, at the Gandhi Museum in Delhi, I started reading about Ambedkar and began chronicling the major events of his life and career – turning myself into an archivist of Ambedkar cartoons.

Ambedkar in the Public Domain

Initially, I was interested to examine how the colonial press represented Ambedkar on their publications. For this, I carefully went through colonial newspapers page by page, often widening my lens from just Ambedkar.

Those days, every time I came across a cartoon on Ambedkar, I would share it on social media for people to get a taste of these primary sources. My intention was also to expose the injustice done to Ambedkar, in colonial publications. All major Indian newspapers, periodicals and cartoons were studied and archived, over a period of about ten months.

After ten months, my friends advised against posting the images on social media, suggesting that I use the valuable data for research instead. I wanted to submit the cartoons as a report to the NCERT and Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), however, the cartoon controversy ended before that, when the Thorat Committee removed Ambedkar’s cartoons from NCERT textbooks. 

Usually when one visits the Archives, the staff enquires about the topic of research. I’ve realised that if one replies “Ambedkar”, it’s simply assumed that one belongs to the Dalit community, but if one says “Gandhi”, they attitude is always different. I’ve also noticed that archival material on Ambedkar would often be slightly ruined, with either the pages torn off or something scribbled on them. This is due to the sheer grudge that ‘upper’ caste Hindu scholars hold against him. The grudge seems to be due to reservations, for they haven’t even read him. [No Laughing Matter touches upon the issue of archiving subjects related to Dalit identity.]

Archiving took me to several places and libraries. Most of the cartoons featured in No Laughing Matter are from the microfilm archive at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in New Delhi. I was still not satisfied. I visited the National Library in Kolkata, the Andhra Pradesh Archives and Research Institute in Hyderabad, Pune’s Film Institute Library and the Madras Archives in Chennai.

The visits were possible only because I had saved some of the money I received as part of the Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship. Even though in the final year of my PhD at the time, I felt archiving these cartoons was more important. 

Not a Mere Cartoon-Collection

A mere compilation of cartoons was not enough. Cartoons need the support of strong annotations. I thoroughly went through the writings on Ambedkar, especially biographies. Thereafter, my quest was to discover how each of them represented Ambedkar. I also read his own writings and speeches, published by the Maharashtra Government Press. Juxtaposing all of this with newspaper reports and cartoons was the next step.
Towards the end, the process took on a Roshomon effect, as I searched for ‘truth’ in every possible source – for which I even studied the characters featured in the background of the Ambedkar cartoons. In other words, a compilation of Ambedkar cartoons is not just about Ambedkar. It also tells one about the colonial times in general – the Congress, the Viceroys and their Executive Council members, the drafting of the Constitution, the Hindu Code Bill etc. While working on my book, No Laughing Matter, I had compiled cartoons on the draft Constitution – specifically, to see how cartoonists of the time viewed the drafting process.

Cartoonists and their Priorities

During the later stages of my research, I felt that a biography of cartoonists was as important as their cartoons. As a result, I began to collect information about cartoonists from newspaper sources: their educational background, how they were trained as cartoonists and joined popular newspapers etc. Interestingly, only if they crossed a line were cartoonists removed from their field. Cartoonists such as Shankar (K. Shankar Pillai, founder of Shankar’s Weekly, whose 1949 Ambedkar sketches stoked the NCERT cartoon controversy in 2012) and Enver Ahmed are the best examples of this.

I compared how they depicted Ambedkar and other leaders, to understand the pulse of the times. Yes, during Partition, there were controversial sketches of Gandhi & Jinnah. Sukeshi Kamra, a post-colonial studies expert, in her book Bearing Witness, discusses the cartoons of this era. There was a cartoon on Gandhi sleeping with women, as part of the political rivalry between the Muslim League and the Congress party. Yet, the topics that cartoonists had chosen at the time surprised me to no end. 

As is well known, Indian cartoonists had adopted the style of the legendary British cartoonist David Low, but they did not adopt his subtlety. They injected their casteism, misogyny and other perversions into these cartoons and they actively ridiculed caste, religious and gender identities.
Above all else, the cartoonist’s reverence for the British Raj and their loyalty for the Viceroys remained unchanged. They took extra care while drawing cartoons featuring British viceroys and were less careful—more careless—while drawing leaders who opposed the Congress and Gandhi. Indian cartoonist’s sketches on the draft Constitution and the Hindu Code Bill are the best instances of this and of their lack of sharp political ideas. 

By the time my research ended, I realised that Ambedkar had always been ahead of his times. I also saw that the cartoonists in the popular press had no clue about his ideology. What illustrates this best is the fact that there is not a single cartoon depicting Ambedkar’s famous work, Annihilation of Caste, even though Gandhi had debated annihilation and even wrote counter arguments to it in his own paper, Harijan. 

No other Dalit leader had the charisma Ambedkar at the time. Yet, the mindset of cartoonists remains the same as during Ambedkar’s time, and the best example of this was when cartoonists defended the controversial cartoon in 2012, in the name of “freedom of expression”.

We have a poor sense of history. We lag behind in historical research. Our archival sources are not well-protected. We need a separate cartoon library or museum. If there was such spaces, the Ambedkar cartoon controversy would have never erupted.

 Unnamati Syama Sundar is a scholar and cartoonist. His study of the ‘Ambedkar cartoons’ led to a book, No Laughing Matter: The Ambedkar Cartoons, 1932-1956, published by Navayana in April 2019. 
 

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My family’s experience cannot compare with the hate that burst forth in Pittsburgh several weeks ago, when 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue were murdered simply because they were Jewish people attending prayer. But we are living in a period of increasing hatred directed at minorities of all kinds, and anti-Semitism is on the rise across the globe.

The Pittsburgh synagogue gunman, Robert Bowers, raged in online platforms that Jews were “invaders” trying to destabilise the United States. They were, he said, “an infestation” and “evil”. Bowers’ rants cast Jews in the role of dangerous revolutionaries out to destroy Western civilisation. This has long been a staple perspective of anti-Semitism.

In my research, I have been studying the anti-Semitic images that were commonplace in Vienna early last century. These stereotyped images served to vilify Jewish people, culminating in the removal of most of the Jews from Vienna in 1938.

I believe it is important that we reflect on these upsetting images to consider how the “mainstreaming” of anti-Semitic ideas and images in popular media can have terrible consequences.
 

Caricatures in the fin-de-siècle Viennese press

At the turn of the century, the Austrian capital was home to the third-largest Jewish population in Europe after Warsaw and Budapest. Accounting for almost 9% of Vienna’s population, Jews were a highly visible minority. They were also a constant source of conversation and fear within Vienna’s political and civic arenas.

Anti-Semitic caricatures and literary sketches in the Viennese press ran rife from the end of the 19th century until the German annexation of Austria in March 1938.

The cartoons presented a variety of messages that characterised Jews in a number of negative roles: as the binary opposite to Aryan morality and virtuousness, as money-grubbing parvenus, or as attempting to take over large parts of the city. What all these stereotypes had in common was their characterisation of Jewish people as an Other who did not belong within European society.

One caricature from the widely read Viennese biweekly satirical magazine Kikeriki, published in 1900, comments on the presence of Jews at elite social events.

Caricature from the satirical magazine Kikeriki. Author provided

It depicts Jewish men and women ridiculed for their supposed racial characteristics (a view strongly influenced by the popularity of eugenics and Social Darwinism during this period) and, by satirising the popular dance styles at elite city balls, implies that Jews dominated Viennese elite circles. The image’s caption makes no overt references to Jews, but the visual stereotypes would have made it very clear to the readers what this image was about.

A 1900 cartoon in Figaro. Author provided

Another cartoon from 1890 in Figaro (not to be confused with the popular French daily Le Figaro) depicts two men meeting on a crowded Viennese street. One of the men, a visitor, asks a local if he would be so kind as to point out the Judengasse [Jews’ Street]. The latter replies, “Perhaps you can tell me where is it not.”

The scene behind these two gentlemen is filled with characters drawn with common Jewish bodily stereotypes: large hooked noses, dark curly hair and thick lips.

Although at this time most Jews living in Vienna spoke German and were adherents to secular German culture, the figure of the Ostjude (Eastern Jew) was a typical feature of these cartoons. Anti-Semitic cartoonists, newspaper editors and politicians harnessed a fear connected to an increased Jewish migration from Austria’s eastern crownlands and the pogroms of the Russian Empire.

Despite the fact that Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox, traditionally attired Jews never accounted for the majority of Vienna’s Jewish population, cartoons often depicted them as descending en masse into an unsuspecting “German” city.

Cartoons often depicted Jewish people descending ‘en masse’ on a city. Author provided

Other cartoons bemoaning Vienna’s “Jewification” gave way to those speculating on the revenge that would be meted out to the Jews; not necessarily violence and murder, but other forms such as banishment from the city and its social and political arenas.

A revenge fantasy. Author provided
 

‘Jewification’ and revenge today

The effects of this tradition of anti-Semitic representation are clear. It took very little for average men and women to turn on their Jewish neighbours and colleagues after the German Anschluss in March 1938.

Many Viennese Jews were lucky to escape. Some, just under 2,000, found a haven in Australia. They have since, like many other refugees and migrants, contributed to the economic, cultural and political development of Australian culture in the post-WWII period.

Yet the themes of “Jewification” and revenge expressed in these cartoons are, sadly, still relevant today.

In his online rants, for instance, Bowers had condemned the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) – a Jewish refugee advocacy and support group founded in New York in 1881 – for “bringing in invaders”.

The Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros, meanwhile, has been the target of anti-Semitic demonisation. And in Charlottesville last year, hundreds of mostly young white men marched with torches chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us”.

How we speak about and depict others in the media and social discourse perpetuates long-held stereotypes and ultimately emboldens hate-filled individuals. It is for this reason that we should look to the past – and learn from it.
 

Jonathan C. Kaplan, Doctoral candidate, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post How anti-Semitic stereotypes from a century ago echo today appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
Drop the cartoon and carry a photo!

That’s how my cartoon column with Mail Today ended yesterday.

That’s how the editor looked at a cartoon and cartoonist’s opinion.

That’s how the editor chose to shut a voice!

The cartoon he rejected was about how China is surrounding India by spreading influence in countries like Maldives and others. The editor said the cartoon is ‘Very defeatist and the China problem is being overplayed’

I thought it’s how a cartoonist looked at the growing influence of China around Indian interests.

So I said it’s debatable and cartoonist’s opinion should be valued.

And in response, he asked the news desk to drop the cartoon and carry a photo.

I have been battling to protect my freedom, to protect the sanctity of a cartoon column, for many days. May be for the editor it’s just three column space, but for a cartoonist it’s a whole world. A world where the cartoonist is free to express his opinion. A world to challenge his own creative boundaries. A world to voice protest, criticise, lament, cheer etc.
-First they rejected a cartoon showing cow saying ‘The editor is not too happy with the cartoon with cow’
-For a cartoon on lynching I received this message ‘There’s a bit of an issue. India Today Group has decided not to come out with any community based cartoons.’
-For one cartoon on Modi, they asked ‘if I can replace Modi’s character with any general BJP character’
-And then ‘ Editor is not comfortable with Muslim angle in the cartoon’
-And  ‘editor didn’t like the demonetisation link with 100% electrification’
-And more of ‘this doesn’t make sense’, ‘this is unacceptable’ etc etc.
(And many of these rejected cartoons were used by  other clients and some of them went viral, shared/retweeted by even many journalists)

It was very difficult to do a cartoon, as too many barriers were installed around me.

Out of desperation, I approached many senior journalist friends for feedback. They sympathised with me, some asked me to wait, some asked me to stay strong.

Giving up is easy in such situation as I’m a freelance cartoonist contributing to other clients too.  I thought I need to fight for my right. I thought I need to do justice to the cartoon space that goes with my name.

But at the end, I was rudely reminded that, that space is owned by the editor, the paper.

And they could just drop my cartoon and carry a photo!

Of course, there’s a strange relief. Now there’s a thought that when I sit to draw a cartoon, I don’t have to worry about, what my editor thinks/says about the cow in the cartoon, lynching in the cartoon, Modi in the cartoon or a Muslim/Hindu guy in the cartoon!
But this humiliating experience is hurting.

As a cartoonist I expect my editor to respect my opinion and also trust the boundaries I have drawn for myself. Cartoonists are not bound to mimic editor’s voice. Cartoonists are supposed to and expected to express independent voice.

Of course, editor is within his right to differ with a cartoon and inform the cartoonist. But he should be open to discuss, without being dictatorial.

My cartoons used to appear in Op-ed page of Mail Today, where I thought some of the columnists enjoyed more freedom than my cartoons!

Luckily I have few other clients, where the editors respect my opinion and trust my cartoons, even when they don’t agree with me. Hope we will have more such large-hearted editors.

And I also have social media, where independent voice gets an audience.

Ironically, the personal website of BJP chief Amit Shah carries most of my cartoons featuring him, many of them are very critical of him!

As famously quoted, when they are asked to bend, they chose to crawl!

This is an unedited reproduction of the writer’s post from his website, cartoonistsatish.com

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Modi, Surgeon-in-chief

Religion – the ultimate Black Money hoarder

Digital wallet? Come on, I’m in the service!

(Republished with permission from raiot.in).

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