There are moments when I love my job or rather, my business of journalism – even I, a hard-nosed cynical hack of nearly three decades. It is because you love and cherish these moments that you are so grateful you are in this business. How else would I, a hopeless, hopeless philistine, hope to find myself on a rain-drenched terrace in old Varanasi with Ustad Bismillah Khan? As it happens, it was almost exactly the same time last year.

I can fill the rest of this space just describing the beauty of his face, his spirit, his talent, his madness, even his commercialism. To date, he is the only guest who demanded, and was paid – though only a very reasonable tribute – for appearing on Walk the Talk. He said he had a large family to support, even at 91, and could do with whatever money came his way. And when I reminded him, while leaving, that he had to come and perform at my children’s weddings, he said yes immediately. And then quoted the price: five lakh, plus air tickets and stay for seven people. You could touch his innocence with bare hands in the heavy monsoon air.

Khan Saheb let me down on this one though. He will not come and perform at my children’s weddings, whatever the price. But he left me with memories – and lines – that will never go away. What was the difference between Hindu and Muslim, he asked. What, indeed, when he sang to Allah in raga Bhairav (composed for Shiva) and brought to tears the Iraqi maulana who had just told him music was blasphemy, “evil, a trap of the devil”. Khan Saheb said, “I told him, Maulana, I will sing to Allah. All I ask you is to be fair. And when I finished I asked him if it is blasphemy. He was speechless.” And then Khan Saheb told me with that trademark mischievous glint: “But I did not tell him it was in raga Bhairav.”

Why did Khan Saheb not migrate to Pakistan with partition? “Arre, will I ever leave my Benares?” he asked. “I went to Pakistan for a few hours,” he said, “just to be able to say I’ve been there. I knew I would never last there.” And what is so special about Benares, his glorified slum of a haveli in a grandly named Bharat Ratna Ustad Bismillah Khan Street that had more potholes than footholds and more heaps of chicken entrails from nearby meat shops than garbage heaps from homes? “My temples are here,” he said, “Balaji and Mangala Gauri.” Without them, he asked, how would he make any music? As a Muslim he could not go inside the temples. But so what? “I would just go behind the temples and touch the wall from outside. You bring gangajal, you can go inside to offer it, but I can just as well touch the stone from outside. It’s the same. I just have to put my hand to them.”

How is that devotion in a week when our parliament was rocked by issues like the forcible, and criminal, chopping of a Sikh boy’s hair in Jaipur and the controversy over state-mandated singing of Vande Mataram in schools to launch the 150th anniversary of 1857? Or when we were all so outraged by the paranoia that caused the Mumbai bound KLM-Northwest flight to return to Amsterdam, the racial profiling of Muslims, particularly Asian-Arab Muslims and so on?

Khan Saheb’s was a talent worthy of a Bharat Ratna and immortality. But he also personified, so strikingly, the fact of how the Muslims of India defy the stereotypes building up in today’s rapidly dividing world. They may be poorer than the majority, or even other, smaller minorities, they may still live in ghettos of sorts, but they are a part of the mainstream, nationally as well as regionally and ethnically, more than Muslim populations are in most parts of the world. A Tamil Muslim, for example, is as much an ethnic Tamil as a Hindu or a Christian and certainly has more in common with his ethnic cousins than with fellow Muslims in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. India’s Muslims work in mainstream businesses where their interests are meshed inextricably with the rest, particularly the majority Hindus, even if they happen to spar occasionally.

That is why, unlike Bush’s America or the western world in general, India cannot even think of the diabolical idea of “Islamic” fascism or terrorism. No country can survive if it starts looking at nearly 15 per cent of its population as a fifth column. That is why India’s view of the war against terror has to be entirely different from the western world’s, more nuanced, more realistic and, most importantly, entirely indigenous.

It is a difficult argument to make in times when it is so tempting to tell America and Europe that see, the people who are terrorising you are the same as the people who have been terrorising us. So far you never believed us. Now with every other terror suspect being traced back to Pakistan and, more precisely, Jaish or Lashkar, accept and acknowledge that we have been in the forefront of the global war against terror for a decade before it hit you. The danger in that approach is, the Americans and the Europeans can choose that approach – though it is not working for them as well – because for them these Muslims are outsiders, different, and therefore candidates for racial profiling. You can racially profile a million people in a universe of 27 crore. Can you profile 14 crore in a universe of a hundred crore? Particularly when most of them, in their own big and small ways, are as integrated in the mainstream, as zealously proud and possessive of their multiple (ethnic, linguistic and professional) identities as of their faith?

That is why the key to fighting, okay, this wave of terror emanating from Muslim anger is to absolutely avoid the “global war on terror” trap.

The terrorists know it. That is why attacks in India, even by angry Indian Muslims, are not directed against some evil global power or its symbols. Nor are they meant to support some pan-Islamic cause, Palestine, or even, for that matter, Kashmir. Their objective, always, is to strike at our secular nationalism. Every single attack has had the same purpose, starting with the first round of Bombay bombings in 1993.

Sharad Pawar made a bold confession to me earlier this month that he parachuted from Delhi into a riot-torn Bombay then figured immediately that the terrorist plot was to kill a large number of people in Hindu localities to trigger large-scale mob attacks on Muslim areas where automatic weapons and grenades had been stored with their agents. Once the mobs were stopped with these automatic weapons it would lead to a carnage that would be uncontrollable. It is for that reason that, he says, he lied on Doordarshan that there had been 12 blasts (where there had been 11) and added the name of a Muslim locality as the 12th. Today we can all rue the fact that judgement in the case of those blasts is still awaited, 13 years later (this article was written in 2006). But we should also cherish the fact that in eschewing any rioting and actually returning to work the very next morning, Bombay had defeated the larger design of the terrorists.

Every attack since then, the temples at Ayodhya, Akshardham and Varanasi, Raghunath temple in Jammu, even the bombs at Delhi’s Jama Masjid, had the same purpose: widening that divide. But it is tougher in India where any notion of ‘Them versus Us’ is an impossibility given how closely communities live, work and do business together. It is one thing to say that we have learnt to live with diversity for a thousand years. It is equally important that we internalise the idea of diversity, equality and fairness that is in our Constitution and in the process of nation building make the very idea of a global war against ‘Islamic fascism’ totally alien and ridiculous for India.

There is a war on for us and there is no getting away from the fact that some of those on the wrong side today are fellow, angry Indians, and we have to deal with them firmly and effectively. But we will need to evolve an idiom and a strategy entirely our own, in tune with a society which loves equally Ustad Bismillah Khan and Pandit Ravi Shankar, who both sing and pray to Allah and Shiva, Krishna in ragas composed for either. Today India enjoys great respect in the world because of its unfolding economic miracle. If India can get this nuance right, it could be the toast of the world tomorrow for an even greater socio-political miracle, a secular but deeply religious nation that defeated terrorism while taking its 14 crore Muslims along.

Courtesy: The Indian Express

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

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Many decades ago, Rafiq Sabir entered a Gujarati businessman’s palatial home in Bombay. Almost 60 minutes after this intrusion, he was led out, handcuffed, by policemen. The charge against him was that he had attacked ‘a leader of a religious party for political reasons’. This leader survived the attack and went on to create a country where 68 years later, ‘another Rafiq Sabir’ attacked ‘a leader of a political party for religious reasons’. The snake was taught another language, the venom was given another colour but their effectiveness was undiminished.

Today an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis hold in respect a repulsive constable of the Punjab police. My own house is divided. My parents have asked me time and again to not write anything disparaging about this ‘courageous man’. I would have heeded them if there wasn’t a large crowd a hundred yards from my house still protesting against the death sentence for Mumtaz Qadri.

A much smaller crowd gathered weeks ago in America too and they were also protesting against a death sentence. There is nothing uncivil in such protests but if the protesters are trying to glorify a confessed murderer, a cold-blooded fanatic, things do look threatening. These are the people who cheered the death of an innocent reformist and the destruction of a small Christian family. It is never enough for them. Should they not be appeased by god’s vengeance which will strike the ‘unlearned’? Should they not calm their hearts by remembering god’s words: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay…”?

Mumtaz Qadri also has something to learn. Martyrs don’t get glory for free; they have to sell their lives for it. And under no conditions do they run about town filing appeals against their death sentences. Perhaps Mr Qadri has become too accustomed to the attention he is getting in this world and he has forgotten the next.

Before emptying dozens of bullets into Salmaan Taseer’s chest, Qadri was fully cognisant of the fact that he was committing murder and that he would be executed for it. Why then this dilly-dallying, these second thoughts?

Then there are those liberals who don’t want Mumtaz to be executed. To them, the death penalty is as criminal as murder, only that the former is sanctioned by the state; it is a punishment which leaves no room for reform and gives no value to remorse.

But a criminal who shows no remorse can’t be reformed. It is almost always the court verdict which awakens a convict from his delirium and if he is unable to show remorse then, one can rest assured that he never will. Expecting remorse from a deluded Mumtaz Qadri is like expecting remorse from Hitler. Their crimes weren’t the result of personal animosity towards their victims – they were caused by deep personal convictions. We can’t even expect that Qadri will reform himself, for what would reformation mean to him? To the religious crowd, he sits at the pinnacle of chivalry, selflessness and courage. Where do you go from the pinnacle? For me, the only non-repulsive thing that Mumtaz Qadri can become is a dead man.

If people like Mumtaz Qadri keep rising up in our society, we must realise that it is time for some introspection. Bigoted mobs, men suffering from Jerusalem syndrome and faux liberals can’t be waited out. They have to be dealt with severely and their identities be thrown into the dark parts of history. Before reading the sentence to Jinnah’s assailant, Justice Blagden made remarks which have something for everybody (To make it more relevant, I have replaced the word ‘political’ with the word ‘religious’):

“No country can be happy and prosperous which condones murder for ‘religious’ purposes or for any other purpose. The only result of condoning a ‘religious’ murder is to substitute the rule of hooligans for the rule of reason… You and misguided people like you have to be taught fact by punishment and the example of punishment…”

Jinnah might have won against Rafiq Sabir but he lost against history. Intentionally or unintentionally, he gave birth to the very society he was fighting against. It is a society where even a brave judge has to vindicate his position by prefacing his verdict with an apologetic statement: “A proven blasphemer is wajib-ul-qatl (liable to be killed). He cannot be forgiven. Only the holy prophet himself can forgive him.”

How far have we come? Perhaps hate does beget hate. We are children of hate.

This article was posted on The Express Tribune blog on October 13, 2011, http://blogs.tribune.com.pk

Archived from Communalism Combat, November 2011. Year 18, No.161 – Neighbours

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Archived from Communalism Combat,  April 2009 Year 15    No.139, Ekal Vidyalaya Way,  Training to Hate: The Ekal Vidyalaya Way

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1.1 The state has a duty to provide a meaningful quality education for all as part of its duty to provide school education for all, as part of the latter’s fundamental right. It is obvious that textbooks are a fulcrum of any system which seeks to provide quality education. We have now an enormous variety of textbooks in the country and the content analysis undertaken for this report shows that there are many problems with textbooks in use in different types of schools. The provision of textbooks in our country is largely governed by a laissez-faire approach. While the plurality in the textbooks and textual materials so produced is and can be fruitful, it is important that these textbooks have to be informed by the philosophy of liberal, secular and democratic education. They need to keep the Constitution and its provisions in view. It is important that textbooks and textual materials are written and produced within this framework and the country must be satisfied that these processes are transparent.

1.2 There is an urgent need to set up an institutional facility to keep an eye on textbooks. Research on textbooks is an essential feature of a healthy education system but in the context of the challenges we face, research must take the form of inquiry into specific problems relating to the quality of textbooks and the values they convey. An institutional structure to perform this task needs to be independent of any organisation which is involved in textbook preparation. This would imply that the institutional facility we are recommending for exercising vigilance on textbooks cannot be associated with the NCERT at the national level and SCERTs at the state level. The NCERT is a major player in the textbook industry and is likely to remain involved in it in the foreseeable future. Therefore, while the NCERT’s and SCERT’s role as a research organisation must extend to research on textbooks, independent institutional structures need to be set up to exercise vigilance on textbooks published by both government organisations as well as by others. The structure can be called the National Textbook Council. The state governments may be encouraged to set up their own State Textbook Councils. Both the National Textbook Council and State Textbook Council should be fully autonomous and representing genuine voices in civil society and the academia so that the monitoring of textbooks can be performed with intellectual rigour, sensitivity and commitment to constitutional values. The primary role of these Councils would be to review the contents of textbooks to ensure compliance with the constitutional values and national policies on education. The National Textbook Council may devise its own procedures for review. Given the fact that ordinary citizens do not have a forum where they can complain about the content and quality of textbooks, even though their own children are involved, these Councils may especially respond to complaints received from the public about the quality and value perspective of school textbooks by conducting specific inquiries.

2.1 The CABE may set up a Standing Committee. The Standing Committee will inform the CABE from time to time about textbook-related matters and seek guidance from the National Textbook Council. The Committee will from time to time review and examine standards and relevance of textual materials for the educational enterprise and assess the social content of textbooks and textual materials and examine whether they are consistent with the vision of the Constitution and the values of the national policy on education and in terms appropriate for children at different stages of development. It will submit its report to the government and this should be made public.

2.2 It is extremely important that the principle of periodic review of textual materials be accepted and review undertaken on a regular basis. The CABE Standing Committee can decide the periodicity of such reviews.

2.3 Guidelines should be laid down for the periodic review of textual materials of all kinds so that textbooks are consistent with the secular fabric of Indian governance. The Standing Committee would be empowered to prepare the guidelines and outline the parameters for review. It is important that the criteria for approval of textual materials must include a proper analysis of content to assess its adherence to the core principles before the textbooks are approved and prescribed. This will need to be conducted by academic experts who can judge departures from core principles of egalitarianism, democracy, secularism and removal of social barriers, which define the national endeavour of education for all and nation building. These guidelines must be strictly adhered to.

2.4 The Standing Committee should make these periodic reviews and reports public. This should be widely publicised through the media and other means to increase public awareness of the social content of textbooks and the importance of using textual materials that are in keeping with the values and spirit of egalitarianism, secularism and democracy.

2.5 The review process must be initiated without inconveniencing parents and children and be completed within six months of the beginning of the new academic session.

3.1 It is a matter of concern that the NCERT and SCERT have so far not taken up research on textbooks as a major area of research and this needs to be strengthened. The NCERT and SCERTs can be asked to set up units dedicated to research on textbook preparation and evaluation. Academic autonomy required for undertaking this function in an objective manner should be provided to the NCERT and SCERTs.

3.2 Adequate funding must be made available to concerned agencies for engaging in research on social content of textbooks. Adequate staff must be provided so that it could function in conjunction with and provide support to the CABE Standing Committee for Curricular Review. The MHRD, State Education Departments and State Directorates of Education should earmark funds for this purpose and all institutions of higher learning should support research in school textbooks.

Archived from Communalism Combat,  April 2009 Year 15    No.139, Report of the CABE Committee, Recommendations on Regulatory Mechanisms for Textbooks and Parallel Textbooks

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Textbooks have always been an integral part of the Indian school education system. As the school education programme acquired a mass character in the post-independence period, the absence of good quality textbooks began to be acutely felt. Yet the period immediately after independence saw no major effort to mass-produce textbooks. As the system expanded, the textbook industry became one of the very profitable fields for investment which also led to a proliferation of low quality, substandard and badly produced textbooks. Thus the availability of textbooks at affordable prices for the poor also became an important issue. The Education Commission (1964-66) points out that textbook writing and production did not receive the attention they deserved. The Commission also identified several factors contributing to the problem, such as the lack of interest shown by top-ranking scholars, malpractices in the selection and prescription of textbooks, unscrupulous tactics adopted by several publishers, lack of research in the preparation and production of textbooks and the almost total disregard of the need for bringing out ancillary books such as teachers’ guides and supplementary material. It is in this context that many state governments took over the production of textbooks.¹

The establishment of the Central Bureau of Textbook Research in 1954 and its subsequent merger into the NCERT in 1961 gave a new direction to textbook development and production. The NCERT launched a comprehensive programme of textbook production from the late 1960s. The National Board of School Textbooks in its first meeting in 1969 suggested that the NCERT should work out a general framework in the form of principles and criteria for preparing textbooks for different school subjects by actively involving state authorities, subject specialists, teachers and other educators.

Emergence of State Agencies: NCERT, SCERTs and Textbook Bureaus

Efforts to institutionalise textbook preparation and production began with state production of textbooks in the post-independence period. Uttar Pradesh, for instance, was one of the first states to do so. The State Institutes of Education (SIEs) and State Institutes of Science Education in the mid-1960s took up this task. Both structures were integrally part of the State Directorates of Education. The NCERT had also begun preparing textbooks at the national level. Particularly with respect to social sciences, the writing of history became tied to the elaboration of the nationalist project to build a democratic, liberal, socialist, humanistic vision. Moved by the optimism of the age and the urge to provide the children of new India with a history of India’s past, many reputed academics were invited to write textbooks when the NCERT was set up in the mid-1960s.

During this time, state governments, faced with the task of providing textbooks in schools which then were predominantly government-run, established Textbook Bureaus and State Boards of Examination. While the Textbook Bureaus focused on the printing and distribution of textbooks and the Boards had the task of prescribing syllabi and conducting examinations, the states used several methods for the actual preparation of textual materials.

A few state governments established Textbook Corporations for the production of textbooks. In most states, the function of textbook preparation, particularly for primary and upper primary classes, was taken over by SCERTs which subsumed the SIEs organisationally as well as functionally. For instance, the Maharashtra government combined the task of textbook production and related research by the creation of the Maharashtra State Board of Textbook Production and Curriculum Research. Based on the recommendations of the NPE 1986 to decentralise curricula and textbook writing, states began to establish SCERTs, either closing down the older SIEs or amalgamating them with the SCERTs. However, there existed a tension with regard to their functioning. While states were prepared to allow the SCERTs to prescribe the function of textbook preparation for primary and upper primary classes, they were reluctant to hand over a similar role to the SCERTs in respect of secondary education.

Textbook preparation at the secondary level was assigned either to the wholly state-controlled Board of Education or the state’s Directorate of Education. However, neither structure had the professional wherewithal to undertake the academic task of textbook writing, the former being an examining body and the latter an administrative one. They relied upon ‘established’ academics chosen by a committee constituted to choose writers. In effect, textbook preparation was left to the discretion of handpicked academics. This is not to give the impression that in contrast to the situation as regards secondary education all was well with regard to primary and middle schools. This does not imply that the tasks, even for primary and middle sections, were fully streamlined and that all the SCERTs carried them out systematically. For one, some of the SCERTs, as in case of the north-eastern states, came into existence much later and the responsibility for textbook preparation and production in some of them is still quite fluid.

There is hardly any regulation or regulatory mechanism for the textbooks and textual materials used in schools outside the government system
 

The textbooks for the secondary and higher secondary stages are generally adopted from the NCERT in most of the states. Textbooks at the secondary stage are not prepared in Delhi, as all schools are affiliated to the CBSE. CBSE-prescribed textbooks are used at the higher secondary/PUC stage in Delhi. The Himachal Pradesh Board does not prepare textbooks for Classes XI and XII; instead, books of the NCERT are recommended in the schools. In Haryana also, textbooks published by the NCERT have been introduced in the state at the secondary and higher secondary/PUC stage. In Orissa, at the secondary stage (for Classes VIII, IX and X) the Board of Secondary Education, Orissa – which is an autonomous organisation – prepares textbooks. At higher secondary education (for Classes XI and XII) the State Bureau of Textbook Preparation and Publication, Bhubaneswar, is responsible for preparing textbooks. But, as already mentioned, very few states directly intervene in private unaided schools with regard to the nature of teaching-learning material and books being used. Once recognition is given to such private self-financing schools, public examinations are the only link between the schools and the state government authorities.²

The role of the NCERT as a textbook producer at the central level has expanded enormously with the publication of NCFs and the collaborative arrangement between the CBSE and NCERT.

With the huge expansion of the private unaided sector at both the elementary and secondary levels, divergence in the use of textbooks by government and private schools has acquired considerable importance as described in the ensuing sections. Given this diversity of textbooks in all types of schools, what goes into the textbooks is a matter of national importance and merits the highest attention.

Textbook Preparation Mechanisms for Schools in the Government System in the States

What processes do the SCERTs/other agencies adopt in preparing textbooks? If private publishers are involved, how are the books approved and prescribed by the state government bodies? Are private schools free to use any textbook? The CABE Subcommittee explored these questions with state agencies through quick questionnaire-based surveys. Eighteen states responded. In addition, the Subcommittee studied the responses to questionnaires sent out by the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA).3 The Committee has also looked into the state studies series undertaken by the NIEPA between 1994 and 2004.

Based on these studies plus information available from state reports commissioned by the Committee, state mechanisms can be broadly categorised as:

1. States which relied on the NCERT textbooks and de facto accepted the presumed institutional mechanisms of the central agency to approve textbooks. Examples are Arunachal Pradesh and the union territories.

2. States which permit textbook preparation up to Class VIII by the centrally funded and controlled DPEP/SSA and, for the secondary stage, use their own State Boards. In Himachal Pradesh, textbooks are prepared by DPEP/SSA and printed by the Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education. In Orissa, the responsibility for preparing the textbooks for different streams of education rests with the different organisations/institutions of the state. At the elementary stage the Directorate of Teacher Education and SCERT and the Orissa Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA), Bhubaneswar, prepare textbooks.

3. States which took on the responsibility of preparing their own textbooks but entrusted this task to their own, wholly controlled state agencies. States like Karnataka and Gujarat have the Directorate of Textbooks which is a wing of the SCERT. The SCERT itself is very strongly state-controlled. In Mizoram and West Bengal, the Board of School Education prepares the textbooks for the elementary stage. In Mizoram, the Mizoram Board of School Education Act l975 empowers the Board to prescribe, prepare, publish and select textbooks for the various examinations conducted by the Board. Under the Board, the Statutory Committee of the Mizoram Board of School Education selects textbook writers and editors for textbook and syllabus preparation. In Gujarat, the Gujarat School Textbook Board is the regulatory authority. The GCERT only provides technical support to the Textbook Development Board which is fully responsible for the preparation, publication and distribution of textbooks. In Madhya Pradesh, for example, the SCERT prepares the textbooks and their printing, publication and distribution is done entirely by the Madhya Pradesh State Textbook Corporation.

4. Among the states which permit SCERTs to prepare textbooks up to Class VIII, which rely on the CBSE/NCERT for the secondary stage, are Delhi, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana and, of course, the union territories. In Haryana, the Board of School Education assigns the work of material development to the SCERT which in turn accomplishes the work by organising workshops with schoolteachers and subject experts and subject specialists working in the SCERT. While the SCERT produces/develops textbooks for primary classes (I to V), for Classes VI to VIII, textbooks published by the NCERT have been adopted by the state. In Delhi, teams comprising senior university teachers, professionals from the NGO sector, college teachers, SCERT and DIET (District Institute of Education and Training) teacher educators and schoolteachers prepare the textbooks in a collaborative mode for Classes I to VIII. In Rajasthan, textbooks for Classes I to VIII are prepared by the SCERT, approved by the state government and published by the Textbook Board. Before publication, computerised manuscripts of all textbooks in the form of hard copy are presented to the Secretary (Education) and to the Education Minister for approval. Similarly, in the schools run by the state government or recognised and aided by the state government of Uttar Pradesh, it is compulsory to use only those textbooks which are approved by the Uttar Pradesh Basic Shiksha Parishad and Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad. But the two Boards (Parishads) of the state government sometimes only approve a panel of authors and not the precise books and the schools are free to choose books written by any of the empanelled authors. From Class IX to XII this practice is quite often followed.

Institutional structures and mechanisms, including legislative measures, exist in several states. In Orissa, legislative measures have recently been taken for the adoption of a language textbook (Oriya) in English medium schools affiliated to the ICSE and CBSE. In Madhya Pradesh, the state government has formulated an Act, the Madhya Pradesh Prathamik Tatha Madhyamik Shiksha (Pathya Pustakon Sambandhi Vyavastha) Adhiniyam 1973 and 1974, which approves the textbooks of the state. These approved books are to be adopted essentially by government primary and upper primary schools.4

While in most cases textbooks are printed in state government establishments, some states use private facilities also for the purpose. In Karnataka, the Directorate of Textbooks as a wing of the Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT) prepares all the textbooks for Classes I to X. After preparation, 60 per cent of the textbooks are given for printing to the government press and 40 per cent are printed by private printers/publishers. Management of printing and publication is an important issue, as it involves large amounts of investment and substantial profit-making wherever private publishers are involved.

Gujarat follows a three-tier try-out system in three phases before introducing textbooks. Try-out: Phase I involves try-out in 400 randomly selected primary schools; Try-out: Phase II involves try-out in selected schools of low literacy rate districts; and Phase III involves implementation of the modified textbooks all over the state. In West Bengal also, a periodic try-out process is adopted before finalisation of the manuscripts. In Mizoram, the Mizoram Board of School Education (MBSE) as a first step examines the curriculum and syllabi of other Boards and the NCERT and formulates a suitable curriculum and syllabi for Mizoram state. Editors are also appointed to edit the textbooks written by local experts. The Mizoram Board of School Education regulates textbook publication through private publishers. The State Board prints all the textbooks, as the Board is empowered by the Mizoram Board of School Education Act 1975, passed by the Mizoram Legislative Assembly.

In Karnataka, Textbook Committees are formed for every subject/class, consisting of subject experts and classroom teachers. The manuscripts prepared are scrutinised by another group of experts and introduced for one year in selected blocks of the state. The textbooks are again revised, based on the feedback, and introduced in the entire state.

The Madhya Pradesh State Board-affiliated schools, both government and private, are all supposed to use only the books produced by the State Government Education Department i.e. developed by the Madhya Pradesh SCERT and printed by the Madhya Pradesh State Textbook Corporation. The Madhya Pradesh Textbook Act mandates this. Even the books or magazines provided to the libraries are supposed to be approved by the state government. The mechanism of textbook writing is done in a workshop mode. Resource persons for these workshops are identified from various fields of education – schoolteachers, subject experts, persons from Regional Institutes of Education (RIEs), DIETs, Colleges of Teacher Education (CTEs), Institutes of Advanced Study in Education (IASEs) and retired persons. A Textbook Standing Committee approves the textbooks and the state government notifies the approved textbooks.

In Bihar, the institutional mechanisms for regulating school education are fully in place but there is a total lack of coordination between agencies entrusted with the preparation and publication of textbooks in Bihar. This is largely because of the failure of the SCERT to carry out its responsibility with regard to the production of textbooks owing to an absence of coordination between the different organisations involved in the supervision and preparation of books. They are neither well organised nor adequately prepared to carry out this work. The inefficiency of government departments has led directly to the emergence of parallel textbook centres in the state, weakening the existing institutions to a point where there is hardly any publication of textbooks by government institutions and the textbooks which are published do not reach the student. As a result, the responsibility for production of books has gone out of the hands of the government. For all practical purposes the production and distribution of textbooks is happening outside the state structures. Even though they are supposed to use textbooks produced by the government, the private schools are not doing so because government agencies have not been able to cater to the huge requirement of textbooks for schools in Bihar. Shortages and delays in production have thus legitimised the production of textbooks by private organisations. There is very little attempt to remedy the complete mismanagement in the preparation and production of textbooks, in the political as well as administrative spheres.⁵

The free space permitted in the system is often abused for partisan purposes by sectarian organisations and schools affiliated to them

Very few states approve textbooks written and produced by other individuals or organisations. Even in the states where such a provision exists, it is done only after the books are examined first by a group of experts in a workshop and the opinion is taken to the state-level Textbook and Syllabus Committee for final perusal and approval. It is only in the states of Delhi, Haryana, West Bengal, Nagaland and Himachal Pradesh that private unaided schools are free to adopt textbooks of their choice though there is no particular procedure for regulating the adoption of books. In all other states, the schools have to adopt the state-approved textbooks. But to some extent this prescription is only notional, as it is linked to the syllabus prescribed for the final board examination. Beyond the use of the state-prescribed textbooks, private unaided schools are free to adopt additional or supplementary books.

Mechanisms for Textbooks Used by Schools Outside the Government System

The non-government schools are of a wide variety. Some are run by private managements which have a chain of schools. These chains are sometimes citywide or statewide and sometimes countrywide. Besides, there are schools run by various religious and social organisations. Some schools are run by Christian missionary groups of different denominations. Then there are madrassas run by different Muslim councils or groups and there are Saraswati Shishu Mandirs run by Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS. This variety is made even more complex by those chains of schools which focus on a particular language or subject, like Sanskrit Pathshalas. The method of selecting textbooks in these schools is as varied as their management. Those schools which fall under any council or board or trust choose books as per the directions of the latter. But these councils/boards/trusts do not have a uniform method. Some of them prescribe specific books for various subjects whereas some others just adopt the government-approved books and yet some others choose a combination of the two, that is, they adopt government-approved books for some subjects but for other subjects they prescribe specific books of their choice. Some boards/councils do not prescribe to schools any specific books but give them a syllabus or curriculum framework in the form of guidelines and the school principals, in consultation with teachers, decide upon the prescription of textbooks for their respective schools. There are several chains of schools run by private trusts which adopt government-approved books. Vidya Bharati/Saraswati Shishu Mandirs, Darul Uloom Deoband, Nadwatul Ulama, etc not only prescribe specific books for their schools, they also publish them. The Deeni Taleemi Council prescribes and publishes some specific books, mainly for religious education, but for the other subjects it prescribes the books approved by the Uttar Pradesh Basic Shiksha Parishad and Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad. The Council of Anglo-Indian Schools provides a curriculum and leaves the choice of textbooks to the schools supported by it.

There is hardly any regulation or regulatory mechanism for the textbooks and textual materials used in schools outside the government system.6

In all the states except Gujarat, non-government schools have private publishers providing teaching and learning aids for teachers and students. There is a flourishing private industry that thrives on the prescribed textbooks of the centre and state. Textbooks prepared by private publishers range all the way from being shadow books of the NCERT/states’ books to kunjis, workbooks and guidebooks. Private publishers visit the schools with their books, teachers judge the books and on the basis of consensus books are selected. Private publishers informally visit the faculty members and inform them about the books, place specimen copies before them and request them to suggest books to the students. Students generally for examination purposes purchase these books.7

In actual practice, many private schools use books published by private agencies either as supplementary materials or even as substitutes. These books have not gone through any process of government approval. Many schools use private books along with the state government textbooks, others use them as substitutes while still others use private publishers’ books only where government textbooks are not available for that particular subject at that level – for example, Environmental Studies for Classes I and II or Moral Science, General Knowledge, Drawing, etc.

Supplementary workbooks and kunjis are freely available as are dictionaries, question banks, answer banks, guess papers printed by a host of publishers from Nai Sadak which has emerged as a parallel textbook centre. These kunjis/supplementary workbooks are available on sale for each of these books, which may or may not be prescribed by the school but publishers market these through the tuition routes.8 Teachers are also known to unofficially nudge children towards a particular set of kunjis. Some of these books are at least twice as expensive as the government textbooks. There is a flourishing market for kunjis in the states as well. These are generally of poor quality, unregulated and expensive. In Maharashtra, for instance, while the prescribed social sciences textbooks in History, Geography and Civics separately are priced between Rs 10-12 each, the kunjis cost Rs 30-40 each. The majority of children buy both. This publishing usually begins from Class VI but of late there are kunjis from Class IV.

Some schools run by religious and social organisations, such as Vidya Bharati schools, are affiliated to the CBSE or their local State Boards. For instance, in Rajasthan, the school authorities say that they recommend NCERT or SCERT books to the students. Value education books are written by some of the authors who have been identified by the parental organisations of the schools, like the DAV College Management Committee, Delhi, Bharatiya Vidya Samiti, Rajasthan, Vidya Bharati Sanskriti Shiksha Sansthan and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai. School authorities also argue that [the selection of] books of private publishers which they suggest or recommend to the students is based upon decisions taken by faculty members.

There are a large number of madrassas all over India. At present there are official Boards of Madrassa Education in Assam, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh. A large number of madrassas come within their jurisdiction and subsist on government funds. But in the rest of the country, they are being run on private charity. The NCERT has no provision for a Board administering the curriculum of madrassas in India. State governments like Uttar Pradesh do appoint such Boards but Delhi, for instance, does not.9

Delhi contains around 40 madrassas, of which a handful, like Rabiya Madrassa, is open to girls.10 There are two types of madrassas, those that follow the NCERT syllabus (Urdu medium) and those teaching only manqulat (religious education).

Madrassas following the NCERT syllabus have to teach with translations of English textbooks.11 Those teaching religious education follow a curriculum dating back to the 18th century. It includes the Koran, Fiqh (Jurisprudence), Sarf and Nahw (Arabic Literature and Grammar) and Tarikh (History from the Prophet to Khilafat-e-Rashida, 610-661 CE). As the qualifications provided by these madrassas are not recognised elsewhere, they prepare students only to become teachers themselves in these schools or to become imams, muezzins, khatibs, kazis and muftis.12

Some Important Issues

It is important to recognise that the states have come a long way in improving the practices related to printing and production of textbooks. But there is no proper direction in the policies and practices related to preparation and use of textbooks in schools. All the states have established mechanisms for the selection, publication and approval of textual materials. But the mechanisms and processes vary from state to state. It is a mixed picture with regard to which body will approve the textbooks. Almost every state has, through legislation, created state agencies/bodies for syllabus preparation and textbooks.

What is important to note is that these processes and mechanisms are all rather mechanically followed by the state agencies without much regard for the substance and content of textbooks. What is of real concern is that there is no way of assessing whether the textbooks actually adhere to the aims of education policy. Also, there appears to be very little application of mind with regard to the selection of material. The State Boards or SCERTs appoint expert committees to prepare the curriculum. The processes are all in place but the content is not of good quality or even always agreeable. This is partly because of the overwhelming emphasis on form with very little attention being devoted to content of textbooks and supplementary materials.

Another disturbing fact is that the free space permitted in the system is often abused for partisan purposes by sectarian organisations and schools affiliated to them. Such organisations exploit the fact of the palpable lack of critical scrutiny of the substance to smuggle in textual materials that dangerously undermine the aims of education and even vitiate the constitutional framework.

It appears necessary to issue a set of national guidelines to ensure that the core reading and learning material made available to children and teachers in schools scrupulously conform to constitutional values and educational policies and ideals. However, it must continue to be the responsibility of state governments to ensure that they are not flouted by cultural and social organisations which have established their schools and use privately published books within the state or by private educational establishments. n

______________________________________

Notes

1 This section on institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms has gained much from a Note prepared by R. Govinda and Mona Sedwal, ‘Preparation, Production and Prescription of Textbooks for School Education in India’, NIEPA.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Bihar Report.
6 Some of this information is based on responses of SCERTs, SIEs, SIETs (State Institutes of Educational Technology) to the questionnaire sent by the CABE Subcommittee to elicit information on regulatory mechanisms in the states, 2005.
7 Information from Janaki Rajan’s Note submitted to the CABE Committee.
8 Ibid.
9 Report on Delhi Madrassas.10 Ibid, p. 2. 11 Ibid, p. 6. 12 Ibid.

Archived from Communalism Combat,  April 2009 Year 15    No.139, Report of the CABE Committee, Institutional Mechanisms for Preparation of  Textbooks in the States

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Educational policies are prepared by committees set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). These are approved by the CABE and also tabled for approval in both houses of Parliament. Several major committees have been set up since independence: the Secondary Education Commission (1952-53), Education and National Development (1964-66), National Policy on Education (NPE) 1986 and Programme of Action (POA) 1992. The Review Committee of the NPE 1986, known as the Acharya Ramamoorthy Committee (1990), reviewed the NPE 1986 and the Yash Pal Committee’s ‘Learning Without Burden’ (1994) suggests ways of reducing curricular load.

The National Curriculum Frameworks

Curriculum development, syllabus design and the preparation of instructional materials, including textbooks and their evaluation, began with the emergence of the NCERT as a nodal agency at the national level in the area of school education. The NCERT was involved directly in the process of curriculum development and preparation of textbooks. As the State Institutes of Education (SIEs), State Textbook Boards and State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs) were established, these gradually followed the pattern of providing technical support to research and development activities underlying the formulation and the preparation of textbooks at the state/union territory levels.

1. At the central level, based on education policy, a National Curriculum Framework (NCF) is brought out by the NCERT. Since independence, three NCFs have been framed on the basis of the recommendations of the two major committees, 1968 and 1986. The NCF framed in 2000 is the only NCF that was framed without a policy statement preceding it.

2. The NPE 1986 defines the NCF as follows: "The national system of education will be based on a national curricular framework which contains a common core along with other components that are flexible." Common core has been defined by the NPE as follows: history of India’s freedom movement; constitutional obligations; promotion of values such as India’s common cultural heritage; egalitarianism; democracy and secularism; equality of the sexes; protection of the environment; removal of social barriers; observance of the small family norm; inculcation of the scientific temper. Textbooks which seek to fulfil curriculum objectives must reflect the above-mentioned aspects of the ‘core’.

3. The NCF 2000 makes fundamental departures from the earlier NCFs and policies in respect of the role of values, the place of religion, equality of educational opportunity, etc. These departures generated wide controversy both with regard to (a) the process of preparation and (b) content of the NCF.

4. The Executive Committee of the NCERT in its meeting of July 19, 2004 decided to initiate a review of the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCFSE) 2000. It decided to form five structures to undertake the NCF review. These structures are: the National Steering Committee; National Focus Group; Committee for Consultation with States; Research Unit; Coordination Committee. The National Steering Committee chaired by Professor Yash Pal has members including scholars from different disciplines, principals and teachers, representatives of NGOs and members of the NCERT faculty. The Committee is deliberating on all aspects of the school curriculum, taking into account the existing framework. The final review document will be presented to the Executive Committee of the NCERT and the Council of the General Body for discussion and approval, and ultimately to the CABE.

Following the curriculum framework, syllabi for the primary, middle, secondary and senior secondary stages are also prepared. The syllabi assume great importance, as this sets out both the content contours and topics on the basis of which the Examination Boards set questions for examinations. The syllabi are therefore more familiar documents among teachers, parents and students than the policy or the curriculum framework. There are many Boards in the country but most states have their own Examination Boards in addition to the CBSE and Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) Boards. Each Board prescribes its own syllabi. It may or may not adhere to the NCERT syllabi.

The textbook is a major educational tool for students. In India, textbooks occupy most of the educational space in schools. They are not just teaching manuals, they shape the minds of children in their formative years and have a profound influence on how young minds interpret reality. For this reason the content of textbooks or instructional material is a deeply contentious issue in several countries around the world. Indeed questions of curriculum and textbooks are so contested because they are at the heart of debates over national identity and over who will define and control what is worth knowing. This is probably why in a country as diverse as ours the issue of textbooks is a site of much contestation and conflicting interpretations. In one sense, the content of our textbooks is a crucial disseminator of fundamental values of citizenship, values that we need to pass on to the next generation. Thus the content of textbooks is of vital importance and has a significant impact on the educational development of students.

Types of Schools

Schools and school systems in India are a bewildering array of structure and functioning. Kendriya Vidyalayas (KVs) are primarily meant for children of central government officers who are posted all over India. They are affiliated to the CBSE which prescribes the syllabus and the NCERT textbooks. They function from Class I to Class XII. Navodaya Vidyalayas (NVs) are centrally managed and are meant for talented children from the rural areas and function from Classes VI to XII. They are also affiliated to the CBSE and use NCERT textbooks.

Private unaided schools are also affiliated to the CBSE and form a very influential group in the system. They use NCERT textbooks from Class IX onwards and function from preschool to Class XII. Private aided schools receiving aid from state governments are affiliated to the CBSE or State Boards.

Christian missionary schools are affiliated to the ICSE, CBSE and State Boards. In the past few years the International Baccalaureate has made significant inroads among elite private schools.

The majority of children study in schools run by the state government. These are affiliated to their own State Boards and use textbooks prescribed and prepared by their own state bodies, usually the State Institutes of Education or SCERTs.

Alternate schools under many names are also run under the SSA (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan). They have textbooks, workbooks, worksheets and teaching-learning materials prepared by the SSA/DPEP (District Primary Education Programme).

There are lakhs of private unrecognised primary schools all over the country, for preschool to Class V/VIII. The textbooks used in these schools are more often than not low priced, low quality kunjis or ‘guides’.

There are also small primary schools run by several social and religious organisations which are not affiliated to any agency.

Then there is the National Institute of Open Schooling which has its own Board of Examinations and prepares and prescribes its own books. State Open Schools are run along the same lines as the National Open Schools.1

Curriculum Framework, Syllabi and Textbooks

With the adoption of the 10+2 pattern as recommended by the Education Commission (1964-66), the NCERT developed supporting syllabi and textbooks to be used as models by the states and union territories. Most states excepting the newly formed ones and the union territories have their own Examination Boards, similar to the CBSE, which are known as State Boards. The respective State Directorates along with the SCERTs prepare textbooks which are then printed by the Textbook Bureaus in states at a highly subsidised price.

The most important issue is with regard to textbooks and related literature used in schools run by religious and social organisations

The NCERT has brought out three sets of syllabi so far: in 1975, 1988 and 2002. Although the NCERT frames the syllabi, it is the CBSE that prescribes syllabi which are valid for purposes of examination and certification for schools affiliated to the CBSE. State Boards prescribe the syllabi and textbooks for schools affiliated to them. However, private schools do not necessarily follow the Board-prescribed syllabi and textbooks till Class VIII.

Non-NCERT, non-CBSE-prescribed textbooks constitute the majority of textbooks in use in the country. A detailed account of institutional mechanisms in the states for textbook preparation is given in the next chapter.

There are large numbers of textbooks published by the private sector. Non-government schools are free to choose publications, including those published by the private sector. Some of the elite schools use books produced by private publishers such as Oxford University Press, Ratna Sagar and Maktaba Jamia.2 Selection of textbooks from private publishers is dependent on the school, which generally invites publishers to bring the books before a committee of teachers to decide. Many incentives are offered by publishers to schools, which could range from price cuts to a percentage of total cost of books supplied being made over to the school.3 A measure of state patronage for them can be discerned from the fact that seminars and workshops for teachers, held by state bodies, are ‘sponsored’ by these publishers.4 However, the point is that these private publishers cannot be wished away legally. Every publisher has a right to publish and if parents choose to select the textbooks for their children to read, there is not much that can be done.

The most important issue is with regard to textbooks and related literature used in schools run by religious and social organisations which have a large outreach and impact. Some schools i.e. Saraswati Shishu Mandirs,6 Ekal Vidyalayas, Pathshalas, Madrassas, etc run by respective religious and social organisations follow their own curricula and books. Some of them use this route to promote ideologies that often contradict the basic principles and vision of the Constitution and educational policies.8 There is no mechanism to regulate the content of the textbooks used by these organisations or to prevent them from publishing and distributing them. They seek recognition neither from the state nor any examining Board. The Policy of Non-Formal Education (1986) enables any organisation to run non-formal centres. If they do not receive state funds, they are not governed by the state. They continue to run their ‘centres’ with books of their choice. When children are ready, they are registered with the Open School and obtain their certification.9

Some Important Issues

As there is no state-level curriculum statement, it is presumed that the syllabi adhere to the core elements of the NCF (which is the expectation of the NCF). No serious scrutiny of the extent of adherence to the core curriculum of state syllabi has been conducted so far.

Textbooks and curricula in schools run by religious and social organisations and schools not aided by the state are not regulated in any form by state agencies. Their adherence to constitutional provisions and educational policies is an issue of major concern and this has been discussed in Chapter IV on the social content of textbooks.

______________________________________

Notes

1 Information from Note submitted by Janaki Rajan, Director, SCERT, New Delhi, to the CABE Committee.
2 Founded by Jamia Millia Islamia, the Maktaba Jamia is a private limited company with the Jamia Millia Islamia having an 80 per cent financial stake in the company.
3 Ibid.
4 Publishers also offer to underwrite seminar and other expenses of the schools. This is apart from the usual calendars, diaries, posters, stationery offered free to schools. Ibid.
6 An umbrella organisation, Vidya Bharati was founded in 1977 and at that time it ran 700 schools. In 2003 it had 14,000 schools, 73,000 teachers and 1.7 million pupils. "In 1991 Vidya Bharati claimed it was running the second largest chain of schools in the country, next only to the government schools." Information given in Christophe Jaffrelot, ed. The Sangh Parivar: A Reader, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2005, p. 6 and p. 199 respectively.
8 On schools and textbooks used in Saraswati Shishu Mandirs, Ekal Vidyalayas, etc see Tanika Sarkar, ‘Educating the Children of the Hindu Rashtra: Notes on RSS Schools’ in Christophe Jaffrelot, ed. The Sangh Parivar: A Reader; Teesta Setalvad, ‘How textbooks teach prejudice’, Communalism Combat, October 1999; Teesta Setalvad, ‘Gujarat: Situating the Saffronisation of Education’ in The Saffron Agenda In Education, Sahmat, New Delhi, 2001; Nalini Taneja, ‘Communalisation of Education: Taking Stock Again’, People’s Democracy, No. 43, October 2003.
9 Janaki Rajan’s Note submitted to the CABE Subcommittee.

Archived from Communalism Combat,  April 2009 Year 15    No.139, Report of the CABE Committee, Policies, Curricula, Syllabi and Textbooks

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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
 

The post The growing ‘democratic deficit’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Anis Haroon, the well-known women’s rights and peace activist, relates a story about the time she visited Bangalore, India, in 1989 to attend a South Asian women’s conference. She was among the three Pakistani participants but the only one to have a ‘police-reporting visa’. This led to a memorable incident at the local police station, at a time when few Pakistanis were able to visit India and vice versa…

Pakistan-India relations had for years been marked by acrimony and tension at the best of times, punctuated by outright war at others, the most bitter of which was still a not too distant memory – 1971, when Bangladesh won its liberation from Pakistan with India’s help. But by 1989 there was a different atmosphere. The cold war was over. So was the Afghan war. Those were the heady days of the ‘restoration of democracy’ in Pakistan. Gone was Gen Zia-ul-Haq who had taken Pakistan in an altogether different direction than envisaged by earlier leaders. Gone were Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Indira Gandhi and their tense competitive relationship, particularly since 1971. A cautious thaw in Pakistan-India relations was discernible with the new generation of leadership symbolised by Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi, both of whom had recently come into power in their countries, holding out the promise of participatory democracy and better neighbourly relations.

But all the years of a lack of contact between Indians and Pakistanis had made the people of either country almost an alien species to each other – and it took a grumpy subinspector to bring home the ridiculousness of this enforced separation, when visas were difficult to obtain – and then only for those visiting relatives across the border. The eighties saw the formation of the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation in 1984 and the rise of the NGOs. Many individuals and NGOs began to form regional alliances to discuss issues of mutual concern – the earliest such meetings were focused on safe ‘non-political’ issues like environment and women’s rights, and played a crucial role in bringing people together on these platforms, particularly Indians and Pakistanis.

It was in this context that Anis Haroon, in India to attend one of the first of such regional meetings, found herself outside a police station at the remote suburb of White Plains in Bangalore, armed with her ‘police-reporting’ visa and accompanied by a conference volunteer.

South India is another country for many North Indians and Pakistanis. The only common language is English and some Hindustani. The following conversation took place in a mixture of both, with some frustrated exclamations in mutually incomprehensible Urdu and Kannada escaping the protagonists from time to time.

"Hello, I’m a Pakistani," Anis announced, waving her green passport at the drowsy subinspector inside the police station.

Grunt. "So?"

"I’ve come to report," she persisted.

The policeman finally looked up, displeased at being disturbed. "Report what?"

"I have to report my arrival."

"Why?"

Nonplussed silence, then: "…Because I was told I must."

He seemed more alert suddenly. "Are you here illegally?"

"No."

"Have you lost your passport?"

"No…"

"Your ticket then?" Inspector a bit irritable by now.

"No but…"

"Have you lost your luggage? Has someone misbehaved with you?"

"No, no, no." Anis also somewhat irritated.

"Then WHAT are you reporting? Go away and stop wasting my time!"

With this bit of irrefutable logic, the man flapped Anis and her companion out of the police station and returned to his snooze.

Perturbed at not having the precious stamp attesting to her legal sojourn in India, they reluctantly began to turn back when the station house officer put-putted up on his motorbike. A superior officer! He would understand the complexities of Pakistan-India relationships and legal requirements! The two women explained the situation and the SHO went inside to confront his recalcitrant junior. After five minutes of loud arguments in Kannada, the visibly annoyed subinspector beckoned in the source of annoyance, who returned inside meekly to present her passport to him.

Grumbling loudly in Kannada, he scribbled something on the police reporting form, and gave back her green passport (thankfully duly stamped) and gestured her away. Safely outside, Anis Haroon looked at what he had written: "A Pakistani has come to this police station to report. But she has nooooothing to report."

Thankful to at least have the precious stamp attesting that she had ‘done the needful’, Anis returned to the conference where she recounted the story.

Later, Shoaib and Salima Hashmi made a skit out of it, which they played out in front of Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto – both reportedly laughed a great deal at the ridiculousness of the situation, which was actually a true story. But their personal response to the story notwithstanding, neither was able to do away with the visa requirement that Pakistanis and Indians visiting each other’s countries must report to the police within 24 hours of arrival and departure (although this condition is occasionally waived).

A child of 15 or a grandmother of 70 – unless they have the connections to obtain a waiver, all Indians and Pakistanis visiting each other’s country must present themselves to the police after arrival and then before departure. The logic of this requirement defies all reason.

The subinspector in Bangalore in 1989 hadn’t caught on yet because there were, at that point, so few visitors from Pakistan, but the only beneficiaries of this archaic and discriminatory requirement are the police, who make a nice extra packet every month by facilitating such reports.

As Dr Mubashir Hasan (founding member of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission) notes, even when the rulers try to end this requirement, the bureaucracy stands in their way – he cites the specific example of Nawaz Sharif and Vajpayee during that historic bus trip in 1999 when the senior civil servants in attendance shot down this proposal made by the two prime ministers during their meeting.

With the composite dialogue dragging on and on, showing no results, surely this is something both governments can agree on – something that a grumpy police officer in Bangalore recognised years ago – that Pakistanis and Indians legally visiting each other’s countries have nothing to report. n

Courtesy: www.chowk.com

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

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Anyone who is familiar with the field of Urdu poetry will readily recognise and acknowledge that it is extremely gendered. This gendering works at two levels. First, most of the poets are men; virtuosity in verse is still considered to be a male purview and women poets, even well-known ones, continue to be marginalised. Second, the predominant themes and metaphors of this genre assume the poet-as-male (and consequently the reader-as-male) and revolve around the themes of the beauty of the beloved, the plight of the lover and the pains of unrequited love.

Women feature mostly as an abstraction and as the object of the male protagonist’s desire⁸³. As Rukhsana Ahmad points out in her introduction to Beyond Belief (the first collection of feminist poetry published in Pakistan), ‘(t)he bulk of published Urdu poetry is still love poetry bound in the old traditional idioms and conceits’⁸⁴. These ‘conceits’ include the male poet as the embodiment of agency and the woman as a mere object, represented as ‘a feckless beloved, who was endowed with heavenly beauty… fair of face, doe-eyed, dark-haired, tall, willowy, for whom the poet was willing to die but who vacillated from indifference, shyness and modesty to wanton wilfulness and cruelty⁸⁵.’

The PWA [Progressive Writers’ Association] poets, notwithstanding their commitment to social change and egalitarianism were, for the most part, inheritors of this legacy of Urdu poetry as well as its purveyors. In their work, a woman was frequently seen as an exemplification of beauty and a repository of purity. She was often depicted as a weak victim of oppressive structures who depended on men to save and protect her and on their generosity of spirit and sense of righteousness to rescue her from her plight…

In their role as social reformers, the Progressives did, at times, take issue against the oppression of women and sought to highlight their condition. Speaking against the institution of the veil in his poem Purdaah Aur Ismat (The Veil and Honour), [Israr-ul-Haq] Majaz offers the following commentary:

"That which is not visible cannot be Exquisite

That which remains hidden cannot be the Truth

That is not Nature, nor is it Destiny

Whatever else it is, this is not Virtue"

There are also the occasional moments when the progressive poet sees women as potential rebels and agents who have a role to play in the public space and in social transformation. In a poem Naujavaan Khaatoon Se (To the Young Woman), Majaz writes:

"It would be better if you shrugged off this wicked veil

It would be better if you used your beauty to cover yourself…

This scarf that covers you is beautiful indeed

It would be better if you converted it into a banner of revolt"

While Majaz’s poems take a position against the sequestering of women behind the veil, it is important to note that their tone tends to be patronising for they are essentially exhortations by the male poet to women. Perhaps the poem by a male progressive poet that comes closest to representing a woman as a subject in her own right is Aurat (Woman) by Kaifi Azmi:

"The past hasn’t recognised your worth

You are capable of producing flames, not just tears

You are Reality, not merely an interesting tale

Your Being is more than your mere Youth

You will have to rewrite the theme of your History

Arise my love, that we can walk together

"Destroy the idols of Custom, break the shackles of Tradition

Free yourself from the enfeeblement of Pleasure, the false ideas of Delicacy

Step out from the confining circle of Femininity drawn around you

And if Love becomes a prison, then reject the constraints of Love

You will have to crush not just the thorns, but the flowers in your path too

Arise my love, let us walk together…"

Kaifi’s poem is radical in the way it positions a woman as a fellow companion, in its exhortation that women break free from the confines of tradition and custom, but particularly in its insistence that women not only crush the ‘thorns’ in their path but also its ‘flowers’ (delicacy, elegance, femininity, grace and even love) that serve as mechanisms of limitation and control. Where it falls somewhat short is that while Kaifi is establishing the position of his female companion as a comrade, he demands that she shed her accoutrements of femininity in order for her to ‘accompany’ him on his quest. Nor does Kaifi manage to fully reject the conventional characterisation of women in the dominant discourse of the time, for the woman of his poem has the capacity to produce flames ‘in addition to’ the ability to shed tears; her existence is ‘more than’ her beauty and youth.

Notwithstanding a few scattered examples of such engagements with patriarchy, none of the PWA poets ever wrote in a manner that unambiguously assumed women’s independent power, subjecthood and agency. For this to happen in the field of Urdu poetry, we had to wait for the works of the feminist poets from Pakistan, particularly Kishwar Naheed and Fehmida Riyaz. In order to understand and appreciate their work, it is important to place it in the context of the material and social conditions in Pakistan within which it was written.

The political, social and cultural milieu of Pakistan in the 1980s was defined by General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation programme and its attendant attack on women’s rights. Zia’s misogynist policies were an articulation of the anxieties of class and gender felt by middle class men during this period who resented what they saw as the increasing presence of women in the public sphere and feared the repercussions this might have in the private sphere of the family. It is perhaps a testimony to the force of these anxieties that the state’s blatantly sexist policies and the far-reaching changes they forged within Pakistani society and culture did not inform the work of progressive male poets in any significant way (perhaps the one exception was Habib Jalib, the only one who participated in the famous 12 February 1983 demonstration organised by the women’s movement against the [discriminatory] Law of Evidence). This burden was left for feminist poets to bear.

The challenge posed by these feminist poets to the establishment worked at different levels: first, they were women poets writing in what was an overwhelmingly male literary milieu; second, they were feminists raising their voice against an increasingly hostile and misogynist social and cultural context; and third, they were producing work that effectively subverted existing, accepted conventions of poetic form and content.

The poetry of these feminists was not confined to women’s issues; they were fierce critics of the reactionary political, social and cultural changes taking place in Pakistani society. However, given that the brunt of the state’s retrogressive Islamisation policies along with the changes they wrought in other aspects of Pakistani life was borne by women (and minorities), most of their poetry did overwhelmingly address ‘women’s issues’ such as the Zina Ordinance (which included punishments such as stoning adulterers – both male and female – to death, and which tried rape victims under charges of zina, or adulterous sex).

Not all women or poets of the time chose to challenge the prescribed literary forms or themes, nor was all women’s ‘progressive’ poetry (that which worked to subvert the patriarchal establishment) of one piece. Progressive poetry written by women ranged from the work of Parveen Shakir and Ada’a Jafri – whose poetry was less explicitly political insofar as it did not address explicitly ‘political’ issues, and who tended to use conventional poetic forms such as the ghazal (and in the case of Jafri, some of its standard expressions as well) – to that of poets such as Kishwar Naheed and Fehmida Riyaz, whose writings were stridently feminist in their tone and subject matter.

However, given the male dominated nature of the Urdu literary establishment, the very fact of a woman writing ghazals was itself subversive since it inverted the implicit convention that women were the objects rather than the subjects, or agents, of romance and desire. Feminist poets had to deal with a significant backlash, including criticism from the largely male status quo, for their ‘loose morality’ and their ‘masculinity’⁸⁶, and were frequently subjected to the threat of violence from the state and individuals⁸⁷.

Since women were at the vanguard of the movement against Zia’s martial law government and its policies, it is not surprising that they were also the most political and prominent writers/poets/artists of the time. As Kishwar Naheed points out in her well-known poem, Hum Gunahgaar Auraten (We Sinful Women):

"It is we sinful women

Who are not intimidated

By the magnificence of those who wear robes

Who don’t sell their souls

Don’t bow their heads

Don’t fold their hands in supplication

We are the sinful ones

While those who sell the harvest of our bodies

Are exalted

Considered worthy of distinction

Become gods of the material world

"It is we sinful women

Who, when we emerge carrying aloft the flag of truth

Find highways strewn with lies

Find tales of punishment placed at every doorstep

Find tongues which could have spoken, severed"

Besides being a harsh indictment of those who sold out to the establishment, these words also directly subvert the dominant stereotypes of women as weak and ineffectual and their accompanying ideas about ‘femininity’. The phrase ‘we sinful women’, repeated like a chant throughout the poem, functions as a slap in the face of the religious orthodoxy and the state, referring as it does to the Zina Ordinance which uses the crutch of Islam to hold women responsible for all sex crimes.

Fehmida Riyaz’s poem Chaadar Aur Chaardiwari (The Veil and the Four Walls of Home) was another explicit example of the way feminists used poetry as a medium of dissent against the Zia regime and as a critique of the hypocrisy of the religious orthodoxy. The poem derives its title from the name of the campaign started by Zia’s Islamic Ideology Council, which was part of the general move to restrict women’s participation in society to the domestic sphere…:

"Sire! What will I do with this black chaadar

Why do you bless me with it?

I am neither in mourning that I should wear it

To announce my grief to the world

Nor am I a disease, that I should drown, humiliated, in its darkness

I am neither sinner nor criminal

That I should set its black seal

On my forehead under all circumstances

"If you will pardon my impertinence

If I have reassurance of my life⁸⁸

Then will I entreat you with folded hands

O Benevolent One!

In Sire’s fragrant chambers lies a corpse

Who knows how long it has been rotting there

It asks for your pity

Sire, be kind enough

Give me not this black shawl

Use it instead to cover that shroudless corpse in your chambers

Because the stench that has burst forth from it

Goes panting through the alleys –

Bangs its head against the door frames

Attempts to cover its nakedness

Listen to the heart-rending shrieks

Which raise strange spectres

"They who remain naked despite their chaadars

Who are they? You must know them

Sire, you must recognise them

They are the concubines!

The hostages who remain legitimate through the night

But come morning, are sent forth to wander, homeless

They are the handmaidens

"More reliable than the half share of inheritance promised your precious sperm…

"My existence on this earth is not as a mere symbol of lust

My intelligence gleams brightly on the highway of life

The sweat that shines on the brow of the earth is but my hard work

The corpse is welcome to this chaadar and these four walls

My ship will move full sail in the open wind

I am the companion of the new Adam

Who has won my confident comradeship"

In this powerful poem, Riyaz, by rejecting the chaadar being offered to her by the self-styled keepers of people’s conscience, also rejects the Islamists’ construction of her as a sexual object that is required by the law to be veiled and sequestered within the four walls of the home. She subjects these powers to biting sarcasm by repeatedly addressing them with mock honorifics such as ‘huzoor’ [sire], and a series of formulaic phrases such as jaan ki amaan paaoon [have reassurance of one’s life], dast-basta karoon guzaarish [entreat with folded hands] and banda-parvar [Benevolent One]. Since she is not in mourning, nor a sinner or criminal, she argues with mock innocence that she does not understand why she is being offered the black shawl (or, by implication, the seclusion of the chaardiwaari). The rest of the poem lists the crimes against humanity which her addressee is guilty of, particularly the (sexual) exploitation of women through the institutions of concubinage and marriage, an exploitation that often begins at a very young age.

The poem ends with her concluding that it is he, not she, who needs the black shawl so that he may cover his own hypocrisy and shame. Although Riyaz never mentions Islam directly, it is the absent referent in her text because it is under the chaadar (cover/cloak) of Islam that women have been subjugated for ‘long centuries’. The ‘spectres’ of all these female victims who carry the stench of death are the skeletons in the Islamist’s closet to which Riyaz ‘respectfully’ draws his, and our, attention.

The last stanza of the poem is worth noting, for in direct contrast to the depiction of women in Urdu poetry, Riyaz counterposes her own reading of women against the traditional as well as Islamist ideal of ‘womanhood’ and proposes a new female subject – an intelligent, sentient being (as opposed to an object of desire and symbol of lust), a worker whose ‘sweat shines on the brow of the earth’, a quintessentially modern subject whose ‘ship will move full sail in the open wind’. The relationship between men and women is also redefined as one of comradeship between equals; this kind of comradeship is only possible, however, with a radically reinvented and redefined man – an Adam who is capable of winning her confidence and is thus worthy of her⁸⁹.

In her poem, Riyaz lampoons the normative Islamist discourse of a patriarchal and paternalistic relationship between women and men and rejects the notion of a woman as an obedient wife who revels in her role as the ‘light of the home’ and one who is supported by a husband who has unquestioned authority over her in all matters. The idea of an equal and companionate relationship with a man is thus a radical proposition, especially when accompanied by implications of a life of unfettered freedom expressed through the trope of the sailing ship, deliberately counterposed to the chaardiwaari. It is also worth noting that Riyaz’s use of words like laasha (corpse), gala sada (rotten) and natfa (sperm) – words not normally used in poetry – along with the explicit references to sex and depravity provide another layer of subversiveness in terms of both form and content.

[In] [y]et another poem by Riyaz, titled Aqleema… [t]he explicit references to the female body are Riyaz’s reminder to us that patriarchal society objectifies its women and treats them as sacrificial lambs, destined to be butchered and consumed. The poem goes on to draw attention to the fact that Aqleema has a mind too, one that is rendered invisible by the patriarchal system, not merely to human beings but also to god himself, who has chosen to reveal his word to the world through male prophets alone…

The deconstruction of the normative ideals of womanhood and femininity was a recurring theme in the work of the feminist poets, who deployed a radically different aesthetic both in the choice of their themes and their language in order to challenge existing standards of public discourse and poetry. Boodhi Ma (Old Mother), by the contemporary Punjabi poet Gulnar, is an address to an old woman who has been repressed by patriarchal structures of power and control throughout her life and is a defiant call to all women to reject the roles imposed on them by societal and religious norms. It is interesting to note the unselfconscious use of the English word ‘symbol’ in the poem, another flouting of the conventions of Urdu poetry and its formal diction. This deployment of everyday speech in a literary piece is testimony to the fact that the Urdu for these poets is a living language:

"Old Mother

Why are you teary-eyed today?

***

"Why are you sad?

You, who have given birth to sons?

***

"Oh Mother, your fate!

Your childhood spent in bondage to your father

Your adolescence under the control of your brother

Your youth in bondage to your husband

And your old age in your sons’ servitude

But doesn’t Heaven lie beneath your feet?!

Then why, in the cruel cold of winter

Are your feet bare?…"

In the Islamist rhetoric, women are idealised as mothers beneath whose feet lies heaven and as good wives who are the ghar ki rani/malika or the ‘queens’ of the domestic realm. Gulnar critiques these ideals by inserting the figure of a woman who, despite having adhered to all the conventions and expectations of the good woman in her avatars as daughter, sister, wife and mother of ‘seven sons’, is nevertheless left shelterless and uncared for.

In contrast, Gulnar offers a protagonist who is the Islamists’ nemesis: modern, enlightened, educated and unwilling to accept the roles assigned to her by mainstream society in general and religious orthodoxy in particular. She is sensible and hard-nosed (a far cry from the whimsical beloved of mainstream Urdu poetry), wears leather shoes, adopts ‘spectacles’ to see the world clearly through her own eyes, and has rejected the realm of abject domesticity for the world of letters and the realm of intellect. And unlike the protagonist of Riyaz’s poem, Gulnar’s woman does not appear to need a (male) companion in her quest for self-actualisation.

***

While the feminist poets focused considerably on the condition of women in Pakistani society, they also articulated a comprehensive critique of their contemporary social conditions. Poems such as Kishwar Naheed’s Sard Mulkon Ke Aaqaaon Ke Naam (To the Lords of the Cold Nations) offers a commentary on Eurocentrism while Censorship and Section 144⁹⁰ challenge the state’s repressive policies. Fehmida Riyaz’s Kotvaal Baitha Hai (The Police Chief is Waiting) and Khaana-Talaashi (The Search) describe her interrogation and the search of her home by the police. Ishrat Afreen’s Rihaa’i (Release) is a poem that talks about how the fight for liberation from ‘the mountains of dead traditions, blind faith, oppressive hatreds’ (Pahaad murda rivaayaton ke, pahaad andhi aqeedaton ke, pahaad zaalim adaavaton ke) is an obligation owed to the next generation while Neelma Sarwar’s Chor (The Thief) reflects on the cruel disparities of wealth in society.

In a similar vein, Fehmida Riyaz’s long prose poem Kya Tum Poora Chaand Na Dekhoge? (Will You Not See the Full Moon?) uses the moon as a metaphor for truth while deploying colloquial terminology to criticise conspicuous consumption and ridicule the subservience of Pakistani society to the petrodollars of the Saudi kingdom…

Understanding that the Islamisation project was a ‘culturalist evasion’⁹¹ of the real issues facing Pakistan, Riyaz uses her poem to highlight the concerns of the people at large who live under conditions of starvation and depredation while the city panders to the desires of the elite. The poem is replete with gothic representation and a pastiche of strange and ominous images such as the kites circling a burning sky, the city as web or a trap and the pathological and almost sexual lust for imported commodities which awakens the ‘whore of purchasing power’. This stark reference to the increasing commodity fetishism of the wealthy classes and the symbols of this fetish (the shopping plazas, the mansions) are described as boils on the molested body of the city, just as conspicuous consumption is a sore on the diseased body politic of the nation state.

The satirical allusions to the influence of petrodollars and the throwaway Arabic phrases are references to the Pakistani state’s proclivity to look towards Saudi Arabia for affirmation in the political, economic and even cultural spheres, the increasing use of Arabic words on Pakistan Television, the introduction of Arabic as a compulsory subject in public schools and the Arabisation of Urdu itself, all of which were a result of the Zia regime’s effort to move ever further away from an Indo-Islamic culture which was shared with India and towards an ‘Islamic’ identity defined by Arabic elements.

The onward march of capital and the obscene culture of consumption it engenders are depicted through the superimposition of sexuality, depravity, lustfulness and disease in a way that highlights the indifference of the system to the poor and the dispossessed. Fehmida Riyaz’s theme throughout her long poem is that Islamisation is simply a ruse with which the rulers defuse dissent and construct consent while dividing the nation sharply between those who have economic and political power and those who do not.

The arrival of the feminist poets in the realm of Urdu poetry signalled the beginning of a new brand of progressivism, one that took on the establishment in ways that were radical and powerful. These poets – Kishwar Naheed, Fehmida Riyaz, Ishrat Afreen, Saeeda Gazdar, Neelma Sarwar, Sara Shagufta, Zehra Nigaah, Gulnar and others – transformed not merely the themes of Urdu poetry but also its language and its grammar. As Rukhsana Ahmad writes, these poets represent ‘that strand of the progressive tradition in Urdu poetry which had in the early forties so powerfully contributed to the freedom movement.⁹²’ They, more than anyone else in the contemporary period, are the true inheritors of the tradition of progressive poetry, its champions, and its trailblazers.

A very short poem by Ishrat Afreen, titled Intisaab (Dedication), sums up the contribution of the feminist poets to literature quite well:

"Mera qad

Aur meri ma jeet gayi

(My height
Surpassed that of my father
And thus, my mother won)"

(Excerpted from Anthems of Resistance – A celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry by Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir; India Ink, Roli Books Pvt. Ltd., 2006.)

Endnotes

83 Admittedly, some might dispute this claim, citing the example of the ghazal in which both the lover and the beloved are referred to in male terms. However, the themes of these poems and the actions of its protagonists, particularly in the context of the times, leave us with little doubt about the gender of the subjects/objects of the poet’s voice.
84 Rukhsana Ahmad (editor and translator), 1990, Beyond Belief, Lahore: ASR Publications, p. iii.
85 ibid., p. ii.
86 The charge of masculinity was most often thrown at Kishwar Naheed because of her blunt personality and her even more blunt poetry.
87 Both Fehmida Riyaz and Kishwar Naheed were targeted repeatedly by the state. Fourteen cases of sedition were filed against the magazine edited by Fehmida Riyaz, one of which carried the death sentence. Riyaz had to go into exile in India along with her family. Naheed was constantly harassed in her job as a civil servant and frequently threatened. Cases were filed against her as well. Clearly, both were seen as threats to the state.
88 A standard way of beginning an address to the prince or emperor.
89 This poem can be interestingly juxtaposed against Ishrat Areen’s Adhoore Aadmi Se Guftagu (Dialogue with an Incomplete Man) in which the poet declares:
"How can I share my thoughts and feelings with you?
How can I take you along on this journey of the intellect?"
Despite his ‘artistic skills… stature… personality’, the man being addressed by Afreen is seen by her as no more mature than a callow boy:
"You are a mere boy
Who is attracted to
Weeping girls
Wounded and flightless butterflies
Boats anchored at the shore
And who seeks sanctuary in the simpering pleasures found in the broken wings of a dove
Who for the sake of immature desires
Will sacrifice his principles"
90 Section 144 in the [Pakistan] Penal Code is used to restrict assembly of people in public spaces, a common law deployed to prevent public gatherings and therefore, pre-empt dissent.
91 Samir Amin’s term.
92 Rukhsana Ahmad, op. cit., p. iv.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Pakistan 3

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Classical music is standing on its last legs in Pakistan. The sarangi and vichitra veena are dead. There is only one sarod  player in the entire country, Asad Qizilbash. Tari Khan is the only tabla player who can play a complex rhythmic cycle. Ashraf Sharif Khan Poonchwale is the only sitar player who can rub shoulders with sitar players of international repute.

The saddest aspect is that none of these artistes has a successor and their art will be buried with them. Vocal music is also in shambles. The progeny of Fateh Ali Khan and Salamat Ali Khan have been a great disappointment to their gharanas. Thus, the gaiki (style) of Patiala and Sham Chaurasi is literally dead. Ghazal and thumri are also on the deathbed, ever since the incapacitation of Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali, Farida Khanum and Iqbal Bano due to age.

Pakistan inherited classical music, like other assets, at the time of partition but did nothing for its development. It was unable to retain even a genius like Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. Bureaucratic arrogance forced him to surrender Pakistani nationality and settle in India where he was revered like another Tansen. Ustad Alla Rakha received much the same treatment as Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. His greatest contribution to the world of music is his son, Ustad Zakir Hussain, who is regarded as the tabla player of the century. Alla Rakha could never have made this contribution had he lived in Pakistan.

Some 20 years ago, a great Indian sitar player, Rais Khan became a Pakistani national after marrying our Bilquis Khanum. Neither the music institutions nor the artistes in Pakistan bothered to benefit from this opportunity. He was given the same treatment as Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and as a result his music never witnessed further progress. Rais Khan, by becoming a Pakistani national, deprived his son Farhan of the vast exposure he could have had in India. His son can never be a good sitar player while he lives in Pakistan.

The mindset of musicians has also caused colossal damage to music in Pakistan. Pakistani musicians deliberately kept their art secret and made no efforts to pass it on to coming generations. A friend, Hassan Azad, a mathematician and a student of sitar, was always curious about the secret behind the systematic expansion of ragas. No Pakistani musician was willing to share this knowledge with him. It took Hassan 45 years to learn the secret after he was able to instantly notate the music composed by stalwarts such as Ustad Fayyaz Ahmed Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Ustad Amir Khan, Ustad Inayat Khan, Ustad Vilayat Khan and Ustad Shahid Parvez. (See Hassan’s work at http://faculty.kfupm.edu.sa/ math/hassanaz/essays-music.htm.)

Musicians like Ustad Amir Khan, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan and Roshan Ara Begum never vocalised their bandish (compositions) clearly. All their music was in aakaar (improvisations that involve using vowels alone). Perhaps that is why classical music could never attract a lay audience. Moreover, not a single musician documented the music of his gharana. As a result, their gharana gaiki passed away with their death.

Pakistani musicians have been extremely miserly about teaching music – even to their own sons and daughters – so that no one could overshadow them. A well-known tabla player from Lahore who is given to challenging everyone has recently been challenged by his own son! Music is not impossible to learn but the attitude of musicians has made it so. When one hears from an ustad (teacher or master) that it took him 20 years to perfect the first note, sa, who would want to learn music? And if at all one still persisted, musicians employ other deterrent tactics. They start fleecing you in the name of gunda-bandi and nazar (tutelage and gifts). A friend, Nazir Khan says he spent about one million rupees on a well-known Rawalpindi musician to teach his son tabla and classical vocal music. The musician literally ‘robbed’ Nazir Khan for eight years to teach Khan’s son what he could have learnt from an attai (non-gharana musician) in three months.

Naqi Khan, grandson of Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, wanted me to become his gunda-band shagird (committed disciple) before he answered my question pertaining to voice culture. On the other hand, a leading sitar player from India, Ustad Shahid Parvez had no reservations about giving me the right tips on the telephone! He was in fact magnanimous enough to teach me a 13-beat rhythmic cycle that he had himself composed and which had been played by Vijay Ghate in one of his recordings of raga Rageshri.

I asked Tari Khan, who is also a good friend, what the first lesson he had learnt from his guru had been. "I don’t remember," he said, thinking I might benefit from his reply. That is the mindset of Pakistani musicians. The result is that classical music is declining in Pakistan and thriving in India.

Archived from Communalism Combat, August-September 2007, Anniversary Issue (14th), Year 14    No.125, India at 60 Free Spaces, Pakistan 2

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