(On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, or, Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday)
Mohandas Gandhi forged such a distinctive path in so many spheres of life that it should come as no surprise that his conception of secularism is also at odds with nearly every commonplace understanding of secularism. Indeed, as my argument unfolds, it will become amply clear that Gandhi’s adherence to secularism entailed a deepening of religious belief; as he was to tell some English friends who came to see him on the evening of 31 December 1947, ‘what I want to do and what I have been eagerly doing for the last sixty years is atmadarshan [self-realization]…. I do not boast of my perfect success at it. But, little by little, I am inching towards it. And my every worldly (secular) engagement is carried out just from this perspective.’
The adherents of a rigorous conception of secularism have long subscribed to the formula of the separation of ‘church’ and ‘state’. Whether such a conception of secularism has existed anywhere even in the West is doubtful, but certainly, as is widely recognized, secularism so understood never had any traction in India except among a miniscule number of people who self-consciously styled themselves atheists, rationalists, and sometimes even humanists. What prevailed in India was not the view that the state might not promote religion, but rather that it was not to bestow favours on one religion at the expense of other religions. Many people have thought that such a view can fairly be said to characterize Gandhi’s own position.
Some of Gandhi’s pronouncements certainly appear to support the view that his secularism, to the extent that the word seems apposite for a man who remarked that not a leaf moved without the will of God, could not countenance the possibility that the state might concern itself with religious matters much less promote one religion. Writing in the pages of his journal Harijan in February 1947, as independence was imminent, he warned that the state ought not to ‘concern itself or cope with religious education’. Shortly after the attainment of independence, he firmly opined on the necessity of an Indian ‘Government for all. It is a “secular” government, that is, it is not a theocratic government, rather, it does not belong to any particular religion.’ There can be no doubt that he would have found the idea of a Hindu rashtra utterly repugnant.
However, the question of Gandhi’s secularism calls for interrogation from other perspectives. Some scholars hold to the view that the more palpable demonstration of his secularism resides in establishing that for him religion was in no wise incompatible with reason. His views on Hindu scriptures may be summoned as an illustration: his unstinting admiration, even reverence, for Tulsidas’ Ramacaritmanas did not stop him from rejecting one of its verses as misogynistic and thus reprehensible. He took a similar view in regard to Islam, and was critical of a Muslim clergyman who defended the stoning to death of Ahmadis on the grounds that it was sanctioned in the Quran: as Gandhi averred, ‘every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent.’
Gandhi had from the outset advocated for a position that is often described as ‘religious politics’. In the concluding chapter of his autobiography (1927-29, he observes that he was drawn into politics owing to his ‘devotion to Truth’, and that ‘those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.’ He had declared as much when he accepted the presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1924, adding the caveat that he had in mind ‘not the religion of the superstitious and the blind, religion that hates and fights, but the universal Religion of Toleration. Politics without morality is a thing to be avoided.’
Gandhi at prayer, around 1948; photographer unknown.
The present turn in Indian politics, with the demonstrable rise of an ugly and xenophobic Hindu nationalism, suggests however the perils of invoking ‘religious politics’—even with the caveats that Gandhi had put forward repeatedly and his plea for a ‘universal Religion of Toleration’. It is tempting to think that as Gandhi saw India increasingly slipping into communal violence from the late 1920s onward, he may have stepped back from the ‘religious politics’ that he had advocated. His ‘secularism’ is often ascribed to this very set of circumstances, and the liberal interpretation has insisted that he eventually came to adopt something like the bourgeois conception of secularism as a political ideology that was supremely respectful of individual rights.
In plain English, Gandhi, on this reading, increasingly thought that religion was strictly a private affair and should nowhere be dragged into the public. But Gandhi never adhered to the idea of the private and public as distinct and discrete spheres of life. It is critically important, as well, to recognize how his evening public prayer meeting, a full-length study of which is still awaited though there are countless number of books on his religious life and practices, evolved over the decades. It may be argued that what is more representative of his outlook is the stupendously radical idea that if the Muslim prays, he should pray that not that the Hindu should become a Muslim but rather a better Hindu; that if the Hindu prays, he should pray not that the Muslim should return to the Hindu fold but rather become a better Muslim; and thus with the Christians, Sikhs, and others.
In addressing a gathering of Buddhists on the occasion of Buddha Jayanti in 1925, Gandhi recalled that Muslims often mistook him for a Muslim, the Jains for a Jain, and his Christian friends for a Christian. The Christian missionaries who met Gandhi soon realized that it was pointless to make an attempt convert him to Christianity since he was a much better Christian than any they had ever encountered. It is Gandhi’s profound religious belief and sensibility that made him resolutely secular; his secularism, and his worldly obligations, each of which was but an attempt to strive for self-realization, deepened his religious belief. His veneration for other faiths made him more, not less, of a Hindu. The advocates of a militant and muscular Hindu nationalism are in this matter entirely clueless—scarcely surprising given their ferocious disdain for self-reflexivity or anything that may remotely be called thought.
First published in print and online in the Indian Express, 2 October 2023, as “Gandhi’s Secularism Drew on His Profound Religiosity”. The present version is slightly longer.
This essay has been written on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru (14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964). It is perforce necessary at this time since the very name of Nehru has become anathema, to the BJP and its leaders as much as to many middle-class Indians; indeed, some of the criticism astonishes owing to the barely disguised and virulent hatred that it displays towards its subject. Th essay seeks not to eulogize Nehru, but to offer a candid assessment of someone who was recognized in his own time not only as a world statesman, but as someone who shepherded the newborn nation-state of India at a critical juncture in world history. His economic policies have been omitted, not because they are insignificant, or perhaps because he is more vulnerable to criticism on that front than on any other, but because the subject is complex and deserving of a separate companion piece.
Jawaharlal Nehru commenced his long stint as the first and, to this day, the longest-serving Prime Minister of India in exhilarating and yet difficult and unusual circumstances. His speech as the country’s chosen leader on 14-15 August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly famously spoke of India’s “tryst with destiny”. It was a moment long wished for, but Nehru recognized that the man whom he knew to be the mastermind of the freedom struggle, Mohandas Gandhi, was not there to celebrate India’s independence. Gandhi had lodged himself in Calcutta in an effort to bring peace to the riot-torn city. The blood feud between India and Pakistan would leave a long trail of dead and wounded, generate the world’s largest flow of refugees, traumatize tens of millions of people, and even send the two countries to war. Less than six months later, the Mahatma would be felled by an assassin’s bullets, and the nation would be plunged into grief. If the newly minted leader of a fledgling state had not enough on his hands in trying to keep the country together and comfort the afflicted, he now had the unenviable task of presiding over the funeral of a person who had become a world historical figure and was being apotheosized as a modern-day Buddha and Christ. It is said that, in the midst of the elaborate and taxing preparations for the last rites to lay Gandhi to rest, Nehru, who was habituated in seeking Gandhi’s advice at difficult moments, turned to some of the men around him and said, ‘Let us go to Bapu and seek his guidance.’
Nehru with President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
The task before Nehru was immense. The leaders of other colonized nations had doubtless their own challenges, but the challenge before India under Nehru was greater. Over 300 million Indians, living in half a million villages, towns, and cities, encompassed a staggering diversity—whether with regard to religion, caste, the mother tongue, cultural inheritance, or socio-economic standing. Most Indians, moreover, were desperately poor, itself a damning indictment of two hundred years of unremittingly exploitative rule of India, and to most witnesses and commentators the political institutions that India inherited from the colonial ruler had seemingly been designed for vastly different circumstances. There was really no precedent in history for catapulting such a country into what the Constitution of India, itself crafted over a year-long intense and at times brilliant debate in the Constituent Assembly, called a modern “sovereign democratic republic.” There was much else that was singular to India: alongside undivided British India, there were 562 native states presided over by hereditary rulers, and the vast majority of these states had willy nilly to be ‘absorbed’ into India. Students of Indian history have described this process as the ‘integration of Indian states’, but it would not be incorrect to say that the task before Nehru and the ruling Congress party was yet greater—the consolidation of the idea of India as a modern nation-state.
One might, in a more exhaustive survey of the nearly seventeen years during which Nehru shepherded India into modernity and the global stage, rightfully offer an inventory of his triumphs and failures. One cannot underestimate, for instance, the enormity of the accomplishment represented by the first general election held in India between 25 October 1951 and 21 February 1952. As a democratic exercise in universal franchise, there was nothing in the world that approached its monumental scale, all the more remarkable in that the traumas and wounds of partition were still everywhere present. Nearly 106 million people, or 45 percent of the electorate, cast their votes—and this in a country where the literacy rate in 1951 was just over 18 percent. The same exercise was carried out in 1957 and 1962, the last general election before Nehru’s death in May 1964, and certainly the same cannot be said of almost any other country that went through the process of decolonization. If this alone can be summoned as an instance of Nehru’s propensity to observe democratic norms, it is nonetheless also true that he imposed President’s rule on eight occasions, and his dismissal of the elected communist government in 1959 led by EMS Namboodiripad in Kerala is often cited as an instance of his inability to tolerate dissent.
One may go on in this vein, but it would be far more productive to delineate, howsoever briefly, the idea and ethos of India under the Nehruvian dispensation. India had inherited parliamentary institutions from the British and, under Nehru, these institutions were further nurtured, sometimes with an intent of making them more responsive to Indian conditions and even reflecting an Indian ethos or sensitivity to the history of social institutions in India. Democratic institutions, on the whole, showed stability and maturity, the higher Indian courts showed a capacity for independent judgment, and the press largely exercised its freedoms without hindrance. The Lok Sabha Debates of that period show that, though the Congress exercised an overwhelming majority in Parliament, the opposition was no walk-over and Nehru and his ministers were often put to the test. The office of Election Commissioner was established before the first general election to oversee the fair conduct of elections. The stability of political institutions can be gauged by the fact that, unlike in neighboring Pakistan, or (say) in Indonesia which had acquired its independence from Dutch rule, the military was prevented from exercising any influence over the civilian government. In this respect, Nehru rigorously ensured, as any democracy must do so, that the military would follow the civilian authorities.
While India under Nehru was not entirely free of communal disturbances after the partition killings had subsided in the early part of 1948, his own adherence to the idea that the minorities should feel safe in India cannot be doubted. Most communal incidents were minor, and not until 1961 can one speak of a fairly significant outburst of communal violence in Jabalpur, M.P., where the rise of a successful Muslim entrepreneurial class generated some anxiety in the Hindu community. Nehru’s own courage in trying to stem communal violence has been widely documented, and the eminent American writer Norman Cousins was among those who witnessed Nehru boldly intervening personally to put a halt to communal altercation, sometimes placing himself between rioters on the street. It may be argued that Nehru was fundamentally committed to the idea of the dignity of each individual, irrespective of caste, religion, sex, socioeconomic status, and so on. In this, I daresay, he took his cue not merely from the liberal tradition but, more importantly, from India’s numerous sant traditions and the example of Gandhi. The cynics and critics may argue that the rights of the untouchables—as they were then known—barely advanced under Nehru, but such a view is not sustained by a close study. It is, however, certainly the case that, notwithstanding the constitutional safeguards offered to the Dalits, their progress in being accepted as full members was far slower than envisioned and hoped by B. R. Ambedkar himself. Indeed, India is far from having made the progress in this matter that one could consider as even minimally acceptable even today.
Speaking retrospectively, it also seems to be indisputably true that, in addition to Nehru’s own belief in the inherent worth of each individual, India was a more hospitable place under Nehru than it would be under his successors. Nehru could be intolerant and authoritarian, as I have suggested apropos of his dismissal of the Kerala government, but one must distinguish between the political choices that he made on the one hand, and the culture of tolerance and debate that was fostered in Nehruvian India on the other hand. There was a serious investment in the cultural sphere, as manifested for instance by the creation of various national academics of art, music, dance, and literature, just as there was an effort to promote the higher learning. Nearly every account of Nehru references his determination to make India modern, and even to turn India into a scientific powerhouse, and the establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology—Kharagpur (1951), Bombay (1958), Madras (1959), Kanpur (1959), and Delhi (1961)—is often touted as his greatest achievement. Certainly, these original IITs remain India’s most well-known form of cultural capital in the world of higher learning today, besides some departments at a handful of universities such as Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University and a few other institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science (established in 1909).
Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi, and Sardar Patel at the meeting of the All India Congress Committee, Bombay, 1946.
However, the culture and ethos of hospitality to which I advert had other dimensions, none more important than Nehru’s firm and resolute adherence to the notion of secularism. It is being increasingly said that Nehru was too Anglicized and ‘out of touch’ with the masses to understand the common Indian’s allegedly unquenchable thirst for religion, but this argument is preposterous just as it is insensitive to the fact that Nehruvian secularism did not at all disavow the place of religion in Indian public life. Rather, such secularism as Nehru embraced was rooted, not in the repudiation of religion, but rather in the explicit disavowal of turning India into a Hindu nation-state or in appearing to convey the impression that the Hindus would be given preference over the adherents of other religions in jobs, university seats, and so on. It is for this reason that in 1951, on the occasion of the inauguration of the newly reconstructed Somnath temple, Nehru was appalled to hear that Rajendra Prasad, who as the President of India represented all Indians and not merely Hindus, had accepted the invitation to preside over the occasion.
In any consideration of India under Nehru, one must not be oblivious to his conception of India in the world. Here, too, a contemporary assessment of this question in India has become well-nigh impossible owing to the relentless hostility towards Nehru among large segments of the middle class who have been animated by the notion that it is time to assert the prerogatives of Hindu India. It is increasingly being said that India under Nehru was ‘irrelevant’ in world politics, and there are apocryphal stories of the Indian prime minister having foolishly abandoned a promised UN Security Council seat in favor of the Chinese—who, on this view, returned the favor with an unprovoked attack on India in November 1962 that mightily contributed to the heart attack from which he died sixteen months later. What is, rather, indisputably a fact is that, after Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948, it was Nehru who was easily the public face of India to the world: no Indian came remotely close to having the kind of influence that he wielded on the public stage, and he did so not, as some would rather believe, merely because he was Westernized, charming, learned, and in every way a suave and even effete gentleman. Critics scoff at his many friendships with leading intellectuals, writers, and even scientists around the world, viewing them as part of his affect and his eagerness to cultivate an international audience, but such friendships—with Albert Einstein, Paul and Essie Robeson, and Langston Hughes, among others—are a testament to his ecumenism and catholicity of thought. The late Nelson Mandela repeatedly went on record to express his admiration for Nehru.
Jawaharlal Nehru representing India at the Bandung Conference in 1955.
To speak of India under Nehru, therefore, is also to speak of India’s place in the world at the time. The very idea of what is today termed the ‘Global South’ was, in considerable measure, the outcome of Nehru’s keen desire to cultivate relations with other countries that had been colonized, to forge links of solidarity among coloured peoples, and to renew conversations among the colonized that would not have to be routed through the metropolitan capitals of the West. The 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries, where Nehru had a prominent role, was the most well-known manifestation of that worldview. It was also the leading milestone in what was known as the nonalignment movement which was Nehru’s brainchild as much as that of anyone else. Nehru positioned India during the Cold War as a country that would ally itself neither with the United States nor with the Soviet Union, though, given the constraints that geopolitics imposes, in actuality India often had to lean one way or the other, and most often, or so the conventional opinion holds, leaned towards the Soviet Union. His choice of non-alignment, it may be said, reflected his Gandhian outlook and a decided preference for a third path or space in the international sphere. If India was, on the whole, a much gentler place under Nehru than it has been in recent decades, it may well have been because the shadow of Gandhi was always there to remind Nehru of the imperative to adhere to the ethical life even in the grim and grime-ridden world of politics.
First published at abplive.in under the title, “Mentor to a Fledgling Nation: India under Nehru”, on 14 November 2022.
On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, August 15
In the wake of the “Har Ghar Tiranga” campaign, a campaign designed to encourage every Indian home (har ghar) to display the National Flag (tiranga, literally tri-colored), it is useful to think briefly about the evolution of the national flag, its place in the nationalist imagination during the anti-colonial struggle, and the particular way our relationship to the flag is a matter of the heart, the state, and the Indian constitution. Some people have thought that the orange in the flag represents the Hindu constituency, the green the Muslim community, and that all “others” are represented by the white in the flag. Gandhi had said as much, in an article for Young India on 13 April 1921, except that at that time red took the place of orange, but he also added that the charkha or spinning wheel in the middle of the flag pointed both to the oppressed condition of every Indian and simultaneously to the possibility of rejuvenating every household. The Constituent Assembly debates, which led to the adoption of the tricolored flag on 22 July 1947, suggest that some members were more inclined towards another interpretation, seeing the green as a symbol of nature and the fact that we are all children of ‘Mother Earth’, the orange as symbolizing renunciation and sacrifice, and white as symbolic of peace (shanti). That may be so, but the tiranga cannot be unraveled without some consideration of how it emerges from the three-forked road of the heart, the state, and the constitution.
Just what, however, is a national flag and why do all nation-states have one? The national anthem and the national flag are the bedrock of every nation-state; nearly all also have a national emblem, as does India. India has a complicated history around the national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana”, and the country officially also has a national song, “Vande Mataram”; and, then, there is an unofficial anthem, “Saare Jahan Se Accha”, which has wide currency. This makes the national flag especially and supremely important in India as an unambiguous marker of the nation-state. The honor and integrity of the nation are supposed to be captured by the flag, and the narrative of the nation-state everywhere offers ample testimony that the national flag is uniquely capable of enlisting the aid of citizens, giving rise to sentiments of nationalism, and evoking the supreme sacrifice of death. In a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and highly polyglot nation such as India, the national flag is there to remind every Indian that something unites them: before their allegiance to a language, religion, caste group, or anything else, they are Indian. Thus, in every respect, the national flag commands, not merely our respect, but our allegiance to the nation.
The Ministry of Culture’s “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav” website, of which the “Har Ghar Tiranga” campaign is one component, adds something quite different to the discussion. It states that “our relationship with the flag has always been more formal and institutional than personal”, and the campaign seeks to evoke in every Indian a “personal connection to the Tiranga” and “also an embodiment of our commitment to nation-building.” The idea, it says candidly, “is to invoke the feeling of patriotism.” To understand just what this means, we have to disentangle two elements: first, the question of patriotism; and, secondly, the fact that the relationship of Indians to the national flag is sought to be altered from a formal, stiff, and institutional relationship to a more personal and engaged one. Let us first turn to the second point, before returning to complete the broader discussion on patriotism.
Unlike countries such as the United States and Canada, India for a long time did not in fact permit ordinary citizens to fly the flag from their residence or business. This right was preserved as the prerogative of the state. “The Flag Code-India”, overhauled in 2002 and replaced by the “Flag Code of India”, and the Prevention of Insult to National Honour Act, 1971, set down the protocols to be observed in flying the national flag. In a now little-remembered but highly significant ruling on 21 September 1995, the Delhi High Court directed that the then “Flag Code-India” could not be interpreted so as to prevent an ordinary citizen from flying the National Flag from their business or residence. This eventually brought into existence the “Flag Code” of 2002, which permits unrestricted display of the tricolor consistent with the dignity and honor that is owed to the National Flag. However, aside from the question of the material to be used for making the National Flag, which has been the subject of considerable discussion in recent days, the Flag Code still imposed restrictions, such as being flown only “from sunrise to sunset “ (Para 2.2, sec. xi). The changes, moreover, were never public knowledge, and as a consequence it is safe to say that Indians have had a distant and formal, rather than personal and intimate, relationship to the National Flag. It is precisely this relationship that the “Har Ghar Tiranga” initiative has sought to change.
What is striking, and no longer seems to be a part of public or even institutional memory, is that in the two to three decades before independence, Indians did indeed have a personal relationship to the Congress flag or, as English officials with some derision described it, the Gandhi flag—the very flag that, after modifications, including the replacement of the charkha with Ashoka’s Lion Capital, would become the National Flag adopted by the Constituent Assembly. Congressmen and women fought government officials with zeal for the right to hoist their flag. They found that hoisting the flag invariably attracted the wrath, and often the vengeance, of British officials, and invariably ordered the flag to be brought down. On the rare occasion that a government official allowed the Congress flag to fly, he would receive an instant reprimand from the colonial government. This happened in 1923 in Bhagalpur, where the official consented to have the Congress flag flown alongside the Union Jack, albeit at a lower height. Not only the Government of India, but the British Cabinet issued a stern note saying “that in no circumstances should the Swaraj or Gandhi Flag be flown in conjunction with even below the Union Jack.” During the Salt Satyagraha, boys as young as eight years old were whipped for the offense of flying the flag or trying to hoist it. The indomitable Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, in her riveting memoirs, has described the tussle over the flag during the Salt Satyagraha, with the Congress Volunteers hoisting the flag time after time, and the police lowering it each time. “Up with the Flag”, “Up with the Flag”—the echoes kept ringing in her ears.
The right to fly the National Flag, in other words, was won after an arduous struggle. The flag evolved over time: it was Bhikaji Cama, who edited the newspaper Bande Mataram and closely networked with Indian revolutionaries in Europe, who unfurled the first Indian national flag at the 2nd Socialist International Congress at Stuttgart in 1907, and Kamaladevi rightly points out that she “installed India as a political entity” by doing so. The same flag had been hoisted for the first time in Calcutta in 1906. By 1921, the charkha had been installed at its center at Gandhi’s instigation, and the flag was again modified in 1931. As Gandhi had written, “a flag is a necessity for all nations. Millions have died for it. It is no doubt a kind of idolatry which it would be a sin to destroy.” Seeing how British hearts pounded with pride at seeing the Union Jack fluttering in the wind, Gandhi asked whether it was not similarly necessary that all Indians “recognize a common flag to live and to die for”? If the Congress flag accompanied every campaign, artists similarly positioned the flag prominently in their artwork. In a 1945 color print celebrating Subhas Bose and the heroes of the Indian National Army who were put on trial on charges of treason, we see the Congress flag with the charkha, and the INA flag with the springing tiger, on either side of Subhas Bose (see fig. 1). Martyrs fell along the way, but their struggle was not in vain: in Sudhir Chowdhury’s print from 1947, the heads of the martyrs, among them Bhagat Singh and Khudiram Bose, lie at the feet of Bharat Mata, who hands the tiranga to Nehru on the eve of independence (see fig. 2). In her various hands, she holds the other iterations of the national flag before it evolved into the tiranga.
Fig. 1, Sudhir Chowdhury, I.N.A. officers with Netaji, c. 1945.
If Indians fought for the national flag with zeal, they did so because they believed in what it stood for and they did so from their own volition against colonial oppression. The affection for the flag came from within, as a mandate from the heart rather than from the state. In any discussion of what the flag means today, it must be borne in mind that though the business of the state is to produce patriotic citizens, a patriotism that is manufactured by the state cannot endure and is as ephemeral as a market commodity. It is no less pertinent that the Constitution of India has nothing to say on the national flag. Though former Chief Justice Khare, heading a three-member bench of the Supreme Court, stated in 2004 that the citizen had a fundamental right to fly the flag as guaranteed by Article 19 (1)(a) of the Constitution, the article in question is about the freedom of speech and expression, and the right to fly the flag was interpreted as being subsumed by the larger right specified by Art. 19 (1)(a).
Fig. 2: Sudhir Chowdhury, “Worship of Martyrs”, c. 1947.
The Constitution has, of course, nothing to say explicitly on thousands of subjects, and Chief Justice Khare did what courts must do, namely interpret the Constitution. That is well and good, but we must confront the fact that many who honor the flag do not necessarily honor the Constitution. The state may be no exception; indeed, it is far likely to honor the flag rather than the constitution. A rogue can fly a flag as much as a saint; it takes almost nothing to show one’s patriotism. If patriotism can be purchased on the cheap, for a 5-rupee (7. 5 cents) plastic flag put together in China, which the present regime in India has derided as the mortal enemy, it is practically worthless. That larger right to freedom of speech and expression which subsumes the right to fly the flag is critically important, but it is also equally important to recognize that the Constitution, as the supreme law of the land, itself subsumes the National Flag. Now that the citizens of India have won the right to hoist the National Flag without restriction, consistent with respect to the National Flag, it is perhaps time to think about the corresponding duty they owe to respect the freedom of speech and expression, and the obligation, which the present government has shown little if any interest in honoring, to protect the Fundamental Rights promised in the Constitution to every citizen.
First published under the same title in a slightly shorter form at abplive.in, here.
Gujarati translation by abplive.in available, here.
April 13 is never likely to be forgotten in India, certainly not in the Punjab. That day, 103 years ago, 55-year-old Reginald Dyer, an acting Brigadier-General in the Indian Army born in Murree, in what is now Pakistan, ordered fifty Gurkha and Balochi riflemen to commence firing without warning upon an unarmed crowd of over 15,000 and perhaps as many as 20,000 Indians gathered at an enclosure called the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, a stone’s throw from the Golden Temple. The firing ended only when the troops ran out of ammunition; most of the 1650 rounds met their target, judging from the official tally of 379 dead and some 1,200 wounded. Some Indian estimates of how many people were killed ran to about 1,000. As the narrator Saleem in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children recalls, Dyer told his men: “Good shooting.” The men had done their duty, order had apparently been restored: “We have done a jolly good thing.”
Jallianwala Bagh after the massacre, 1919.
It was Baisakhi, the first day of the spring harvest festival, and crowds from the city and adjoining countryside were milling around the Golden Temple and the vicinity. But the days immediately preceding had been taxing, ridden with uncertainty and violence. Though Indians had given their lives by the tens of thousands in World War I, a war which was scarcely their own, they got rewarded at the end of the war with increased repression. True, in mid-1918, the “Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms” led to a minimal increase in Indian franchise and similarly a limited devolution of power to the central and provincial legislative councils. From the standpoint of Indian liberals, these reforms were too little and too late, and the more militant-minded among Indian nationalists clamored for much greater concessions from the British. Nor did Indians seem prepared to accept the preposterous idea, which the English took rather too seriously about themselves, that their word was as good as gold or that they believed above all in the idea of “fair play”. Unfortunately, British goodwill would soon be exposed as a mere chimera. A committee appointed to inquire into alleged revolutionary conspiracies headed by Justice Rowlatt recommended the suspension of civil liberties, and repressive legislation followed in quick succession. The British resort to preventive detention in an attempt to squelch nationalist agitation was captured in the headlines of one Lahore newspaper in early 1919 with the phrase, “no dalil, no vakeel, no appeal.”
Mohandas Gandhi, who had returned to India from his twenty-year sojourn in South Africa four years ago, responded to the Rowlatt Acts with a call to the nation to observe a general hartal and so launched himself into national politics. “The whole of India from one end to the other, towns as well as villages,” wrote Gandhi in his autobiography, “observed a hartal on that day. It was a most wonderful spectacle.” This was just days before the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Punjab was being governed by Sir Michael O’Dwyer, a firm believer in authoritarian rule who fancied himself a savior of the simple-minded Indian peasants who, according to him, had nothing to do with politics and deserved protection from treacherous urban Indian elites. Like Reginald Dyer, with whom he is often confused, O’Dwyer was of Irish extraction, a perhaps not unimportant fact considering that the Irish were brutalized by the English and in turn brutalized those whom they colonized in policing the British empire. O’Dwyer did not at all take kindly to the defiance of authority and was certain, from his apparent study of history, that the great and firm hand of the British had not only saved the Punjab from the mutiny of 1857-58 but had been crucial in enlisting the aid of the Sikhs in suppressing the mutiny. The government had no greater task than to uphold “law and order” and, watching the effects of the hartal initiated by Gandhi, he warned that the agitators “have a day of reckoning in store for them.”
Local people point to the holes in the wall to suggest how Dyer directed the firing on 13 April 1919, deliberately aiming with the intent to kill as many people as possible.
What transpired in the days just before the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh need not be recounted at length. Deputy Commissioner Miles Irving inadvertently revealed what truly stoked the anxiety of the British when, in a telegram to O’Dwyer on April 9, he described the Muslims and Hindus of Amritsar as having “united.” That the Hindus and Muslims might unite was equally incomprehensible and alarming. The British responded to this wholly unwelcome show of solidarity among Indians with the arrest and expulsion of two local leaders, Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew, precipitating large demonstrations. Twenty Indians died in police firings; British-owned banks were attacked by crowds. Nothing infuriated the British more, however, than the assault on an Englishwoman, Marcia Sherwood: she was badly beaten but saved by other Indians. The white woman was nothing short of sacred, inviolable, “untouchable” to the Indian. The men of the ruling colonial elite perceived the loss of her dignity as an affront to them. Their humiliation had to be avenged, and so it was: the street where Miss Sherwood had been assaulted was sealed off and Indians had to crawl if they wished to make their way in or out of the lane. A flogging post was set up to whip sense and discipline into those Indians who might dare to act otherwise.
The “Crawling Lane”.
Gandhi would subsequently describe “the crawling lane” as the site of a national humiliation. Once the firing at the Jallianwala Bagh had stopped, Dyer did not stop to render aid to the wounded. He would later state that no one asked for his help–who would ask for help from a butcher, one might ask–but his real attitude is betrayed by his confession that as soldier and officer of the law, his job was not to aid the wounded. That was not his business. The city was under martial law, and what the British described as “disturbances” had rocked other parts of the Punjab. Demonstrators were strafed from the air: this initiated a new phase in colonial warfare, and George Orwell in a scintillating essay noted the corruption of the English language entailed in describing such brutal suppression as “pacification.” O’Dwyer, who signaled his approval of the actions taken by Dyer in Amritsar, was quite certain that the Punjab had been saved from a dire situation which recalled the Rebellion of 1857-58. Indeed, in the months ahead, the spectre of the Mutiny loomed over the prolific debates about the measures taken by the British to contain the disorders.
1919, however, was not 1857. The Indian National Congress was now a formidable organization and the British had failed to fully comprehend that politics had entered the phase of plebian protest. Hundreds of people had been killed in cold blood, all because Dyer, by his own admission, had sought to “teach a lesson” to “wicked” Indians” and create a “wide impression” of the costs of defying lawful authority. The idea of “fairness” and the notion that the British had instituted a regime of “law and order” that offered Indians deliverance from “despotism” had long been the principal pillars of colonial rule, and an inquiry into a massacre that threatened to stain the good name of the British was all but inevitable. It came in the form of the Disorders Inquiry Commission, presided over by Lord William Hunter of Scotland. Many Britishers in India resented the intrusion into Indian affairs from London. The theory of “the man on the spot” was one of the cornerstones of colonial governmentality. Dyer had been confronted with what he perceived to be a mutiny-like situation, and as the “man on the spot” he alone knew what was required to create a suitable effect. Armchair politicians in Britain had no business to impugn the judgment of experienced officers, they argued, and many in Britain also agreed. When, months later, Dyer was forced to resign his commission, the British public, led by the rabidly racist Morning Post, opened a fund in his name–the antecedent of the modern-day crowdfunding campaign–and raised £26,000 for him, an amount worth over £1.1 million today. The “Butcher of Amritsar” went into luxurious retirement, though I suspect that some Indians rejoiced that Dyer’s life was cut short by arteriosclerosis.
The “Punjab Disturbances” would come to occupy a distinct place in the annals of colonial Indian history. Most people, even Indians, remember only the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, but Gandhi was quite clear in his mind that the “crawling lane” order was even a greater wound on the Indian psyche. What the British created in the Punjab was a regime of terror. The Congress appointed its own committee of inquiry, and it took a much harsher view of British actions than the official Hunter Commission. Indian affairs had never commanded much attention in Parliament, but, rather unusually, the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity and its aftermath were debated vigorously both in the Commons and among the Lords. Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu opened the proceedings in the Commons with the observation that Dyer had a reputation as an officer whose conduct was “gallant”. Montagu was grateful for the service that Dyer had rendered to the Empire. Nevertheless, an officer who justified his actions with the submission that he was prepared to inflict greater casualties if he had the means to do so from none other than a motive “to teach a moral lesson to the whole of the Punjab,” was guilty of engaging in “a doctrine of terrorism.” Montagu went on to charge Dyer for “indulging in frightfulness.” The grave import of this accusation would not have been lost on his fellow Parliamentarians: “frightfulness” was the English rendering of schrecklichkeit, the word first used to describe the terrorism inflicted upon Belgian civilians by the German army in World War I. That an English army officer should stand accused of pursuing the policies of militaristic Germans was an intolerable idea. The rampant anti-Semitism of the English elite already made Montagu, a practicing Jew, a suspect figure, and in 1922 Montagu himself was forced out of politics.
There is by now a familiar narrative of the Indian reaction to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Every school history textbook describes how Tagore wrote a moving letter to the Viceroy where he asked to be relieved of his knighthood, characterizing the massacre as “without parallel in the history of civilized governments, barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote.” More than twenty years later, Udham Singh, who was 20 years old at the massacre, sneaked into Caxton Hall in London where O’Dwyer was attending a lecture and shot him dead with a revolver. O’Dwyer had spoken of the day of reckoning and now he got his comeuppance. Remarkably, Dyer is the only person whose name Gandhi, with his own extraordinary flair for the English language, turned into an ideology. He wrote of “Dyerism” to signify the terrorist apparatus of a state that bears no responsibility to its subjects. It was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the atrocities in the Punjab that, as Gandhi would describe at his trial in 1922, turned him from a “staunch loyalist” and “co-operator” to an “uncompromising disaffectionist” who was convinced that British rule had made “India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically.”
Much has been made of the fact that during the debate in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill condemned the “slaughter” at the Jallianwala Bagh as an episode “without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire.” Churchill of course had a way with words, and so he continued: “It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.” But by what measure do we describe the incident as “singular”? As wartime Prime Minister two decades later, Churchill was not merely indifferent to the plight of millions in Bengal facing acute food shortages, but almost certainly precipitated with his callous policies a holocaust that led to the death of three million people. It barely suffices to say that if ever there was an incident of the pot calling the kettle black, this would be it: the monstrosity of it is that Churchill, a dedicated racist his entire life, appears as the guardian of English virtues in this debate. As I shall argue in the subsequent essay, however great the atrocity of Jallianwala Bagh, the view that Jallianwala Bagh was somehow an exception cannot withstand scrutiny. The British were then, as they are now, unrepentant and day of reckoning of the Empire has yet to come–even though British rule in India ended 75 years ago.
Additional Note: I published a 3-part piece on the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity on this blog in 2019. This first part is adapted from that piece, but some portions have been entirely rewritten. The second part that will follow in a few days is entirely new. Consequently, taken as a whole, this two-part piece is substantially new.)
This part was first published at abplive.in under the same title on 13 April 2022. Translations into Hindi, Punjabi, and a a number of other Indian languages are forthcoming.
(2nd of two pieces on Lata Mageshkar, 28 September 1929 – 6 February 2022)
The nation will take its time to come to grips with the phenomenon that was Lata Mangeshkar. One article or social media post after another has rehearsed the facts and occasional exaggerations that point to her astounding popularity. As I noted in the previous post, she is sometimes credited with having sung 50,000 songs, and that too in as many as 36 languages; accolades were heaped upon her, not least of them the Bharat Ratna, and the sobriquets with which she was showered include ‘Melody Queen’ and ‘Nightingale of India’. School children of my generation grew up learning that Sarojini Naidu was the Nightingale of India, but it is surely a sign of our times that the feisty Naidu, who was a highly accomplished poet and yet led the raid at the Dharsana Salt Works during the Salt Satyagraha and made world news, has had to make way for someone who has ruled the airwaves.
Mahatma Gandhi With Mahadev Desai and Sarojini Naidu on their way to Buckingham Palace, London, to meet the King-Emperor, 1931.
Lata monopolized the national imagination. In time to come, as film studies becomes more established in India as a discipline and distance permits a more nuanced and critical outlook on the legacy of Lata, we will doubtless derive a better understanding of how she became supremely ascendant as a playback singer, her place in the film industry, the interplay of gender and caste in shaping the contours of her life, and the circumstances that conspired to make her the heartthrob of the nation. Luck played a part, too: it was rather fortuitous for Lata that, with the partition of India, the inimitable Noorjehan left for Pakistan and so created an opening for her, even if it be argued that she would nevertheless have found her footing in the industry. When her popularity is ascribed to her ‘golden voice’, little if anything has been said: she was not the only gifted female singer of her generation, her own sister Asha Bhosle being a case in point, as can also be said of Suraiya who as a leading actress also had the distinction of singing for herself. One can at best refine the point and suggest that Lata’s voice was supremely expressive, or that—as Javed Akhtar has put it—her pronunciation even in Urdu was flawless or that her sur was perfect.
The nation has in most cultures been conceived as feminine and I suspect that we can begin to have a better conception of the extraordinary place of Lata in the life of the nation when we imagine how she not only embodied the nation but sang the nation. The near conjuncture between 1947, the independence of India, and 1949 when Lata’s arrival on the national stage became inescapably clear cannot be missed. 1949 was, the film historians remind us, the breakthrough year, the annus mirabilis of her life that left everyone else reeling. Naushad had four films that year but the one with Lata, Andaz, scored handsomely over the others, and Shankar Jaikishan made their acclaimed debut with Lata’s voice in Barsaat. This would have been nearly enough to send everyone packing, but Lata topped it with one of the songs with which her name is indelibly linked, ‘Aayega aanewala’, from the film Mahal directed by Kamal Amrohi. Some call it her ‘signature song’; it is surely among her best and critically important, not just because it launched her, but also owing to its place in the repertoire of songs that illustrate what I have described as singing the nation.
Still from film Andaz (1949).
‘Aayega aanewala’ will appear to many as an odd choice to understand the interface between Lata and the idea of the nation. That honor surely belongs, most will proclaim, to ‘Ae mere vatan ke logo’, a tribute to the soldiers who died during the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The story has been told ad nauseam of how her rendition of the song before Jawaharlal Nehru on Republic Day, 1963, sent him into tears. But in one very important way, this song should be viewed as anomalous in the context of my argument: it was specially written for the occasion by Kavi Pradeep and is not attached to any film. What is distinctive about the culture of the Hindi film, and Lata embodied this ethos perhaps better than any other playback singer, is that the Hindi film performs the nation itself—and nowhere more so than in the songs. This is to say that the song bears the burden of some of the most characteristic aspects of the nation—what may be called values, norms, and mores, but also the culture’s literary tropes, reigning metaphors, and expressive devices.
Let us consider briefly two instances from the song, Aayega aanewala. The film Mahal is commonly described as a gothic horror film, but the plot need not be understood to comprehend the force of my argument. It is a romantic song—about longing, the anticipation with which one awaits a lover, the thumping sound of one’s heartbeat, hoping that the one who must come, will come (aayega aayega aanewala). And then we encounter these lines: ‘bhatakhti hui jawaani manzil ko dhoondti hai /maaji bagair nayya sahil ko dhoondti hai / kya jaane dil ki kashti kab tak lage kinaare’. ‘A restless (and desolate) youth looks for her destination’, Lata sings, ‘much as a boat without a boatman is looking for the shore; who knows when the boat, or heart, will dock at the banks of the river (kinaare)’. The listless heart as a boat that is knocked around in the sea is a stock metaphor in Sanskrit love poetry, but the entire series of metaphors—the boatman, the boat, the river, the shore—proliferates in the bhakti literature of India and is unquestionably one of the more distinctive features of Indian literary traditions. To be sure, Lata is neither the lyricist nor the music composer; but, as most recognize, the singer over time becomes de facto the author of the song. What is emphatically clear is that Lata, whose command over the classical music repertoire was just as formidable, sang with full awareness of how the metaphors drew upon Indian traditions.
If Lata sang the nation, ‘Aayega aanewala’ furnishes a yet more dramatic illustration of this phenomenon, one which also points to what I have previously described as the near conjuncture of 1947 and 1949, just as it suggests that Lata’s hold over the national imaginary had to do in some measure with both the Hindi film’s own construction of the virginal purity of (Hindu) women and of the nation itself. One of the most peculiar aspects of broadsheets or nationalist prints that circulated widely in the 1930s is the frequent depiction of martyrs as moths (parwaane) that have fallen at the feet of Bharat Mata (see image below). Oddly enough, or perhaps not so, the song takes recourse to the same metaphor: ‘deepak bagair kaise parwaane jal rahe hain, / koi nahin chalata, aur teer chal rahe hain’ (‘How is it that moths are burning though there is no flame, / No one shoots the arrows, yet I feel the sting of their pain’). My point is not that there is any direct correspondence between the prints and the song. That is far from being the case, and indeed in ‘Dukhi Mata’ (fig. 1) the flame is lit but the moths have been devoured in its flame. Yet, as we know, shaheeds (Bhagat Singh among them, recognized here in this print by his trilby) are amar (immortal): truly do they burn (jal rahe hain). This literacy device suggests the proximity of the song to the nation embodied as Bharat Mata.
Dukhi Mata (‘Sad Mother’), c. 1930. Collection: V. Lal.
As a coda, let me add a provocation, or, in terms more familiar to the Hindi film song aficionados, spice up Lata with a bit of Asha. A good portion of the urban middle class in India has shown that it has little use for the ‘Father of the Nation’. As long as Lata, who was the undeclared Mother to the Nation, was there, India was never quite orphaned. Now, Lata’s gone, but . . . perhaps aayega aanewala.
First published in OPEN Magazine on February 11, 2022, as ‘Singing the Nation’, print & online.
There has never been any question that Lata Mangeshkar, who passed on at the age of 92 on February 6 in Mumbai, was the most popular singer in India. There have been endless number of affirmations of her popularity, but just why she may have been so popular, to which I shall turn in the second half of this essay, has been much less frequently explored. Lata certainly never had any equal among female playback singers, though it is sometimes argued that her sister, Asha Bhosle, held her own for at least a period of time, and among male playback singers Muhammad Rafi alone quite possibly rivaled her in popularity. If Lata was the ‘Melody Queen’, he was the ‘Melody King’. But Lata had the advantage over Rafi Sahib, who was a mere 55 years old at the time of his death, of longevity. Asha has a large following, to be sure, and many claim that she was more versatile than her older sister. Apart from the question of whether Lata was deservedly more popular than Asha, this ‘debate’ is unlikely to be ever resolved and is best left to those who are avid about their partisanship and who have the time and inclination to press their passionate conviction upon others.
As a testament to Lata’s popularity, many in the media have since her passing four days ago mentioned her apparently unrivaled repertoire of songs. Some say that she sang in thirty-six languages, while others are content to mention ‘only’ around 15-20 languages. Considering that most people cannot sing well in one language, unless they have had some training, a handful of languages would be enough to point to her extraordinary gifts. The huge commentary in the established media and the even greater outpouring of thoughts and sentiments on social media have all coalesced around the staggering number of songs Lata is thought to have sung. Some have mentioned as many as 25,000, or 30,000, and as far back as 2004 the BBC, in introducing an article by Yash Chopra on the occasion of Lata’s 75th birthday, mentioned ‘50,000 songs’. The obituary in the New York Times speaks casually of ‘tens of thousands of songs’ that Lata reportedly sang. Indians have long clamored to get into the Guinness Book of Records for one record or another, and to many Indians it was a matter of pride that the Guinness Book acknowledged her as early as 1974 as ‘the most recorded artist in music history’, though the claim was disputed by Muhammad Rafi. Just how this dispute was handled is a long story, but in 2011 the Guinness Book acknowledged Asha Bhosle for holding the world record for the largest number of ‘single studio recordings’. Neither sister holds the record today, that honor having passed on in 2016 to Pulapaka Susheela Mohan who is a veteran playback singer in Telugu films, though she also sings in other languages including Tamil.
Considering that India is a country obsessed with records and also renowned as a powerhouse of statistics, and that Indian film music aficionados number in the millions, it may be surprising that no one really knows how many songs Lata performed. However, in other respects as well there is something askance and quaint in the widespread approbation of her as the ‘Nightingale of India’. Growing up in India in the late 1960s, the ‘GK’ (General Knowledge) book assigned in school ensured that we knew that the ‘Lion of the Punjab’ was Lajpat Rai, ‘Frontier Gandhi’ was Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Lokamanya (‘Beloved of the Nation’) was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and ‘Deshbandhu’ (‘Friend of the Nation’) was C. R. Das—and that the ‘Nightingale of India’ was Sarojini Naidu, not Lata Mangeshkar. Sarojini Naidu was, of course, a feisty freedom fighter, a close associate of Gandhi and, after independence, Governor of the United Provinces. It is a lesser-known fact that she was also an accomplished poet, indeed celebrated by more than one English writer as India’s best poet in English. Sarojini Naidu was, however, no singer, and it was the expressive, lyrical, and emotive quality of her poetry that earned her, from Mohandas Gandhi, the sobriquet ‘Bharat Kokila’.
Here Gandhi was following the English tradition that has long associated literature and poetry with the nightingale. The English romantic poets, in particular, were enchanted with the nightingale, most famously among them John Keats whose ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ remains a staple in English poetry classes. It is perhaps this verse which captures the Indian public’s view of Lata’s ‘full-throated’ voice for the ages:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown . . .
His friend and contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his famous ‘Defence of Poetry’, did not doubt that the nightingale commanded the world—as did the poet: ‘A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.’ Gandhi knew, however, that the nightingale is not an Indian bird; thus, he refers to Sarojini Naidu by the word ‘kokila’, the indigenous bird that most closely approximates the nightingale. More tellingly, though perhaps few in India at all care for such matters, only the male nightingale sings. The female does not sing at all; the male nightingale, which has a vast and astonishing repertoire of over 1000 different sounds, compared to around 100 for a blackbird—the bird celebrated by the Beatles with the lines, ‘Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly’—serenades the female, and that too mainly at night.
Still, even as one takes the measure of Lata’s popularity, a more enduring question remains to be understood. What made her popular to the extent that she became practically the voice of the nation, and how did she remain at the top for decades? To many, the answer is obvious: she had a ‘golden voice’. By this it is meant that her singing was flawless and her sur was perfect; her singing, it is claimed, was uniquely expressive and she could even get into the skin of the actress for whom she was singing. Her biographer, Nasreen Munni Kabir, states that Lata also had the gift of capturing the mood of the song and the meaning of the words. Lata had grit and determination—and discipline, too. To sing in films in the late 1940s and into the 1960s one had to know Urdu, and Lata had to learn it; and the story is famously told of the time when Dilip Kumar rubbed it into Lata that her Urdu had a little too much of dal-chawal in it! Lata worked on her Urdu, to the extent that, as Javed Akhtar has related in a recent interview, he did not once hear her mispronounce an Urdu word. But he suggests that none of this was sufficient to produce the magic that one associates with Lata, and he points out that within fifteen minutes of getting the lyrics for the first time, and not having heard the music either, she had virtually mastered the song. There was some other quality Lata possessed that was uniquely her own, and Javed Akhtar attributes this to her ability to penetrate to the subtext, the meaning of a song that lay beyond the words.
Beyond even this, I would argue, there is something else that made it possible for Lata to become the heartthrob of the nation. She emerged on the national scene with a bang in 1949 by establishing her presence as a singer in several films, many of which became hits: Mahal; Barsaat; Andaz; Bazaar; Dulari; and Patanga. The historical context that saw her take the country by storm is critically important. India had acquired its independence in 1947 and one of the many questions before the country had to do with the status of women. Gandhi’s noncooperation movement of 1920-22 had brought women out into the streets for the first time and the trend accelerated with the Salt March and subsequent satyagrahas. But, in most other respects, women were not part of the public sphere, and though the Constitution that was being drafted by the Constituent Assembly envisioned an equal place for women in Indian society, the prevailing sentiment was that women belonged mainly in the domestic sphere. To take one illustration, though women played an important role in the communist-led Telengana Rebellion (1946-51), studies have shown that even their male compatriots expected women revolutionaries to give up their rifles and return to the kitchen once the rebellion was over.
At the same time, the struggle for freedom was also built on the idea of service to, and sacrifice for, Bharat Mata. The nation in most parts of the world is construed as a feminine entity, but in India this had resonance beyond the ordinary for many reasons, among them the fact that Hinduism, in contrast to the Abrahamic faiths, has still retained a space for the feminine in various ways. This can be seen in the attachment to goddess worship that is still found in nearly all parts of the country, though it is more pronounced in some parts of the country, such as Bengal, than in others. Indian art during the freedom struggle from the 1920s until the attainment of independence is suffused with invocations to Bharat Mata. In the aftermath of independence, the idea of Mother India had to be given a new incarnation—and then, fortuitously, Lata came along. She represented the idea of the feminine principle in its least threatening form. Where the prominent female singers of the previous generation had heavy, contralto voices, often having to sound almost like a man, as is evidenced amply by Malika Pukhraj and Zohrabai Ambalawali, Lata started off with a voice that was somewhat girlish and somewhat desexed. The contrast is all too apparent in the very first film, Mahal (1949), where Lata and Zohrabai, both uncredited, first appeared together: Lata sang ‘Aaayega aayega aanewala’, which blew everyone away, but the intoxicating mujra, ‘Yeh raat phir na aayegi’, is performed by Zohrabai. Lata’s was a voice that domesticated women, so to speak, and put them in their place as keepers of the hearth and custodians of the nation’s morality. This placed Lata at a considerable remove from the generation preceding her, some of whom also had to struggle against the stigma attached to female singers.
As historians of the Hindi film song have argued, but more importantly as every listener who has heard Lata and Asha Bhosle at some length knows, there is a marked difference in the artistic trajectories of the sisters in one fundamental respect which has a bearing on the argument that Lata speaks for a certain kind of femininity which places her in a different relationship to the idea of the nation. If Lata’s singing was more soulful, Asha’s singing had more body to it and exuded a kind of raw sensuousness—in part because Asha sang for actresses who had taken up roles where the heroine could to some degree project her sexual identity. It is common knowledge that Lata would not sing the songs of the vamp, but Asha gave a sexual feel to feminine identity in ways that went beyond simply being reduced to a vamp or someone who did mujra songs. The womanliness that Asha’s voice embodied hinted at sensuousness, a comfort with one’s own sexuality, but only occasionally did it border on the salacious.
If we had to put this in simpler terms, we can find the source of Lata’s popularity not only in everything that has been ascribed to her—perfect sur, flawless pronunciation, expressive soulful singing, and a genius for comprehending the mood of every song that went beyond the words—but also in the fact that she came to embody the idea of a virginal womanhood almost at the very inception of the nation. (Some may find the notion of ‘Bharat Mata’ and ‘virginal womanhood’ do not easily sit together, unless one was invoking some Indian conception of the ‘Virgin Mary’.) No one, after all, speaks of ‘Asha Didi’. Much work needs to be done to understand the magic wrought in India, and over India, by Lata Didi.
Part III of 3 parts of Udham Singh: A Colonial Massacre and the Birth of a ‘Revolutionary’
Sardar Udham is not, then, a film without its insights. Anti-colonial cinema in India has been prone to cast English officials such as O’Dwyer, or the officials who appear in Lagaan, as wooden characters. It is immaterial that, even in a film claiming to be based on ‘true events’, Udham is shown—in the absence of supportive historical evidence—as having ingratiated himself into O’Dwyer’s good graces and found employment at his home, but this artistic license permits the viewer to be privy to exchanges between the two which furnish a few clues to some peculiarities of the colonial sensibility. The British in India saw themselves as a transcendent force for the good, as custodians of law and order and firm adherents of the rule of law, and as exemplars of the idea of fair play whose keen sense of justice won them the goodwill of ordinary Indians. The highly placed colonial official Major-General John Malcolm, one-time Governor of Bombay and a prolific author, was speaking for every one of his ilk when in 1823 he wrote that ‘almost all who from knowledge and experience have been capable of forming any judgment upon the question, are agreed that our power in India rests on the general opinion of the Natives of our comparative superiority in good faith, wisdom, and strength, to their own rulers’ (A Memoir of Central India, Vol 2, Appendix 18). And that was putting it in mild and even polite language, considering that James Mill thought of India as being in a ‘rude’ (primitive) stage of civilization and others wrote of the ‘savagery’ of Indians. To the end of his life, O’Dwyer—a more critical character than the immediate perpetrator of the massacre since as the administrator of the Punjab he was responsible for shaping the policy in that province—persisted in holding to the view that it was the educated who had instigated the common folk of the Punjab to rebellion and that the yeomen peasantry could not be aroused to political consciousness except through the machinations of the Indian political elite. Both O’Dwyer and Dyer remained wholly unrepentant, firm in their belief that the Amritsar shooting was a military necessity and a deterrent that alone could prevent India from erupting into rebellion as in 1857. If, at the end of it all, there is not much else that one can divine from the filmmaker’s attempt to enter into O’Dwyer’s frame of mind, it is largely because Michael O’Dwyer, as his memoir amply demonstrates, was a man of singular mediocrity.
Statue of Udham Singh, Amritsar, 1990.Statue of Udham Singh, Amrtisar, 2018.
Amidst the humdrum life of Michael O’Dwyer and the peregrinations of Udham Singh, there are two moments of cinematic illumination which set up what is the fundamental story of modern times, that is the dialectic of motion and stillness, the mobile and the immobile. When Udham walked into Caxton Hall on 13 March 1940 with the intention of eliminating O’Dwyer, he carried with him an identity card that bore the name of ‘Mohamed Singh Azad’. Popular tradition has improved upon historical fact and rendered the name, as does Sardar Udham, as ‘Ram Mohamed Singh Azad’. What does this signify, asks a senior British official, to which Inspector John Swain somewhat haltingly replies: ‘Sir, this name signifies the religious unity of India’. Udham’s acolytes hold this up, quite reasonably, as an illustration of their shaheed’s secular credentials, but this gesture, even as it anticipates the theatrics of Amar Akbar Anthony by a generation, is somewhat predictable. Far more arresting is the fact that Udham assumed multiple aliases, traveling incognito with passports in the names of Sher Singh, Ude Singh, Udham Singh, and Frank Brazil. We moderns like to think of ourselves as living in a (to use that dreadful cliché) global village, but ours is an era not only of passport control but draconian surveillance regimes. The passport itself is a relatively modern invention just as the nation-state is the ghetto from which we cannot escape. What is most remarkable is just how mobile Udham could be, transgressing borders with relative ease. Against this mobility is the indubitable fact of the immobility of the thousands who were trapped in the walled enclosure known as Jallianwala Bagh. Some could run, but only a few metres before running into the bagh’s outer wall or being mowed down by the deadly hail of fire. Many others could not run at all; hundreds were trampled over in the ensuing stampede. In what is the film’s darkest and chilling moment, Udham crawls over the wall of the bagh later in the evening and stumbles upon mounds of the dead and the wounded. In an extended sequence lasting over fifteen minutes, he leaves with the wounded and repeatedly returns to take them to safety: in the stillness of the night, there are at most the faint moans of the wounded. It is Ghalib, writing on Delhi as a desolate city of the dead after the British had reduced Hindustan’s first city to abject submission, that comes to mind: 1857 redux, precisely what the two henchmen of the Raj thought they were averting.
*****
The Jallianwala Bagh Memorial has been mired in controversy since the present government sought to transform it over the last several years into what they call a ‘world-class’ tourist site. Though Amritsar has a statue of Udham Singh that was installed in 1990, a large new statue of Udham Singh, which though sponsored by the Kamboj community to which he belonged can also be seen as part of the renovation initiative, was put up in 2018 just outside the memorial complex. The statue from 1990 shows Udham as a turbaned and bearded Sikh, holding a revolver in his right hand. The sculptor was, one could say, attempting to capture a likeness of the man in the act of shooting Michael O’Dwyer; on the other hand, Udham was neither bearded nor turbaned when he carried out the fateful act. Indeed, in the preceding six years that he lived in England, he abjured the external signs that identify the Sikh male. The new statue has been mired in controversy: some have objected to the loose and ill-fitting turban that sits atop Udham’s head, while others cavil that his outstretched right hand is sans revolver. The Government of India is said to have objected to a revolver in one hand, saying that it would ‘send a wrong message’, especially to the young; the clod of earth in the palm of his right hand is supposed to represent the soil of Jallianwala Bagh now sanctified by the blood of the hundreds who were martyred. However, to understand what is at the heart of the controversy, one can do no better than to turn to Sunam, Udham Singh’s birthplace, where the viewer is confronted with the bizarre fact of two statues of him, installed in the same year of him, that stand cheek by jowl. One depicts him as a Khalsa Sikh, with unshorn hair and a beard; the other shows a clean-shaven man, recognizable from most of the pictures of Udham Singh that circulated in the public realm in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and in the following two to three decades.
Close-up of the outstretched arm of Udham Singh holding a lump of earth in his right hand, from a statue of him in Amritsar, 2018
There is little if anything to suggest that Udham Singh was an observant Sikh, much less someone who swore by a Khalsa Sikh identity. Many contemporary public commentators have expressed alarm at the propensity of the present government to appropriate the most renowned figures of the freedom struggle, including figures such as Bhagat Singh who was an avowed atheist, but the apotheosis of Udham Singh (and Bhagat Singh, for that matter) into a Khalsa Sikh is not any less troubling. It is unlikely that these controversies will die down anytime soon. The functionaries of the state and the middle class in India have agreed upon a solution that deflects some of the fundamental questions and promises to satisfy the nation’s ego. This solution is captured in some of the scripted lines that appear on a dark blank screen at the end of Sircar’s film where it is solemnly declared that ‘more than 100 years later, India is yet to receive an official apology from the British government for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.’ An apology that has to be forced, as seems to be the case, from the British is no apology at all; an apology that may arrive when India is in the position of being a world power, if that day should arrive at all, would be nothing else but a demonstration of the coercive power of the strong and an instantiation of the maxim that ‘might makes right’. Little do those who would like an apology know that we are in the midst of an epidemic of apologies. Some would like an apology to be accompanied by substantial financial compensation, to put some teeth into it and make it hurt. Perhaps we should think of an apology, unthinkable for the foreseeable future, which would entail the British erecting, of their own free will, a statue of Udham Singh alongside the one of Mohandas Gandhi that stands in Westminster. The pigeons, at least, will have a field day.
(concluded)
See also Part I: The Making of Sardar Udham: A Massacre, A Young Man, and the Burden of Revenge, here.
Part II: The Peregrinations of a Supposed Revolutionary: The Many Guises of Udham Singh, here.
The 3 parts together were first published in marginally shorter form as “The Enigma of Udham Singh: Jallianwala Bagh and the Solitude of Revenge” in Open magazine (print and digital, 5 November 2021), available here.
Part II of Udham Singh: A Colonial Massacre and the Birth of a ‘Revolutionary’
Sardar Udham is curiously both an ambitious film that is lured by the idea of the epic and at the same time marred by a profound unself-reflexivity and insularity that also characterized Udham’s own life. To say this much is already to invite the wrath of those who have canonized Udham as a great shaheed, a worthy addition to the country’s gallery of martyrs, but the film inadvertently furnishes grounds for taking the view that however courageous Udham may have been, he worked with a very limited if not impoverished conception of ‘revolution’. The film does not purport to be a full-length biography, but it is tempted into being one. The viewer acquires no knowledge of his life before the massacre, except for the fleeting remarks shared between police officers about his childhood at an orphanage after the loss of both his parents at an early age. Attempts to claim Udham as a Khalsa Sikh doubtless also have something to do with the fact that he was raised at the Central Khalsa Orphanage from 1907 onwards. The film commences in 1931, when Udham was released after four years in jail after being caught with a cache of arms and prohibited political literature which led to his conviction under the Arms Act. We see Udham moving from one country to another, assuming aliases, taking up jobs in which he had little interest but which apparently allowed him time to foment his plan to assassinate O’Dwyer. Udham worked in various factories, as a peddler, carpenter, and engineer, and even as a lingerie salesman and as an extra on a film set. Throughout his adult life, the film suggests, Udham remained laser-focused on his objective just as Bhagat Singh remained his idol. Whatever the vicissitudes and setbacks of life, Udham never lost sight of the objective he had set for himself, and similarly it is the teachings and memory of Bhagat Singh that animated him. Just why it took him more than twenty years after the massacre, and some seven years after his arrival in England, to snuff out O’Dwyer’s life remains something of a mystery. But what is even more striking is that Udham does not appear to grow very much in these years: he was never a very lettered man to begin with, and where Bhagat Singh was to the end of his young life—he was sent to the gallows at the age of 23 in 1931—a keen if not voracious reader, Udham does not seem to have had any attachment to books. The only book that left an impression on him was Heer Ranjha, perhaps in the rendering of Waris Shah, and it on this book that he chose to take an oath when he was put on trial for the murder of O’Dwyer.
It may be that, in Sircar’s own view, some of Udham’s movements do not quite add up to the main narrative, but their omission from his film point perhaps to Udham’s provincialism and certainly to the filmmaker’s own inability to comprehend the place of the wider Indian diaspora in the making of Udham Singh. The film is silent on Udham’s intriguing years in Africa—according to some accounts, in Nairobi, and more likely in Uganda, where Indian labour was the backbone of the railways—where the young political rebel could conceivably have developed a sharper sense of the solidarity of the working class. Even more tellingly, Udham’s first long trip to the US in 1924, resulting in a long stay of three years, is omitted from the narrative. Udham is said to have become involved with the Ghadar movement in the US, but the American sojourn also netted him a wife—a Mexican woman, no less, if only because the Johnson-Reed (Immigration) Act of 1924 and other anti-Asian legislation shut out virtually all Asians from the US and compelled Indian men already in the US to take Hispanic women for their brides. The only half-decent biography of Udham by Anita Anand, The Patient Assassin, furnishes more details than we have ever had of Udham’s life with Lupe Hernandez, whom he deserted, along with their two children, when he left the US in 1927. Apparently Udham’s many supporters seem to have swallowed whole the notion that revolutionaries can be forgiven not only their excesses but such derelictions of family duty and parental responsibility if for no other reason than that making “revolution” is a forbidding task and that revolutionaries must not be subjected to the standards of bourgeois society. In the US, in any case, Udham would for some time have been part of the Punjabi-Mexican community, though we can also locate him in the vortex of what the scholar Vivek Bald has charmingly described as ‘Bengali Harlem’, a network of Indians who merged into Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and African American communities where present-day Global South solidarities were anticipated in their own fashion. These already elusive histories do not even leave a trace in Sircar’s film.
Udham Singh’s comings and goings may suggest to some that he was a man of cosmopolitan interests, or a theorist of revolution who was inspired by the idea of contributing to a worldwide upheaval of the working class, but this would be a very charitable interpretation of a peripatetic existence that remains something of an enigma. To be sure, the film hints that Udham was aware of some of the immense footprint of the British empire, and he would have come to know that the Irish were among those who had withered under English oppression. He was at one time even a gunrunner for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in one scene he tells an IRA man, ‘We had our Bloody Sunday’, a reference of course both to the Amritsar massacre and to the killings of civilians by British troops at a football match in Dublin in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence. In his broken English, Udham explains to the Irishman, ‘Your revolution and mine are the same. You lamb, I lamb: the butcher the same.’ But there is no hint that, in twenty years of this itinerant living, Udham derived a keener understanding of the struggle in India, or that he arrived at fresh insights after his interactions with the working class and communist political activists in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Udham’s links to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) were largely through Bhagat Singh, though the precise historical record of their association is tenuous at best, and even Udham’s activities as a HSRA member were quite limited. He seems in the film to go in and out of shadowy meetings with self-styled revolutionaries in Moscow and London, and there is much talk of ‘revolution’, but slogans do not make a revolution. Indians, V S Naipaul would have said with his characteristic cynicism, are exceedingly good at shouting and sometimes coining slogans; but what is the more surprising thing is how many academics have been taken in by stories of the gallantry of the HSRA, which was as much of a slogan-making factory as it was a bomb-making workshop.
‘Let the world know’, Udham says to detective inspector John Swain at their last meeting before he goes to the gallows, ‘that I was a revolutionary.’ We are no wiser at the end of this film than we were at the beginning as to what is a revolutionary. Udham was in the vicinity of the massacre and, the film strongly avers, arrived at the blood-soaked Jallianwala Bagh later in the evening; and he then took an oath that he would avenge the massacre. He nursed this grudge for twenty-one years before felling O’Dwyer with shots from his revolver and thereby demonstrating his patriotism, but what is “revolutionary” about such a practice of politics? It is doubtful that Udham knew, but the one man who had reflected for decades on these matters, on political upheaval, violence, and the radical transformation of society, was Mohandas Gandhi. We do not need the life of Udham Singh to write about Gandhi; however, it is impossible to engage with either Bhagat Singh or Udham Singh except in the backdrop of Gandhi, who absolutely dominated the political scene and whose presence was inescapable to anyone who sought to enter into politics. One would not know this from watching the film, where Gandhi is mentioned but once, and from which the innocent viewer might walk away with the impression that freedom from colonial rule was wrought by a bunch of young boys and some girls wielding country-made guns and shouting themselves hoarse with the slogan, ‘Inquilab zindabad’ (‘Long Live Revolution’). The martyr’s supporters, no doubt, have little time to spare for Gandhi, who was as usual forthright and uncompromising in his denunciation of the assassination of O’Dwyer and the injuries inflicted on Lord Zetland (Secretary of State for India) and two other English politicians as an act of ‘insanity’ which had caused him ‘deep pain’. While expressing his condolences to ‘the deceased’s family’, Gandhi noted that ‘such acts have been proved to be injurious to the causes for which they are committed’ (Statement to the Press, 14 March 1940). Unlike the enterprising and brilliant if self-serving V. K. Krishna Menon, who at first unequivocally repudiated Udham’s act as ‘abhorrent’ but then engineered his appointment as junior counsel for the defence of Udham once he saw the enthusiasm with which expatriate Indians as well as Indians at home were willing to embrace the assassin, Gandhi remained consistent in adhering to the view that his differences with O’Dwyer and Zetland alike did not permit him to condone murder or an act of insanity. Writing a few days after the death of O’Dwyer, Gandhi described it as incumbent on the exponent of nonviolence to ‘make every Englishman feel that he is as safe in our midst as he is in his own home. It fills me with shame and sorrow that for some time at least every Indian face in London will be suspect’ (Harijan, 23 March 1940).
What Sardar Udham misses, in common with nearly every film that has ever been made on Bhagat Singh, the HSRA, and Udham Singh, is the opportunity to cast the relationship between these revolutionaries and Gandhi as something other than purely adversarial. It is Gandhi who was the principal author of the Congress Committee Report on the Punjab Disturbances, an extraordinary retort to the official Hunter Commission and a devastating indictment not only of the colonial machinery of repression but specifically of the culture of violence bred by both O’Dwyer and Dyer. O’Dwyer knew of Gandhi’s role in the making of the Congress report, and there is a point in the film where O’Dwyer, shown promoting his book, The India That I Knew (1928), critiques Gandhi for suggesting that he, O’Dwyer, had sought to suppress political consciousness among Indians. Whether Udham—and the HSRA revolutionaries—knew or even cared is an interesting consideration. But there is another point of intersection, one which often escapes the attention of commentators. Whatever his distaste for violence, and his principled repudiation of acts of political sabotage and assassination, Gandhi was adamant that the colonial state was never to be permitted to cast political acts as common crimes. Gandhi abjured the methods adopted by the HSRA, and even more so the rank opportunism of someone such as Vinayak Savarkar, but he recognized the political nature of their acts. It is this outlook which shaped even his relationship to Savarkar, whose tendency to political chicanery and encouragement of violence among others Gandhi deplored even as he saw it fit to state that Savarkar deserved attention as a political offender. Udham, one hopes, would have seen in Gandhi a supporter of his own adamant repudiation of the colonial attempt to cast him as a common criminal, as this exchange in the film between the prosecutor and Udham shows:
Udham: I was in jail for four years [1927-31]. But not for a crime.
Prosecutor: Why on earth would anyone be in prison for four years if they
had not committed a crime?
Udham: No, no, no crime. I was fighting – fighting for freedom . . .
[A Review article on India: A Story Through 100 Objects, by Vidya Dehejia. Delhi: Lustre Press/Roli Books, 2021. ISBN: 978-81-94969174. 279 pp.]
Some years ago Sunil Khilnani, author of the elegantly written The Idea of India, a long discursive essay on post-independent India very much shaped by a Nehruvian sensibility, embarked on a rather different enterprise as he attempted to grapple with a country characterized by a long past. How might we imagine the history of India if we were to view it through the lives of some of its most arresting men and women—and equally some who won little recognition beyond their own community, fell into obscurity, or were architects of policies that have long since been disowned? The outcome was a book that Khilnani called Incarnations: India in 50 Lives (2016). It is understandable that his narrative should be peopled by the likes of the Buddha, Ashoka, Shankara, Kabir, Nanak, Mirabai, and Gandhi, but the choice of Charan Singh, a wily politician who served as the country’s caretaker Prime Minister for six months at the head of a wobbly coalition, will seem odd to many except perhaps to those who remember his reputation as an unstinting champion of the rural peasantry. The choice of Satyajit Ray may seem inspired to film afficionados who recognize him as one of world cinema’s supreme auteurs, and whose Apu Trilogy is a landmark of humanism, but I suspect that the hundreds of millions who follow Salman Khan or Shahrukh Khan have barely heard of a director who crafted his films in the image of Mozart’s operas where, as Ray once explained, ‘groups of characters maintain their individuality through elaborate ensembles’.
Khilnani did not claim to be writing about the 50 most influential Indians, or the ‘greatest’ Indians, but it is in the nature of things that his 50 lives should have been construed as in some ways the lives of the most eminent Indians. Any enterprise such as Khilnani’s must be marked by eccentricity. It is a similar eccentricity, if that is the word to designate choices that sometimes appear unstable, quirky, and occasionally outlandish, that characterizes Vidya Dehejia’s audacious and intellectually provocative attempt to narrate the story of India through 100 objects. Dehejia is principally an art historian and would doubtless have been inspired by A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), an attempt by Neil MacGregor to write a ‘world history’ through 100 objects in the gargantuan collection of the British Museum of which he was then the Director. MacGregor was constrained only by the parameters set for him: ‘The objects had to cover the whole world, as far as possible equally’, and address the totality of human experience, not only the lives of the rich and the powerful; consequently, the objects chosen could not merely be great works of art but had to speak to everyday life. Dehejia in principle sets for herself a somewhat similar task with regards to the objects that she chooses, stating that she has tried not to privilege any political standpoint and that she has sought to be ‘even-handed and fair-minded’ in the story that she tells. The desire to be ‘even-handed and fair-minded’ may evoke some cynicism from the reader with a knowledge of the British attempt in India to represent themselves as neutral gatekeepers, but others might say only that Dehejia is being true to the calling of her profession.
It is, however, in the structure of her book, lavishly illustrated and meticulously produced by New Delhi-based Roli Books, that she most closely emulates MacGregor with one significant difference. Both books are divided into twenty chapters and generally four to five objects illustrate the thematic argument of each chapter; however, where MacGregor proceeds strictly chronologically, moving from one phase of history to another, Dehejia’s fidelity to chronology extends only within each chapter. Thus, for example, in discussing ideals of womanhood in India, Dehejia moves from a bronze statue of Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, c. 900 CE, to a watercolour on paper from 1615 of Nur Jahan, whom some readers may perhaps be surprised to discover was an expert markswoman; and from there to a recent statue of Ahilyabai Holkar, who was an astute ruler as much as she was a pious Hindu in the mid-18th century, to two early nineteenth century representations of Saraswati and Bharat Mata.
To understand the circumstances that have conspired to make possible a work such as Dehejia’s, it is necessary to recapitulate a few recent developments in historical scholarship. There is, after some decades where cultural studies predominated and the gaze was riveted on the politics of representations, once again the turn to material history. It is immaterial that the Chola Temple Walls which Dehejia adroitly describes as a ‘Public Record Office’ (pp. 68-69), covered as they are with inscriptions, cannot quite be held in one’s hands as is generally true of many objects. Her objects are artefacts that inscribe a past, speak to the present, and occasionally portend the future. Secondly, Dehejia is still beholden to one of subaltern history and postcolonial theory’s most potent insights, namely the place of the ‘fragment’ in the imaginary of the nation. Taken together, her objects—and other like objects—are more than the sum of the parts; but each is a fragment, sometimes calling forth other associations, occasionally a whole unto itself, and sometimes orphaned. Thirdly, and relatedly, since national histories have become suspect to enlightened liberals, more particularly as they generally degenerate into becoming nationalist histories, scholars have had to search for new ways to write national histories without succumbing to the nationalist malady. Dehejia’s history of India through 100 objects can certainly be read in this vein.
It is as an art historian that Dehejia comes to her task and this shows equally in her choice of themes and the objects to illustrate the themes. Though four to five principal objects are apportioned for each part, the section on the ‘Art of the Illustrated Book’ is an exception with seven objects—and all these are examples of what may be called ‘high art’, folios from rare manuscripts and miniature paintings. At least half of the objects chosen by her are sculptural works or miniature paintings and the overwhelming and some will surely say misleading impression left upon the reader is of a civilization that was shaped predominantly by the artistic sensibility of Indian people. One hundred objects are numbered but the ‘100’ is not to be taken literally, nor are the objects always drawn from India, even if they are clearly ‘Indic’ in origin or produced in some fashion under the sign of the Sanskrit cosmopolis: thus, for example, a 9th-century Sri Lankan statue of the Buddhist goddess Prajnaparamita is offered as an illustration of the ‘yogic body’, but the argument is supplemented both with seals from the Indus Valley (ca. 2000 BCE) to suggest the antiquity of yoga in India’s imagination and the famous 7th century CE open-air ‘Great Penance’ relief carved on two boulders at Mamallapuram where yogic postures are depicted (pp. 34-37). The commentary that ensues is what one might expect from an art historian, though here Dehejia’s declared intent to eschew a political position here perhaps does short shrift to the subject. There has been a lively debate in recent years, particularly in the United States, on whether yoga is intrinsically related to Hinduism: both the Christian right and Hindu nationalists have affirmed (though for different reasons) such a relationship, while many especially liberal practitioners of yoga claim that it is a wholly secular practice shorn of any religious underpinnings. There is some controversy over whether the main motif of this magnificent sculptural relief is Arjuna’s penance or the descent of the Ganga, but in either case yoga’s associations with Hinduism seem unimpeachable.
-Great Penance Relief at Mamallapuram (formerly Mahabalipuram), Tamil Nadu, 7th century CE. The figure of the ascetic in a yogic pose can be seen at the center, about a third of the way down from the top.
Dehejia is less reticent, however, on how what objects tell us about Hindu-Muslim relations and the contemporary project to read Hindu aspirations into the past. She does not state her position bluntly but her repudiation of the communalist standpoint is clear enough. It is a measure of the restraint with which she writes that the discerning reader will at once understand her position while the reader who is disposed towards Hindu nationalism is perhaps likely to think anew his or her own position. Consider her treatment of this subject through two objects. A Chalukyan period (ca. 1000 CE) granite sculpture of a dvarapala (door guardian) interests her since it frequently changed hands, moving one from Hindu king to another in a tale of vanquishers and the defeated (pp. 62-63). Sometimes objects, and sacred centres—most famously Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, otherwise known as Sancta Sophia—fell to the conqueror of another faith, a phenomenon that she rightly points out can be seen ‘in most parts of the world’. The communalist would like to read such phenomena exclusively through the lens of religious animosity, but it is the politics of conquest and the quest for power that characterize this history rather than the politics of religion. More arresting for many reasons, not the least being that even educated Indians know very little about the Deccan sultanates (1527-1686) and their extraordinary cosmopolitanism, is her choice of two miniatures from Bijapur (ca. 1604, pp. 106-7). One features Ibrahim Adil Shah, Sultan of Bijapur, who wore the rudraksha beads associated with Shiva, playing the tambura; in the other miniature, produced at the Sultan’s behest, the goddess Saraswati, a veena resting on her left rap against her right shoulder, is rendered much like a Mughal princess. This hybridized painting is emblematic of the syncretism of the Muslim courts. Adil Shah had inscribed along the top the words, ‘Ibrahim, whose father is guru Ganapati and mother the pure Saraswati.’ Should we be surprised that in more recent times Ustad Bismillah Khan, the master of the shehnai (the double-reeded oboe common in north India) nonpareil, played at the Kashi Viswanath temple and that he regularly prayed to Saraswati?
Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah playing the tambura; ascribed to Farrukh Beg in an inscription written by Muhammad Hussain Zarin Qalam, c. 1610-11. From an album page. Collection: National Museum, Prague.
I would like to insist that one cannot begrudge Dehejia her choices. Nevertheless, even as she candidly terms them ‘idiosyncratic’, the debate is not thereby closed. Each object tells a story, and she is adept in narrating the story, but thousands of other objects, each illuminating in its own fashion, would have served her equally well. A number of arguments may be raised in this connection, again less so as criticism than as provocations. First, I wonder if it is not the case that Dehejia has been perhaps overly influenced by trends highlighting “diversity” and the occluded subjects of history. A watercolour from 1615 of Empress Nur Jahan underscores her abilities as ruler and as an expert markswoman (pp. 236-37), and the aforementioned bronze statue of the 10th century Chola queen Sembiyan Mahadevi and the 2011 statue of the 18th century Ahilyabai of the House of Holkar are in the same vein (pp. 234-35, 238-39). In recent years there has been a spate of biographies of Mughal women of the royal household, some written, it seems, to counterbalance the lavish attention bestowed on the great Mughal rulers. This is all fine and admirable, but still at the end a rather anodyne exercise, establishing only, as Dehejia argues more than once, that patriarchy in India (and elsewhere) has prevented women from attaining their full potential. The more critical question is whether women in politics may furnish us a politics that will yield a more just and equal society. Secondly, and somewhat in this vein, India has historically provided richer possibilities of imagining a world that is not tethered to rigid conceptions of male and female, masculinity and femininity. The stunning statue from a copper alloy of ca. 1000 of God as ardhnari (half-woman) points to a world where both masculinity and femininity were preceded by androgyny (pp. 84-85). According to Dehejia, ‘the dominance of the male is clear in the fact that the composite image is called Shiva as Half-Woman’, but one must perforce ask: ‘called’ by whom? There is nothing intrinsic in the image which suggests the conception of God as predominantly female or male. But supposing that Dehejia were right, one is then moved to inquire whether the art of the West, or of China, Japan, or Africa, also allowed for such imagery of the divine godhead? Is the dualistic framework of thinking as much a problem in classical Indian thought as it is in the philosophical systems of the West?
Shiva as Ardhnari (Half-woman), c. 1000 CE, from Nepal. Copper alloy with gemstones. Approximately 83 cms. Collection: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The colonial civil servant and ethnographer William Crooke wrote a delightful and now forgotten book called Things Indian (1906). There are some 175-200 odd essays on subjects such as amulets, bamboo, the bazaar, camels, carpets, curry, diamonds, elephants, embroidery, fairs, rice, salt, tea, and snakes. I am tempted to ask, after reading about amulets in Crooke’s book, why ‘bangles’ are not one of the 100 objects that Dehejia writes about: the bangle-seller has been a ubiquitous presence in our bazaars and fairs, and the scene of a woman breaking her bangles upon learning of her husband’s death is to be found in scores of Hindi movies. A similar thought might arise regarding the mango and the banyan tree, but here Dehejia anticipates the reader in capturing these two ‘objects’ alongside the tiger, the peacock, and the lotus flower in the definitive stamps released by the Indian government’s post and telegraphs department (pp. 260-61). But their reproduction in this doubly diminutive form nevertheless suggests once again that everyday objects are slighted in favour of works of arts. Where, the reader may also ask, is the cricket bat? If cricket is, alongside popular cinema, the enduring passion of so many in the country, it would appear to be deserving of some attention. I was thinking likewise of the matka (clay water pot), the belna (rolling pin), and the pots and pans of the Indian kitchen. The pressure cooker—the traditional one, not the new incarnation known as ‘instant pot’—was invented in the US and became practically obsolete there, except as a retrofitted bomb, but in India it has found an enduring home and the Indian kitchen is unthinkable without it. Yet it is a mark of the suppleness of Dehejia’s thinking that some of these pots and pans do make their appearance in her ‘objects’, having entered into the imaginary of the contemporary artist Subodh Gupta’s massive installations, ‘Spill’ and ‘Very Hungry God’ (pp. 268-69). Objects with which we have lived for a very long time may take on new forms. We can read new meanings into them. It is to Dehejia’s credit that her book allows for this fecund play of possibilities.
Subodh Gupta, “Spill”, 2007.
[First published in a slightly shorter version in Open magazine (26 July 2021) under the title “An Objective History” and also available online (16 July 2021) here.]
With the passing of Sunderlal Bahuguna on May 21, the great social activist who added the “Chipko Movement” to the glossary of environmentalists worldwide, COVID has found one of its most illustrious victims. Bahuguna was hospitalized on May 8 after testing positive for the coronavirus and breathed his last nearly two weeks later, dying from complications arising from COVID. His death is rightly being mourned as a monumental loss to the Indian environmental movement. He was also, however, one of the last great witnesses to the Gandhi era—that is a loss which is almost inestimable.
Lal Salaam: A Blog by Vinay Lal 