Anyone who has even a passing interest in the history of the subcontinent knows the circumstances in which the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India and the subsequent decades of bloody consequences. But what few know is the story of the accession of Manipur to India. A state tucked away in India’s northeast, its ruler too had wanted to retain his independent status, goading Sardar Vallabbhai Patel, then India’s home minister, to remark, “Isn’t there a brigadier in Shillong (Manipur’s capital now)?” Soon, the Maharaja was virtually imprisoned in his residence, and intimidated to agree to the merger of his state with India. “When the ceremony to mark the transfer of power and the end of this ancient kingdom took place in Imphal on October 15, 1949, a battalion of the Indian Army was in place to guard against possible trouble,” writes Sanjib Baruah, professor at the Bard College, New York.
Switch to Pakistan, whose leaders are extremely conflicted about the persona and ideology of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Was his lifestyle that of the traditional Muslim, as is portrayed in the state-sponsored photographs of him? The answer was at least clear to President Gen Ziaul Haq, who would mark out the pages on Jinnah’s dietary habits in Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan before presenting it to his guests. General Zia’s aim was to portray that he was remarkably different from the founder of Pakistan. Pakistani journalist Khaled Ahmed notes, “The Quaid’s daughter, Dina, living in New York, was secretly asked to deny that her father ever drank alcohol or ate ham. When she refused to oblige, she was threatened with disclosures about her private life if she ever made it public that she had been approached.”
These two incidents are narrated in two separate chapters in The Southasian Sensibility, a collection of essays Kathmandu’s Himal magazine has launched to commemorate its 25th year of publication. The question to ask is why should its editor, Kanak Mani Dixit join the two words, south and Asia? The answer echoes the argument former Indian Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao cited to advocate the knocking off the hyphen separating Non from Aligned in the Non-Alignment Movement. The insertion of the hyphen, Rao said, imparted a negative flavour to the movement, in contrast to what he thought was a positive assertion from a group of countries wishing to remain outside the camps of the United States and the erstwhile USSR. Southasia, therefore, is a positive concept that delineates the region as an entity united by history and similar cultural experiences.
The essays in The Southasian Sensibility have not been written specially for the book but culled from the many past issues of Himal. Your presumption that the book is dated evanesces as you thumb through it. You realise the essays, written at different points over the last 25 years, tell us about the persistence of our memories, and the manner in which the present in South Asia remains shackled to the past. Partly, this is because the essays invariably depict the traumatic project the idea of building a modern nation-state can degenerate into.
For instance, Ahmed’s essay, written in 1998, demonstrates that the contest to give a certain persona to Jinnah is an extension of the passionate debate over the kind of personality — secular or Islamic — Pakistan should acquire. Since 1998, flying bullets and exploding bombs have become additional arguments in the fiery exchanges between Islamists and others, prompting Pervez Hoodbhoy to write, in 2010, Why Pakistan is Not a Nation. To become one, he says Pakistan needs peace, internally and externally, provide economic justice, and become a welfare state through the whittling down of massive holdings of landlords and assets of its army personnel. Hoodbhoy adds, “Most countries have armies but, as some have dryly remarked, only in Pakistan does an army have a Pakistan.”
Written in 1992, Kanak Mani Dixit’s The Dragon Bites Its Tail explodes the deliberately created myth of Bhutan being an idyllic country, which is fortunate to have a sagacious royal family, hailed worldwide for introducing the concept of Gross Happiness Index (GHI). It is a survey Bhutan periodically undertakes to measure the growth of happiness among its citizens, as against their mere economic prosperity. As you read through Dixit’s textured narration, you wonder what the results of the GHI survey were in south Bhutan, where live the Nepali-speaking people, or Lhotshampas. Over the years, Thimpu has deprived them of their citizenship through retrospective changes in the law, imposed on them an official code of culture, and sponsored goons to chase thousands out of the country, where they had been living for generations.
This brutal policy has been justified as a method of keeping intact the supposedly pristine glory of Bhutan. Dixit quotes a western diplomat saying, “The point the Bhutanese make is straightforward: we cannot afford to be swallowed by the Nepalis. They are still at a stage when they feel that the Nepali population is not at a suitable level.” As for India, it did not restrain the royal family from walking the path of extraordinary inhumanity because the kingdom acted as an effective “buffer state on its sensitive northern border.”
India too is engaged in battling the memories of many social groups, who they were and who they want to become. The sheer intransigence of memories provokes the Indian state to deploy its formidable power to try to efface the ideas inherited from the past. It was much easier to pack off the Manipuri king than it has been to vanquish its underground militant groups, not even by the army empowered under a special law to kill people without being questioned. Prashant Jha toured Gujarat in 2006 to discover the Berlin-like structures separating Hindus and Muslims, whom the 2002 riots have divided more irreparably than ever before. In an elite government colony, three children got off their cycle on seeing him. “Terrorist,” one screamed. Why? “Because you are a Mussalman,” responds the child, adding, “Get out of here, this is a Hindu area.”
In his 1996 essay, Sanjoy Hazarika speaks of the plight, among others, of the Chakma and the Rohingya, whose doleful tales are headlines even in 2012. Indeed, democracy reinforces as well as redefines identities derived from religion, caste, language and ethnicity. So Understanding the Nepali mandate, written in 2008, presages the political salience the Madhesis were to acquire over the next four years. Nepal’s confrontation with the politics of identity has not yet perhaps reached its apogee. At times, these identities become the basis of bloody conflict between the state and social groups, particularly those spread in a contiguous area. Is there no way out but to stymie these groups until they accept the terms of the state?
The way out lies in compromise, says Ramachandra Guha, urging that the writer and the intellectual need to refrain from complete identification with one party to a dispute. They must persuade each party to move beyond dogmatism, and insist on upholding the right to elect freely one’s leaders, seek a place of residence and company of one’s choosing, and speak one’s language and practice one’s faith. These are precisely the contentious aspects of the question: Who are we, really? It is the question The Southasian Sensibility seeks to answer.
The author is a Delhi-based journalist and can be reached at [email protected]