Why is the BJP so keen on appropriating icons from outside its Hindutva fold?

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First published on Scroll.

Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao was a man of versatile talents. An effective chief minister, he is also known for being the first Indian prime minister who was not a native Hindi-speaker – a somewhat patronising fact to remember him by, given that he was a polyglot who knew 17 languages, including Hindi.

Eleven years after this death, he still has the political classes chattering: the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government is building a memorial to Rao in Delhi. So keen is it on achieving this that work was rushed to inaugurate the memorial on Rao’s 94th birth anniversary on Sunday.

The BJP’s move to remember Rao stands in stark contrast to the Congress’s attitude towards his memory. Although a Congressman for life, Rao was dumped rather hastily. His fall from grace was so complete that the Congress even forced his family to perform his last rites in Hyderabad and not in Delhi, lest the attention took away some of the spotlight from the Nehru-Gandhi clan.

Rao isn’t the only estranged Congressman that the BJP wants to commemorate. Last Wednesday, the Narendra Modi government approved plans for a national memorial at the birthplace of Jayaprakash Narayan in Bihar. And then of course, there is the continued appropriation of Vallabhbhai Patel and Subhash Chandra Bose.

Searching for icons

Why is the BJP, the largest party in Parliament, and Narendra Modi so keen on appropriating non-BJP icons? The party claims to be feting Rao for instituting liberalisation. But to be consistent with the rationale, will the party also praise Manmohan Singh given that his contribution was also integral to the process? Seems unlikely.

It is also unlikely that Jayaprakash Narayan, the socialist leader the BJP is commemorating, would take too well to celebrations of liberalisation. It is also ironical that Modi is celebrating JP’s fight against over-centralisation of power in the person of the prime minister.

Platitudes aside, the core issue is quite simple. The BJP might be facing a surfeit of electoral riches now but its political legacy is shallow and weak. There is no historical depth in the Bharaiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh combine that now dominates Indian politics. On the one hand, this is a great story of a meteoric rise. But, on the other, lack of a historical narrative can be a serious handicap to building a strong foundation for power.

A long history of nothing

To be sure, the BJP-RSS aren’t new organisations. The RSS was founded in 1925 and will celebrate its 90th anniversary in September. The RSS’ political arm, the BJP, is no spring chicken either. It was founded in 1951, making it a venerable 64 years old.

The issue isn’t age – it’s impact. The BJP as a political formation might have existed for a great many years, but for most of that time, it’s been a marginal player in Indian politics with no influence and, consequently, no legacy.

In 1971, for example, the Jan Sangh only managed to win 7.35% of the votes polled. Added up, the vote share of the two Congress parties (the Congress-O and Indira Gandhi’s Congress) was more than seven times as much.

After that came the Emergency, the 40th anniversary of which is being so exuberantly marked by the BJP. The party today uses the event to claim its historical roots.

Did the Emergency birth the BJP?

This is understandable given that the BJP – or the wider Hindutva family – really has nothing to show for the Freedom Movement. Leaders such as Vinayak Savarkar and BJP founder SP Mookerkee, for example, opposed the Quit India movement and cooperated with the British Raj. This might have made tactical sense at the time and helped the Hindutva movement grow a bit but it really doesn’t make for a good historical narrative.

Thus, all the BJP has left is the Emergency and, for the past month or so, we’ve been treated to narratives about how seminal the BJP-RSS role was in this movement against Indira Gandhi’s despotism (expectedly, even Modi’s personal role in it has been lionised).

These narratives are effective and help the BJP carve out a distinct space for itself in India’s history. Narratives aside, however, the funny thing is that this supposedly heroic role of the BJP-RSS in upholding democracy during the Emergency helped it very little in actually getting any democratic support for itself.

After 1971, the next election the BJP fought alone was in 1984 (it fought the 1977 and ‘80 elections as part of the Janata Party, so there are no numbers to go on). Its vote share in ‘84 ? 7.74%. Sure, the numbers were up from 7.35% before the Emergency (1971 elections). But only by 0.39 or 5%. That’s it.

Its role in the Emergency that the BJP is most proud of today – that it considers its moment of political birth – seems to have had no effect on India’s voters. Post emergency, the BJP was as much of a minor player as it was before.

Ram’s role

So if not the Emergency, what actually gave birth to the party which now has a majority in the Lok Sabha? Let’s look at the numbers again.

In the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s vote share jumped to 20.11% : a near tripling of its 1984 number. In contrast, the BJP vote share in 2014 only increased by a little more than 50% since 1991. The 1991 inflexion point? The Ram Janmabhoomi agitation. The search for Ram’s birthplace generated a religious frenzy which also birthed the BJP as a serious contender to power.

Unfortunately, effective as they are at the ballot box, religious frenzies don’t make for terribly effective historical narratives. Until reminded by, say, a pesky Vishva Hindu Parishad functionary, the BJP wouldn’t mind forgetting this movement. And of course it seems to have no plans to build a temple as long as it is in a position of political strength.

Apart from that, however, there really isn’t much else of impact in the BJP’s rather uneventful history. So while the party has pushed its Hindutva leaders, given that they were political pygmies in their times, it has not been very effective. People such as SP Mookerjee, Deendayal Upadhyaya and Madan Mohan Malaviya might be committed Hindutva ideologues but they really don’t add any heft to the BJP today.

To compensate, the BJP desperately trawls around for anyone who isn’t a Congress favourite – a fairly easy task, it might be noted, since that includes almost anyone who isn’t a Nehru-Gandhi. Legacies of ex-Congressmen such as Vallabhbhai Patel, PV Narasimha Rao and Jayaprakash Narayan are seized hurriedly and even the square pegs of committed ideological opponents such as Marxist revolutionary Bhagat Singh are sought to be hammered into the round Hindutva holes of the BJP.

Given the BJP’s absolute lack of options, this is hardly a surprise and till now, in fact, the Modi government has done a fairly good job of icon appropriation. After all, if there’s one thing this government is good at, it’s communication. Even so, this complete invention of a historical narrative is no easy task and it remains to be seen, a few decades down the line, how well the BJP has performed at this task.

Revisiting Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the Trinamool's latest hero

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First published on Scroll.

On Tuesday, the Trinamool Congress paid floral tributes to Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, (which later evolved into the Bharatiya Janata Party), marking another step on the road to the rapprochement between the TMC and the BJP.

From facing off bitterly against each other in the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections, the past few months have seen a definite thaw in relations between Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi. The BJP, since then, has now gone so far as to slow down corruption investigations against Trinamool leaders. And the Trinamool, in turn, has helped the BJP out in the Rajya Sabha as well as backed key foreign policy decisions with Bangladesh (such as the Land Boundary Agreement).

Even by these standards, though, feting SP Mookerji is significant. The Trinamool, till now, was a party accused of pandering to Muslim right wingers in Bengal – it instituted a stipend for imams and all but expelled Taslima Nasreen from the state. With Tuesday’s move, the TMC is trying to square the circle, by also identifying with a person who was one of the Hindutva movement’s leading lights and who, in 1947, openly called for Partition.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee

SP Mookerjee was born into bhadralok royalty. His father was Asutosh Mookerjee, the towering vice-chancellor of Calcutta University  (a post later held by the son too), who was awarded the Star of India and knighted for his services to the Empire.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee entered politics at the age of 28 and was first elected to the Bengal Legislative Council as a Congress candidate from Calcutta University in 1929 (without universal adult franchise, the Raj had a complex system of allocating legislative seats with quotas to special interests such as industries or, in this case, scholars).

He didn’t last too long in the Congress, though, given that it soon decided against council entry and SP Mookerjee didn’t want to vacate his seat, which he then held as an independent. Moreover, Mookerjee found the Congress’ attitude towards Muslims too soft and he was more interested in championing Hindu interests.

Communal Award

The politics of Bengal changed sharply after 1932, when the Raj released a new plan of legislative seat allocation known as the Communal Award. In Bengal, till then, in spite of the Muslims being a majority, there were more Hindu seats in the Council than Muslim seats. The Award reversed this anomaly, awarding more seats to the majority Muslims. To make matters worse for the upper caste bhadralok, in far away Pune, Mohandas Gandhi had come to an understanding with BR Ambedkar to award a large portion of “Hindu” seats to Dalits, in return for joint caste Hindu-Dalit electorates. This made the bhadralok’s position even weaker.

The bhadralok had, till then, dominated this province’s politics. Before the Communal Award, there were 46 Hindu seats to 39 Muslims seats in Bengal. This new system of distributing  power by the counting of heads, though, changed this system overnight. Now for 80 Hindu seats there were 117 Muslims seats.

Even as this new system was being introduced, the British governor of Bengal warned Delhi that this would “increase communal bitterness”. Sure enough, the Hindu elite of Bengal were alarmed at this sudden loss of power. One petition, signed by a stunning array of Bengalis, including SP Mookerjee and also Rabindranath Tagore, argued that the the Award was unjust since the “Hindus of Bengal, though, numerically a minority, are overwhelmingly superior culturally.” As historian, Joya Chatterji points out, “the implication was that the 'cultural superiority' of the Hindus more than outweighed the numerical majority of the backward Muslims, and entitled Hindus to a share of power far in excess of their numbers”.

Embattled minority

Almost overnight, the bhadralok community, that had almost come to define what “national” meant, started to see themselves as an embattled minority community (only a few decades back, the North Indian Muslim elite had gone through an near identical identity crisis).

In 1937, provincial elections were held in Bengal, which the Congress fought as part of an informal coalition with the Krishak Praja Party, a party of the largely Muslim peasantry of Bengal. The Bengal Congress, more than in any other part of the country, was a largely Hindu-based party. It thus didn’t fight a single Muslim seat – a wise move since it wouldn’t have won anyway – and left them for the KPP.

Unfortunately, post the election, driven by a host of factors, the Congress refused to form a coalition government with the KPP and its influential leader, Fazlul Haq (Haq has mostly been forgotten by the city he was once Premier of, but in Park Circus, the Kolkata street where he once lived, Jhowtala Road is now named "Fazlul Haq Sarani") . Haq was therefore forced into the arms of the Muslim League. Although both parties represented Muslims, there was a class divide: the League represented zamindars while the KPP, peasants and they had in fact fought as bitter rivals in the elections.

Again with eerie parallels to the United Provinces, this provincial government that was then formed did not have any minority (in Bengal’s case, Hindu) representation. This sealed the fears of the Hindus in the province that this new system placed them under the rule of a – to use Jinnah’s phrase – “permanent majority”.

Sectarian parties, paradoxically, do well in areas where their communities are in a minority and can be sold a certain kind of politics. Thus the Muslim League was strongest amongst the minority Urduwallahs and was, for most of the time, a bit player in majority-provinces such as Bengal and the Punjab.

After the formation of the League-Praja ministry, it was the province’s Hindus who realised that they were a minority in Bengal. It was in this situation, in 1939, that Vinayak Savarkar – another Hindutva stalwart – launched his party, the Hindu Mahasabha, in Bengal. Mookerjee joined the party and by 1940 had become the Mahasabha’s president and its most prominent face in Bengal.

Communal campaign

Mookerjee now took up a stridently communal campaign. Gandhi’s non-violence was ridiculed and the manhood of the Bengali Hindu was sought to be reclaimed. In a line of thinking that continues till today with the BJP, the Mahasabha attacked the so-called minority appeasement of the Congress, blaming the Grand Old Party for Hindus being “strangled to death” in Bengal.

In this campaign, he attracted a great measure of support, drawing to his party not only prominent zamindars but also the business wealth of Kolkata. While the Mahasabha could never supplant the Congress as the natural party of the Bengali Hindu, it did have a huge influence on Congress policy, yanking it to the right. In the crucial period of 1946-47, both parties worked together in close cooperation in the province.

In spite of his communalism, however, it was Syama Prasad who did what the Congress could not in 1937: he allied with Fazlul Haq and joined his Progressive Coalition Ministry, thus becoming Bengal’s Finance Minister. The Mahasabha had at the time opposed the Quit India movement and as minister, Mookerjee stuck to that agenda, writing in 1942 to the Governor of Bengal, Sir John Herbert, in order to offer his “whole-hearted cooperation” in order to “combat this movement in Bengal”. The fact that Mookerjee cooperated with the Raj in order to try and crush the Quit India movement is, till today, used as a stick to beat the BJP with.

Partition role

SP Mookerjee is most reviled – or feted, depending on where you stand – for his role in 1947. By the start of 1947, the Cabinet Mission plan, which promised a united India lay dead, rejected by the Congress. In this stalemate, as the country increasingly hurtled towards communal chaos, Mookerjee proposed a solution for Bengal. In a landmark piece in the Bengali newspaper, Anandabazar Patrika on 21 March 1947, Mookerjee wrote that “the mere mention of the word ‘partition’ need not throw us into a fainting fit”. He also listed the benefits of this division. The creation of West Bengal would help in “saving Bengali Hindus” because the new province would be 70% Hindu – helping engineer a majority.

For the Hindus left behind in Pakistan, he proposed the “Hostage Theory” – an extremely popular conjecture in 1946-47 which held that since both India and Pakistan had “each others” minorities, fears of reprisals would force both to keep their minorities safe. For SP Mookerjee, it meant that East Pakistan would take care of its Hindus since it would be anxious about Muslims in West Bengal. For Jinnah, it means that Uttar Pradesh wouldn’t harm its Muslims since Pakistan had Hindus too, which India wouldn’t want harmed.

In practice, however, it was seen that a calm weighing of the pros and cons of the “Hostage Theory” is something that frenzied mobs out to murder, rape and loot did not do. The Muslims of Delhi and the Hindus of Dhaka were attacked all the same.

This issue was especially stark in Bengal since after Partition, as much as 42% of Bengal’s Hindu population was now in East Pakistan. Ironically, after proposing Partition, SP Mookerjee, post 1947, also courted the votes of the refugees streaming in from East Pakistan. He resigned from the Nehru Cabinet when it signed the Delhi Pact on the minorities in the two Bengals. And in one of this more extreme suggestions (a permitted luxury now that he was in the opposition) Mookerjee wanted Nehru to declare war on Pakistan and annexe territory from East Pakistan.

Post-1947 collapse

Given these wild swings, it is not surprising that far from making a dent in Bengal, the Hindu Mahasabha couldn’t even attract the vote of the refugees streaming in from East Bengal, who largely turned to the the left and would later on go on to become one of the CPI(M)’s core support bases.

Moreover, serious allegations of a Mahasabha role in the assassination of Gandhi were a major blow to the party and its organisation in Bengal was severely affected. Consequently, Mookerjee left the Mahasabha and founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. The party was formed in association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and is the earlier avatar of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Mookerjee, once a stalwart of Bengal politics, was now reduced to a bit player in the newly partitioned state of West Bengal that he had helped create. In the 1952 West Bengal Assembly Elections, the Jana Sangh won a paltry nine seats out of 238. This is how the Hindutva movement more or less remained in the state till 2014, with SP Mookerjee a near-forgotten figure. Of course, now with a small resurgence of Hindutva in Bengal in the form of the BJP, it is no surprise that he is being remembered again.

Why are Indian Muslims using the Arabic word ‘Ramadan’ instead of the traditional 'Ramzan'?

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First published on Scroll

It’s that time of the year again. As the annual month of dawn-to-dusk fasting comes around, people everywhere are girding their social media loins to fight the inevitable lexical war that’s about to break out: Ramzan or Ramadan?

This contentious battle is being fought over the name of the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, which is also when Muslims fast to commemorate the first revelation of the Quran to Prophet Muhammad. Historically, most Muslims on the subcontinent have called this month by its Persian name, “Ramzan”, especially if they speak Urdu and Hindi. Languages such as Bengali, which don’t have a "z", use a variant of that word: “Romjan”. In the past decade or so, however, a great many subcontinental Muslims have rejected these traditional names and taken to using what they believe is the Arabic word for it: Ramadan.

“People have suddenly begun to call it ‘Ramadan’, since that is the pronunciation of the word in the Quran,” said Delhi-based writer Rana Safvi. “But as a child, growing up in Lucknow, it was always called ‘Ramzan’. This is a completely new thing.”

Linguistic purity fail

The name of this month in Arabic can be transliterated into Roman characters as "Ramadan" – the "d" there being a rather arcane and ancient Arabic sound that really has no equivalent in any Indian language or English and is terribly difficult to enunciate. For non-Arabs, the "d" is usually approximated to the soft "d" of "dal-chawal" or (by English speakers) with a hard "d" (as in "dad").

Ironically, even modern-day Arabs pronounce this "d" sound quite differently from the time the Quran was written, a natural result of the phonological changes that any language goes through with time.

End result: in spite of the intentions of speakers to mimic Quranic pronunciation, it’s a lot easier said than said correctly.

Language is a powerful marker of intent and identity and, more often than not, people try and mould it into idealised shapes. Unfortunately, as this example shows, language is also an incredibly difficult thing to change, hardwired as it is into our brain. Arabic isn’t the only example. The brouhaha over teaching Sanskrit, right after the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party came to power was quite ironic since, right now, millions of Indian children supposedly study the language without even learning how to pronounce Sanskrit’s ancient sounds, which have long since ceased to exist in India’s modern bhashas.

Indo-Persian culture

If, however, Indian Muslims have jumped from one incorrect pronunciation to the other, what was the point of it all? Twisting the pronunciation of Ramzan does not serve any explicit theological purpose, but it does serve as a rather prominent cultural marker, signalling a significant change in the way Indian Muslims – specifically Urdu-speaking Muslims – look at their culture.

Much of what is Indian Islam – with possibly the exception of Kerala – comes down not from the Arabs but Central Asians and Iranis, members of the  Persian cultural sphere that dominated the Eastern Islamic world. India was itself a part of this cultural sphere and for hundreds of years, Persian was the country’s lingua franca, resulting in native languages such as Marathi and Bengali being inundated with Persian words. This influence was so pervasive that India’s de facto national language has a Persian name: Hindi (literally, “Indian”).

The language of Indian Islam is, therefore, highly Persianised – an oddity for a religion that has Arabic as its liturgical language. The word for the Islamic prayer is the Persian “namaaz” (Arabic: salaah) and for fast, the Persian loan “roza” (Arabic: sawm). Most prominently, the common everyday word for God is from Farsi: Khuda.

These borrowings, mixed in with local elements, created a unique Indo-Islamic culture that stood for a great many centuries.

Arabisation

Events in faraway Arabia, though, changed matters. After World War I, a family called the Saud, driven by a fanatical version of Islam called Wahhabism, captured much of the Arabian peninsula including the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In spite of housing these two cities, however, this patch of desert land had never been very powerful and the great Arab empires ruled from up north in what is now Iraq. A singular stroke of luck changed that for the Saudis: the land spouted oil, great fountains of it – a crucial mineral in the age of machines.

In the subcontinent, meanwhile, Muslim elites, defeated by British colonialism and facing a precipitous decline in their fortunes, weren’t terribly upbeat about their own cultural moorings. The influence of the rich Saudi state, both soft and hard, crept into the subcontinent, as its Muslims looked to the ultra-conservative theocratic state for cultural and theological ballast.

In Pakistan, for example, massively popular televangelist took to pushing Arab credentials as a marker of piety. “In their efforts to sell their Muslimness, televangelist such as Aamir Liaquat, started to use Arabic words and even wear Arab-style clothes,” said Pakistani journalist Tazeen Javed. Similar dynamics were at play in India too: superstar televangelist from Mumbai, Zakir Naik, wouldn’t be caught dead calling it “Ramzan”.

Muslims elites across the subcontinent borrowed these Arab liturgical words, now as markers of their religious identity. Not only were they Muslims, but a certain kind of Muslim, following a Saudi-influenced brand of Islam, so strict that even in common speech, no measure of so-called unIslamicness was allowed to creep in. “Ramzan” hasn’t been the only target, as can be expected. The word “Khuda", a mainstay of cultural expressions such as Urdu poetry, is also being expunged, since God can only have an Arabic name. The standard Urdu expression for “goodbye” – “Khuda hafiz" – is now being bowdlerised to “Allah hafiz".

Renaming God and fasts is still fine – men have been known to do odder things for religion. But when people begin chopping and changing their word for “goodbye”, then you know you’ve got a serious case of cultural insecurity on your hands.

An animated map shows how Sanskrit may have come to India

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First published in Scroll.

People in a vast swathe of the  Eurasian continent, from Britain in the west to Bengal in the east, are speakers of languages that belong to the same linguistic group, the Indo-European family. About half of the planet’s population today speaks an Indo-European language.

This is a remarkable fact: it means that around 3 billion people speak tongues that descended from what was, once upon a time, a single language and was spoken by a group of nomads whose numbers wouldn’t have been larger than that of a tribal confederation.

Indo-European expansion

How did this single language, which linguists have taken to calling Proto-Indo-European, spread across the word, giving rise to entities as diverse as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Persian and Bhojpuri?

The nomadic tribes that spoke the language spread through large parts of the known world around 6,000 years ago. In the words of anthropologist David W. Anthony, writing in his fantastic book on the spread of the Indo-Europeans, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World:

The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language lived at a critical time in a strategic place. They were positioned to benefit from innovations in transport, most important of these being the beginning of horseback riding and the invention of wheeled vehicles.

Horses, wagons and chariots gave these Indo-Europeans certain advantages militarily over the existing settled societies of Europe and Asia. Another innovation was biological: Indo-Europeans developed a gene mutation that allowed them to digest milk even after being weaned, thus providing these nomads with a continuous and mobile source of nutrition. We can see echoes of these historical facts in the culture of the early Vedic people who venerated horses and frowned upon the killing of milch cattle.

Where was the Indo-European homeland?

While this much the experts agree on, there are two competing hypotheses for the place of origin of these Indo-Europeans (or, as they were earlier know, the Aryans). The conventional view places their homeland in the Pontic steppe, which corresponds to modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. An alternative hypothesis claims that the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey.

The latter hypothesis was recently backed up by a seminal study led by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, which was published in the journal Science. Here’s an animated map that illustrates the results of that research.




Politics behind the theory

For a dry thesis on human prehistory, the Indo-European theory of migration has caused enormous upheavals in the modern world. Because these initial Indo-European speakers had been able to get about and, in many cases, managed to spread their culture around, a certain Mr Hitler, who considered himself a descendant of these people – the Aryans – mangled the theory into one of racial supremacy.

Race as a concept is mostly nonsense but the damage that Hitler caused with it meant that academics stopped using the word “Aryan” lest anyone think they were talking of a blue-eyed, blonde-haired alpha people (although Indian text books are yet to get the memo). “Indo-European” is the correct term now.

While the Nazis had gone overboard in their acceptance of Aryan migration, at the other end of the spectrum, many of the very people who had coined the word “Aryan” have rejected it completely.

The Hindutva out-of-India myth

In India, driven by the 20th-century ideology of Hindutva, which made nationality a matter of historical association with the subcontinent, a few people vehemently dismissed this now-standard academic consensus of migrants from the north-west bringing into India key cultural markers such as the nascent Vedic religion and early forms of Sanskrit, the liturgical language of modern Hinduism.

Instead, hemmed in by doctrine, Hindutva ideologues such as Belgian Indologist Koenraad Elst try and explain the massive spread of Indo-European languages by postulating that the original home of these Aryans was India – a theory almost as ridiculous today as Intelligent Design or a Flat Earth Hypothesis.

With the Hindutva ideology gaining popularity, you now have a huge number of people who consider this sort of dodgy stuff to be authentic. And as we can see from peeping across our western border, believing in a wonky, made-up history can have terrible consequences.

Rajnath's Maharana Pratap vs Akbar diatribe marks the complete communalisation of Indian history

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First published on Scroll.

Of the many ways a sidelined minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party government can grab some attention, nothing seems to be more effective than stirring the communal pot. That’s exactly what Home Minster Rajnath Singh did on Sunday, hinting at a grand epithetical conspiracy to deny Mewar’s ruler, Maharana Pratap Singh his due, even while setting up a comparison with Pratap’s contemporary, Mughal emperor Akbar, who fought Pratap in the Battle of Haldighati in 1576.

Our text books have not been able to fully recognise Maharana Pratap's contribution and significance in India's history.

— Rajnath Singh (@BJPRajnathSingh) May 17, 2015

If Akbar can be called 'Akbar the Great' for his contribution then why can't Maharana Pratap be recognised as 'Maharana Pratap the Great'

— Rajnath Singh (@BJPRajnathSingh) May 17, 2015 

Maha meaning

Secret conspiracies and shadowy visions of victimisation are, in many ways, the bread and butter of the Hindutva ideology that Rajnath Singh subscribes to – a rare case of a majority group running afraid of a minority. In this case, though, the patent absurdity of Rajnath’s Singh’s victimisation complex can be seen from the fact that "maha"’ – the prefix in Pratap’s title of "Maha-rana" – in a number of Indian languages, including Singh’s mother tongue of Hindi, literally means “great”.

@BJPRajnathSingh there's already a Maha in his name. Do you propose calling him Ultramaharana Pratap?

— oculus (@daddy_san) May 17, 2015 

Great Rana Pratap The Great... This changes everything! https://t.co/YYYnB11WUc

— Ashwin Mushran (@ashwinmushran) May 17, 2015

Like the absurdity of the accusation that the descriptor “great” isn’t associated with Pratap Singh’s name, the underlying charge that somehow India’s official histories give more primacy to Akbar, over his adversary Pratap is absurd.

Akbar forgotten, Pratap remembered Far from mollycoddling Akbar, modern-day India, in a willful act of amnesia, seems to have completely forgotten one of its most impactful rulers. Let us take public works, given their high visibility: there seem to be no roads, roundabouts, airports or museums named after Akbar, post-1947. There is an Akbar Road in Lutyens’ Dehi but credit for that goes to the British, who made sure that their new capital city embedded the historical memory of the seven cities of Delhi. Akbar might have been one of the most enlightened rulers of his age whose actions would shape the subcontinent for centuries, but for the modern Indian state, he seems to be a persona non grata.

In comparison, the Indian state takes great care to publicly remember Maharana Pratap. Kolkata has a park named after him, Mumbai a chowk and Lucknow a road. Udaipur’s airport is called the Maharana Pratap Airport and Delhi’s interstate bus terminal is named after the Rana. Equestrian statues of Pratap abound across India, with one even making it to Parliament – one of only three medieval rulers to be so feted (the other two being Ranjit Singh and Shivaji).

Clearly then, Rajnath Singh’s paranoia of Akbar swamping Pratap in India’s historical memory is just that – paranoia.

Material impact

What is interesting in this massive imbalance in the way India fetes Pratap over Akbar is, materially, how much more impactful the latter was compared to the former. Akbar laid the foundation of an empire that ruled the subcontinent for three centuries. The structure of governance he set up was adopted by the Raj and elements of it still exist today. The musicians he patronised fundamentally impacted Indian music and our modern songs and films still feature tunes composed in Akbar’s court. The religious scholarship that was undertaken in his kingdom defines our theology today: Tulsidas was a subject of Akbar’s.

Pratap, on the other hand, was the rule of small principality which, soon after his death, merged with the Mughal empire. The material sphere of his impact, by extension, will obviously be magnitudes smaller than Akbar’s.

But, it might be argued, material impact isn’t everything. Pratap’s tale of holding out against an overbearing foe is a gripping and inspiring tale. Fair enough.

Some heroes are more equal than others

But India has a rich history and there are other tales of valour: one is the story of Chand Bibi, the remarkable Queen Regent of Ahmednagar, a Sultanate in the Deccan. Chand Bibi, like Pratap, also defended her kingdom against the forces of Emperor Akbar in the face of overwhelming odds. And she did it as a woman, with all the difficulties that would entail. In a fascinating bit from historian Richard Eaton’s book, A Social History of the Deccan, a Mughal general mocks Ahmadnagar’s diplomat, Afzal Khan, calling him a “eunuch” for fighting under a woman. In a line that Bollywood would take up after four centuries, Khan simply stated that he had “eaten the salt of the Sultans of the Deccan” and would die for them.

In spite of this, Chand Bibi is a forgotten figure. There are no airports, roads or bus terminals named after her for her courage. No roundabouts with her perched atop a rearing steed.

We see the same dialectic at play with Shivaji in his battles against Aurangzeb. Chand Bibi was the first of many powers in the Deccan to resist Mughal supremacy. Five sultanates in the Deccan countered Mughal belligerence as part of a long drawn out war and it was only Akbar’s great-grandson, Aurangzeb who was able to subdue them. Yet of all these tales of Deccan resistance, why is Shivaji the only one played up in the state’s histories and in the popular realm? Why is, say, Malik Ambar, Peshwa of Ahmednagar, who pioneered the light cavalry guerrilla tactics that Shivaji would use later on, forgotten?

Hindu-Muslim narrative

If the unique key to being remembered in modern India is not material impact or even intangibles like valour, what is it? What separates out Shivaji from Chand Bibi or Malik Ambar in the Deccan. And from the Battle of Haldighati, why is Pratap remembered but Akbar and the general commanding the Mughal army, Man Singh of Amber, left to fade out?

The answer it seems is a narrative that sets up a millenarian belief in communal conflict – a largely imagined Hindu-Muslim crusade. Anything that can be force-fitted into this narrative seems to be worth celebrating as a part of the history of modern India. Anything that doesn’t is forgotten. Shivaji versus Aurangzeb plugs in to this narrative as does Maharana Pratap against Akbar. Both Pratap and Shivaji are presumably glorified for supposedly fighting Muslims. Man Singh, Akbar’s general is forgotten. As are the exploits of Chand Bibi and Malik Ambar in the absence of any overarching narrative of Hindu-Muslim conflict.

History is often seen as a passive recording of events gone by. Far from it, it is an active process of creating a past and is informed as much by our present as by previous events. It seems that when we create our national histories, we require a mirror of our 20th century obsession with communal categories.

Jinnahesque gesture

This is something that Muhammad Ali Jinnah had bought up in 1940 as he laid out his arguments for what he believed would prove the existence of the “Two Nation Theory”.

“It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different, and different episode[s]. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats overlap. “  

There are a great many ideas that have been relegated to obsolescence since 1940 but Jinnah’s malevolent history lesson still rings true, it seems. Rajnath Singh’s Pratap versus Akbar is a small illustration. Narendra Modi himself made his views quite clear when he announced, soon after being sworn in as prime minster, that he considers the past “1,200 years” of Indian history a period of “slavery”. For Modi, literally not a single Indian Muslim ruler could be a positive part of the nation’s history. Moreover, to mark Modi’s first anniversary in office, the BJP is planning a celebration of India’s Hindu historical icons.

The Jinnahesque prescription of deriving inspiration from different sources of history, one apparently Hindu and the other apparently Muslim, it seems has now taken root in the highest echelons of India’s government. Acche din, indeed.

Partition and Two Petitions

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In 1906, the Aga Khan led his (in)famous deputation to the then Viceroy of India, Lord Minto, a person now immortalised for generations of Calcuttans as a rather important bus stop, Minto Park.

The deputation asked for two things: separate electorates based on communal lines and "adequate Muslim representation" that would take into account not merely the numerical strength of India's Muslims but also "their political importance" and "the value of their contribution which they make to the defence of the Empire".

This led to the Indian Councils Act of 1909, commonly known as the Morley- Minto Reforms, which bought a measure of representation to Indians for the first time but with separate electorates. The deputation was also one of the drivers for the founding of the Muslim League in Dhaka later on that year.

Why did the Aga Khan take this step clearly against what is considered a near-sacred principle now, one man, one vote? The reason was that the north Indian Muslim elite were worried that representative democracy with a limited franchise (based on education and wealth) along with communal voting blocks made caste Hindus easily the most important power centre in the United Provinces, replacing the largely Muslim, Awadh Elite. This formulation was meant to stem that inevitable tide.

Mirror petition

While this incident is (quite correctly) stressed highly in standard Indian historiography as a key milestone on the road to Partition, another strikingly similar petition is usually left out in this as causation. This petition was also sent by a communal minority who were once an unquestioned elite but now felt the heat of democratic representation bear down on their power.

The petition was sent by a very large section of Bengali Hindu bhadralok to the Secretary of State, Lord Zetland in 1934. And since, in the end, it was Bengal and not the United Provinces that was partitioned, it could be argued quite convincingly that this petition had a far larger effect on the final events of 1947 than the Aga Khan's.

Background: in 1932, the British introduced something called the Communal Award which, in Bengal, made population the basis for awarding seats to different communities. This might seem blindingly obvious now, given how universal adult franchise is so widespread, but in United Bengal, till then, as a result of limited franchise based on wealth and education, Bengali Hindus had more seats than Bengali Muslims, in spite of being a numerical minority.

Loss of power

The 1932 award, by reversing that principle of awarding representation on the basis of wealth and education and now awarding seats on the basis of overall population, alarmed the elite Bengali bhadralok who had dominated the province till then, a little like the Awadh Elite, pre-1857.

The petition, therefore, just like the Aga Khan's sought to soften the blow of majority rule.

It argued that the Communal Award, by simply counting heads, had ignored the “enormously predominant role that [Hindus] have played under British rule in the intellectual, cultural, political, professional, and the commercial life of the province’. The memorial continued on with some numbers: "Hindus of Bengal though numerically a minority, are overwhelmingly superior culturally, consisting as much as 64% of total literate population and more than 80% of school going population. Their economic preponderance is equally manifest in the spheres of the independent professions and commercial careers making up nearly 87% of the Legal, 80% of the Medical and 83% of the Banking, Insurance and Exchange business’.

The petitioners therefore objected "strongly against the unfair and unprecedented provision to protect a majority community by conferring upon it a position of permanent and statutory predominance in the legislature and making that position unalterable by any appeal to the electorate".

The bhadraloks who sent this plea – to not base political representation directly on the basis of population – included a veritable who's who of Bengal at the time: Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chatterjee (the author of Devdas), PC Roy (the chemist), Nil Ratan Sarkar (physician), SP Mookherjee (Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University and later part of Nehru's cabinet) and BP Singh Roy (Former Land Revenue Minister).

"National" to "communal"

This represents a remarkable change in attitude of the bhadralok who had once thought of themselves as purely Bengali in identity and above communal markers. For example, in 1905, they had strongly resisted the partition of Bengal on communal lines. Historian Bidyut Chakrabarty, in his book, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, comments on this change:

"If it is contrasted with the 1905 partition, the second partition [of Bengal, in 1947] is a paradox of history. In 1905, the Hindus had opposed the division and the Muslims wanted it. In 1947, the Muslims were opposed to it while the Hindus were in favour. There was a complete reversal of the Bengali Hindu attitude."

Gandhi had once remarked on how Muslims had never seen themselves of as a minority under Mughal rule but did so in colonial-and-soon-to-be-Independent India. Of course, that journey from "Hindustani" to "Muslim", under the new pressures of representative democracy, is typified by the Aga Khan's deputation. And, in a striking parallel, the journey of the bhadralok from "Bengali" in 1905 to "Hindu" in 1947, asking for the partition of Bengal, is typified by the 1934 petition,

A new Gandhi museum in Gujarat does a good job of showcasing Modi

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Arun Shourie, one of the Indian right’s most influential intellectuals, last week sharply criticised the Narendra Modi government for a host of things, including the prime minister’s monogrammed pinstriped suit. “You cannot take Gandhiji’s name and wear such a thing,” he said, referring to Modi’s expedient use of Gandhi’s name while doing the opposite of what the Mahatma would have prescribed.

There are many claimants to the award for Best Politician in a Faux Gandhian Role and, Modi is in exalted company here, starting right from Jawaharlal Nehru himself. But the suit incident highlighted by Shourie isn’t Modi’s best performance in that category. That would have to be Dandi Kutir, a massive memorial dedicated to the Mahatma in Gandhinagar in Gujarat, which opened to the public in January.

Gandhinagar is an unusual Indian town for two reasons: it has great infrastructure and (almost) no people. Towering above the sleepy town is a tan-coloured cone as tall as a high-rise. This is Dandi Kutir, built in the shape of a mound of salt to commemorate Gandhi’s salt satyagraha. I’m not sure why they decided to colour what was supposed to be a mound of salt, tan and not white, but then this was only the first of many incongruences on my visit to this museum.

Striking structure

Spread over 15 acres, the Dandi Kutir complex is a part of the Mahatma Mandir, an impressive business convention centre, initiated by the state government when Modi was the chief minister. Chromatic verisimilitude aside, the massive cone of the Dandi Kutir looks rather striking. It is ringed by a series of administrative offices and the best government-built loos I have ever had the pleasure of using – a definite mark of getting their priorities right.

After 10 minutes of walking around with a growing sense of admiration, my balloon was punctured a bit when I reached the gates of the museum and was told it was just about to go into a one-hour lunch break. “Actually, come back in an hour-and-a-half,” said the man at the counter. “It takes time for people to gather up and we only open after lunch, when we have a crowd of at least 15 visitors.”

No matter: guess it’s difficult to get rid of all sarkaariness at once.

Thankfully, they let me wait inside the air-conditioned cone. The museum was spread out across three vertical levels, connected by elevators and steel-and-glass catwalks which spanned from one end of the museum to the other. The cone’s apex had a skylight cut out and the strong summer sun shone in, lighting the interior up with natural light. It all looked impressively industrial and modern, so much so that it would have made the Mahatma turn in his grave should he have had one. The cornerstone of Gandhi’s economic philosophy rested on the rejection of Western-style industrialisation. For example, in Harijan in 1946, Gandhi wrote:

“I do not believe that industrialisation is necessary in any case for any country. It is much less so for India. Independent India can only discharge her duty towards a groaning world by adopting a simple but ennobled life by developing her thousands of cottages [as industries] and living at peace with the world.”

Built on a budget of Rs 260 crore, there was not much in the space-age interiors of this museum built to commemorate Gandhi, which would remind one of a small-scale village industry.

Namo quiz

Some of this ideological confusion can perhaps be explained by the fact that the Dandi Kutir museum is only partially utilised for the commemoration of Gandhi. One portion of the structure is a meta-museum of sorts, which proceeds to explain how and why the Dandi Kutir was built, a fairly unique segment as far as museums go.

This bit, as it turns out, is dominated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A large LCD panel television has a video address by the prime minster on loop, telling us why and how he conceptualised this structure. Another backlit panel hails the museum as “a monumental tribute from one great visionary to another” while another congratulates “SHRI NARENDRA MODI, The Visionary Architect of Mahatma Mandir” even as Shri Narendra Modi smiles benignly from another panel, looking dapper in a beige Nehru Jacket.

It is this section which contained my favourite part of the entire museum: the “Namo Quiz”, a 60-question trivia quiz, hosted on a touchscreen console, entirely about the life of Narendra Modi. It was a tough quiz mind you and I, at least, didn’t do all that well. Some of the trickier questions are listed below for you to take a crack at:

1. “From which league (Sangh) Shri Narendra Modi took the training?” (Options: RSS, NSS, VSS, PSS).

2. “People know Shri Narendra Modi by which nick name?” (Options: Narema, Namo, Naren, Namohar).

3. “What kind of clothing Shri Narendra Modi likes to wear most?” (Options: Kurta-Chudidar, Pyjama, Pent-shirt, Jeans-T shirt, Zbba-Dhoti).

4. Separate questions on the names of his mother, father and, surprisingly, even his wife.

5. How many brothers and sisters, respectively, does Modi have?

6. “Which world famous magazine mentions Shri Narendra Modi as the most powerful man in the world?”

7. “Shri Narendra Modi strongly believes in _____.” (Options: Accommodation, Afford, Renunciation, Development).

8. “In childhood Shri Narendra Modi took which animal’s cub home adventurously?” (Options: Elephant, Camel, Crocodile, Horse).

9. “After the victory of 2014 Loksabha elections, what did his mother give him to eat?” (Options: Shira, Curd, Halva, Laps).

10. “What kind of exercise does Shri Narendra Modi does every morning? (Options: Jogging, Walking, Yoga, Running).

After this tough-yet-engaging quiz, the actual Gandhi museum paled somewhat in comparison. The museum also suffers from a fatal flaw, as far as museums go: there isn’t a single object or artefact on display.

Story of Gandhi

Instead, what it does do is tell the story of Gandhi using a mixture of animated short films, information panels and an audio guide, a rather simple task, which it does quite competently. It’s a direct telling of Gandhi’s life and sticks to much of the standard narrative that Indian school children have grown up with. Some of it is actually quite well done. For example, Gandhi’s travels across India, after he came back from South Africa, is shown via LCD panels fitted onto a mock third-class train compartment, which I thought was quite clever.

More of an amusement park than a museum, sure, but engagingly done nonetheless.

The one place the narrative becomes a bit odd is right at the end. And it’s an expected chink. The final audio segment relates how Nathuram Godse “tore through the crowd” and shot Bapu dead in a prayer meeting, but conspicuously stays away from the whys and wherefores of the act. No link is made between Partition and of Godse’s motivations, a belief that Gandhi was appeasing Muslims.

In fact, unlike the Namo Quiz, the audio narration of Gandhi’s assassination does not even care to ask: from which league (Sangh) Godse took the training?

And earlier piece on a touring the Nehru-Gandhi Museum, Anand Bhavan in Allahabad.

First published on Scroll.