A Paean to Humanity in South Asia - Part
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
American University
Washington, DC
The controversy around Panipat, the recent Bollywood historical blockbuster about an invading Afghan warrior king, that erupted last year in India was not an isolated incident. Just as President Donald Trump had labeled immigrants coming to the US from the Latin south as rapists and murderers, Bollywood had aggressively begun to make films depicting Muslims coming from the north as rapists and murderers.
2018’s Padmaavat about Alauddin Khilji, ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, depicted him in this negative light; reviews in The Globe and Mail and TheNew York Times noted its portrayal of heroic Hindus fighting Muslims depicted as “evil” and “ruthless” “foreign” forces who “eat dirty, fight dirty and follow the lead of a marauding brute who dishonors his own wife.” There was already a full-blown campaign to malign the historical image of Tipu Sultan, ruler of the south Indian Kingdom of Mysore and once seen as a celebrated nationalist Indian ruler (and Prime Minister Imran Khan’s hero). Indian pop music too features depictions of Muslims as dangerous invaders, with stars like Laxmi Dubey singing songs that call on Hindus to “fight proudly against ungodly religions,” “perform ceremonies with bullets,” and “cut off the tongues of enemies who talk against Ram.” Songs like these are blasted into Muslim neighborhoods to intimidate them.
Campaigns like this have led to the frightening current situation where mobs of Hindus armed with staffs go out looking for members of the minority communities, especially Muslims, and kill them all the while the gang films the gory details on videos that are then widely circulated. This is the actual meaning of mayhem—the crime of maliciously injuring or maiming someone in order to incapacitate the victim. In the mayhem, Hindu sadhus, Dalit, Christians and even nuns have been attacked.
Muslims, in particular, have been targeted in the name of “cow protection” by the mobs and are now accused of bringing coronavirus as part of their “corona jihad.” A leader in the Hindu nationalist Dharm Jagran Samiti organization announced on television a target to “finish Islam and Christianity” in the country by the year 2022, while a member of the Legislative Assembly from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh, the nation’s most populous state, set a date of 2024 when India would be exclusively Hindu and spoke of the “animalistic tendency” of Muslims. People have become so blasé about attacking Muslims that Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, who praised Gandhi’s killer as a “patriot,” spent eight years in prison for her involvement in bomb attacks in 2008 that killed 6 Muslims, won her election for national parliament as a BJP candidate in a landslide.
Although India’s founding fathers Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru promoted coexistence between the religions, their vision of modern India is facing an existential crisis. There were many tell-tale symbols of the ignominious rejection of Gandhi and his philosophy of non-violence in India; Gandhi’s ashes being stolen; Gandhi’s image being publicly shot at by the national secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha organization; Gandhi’s killer being hailed by the title “Mahatma,” and temples being constructed in his honor and a cult of personality arising around him. Recent headlines from The New York Times capture what is going on in the country: “How Delhi’s Police Turned Against Muslims,” “In India, Modi’s Policies Have Lit a Fuse,” “Gandhi’s Killer Evokes Admiration as Never Before,” “‘Muslims Are Foreigners’: Inside India’s Campaign to Decide Who Is a Citizen,” “India Plans Big Detention Camps for Migrants. Muslims Are Afraid,” and “India’s Soundtrack of Hate, With a Pop Sheen.” The acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy speaks of a “crisis of hatred against Muslims.”
From the harsh lockdown in Kashmir, to the lynching and burnings across India, to the citizenship laws that make Muslims third-class citizens in their own land, to the media and police onslaught, the Muslims of India are reeling. The campaign against Muslims posits that India is exclusively a Hindu nation and Muslims are nothing but dangerous alien invaders. Muslims are also accused of being worthless and of having contributed nothing to India. This is incorrect as so much of the architecture that symbolizes India, from the Taj Mahal, the Shalimar Gardens, and the Red Fort, to the cuisine such as tandoori and the biryani, to languages (Urdu) and music (Qawwali and Ghazal), is of Muslim origin or influenced by them. Most Indians do not know that one of the most popular national songs, Sarey Jahansey acha Hindustan hamara, was written by Allama Iqbal, a Muslim. Iqbal also wrote a famous poem in honor of Lord Ram calling him the “Imam of Hind.” Above all the Mughals, probably the grandest, most successful and most colorful dynasty of India, created the idea of a united subcontinent. Under the Mughals, India, as Dr Shashi Tharoor has so eloquently reminded us, was the richest and most powerful country in the world with a GDP estimated to be over one-quarter of the entire planet. When the British left two centuries later it was reduced to about two percent. Today Muslims are the most oppressed and marginalized of India’s communities with the state seemingly on the warpath against them to further crush them. It is an irony of history that a subcontinent that has produced Buddha, Ashoka, Guru Nanak and Gandhi, and promoted their beautiful messages of ahimsa, shama and shanti, has been reduced to seeking inspiration from Hitler, a demented, bloodthirsty, little European who attempted to slaughter millions of his citizens because they belonged to a different religion.
The reality on the ground in India today implies a deep hatred of Muslims among Hindus and vice versa, and by extension, in the public mind, between Indians and Pakistanis. Seeing the ugly confrontation between India and Pakistan and the disgusting acts of violence that it has generated on the Subcontinent it is understandable to see Hindus and Muslims as eternal foes with undying hatred of each other. And Muslim mobs in Pakistan and Bangladesh have exhibited similar violent hatred towards their Hindu and other minorities. One might assume that there is nothing but hatred between Hindus and Muslims. This is, however, an incorrect reading of history and indeed my own experiences confirm its falsehood. I wish to share the following personal examples which throw light on the subject and challenge the idea of an immutable confrontation between the two faiths.
The first example is of the esteemed Hindu scholar Nirad C. Chaudhuri. In the 1960s I had read Nirad Babu’s book The Continent of Circe: Being an Essay on the Peoples of India, Babu being an honorific for the general respect that South Asians gave to him, and it had left a deep impression on me. Impressed by Nirad Babu’s knowledge of the Subcontinent and attention to detail, I decided to interview him for my own book Resistance and Control in Pakistan (Routledge, 1991) when I was based in Cambridge in the late-1980s. I thought he might have insights into the region of Waziristan to add something new to my perspective. At first those who acted as his minders in Oxford where he lived were reluctant to give me access and asked many questions as to why I wanted to see him. A nonagenarian, he was also something of a celebrity curiosity. Nirad Babu was 5 feet in height but intellectually he towered over those around him. On his hundredth birthday, the Queen and the President of Oxford University sent messages of congratulations.
When I told them I had been Sub-Divisional Magistrate or Assistant Commissioner in charge of Kishoreganj, his hometown, in Mymensingh District, I was immediately invited to Oxford. We fixed a date to travel from Cambridge. Amineh, my eldest child, still at high school but even then curious about the world, accompanied me.We first talked about Waziristan. He asked intelligent questions based on his readings of Waziristan: he asked about the river Tochi and about the legendary Fakir of Ipi. In between the volley of questions, he delivered brief lectures on the tribes and terrain of Waziristan. Nirad Babu had the reputation of being a walking encyclopedia and I was not disappointed.
But it was his hometown at the other end of the Subcontinent in Kishoreganj that was on his mind. He had left his family home in Kishoreganj in what became East Pakistan and found himself a refugee first in India and then in England. To him, I became a link, however weak, with his own past. Again and again, he came back to Kishoreganj, soaking up information like a thirsty traveler gulping water. He asked many questions about his home, which I had visited while on a tour of the area. My visit was a homage to his scholarship, and little did I imagine that one day I would meet him. It was a largish rural house and kept in good condition by the family retainers. Every time I reminded him that it was getting late for my train he suggested I take a later train. That afternoon, we were two exiles from a beautiful land united by our distant memories of it.
When I requested a blurb from him for my book, he readily agreed. That encounter in Oxford, my reaching out to an old man in exile still yearning for his homeland across the world, was an act typical of the composite culture of South Asia; his response by giving a stranger the gift of a blurb for his book was an equally generous South Asian gesture. He received me with traditional hospitality but he also saw me through the prism of his affection for the British. In my job as a field district officer he could not but help connect me to what in his mind was the ideal type of the British scholar–administrator, indeed that is what he precisely mentioned in the excellent blurb that he gave me. It graces the cover of my book: “Akbar Ahmed’s book is in a great tradition of the greatest British administrators—Sir Alfred Lyall, Sir William Hunter, and Sir Denzil Ibbetson. Ahmed is also like them, an anthropologist administrator.”
Another towering Indian intellectual and an ex-Supreme Court judge, V. R. Krishna Iyer, also reached out to me in this spirit of inclusive humanism. He reviewed my 1992 book Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise thus: “Discovering Akbar Ahmed through his brilliant book Discovering Islam was my first experience … Ahmed is, above all, human and so is his book. I am in love with both” (Iyer in Economic and Political Weekly, 7 November, 1992, Bombay.)
My next example is of an Indian student, Pawan Bali, a Sikh who was my teaching assistant at American University in Washington, DC. To meet Pawan is to see the spiritual beauty and compassion of the great South Asian religions. She hails from Kashmir, the land of mystics, poets and powerful women, and personifies the rich Kashmiri culture that is influenced by the great faiths of South Asia. When Pawan joined me she was already a distinguished journalist and filmmaker. She had worked with newspapers like the Times of India and the Indian Express. She was also the bureau chief for the Indian news channel CNN IBN.
I asked Pawan to reflect on our time together. “You have been a mentor, a friend and someone who has led me to view not only Islam, but my own religion, Sikhism, with a new perspective,” she responded. “With you I have learned to discover the commonalities of faith, and the embracing power of human bonding. Our discussions on Sufi Islam, the teachings of Guru Nanak, my time with you teaching the courses of the World of Islam and Judaism and Islam, all have demonstrated the powerful message of humanity, equality and justice that underlines each faith. Being a fellow South Asian, we both have shared our disappointment on the growing chasms between faiths in India and Pakistan, our concern for minority communities; we both have shared grief over young girls being brutally raped in Kasur or Kathua; we have shared hope and pride in our common South Asian heritage, our love for music and poetry. All this is, and will always be special to me. Some of my fond memories with you include the time you said a prayer at Nankana Sahib, when my daughter was born and you sent me a photograph: the time when we walked into a mosque in DC, with our class of American University students, only to discover how divides dissolve across faiths, identities and culture.” (Continued next week)
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