There is nothing surprising about the latest Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) attempts to label Tipu Sultan as ‘anti-Hindu’ and ‘anti-Kannada’ or to make Kashmiri children studying at schools outside the state to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ (the essentialist Hindutva version of “Viva India”).
Recall the Ram Janmabhoomi agitations from 1989. Conflicts that had led to the event resonate in writings of South Asian authors whose works I have been teaching and discussing as an academic.
A disused 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid, was demolished by Hindu supporters of the Saffron movement who hoped to construct a temple, the Ram Janmabhoomi, on that site. Hindu-Muslim riots swept Northern India in the demolition of the mosque.
Both sides in the conflict had attempted to create a new past for the nation. The militant Hinduism that the Ram Janambhoomi movement incited challenged the basic principle of democracy on which the nation was founded upon. Loyalty to the community was evoked to create nostalgia for a concocted past that was meticulously contrived.
The religious chauvinism that was manifested in this dark period in the history of India was transformed into bigotry supported by trans-nationals in the U.S. and the U.K. The identities and ideologies that resulted from this bigotry treated the idea of a multilingual and multiethnic and secular nation as if it was a myth.
The academics and activists who endeavored to transform that ‘myth’ into reality were dubbed ‘outsiders’ and ‘inauthentic’. Their attempts were challenged by the construction of a mythic history asserting national tradition in a classically fascist form. This project of constructing history of a nation involved selective appropriation of past and present and an abrogation of major parts of history.
For instance, Kai Friese reported in the New York Times that in November 2002, during the reign of the BJP, the National Council of Education Research and Training in India, the central Indian government organisation that finalises national curriculum and supervises education for high school students, circulated a new text-book for Social Sciences and History.
The replacement of ‘Indus Valley’ Civilisation with the mythical ‘Indus-Saraswati’ Civilisation in textbooks was a strategic manoeuvre to negate the fact that Hinduism was a syncretic religious tradition
The textbook conveniently overlooked the embarrassing fact that the architect of Indian independence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had been assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist. Friese makes the reader aware that this version of Indian history was also embellished with some interesting fabrications. One of those was the erasing of the ‘Indus Valley’ Civilisation and its replacement with the mythical ‘Indus-Saraswati’ Civilisation.
This was a strategic maneuver to negate the fact that ancient scriptures of Hinduism were associated with the advent of the Aryan peoples from northwest, and that Hinduism was a syncretic religious tradition that evolved through a commingling of various cultures and traditions.
In this nationalist project, one of the forms that the nullification of past and present histories took was the subjection of religious minorities to a centralised and authoritarian state buttressed by nostalgia of a ‘glorious past’. Thus, the Babri Masjid, an obscure little mosque, was destroyed by an unruly mob that rallied around the BJP. By blatantly advocating and supporting the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the BJP activists and supporters also negated the directive of the highest court of law in the land that had sought to protect the site by staying its appropriation by any political party. The BJP bigwigs were equally responsible for the incident.
As Vijay Mishra observes, this movement had received financial assistance from immigrants, who supported Hindutva, based in the West. He notes that “funding of Hindu institutions, temples, and other supposedly ‘charitable’ enterprises by diaspora Hindutva advocates, particularly those from the U.S. can be established beyond doubt.”
Such appeals and unambiguous encouragement to enjoin the native mob and commit acts of violence were, according to Aijaz Ahmad, ‘replete with appeals to national pride, racial redemption, contempt for law, and civility’.
One of the celebrities whose historical analysis of the Islamic conquests in India seems to fan the flames of divisive politics, pitting Hindus against Muslims, is the Nobel laureate,
V.S. Naipaul. In his work Beyond Belief, Naipaul dismissed Islam as an alien imposition which had estranged the nations of the Indian subcontinent from their own heritage. He wrote that Muslims of India and Pakistan lacked an ‘authentic’ Muslim lineage and so were severed from a keen sense of reality. The condition of such non-Arab Muslims had ‘an element of neurosis and nihilism’. Naipaul’s inference seemed to erase the tremendous adaptation, indigenisation and evolution of Islam in countries like India. Needless to say, it reinforces the claims of right-wingers who label present-day Muslims ‘outsiders’ or ‘invaders’ in India. Such claims ignore how communities grow historically within the framework created by a dialogic discourse. The author of Indian origin, who lives in England, has portrayed India as ‘full of signs of growth of ‘an Indian, and more specifically, Hindu awakening’.
On the other hand, in Pakistan, impassioned appeals of the clergy to outdated sectarian concepts has bred rancorous hate and exploited the illiteracy and poverty of the majority of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent who were unable to study progressive concepts of Islam for themselves.
This strategy of fortifying fundamentalism has created a gulf between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ rooted in contemporary politics, and not ancient history. Ultra right-wing political and religious organisations in both India and Pakistan have justified repression of dispossessed classes, and subjugation of minorities and women with the language of culture and religion.
Such practices have also led to a denial of science and historical understanding of precepts of Islam.
The writer is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, The Life of a Kashmiri Woman, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan has also served as an guest editor working on articles from the Jammu and Kashmir region for Oxford University Press (New York), helping to identify, commission, and review articles. She can be reached at [email protected]