Arundhati Roy On The Meaning And Idea Of Resistance

It has become fashionable to simply accept, to acquiese to power, to be obsequieous, to kiss-ass, to bend over to be taken from behind, to be grateful that your mortage can still be paid, to look for hand outs, to simply repeat the rhetoric and language of the powerful…to simply exlain the status quo and consider it insight.

Arundhati Roy continues, quietly and incisely, to remind us that dissent, all dissent, is the fundamental platform of democracy and of liberty.

One of my favorite commentators, Mark Slouka, recently penned a piece called Democracy & Deference where he ask, first the Americans, but then the world in general:

Turn on the TV to almost any program with an office in it, and you’ll find a depressingly accurate representation of the “boss culture,” a culture based on an a priori notion of—a devout belief in—inequality. The boss will scowl or humiliate you…because he can, because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . because, well, because he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.

This is the paradigm—the relational model that shapes so much of our public life. Its primary components are intimidation and fear. It is essentially authoritarian. If not principally about the abuse of power, it rests, nonetheless, on a generally accepted notion of power’s privileges. Of its inherent rights. The Rights of Man? Please. The average man has the right to get rich so that he too can sit behind a desk wearing an absurd haircut, yelling, “You’re fired!” or refuse to take any more questions; so that he too—when the great day comes—can pour boiling oil on the plebes at the base of the castle wall, each and every one of whom accepts his right to do so, and aspires to the honor.

And then leads us to the crucial question on which our democracy may hinge:

What kind of culture defines “maturity” as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and “realism”? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses.

Indeed, what kind of culture is that? We would do well to consider answers.

The Hindus Live In Small And Dark Homes Or Educating Our Child Soldiers

The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. Religious missionaries themselves have contributed to this evil; in the name of brotherhood and in the arrogance of sectarian pride they have created misunderstanding. They make this permanent in their textbooks, and poison the minds of children.

Rabindranath Tagore “To Teachers”,

from Chakravarty, A (ed) The Tagore Reader (Page 216)

Jamaat-e-Daawa/Lashkar-e-Taiba Graffitti Near The Town of Gujranwala, Pakistan Reads "THE LIBERATION OF KASHMIR WILL NOT BE ACHIEVED THROUGH NEGOTIATIONS BUT THROUGH THE DEATH & DESTRUCTION OF THE HINDU"

Our wars, our massacres, our suspicions and fears, our prejudices and hatred, begin in the pages our of children’s textbooks.

No where is this more apparent than on the pages of Pakistan’s Social Studies and Pakistan Studies textbooks, most of which were being taught in her schools up till at least 2002 if not later. In a study commissioned by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, titled The Subtle Subversion:The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, the authors identified a long list of what can only be called hate material taught to high school children in Pakistan.

It makes for sobering reading that I share with you here.

• Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter the temple at a time. In our mosques, on the other hand, all Muslims can say their prayers together. - Muasherati Ulum for Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1996, p 109

• This division of men [among Aryans] into different castes is the worst example of tyranny in the history of the world. In course of time the Aryans began to be called the Hindus. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 59

• The Hindus lived in small and dark houses. Child marriage was common in those days. Women were assigned a low position in society. In case the husband of a woman died, she was burnt alive with his dead body. This was called ‘sati’. … The killing of shudras was not punished, but the murder of a Brahman was a serious crime. … However, the people of low caste were not allowed to learn this language. The caste system had made their life miserable.” - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 67

• Muslim children of India wear shalwar kameez or shirt and pajama and Hindu children wear Dhoti also. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 79

• Hindus thought that there was no country other than India, nor any people other than the Indians, nor did anyone else possess any knowledge. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82.

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• Nehru report exposed the Hindu mentality. - Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 102

• The Quaid saw through the machinations of the Hindus. - Social Studies Class-VII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, ?, p 51

• The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women. - Muasherati Ulum for Class IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1995, p 81

• The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilisation. Hindi-Urdu controversy, shudhi and sanghtan movements are the most glaring examples of the ignoble Hindu mentality. - M. Ikram Rabbani and Monawar Ali Sayyid, An Introduction to Pakistan studies, The Caravan Book House, Lahore, 1995, p 12

• Hindu pundits were jealous of Al Beruni. Since they could not compete against Al Beruni in knowledge, they started calling him a magician. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82

• The Sultans of Delhi were tolerant in religious matters. They never forced the non-Muslims to convert to Islam. The Hindus embraced Islam due to the kind treatment of the Muslims. The caste system of the Hindus had made the life of the common people miserable. They were treated like animals. Nobody could claim equality with Brahmins. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 109

• The Hindus who have always been opportunists cooperated with the English. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 141

• The Hindus praised the British rule and its blessings in their speeches. The Hindus had the upper hand in the Congress and they established good relations with the British. This party tried its best to safeguard the interests of the Hindus. Gradually it became purely a Hindu organization. Most of the Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent. They demanded that the Muslims should either embrace Hinduism or leave the country. The party was so close to the Government that it would not let the Government do any work as would be of benefit to the Muslims. The partition of Bengal can be quoted as an example. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 143

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. – Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• The British confiscated all lands [from the Muslims] and gave them to Hindus. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 91 [This is stated despite the fact that all the large feudal lords in the part that later formed Pakistan were Muslims]

• Therefore in order to appease the Hindus and the Congress, the British announced political reforms. Muslims were not eligible to vote. Hindus voter never voted for a Muslim, therefore, … - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 94-95

• Hindus declared the Congress rule as the Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104

• At the behest of the government [during the Congress rule], Hindu “goondas” started killing Muslims and burning their property. – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104-105

• The British, with the assistance of the Hindus, adopted a cruel policy of mass exodus against the Muslims to erase them as a nation. The British adopted a policy of large scale massacre (mass extermination) against the Muslims The Muslim population of the Muslim minority provinces faced atrocities of the Hindu majority. [The Muslims] were not allowed to profess their religion freely. Hindu nationalism was being imposed upon Muslims and their culture. All India Congress turned into a pure Hindu organisation. The Congress was striving very hard to project the image of united India, which was actually aimed at the extermination of the Muslims from the Indian society. The two Hindu organisations [Congress and Mahasabha] were determined to destroy the national character of the Muslims to dominate and subjugate them perpetually. - National Curriculum English (Compulsory) for Class XI-XII, March 2002, pp 6, 13, 31, 45, 7, 25, 8, 46, 48, 50

• While the Muslims provided all type of help to those wishing to leave Pakistan, the people of India committed cruelties against the Muslims (refugees). They would attack the buses, trucks, and trains carrying the Muslim refugees and they were murdered and looted. – National Early Childhood Education Curriculum (NECEC), Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, March 2002, p 85

• The Hindus in Pakistan were treated very nicely when they were migrating as opposed to the inhuman treatment meted out to the Muslim migrants from India. - Social Studies Class- IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p. 85

• After 1965 war India conspired with the Hindus of Bengal and succeeded in spreading hate among the Bengalis about West Pakistan and finally attacked on East Pakistan in December 71, thus causing the breakup of East and West Pakistan. - Social Studies (in Urdu) Class- V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 112

• Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam - Urdu Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 108

The dismaying simplicities and inanities are too many to list here. Suffice it to say that since the 1970s the children of Pakistan have been subjected to a systemic and comprehensive ‘poisoning’ of their minds when it comes to matters Indian, Hindu and the country’s Islamic heritage. The same report outlines in great detail the encouragement of religious violence, the denigration of women, the foisting of an Islamic ideology of Pakistan and other ahistorical perspectives with which the country’s children have been scared.

Professor Pervaiz Hoodbhoy has been documenting the deterioration in the educational culture of the country, in particular, the celebration of religious violence and the projection of a homogenous Islamic heritage of Pakistan, the latter at times going to levels of stupidity that defy commonsense. For example, history textbooks in Pakistan actually attempt to directly associate the ‘idea of Pakistan’ and the ‘creation of Pakistan’ to the earliest presence and arrival of Arab forces on the shores of Sindh! This inane association, in fact violent castration of the history of the region, to all that is perceived to by only ‘Islamic‘ is perhaps the underlying pathology that has scared education in the country for decades. (Please email me directly if you wish to see a copy of this report.)

The quest for peace and reconciliation often begins in the gilded corridors of diplomacy, or the cynical bed chambers of the politicians. It would seem that we would do well to instead begin in the moldy, dank, dark classrooms of the nation’s ignored and underfunded education institutions where the foundations of suspicion, fear, loathing and anger are laid.

In her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that:

The ability to accept difference – difference of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality – requires, first, the ability to accept something about oneself; that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult and child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life., that others outside oneself have a reality. This ability requires, in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees reality in other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one’s own power or threats to that power.

Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within, (Page 336)

Pakistani society, from its citizens to its military, is imbued with a suspicion and fear of ‘the other’ defined as ‘the Hindu‘, the nation of whom is India. It is cultivated in their minds at an age when they are hardly able to think, and more susceptible to the perspectives and dogmatism of their adults.

It is a dogmatism, bigotry and hate that is of course mirrored across the border in India, particularly during the hideous eight years the Indian democracy was under the guidance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In a series of terse and critical essays, India’s Outlook magazine featured a series of articles by writers taking to task the BJP government’s attempts to re-write Indian history with a distinctly communal/sectarian bent.See for example the piece Communalisation of Education by Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, or a piece by the eminent historian Irfan Habib called The Rewriting of History…

I found this last essay particularly interesting because of its focus on the treatment of the heritage and presence of Islam and Muslims in India in the National Curriculum Framework of School Education (NCERT) text books. NCERT is a technically a private body, but has close links to the Ministry of Education (MoE), with NCERT’s head being chosen by the MoE. The Supreme Court has in fact defined the NCERT back into the government and given broad authority.

I quote Habib himself:

Given its view of Muslims as utter barbarians, the Sangh Parivar is naturally uncomfortable with Muslim scientific thinkers. Alberuni, whose description of Indian sciences in the earlier part of the eleventh century was described by K.M. Panikkar as “a moment in history”, attracts the ire of the Sangh propagandists who hasten to picture him as anti-Indian, because of his remarks about Bahmagupta’s mythological explanation of the eclipses and about the Indian tendency not to accept external discoveries. As for Akbar the Mughal emperor, who occupies a particularly high place in Indian history, for his policy of tolerance, humanism and patronage of the arts, he is totally unacceptable not only as a “foreigner,” but also as the grandson of Babur, made notorious owing to the Babari Masjid. When the Indian Council of Historical Research, during its pre-RSS past, decided to observe the 450th birth anniversary of Akbar in 1992, the BJP MPs raised the matter in Parliament, one of them even describing Akbar as a “Pakistani” having been born in Umarkot (Sind).(They naturally forgot the birthplaces of L.K. Advani and the like).

Martha Nussbaum provides a detailed examination of the assault on India’s textbooks that took place under the ‘wise’ guidance of the BJP’s historians. A large number of Indian organizations and individuals challenged the distortions, bigotry and outright lies that tainted the new textbooks being made available to Indian students once the BJP had come to power. The attempts to ’saffronize’ education in India i.e. to infuse it with the ideology of Hindutva, became a fundamental goal, with education minister Murli Manoha Joshi, a BJP politician with known links to the RSS and VHP, given the leadership of this effort.

And with an indictment that could not cut more deeply, Irfan Habib warns the Indians that:

If the BJP is to have its way, we would soon be competing with Pakistan in framing the utmost possible parochial view of the past.

And indeed, given the state of books in Pakistan today, a situation that many in its civil society are fighting to reform, there could be no worse insult or fear. Pakistan and India eye each other with fear, loathing and suspicion. The idea of the other as the singular enemy, distorted in its hatred of ‘us’ and determined to do anything in its power to destroy ‘us’ is ingrained into our minds from an early age. At ages when children are still grasping to understand the fundamentals of Newtonian physics, they are subjected to historical, sectarian, and political indoctrination that they can neither comprehend nor question. In fact, they are encouraged not to question at all. And perhaps that is why this indoctrination must take place at so early an age – an age where critical thought could develop but instead unquestioning obedience and obeisance is encouraged.

Our child soldiers are being prepared as we speak. They, with their distortions and prejudices, will eventually man the corridors of diplomacy, politics, military and the citizenry. They will, except for a handful few able to break the pattern, carry within them the lessons of their youth, the unexamined prejudices and hatred of their adolescence. To imagine that their distorted world views, developed under the authority of a state and its adult voices, will not color their engagement with ‘the other’ is to be naive at best, irresponsible at worse. It is a world view apparent in the language of our military and our politicians today – bent as they are on working with caricatures and generalizations that convince them that only barbarians and killers live on the other side of the borders.

Its time to read new books.

The New India? Or How It Became Just Like Everyone Else!

I came across this piece in the recent issue of Granta and it made for depressing reading.

Capital Gains by Rana Dasgupta

I was not quite sure what about it really cut to the quick. I am still not sure.

Perhaps it is some sort of romanticism about a world in the past that cared for something more than just material wealth, brand awareness, consumer choice and flash. But I have read Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities and know well that such a world never existed. There is a surprising continuity in man’s perpetual search for the banal, the bombastic and the brilliantine!

Perhaps it was that it reminded me so much of the Karachi that i grew up in – vapid, empty, all show and no go, where men were hot air and women simply decorative pieces to be shown and then discarded to their domestic nothingness. Pakistan succumbed to the seductions of the ‘free market’ i.e. open to foreign products and killing all its own, far earlier than India did. And all throughout my early years I would envy India’s independence, her ability to stand on her own feet, achieve engineering and national achievements through her own efforts. While Pakistan was for sale to the highest bidder. Probably another romantic delusion, but certainly with some truth to it. Pakistan became a ‘client’ state back in the 1960s, whereas India was always the independent, confident, self sufficient and not cowed by power structures from without.

But Dasgupta’s piece bought back memories of that earlier Karachi I disliked and feared so much. Today it is a hollow city, its inhabitants without culture, their eyes turned towards ‘the West’, desperate to make their children the equivalent of modern day Janissaries, as the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid once called my generation. A generation raised in Pakistan to be sold to the highest bidders (academic, corporate) in the Western world. If you don’t know, the Janissaries were a force made from abducted sons from conquered countries, and then sent back to those countries to act as soldiers and administrators.

Is India becoming a Pakistan i.e creating an entire class of people who have effectively seceded, as Arundhati Roy once argued from the rest of the nation?

Tarun, the editor of the amazing Tehelka magazine is quoted in this piece as saying:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

The conflicts in Pakistan are not seen as class wars, but they are. I recently wrote a post called Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War about how foreign journalists/reporters are confused when it comes to reporting about Pakistan. Few realize that the rise of insurgencies and voices of sectarian political allegiances are veils that hide large scale class conflicts that have not be resolved in the country.  India’s conflicts in the West (Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Chattisgarh etc.) are class conflicts as well, as reporter Jason Motlagh has recently written in Conflicts Within.

In Pakistan the deprived (and they are not necessarily the poor, simply the cheated, fooled and ignored) are asking for their share, and using religion (in Swat for example) and nationalism (in Baluchistan for example) to fight for their share of the pie that is otherwise in the hands of a minority, venal, wealthy class that just does not care!

I will say that while reading this piece I was irritated by the suggestion that this mindless affinity for wealth and its display, the indifference towards the environment or broader societal welfare needs (education, health care etc.) is some sort of Hindu problem. Such suggestions are simply racist – there is just no other term for it. They are reductive, simplistic, and label hundreds of millions of people from varied class, culture, ethnicity etc. with a broad brush. Many object to such language when it comes to Africans, or Muslims, or Arabs. I can’t accept it here and we should not either.

The greed of man, the banality of man, does not need a religion or a universal spiritual outlook. I mean, has anyone been to Dubai recently? Money and consumerism have reduced that nation to a catatonic bonhomie that I believe would easily diagnosed by a professional as ‘diseased’! It continues to surprise me  the ease with which we speak to the general but rarely ever acknowledge the shared; human greed and frivolity is universal and has nothing to do with religious outlooks or philosophies. If anything, the religions are easily (too easily!) woven into our human preferences and values most of the time anyways – its called cultural adaptation and adjustments!

What is happening in Delhi is real of course. But its not just Delhi – it will happen in every city of India if its not already that way. I would argue that anyone who knows the history of India, particularly the show and pomp of its most recent collection of rulers; the British, The Mughals, the Hyderabadi dynasty etc. will know what pomp and bombast are. Are we truly in a moment of unique crassness and indifference? I am not so sure. And Its not unique to India either. Its China. Its Islamabad. Its Doha. Its Milan. Pankaj Mishra wore eloquently about this India in a piece in The Guardian some months ago.  I remember this paragraph:

In India…the pursuit of economic growth at all costs has created a gaudy elite but also widened already alarming social and economic disparities. Facilities for health care and primary education have deteriorated. Economic growth, confined to urban centres, is largely jobless. Up to a third of Indians live with extreme poverty and deprivation. And militant communist movements have erupted in the poorest, most populous states.

When we arrive in India in a few weeks (aside: this essay was originally written for workshop students accompanying me to India in August 2009) we have to remember that we are entering a dynamic and modern India, but that the stories we will cover are the ones that are being lost in the hysteria of celebration and consumerism. There are many who are richer, but some argue, many more who have been left in the wake of this pursuit of wealth.

As journalists it is our responsibility to add the weight of our voices to that of the weak, to help balance the equation, and facilitate their access to rights, justice, and basic human needs. I think that Pankaj Mishra said it best, in a tribute he wrote for the late Babara Epstein (editor The New York Review of Books), when he said that:

…literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; … it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; … it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless.

I don’t believe that any nation that ignores the welfare of all its citizens can succeed in the long run. I know this from my experiences in Pakistan – a very wealthy nation with levels of deprivation and poverty that leaves one reeling. Certainly in Sweden, where I have now lived for nearly 9 years, I can see possibilities I had previously not imagined; the achievements of a state that invests in the broad welfare of all its citizens is quite a sight to behold.

You can’t build a sky scrapper over weak foundations.

Our Songs Carry Our Soul: Khwaja Ghulam Farid’s Husn e Haqiqi

more about “Our Songs Carry Our Soul: Husn e Haqi…“, posted with vodpod

Khawaja Ghulam Farid was a Sufi poet, and this is the Pakistani singer Areib Azhar singing one of his poems Husn-e-Haqiqi (The Beauty of Truth). This performance is nothing short of stunning, one of the more beautiful renditions of this poem I have ever heard. And Azhar’s voice is simply magnificent – controlled and guided to provoke the heart and emotions in a way that only South Asia’s Sufi folk music can.

Below is a translation, by Areib Azhar himself, of this beautiful poem:

O’ Beauty of Truth, the Eternal Light!

Do I call you necessity and possibility,

Do I call you the ancient divinity,

The One, creation and the world,

Do I call you free and pure Being,

Or the apparent lord of all,

Do I call you the souls, the egos and the intellects,

The imbued manifest, and the imbued hidden,

The actual reality, the substance,

The word, the attribute and dignity,

Do I call you the variety, and the circumstance,

The demeanor, and the measure,

Do I call you the throne and the firmament,

And the demurring delights of Paradise,

Do I call you mineral and vegetable,

Animal and human,

Do I call you the mosque, the temple, the monastery,

The scriptures, the Quran,

The rosary, the girdle,

Godlessness, and faith,

Do I call you the clouds, the flash, the thunder,

Lightning and the downpour,

Water and earth,

The gust and the inferno,

Do I call you Lakshmi, and Ram and lovely Sita,

Baldev, Shiv, Nand, and Krishna,

Brahma, Vishnu and Ganesh,

Mahadev and Bhagvaan,

Do I call you the Gita, the Granth, and the Ved,

Knowledge and the unknowable,

Do I call you Abraham, Eve and Seth,

Noah and the deluge,

Abraham the friend, and Moses son of Amran,

And Ahmad the glorious, darling of every heart,

Do I call you the witness, the Lord, or Hejaz,

The awakener, existence, or the point,

Do I call you admiration or prognosis,

Nymph, fairy, and the young lad,

The tip and the nip,

And the redness of betel leaves,

The Tabla and Tanpura,

The drum, the notes and the improvisation,

Do I call you beauty and the fragrant flower,

Coyness and that amorous glance,

Do I call you Love and knowledge,

Superstition, belief, and conjecture,

The beauty of power, and conception,

Aptitude and ecstasy,

Do I call you intoxication and the drunk,

Amazement and the amazed,

Submission and the connection,

Compliance and Gnosticism,

Do I call you the Hyacinth, the Lilly, and the Cypress,

And the rebellious Narcissus,

The bereaved Tulip, the Rose garden, and the orchard,

Do I call you the dagger, the lance, and the rifle,

The hail, the bullet, the spear,

The arrows made of white poplar, and the bow,

The arrow-notch, and the arrowhead,

Do I call you colorless, and unparalleled,

Formless in every instant,

Glory and holiness,

Most glorious and most compassionate,

Repent now Farid forever!

For whatever I may say is less,

Do I call you the pure and the humane,

The Truth without trace or name.

(Translation by Areib Azhar)

You may also want to check out some of the other performances on the Coke Studio website.  This performance by the masterful Saeen Zahoor of Bulleh Shah’s, another Sufi folk poet, is truly stunning.

The entire Coke Studio sessions can be seen and heard here: Coke Studio. It is a remarkable collection of music and talent, a truly beautiful reflection of Pakistan and her deep connections to her Indian heritage. This is not just Pakistani music – this is the voice of South Asia, tracing its heritage and traditions to hundreds of years of development and evolution. These songs, these poems, their voices and their passion transcend boundaries, and reflect the continuities of traditions and cultures that Edward Said was so determined to remind us of.

How Hindus Are Destroying New Delhi Or An Exercise In Absolute Foolishness Masquerading As A Stupid Opinion

Writer Rana Dasgupta, famous for his book Tokyo Cancelled, has penned a piece on the city of New Delhi and its rampaging obsession with things material, brand-obsessed, consumerist, shallow, callow and crass. Called Capital Gains it appeared in the recent issue of Granta magazine.

Fair enough – one can write similar pieces about pretty much any city in any ‘capitalist revolutionary’ city anywhere in the world. Take your pick, this story though well written and at times funny, could just as well be about Karachi, Rio De Jeneiro , Bangkok, Dubai, Shanghai, Beijing or even the now-under-China’s shadow, Hong Kong.

I enjoyed reading the piece, but the reason why I am writing this post is less the piece itself, since it was rather banal and unsurprising, but that in the midst of it I came across this rather amusing (and I mean that not in an amusing way) exchange that the write has with an editor at Tehelka magazine:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

‘Do you think anything will come of all this money they’re making?’ I ask. ‘Do you think they’ll try to leave behind a legacy?’

‘They don’t care about their legacy! This is a Hindu society: I’m back for a million more lives – how much fuss am I going to make about this one? Indian businesspeople might run a school or feed a few orphans, but they’re not interested in reform because they are bent on making the system work for them. Hinduism is very pliable. It rationalizes inequality: if that guy is poor it’s because he deserves it from his previous lives, and it’s not for me to sort out his accounts. Hinduism allows these guys to think that what they get is due to them, and they have absolutely no guilt about it.’

Frankly, and I realize that this is merely the opinion of an individual at a magazine that I otherwise respect, I was shocked that such reductive, essentialist nonsense made it past the editing sessions. This statement is so wrong that it isn’t even wrong, its just plain callous, and frankly lunatic.

A city of tens of millions of people, with a history and a heritage that goes back over a thousand of years and that contains within it an incredibly diverse, varied, complex community of people of all walks of life, beliefs, class, ethnicities, cultures, values, ideas, fears, doubts and dreams can never be called ‘a Hindu society’ alone. This is such a vast idiocy that it can’t even be laughed it. Delhi is one of the world’s great cities and what makes it so is that it is a cradle of the world’s heritage and civilizations and that billions have passed through her, lived there, defined it and more will.

It is a world city. Complete with the full complexity and vastness of what that term means.

The so-called Hindu businessmen with their indifference to reform are pretty much like tens of millions of other businessmen and capitalists around the world. Their being Hindu explains nothing about their exclusivity, pursuit of wealth and bombast, their greed or their general indifference. They are just businessmen, much like all the others (Muslims, Sikh, non-believers, gay, straight, black, white and other) that live and work and play and show-off in Delhi. Business is about profits regardless of who conducts it. There are strands of Hinduism (I use this term broadly) that call for asceticism and abstinence from desire. So by what definition is the tern Hinduism being used here by this editor? And what does anyone being Hindu really tell us about their indifference and/or greed? Nothing I say!

An elite, a capitalist elite, weaned on the belief that success is to the strong and clever is indifferent to the under privileged and exploited in all societies across the globe. I am sure that Dasgupta has been to the USA, or China or even to Pakistan. It has nothing to do with Hinduism. The Delhi elite are in fact too much like those in other nations and cannot be understood through the prism of religion. To attempt to explain what are secular acts – power, wealth, snobbery, indifference by deferring to something as ill-defined as Hinduism is irresponsible to say the least, and dangerous at the worst. I say dangerous because it encourages people to essentialize others, to reduce them to a mass and loose sight of them as individuals. It is the same issue I have by the repeated insistence of journalists, pundits, intellectuals and others to explain socio-political issues in Muslim and Arab nations through the prism of Islam. This is a distorting and randomizing prism that allows us to say anything about any situation based purely on imagined ideas of how people transform philosophies (which is what religions are) into worldly actions. It is near impossible to imagine that everyone does it the same way!

Full disclosure: I remain a big admirer of the Tehelka editor who actually made this inane comment and encourage people to read Tehelka magainze – a real example of courage in journalism.

I repeat a comment made by Robert Musil in his masterwork A Man Without Qualities that I am reading now as I wrote in an earlier blog piece called In Bed With Robert Musil Part I

…it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters; a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. (page 30)

The point being not that there are nine or three or ten or twenty characters, but that individuals are more than just one things and that a religion is simply one piece that can be at times a major and other times a minor influence of their decisions, priorities, values and behaviors. To attempt to blame this on religion, and worse on a religion as varied, complex, and near-impossible-to-define, as Hinduisum is even more egregious.

What is happening in Delhi though disappointing is in fact taking place in cities all across the globe and is not unique to India, or to Hindus. It cannot be understood, explained or blamed on something called Hinduism or the Hindu.

Realities, Myths, Fantasies & Paranoias: The Muslims – Get To Know Them Series

Professor Yoginder Sikand recently posted an extensive review of Abdelwahab El-Affendi’s Who Needs An Islamic State. The book is a fascinating challenge to political Islamists everywhere and confronts them on their simplistic, utopian and definitely mythical ideas about an earlier pure, ideal, perfect Islamic past. As Professor Sikand writes:

El-Affendi is particularly critical of modern Islamist ideologues, such as the Egyptian Syed Qutb and the Pakistani Abul Ala Maududi, who conceived of an ideal Islamic state as being totalitarian, anti-democratic, authoritarian and coercive. He is bitter about what he calls the Islamists’ ‘self-righteous pretensions’, which translates into ‘a readiness to resort to violence at the slightest pretext’. He likens them to the Khawarij or Kharijites, an early splinter group from among the Muslims, who saw themselves alone as true Muslims, and the rest of the world, including other Muslims, as deviant, aberrant, even anti-Islamic, thus ruling out any room for compromise.

While still upholding the notion of a Muslim state molded or guided by religio-moral concerns and principles, el-Affendi points to the serious gaps in modern Islamist political thought, indicating the way forward for the emergence of a genuinely democratic, pluralist and contextually-relevant Muslim political discourse.

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I also found Salman Hameed’s blog Irtiqa. As he describes it, it:

…tracks and comments on news relevant to the interplay of science & religion – including scientific debates taking place in the Muslim world. Irtiqa literally means evolution in Urdu. But it does not imply only biological evolution. Instead, it is an all encompassing word used for evolution of the universe, biological evolution, and also for biological/human development. While it has created confusion in debates over biological evolution in South Asia, it provides a nice integrative name for a blog that addresses issues of science & religion.

Salmam Hameed is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Science & Humanities at Hampshire College, Massachusetts and working “…on understanding the rise of creationism in contemporary Islamic world and how Muslims view the relationship between science & religion.”.

Check it out – There was an amusing discussion about a mythical Halal Browser – a poke at the recently announced Koogle a Kosher browser – no, I kid you not! The Halal browser drew some comments from Karachi blogger Tazeen Javed about its seductive features for the obscurantists.

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I also found, thanks to Salman Hameed something that I had been looking for for months – a survey of educational institutions in Pakistan and in particular the spread of madrassas as far as the country’s education structure goes. Here is a fascinating piece by Asim Khwaja called The Madrassa Myth that examines how pervasive a presence these religious institutions have in the country. The conclusion: not much! Though as one commentator points out, unregistered madrassas may not be in the data. Worth a read.

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And then from my own bookshelves I found, while dusting them of course, copies of Fazlur Rahman’s Islam and Islam & Modernity.  Fazlur Rahman studied Arabic at Punjab University,  went to Oxford University where he wrote a thesis on Ibn Sina. He then taught at at Durham University and then at McGill University where he taught Islamic studies until 1961. A noted Islamic scholar, he was also the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. And perhaps most obviously, he was reviled and hounded out of Pakistan where he had been invited to head the Central Institute of Islamic Research. As explained by Hangingodes:

Anyone examining the newspapers of second half of 68′ would know with ease that the whole episode was one of the earliest and most unfortunate sagas of political hijacking of Islam. It is immaterial whether Fazlur Rahman was labeled a kaafir, an apostate or a religious hypocrite and how the political environment at that time overshadowed an otherwise academic issue; what is important however, that Fazlur Rahman proved to be a victim of misdirected traditionalist emotionalism and paid the heavy price of abandoning his cherished goal of transforming intellectual heritage of Muslims and deploying a modern religious education policy in Pakistan.

A brilliant man, a superb scholar, his works are the earliest influence on my own ideas about the study of religions and in particular the rigorous and modern examination and investigation of the religion of Islam. I recommend both Islam and Islam & Modernity as places to start, the latter is in fact a fabulously enlightening work!

No Pharaohs In The Modern World: The Liberal Muslim & Indian Democracy

The stranglehold of the orthodoxy, especially in its political and religious form, has to be loosened and slackened. The answer lies in more and more Muslim communities moving towards democracy. There is no short cut to democracy. . . . There is no place for pharaohs in the modern world. (Mushirul Hasan)

Martha Nussbaum has had a deep and committed engagement with India – a land she calls ‘her second home’, for many years now.  This American philosopher with an interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics, has found a deep interest in modern India’s struggles with democracy and ethics.

Nussbaum is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor.

Her latest missive on the situation in India comes as a bit of a surprise because it addresses a subject few have had the will to address; liberal Muslims confronting violence, discrimination and injustice, and yet choosing the path of the law, non-violence and intellectualism to confront it.

A new essay Land of My Dreams: Islamic liberalism under fire in India Martha Nussbaum offers a fascinating history of one of Delhi’s great liberal educational institutions, the Jamia Millia Islamia.  As Nussbaum describes it in her piece:

Jamia was born radical. Its curriculum emphasized the study of nationalism as well as the study of Islamic history and the Qu’ran; its admissions policy welcomed male and female, Hindu and Muslim; its pedagogy emphasized debate and contestation in the teaching of all subjects, including religion, denouncing the mere “passive awareness of dead facts.” The school had strong links with theorists of progressive education such as Bertrand Russell and Rabindranath Tagore and thus gave substantial weight to the arts and vocational education.

The piece is as much about the Vice-Chancellor of the institution, Mushirul Hasan, whose story, as Nussbaum points out, reminds us of 3 things:

First, the values we associate with classical liberalism-such as the defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and procedural due process-are not exclusively Western values. During the independence movement in India, they were reinvented by a colonized people who had seen just how little their Western masters honored such norms.

Second, these values are not tepid and centrist, as we sometimes hear, but rather, truly radical in a world of nations increasingly under pressure both from external violence and from internal quasi-fascist forces.

And finally, Hasan’s story shows that there is a distinctive and genuinely Islamic form of liberalism, long-lived and drawing inspiration from religious texts and their central concepts.

Unfortunately The Boston Review magazine allows people to comment on the essays they publish.  The reactions to Nussbaums’ piece stretch the realm of decency and coherency. I suspect that in the coming weeks the number of ‘comments’ consisting of slurs, abusive dismissals, sexist denigrations and outright insults against this scholar, philosopher, humanist and ethicist will only grow. These commentators do a disservice to not just Nussbaum, but to the very community that apparently think they are defending by abusing the writer and her works!

Martha Nussbaum is also the author of a book on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and the threat to Indian democracy called The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future which was reviewed by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books

The Tears of The Goddess

Dinesh Khanna is a photographer and a friend.  Based in India he has been working on a project with First City Magazine examining the contradictions and ironies of life in his native country of India.

I loved this image of his because of how quietly it provokes so many thoughts and speaks to so many truths.

A goddess, worshiped, cared for and loved perhaps just a few hours earlier, now lies in a garbage heap, stripped of all her divine powers, and left in her essence; waste.

A god who served her purpose.

Some, righteous and arrogant, will see this as an image of a Hindu god.

Much like the Lahori booksellers I met some years ago who were proudly selling copies of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian, not realizing that Russell’s was an argument not against Christianity, but against all religions!

But this image is in fact an image of all religious philosophies – used as they are to serve the base instincts of man and discarded when in conflict with these instincts.

The goddess has been humbled.

Will man ever be?