The Political Evolution of Muslims in Tamilnadu and Madras 1930-1947

Title: The Political Evolution of Muslims in Tamilnadu and Madras 1930-1947
Author: J B P More
Publisher: Orient Longman, 1997 (First)
ISBN: 8125010114
Pages: 272

When Muslims demanded creation of a new Islamic state of Pakistan in the 1940s by dividing India, it evoked a range of emotions on Indians. For some, even the idea of vivisecting the motherland – Akhand Bharat – was anathema. Some others evaluated the Muslim demand on the basis of two-nation theory and looked at the scenario in a dispassionate way. The question was whether the two largest religious communities in India formed two separate nations. Eminent statesmen like Dr. Ambedkar studied the problem in detail and confirmed that there are no common historical antecedents which Hindus and Muslims shared together as matters of either pride or shame. In fact, one party’s episode of shame was the other party’s moment of pride. The invasions of Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Timur, Babur, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali and the ensuing devastation are matters of glory for the Muslims as these helped to implant the religion firmly on this ground. In the absence of a common feeling, Ambedkar rejected the Hindu view that the two communities formed one nation. The focus of the studies on the radicalization of Muslim politics and the accentuation of Muslim separatism during the 1930s and 40s were mostly north Indian Muslims. This book supplies that deficiency and is an analysis of the political evolution of the Muslims in the Tamil districts of the Madras Presidency under British rule. J B P More – Jean-Baptiste Prashant More – Is a French historian of Indian origin. He was born in Pondicherry and stays in Paris. His specialization is south Indian history. He has authored many books.

More introduces the historical background of the Muslim community from very early on and how they influenced politics in the region. Apart from brief incursions during the Sultanate period and in the Mughal era, the land was comparatively peaceful. On account of this short duration of Muslim political domination and the small Muslim population of 7 per cent of the total, division between Hindus and Muslims on the basis of religion did not appear to be very glaring. Two different streams of Tamil-speaking and Urdu-speaking people together formed the community of Muslims in Tamil Nadu. The cultural and social milieu of the Muslims was dominated by the Urdu-speaking aristocrats like the Nawab of Arcot while the Tamil-speaking faction was mainly traders or merchants, often very rich. The Nawab of Arcot owed his throne to the British and moved his seat to Madras in 1767 where the British were headquartered. However, the British abolished the Nawabship in 1855 and reduced him to the degree of a mere pensioner with a grand title of the Prince of Arcot. He was the president of the Madras unit of the Muslim League. The shortage in numbers was sought to be made up with conversions from Hindus which frequently caused social tension. The community was backward by the end of the nineteenth century as the Muslims did not opt for modern secular education introduced by the British, but resented the Hindus taking part in it and occupying positions in government. The Urdu-speaking Muslims were nostalgic about their past glory and regarded the British as usurpers. Times were changing however. English, Tamil and Telugu assumed more importance at the expense of Arabic, Persian, Urdu and the study of the Muslim religion.

In the description of the development of political awareness among Muslims, lack of meticulous depth is seen. Whatever he has included is provided in other books on this subject and nothing new is found. As an example, the continuous defeats and side-lining of Turkey in European politics which earned it the sobriquet of the ‘Sick man of Europe’ in the mid-1860s elicited anger and unrest in Indian Muslims, but this episode which is a harbinger of the Khilafat movement half a century later, is not at all considered for discussion. Even though Muslims constituted only 7 per cent of the population, communal riots occurred intermittently though not on the scale and severity of north Indian riots – except perhaps the 1921 Malabar riots which reached genocidal proportions. The Muslim League was formed in Madras as a sequel to the parent organization’s birth at Dhaka and it was led by Urdu-speaking aristocratic-merchant elite. They were part of the Deccan and north Indian Muslim tradition. The Urdu press of Madras tried their polarizing campaign by describing the Congress as a Hindu gathering, working in the interests of the Hindus. The Tamil- and Malayalam-speaking Muslims were said to be impervious to pan-Islamic sentiment and usually kept a low profile in politics until the launching of the Khilafat movement. Their behaviour underwent a sea change thereafter and became more conscious of their Islamic identity. This was the state of affairs when Indian politics was entering an explosive phase in the 1940s.

The development of the anti-Brahmin movement in the Presidency and its steadfast alliance to British interests and the Muslim League are clearly explained in this book. This was the precursor of the Dravidian movement which is still flourishing in Tamil Nadu today. A political set up known as the Justice Party contested elections from 1919 under British rule and formed ministries in Madras. This was while the Congress was boycotting these powerless legislatures. The Justice Party always sided with the British, but their government did not satisfy Muslim aspirations. Even though the Justice Party constituents were non-Brahmin but higher caste Hindus, their hatred towards Sanskrit and the Hindu religion was legendary. E V Ramasamy, the leader of the Self-Respect Movement, asked the untouchables to convert to Islam in 1919. Large scale conversions from lower castes to Islam began to take place in the 1930s. Muslim leaders made it a practice to celebrate such events in villages (p.91). This spawned a lot of communal unrest. An interesting thing to observe is that when communal disturbances occurred, the Muslims treated the entire Hindu community as one in inflicting damages. Several instances are recorded in this book involving Muslims fighting the Brahmins, intermediate castes and Dalits separately.

External observers of Islamic societies are usually reluctant to countenance the level of bigotry and fundamentalism that dictate those societies’ actions. Instead of examining whether a particular act was caused by any specific religious injunction or not, they assume economic/political factors behind it and arrive at very wrong conclusions. Instead of studying the target society comprehensively, they attempt to define those societies based on what they have learned as part of a western liberal education. This timidity bordering on fear of consequences is a characteristic of the scholars who try their best to avoid offending Muslim hardliners who are easily enraged by the slightest of provocations, however benign they might be. This author is also not different. However, he points out that the idea of secularism directly threatened Muslims’ historical conditioning where Islam occupied the central place which sought to control the actions of the believers individually as well as in groups. The author also makes a crucial observation that the population factor played an important role in communal riots. In all places where Muslims were concentrated or in sufficient numbers to form a compact block, there were systematic instances of riots (p.98). The book also includes a survey of the growth of educational institutions in the Presidency with special focus on how the Muslims utilized them in the twentieth century. The government went out of its way to establish separate schools for Muslims in addition to admitting them in common schools. Muslims, as a community, was lagging behind only the Brahmins but was far ahead of other Hindu communities. Further yielding to Muslim pressure, the government provided religious instruction for Muslims in common schools at taxpayers’ expense. The Hindus or Christians did not demand any such facilities and instead, high castes like Brahmins readily partook in modern education (p.86).

The Khilafat Movement viciously roused the communal sentiment among Muslims. Their political consciousness was again revived with the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s. When Congress changed its strategy to demand complete independence instead of dominion status, the true colour of nationalist Muslims came out. Yakub Hasan Sait severed his connection with Congress because he feared that Muslims won’t have the commanding position in an independent country the Congress was contemplating. Muslim leaders collectively condemned the Gandhian movement to be inimical to Muslim interests. Jamal Muhammad opposed the boycott call of foreign goods as they were sold in the shops owned by Muslims. In the 1937 elections, Muslim League won 6 out of 8 Muslim seats it contested in Madras. Jamal Muhammad, the leader of the Muslim League, contested from the general constituency of commerce and was soundly defeated by T T Krishnamachari, an independent candidate. The author then claims that Congress’ assuming office in 1937 without a coalition with the Muslim League was a blunder which contributed to radical Islamization of Muslim politics that led finally to the religious assertiveness of Muslims (p.151). This is plainly wrong and a stout refusal to see the elephant of Muslim fanaticism in the room. It won’t be mollified by anything other than total control of the society of believers and submission of unbelievers to it. Muslims then objected to singing Vande Mataram in the assembly and opposed the ban on cow slaughter proposed by the Congress. The party meekly yielded to Muslim demands and stopped singing of the patriotic song after a few weeks. Even the usually stubborn Dravidian leaders were also willing to bend over backwards to satisfy Muslim claims. When P. Khalifullah chided the Self-Respect Movement for being atheistic, E V Ramasamy capitulated and submitted that atheism was not part of the official program of the movement which in fact was garlanding Hindu idols with strings of footwear.

The author elucidates the bitter tale of how the South Indian Muslims eagerly supported the call for the division of India and creation of Pakistan. During World War II, the Madras Muslim League joined the pan-Indian struggle for Pakistan and extended support to the British war effort which the Congress boycotted. The Leaguers wasted no opportunity to seed discord among Hindus by carping on caste differences. They joined the Dravidian campaign against Brahmins and also against the ‘Aryan’ influence in Congress. Finding the time ripe for extracting his pound of flesh, E V Ramasamy came out with an outrageous demand for a new nation called Dravidastan roughly coterminous with South India to which Jinnah expressed his tacit backing. The entire Muslim community in Madras voted for Pakistan in 1946 as the Muslim League won all 29 Muslim seats in the assembly, securing 99 per cent of the votes in most constituencies. But it soon became apparent that the newly created Pakistan is intangible for Madras Muslims as they would not migrate to it. The Muslim leaders then put up a bold face and declared their unflinching loyalty to their religion. Mohammed Ismail, the President of the Madras Muslim League, boasted that ‘a Muslim is always a Muslim, a Muslim first and a Muslim last’ and that he was proud of being part of creating Pakistan (p.203). Ramasamy added fuel to the fire by observing India’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, but Muslims cleverly dissociated from him after 1947. The Muslims in Malabar was also wholeheartedly in favour of Pakistan. When it was clear that they will not be a constituent part of it, they demanded a separate state of Moplastan. The campaign included observing May 23, 1947 as Moplastan Day.

The depth of research in this book is quite shallow and never goes much lower than skin-deep. The author sidesteps the issue of fanaticism and believes that the Muslim community responded in ways put forward by European social theorists without any basis in fact. He claims that after 1930, general economic decline of Urdu-speaking Muslims led to their influence dwindling and economic prosperity of Tamil-speaking Muslims increasing. This assertion remains pure speculation and never substantiated. This might also be a feeble attempt to introduce an economic factor in the transformation of a Muslim society. More seems to be unaware of the people he was handling in this book. On page 215, he states that ‘if low caste Hindus were a majority in the border areas like the Muslims, they too would have demanded partition’. The stupidity of this comment is mind-boggling because the low-caste Hindus are indeed the majority not only in border states but in other provinces as well, except perhaps Uttarakhand. On the other hand, this is a wily argument to weigh in a geographical ballast into the Pakistan demand rather than the purely religious which it was. The author mentions the many ways in which conversion to Islam was being continuously taking place in the Presidency. The duplicitous nature of Sufis comes out in the open. They outwardly preached eclectic values but strictly maintained their Islamic identity and indulged in conversions on the sly. The copy of the book which I had used had 16 pages (p. 113-128) missing. Instead, a duplicate copy of pages 129-144 was found inserted.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Critical Mass

Title: Critical Mass – Decoding India’s Nuclear Policy
Author: Rajaraman R
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9789354359934
Pages: 450

When we were in college in the early 1990s, the suspense regarding India’s possession of nuclear weapons was an intriguing topic of debate. We were all unabashedly pro-nuclear: we wanted India to definitely possess nuclear weapons but not to use it till the last resort is exhausted. A nuclear test was conducted in 1974, but its euphoria had long died down. It was known that thanks to A Q Khan’s smuggling of nuclear material, Pakistan also possessed nuclear arms but they had not tested it. It was a nuclear ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ situation in the subcontinent. The uncertainty was dispelled on 11 May 1998 by the Shakti nuclear tests conducted by India at Pokhran and tests two weeks later by Pakistan. Both nations then officially declared to have possession of nuclear weapons. The US was totally taken off-guard by India’s testing and frankly, that was the icing on the cake. We were so overjoyed that for many years hence, ‘shakti’ used to be our computer password with some combination of letters or numerals. It was reported that the US President Bill Clinton came to know about it from TV news. Crippling sanctions on transfer of technology and supply of uranium for reactors were imposed on both nations soon thereafter. Anyway, the 1998 nuclear tests was a game changer. With it, India elbowed its way to the international high table. India’s rapid economic growth in the ensuing years finally convinced the US to allow it a one-time exemption from nuclear sanctions if India separated its civilian and military programs and subjected the civilian program to international surveillance and safeguards. A nuclear treaty was put in place in 2008 after more than three years of hard negotiations amid opposition from even the ruling party in both the countries. India also formulated a nuclear policy at this time which clearly defined its objectives in having nuclear weapons. R. Rajaraman was a renowned theoretical physicist of JNU who changed his theatre of work to nuclear policy issues and arms control after retirement. He has worked in international NGOs like International Panel of Fissile Materials (IPFM) and has attended numerous programs on nuclear issues and disarmament. Even though the author is ideologically positioned against nuclear weapons, he understood the futility of opposing it after 1998 and changed track to analyse the scenario objectively.

Being a physicist himself, Rajaraman clearly lists out the reasons for why India desperately wanted the post-1998 sanctions to end and reach a deal with the US which would automatically prompt other nations to follow suit. By 2020, it was estimated that the burgeoning energy demand of the nation would reach 300,000 MW of electricity. Out of this, 30,000 MW was to come from nuclear energy. However, uranium sources were very poor in India which could not meet the demand. Sanctions had caused the uranium supply to dry up. Another option was to ‘create’ uranium by transmuting thorium metal in a breeder nuclear reactor. But this technology was only in the design stages and tough technical challenges prevented its early maturing. Under the proposed deal, the civil and military programs were to be separated. India wanted to keep its fast breeder system in the military group but the US initially objected to it. Many, including the author, criticized India’s stand as it would torpedo the deal. India remained steadfast and negotiations remained in limbo for some time. Finally, the US blinked and the deal was signed. The author graciously acknowledges that ‘those observers, including myself, who felt that the Indian demand on the breeder was a deal breaker and should be softened in the higher interests of our nuclear energy needs turned out to be wrong’. This was made possible with a great deal of support extended by the then US President George W Bush in yielding to India’s demands. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged him for this, Singh was ridiculed by the Left intelligentsia. Rajaraman then quips that ‘it would only be poetic justice to rename the street in front of the what had been the world’s last leftist bastion – Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi – George W Bush Marg or Avenue’ (p.80). It should be remembered that the author was a teaching faculty at that institution for many decades.

Even though the nuclear deal was made functional at great risk of being aborted anytime in the middle, the author finds that India shot itself in the leg with a strange legislation whose only purpose was to scare away potential reactor suppliers. India passed a Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act in 2010 with stringent rules of compensation by the supplier in case of an accident attributable to negligence on their part. Even before reactors could be purchased and built, an extensive redressal system was put in place. In case of an incident, the reactor operator could sue the supplier if the incident was as a consequence of an act of the supplier which includes supply of equipment or service with patent or latent defects. No other country had stipulated such conditions for reactor purchases. When no supplier from the US, France or Russia was willing to enter into a contract on these terms, the government diluted the provisions. Supplier liability was then limited to the warranty period and capped at a fixed sum of Rs. 1500 crores. The book includes details of reactor negotiations with GE, Westinghouse and Areva. GE backed out due to the liability act while the others were mired in financial difficulties and bankruptcy. With the Fukushima reactor accident in 2011, many countries in the world chose to turn away from nuclear energy.

This book handles the issue of ‘credible minimum deterrent’ (CMD) in some detail which is the basis of India’s nuclear policy. This document states that India won’t use nuclear weapons first. But if it was attacked by nuclear weapons at home or wherever its troops are, it would retaliate with nuclear weapons to inflict an unacceptable damage on the enemy. A nuclear deterrent arsenal is required to convince the enemy of the stupidity of launching a first strike. The extent of the unacceptable damage is estimated and redundancy is added to arrive at the required number of warheads. However, the concept of deterrence necessarily assumes that the other side is rational who values human life. No deterrence is feasible against a suicidal jihadi group should one take over Pakistan as no amount of civilian deaths would deter them. Even Mao Zedong of China – may be only as a rhetoric – once declared that he was willing to sacrifice 300 million Chinese in a nuclear showdown with the US. The author then estimates that only two bombs are required as retaliation for a first strike on the major cities of Pakistan or China which would cause at least half a million deaths that is sufficient ‘unacceptable damage’. Hence he audaciously suggests just two bombs as sufficient CMD. This pittance is against thousands of nuclear warheads in China and hundreds in Pakistan. Why are our intellectuals so adamantly anti-national? The cold war arms race had accumulated around 60,000 warheads by both adversaries. The author suggests a ‘more is not better; less is enough’ principle. However, professionals in India’s nuclear technology front have outright rejected Rajaraman’s insinuations as ‘an amateurish oversimplification by a theoretical physicist unschooled in the complexities of nuclear technology’ (p.201). He then considers the delivery systems and concurs with the general view that the triad of delivery platforms such as land-based missiles (the Agni series), sea-based missiles from nuclear submarines and release from fighter jets. Assuming that many of them might be shot down by missile defence systems, conservative analysts feel that even 100-odd warheads will not be sufficient to arm the triad for ensuring minimum deterrence.

However cleverly one may play brinkmanship, the chance of getting struck by a nuclear bomb in a busy city cannot be entirely ruled out. This can also happen by accident or equipment malfunction even if not by intent. Rajaraman raises awareness of the requirement of a civil nuclear defence and complains that India has still not developed a system. The US had implemented several measures in the 1950s but the American civil defence was not revived once they petered out by the 1960s. Nobody finds it attractive enough to spend a lot of money on something that may never be used. The American public and government lost interest in maintaining such a high level of preparedness for an event that didn’t seem to be happening. Besides this may not even be practical in India because of the incredibly short time of response available to a missile launch from Pakistan. A nuclear device shot against India from the Sargodha air force base in Pakistan would reach Delhi in just six minutes! This book also hints that the Indian government should have conducted a referendum before going nuclear in 1998 because it was an existential issue for the public. Here again, he is demanding something from India which no other country had done before. In fact, this is an existential issue more for the author as his research, seat in international consultative bodies and stature are solely linked to his anti-nuclear stance. However, he is not much concerned about countries other than India possessing nuclear weapons.

An original idea which is fully explained in the book is estimating the casualty figures in case of a nuclear attack on an Indian metropolis. Based on international consensus charts, the author makes ballpark estimates of the number of civilian deaths in the event of a nuclear bomb exploding in various neighbourhoods of Delhi. This makes for sickening reading, but we must accept that it is a risk we have to contend with while living next door to our arch enemy who was willing to eat grass to get nuclear weapons. Rajaraman describes about the numerous international conferences on nuclear issues he had attended around the globe. Some photographs are included which do not go above the level of ‘selfies’. Many of these meetings were pointless exercises of academic-turned activists helping each other to make an item of expense acceptable to an auditor of the grants received by them. Many of them are simple gatherings of self-appointed arms control ‘experts’ running on liberal funding by American NGOs. The author’s criteria for evaluating the ‘success’ of such meetings verge on the comical. His estimate of the utility of such conferences is represented in such remarks as ‘they were attended by unprecedented number of heads of states’, ‘the set of invitees was very inclusive’, ‘the proceedings were very cordial’ etc. He has also shared the response of the official Indian delegation upon meeting him on the sidelines of such global meets. The officials considered him only as a rabble-rouser and won’t even talk to him even if he made an initiative to walk over to their seats to make a self-introduction. Reports of two such incidents are recorded in the book. International NGOs usually rank India very low in their much-trumpeted-yet-totally-worthless global indices. One such scheme is the Nuclear Security Index where India’s position is just two slots from the bottom. Rajaraman admits that this is due to the prejudice of the adjudicating members who are resentful of India not joining the NPT and peeved at its getting away from the consequences of the 1998 tests with a nuclear deal from the US.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Battle for Sanskrit

Title: The Battle for Sanskrit – Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred? Oppressive or Liberating? Dead or Alive?
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2016 (First)
ISBN: 9789351775386
Pages: 468

Sanskrit has been the language that united India culturally and politically for millennia till the time of Islamic invasions. Though a thousand years of disuse since that episode had sapped some of its vitality in the political arena, Sanskrit continues as a link language for the spiritually minded. During British occupation, the whole genre of Orientalist studies was created to search India’s canons and texts in Sanskrit with a view to tweak the colonial regime to increase its efficiency. The ancient law books had to be translated into English which were then thought to act as the standard on which justice would be dispensed to Indians. However at no point in the growth of Orientalism was it concerned with the eventual replacement of English with Sanskrit. It co-opted some Indians trained in Western methods to translate Sanskrit works to English. With the fall of colonialism, scarcity of resources drove Orientalist research from Oxbridge to American universities, especially Harvard. Several American scholars gained a masterful grasp of Sanskrit and began to study the literature in detail. Most of the present-day Indians don’t know Sanskrit. Hence it fills them with immense pride with some gullibility to see a Westerner handling the ancient language pretty well even though it may be as short as reciting a couplet. Internal defences are lowered as an outcome and the Western scholar is poised to enjoy unlimited power in controlling the flow of patronage and resources from rich Indian businessmen and religious institutions. This book warns about the assault on our Vedic traditions coming from an American school of thought whose fundamental assumptions are dismissive of the sacred dimension of the language. We should not be naïve to hand over the keys to our institutions to outsiders to represent our legacy. The book also seeks to wake up traditional scholars of Sanskrit about an important Western school of Sanskrit studies whose scholars are intervening in modern Indian society with the explicitly stated view of detoxifying it of ‘poisons’ allegedly built into Sanskrit and to dismantle the ‘oppressive’ mindset against Dalits, women and Muslims. Rajiv Malhotra worked as a senior executive in the software and telecom industries before becoming a management consultant. He took early retirement in the 1990s at the age of 44 and established Infinity Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Most of the discussion is based on the work and activities of Sheldon Pollock of Harvard and the group of scholars under his guidance. The author defines two categories of Sanskrit researchers. The Outsiders refer to people from Western academies and the Insiders denote the traditional scholars of the language. He warns that the Outsiders are highly vocal and public in championing their view. At the same time, some of the Insiders are so naïve that they feel flattered when the Outsiders show interest on them which is really intended to dismantle the traditional world view. These Western scholars are accused to have gone too far in prescriptive study rather than descriptive and are more like political activists representing a foreign perspective seeking to topple and demolish Indian sanskriti in its present form. The Outsiders are so powerful that they control many of the important international conferences on Sanskrit, the prestigious chairs of research activity, the best-paid academic jobs and the availability of grants for research work. It is to be specified here that the categorization of Outsiders and Insiders does not in any way infer ethnic or racial divide. It’s only the worldview of the groups that make the difference. Indian scholars who do their research in India but subscribe to the Western precepts also deserve the epithet of ‘Outsiders’.

Malhotra explains how the nucleus of Sanskrit studies was shifted from Britain to the US after the fall of colonialism and the development of a new American Orientalism. This differed in one more aspect with the colonial variety in that it was shaped by the white society’s conflict with indigenous tribes of America at the frontier and African slaves within. This victor-vanquished aspect was later extended to India. It applied the image of the ‘savage’ to those deemed ‘idol worshippers’, ‘primitive’, ‘lacking in morals’ and ‘prone to violence’ etc. It often stereotyped ‘savage’ culture as being oppressive towards its women, children and lower social strata, described as subaltern groups. The modus operandi of this American group is also explained. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Indian Left was stranded without a patron. Just as the CIA recruited the former Soviet nuclear engineers to work for the US, agencies such as the Ford Foundation appropriated them to serve the American academics in the humanities. These scholars quickly learned that a sure path to rapid advancement in the field was to produce research demonstrating that exploitation was built into Indian society. The idea that Western colonialism was a thing of the past is implicit in the term ‘post-colonial’ which they widely circulated. At the same instant, the concept that Sanskrit was still exploiting was given wide currency. Besides, the Indian Left lacked adequate knowledge of Sanskrit. Even eminent historians who interpreted ancient inscriptions such as Romila Thapar or Irfan Habib are ignorant of Sanskrit. This made them vulnerable to ridicule over silly errors in their treatises. This proved a serious handicap for Indian leftists against traditionalists. This gap is now filled by a group of politically charged American Sanskrit scholars with Marxist commitments. This book is, in fact, a battle cry against them.

What is truly shocking in the book is the author’s expose of Sheldon Pollock’s strategies – both overt and covert. Even though he is widely acclaimed as a great Sanskrit scholar, this book argues and proves that Pollock has a clandestine agenda to revamp Sanskrit heritage on the mould of American ‘woke’ values. Pollock criticised scholars who romanticized the Sanskrit tradition. He believes in the ethical responsibility of scholars to expose the oppressiveness he sees within the tradition and to eliminate it by re-engineering the tradition. He rejected the Vedic roots of the heritage terming them primitive, superstitious and discriminatory. Pollock superimposed on to Hinduism the Western divide between Biblical theology/liturgy on the one hand and the performing arts on the other. This was a failure to comprehend the dichotomy of Western art with its established puritanical religion as the former had originated from its ancient paganism. This was not the case in India. He sets out to decouple kavyas from the Vedas as belonging to a secular viewpoint and transcendence respectively. Malhotra asserts this to be totally wrong. A truly outrageous finding of Pollock is that Sanskrit is the source of Nazi evil. He claims that Nazism and British Indology were merely building on the socio-political oppression that had always existed in Sanskrit language. In effect, Pollock argues that Sanskrit is at the root of all evil in the world. Is this the indicator of a scholar’s love for the language he had studied for a lifetime? He then goes on to deny the originality of the ancient composers of Sanskrit. Vedic Brahmins are alleged to have copied the new literary Sanskrit developed by Buddhists and created Ramayana. According to Pollock, Ramayana is plagiarized from a Jataka story. He then claims that Ramayana was used by the Brahmin-Kshatriya aristocracy to arouse Hindus and demonize Muslim invaders from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. In short, even resisting the fanatic Muslim conquerors – who erected towers of skulls of men they killed and took their women and children as sex slaves – is a sin the Indians had committed!

Malhotra successfully peels off the false arguments enveloping Pollock’s idea one by one and eventually reaches the core which is shockingly illogical and fallacious. Pollock refers to karma as a form of fatalism; but equating karma with the Western concept of mechanistic fate is a profound misunderstanding. Karma is the result of prior actions and its future can be altered by new ones. Pollock’s next attempt is to strike at the fault lines of Indian society and cleave it into many pieces. Pollock deconstructs kavya with a singular view to interpret it as an expression of the aestheticization of political power, which is only a ploy to make the power look glamorous to the subjects of the king and to keep them obedient. It was primarily produced in the royal courts by resident royal poets who were complicit in the socio-political stratification and oppression of Dalits and women. Hindu kings used Sanskrit grammar also as a tool of oppression is the next item in the charge sheet. Correct order and structure of language were thought to lead to correct order and structure in society. He brings in this argument in analogy with medieval Europe where laws were imposed on speakers of certain languages with the clear intention to oppress them. This European parable is not at all applicable to India as no Hindu king had banned any language.

A detailed analysis of the duplicitous nature of Pollock’s intellect is given in this book. In fact, he is widely regarded as a friend of India who has dedicated a lifetime of research to Sanskrit studies. The Indian government had conferred on him the prestigious Padma Shri in 2010. He is a close friend of the philanthropic billionaires in India and is the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India in the US which was set up with funds from the family of the Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murty. In fact, the author came into the foreground when the Sringeri Matha established by Adi Shankara was planning to finance a research effort by Pollock and his cronies which would have inflicted damage on the sacred tradition of Sanskrit. The author’s intervention was just in time to put a freeze on that decision. Malhotra alleges that in the mainstream media, Pollock projects great love for Sanskrit to impress traditional Indians and their government. Yet in his academic writings he claims that praising Sanskrit amounts to a ‘farcical repetition of myths of primevality’ (p.275). Pollock’s tirades even challenge the integrity of India. He claims that there was no Indian nation or even Indian civilization. He implored scholars to explore the historical contingencies that made nation-states of France and England but not of Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra (p.311). He seems to be troubled with the state of affairs that India did not disintegrate into multiple nationalities.

The book is excellently structured and brilliantly argued with logical pleas and descriptive examples. However, the author gets a bit carried away while dealing with traditional studies of Sanskrit and its oral tradition. It is claimed that mantras are understood as corresponding to vibrations ‘serving as keys to higher states of consciousness’. Hence writing them down and translating it defeats the whole purpose. This argument does not seem to be much rational. The author calls for new itihasas and smritis to be written in Sanskrit. He suggests the two long-lived traumatic events in the last millennium: the Islamic invasions which peaked with Aurangzeb’s rule and the British colonialism as subject matter of the proposed literary venture. What makes this volume priceless is its extra-sharp analytics of Pollock’s academic corpus. He takes great pains to explain and illustrate the theories of Pollock such as ‘aestheticization of power’ to make it understandable to general readers as well. Roping in the traditionalists to understand and respond to Pollock’s claims is another aim of this illustrative discourse. Criticism against Pollock made by other western scholars such as J. Hanneder is also included. 

Rajiv Malhotra is a true nationalist who is ever on the lookout for movements against the nation. One of his immensely prescient books is ‘Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault-lines’ which was reviewed earlier here.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

India Unbound

Title: India Unbound – From Independence to the Global Information Age
Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2000)
ISBN: 9780143419259
Pages: 419

A big contradiction lies at the heart of the perception of Indian society regarding the growth of its economy in the last three decades, especially after the great Liberalization of 1991 put forward by Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. It emancipated the economy and unleashed its animal spirit which was kept in bondage for four decades by the debilitating chains of Nehruvian socialism. Truly, 1991 can be designated as the year of India’s economic independence. But the irony is that most Indians still believe that the market makes ‘the rich richer and the poor poorer’ which would lead to corruption and crony-capitalism. The 1991 reforms and its aftereffects catapulted India to the position of the fifth largest economy in the world and lifted 415 million people out of poverty in the last fifteen years. Despite the market having generated widespread prosperity over two decades, people still distrust it and the nation continues to reform by stealth. This book is a jewel of sorts; you would find hundreds of books criticizing liberalization churned out by political and academic factories of the Left but rarely a book of this kind appears. It is in its core a biography of the author, but examines the Indian economy also in parallel. Das explains why the 1991 reforms was essential, how it progressed, what were the areas which needed accelerated reform and the changes it has wrought in Indian society. Gurcharan Das graduated in philosophy from Harvard and was CEO of Procter & Gamble India. He was instrumental in setting up the market for Vicks Vaporub, which is an American product. After taking early retirement at 50, he became a writer and consultant who give time only to young and promising companies.

This book is a must-read for those who want to understand how India failed to get its objectives correct. The leaders of the freedom struggle – Gandhi and Nehru – used their influence over the masses in a way harmful for them as well as for the nation. Fallacious arguments captivated the public mind such as ‘small companies are better than big ones’ (Gandhi), ‘public enterprises are better than private ones’ (Nehru) and ‘local companies are better than foreign ones’ (both). They so mesmerized India that the succeeding generation whose job was to jettison these foolish ideas, failed to do so and did us incalculable harm. And what did they achieve after half a century of mixed economy? After 50 years, the failure was staggering: 40 per cent of Indians were still illiterate, half were miserably poor earning less than a dollar a day, one-third of the people did not have access to safe drinking water, and only a sixth of the villages had modern medical facilities. In the end, this meant two generations who missed the opportunities. Instead of socialism, this path led to a corrupt, domineering state. Narasimha Rao was also forced by the IMF to bring in meaningful reforms. The 1991 Liberalization opened the economy to foreign investment and trade. It dismantled import controls, lowered customs duties, devalued the currency and virtually abolished the licensing controls on private investment. The reforms drastically cut down the tax rates and broke public sector monopolies. Growth immediately picked up to 7.5 per cent and foreign exchange reserves shot up from 1 billion to 20 billion USD. The author however notes that though the license raj was done away with, the inspector raj is still intact. The reforms are only half complete. This book was written in 1999, but the observed shortcomings still exist in the system.

The author remarks that the immediate post-independence years were a time of centre-left ideology in many countries and in fact Nehru was in sync with Fabian socialists of the UK. During his college days at Harvard, Das noted that students were left-of-centre in thought and were concerned with redistribution of wealth and ignored the whole subject of wealth creation. Many of India’s intellectuals and policy makers were trained in the West and suffered the same blind spot. Most of the teachers also had an anti-business bias which reinforced the student prejudices. Developmental economists thought that growth would provide jobs, raise incomes and pull up people from poverty. However, East Asia realized the futility of this policy after a decade or so of experimentation. They quickly changed track and went back to market-oriented reforms. But in India, the failed policies were consolidated under Indira Gandhi. She further tightened the rules which were already taut. It was the period in which the author completed his education and joined Richardson Hindustan which produced the ubiquitous balm of India – Vicks Vaporub.

Gurcharan Das provides an excellent survey of the misfortune that is euphemistically called Nehruvian socialism or the mixed economy. The 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution was a great blunder of Nehru and his planning advisor Mahalanobis. It reserved seventeen sectors exclusively for state enterprises. When G D Birla requested for permission to start a steel plant, consent was denied! The Tatas made 119 proposals between 1960 and 1989 to start new businesses or expand old ones and all of them ended in the bureaucratic files. Nehru in his naivety dampened the competitive spirit of India’s entrepreneurs when he innocently enquired of the need for having ‘nineteen brands of toothpaste’ (p.153). Another ‘gem’ of stupidity came later when Nehru declared in parliament that ‘public sector’s aim is not to make profit but to meet social objectives’. He nationalized a number of industries without adequately compensating the owners. His public sector was marked by low return on capital, lack of autonomy and accountability of senior managers. The supreme leader’s callous attitude did not instill in them a concern for profit and efficiency. In fact, this complacency to profits continued until recently till the government linked the employees’ wage revision to the company’s profitability.

If Nehru’s economic policy was unfortunate, Indira Gandhi’s trajectory was nothing short of a disaster. Since the author was personally at the receiving end of some of her bad policies, he argues with spirit and conviction. Under her tenure, India withdrew further from world trade, raised tariffs and taxes even higher and became one of the worst performing economies. He estimates that Indira’s follies cost about 1.3 per cent lower in terms of GDP per year. The stringency of laws was in direct proportion to corruption. It could also be that the rules were hardened to thoroughly milk the industry in terms of kickbacks. The MRTP act brought in to curb monopolistic and restrictive trade practices in 1969 was so draconian that it crippled private industry for a generation. Under this law, any business group with combined assets worth rupees 20 crores or above was declared a monopoly and effectively debarred from expanding its business and placed under strict anti-monopolistic supervision and control. Rajiv Gandhi ‘graciously’ raised the limit to rupees 100 crores, but Narasimha Rao entirely scrapped this ridiculous law. Pranab Mukherji, who was the finance minister of Indira and later the nation’s president, was totally closed to any new idea and embarrassingly arrogant when he answered questions (p.197). The Janata party which replaced Indira continued to hoist Gandhian socialism and sacrificed growth. They reserved 863 industries for the small sector. Only entrepreneurs who invested less than rupees 60 lakhs could enter one of these industries. Competition from large and medium enterprises vanished and the sector moved into paralysis. A great irony of this period was that some of the future champions of the 1991 Liberalization were part of the government and responsible for some of its stringent regulations. There were many outstanding economists in government and academia such as I G Patel and Manmohan Singh who didn’t blow the whistle. They kept serving a morally bankrupt system for years, providing it with intellectual respectability and support.

The author joined Vicks very early and has contributed a great deal in making the product widely acceptable and used. It is amusing to learn that people thought it to be an original Ayurvedic remedy while in fact it was researched and developed in the US. It was only in the 1980s that it was marketed as Ayurvedic after ascertaining that its constituents were described in Ayurvedic textbooks. Their efforts to ensure customer satisfaction at every level of the employees are enlightening. Having partnered and worked with foreign and Indian professionals for many decades, Das feels that Indians are not good at working as a team. He claims that the poor teamwork of Indians is a festering, chronic disease. This divisive character is a national competitive disadvantage. A recurring refrain in the book is that intellectuals have not been able to sell the 1991 Reforms to the common public as a beneficial thing. Most of the people who really understand it remain mute while the politically motivated gang continuously point to the mindless jargon of ‘growing inequality’ as something that is going to seriously affect the lives of the less well-off. This book provides several arguments to decimate such propaganda of naysayers. The author comments in this regard that greater benefits owned by a few could be justified if the inequality improved the situation of the poor. A CEO earns many times more salary than the ordinary workers, but they consent to it as long as it motivated him to earn more profit to the company and the workers get higher wages as a result.

The book includes biographical sketches of Aditya Birla, Dhirubhai Ambani and Sam Pitroda as a kind of motivational story for young entrepreneurs. The latter parts of the volume deals with a review of the 1991 reforms and the areas which have not improved in the year 1999 when this book was written. A drawback is that it includes long sermons to the government, politicians, businessmen and the people which can be a bit tiring for the readers. This edition of the book is published in 2015 and includes a fresh Introduction and Afterword which brims with claims of vindication of the author’s original arguments. His viewpoints are very bold and are excellent examples of out-of-the-box thinking. Das presents data to show that the British rule was not so damaging to India on the economic front, particularly after the last decades of the nineteenth century. Running the empire was definitely not a hugely profitable enterprise. Several grave blunders of Nehru’s economic policy are listed in the book which can supplement Rajnikant Puranik’s famous book, ‘Nehru’s 97 Major Blunders’ and would help him complete a century and a few more points. You can find my review of that book here.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Title: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
Author: Slavenka Drakulic
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2016 (First published 1992)
ISBN: 9780060975401
Pages: 197

There were times at the peak of the Cold War when the world was really nervous about the prospect of a false step from one of the rivals unintentionally setting in motion a nuclear holocaust. Fortunately, one of the contenders – the Communists – collapsed surprisingly quickly in the matter of around three years straddling 1990. The people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe found themselves standing exposed to the world one fine morning. The new world which they saw unfolding right in front of their eyes was full of challenges of the new capitalist system. How they coped with this ‘revolutionary’ change is a question that becomes relevant only after their life under the communist system is studied in detail. There are several books on this interesting topic and their perspectives also differ widely. This book provides a refreshingly new viewpoint and aspires to provide a snapshot of the lives and feelings of the unfortunate men and women – mostly women – who had had no option but to stay under the yoke of communism. The book is dedicated to all women of Eastern Europe, who too made possible the changes in 1989. It tells some anecdotes about how they lived a joyless existence where the seventy years of communism’s authoritarian rule could not provide them with their most basic needs. Slavenka Drakulic is a respected journalist and cultural commentator of Croatia. Her works had appeared in major world journals. She was one of the founders of the network of eastern European women’s groups. She has also produced three other books. This book covers the life in the former Yugoslavia of which Croatia was a part and is based on the author’s firsthand experiences and interviews with women in other communist regimes in the critical period of the dismantling of socialism.

Drakulic presents a fine view of how life was under the repressive Communist state and its never-ending status quo of ordinary life. One was trained to fear change, so that when change eventually began to take place, one was suspicious and afraid, because every change one has ever experienced was always for the worse. What Communism instilled in its victims was the sense of immobility, the absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining their lives differently. Everything in society or any abstract idea was first tested on the touchstone of ideological consistency with Marxist-Leninist thought. Growing up in a Communist country, one learns very young that politics is an abstract concept but a powerful force influencing people’s everyday lives. The state intruded into every minutiae of ordinary life. The political authority and the trivia of daily living were inseparably connected. The author then asserts that communism, more than a political ideology or a method of government, is a state of mind. Everyone watched their steps and felt the breath of the state’s censors behind their neck. The socialist state had also brought to perfection the social game called ‘reading between the lines’. The censoring was harsh and the punishment for even minor infractions matched it.

A good part of the book details how the people of a socialist state always lived with shortages of essential goods. All means and methods of production were under state control and a bunch of bureaucrats decided what to produce and how much of it. This created imbalances such that any item could go out of stock any time. People developed the precautionary habit of storing everything that went through their hands – whether useful or not because you never knew when it might become useful. The planned economy and industrialization drive didn’t care for small things in life. Consumer goods were of poor quality and unappealing. It is the superiority of the West in mass-producing cheap, good quality consumer goods that dazzled the people of socialist states and made them look at their system with inward contempt and suppressed anger. Aesthetics was considered superficial, bourgeois invention. Women were declared equal to men and the state saw no point in them trying to look beautiful! They were made to work everywhere proving that they were even physically equal. The communist ideal was a robust woman who didn’t look much different from a man. Without a choice of cosmetics or clothes, with bad food, hard work and no spare time, it wasn’t hard to create a uniformity that comes out of an equal distribution of poverty and the neglect of people’s real needs. As a result, women in Eastern Europe looked tired and older than they really were. People were instructed to be good workers and party members. To cultivate individualism, to perceive oneself as an individual in a mass society, was looked down upon. Communism liked the homogeneity of cattle a better role model than the fissiparousness of a free-thinking human society.

Continuing with the analogy to cattle, we read about instances where the state control over an individual’s life was suffocatingly tight. Life under communism lacked any kind of privacy. Everybody was comrade to everybody else and every member watched over the life of others because only when there is no privacy can there be total control. Besides, the thinking was that why one needs privacy if he has nothing to hide? In communist Yugoslavia, the state found a novel way to address shortage of housing which the author experienced and describes. The government divided big apartments into rooms, forcing complete strangers to live in a kind of commune. Socialism feared privacy in each of its manifestations. There was only one state-owned channel on television, broadcasting programs designed to brainwash people and bore them to death. However, the party/state functionaries were a class of its own and enjoyed a life fuller and richer than the ordinary comrades. It was hard for common folk even to peek into their houses, protected by high walls, watchmen and dogs and a general element of fear. Consequently, many people ran away from their homes and crossed the border to the West at great risk. They were so desperate and determined to escape the clutches of communism that they ignored the risk of guards shooting them dead if their movement was detected. The author talks about a museum in former East Germany where the devices people created to escape out of their dreary and worthless existence are displayed. This includes a home-made submarine which sailed under the Baltic Sea to reach Denmark. There’s a small aircraft with a car motor, a hot air balloon and a chair-lift with rope using which a whole family escaped.

The author was surprised to see several beggars going about the streets in US cities soliciting something from passersby. It was new to her. Whatever may be its shortcomings, the socialist state had ensured that nobody wandered the streets aimlessly except the gypsies who didn’t count. The cutthroat nationalism of the constituent provinces was also kept under check as long as communism reigned. The first thing people experienced in a state de-shackled from the communist yoke was the civil war that broke out between the different provinces. The warring nations had restarted their fight which was cut off after World War II when socialism had enveloped them. For 45 years, within the iron embrace of the communist party, the wounds of nationalism had not healed. Instead, they were simply ordered to disappear. Drakulic also identifies a deep trait of the socialist society regarding the passivity or detachment of the people in the administration of their social assets. Cities in Eastern Europe fell into decrepitude relatively fast. Low quality of paint, pollution, bad gasoline and bad cars were reasons of this but not the whole story. What caused this degeneration were the people themselves with decades of apathy behind them. Their conviction was that somebody else – the government, the party or those ‘above’ – was in charge of it. How could it be the people when they were not in charge even of their own lives?

The author declares at the outset that this is not a story of big heroes, political prisoners or dissidents, but of ordinary people – especially women – who were under the wheel of communism’s juggernaut who couldn’t stand it anymore. Since it came from the very foundations like a cataclysmic earthquake, the socialist regimes fell like dominoes one by one rather quickly. Readers can enjoy the biting sarcasm displayed in the book against the socialist state thinking big and omitting the mundane things useful in the daily lives of the people. The book is also noted for subtle humour and sarcasm. Political ones aside, she describes about a window-shopping trip in New York with a friend and remarks that ‘due to the fact that we had no money, we were enjoying the expensive clothes just as someone would enjoy an exhibition of modern art’. Most likely the book is a compilation of articles the author had written on journals as all chapters are of equal length. Unfortunately, the author has not examined much on the life of the nomenklatura – the top brass of the party and government – who enjoyed all luxuries of life while almost all others in the country languished in squalor.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Developmental Modernity in Kerala

Title: Developmental Modernity in Kerala – Narayana Guru, SNDP Yogam and Social Reform
Author: P. Chandramohan
Publisher: Tulika Books, 2019 (First published 2016)
ISBN: 9788193926987
Pages: 260

The state of social reforms and standard of living varied much among the British Indian provinces and native states neighbouring them in the colonial period. Even among the princely states, matters differed very much. Travancore was a model state among them having high literacy, emancipation of the backward castes and better healthcare systems as compared to other states. Social reforms implemented in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the little southwestern kingdom were the fountainhead for the onset of modernity in Travancore. The reforms in society and transformation of the economy went hand-in-hand to usher in development in all spheres of life. This book explains the development of modernity in Travancore and the social work of Sri Narayana Guru and SNDP Yogam which acted complementary to open up a modern state along the lines of a constitutional monarchy. It nicely describes how the reforms sought to create a social climate for modernization. P. Chandramohan retired as curator of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi after having served in various positions in that institution for over thirty years. He is a scholar politically oriented towards the Left and this book is an attempt to ‘prove’ that the reform movement in Kerala followed Marxist precepts on the origin and development of social classes and the struggle between them. The book is an academic product of JNU and is a revised version of the author’s M. Phil dissertation which was submitted at its Centre for Historical Studies in 1982. The narrative covers the time interval from around 1891 in which the Malayali Memorial was submitted and till 1936 when all government temples in Travancore were thrown open to all Hindus irrespective of caste differences.

The subject matter of the book primarily deals with the Ezhava community, Sri Narayana Guru who rose up spiritually from its ranks and the community’s social organisation called Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (hereafter referred as SNDP Yogam). The Ezhavas constituted nearly a fifth of Travancore’s population and hierarchically enjoyed a good position among the untouchable castes. Their main occupations were cultivation, manufacture of coir, fiber and jiggery and the extraction of palm-tree products like toddy. Even though they nominally belonged to Hinduism, the Hindu community was stratified based on degrees of purity and pollution. Any kind of solidarity among Hindus in terms of religion was absent. In no other part of India was casteism more rigidly practiced than in Kerala that Swami Vivekananda likened it to a lunatic asylum. Narayana Guru and the SNDP Yogam found the most distressing social issue as the prevalence of the caste system which segregated people on a hierarchically ordained model on the basis of ritual status. The book explains the many situations like the consecration of a Siva temple at Aruvippuram when the Guru and the Yogam came to clash with entrenched dogma. Chandramohan claims that the reforms led to the formation of a new intelligentsia and a middle class whose objective was to determine the contours of a new inter-caste society. This tendency to map anything anywhere to comply with the Marxist principle of class struggle is a recurrent theme in the book.

The book lists out the land reforms introduced in the kingdom of Travancore which transformed the agrarian society in which the king was the sole owner of all land in the state into a modern system in which proprietorship was transferred to his subjects in return for a nominal tax on land they possessed. Important legislations that introduced the concept of private property came into being. In 1865, the government enunciated the Paattam Proclamation which is considered to be the magna carta of Travancore agriculturists. It granted full ownership rights of about 200,000 acres of government-owned land to the holders/tenants. These could then be treated as private, heritable, saleable and otherwise transferable property. This put an end to state landlordism and created peasant proprietorship. The landed ‘assets’ of the state became the landed ‘property’ of the people. Eventually, this would lead to the partition and liquidation of the joint family system. This accounted for 80 per cent of the land. The remaining 20 per cent of jenmam lands was addressed by reforms just two years later in 1867. It redefined the power of jenmis (zamindars) making the eviction of a tenant much more difficult although they were required to continue giving rent to the jenmis. In 1896, the Jenmi-Kudiyaan act came into being. It ensured permanent occupancy rights and fixed rents for kaanam kudiyaans. An amendment was introduced to this regulation in 1932. It converted all tenants into proprietors who were to remit rent to the jenmi. Rent payment had to be made only in cash. Thus the kudiyaans acquired full ownership of the land including tis output. The author also narrates the development of cash economy in the nineteenth century with spread of plantation crops, growth of industries like coir, cashew nut and cotton spinning effected rapid economic change in that century’s last quarter. A middle class cutting across caste lines grew up as a result.

The chapter on Narayana Guru neatly summarizes his contributions to social reform. He melded tradition and modernity and at the same time produced a result greater than the sum of its parts. Guru’s genius lay in completely eliminating some meaningless rituals like mock marriage of pre-pubescent girls (thalikettukalyanam) and those associated with attaining puberty (thirandukuli) while only modifying the practices in some other fields. Superstitious procedures and obscure social customs were summarily reformed. He deconsecrated Ezhavas’ till-then-favoured gods like Chathan, Marutha or Madan and introduced the mainstream Hindu deities minus the Brahmin priesthood. Chandramohan bestows the full credit in spreading universal education on the Christian missionaries. He even praises them for enabling the upward social mobility of the Ezhavas (p.40) because ‘the community used to have interactions with the missionaries’! This does not take into account the potential or limitations of missionaries in an objective way as done in the book, ‘Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 1858-1936’ by Koji Kawashima reviewed earlier here. There is some confusion on the numerical strength of the schools run by them. On p.86-87, the missionaries were said to be running 416 out of 1901 schools (22 per cent), but on the next page, the ratio enlarges to 46 per cent. The mindset of the Travancore government and the people in making it the most literate state on Indian independence is glimpsed in the book. In 1897, 24 per cent of the students were the offspring of labourers/coolies who had recognized the utility of sending their children to schools rather than following the livelihood of their parents. The kingdom provided free education and encouraged new schools. In 1903, it spent 9.56 per cent of its total revenue on education.

The author analyses the socio-economic background which helped caste organizations like the SNDP Yogam to grow up. Contrary to popular perception that the entire Ezhava community engaged in toddy tapping, distilling and distribution, by the end of the nineteenth century, only 3.8 per cent of them were employed in this profession. Others were occupied in lucrative employment and prosperous trade. The government stopped the practice of unpaid compulsory manual labour for public works and instead employed labourers with wages to construct roads. Coir export to the US increased and the price of toddy and arrack doubled. A middle class arose from these developments who found the time to be ripe for collective action for social mobility. In 1896, Dr. Palpu formed the Ezhava Mahasabha but found it difficult to make it popular. Swami Vivekananda advised Palpu to find a spiritual leader around whom a social organization could be built up. That’s how Guru and Palpu met and the SNDP Yogam was born.

The nature and character of the Yogam is analysed in detail and Chandramohan claims that it was an elitist group at least for the first quarter century of its existence. According to the articles of association of the Yogam, it was largely commercial in nature. Membership fee was prohibitively high. Not more than a fourth collected in a year was to be used for that year’s expenses. The remaining was to be loaned out on interest in order to accumulate capital. Stringent restrictions were in place for members defaulting in payment of the fees. In 1916, the Yogam took court action against members who failed to pay subscription, sealed their houses and held up their property. The organization was said to be led by the educated middle class and the laboring class had no say in its functioning. The presidential address and most of the speeches at its annual meetings were in English. T K Madhavan was the leader who brought Yogam to the ground and made it accessible to all. He considerably reduced the fees in 1927 that helped ordinary men to afford membership. The number of members rose from 3818 to 63674 as a result in just two years. The book also includes a brief exposition on the lower castes gaining the right of temple entry and the agitation that went into it. Curiously, the lower castes were not very enthusiastic in entering government-owned temples. It was C. Raman Thampi and Janardhana Menon, two Nair leaders, who advocated for temple entry before any avarna voiced it. The author claims that Vaikom Satyagraha which demanded only the opening up of public roads around that temple to lower castes, was organized by the Congress, upper castes and T K Madhavan, while the Yogam kept aloof from it. The decade that followed it was a crucial one. Ezhavas allied with Christians and Muslims in the Abstention Movement and obtained reservation for the community in government jobs. An argument gained strength among Ezhavas to convert en masse to Christianity in order to break the shackles of caste oppression. The government was then quick to introduce the Temple Entry Proclamation which ensured the right of every Hindu to enter temples.

Even though the book is in original a part of the academic repertoire – being the author’s M. Phil dissertation – it’s very much readable. The argument regarding the social indices of various communities is backed by many tables culled from census data. The book is very reverent to Narayana Guru and adulatory to his work but is against the SNDP Yogam because of its roots among the middle class and its nonchalant approach to class struggle. As noted before, this book is an attempt to evaluate how modernity developed in Kerala in accordance with Marxist theory. The abolition of meaningless rituals like talikettukalyanam, thirandukuli and pulikudi is said to be ‘a phase in the evolution of bourgeois capitalism’ (p.124). The actions of the Guru are claimed to be similar to the liberal tendencies of the modern bourgeoisie (p.134). In the first few chapters of the book, the author maintains self-control in using leftist jargon. So we read about ‘how the ideas of the Guru suited the aspirations of the Ezhava middle class’ and the Guru’s religious reforms in rituals having a ‘democratic element’ in them. The term ‘bourgeois’ appears for the first time on page 128 and is a constant presence thereafter. The funniest part is that the book contains references to EMS Namboodiripad’s works who was nothing more than a jack of all trades but a master of political sectarianism. His arguments and opinions prove nothing but this seems to be a feeble attempt on the part of the author to a logical fallacy called ‘appeal to authority’. To cap it tightly with political rhetoric, it includes a Foreword by the well-known Marxist historian K N Panikkar.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Babur: The Chessboard King

Title: Babur: The Chessboard King
Author: Aabhas Maldahiyar
Publisher: Vintage, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670099542
Pages: 403

Estimating the economic output of a nation in the form of GDP is extremely complicated as the period of study goes further and further back in time. However, some scholars have made intelligent guesses based on ancient commercial sources and the flow of history. In the year 1000 CE, the share of India’s GDP to that of the entire world was 28 per cent while China accounted for 22 per cent. In 1950, this had declined to a measly 4.2 per cent for India and 4.6 per cent for China, even though China kept up its momentum till 1820 in which year its share was an impressive 33 per cent. What caused this devastation of Indian economy in these 1000 years? What caused the decline of agriculture and industry and also the collapse of native social structures? The answer is not hard to find. 700 years of Islamic colonialism and 200 years of British colonialism had sapped India dry of her resources. Till the establishment of the Kimberly mines in South Africa in 1870, Golconda in India was the only major diamond mine in the world. However, each one of the huge number of stones extracted from Golconda was taken out of India by force or trickery. India’s gold and silver alleviated poverty and established infrastructure in the distant lands of Persia, Arabia, Khorasan and Great Britain in that millennium of colonialism and slavery. Mohammed of Ghor led the first wave of Islamic occupation while Babur led the second. This is in addition to the transitory yet thoroughly ruining plundering raids of Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Durrani. However, there is a stream of Indian academia which glorifies the invasion and occupation of Islamic powers as having provided something beneficial to India. This book is an attempt to recreate the history of Babur from primary sources of which the most prominent is his own diary, the Baburnama. Aabhas Maldahiyar is an architect and urban designer who has an intense love for history. A nationalist to the core, Maldahiyar is also a skilled reader of Persian manuscripts. The GDP data mentioned above is taken from the appendix of this book with original references from the book, ‘Contours of the World Economy, AD 1 – 2030’ by Angus Maddison.

Maldahiyar begins with an excellent introductory chapter that seethes with indignation at the slavish way history is taught in post-independence India through a curriculum cleverly crafted by Left historians. The author identifies three traits seen in all NCERT (the state agency which prepares school text books at the national level) text books as 1) all invaders except the British were not bad 2) no invaders including the British had any religious zeal, and 3) before the arrival of the great invaders, India was a place of the worst practices like Sati, untouchability etc. This scam has made not merely wee-sized harm but a catastrophe set to dismantle the pride and respect of our land and civilization. This is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty. The fact that this obfuscation is deliberate is proved by the observation that unlike the British, the earlier colonialists like the Sultanates and Mughals were very honest about their deeds and all the ‘namas’ contain descriptions of the worst kind of atrocities they inflicted upon our ancestors. In their eyes, the atrocities upon the Kafirs were virtuous; hence they saw no reason for hiding it. However, post-independence historians – Leftists on the one hand and Islamists posing as Left on the other – ignored this clear evidence and portrayed these brutal monsters as great kings. The book includes a prescient quote by Heinlein that ‘a generation which ignores history has no past and no future’. This book is claimed to be an attempt to set the record straight by delving deep into the primary sources.

The author plans a grand scheme for the book which envisages the most important primary source – Babur’s journal titled ‘Baburnama’ – superimposed on the happenings around the world during that period. Since this approach does not seek to make any verdict or frame opinion on the subject matter, Maldahiyar proposes to provide a new perspective on Babur. He stresses again at another point that if you must trust something in history, it must be the primary source corroborated with other primary sources on the same subject. With this magnificent objective in place, the author embarks on his journey into the sixteenth century narrative written by Babur but flounders on the very first chapter itself. A lot of details from Babur’s memoir are simply reproduced with no correspondence or correlation. Readers are not able to follow the storyline even if they are well-versed in the biography of Babur. Making an excellent replica of what Babur had written, this book lists out about 20-30 different names of people or places on each page and readers are rendered utterly clueless about what’s happening. In the Sherlock Holmes’ story ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’, the complainant is asked to simply copy the Encyclopedia Britannica on to plain paper with no questions asked. This book is somewhat similar with the difference that the Baburnama is the source of the copying. Incomprehensible sentences like ‘Baqi Chaghaniani, a younger brother of Khusrau Shah, who was more Chaghanian, Shahr-i-Safa, and Tirmiz, sent the khatib of Qarshi to Babur’ (p.168) are repeated without any clarification. This is just one among the numerous such instances. Even the names of the singers who performed in a binge party thrown by Babur are listed faithfully as if the data is crucial in re-evaluating a flawed narrative of Indian historiography. The author has not shown any trace of judgment in selecting the topics and instead portrays Babur as a hero for most of the book. About 20 pages are earmarked to reproduce verbatim Babur’s observations on Kabul city – its geography, climate, fruits, crops and other details – like a gazetteer.

Babur meticulously recorded his impressions on other people – friend and foe alike. He observed places, societies, battles and politics to form his opinion and strategy about them. Babur ruled Kabul for around two decades before invading India and he used this time to effectively subjugate the whole of Afghanistan. Many Muslim tribes were at the receiving end of his battle fury and had to submit to humiliating treatment at the hands of this proud descendant of Timur. We read about some interesting anecdotes in this book on how they responded to defeat in battle. Assuming the disdainful pride of the conqueror of Afghan tribes, Babur writes, “we had been told that when Afghans are powerless to resist, they go before their foe with grass between their teeth as if to say ‘I am your cow’” (p.206). This was what exactly happened at the battle of Kohat. But Babur was not impressed with this spineless and opportunistic display of servility and ordered to behead the Afghans one by one. The book contains a detailed narrative on Babur’s campaigns in Afghanistan, especially his frequent attacks on the Turkmen Hazara tribes. Babur claims that he ‘drove them like deer by valley and ridge; we shot those wretches like deer; we made captive their people of sorts; we laid hands on their men of renown; their wives and their children we took’ (p.255).

The book is extremely boring except for the Introduction and Epilogue which are finely structured and establishes the logic behind writing this book. In fact, these two chapters are the only part of the volume where the author handles his own creation. Regarding the hundreds of pages in which the reader finds no relevance or interest, we can only say that it was a great disappointment. The author appears thoroughly clueless in organizing the content of Babur’s journal in a meaningful way so as to tell a coherent story. Besides, the significance of the title ‘chessboard king’ is not elaborated in the text. Readers are left to form their own conjectures on this critical point. This book is said to be the first among many volumes of a similar nature covering the entire history of Mughals. Maldahiyar may save himself the trouble if the other volumes are also planned to repeat the spirit and style of this book. In fact, I would have given one more star in the rating had I not purchased the book thinking that it’d be a good one on the Mughals. Hence the proverb ‘never judge a book by its cover’ stays very relevant.

The book is a waste of time and not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star