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10TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath

VOLUME 12 â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 1 JANUARY 2020

cover story / politics 28

The Apostle of Hate Historical records expose the lie that Nathuram Godse left the RSS dhirendra k jha Since the assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in 1948, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has tried to avoid being implicated in the crime at all costs. It has used a statement made by the assassin Nathuram Godse to argue that he quit the RSS sometime in the 1930s and joined the Hindu Mahasabha. However, a detailed statement Godse gave to his interrogators before his trial clearly states that he was working simultaneously in both organisations. The story of Godseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life, too, reveals a constant and inextricable link between him and the RSS. It also reveals a troubled character, which may have helped decide his fate.

perspectives

22 politics

18 Lands of the Gods

The colonial roots of the Ayodhya verdict

deepasri baul politics

politics

The siege in Kashmir, the NRC in Assam, the CAA as the law of the land: The rise and rise of the Hindu Nation

What is at stake for the young Hong Kong protestors

52 Intimations of an Ending arundhati roy

22 Fighting for a Future raviprasad narayan

JANUARY 2020

the lede

10 history

8 Faith and Fiction

A historian’s quest for the facts about the Babri Masjid dispute

sushil kumar history

10 Songs of the South

photo essay / conflict

The rise and fall of Dakhni literature

70 Drawing the White

karthik malli

Curtain

communities

Winters of disquiet in Kashmir

12 Open and Shut

sohrab hura

The uncertain fate of Malta’s migrant population

giacomo sini and francesco m bassano

books

literature

86 On the Same Page

Agha Shahid Ali’s translations of revolutionary poets

manan kapoor

the bookshelf showcase editor’s pick 4

94 96 98

86 NOTE TO READERS: THE SPONSORED FEATURE ON PAGE 16 IS PAID ADVERTISING CONTENT.

THE CARAVAN

contributors THE LEDE

8 10 12

Sushil Kumar is an independent journalist. Karthik Malli is a writer and researcher whose work focusses on the intersection of language, history and identity in south India. Giacomo Sini is a photojournalist based in Livorno, Italy. He is primarily interested in the stories of refugees from conflict regions. His work has been published in several international publications, including Vice, National Geographic, the New Internationalist and Al Jazeera. Francesco M Bassano is a freelance writer based in Livorno. He writes about migration, marginalised groups and diaspora identities. He has written for several international publications, including El País, Il Manifesto, Neues Deutschland and Kansan Uutiset.

PERSPECTIVES

18 22

REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS

28 Dhirendra K Jha is a political journalist. He is the author of Shadow Armies: Fringe Organizations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva, and the co-author of Ayodhya: The Dark Night. His latest book is Ascetic Games: Sadhus, Akharas and the Making of the Hindu Vote, published in April 2019. 52 Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Her most recent book is a collection of essays, My Seditious Heart.

PHOTO ESSAY

70 Sohrab Hura lives and works in Delhi and is an associate member of Magnum Photos. Tanvi Mishra is the creative director at The Caravan.

BOOKS

86 Manan Kapoor is a Delhi-based writer. He was a part of the 2019 Sangam House writers’ residency. His biography of Agha Shahid Ali is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.

COVER

Deepasri Baul is an independent researcher working on urban space and public religion. Raviprasad Narayanan is an associate professor at the centre of East Asian studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Photo: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SP / Dinodia

Corrections: Nikita Saxena’s “Making News,” published last month, mistakenly stated that Udit Raj was a Congress MP in 2018. Raj was an MP with the BJP at the time, and joined the Congress in April 2019. The story has been corrected online.

editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior associate editor Roman Gautam deputy political editor Praveen Donthi books editor Maya Palit creative director Tanvi Mishra senior assistant editors Martand Kaushik and Puja Sen copy editors Ajachi Chakrabarti and Akash Poyam web editor Surabhi Kanga assistant editors (web) Arshu John and Tusha Mittal contributing editors Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury, Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume, Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat Peer, Samanth Subramanian and Salil Tripathi staff writers Atul Dev, Nikita Saxena, Sagar and Kaushal Shroff reporting fellow (north india) Tushar Dhara reporting fellow (government) Nileena MS reporting fellow (south india) Aathira Konikkara editorial fellows Amrita Singh and Mehak Mahajan multimedia producer Shaheen Ahmed fact-checking fellows Ahan Penkar and Armanur Rahman social-media management and engagement fellow Karishma Koshal senior software engineer Anjaneya Sivan assistant photo editor Shahid Tantray graphic designers Paramjeet Singh and Kevin Ilango hindi translator Vishnu Sharma and Parijat editorial trainee Mohammed Tahir editorial manager Haripriya KM editorial assistant Appu Ajith luce scholar Lewis James Page editorial interns Ankita Chauhan, Meghna Prakash and Omair Bhat photo intern Rishi Kochhar

editor.thecaravan@delhipress.in

Sagar’s “Biting My Tongue,” published in July 2019, misspelt the last name of Ramchandra Banaudha as “Boudh.” The name has been corrected online.

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The Caravan regrets the errors.

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THE LEDE Faith and Fiction A historian’s quest for the facts about the Babri Masjid dispute / History

“We felt strange and insecure in a society where religious animosity had reached unmanageable proportions.” Sushil Srivastava, a professor of medieval and modern history at Allahabad University, wrote these words in the preface to his 1990 book, The Disputed Mosque: A Historical Inquiry, an account of the nineteenth-century origins of the communal dispute that would culminate in the destruction by a Hindu mob of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, on 6 December 1992. When I met Srivastava, shortly before his death earlier this year, he was living those words, feeling strange and insecure in a society governed by those forces of religious animosity. His professional career had been derailed in the years since he wrote the book, and he had been threatened with violence. His book itself, and the history it laid out, had largely disappeared from the public consciousness. He had been a public witness in the Allahabad High Court case, but on 9 November, a few months after his death, the Supreme Court ruled on the appeal with a verdict that seemed to rely more on popular belief than on historical fact. “Enough is enough,” he told me. “Even I just want to forget this book.” Srivastava was inspired to work on the book while studying historical land-revenue records from the erstwhile princely state of Awadh for his doctoral research. “During my research, in the early days of 1986, I began to feel very deeply that communalism in north India had worsened to a large extent, and that this was directly tied to my profession,” he told me. “The 8

courtesy rough cut productions

/ sushil kumar

Sushil Srivastava’s professional career was derailed in the years since he wrote the book, and he was threatened with violence.

Vishva Hindu Parishad had announced, in 1978, that it would capture a number of mosques that it said were built on the sites of demolished temples. I felt that with so many popular, but baseless, myths giving rise to communal hatred, I should work to popularise the truth of these historical distortions.” Srivastava points out in The Disputed Mosque that Awadh’s Hindus and Muslims lived in relative harmony, with religious differences “either undermined or overlooked,” and the ruling classes celebrating all religious festivals. Although there was sometimes conflict between the Shias and Sunnis, and between Vaishnavite and Shaivite Hindu sects, he writes, “Religious conflicts between Hindus and Muslims were generally unknown.” Before 1853, the mosque was known as either the Jami Masjid or the Sita-Rasoi Masjid. The name “Babri Masjid” came to be used only after commuTHE CARAVAN

nal violence first broke out that year. The violence, Srivastava writes, was the product of British colonial policy, as the East India Company consolidated its hold over northern India. After anti-British riots in Bareilly, in 1816, under the leadership of the Pathans, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the governor general, was made “alive to the possible effect that an appeal to Muslim religious susceptibilities might have on British authority in the north.” In order to prevent an anti-British alliance by driving a wedge between the Shia nawabs of Awadh and the Sunni Mughal rulers, Hastings encouraged Awadh to secede from the Mughal Empire, in 1819. (At the coronation ceremony, the nawab was serenaded by “God Save the King.”) Through a treaty concluded that year, Ayodhya was transferred to a British resident, who would have control over administrative and revenue matters. “It is clear

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that the general intent of British policy in Avadh was to keep the population divided,” Srivastava writes. “This was achieved largely by encouraging the Hindu reaction against Muslims.” A key plank to this strategy was to encourage the growth of Hindu revivalism and fundamentalism. “I am convinced that before the second half of the nineteenth century the idea that the Mughal emperors had desecrated Hindu holy places was quite unknown,” Srivastava writes. This idea, which he says cannot be substantiated through historical evidence, was first perpetuated by British writers in the 1830s, based on little other than local legends and speculation. It was against this background that the communal violence of 1853–55 took place, with Hindu monks claiming that the Babri Masjid used to be a temple, and Muslim clerics claiming that the nearby Hanuman Garhi temple used to be a mosque. Amid the clashes, the Hindus took over the government land adjacent to the mosque, calling it the Ram Chabutra. The British refused to intervene and exploited these divisions to annex Awadh in 1856. In return for their loyalty during the 1857 mutiny, the British showered the Hindu zamindars and akharas—monastic orders—of Ayodhya with gifts, Srivastava writes. After hastily demarcating a boundary between the Ram Chabutra and the mosque, in 1859, the colonial authorities turned a blind eye to the Hindu land grab and the akharas’ activities. In 1934, the colonial government allowed the Hindus to demolish the dome of the mosque, although it later fined the community and used the funds to reconstruct the dome. Using Buddhist and Jain texts as well as accounts by travellers, Srivastava pieces together a history of Ayodhya, as a city that had a number of shrines of all major Indian religions. He notes that the first archaeological survey of the city, by Alexander Cunningham

in 1862–63, found ruins of Buddhist structures—also seen by the Chinese travellers Faxian and Xuanzang—but no evidence of a demolished temple. Hindu pilgrimages to Ayodhya as the birthplace of Ram, he writes, were a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning in the seventeenth century. The first English traveller to the city, the merchant William Finch, who visited during the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, does not mention a Ram Janmabhoomi temple in his memoirs either. Combing through Babur’s memoirs, Srivastava finds mention of the emperor stopping at the confluence of two rivers north of Ayodhya on 28 March 1528. There is no accounting of Babur’s whereabouts between 2 April and 8 September that year. “This is because the pages giving an account of Babur’s activities on these days are missing,” he writes. “The myth has developed because of this absence of information.” It was a number of “British scholars and administrators” writing in the nineteenth century—such as John Leyden, William Erskine, HM Elliot, Patrick Carnegie and WC Benet—who chose to fill in the gaps and perpetuate the myth that Babur visited Ayodhya on 28 March 1528 and demolished the Ram temple on the advice of local fakirs. “My experience of collecting data on Babri Masjid–Ramjanambhoomi was an unforgettable one,” Srivastava writes in the preface. “While my students were interested in what I had to say, my academic friends and teachers, with only a few exceptions, were unsympathetic.” In 1998, he was teaching modern history at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. At the time, Anandiben Patel, the future chief minister of Gujarat, was the state’s education minister. Srivastava told me that she sent him a message, through the Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Madhu Srivastav, that he should leave Gujarat. Once Anil Kane took over as the vice-chancellor at MSU that year, he called Srivastava to his ofJANUARY 2020

fice. “He asked me, ‘Why did you write such a book? Leave, or your legs will be broken.’” Srivastava soon took up a job at Allahabad University. I first met Srivastava in September 2018, when he was living in the university’s faculty residence. He did not have a copy of The Disputed Mosque and asked me to get him one from Delhi. However, procuring a copy proved immensely difficult. I checked the libraries at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Indian Council of Historical Research, Allahabad University and Aligarh Muslim University, as well as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, but while all of them had once had the book, they could not find a copy. Not only had the book disappeared, there seemed to be an attempt to confuse potential readers. In the references to his book Ayodhyã Revisited, the retired police officer and VHP sympathiser Kunal Kishore incorrectly refers to Srivastava’s book as The Disputed Shrine. After a week of searching, Saleha Rasheed, another professor at Allahabad University, found a photocopy of the Hindi translation. (A 1991 English edition can be borrowed from the Internet Archive website.) When I presented the photocopy to Srivastava, though, he did not seem pleased. Over two decades of living in fear had taken their toll. Srivastava told me that he had decided to move out of the faculty residence, to a Dalit neighbourhood fifteen kilometres outside the city, where he could talk more freely. I met him at his new house two months later. He was still afraid for his life, but nonetheless carrying on with his academic work. He was writing a new book, which he could not finish before his death, on how the British constructed a colonial identity for India and imposed it on Indian culture and religion, and how that colonial identity has brought contemporary India to a point where religious minorities cannot see a future for themselves in the largest democracy in the world. s 9

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Songs of the South The rise and fall of Dakhni literature / History / karthik malli On a July night in Bengaluru, I sat down at a local microbrewery with Walter Hakala, the director of Asian studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Over beer, he told me about his latest project: a study of the Deccan region’s Urdu inscriptions. He explained his findings, observations and spoke of the different far-flung corners of the Deccan his research had taken him to. The story of one inscription in particular—in northern Karnataka—sparked off a quest of my own. Once one of the subcontinent’s most politically and culturally important cities, Bijapur is now a small town, peripheral to the centre of regional power, located over five hundred kilometres away from the state capital. It is home to a host of historically and architecturally significant mosques, palaces, stepwells and mausolea—built during its time as the capital of the vast Bijapur Sultanate, ruled by the Adil Shahi dynasty from 1489 to 1686. The striking contrast between the grandeur of Bijapur’s medieval monuments and the shoddiness of its modern infrastructure gives it an almost palpable aura of institutional neglect. To the northwest of Bijapur’s modern city limits lies what was once the bustling market town of Shahpur. A hillock here long served as a base and focal point for Chishti Sufi activity in Bijapur. Today, the hillock is primarily known for the dargah of the seventeenth-century Sufi Amin al-Din Ala, which is built in the distinctive Adil Shahi style. The shrine’s importance goes far beyond its religious significance. Around its entrance are 15 couplets written in an immaculate calligraphic hand, each couplet the verse of a ghazal. Its content is mostly spiritual and esoteric, referencing the Sufi concept of achieving union with god and his wisdom. A chronogram at the end of the inscrip10

tion dates it to 1088 Anno Hegirae, or 1677–78 CE. The inscription is a sight to behold. The verses of the ghazal flank the entrance, the exquisitely written text looming above the faithful who flock to the shrine. According to a report by the Archaeological Survey of India, this is “perhaps the largest single inscription to be found on a Muslim tomb in India, and indeed, even on other buildings, too.” Remarkably, these verses are written not in Persian or Arabic, as one might expect, but in Dakhni, the mother tongue of most of the Deccan’s Muslims. Dakhni is an Indo-Aryan language whose early form was transplanted to the Deccan following Mohammed bin Tughlaq’s decision, in 1327, to move the capital of the Delhi Sultanate over a thousand kilometres south, to Daulatabad. Dakhni inscriptions are rare, and the one at the Bijapur dargah is the oldest surviving inscription in the language. When Hakala went to visit an older specimen in Ahmedabad—dating back to the mid-sixteenth century—he learned, much to his dismay, that it had recently been lost to negligence. Dakhni is today commonly considered a regional variant of Urdu, and scholars often term its classical literary form qadīm—old—Urdu. While Urdu and Dakhni are linguistically distinct, they are seen as sharing a certain literary tradition and canon, effectively making this inscription—far from the traditional heartland of Urdu tahzīb, or cultural refinement, in the Gangetic plains—the oldest extant Urdu inscription. Classical Dakhni emerged as a literary language with the epic poem “Kadam Rāo Padam Rāo,” written by the poet Fakhruddin Nizami in the late fifteenth century at Bidar—the capital of the Bahmani Sultanate—as well as in the verses of numerous local Sufis. This tradition consciously looked towards THE CARAVAN

the cosmopolitan Persian language, long patronised by India’s sultanates, as its reference point, borrowing from it literary themes, forms and aesthetics. With the splintering of the Bahmani Sultanate, Bijapur and Golconda rose to become centres of political power in the region, eventually also evolving into cultural loci for the production of courtly literature in Dakhni. As a language unique to the Deccan, Dakhni spoke directly to a local audience: an audience that took a certain pride in its local roots, and whose identity revolved around this rootedness. This was the Dakhni faction at court: descendants of early settlers from Delhi and local converts. The Dakhnis were perpetually in conflict with the Afaqis, or westerners, who were primarily immigrants from Persia. While the Dakhnis represented local elites, the Afaqis were part of transregional cultural and commercial networks that linked myriad polities within the Persian cultural cosmopolis. Each faction was associated with its own modes of cultural production, shaped by these same allegiances and orientations. The patterns of cultural production in the Deccan sultanates responded to the needs of both the Dakhnis and the Afaqis, indicating “a process of localization while maintaining old trans-regional affiliations and identities,” Roy Fischel, a researcher of Deccan history at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, argues in a 2015 paper. Although the fortunes of both factions waxed and waned over time, the political importance of the Dakhnis grew rapidly in the seventeenth century, in the wake of a growing existential threat to the Deccan sultanates: the southward advance of Mughal expansionism. The Mughals conquered Ahmednagar in 1633, and were showing increasingly clear designs of annexing Golconda and Bijapur. With their ties to

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heritage arts / heritage images / getty images

global networks weakened by dwindling resources, the local sultans had to decisively secure the support of the Dakhnis. After an alliance of Deccan sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire at the Battle of Talikota, in 1565, the material gains from the plunder enabled a cultural renaissance, one accompanied by an efflorescence of Dakhni literature. This lent voice to newly forming local anxieties.

The very name we now know this language by—Dakhni literally means “of the Deccan”—betrays its intimate ties to the region. According to the linguist David Matthews, the name Dakhni was first used in a Bijapuri poem, “Qissā-eBenazīr,” written in 1645 by the poet San’ati, before which it was generally referred to as Hindi. This change in name asserted an almost conspicuously patriotic identification with the Deccan, an identity embodied by the Dakhni elites. As

the historian Richard Eaton writes, Dakhni was “a term reflecting the new point of geographical reference, and the new spirit of cultural independence, of the language’s native speakers—the Deccani class.” Dakhni poetry had always freely referenced local place names, seasons, flora and fauna, even Hindu deities and festivals; used Sanskrit and native Dakhni vocabulary and names over Persian and Arabic ones; and was effusive in its praise of the Deccan. These literary traits articulated through verse the spirit of belonging the Dakhnis felt. With the survival of their states—and patrons— now under question, Dakhni poets began to denounce the Mughals. The Bijapuri poet Nusrati, for example, wrote that the Mughals’ treachery had made “Satan their pupil for eternity.” The story of literary Dakhni, however, had an almost poetically tragic ending. With the fall of Bijapur and Golconda to Aurangzeb’s forces less than a decade after the inscription was issued, the Dakhni tradition was almost entirely extinguished, as its elites no longer held any relevance. They lost their voice as well as their verse. With time, this tradition faded from the collective memory of the Deccan. According to MN Sayeed, a former head of the department of Urdu at Bangalore University and an expert on Dakhni literature, literary Dakhni remains solely the preserve of specialists today. “Most Dakhni speakers are unaware that epic poetry was once written in their language,” he told me. “The dargah inscription’s choice of Dakhni is intriguing, but leaves us with unanswered questions,” Hakala argued. “It tells us nothing about its background, intended audience, or indeed its reception. Did most worshippers recognise the language of the inscription, its words and poetry?” Pausing to take a swig of his beer, he continued, “The dargah is prominently visible from what is likely a royal Bijapuri pavilion that directly faces it. Did it carry some ceremonial importance?” An analogy with Delhi’s Qutub Minar and its prominently visible floriated inscriptions would be worth developing, he said. The dargah’s inscription today stands as a mute and singular witness to the rise and fall of the literary tradition that birthed it, an almost unique testament to the majesty of Dakhni at the court of Bijapur. s JANUARY 2020

left: Dakhni, an Indo-Aryan language, was transplanted in the Deccan region following Mohammed bin Tughlaq’s decision, in 1327, to move the capital of the Delhi Sultanate to Daulatabad.

the lede

Open and Shut The uncertain fate of Malta’s migrant population / Communities

At the dive bar in front of the screening centre for migrants in Marsa, a town in southeastern Malta, time passes by slowly. To kill time, one plays dominoes or billiards, or tries to catch a glimpse of the open sea beyond the rusty ships docked at the harbour. Everything here, whether the languages people speak or the spicy scent of the meat on the grill or the warm and dry wind, is reminiscent of Africa. Yet, Malta plays its role as a southern portal to Fortress Europe. Thousands of refugees have made their way to this island nation over the years and found themselves confined here, awaiting a tenuous future. Their exact number is unknown even to humanitarian organisations that support asylum-seekers. Among these organisations, one of the most active is Kopin, a local NGO that seeks to promote a “sustainable reception” and a meeting point between locals and migrants, through education and training projects. William Grech, Kopin’s executive director, and Dominik Kalweit, Grech’s deputy, explained to us, when we met in June 2019, that anyone who arrives illegally in Malta is taken to the screening centre. They remain there for a maximum of 15 days, during which they are identified, registered and assessed for health and psychological care. Before 2015, all illegal migrants would be automatically detained, but an overhaul of the immigration policy that year changed this. However, migrants without identification documents, or with outdated visas, can still be detained indefinitely. Most migrants are housed in “open centres,” of which there are five on the island, and given a minimum income, without being guaranteed food or other services. They are allowed to leave these overcrowded open centres for school or work, but if they decide to move out, they are rarely allowed back in. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there were 1,445 arrivals by sea in 2018 alone. The migrants were mostly from Sudan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria and Libya. However, NGO workers told us, there are a growing number of arrivals from Italy—refugees moving to look for work, or leaving Italy in the face of growing hostility from Matteo Salvini’s Lega, which was part of the coalition government in Italy until August 2019. 12

A Tuareg migrant from Libya, who had moved to Malta a few months before from the Sicilian city of Catania, told us on condition of anonymity that he had worked as an electrician in Italy. After the reception centre he was living in was shut down, earlier in June, he had nowhere to go. However, the situation in Malta was not what he expected— there were no jobs to be found here, so he wanted to go back. But, despite having an Italian residence permit, he was being prevented by Maltese authorities from returning. We asked him about the situation in his home country, which has seen civil war and anarchy since the 2011 ouster of Muammar Gaddafi. “In Libya, people have completely lost their minds,” he said. “Over there, guys like me are killed like flies. The rest of my family has preferred to flee to Nigeria.” In Ħal Far, a desolate industrial area near a former British air-force hangar, there are two open centres, one of which is reserved for families. The main centre consists of a row of white containers placed on top of one another, each housing at least seven or eight people. Despite its name, the open centre is closed to journalists and NGOs. A former detention building nearby had been bought by a private individual, who was renting out rooms for a hundred euros a month. On 6 April 2019, Lassana Cisse, a 42-year-old Ivorian resident of the Ħal Far open centre, was shot dead on the road to the seaside town of Birżebbuġa. Two other migrants, from Guinea and Gambia, were injured in a separate shooting the same day. Lorin Scicluna and Francesco Fenech, soldiers from a nearby military base, were arrested the following month for the hate crimes. Cisse’s killing is believed to be Malta’s first racially motivated murder. After residents of Ħal Far rioted following an argument between a resident and the centre’s security guards, on 20 October, the Times of Malta noted an outpouring of anti-migrant hate speech on social media. The far-right party Imperium Europa did not win any seats in the European parliament during the May 2019 election, but its vote share has grown almost fivefold since its establishment, in 2000. Neil Falzon, the director of the human-rights NGO Aditus Foundation, told us that hostility towards migrants in the country is the result of the island’s dense population, as well as the fear of a Muslim invasion that would threaten Malta’s Catholic identity—even though most of the migrants from Africa THE CARAVAN

below: A mural in front of the Marsa bus stop, where a detention centre for immigrants was located.

giacomo sini

/ giacomo sini and francesco m bassano

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are Christian. “Immigrants are immediately locked up in identification centres, and immediately perceived negatively—by the surrounding society, by the media, and by politics—as carriers of disease and as Islamic invaders, so that they themselves end up self-excluding and marginalising,” Ahmed Bugre, a Sudanese migrant and founder of the Foundation for Shelter and Support for Migrants, said.

The Catholic Church itself, however, has worked in concert with NGOs to support the migrants. Also located at the Ħal Far airfield are the headquarters of the John XXIII Peace Lab. The NGO, founded in 1971 by the Franciscan friar Dionysius Mintoff, runs a sanctuary that houses and feeds around fifty asylum-seekers. “It is only a drop in the ocean,” Mintoff told us. The site also

JANUARY 2020

has an information centre and café, run by a group of local residents called Ħal Far Outreach, which provides news and linguistic support to the migrants

LETTER FROM MALTA

open and shut · the lede

above: Sudanese youth play dominoes at a bar near the open centre at Hal Far. As an entry point for immigrants, Malta plays its role as a southern portal for Fortress Europe.

“Migrants who arrive mainly from Italy are an opportunity for local entrepreneurs, because they can be exploited as cheap labour,” Kalweit told us. “Often, some people arrive in Malta as victims of human trafficking, brought here by force from shady work agencies in their countries of origin with fictitious promises. The builders have a strong influence on the political decisions of both local parties”—the centre-left Labour Party and the rightwing Nationalist Party—“because they believe that what Malta needs is to encourage tourism and the arrival of cruise ships. But this unsustainable economic boom has not brought more money for essential services, such as health and education, let alone imTHE CARAVAN

proving the system of reception for migrants.” Looking at the blazing containers of the Ħal Far open centre, Ali, a Somali refugee who had fled the militant group Al-Shabaab, said, “Instead of locking up people inside the centres, Europe should offer them an education, because many of them have great abilities. You can find doctors there, and computer scientists who, in a more peaceful future, would return to Africa to improve their countries.” “Education is the key to integration,” a Sudanese migrant told us. “But in a closed and monocultural society like the Maltese, access to it for those who are migrants is strongly discouraged.” s

giacomo sini

living nearby. It also wants to start a children’s library. Another priest, Alfred Vella, runs the Malta Emigrants Commission, a charitable organisation that was founded in 1950 to assist Maltese citizens travelling abroad, but now works to support “all those on the move,” regardless of religion or ethnicity. Vella told us that the biggest challenge is the high cost of living, and the low wages paid to illegal migrants. Around Marsa and Ħal Far, he said, vans pick up migrants to work at construction sites for new homes and luxury hotels. Malta has seen a construction boom fuelled by real-estate speculation, which has sparked a national debate due to the issues of collapsing new buildings, vacant houses and air quality. Migrant workers are not compensated for accidents, and bear their own medical costs.

GET OVER YOUR READER'S BLOCK WITH STORYTEL

verybody knows about the writer’s block but few seem to be aware about the reader’s block. Well, it is that period when one cannot read books. You seem to lose all interest even in the most gripping novels and it has had been more than a year and a half since I had touched a single book beyond my course books. Leisure reading seemed a luxury and I did not even have the time to properly sleep. Stacks of pending assignments, tons of tests and to top it all the incomplete syllabus. My reading habit had somehow died down the lane. There was no more excitement of buying new books from the book fair. The unread books were dusting away in the bookshelf. And then one day a friend announced that she had completed the Harry Potter series. I was astounded and immediately asked how did she commit this feat. And from there on my story on Storytel began. I was skeptical because the idea of listening to 200+ long books felt tiring and also somewhere at the back of my head I was scared what if it ends up being a lost effort? But all my worries were rendered baseless once I dived into the audiobooks. Listening to Anita Nair’s Twin Beds in Konkana Sen Sharma’s voice was surreal. I felt transported into the story as though I was the woman in the hotel room in Thimpu falling in love all over again. I started to spend more and more time on the Storytel and re-discovered my long lost love for Hindi literature. My wish of reading to one of my favorite writers, Premchand, came true. I started with Godan, picked up Gaban, invested myself in Kafan and just kept on diving deeper and deeper. Suryakant Tripathi Nirala’s Nirupama, Sadat Hasan Manto, Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’, Sachchidananda Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ and the list keeps stretching further. I was very surprised with the regional content curated on the app. Not only hindi, the app provides readers with books in Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam and even Urdu! Having over

100,000+ titles to browse from, Storytel becomes the perfect platform to delve into diverse genres from different languages. In the times where English is overtly becoming more impactful and is being widely studied, it is important to remain aware of our roots, our mother tongues. And Storytel offers this opportunity. People who cannot read Hindi, or are not very avid readers of Hindi, can still satisfy their passion for Hindi by listening to the available audiobooks. My Grandfather who was a very active reader of English as well as Hindi literature, used read from the internet his favourite poetry as well as discover new poets. But in old age the eyes are not strong enough to keep up the strain that emits from the computer screen and so he couldn’t sit in front of the laptop for long hours. I was not aware of Storytel then, otherwise his experience would have had become more remarkable. But for all those whose grandparents still yearn for the old times, this app is the perfect gift. The app has a 14-day free trial period after which one can take up a subscription of Rs.299/one can take up monthly subscription of Netflix without fail, then one can also invest in Storytel to revive their lost connections to the good old days.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE MUST AUDIOBOOKS TO CHECK ON STORYTEL IN 2020: 1. Twin Beds 2. The Story of my Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi 3. Godan by Premchand 4. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas 5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 6. Ikigai 7. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 8. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

One can listen to audiobooks anywhere and everywhere, just plug in the headphones and enjoy uninterrupted listening in Metro’s, Cabs and even while flying because Storytel also offers offline listening! The app is also Kids friendly as one can easily switch to kids mode and let the kids enjoy their literature. My cousin of seven years is an avid listener and it has become a ritual for her to listen to a story or two before she falls asleep. Her mother makes use of the sleep timer feature that the app offers and once the set time is up the audio stops playing. This feature is very nostalgic and takes you back to the days when Dadi and Nani used to narrate those folk and fairy tales until we fell asleep. While listening to a book one can also create bookmarks and add notes to it and can use them cleverly in conversations! Storytel app is every book lover’s means to re-experiencing their lost love for books and also develop a liking for other genres. Just like I moved forward from my readers’ block and now have gone back to reading for leisure, give Storytel a chance to let you move your story forward. It’s no longer reading books, as we move to 2020, it about listening to stories as the new way of entertainment on the go.

9. Hamlet by William Shakespeare 10. Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 11. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery 12. The Teachings of Swami Vivekananda 13. The Ivory Throne 14. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 15. Moby Dick by Herman Melville 16. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank 17. Emma by Jane Austen 18. Gulliver’s Travel by Jonathan Swift 19. Harry Potter Series by J.K.Rowling 20. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

PERSPECTIVES Lands of the Gods The colonial roots of the Ayodhya verdict / Politics / deepasri baul

opposite page: The Babri Masjid, depicted in a plate by William Hodges, who visited Oudh at the end of 1783. The mosque was demolished in 1992 by a mob of kar sevaks. 18

The decades-old Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi case has come to be the most intractable property dispute of our times. Most reports locate the starting point of the conflict at 1949, when Hindu idols were surreptitiously placed under the central dome of the Babri Masjid in the dead of the night. Years later, in 1984, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad started the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, mobilising Hindus across the country to build a temple on the disputed site. It ultimately led to the destruction of the mosque by mobs of kar sevaks—religious volunteers—in 1992, and communal bloodletting that left at least two thousand dead. On 9 November 2019, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court pronounced the eagerly anticipated final verdict on the resulting legal dispute. In a unanimous judgment, the court maintained that it had assessed the conflict primarily as a property dispute, or a title suit. “The dispute is over immovable property,” it stated. “The court does not decide title on the basis of faith or belief but on the basis of evidence. The law provides us with parameters as clear but as profound as ownership and possession.” Despite this exhortation, the court extended itself to hand over property rights over the entire disputed site to “Hindus,” on the premise that Hindu faith decreed that very site to be the birthplace of the epic hero Ram, who lived in the Ayodhya of the mythical Treta Yug. The judges described the case as an “adjudicatory task of unique dimension.” What this referred to was possibly the complex task of upholding a rational system of jurisprudence around property law in the face of overwhelming religious sentiments that belied nearly five centuries of the subcontinent’s history. And yet, there is almost nothing particularly unique about a case of this nature appearing before an Indian law court. Property claims, especially over sacral structures and spaces, have historically been THE CARAVAN

made both on the basis of archaeological evidence and religious belief. The coming together of property and religiosity within the courtroom is a legacy of colonial case law between the late-nineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries in British India. Before this, most claims over land were overlapping and nebulous, and shrine lands in particular were, and often continued to be, shared spaces patronised by members of more than one religious community. This was a necessary corollary to the heterogeneous nature of people’s religious practices and beliefs. However, with the enforcement of a property regime under the British, the idea gained currency that a piece of land needs to have a clear, established title of ownership—whether vested in an individual, a deity through a trustee, or a group through an institution. Once the prospect of titular, undivided ownership to sacred spaces became a necessity, communities were forced to consolidate themselves into homogenous groups, to stake exclusive claims on shared shrine lands. The unfortunate result of this public politics of the 1920s and 1930s was the constitution of a conservative, xenophobic and hierarchical religious community, with narrowly drawn boundaries premised on hostility with rival groups. This history is particularly relevant to understanding the Babri conflict, because some disputes over sacred property at this time, such as the Shiv Mandir Agitation of the 1930s, display striking parallels with the Ram Janmabhoomi claim. In 1936, Shampuri, a Hindu ascetic, built a chabutra—platform—and proceeded to squat in Queen’s Garden, which surrounded the municipal Town Hall in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. His encroachments soon expanded further and, in August 1938, the Delhi municipality charged Shampuri with trespassing on government land and ordered the police to remove him and his belongings. Nearly three hundred volunteers gathered on the spot by that evening, set up a temporary structure, and

the british library

perspectives

claimed the spot as the site of an old Shiv temple. Both ascendant and active at this time, the Hindu Mahasabha provided ready leadership to this otherwise localised incident. It mobilised thousands of Hin-

du volunteers and began an agitation, in September 1938, which it called the Shiv Mandir Satyagraha. Defying government orders, volunteers from the neighbouring United Provinces and Punjab kept visiting the site to offer prayers and, JANUARY 2020

in doing so, court arrest. The leaders of the satyagraha demanded the right to offer worship on the now â&#x20AC;&#x153;disputedâ&#x20AC;? site. Worship continued amid heavy police presence, and satyagrahis often resorted to pelting stones at the police. 19

lands of the gods · perspectives One day, a young Muslim man named Munawar Ali made his way into the disputed site and stabbed Shampuri. This sparked off incidents of communal violence, as Hindu groups began to attack neighbourhood mosques in retaliation. This hostility towards local Muslim shrines, however, had deeper roots. In 1931, the remains of a mosque, possibly razed after the Revolt of 1857, had been found in this area. John Nesbitt Gordon Johnson, then the chief commissioner of Delhi, had granted the land to Muslim residents of neighbouring Kucha Qabil Attar to build a small mosque. Referring to this case, the Hindu agitators of the Shiv Mandir Satyagraha argued that a symmetrical claim by Hindus ought to be honoured by a government that claimed to be an impartial adjudicator. Simultaneously, a number of prominent Hindu merchants and traders approached Evan Meredith Jenkins, Johnson’s successor as chief commissioner, in private, offering to buy the entire site, at a competitive market price, on behalf of the Hindu community. Jenkins was unmoved by these demands. He had the site cleared, brought business to a screeching halt in Chandi Chowk by imposing section 144 and cracked down hard on the satyagrahis. Nearly a thousand volunteers were arrested in the course of the agitation. Jenkins called it a case of “bare faced robbery.” He said that he would not reward any demand that was born out of “encroachments” just because he was threatened by mass agitation. He pointed out that the government had acquired the land in question in the 1860s. According to him, “it would be fatal to admit, in Delhi of all places, that acquisition proceedings are invalid.” Besides refusing to be bullied by a mass agitation and the threat of communal violence, Jenkins appeared anxious to uphold the inviolability of property transactions. He saw the issue as an unacceptable claim on prime urban land, and not really as a religious conflict. The agitating Hindu community did not merely want the right to offer worship at the site, it demanded titular ownership or property rights over it. Both the government and the Hindu leaders eventually looked to the courts to pronounce an ultimate resolution. Although the courts rejected the claim of the Hindu agitators, a number of elements of the Shiv Mandir case of 1938 portend the main legal arguments on which the Babri case was successfully built in 2019. First, to strengthen their ownership claim over the site, Hindu plaintiffs in the Shiv Mandir case used the alleged discovery of an “achal shivling” embedded in the ground. In the Ayodhya case, the covert placement of idols in the mosque was similarly used to strengthen the claim that the site was the birthplace of Ram. Archaeological evidence was also proffered to show 20

THE CARAVAN

further “underground” markers of the existence of a temple on that spot. Second, the defendants in the Shiv Mandir case attempted to have both the deity, as a juristic person, and the “Hindu public” added as parties to the dispute. In the Babri case, the infant Ram was introduced as a plaintiff in the 1989 suit filed by Deoki Nandan Agarwal, as his next of friend. Third, Shampuri claimed that he was the shebait, or custodian, of the deity, and ownership rights ought to be vested in him on behalf of the deity. In the Babri case, the Nirmohi Akhara’s claim on the land was premised on its role as the shebait of the disputed shrine. And finally, in the Shiv Mandir case, over two hundred Hindu volunteers were presented as witnesses in court to prove that the demand for land for the public temple was backed by the Hindu public. The idea of the religious “public” as a party to the dispute entered the Babri case in the 1959 suit, when the Nirmohi Akhara claimed that it was “a religious establishment of a public character,” and then again in 1961, when the Sunni Waqf Board asserted that the Babri Masjid was a “public” mosque, and that the board claimed possession of the site on behalf of the Muslim community. However, it was the final Supreme Court verdict that most decisively evoked the idea of the abstract religious public, when it ultimately contended that the “possessory claim of the Hindus … stands on a better footing than … [that of] the Muslims.” The idea of an abstract religious public as a homogenous entity crystallised only as recently as the early twentieth century. Although the subcontinent has been home to a number of different religions for several centuries, historians of South Asia widely acknowledge that everyday religious practices, or the “lived religion” of its people, have never existed in any pure form. This syncretism is manifest in the equally composite character of the region’s sacred landscape. For instance, it is common for worshippers of different religious groups to patronise the same shrine, or for separate shrines to coexist in the same space or in close proximity to one another. In periods of communal animosity, however, these same spaces often become flashpoints of violence. Religious shrines in the subcontinent have always been complex spaces, and the intermixing of the practices of different faiths is only one factor that contributed to this complexity. Shrines were not merely places of worship. They were spaces of collective congregation for the local community. On festival days, thousands of people would gather from far and wide in shrine premises. Shrines were also involved in a host of businesses for income-generation. They would have serais and

lands of the gods · perspectives dharamshalas, and sometimes shops given out on rent. Shahidganj in Lahore was a classic example of a shrine complex that housed both a gurudwara and a mosque for centuries. Even after a Punjab court granted custodianship to its Sikh mahant, Jiwan Singh, in 1850, the mosque continued to operate within those premises. Jiwan Singh used the ample land at his disposal to earn income to support both his own sprawling family as well as religious worship in both shrines. He sold off portions of the large estate to Muslims, who also came to operate out of its premises. As regulators of community life in particular regions, and the recipients of tax-free lands, shrines wielded a type of power that made British administrators nervous. They made repeated interventions, especially in the realm of law, to establish greater control over shrines and their unregulated incomes. To uphold precolonial practices, the British made exemptions for incomes derived from property meant for religious and charitable purposes, under the Income Tax Act of 1886. Soon after, however, they passed the Charitable Endowments Act of 1890, which narrowly defined religious and public charity as a domain that had to remain outside of the commercial circuit of profitability. This act delegitimised all profit-making enterprises that public shrines were involved in. Around the same time, the government cracked down on the incomes of private religious endowments by establishing the deity as a juristic person who could own property, and by extension, be liable to pay taxes on income accruing from it. Besides these legal interventions, the government also eyed the large revenue-free grants of land that shrines traditionally enjoyed. With every colonial survey and review of revenue assignments, these land grants appeared to shrink in size. However, it was the periodical land-acquisition proceedings initiated by the government for “public purposes” that really pushed religious estates against the wall. From the 1860s, and especially after 1911, the British government started acquiring land in and around Delhi, both for urban redevelopment and to build a new capital. The need to pay compensa-

tion forced the government to identify individual proprietors for every plot of land it acquired. This entailed the conversion of premodern claims on land into modern forms of property ownership. Religious shrines, however, posed a serious obstruction to this process. Shrine lands were invariably mired in multiple overlapping claims that had accumulated over centuries. To make the process of acquisition simpler, the government would pay compensation to the custodian of the shrine—variously known as the pujari, mahant, mutawalli or shebait—an individual who had already been identified by case law as the manager of the deity and the shrine and a trustee or controller of the religious property. These measures were met with resistance. A number of local communities mobilised to protest the loss of their community spaces. They also resisted the move to compensate

objecting to the demolition of part of a mosque in Machli Bazar to widen a road. In the same year, Sikh volunteers across Punjab protested the demolition of part of the boundary wall of the Rikabganj Gurdwara in Delhi for construction work that was taking place in the new capital. The consolidation of the religious community around the symbol of the endangered shrine contributed in no small measure to the period of intense communal mobilisation and violence of the 1920s and 1930s. The normalisation of the idea of exclusive ownership built on the institution of property, implemented and upheld by our British liberal predecessors, makes it impossible for us to appreciate how syncretic spaces may have operated in the pre-British past. However, even the most summary historical survey of the disputed site in Ayodhya suggests that it was frequented both by Hindu and Muslim worshippers for

The Supreme Court bench, in its 2019 verdict on the Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhumi case, adamantly refused to acknowledge the presence of historically syncretic traditions of worship in a diverse, pluralist country.

ww individual custodians as owners. They argued that shrines belonged to the entire community, and that ownership rights ought to reside with the community itself. Popular mobilisations around religious shrines, then, were a common feature of the early twentieth century. The Akali Movement, the Khilafat Agitation as well as the Mandir Raksha Movement of the 1920s all drummed up public hysteria around threats to places of worship, and consolidated religious communities around the cause of protecting them from being appropriated, either by the state or by corrupt custodians. Local mobilisations, which had links with these larger movements, were often attempts by groups to protect their community spaces from being swallowed up by the state through land acquisition. This is apparent in the infamous Kanpur Mosque incident of 1913, in which the police shot protestors JANUARY 2020

centuries, and was precisely the kind of space that is intrinsic to India’s historical landscape. In fact, the partition by British officials of the disputed site after the “riots” of 1856–57, into the inner and outer courtyard for Muslim and Hindu worshippers, respectively, appears to have taken cognisance of the shared nature of the religious claims on the site. But the Supreme Court bench adamantly refused to acknowledge the presence of historically syncretic traditions of worship in a diverse, pluralist country. Instead, it chose to emphasise its commitment to “parameters as clear but as profound as ownership and possession” given to it by law. In using a modern, conservative interpretation of possession linked to property, the Supreme Court judgment both undermined the syncretic history that predates our colonial past and managed to placate the Hindu majoritarian government in power. s 21

perspectives

Fighting for a Future What is at stake for the young Hong Kong protestors / Politics / raviprasad narayan Hong Kong erupted in large-scale protests in June 2019, and there are no signs yet of them slowing down. The immediate trigger was a proposed change to extradition laws, but the demands of the protestors over the past seven months have grown wider, presenting foundational challenges to the political life of the territory. Hong Kong was a colony of the British Empire until 1997, when it was returned to China after 155 years. But the retrocession took place under special conditions. The former colony was reconstituted as a special administrative region and was granted special

The sustained and largely leaderless resistance by citizens, mostly youth, against political compromises made by legislators in Hong Kong, has the international community transfixed.

ww privileges, including a separate legal and economic system. These privileges are meant to be in effect until 2047. It is this framework, popularly known as the “one country, two systems” arrangement, which the protestors do not want to see diluted. The sustained and largely leaderless resistance by citizens, mostly youth, against political compromises made by legislators in Hong Kong, has the international community transfixed. Many commentators have described the past year as one of global protests, with citizens pushing back against increasingly authoritarian governments around the world. In India, too, the unprecedented demonstrations by citizens opposing the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 22

and the National Register of Citizens is broadly perceived as a defence of democratic principles. Although not a democracy, Hong Kong is, as a report in Foreign Policy described it, “an unusual example of rights without democracy.” The proposed extradition law poses an existential threat to the region’s autonomy. The law, if enacted, would allow suspected criminals to be extradited to China, thus putting individuals within the reach of the mainland legal system. Hong Kong, with its independent judiciary, is aligned with international norms and a jurisprudence that favours transparency, in comparison to a mainland judicial system that owes its allegiance to the Communist Party of China. The chief worry with this measure was that the law would be used to target activists and dissidents, allowing them to be deported to the mainland. These fears are not unfounded. In 2015, five Hong Kong booksellers were kidnapped and brought to China on vague charges—including, in one case, a traffic violation. These booksellers sold books about the Chinese leadership that have been banned in the mainland. Because of the persistence and ferocity of the demonstrations, the bill was suspended a few days after the protests began. By then, however, the demonstrations had morphed into gigantic pro-democracy protests. Broadly four other demands had been appended to the call for the complete withdrawal of the extradition bill, namely—the protests should not be called “riots;” an immediate investigation be conducted into instances of police brutality against protestors; amnesty for those who had been arrested during the protests; and the implementation of complete universal suffrage. More recently, protestors have been holding rallies in solidarity with China’s persecuted Uighur Muslims. THE CARAVAN

above: Hong Kong has been witnessing large scale prodemocracy protests since June 2019.

anthony kwan / getty images

perspectives

In recent years, the Chinese government has been exerting increasing pressures on the special status Hong Kong enjoys. President Xi Jinping, during a 2017 visit to swear in Hong Kong’s first female chief executive, Carrie Lam, warned that any attempt

to threaten China’s “national sovereignty and security” would be “absolutely impermissible.” It appears important to the leaders in Beijing that the protests in Hong Kong should not have spillover effects on the mainland. Many journalists covering the protests JANUARY 2020

have faced brutal attacks by the police. Increasingly, many media houses in Hong Kong are owned by groups with close business and political links to China. A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists stated that local journalists were “concerned that 23

fighting for a future · perspectives Beijing will retaliate for their critical reporting by blocking them from entering the mainland to work, while international correspondents fear their permission to stay in Hong Kong could be taken away.” According to the CPJ, China had imprisoned 48 journalists by the end of 2019. But despite its best efforts, China is not able to control the narrative. In an age where digital communication has become the norm, protestors have been using social-media platforms effectively to organise protests. This is not the first time social media has been used to facilitate a political movement in Hong Kong. In 2014, thousands of students participated in what is popularly known as the Umbrella Revolution, to protest an electoral reform that would allow Beijing a hand in choosing Hong Kong’s chief executive. Social media became a force multiplier, galvanising people and getting the word out to the international community in a way that had not been possible before. Protestors used umbrellas to protect themselves against tear gas, and the object soon became a symbol of solidarity, with many sharing pictures of a yellow umbrella online. Several internet users in the mainland who were seen as sympathisers of the protests were detained. This time, protestors are using social-media platforms with a deeper understanding of cybersecurity and surveillance measures. They have largely managed to remain anonymous and not be identified by the authorities, while still organising, galvanising and documenting the rallies online. The young have a stake in the political life of the city. By the time they reach middle age—2047, when the arrangement expires—Hong Kong might become yet another Chinese city such as Shenzhen or Wuhan, where, beyond the high rises and tangible economic gains, the people are bereft of any way of expressing their grievances. Youth in Hong Kong are exposed to a culture where dissent and freedom of expression is accepted and tolerated. The city is known for its world-renowned educational institutions, such as Hong Kong University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the 24

Chinese University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong and many other private universities with faculties that are global and reflective of a discourse not constrained by a “party line.” Those above 45 years of age are reluctant to be part of the resistance, as many argue that challenging Beijing imposes heavy costs—economically and socially. Perhaps this generational gap reveals an aspect about a changed political order, where the young have come of age in a globalised Hong Kong, with far more liberal values and exposure to the ideals of democracy. They are not willing to see their social and political freedoms whittled down. The piecemeal sundering of established laws signals to young Hong Kong protestors a future in which they might be forced to submit to greater authoritarianism. Before they reach that point, they are asking for more from the existing electoral system.

of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who categorised economic reforms as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Under Deng, the country’s economic agenda had greater primacy over national security and geopolitical interests. When China opened up its economy to foreign capital and technology, it was Hong Kong that played a seminal role in the process and emerged as a fulcrum to China’s plan of economical transformation. Hong Kong has since emerged as a hub of financial entrepreneurs, international banking conglomerates and legal experts, and has a thriving port. What happens in Hong Kong matters to the rest of the world. The city is one of Asia’s key financial centres. Countries such as the United States, Japan and Australia are keeping an eye on developments in the city since the South China Sea is of immense strategic importance. The recent protests in Hong Kong have encouraged Singapore

Perhaps this generational gap reveals an aspect about a changed political order, where the young have come of age in a globalised Hong Kong, with far more liberal values and exposed to the ideals of democracy. They are not willing to see their social and political freedoms whittled down.

ww Residents of Hong Kong have limited ability to vote for their own local assembly. The Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, or LegCo, is a unicameral institution with 70 members, of whom 35 are directly elected from five geographical constituencies—Hong Kong Island, Kowloon West, Kowloon East, New Territories West and New Territories East. The remaining members are indirectly elected through “functional constituencies,” which consist of interest groups that take their directions from Beijing for the most part. People in Hong Kong perceive the “indirectly elected” to be representing and reflecting the interests of the mainland, since many of them are leading businessmen with financial stakes in the mainland, coupled with personal relations with the Communist party elite since the days THE CARAVAN

to appeal to merchant bankers to shift their resources and portfolios from Hong Kong to the Southeast Asian entrepot state where there is currently more political stability. Hong Kong faces an economic recession, its first since the 2009 global recession. And yet, pro-democracy parties won in recent elections to the LegCo. This has been understood broadly as a sign of wide support for the protest movement and the one country, two system arrangement. The protests are also giving a fillip to activism abroad, where citizens of different countries are fighting for democratic values. This makes Hong Kong an exemplar of modernisation and the processes of globalisation, a place to watch as the lack of an identifiable opposition leader or party to lead the unremitting protests confounds political theorists and challenges established ideas of democracy. s

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THE APOSTLE OF HATE Historical records expose the lie that Nathuram Godse left the RSS

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Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhume Twaya Hindubhume Sukham Vardhitoham Mahanmangale Punyabhume Twadarthe Patatvesh Kayo Namaste, Namaste! O affectionate motherland, I eternally bow to you O land of Hindus, you have reared me in comfort O sacred and holy land, May this body of mine be dedicated to you and I bow before you again and again! These four Sanskrit sentences constitute the first of the three stanzas of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s official prayer, which continues to be sung to this day at its shakhas—regular assemblies meant for physical and ideological training. Godse’s choice of prayer is puzzling. He is believed to have left the RSS sometime around 1938, when he joined the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha—the biggest Hindu-nationalist political party at the time. But the Sanskrit prayer, which replaced a previous Marathi version, was only drafted in 1939 and became popular among RSS cadres much later. Clearly, for Godse to know it, he would have to have had post-1939 RSS links. Narayan Dattatreya Apte—Godse’s accomplice, who was also hanged in Ambala central jail that morning—joined him in reciting the prayer. This was recorded in detail by Godse’s brother Gopal Vinayak Godse, in his memoir Gandhiji’s Murder & After. Gopal was himself one of the convicts in Gandhi’s murder case, and served a life sentence in the same prison. He had requested the jail superintendent that he be allowed to attend the execution, but he only got permission to spend time with his brother and Apte in their solitary confinement cell that morning till 7.30, half an hour before their hanging. This was perhaps the first and only time Apte recited the RSS prayer. Unlike Godse, he had never formally joined the RSS and had even disliked the organisation for not being extremist enough.

DHIRENDRA K JHA

shortly before his execution, in the early hours of 15 November 1949, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, the Hindu-nationalist fanatic who killed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on 30 January 1948, recited a prayer:

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tim sullivan / ap

the apostle of hate · essay

The affinity Godse had for the RSS seems to have changed Apte’s attitude towards it. Only a few days before being hanged, Apte revealed this transformation in a conversation with Gopal. “Well, you often criticize the R.S.S. … but you have really outdone those Sangh volunteers!” Gopal told Apte during one of his regular visits to Godse and Apte after their death sentence was confirmed. “With a smile brightening up his face, Nana said, ‘To tell you the truth, it is our experience for the last four years or more that we [Godse and Apte] generally think on the same lines.’” Apte added, “And as regards the R.S.S., if you ask me, we two are the only volunteers who actually lived the sacred vow chanted by the Sangh Volunteers, every day, namely, ‘Patatvesha Kayo Namaste Namaste!’” The RSS, however, could not muster the courage to acknowledge Gandhi’s assassin as one of its own. The first official reaction of the RSS was an outright 30

denial of its association with Godse in any form and at any point of time. “The Sangha Chalak of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, Bombay, in a statement says the alleged assassin of Mahatma Gandhi was never connected in any way with the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh,” the Hindustan Times reported on 2 February 1948. Two days later, the RSS was banned. Several leaders, including its then sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—MS Golwalkar, were arrested. They were soon released due to lack of evidence against them and the organisation. On 8 November 1948, Godse made a statement to the special court trying him that proved quite convenient for the RSS. “I am one of those volunteers of Maharashtra who joined the Sangha in its initial stage,” he said. “I also worked for a few years on the intellectual side in the Province of Maharashtra. Having worked for the uplift of the Hindus I felt it necessary to take part in THE CARAVAN

the political activities of the country for the protection of the just rights of the Hindus. I therefore left the Sangha and joined the Hindu Mahasabha.” The RSS, which had claimed to have had absolutely no association with Godse, ran with the new line. Through 1949, as Godse and other accused were being tried, Golwalkar went about lobbying to lift the ban on the organisation. The RSS now argued that Godse did indeed join the RSS sometime during the early 1930s, but that he quit the organisation long before he killed Gandhi, and that his association with the RSS ended as soon as he joined the Hindu Mahasabha. The ban was lifted in July that year. On 15 November, Godse was hanged. He was now being referred to as a “former member” of the RSS. The RSS also managed to convince many that not only did the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha exist separately, but even that there was discord between the two organisations.

the apostle of hate · essay For most of history since then, the claim that Godse gave up his RSS membership has gone unchallenged. In March 2014, when the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said in an election rally that an RSS member had been responsible for Gandhi’s death, the organisation filed a defamation case against him. In its oral observations, in July 2016, the Supreme Court reprimanded Rahul for his “collective denunciation” of the RSS and told him that he would have to face trial if he did not express regret for his remark. Rahul refused to apologise, and the case is pending. The Supreme Court was so sure of Godse’s background that it thought it wise to scold Rahul without examining the evidence. Not just the court, even liberal or neutral researchers often concede that Godse was a not a member of the RSS when he killed Gandhi. Eminent historians, such as Ramachandra Guha, and even top international publications, such as the New Yorker, have described him as a “former member” of the RSS. Regardless, Godse has continued to hold pride of place in the imagination of Hindutva followers, despite the RSS’s attempts to distance itself from him. Prominent office-bearers with affiliations to the Sangh and its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have often expressed appreciation for Godse. With a former RSS pracharak—a full-time worker—Narendra Modi as the prime minister since 2014, the BJP’s leaders are embracing Godse more openly. The BJP MPs Sakshi Maharaj and Pragya Singh Thakur, the latter an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts, have praised Godse multiple times. The BJP government of Uttar Pradesh has proposed renaming Meerut district to “Pandit Nathuram Godse Nagar.” Even as Godse-worship has gone mainstream, the RSS has stayed silent for a very practical reason: to avoid being implicated in the assassination of the man considered the father of the nation. Several historical documents that I discovered during my research on Godse over the past eight months confirm that he never gave up his membership of the RSS. Most importantly, a statement Godse gave in March 1948, six months before his statement to the special court, seems to have been ignored by generations of academics and journalists—perhaps due to the fact that it is only available in its entirety in Marathi. The statement, which is also a brief autobiography, never mentions Godse’s departure from the RSS and proves that he was working for both the RSS and Mahasabha at the same time. Pages 18 and 19 of the document, in which he describes the early 1940s, make this clear. “Once again I began to take up the work of Hindu Mahasabha,” the statement says. “Simultaneously, I remained active in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.”

This is corroborated by several other historical documents I discovered. An RSS document, dated 11 May 1940, mentions “N.V. Godse, tailor” as an attendee of a meeting and an RSS organiser from Poona. Many historians’ belief that the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS existed separately is also called into question. The record suggests that many RSS members had dual membership of the Sangh and the Mahasabha, and that the two organisations cooperated closely. Sources show two opposite streams of history regarding the RSS’s links with the Hindu Mahasabha during the 1930s and 1940s—post-assassination sources show a total separation between the two, while pre-assassination sources reveal a fluid relationship between them, with a large number of dual members active in different parts of the country. There are also several reasons to doubt Godse’s November 1948 statement, in which he claimed that he had left the RSS. By this point, having been tutored by a lawyer, Godse was attempting to take complete responsibility for the murder and was trying to implicate as few people as possible. The ponderous statement, which consisted of 150 paragraphs and took Godse five hours to read in the courtroom, was not entirely of his preparation—a fact disclosed later by PL Inamdar, one of a group of lawyers working with the Hindu Mahasabha to defend the accused. “In Nathuram’s case, it was primarily Jamnadas Mehta, Barrister-at-law from Bombay, who assisted him in preparing the statement,” Inamdar wrote. Mehta was also a longtime associate of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the president of the Mahasabha and the guiding light of Hindutva organisations at the time. Godse’s family, including Gopal, have always maintained that he never left the RSS. In a 1994 interview with Frontline, Gopal said, “He has said in his statement [in the court] that he left the RSS. He said it because Golwalkar and the RSS were in a lot of trouble after the murder of Gandhi. But he did not leave the RSS.” Gopal added, “All the brothers were in the RSS. Nathuram, Dattatreya, myself and Govind. You can say we grew up in the RSS rather than in our home. It was like a family to us.” Gopal also attacked the RSS for refusing to acknowledge its own cadres and contrasted it with the Hindu Mahasabha, which never disowned the assassin.

previous spread: Nathuram Godse (Left) with his the defense counsellor LB Bhopatkar during the trial for Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination. opposite page: Nathuram’s brother, Gopal, who was also convicted for Gandhi’s assassination. He recounted in his memoir that Nathuram, shortly before his execution, recited the official prayer of the RSS.

A statement Godse gave in March 1948, six months before his statement to the special court, seems to have been ignored by generations of academics and journalists— perhaps due to the fact that it is only available in its entirety in Marathi. JANUARY 2020

the apostle of hate · essay opposite page: The BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts, is among the multiple office-bearers of the party openly embracing Godse.

The story of Godse’s life reveals a constant and inextricable link with the RSS. Radicalised at an early age by Savarkar himself, Godse inhabited an environment constantly pushed him towards a certain kind of politics. Godse’ peculiar character, marked by a messiah complex and what some commentators have described as a troubled relationship with his masculinity, may have played a role in deciding his fate. born on 19 may 1910, Nathuram Godse had a unique childhood. After the birth of their first child, Mathura, who was a girl, Godse’s parents, Vinayakrao and Lakshmi, lost three sons in a row—all in their infancy. They were convinced that only a girl child would survive in their family. So when Godse was born, they decided to trick fate. The newborn son was brought up as a girl. His nose was pierced and he was made to wear a nath—a nose ring. This, they thought, would propitiate their family deities. So it was that he was given the name “Nathu” and then “Nathuram,” even though his original name was Ramachandra. As a member of Godse’s family told me in July, Godse played with girls of his age, and his parents encouraged him to dress in girls’ clothes. His parents believed that the trick worked. Nathuram survived and his parents had another son—Dattatreya—within a few years. Not long after, Lakshmi gave birth to another daughter, Shanta, followed by two more sons—Gopal and Govind. It was as if Nathuram had rid the family of a curse. When he started going to school, Nathuram gave up girls’ clothing. But he remained entangled in superstition. He became an ardent devotee of the family deities—Hareshwar, believed to be a form of Shiva, and his consort Yogeshwari—and started going into trances where he spoke as an oracle. In his religious Maharashtrian Brahmin family, these attributes were talked about with pride. According to Gopal’s memoir, Nathuram astonished his household when he used his supernatural abilities to cure his elder sister, Mathura, of an ailment that had not been responding to treatment for a long time. Through his early schooling, Nathuram was drawn to mystical practices. Vinayakrao, a petty official in the postal department, had a transfer-

The story of Godse’s life reveals a constant and inextricable link with the RSS. Radicalised at an early age by Savarkar himself, Godse inhabited an environment that constantly pushed him towards a certain kind of politics. 32

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able job and worked in semi-urban areas resembling large villages. “I completed my primary education in these villages,” Nathuram said in his Marathi statement, recorded on 4 March 1948 and signed by the deputy commissioner of the special branch of the CID, Bombay, JD Nagarvala. “I was born at Baramati in Poona district where I studied up to third standard in Marathi medium. My father was then transferred to places like Khed and Lonavala in Poona district where I completed my primary education.” After Nathuram completed his primary education, he was sent to a high school in Poona, where he lived with his father’s sister. He missed the comforts of his home, as well as the attention he got from his family for his abilities. He became a loner, and tried to visit home any chance he got. “Even after he was sent to Poona for his English education, he used to perform this Puja, whenever he came home during the vacations,” Gopal wrote. But as his education progressed, according to Gopal, Godse’s oracular abilities declined, and by the age of sixteen he had ceased to be a medium. After withdrawing from mysticism, Godse spent most of his time among friends rather than on his studies. In 1929, the year he was to appear for his matriculation exam, Godse moved into a rented room, where his friends hung out most of the day. Without adequate preparation, Godse failed the exam. Out of ideas, he moved back in with his family, who at the time lived in Karjat, a suburban town between Poona and Bombay. Within months, his father was transferred to Ratnagiri with a promotion. An ancient town overlooking the Arabian Sea and situated in the Western Ghats of Bombay province, Ratnagiri was the last place Vinayakrao’s job took him to. The move would prove crucial in determining Godse’s future. as godse came of age, India was in a state of upheaval. The Indian National Congress was beginning to recover from the collapse of the Non-Cooperation Movement, in 1922. Gandhi, who had emerged as the unquestioned leader of the freedom struggle came out of a self-imposed political exile, in 1928, and began preparations for another round of non-violent action against the British Empire. Young men began joining the struggle in droves, and internal factionalism within the Congress began waning. Jawaharlal Nehru, the son of Motilal Nehru, then the president of the Congress, emerged as one of Gandhi’s closest political aides. Jawaharlal had been the working secretary of the party for the last two years, and Gandhi looked to him to build bridges with the younger generation. In 1929, Gandhi undertook a long tour of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. He spent nearly two and a half months in major cities and small towns,

sonu mehta / hindustan times / getty images

addressing public meetings where he urged people to wear khadi and join the Congress to participate in the freedom struggle. Congress leaders throughout British India became active, holding regular public meetings and preparing the masses for an impending showdown with the colonial regime. The Congress decided to launch a more radical non-cooperation movement—the Civil Disobedience Movement—at its Lahore session, in December 1929. It resolved to make poorna swaraj, or complete independence, its goal. Gandhi was authorised to strategise a fresh campaign. Godse, who was in his twentieth year, started taking a keen interest in the rapidly developing political situation. “At that time, I began to take part in the processions and meetings which were being held in this connection,” he said in his March 1948 statement. “When a call was given to students to boycott their schools and colleges, I dropped the idea of reappearing for matriculation exam.” Godse started getting lessons in public speaking. “I didn’t know how to speak from a dais,” he recounted. “But after speaking in two or three meetings and

listening to comments of people, my confidence started increasing and I learnt how to give speeches. Now I became a regular speaker in protest meetings organised by Congress in my locality.” Godse was “once or twice” rounded up by the police, “along with around fifty other protesters,” but was always let off after an hour or two at a police station. One important revelation in Godse’s March 1948 statement is the extent of his closeness with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, often known as the founder of Hindutva. Based in Ratnagiri, Savarkar spent the late 1920s and early 1930s sitting inside his home instructing his disciples to unite Hindus not against the British but against a section of fellow Indians: Muslims. Like Gandhi and Nehru, Savarkar completed his education at London’s Inns of Court. He was arrested in London, in 1910, for having commanded the assassination of a British bureaucrat posted in the Nasik district of Bombay. He was brought back to India, tried, found guilty and transported to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for life imprisonment. He spent the next 14 years in prison, and finally secured his release in JanJANUARY 2020

uary 1924 after abject appeals to the colonial regime seeking clemency. He promised loyalty, obedience and good behaviour. In one such plea, he wrote: Therefore if the government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government which is the foremost condition of that progress. … Moreover my conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide. I am ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like, for as my conversion is conscientious so I hope my future conduct would be. … The mighty alone can afford to be merciful and therefore where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the Government? The British did take mercy, and allowed him to live with his wife, Yamunabai, under restricted confinement in the district of Ratnagiri. 33

the apostle of hate · essay below: Godse’s parents, Vinayakrao and Lakshmi, raised him as a girl in his early years. They had lost three infant boys and believed only a girl could survive in their family. opposite page: Godse Kulvritant—a compilation of the family trees of the Godse clan published by Prakash Narhar Godse, in 2006— puts Godse’s father, Vinayakrao, in the eighth generation of his known ancestors.

Savarkar’s admirers, such as the journalist Vaibhav Purandare, claim that his mercy petitions were a mere tactical ploy so that he could come out of jail and take part in the anti-imperialist struggle. While some degree of manipulative cunning was part of Savarkar’s persona, after being released he was never seen even on the sidelines of the freedom struggle. On the contrary, he now openly started looking upon the colonial regime as a boon and an opportunity to cleanse India of Muslims. While he was still in prison, in 1923, Savarkar wrote the monograph Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? The text claimed the whole of India for Hindus by virtue of the fact that they alone, and not Muslims or Christians, considered its territory sacred, as they were more indigenous to the land than others. “All Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race incorporated with and descended from the Vedic fathers, the Sindhus,” he wrote. “We are one because we are a nation, a race and own a common Sanskriti.” This was the first explicit assertion that Hindus constituted a separate nation—a theory embraced 17 years later by Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, when, in 1940, it adopted a resolution saying Hindus and Muslims were two distinctive nations, and demanded the division of India. In 1925, inspired by the writings of Savarkar and several other hardline Hindu leaders, KB Hedgewar formed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh with the aim of establishing a Hindu nation through cultural and religious proselytisation. While Savarkar’s hatred for Muslims was genuine, he also used it to ingratiate himself with the British government. His theory of uniting Hindus against “internal enemies” diverted his co-reli-

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gionists from the freedom struggle, and helped the British implement their divide-and-rule policy. At Ratnagiri, Savarkar preached the doctrine of Hindutva, and of desisting from the practice of untouchability in order to unite Hindus against Muslims. The first time he met Savarkar, in the beginning of 1930, Godse was still trying to figure out his political beliefs, and what he wanted to do with his life. He was enjoying his recent association with the freedom struggle and seemed set to throw himself into the freedom movement. “When I informed him about my decision not to reappear for matriculation examination because of the call to boycott schools and colleges, he seemed annoyed,” Godse recalled in the March 1948 statement. “Twice or thrice he tried to persuade me to change my decision, saying how important it was to continue my studies.” But Godse stuck to his decision, foiling Savarkar’s first overt bid to extricate him from the camp of anti-British agitators. But Savarkar had immense sway among Chitpavan Brahmins—the community to which the Peshwa rulers of the Maratha Empire belonged. Savarkar and his ideology were seen by many members of the community as the authentic continuation of the line of the Peshwas. Savarkar evoked this sense of pride to expand his own clique of devotees. Godse, also a Chitpavan Brahmin, was thrilled to be close to a man considered an icon of the community. The caste bond he shared with Savarkar and his other Chitpavan disciples gave Godse a certain sense of superiority over other Hindus. Chitpavans were one of the rare Brahmin communities that claimed to have a history of valour on the battlefield, apart from the priestly privileges Brahmins traditionally enjoyed. The Peshwas also had a long history of struggle against Muslim rulers in India. With Poona as their nerve centre, the Peshwas, carrying the legacy of the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji Bhonsle, fought against Mughals and Pathans and resisted British domination until 1818. This history would be fodder for Chitpavan Brahmins’ Hindu-nationalist imagination. They thought of themselves as the upholders of a tradition of Hindu resistance against Muslim occupation. Poona’s Chitpavans had produced a stream of men such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the militant chieftain of Indian nationalism before Gandhi turned the movement to nonviolence, and the Chapekar brothers—Damodar Hari, Balkrishna Hari and Vasudeo Hari—who were involved in the assassination of the British plague commissioner of Poona, WC Rand, in 1897. Godse was no stranger to Chitpavan pride. While he belonged to a lower-middle-class family, his known ancestors, by virtue of belonging to the caste, had started off as priestly and social

the apostle of hate · essay at night,” Gopal wrote in his memoir. “The listeners capable of understanding this book were only three: father, mother and Nathuram. Datta”—their brother Dattatreya—“was also another listener, but he was not of an age to understand what he heard.” On 6 April 1930, when Gandhi led a march to Dandi and broke the salt laws, it captured the attention of the entire country. Over the next several months, similar peaceful breaches of law started taking place in other parts of the country, and they soon sparked a massive anti-British upsurge. In particular, the stretch on the west coast from Cambay to Ratnagiri—a region known for natural salt work—became the focal point of the salt satyagraha. But by then, Godse had become a Savarkar convert. Neither Savarkar nor his clique went anywhere near Gandhi’s movement.

elites in the village of Uksan, near Poona. Godse Kulvritant—a compilation of the family trees of the Godse clan published by Prakash Narhar Godse, in 2006—puts Godse’s father, Vinayakrao, in the eighth generation of his known ancestors, starting from Ramchandra Godse, who lived towards the end of the seventeenth century. Vinayakrao’s father, Vamanrao Godse, a farmer and priest like his forefathers, was the first to move out of the ancestral village, to Poona. His decision was aimed at providing his son a modern education, which helped Vinayakrao get a job in the postal department. Godse’s recruitment into Savarkar’s clique, therefore, seemed a natural course for a true Chitpavan. He claimed years later that his shift away from the freedom movement was also influenced by the apprehensions of his father, who, as a government servant, did not want his son to annoy the authorities. “My father feared that my activities might

affect his job, and so he asked me not to take part in any movement that sought to break laws,” he recounted. Savarkar helped develop in Godse a habit of reading—especially reading the kind of literature he wanted him to read. Godse began having regular sessions with Savarkar discussing one subject or another. Between sessions, he would read books and articles written by the ideologue and copy them in his own handwriting. “Once he brought home a copy of Savarkar’s War of Independence of 1857 and used to read it

godse’s radicalisation was briefly halted when the family fell on hard times. In 1933, Vinayakrao, the only earning member of the family, retired. His small government pension was not enough to meet the family’s expenses. The family decided to shift to a place where life was cheaper. They eventually moved to Sangli, a princely state almost two hundred kilometres from Ratnagiri. The cause of the Hindu nation was put on hold. Godse’s younger siblings were all still in school, so he needed to find a job. He became a fruit seller, but the business seems to have failed despite his best efforts. He moved to Itarsi, where he lived with his sister Mathura and her husband and held a few odd jobs, but returned to Sangli, in 1934, when his father fell ill. After he came back, Godse learnt tailoring and opened a shop, called

While Savarkar’s hatred for Muslims was genuine, he also used it to ingratiate himself with the British government. His theory of uniting Hindus against “internal enemies” diverted his co-religionists from the freedom struggle, and helped the British implement their divide-andrule policy. JANUARY 2020

the apostle of hate · essay with the Hindutva lessons he had received from Savarkar. Despite the need to concentrate on his tailoring business to help his father meet family expenses, Godse rushed into the RSS fold the moment he got to know about the organisation’s Sangli branch. Limaye, who joined the RSS in 1932 and was made sanghchalak—chief—of the organisation in Maharashtra two years later, became Godse’s new mentor. Limaye was in his forties and was a close associate of both Hedgewar and Savarkar. According to Godse’s March 1948 statement, Limaye trusted him and seems to have found him ideally suited for bringing young men into the RSS fold, as Godse was attracted neither to the freedom movement nor to women. Godse became a dedicated swayamsevak. He lived with his parents, but the RSS was his new home. Barring his addiction to coffee, he stayed away from all pleasures—it is believed that he did not smoke or drink, and would not even glance at women. His energies were completely devoted to the RSS.

universal history archive / getty images

Charitartha Udyog—literally, a successful business. By that time the RSS, started by Nagpur’s Brahmin community, had expanded and had reached Sangli. Like the organisation’s founders—Hedgewar, BS Moonje, LV Paranjpe, BB Tholkar and GD Savarkar—its leader at Sangli, Kashinath Bhaskar Limaye, was also a Brahmin. Initially, so were most of its members. Shaped without a constitution, the RSS had emerged as a private army of Hindu men, who, much like Savarkar, hated Gandhi and his idea of Hindu–Muslim unity and kept themselves away from the freedom struggle. Its leaders trained its members for an eventual fight against Muslims, whom Hedgewar, the first sarsanghchalak, called “snakes.” Years later, after he had assassinated Gandhi, Godse claimed that when he returned to Sangli, “the RSS was new to Maharashtra”—the Marathi-speaking part of Bombay province—and that he “joined the organisation because its aim was to achieve freedom for Hindu society.” The credo of the RSS fitted

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Meanwhile, his tailoring business suffered from lack of attention. The family felt the impact. “So one day, my father asked me to withdraw from my public life and concentrate on earning money,” Godse said in the March 1948 statement. “But by then my public work had expanded so much in Sangli that leaving it completely and focusing on my business did not seem possible. I, therefore, decided to shift to Poona, away from the area of my public activity, so that I could concentrate only on earning money.” Godse discussed the idea with Limaye, who liked it and facilitated his shift to Poona. There is no record of when he actually moved. A likely date would be 1937, for he told his interrogators years later that shortly after his shift to Poona he got the news of Savarkar’s release from his confinement in Ratnagiri. By then, Godse had become a business partner of one Vishnupant Anagal, a local RSS hand who was already running his own stitching shop in Poona. Since 1930, Godse had seen Savarkar only once: in 1935, when he travelled to Ratnagiri with a group of local youths from Sangli to meet the ideologue. But Savarkar’s influence on Godse remained intact. When restrictions on his movement were lifted and Savarkar addressed public meetings at Kolhapur, Miraj, Sangli, Poona and other places on his way to Mumbai, Godse was present in at least some of them. Godse did not immediately jump onto Savarkar’s bandwagon. His business in Poona had started looking up, and he was able to send around seventy rupees every month to his father in Sangli. Though the sum was paltry in absolute terms, it was significant for the family. In December 1937, Savarkar became the president of the Hindu Mahasabha. By then, Godse and Anagal’s tailoring shop had become a favoured destination for swayamsevaks wanting to get their RSS uniforms stitched. Godse developed a functional relationship with the RSS in Poona around the time he was drifting towards the Hindu Mahasabha. His tailoring partner continued to get clients from the RSS even as Godse moved on to a hectic political career.

the apostle of hate · essay Curran, who was generally particular about referencing the facts he used in his paper, does not cite any source for this information, which completely contradicts the chronology in Godse’s own statements and all other historical records. In the preface of the paper, Curran writes, “The bulk of this study is based on a year and a half of frequent association with the R.S.S.” Curran was the first “outsider,” or a non-RSS person, who was given full access by the Sangh around the time that the organisation was attempting to distance itself from Godse. A possible explanation could be that Curran’s RSS informants, who were desperate to get rid of the Godse stigma, might have planted an untruth that got reproduced in his paper as he lacked any means to verify it. The first mention of Godse’s relationship with the Mahasabha came in late 1938. That year, the Hindu Mahasabha, in concert with the Arya Samaj, a society with its headquarters in Delhi and roots in Punjab, launched an agitation against the nizam of Hyderabad to secure demands for Hindus, arguing that the Muslim ruler was suppressing their civil liberties and culture. The agitation— referred to as a satyagraha by Hindutva organisations—was a passive-resistance movement aimed at obtaining certain political concessions from the nizam. Most of the people involved in the agita-

opposite page: In the late 1920s, Godse became involved with Gandhi and Nehru’s anti-colonial movement. He moved away from it after he came under the sway of VD Savarkar. below: Based in Ratnagiri, Savarkar spent the late 1920s and early 1930s sitting inside his home instructing his loyal disciples to unite Hindus not against the British but against a section of fellow Indians: Muslims.

hindustan times archive

there is no evidence—document or testimony—to suggest exactly when Godse formally joined the Hindu Mahasabha and thereby, as presumed by many, left the RSS. Neither of the two statements he made after assassinating Gandhi—the pre-trial statement recorded in Marathi and his testimony during his trial at Delhi’s Red Fort—say anything about it. His pre-trial statement reveals that he started off as an active member of the RSS and then moved seamlessly to work for the Mahasabha without ending his previous allegiance. The other statement says that he joined the Hindu Mahasabha after leaving the RSS, but does not indicate when. Most writers, both pro-RSS and otherwise, have presumed that Godse left the RSS and joined the Hindu Mahasabha around the time Savarkar became its president. JA Curran, Jr—an American researcher who is credited with the first scholarly attempt to study the RSS—is the only one who departs from this timeline. A detailed report on the RSS, titled Militant Hinduism in Indian Politics: A Study of the R.S.S., which he prepared for the New York-based Institute of Pacific Relations in 1951, says, “Godse had joined the R.S.S. in 1930, winning prominence as a speaker and organizer; he left the Sangh in 1934 because Hedgewar refused to make the R.S.S. a political organization.”

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the apostle of hate · essay tion, which continued until mid 1939, were outsiders trucked into the princely state from British India in groups, or jathas. In Savarkarite parlance, the leader of each jatha was called the “dictator”—a term borrowed from the European dictatorships prevalent at the time. A fascination with Nazism and fascism was common to both the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Godse played a significant role in the movement. “I participated in this movement right since beginning,” he

crucial link between the two organisations. In an undated letter written just before the Hyderabad satyagraha, he advised Savarkar on how the movement to unite Hindus could be strengthened by basing it on the edifice of the RSS. “Its workers are really able leaders,” he wrote. “At present they have the support of the youths. If in future, any work is to be undertaken, it would be advisable to carry it out in consultation with Dr Hedgewar, who is a leader of your calibre and who is capable of

Since there was no restriction on people holding dual membership of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, Godse retained membership in both. In fact, there seems to have been close collaboration between the two organisations. On 5 July 1940, the Marathi newspaper Kesari carried an article by LV Paranjpe—one of the five founders of the RSS, who steered the Sangh as its sarsanghachalak for a short duration when Hedgewar was imprisoned during the Civil-Disobedience Movement, in 1930.

“If in future, any work is to be undertaken,” Godse wrote to Savarkar in a letter around the late 1930s, “it would be advisable to carry it out in consultation with Dr Hedgewar, who is a leader of your calibre and who is capable of doing a job which ten leaders cannot accomplish.” later said. “I was also the dictator of the first batch of eight to ten people who took part in the agitation.” He was soon arrested, and imprisoned in Hyderabad for a year. He was released along with other satyagrahis after the agitation was withdrawn. All through the satyagraha, Hyderabadis remained unmoved despite claims to the contrary by leaders of the agitation, which was manned, financed and directed mainly from outside the state. In his paper “‘Communalism’ in Princely India: The Case of Hyderabad,” the historian Ian Copland writes that the nizam’s concessions to the agitators owed more to the colonial government’s fears of communal repercussions in British India than to the agitation itself. Contrary to the belief that Godse had quit the RSS before joining the Hindu Mahasabha, he seems to have been a 38

doing a job which ten leaders cannot accomplish.” Godse’s attire remained that of an RSS worker. His normal dress was khaki shorts, white half-sleeved shirts, a black RSS cap and a pair of Maharashtrian sandals. In later years, he also wore a dhoti, but he never changed his RSS cap for that of the Mahasabha. In the Hyderabad jail, Godse organised RSS shakhas and held regular exercises, inculcating the gospel of the Sangh even among those satyagrahis who belonged originally to the Hindu Mahasabha. VG Deshpande, the general secretary of the Mahasabha, who led the second batch of volunteers into Hyderabad and was arrested and kept in the same jail, recounted in an interview that Godse administered him the RSS pledge in prison. This was published in The Gandhi Murder Trial, by the former RSS pracharak Tapan Ghosh. THE CARAVAN

“Last year”—in 1939—“the working committee of Hindu Mahasabha decided to set up a national militia,” Paranjpe wrote. “On the advice of Dr. Moonje”—a Hindu Mahasabha leader—“I discussed the issue with Dr Hedgewar. I requested him to provide some swayamsevaks for imparting training to the militia. He happily agreed to make some trained swayamsevaks available for the purpose.” Paranjpe further pointed out that although Hedgewar did not want the RSS to work as an outfit of the Hindu Mahasabha, he had no objection to swayamsevaks working simultaneously for both organisations. “It was because of his policy to keep the Sangh independent and non-affiliated that its area of operation expanded so much. He was himself for long the secretary of Hindu Mahasabha and was recently its vice president. [He believed that]

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Swayamsevaks should give maximum of their time to the Sangh, but there was no bar on those who desired to work for Hindu Sabha. After all, we”—the RSS—“cannot remain unresponsive to Hindutva ideology and the vision of a Hindusthan for Hindus.” A document that cements the case that Godse remained an RSS member was seized from the RSS headquarters, in Nagpur, in the aftermath of the assassination. It can now be found in the records section of Delhi’s Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. The document pertained to a meeting of the organisation’s Bombay unit in 1940— two years after Godse is believed to have joined the Mahasabha. Page 8 of the document has the name “N.V. Godse, tailor” inside a list of “RSSS organisers of Poona” who had attended the meeting. (The organisation was then often referred to as the RSSS.) As per the report, the organisers’ meeting was held on 11 May 1940, and the attendees included “Tatyarao Savarkar”—another name of VD Savarkar—“Kashinath Pant Limaya, the Provincial Organizer of Bombay Province,” “Dr.

Hedgewar Sar Sanghchalak Nagpur,” “Madhav Rao Golwalkar of Nagpur,” “Bapu Saheb Sohoni, Berar Provincial RSSS Organiser,” “Appaji Joshi Wardha District Organiser of the RSSS” and others from Nasik, Poona, Satara, Ratnagiri, Bombay and East Khandesh. Godse is named third from the top. Besides Godse’s membership of the RSS, the document also illustrates the close ties between the organisation and the Hindu Mahasabha under Savarkar. Pro-RSS writers have claimed that the two organisations became especially estranged once Savarkar became the president of the Mahasabha. Their minor quarrels were dramatically played up. For instance, months after the ban on the RSS was lifted, an article on the Sangh’s past relationship with Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha appeared in the 4 February 1950 issue of the Economic Weekly. Titled “The R.S.S.,” the article explained how Hedgewar, despite holding Savarkar in “great esteem,” refused to make his organisation subservient to the Hindu Mahasabha, and how the rift widened in the years JANUARY 2020

opposite page: Kashinath Limaye (seated Left) with VD Savarkar (seated centre) and Nathuram Godse (seated behind the two). Limaye was Godse’s mentor in the RSS and a crucial link between the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. above: The Hindu Mahasabha takes out a march against the visit of Chou En-Lai, the Chinese communist premier, to Delhi in April 1960.

the apostle of hate · essay this spread: According to a myth often peddled by pro-RSS scholars, the organisation and the Hindu Mahasabha became estranged after MS Golwalkar took over as the chief of the Sangh. The historical record suggests that the two maintained close ties during Golwalkar’s tenure.

that followed. Authored by DV Kelkar, the article says Hedgewar’s stubborn determination to keep the RSS away from the political activities of the Mahasabha so frustrated Savarkar that he said, “The epitaph for the R.S.S. volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the R.S.S. and he died without accomplishing anything.” This quote of Savarkar is the most commonly cited evidence for the apparent severing of ties between the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. This is despite Kelkar’s admission in the same article that he was a close associate of Hedgewar. Also, the provenance of his account of the RSS– Mahasabha relationship, as well as Savarkar’s quote, is uncertain, for he cites no reference for his claims. Yet, this historical invention, including the Savarkar quote, has since not only been ceaselessly reiterated by pro-RSS writers, but even parroted by other serious researchers. There are, however, a few historians who could not be deceived. Marzia Casolari, in her January 2000 paper “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s,” in the Economic and Political Weekly, saw through the

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myth. “According to the commonly accepted opinion—supported by the organizations of militant Hinduism—the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha have never been particularly close, and, during Savarkar’s presidentship, they severed their links,” she wrote. “Reality, however, seems to be different. In fact, numerous historical testimonies show not only that such a split never happened, but that the two organizations always had close connections.” Another archival document of 1940 busts the myth that once Golwalkar succeeded Hedgewar following the latter’s death, on 21 June that year, the two organisations became further estranged. An Intelligence Bureau note summarising field reports on the RSS stated that Golwalkar, while addressing meetings of swayamsevaks in Bombay province in November 1940, propounded “the pan-Hindu theory of one undivided India under the Hindu rule of the Mahasabha.” Golwalkar had spent about five months as the chief of the RSS by then. As a Hindutva ideologue, Savarkar was indispensible to the RSS during the 1930s and 1940s. His speeches and writings were the sole intellectual food for its volunteers. According to SH Deshpande, who was an active swayamsevak in Poona between 1938 and 1946, “How very dependent they were on Savarkar can be gauged from the fact that the day he was to address a meeting in Poona, it would be announced at the various shakhas of the town that the evening’s proceedings stood cancelled and that the volunteers could ‘go home’ (i.e. to Savarkar’s meeting! This was never officially mentioned). This concession was not granted on any other occasion.” Savarkar’s attitude to RSS volunteers was even less ambiguous. He was very proud of the reputation he enjoyed among the swayamsevaks and lost no opportunity to visit shakhas or address them whenever he travelled beyond Bombay. A compilation of Savarkar’s diary entries, speeches, articles and notes—Whirlwind Propaganda: Extracts from President’s Diary of His Propagandist Tours, Interviews from December 1937 to October 1941—which was published in 1941, shows that meeting RSS volunteers constituted an important part of his itineraries during this period. The fluid and overlapping relationship between the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS would hold steady for most of the 1940s—until the events of 30 January 1948 completely shattered it. “Since the lifting of the ban, the author has been informed,” Curran wrote, “Golwalkar has discouraged the practice, which had been common prior to 1947 and today still exists to a limited degree, of Sangh members holding office or even membership in the Mahasabha.”

the apostle of hate · essay began to take up the work of Hindu Mahasabha. … Simultaneously, I remained active in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,” he said in the March 1948 statement, in complete contradiction of the statement he made that November. The RSS was operating at the time under severe constraints. The government, gearing up for the Second World War, had imposed a ban in 1940 on civilians wearing uniforms and performing of drill. The ban had halted the expansion of the RSS as it suppressed those very features of the organisation that were its chief attractions for the youth—its uniform and parade-ground activities. Though the RSS’s official attitude was one of compliance with the government orders, some of its local units often flouted the ban. In Poona, where the ban was taken seriously, drills stopped. Swayamsevaks occupied themselves with courses designed to make them ideologically committed and tough.

The absence of new recruits so threatened a section of the RSS’s members that, within a year of the ban, they feared that not only were they not destined to control the country, but also that the whole enterprise was headed towards failure. As the lifting of the ban was nowhere in sight, this section began debating the organisation’s future course of action. Godse was a regular in these discussions in Poona’s RSS circle. “Should the Sangh stick to its original objective or it should modify itself and take part in politics were some of the issues which were discussed regularly,” he said in the March 1948 statement. “I was of the opinion that there should be a Hindu Rashtra Dal with the objective to make our religion strong and protect the Hindu community.” It remains unclear whether Godse’s proposal was his own idea, or originated in the Hindu Mahasabha group he simultaneously attended. It seems

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godse’s familial troubles began mounting again the moment the Hyderabad satyagraha was withdrawn and he was released from jail, in 1939. “On my return, I saw my family struggling for survival,” he later told interrogators. He withdrew from public life for some time, focussing on his tailoring business. He was soon sending home around a hundred and fifty rupees every month. His brother Dattatreya also shifted to Poona. “With a small amount of R75, Dattatreya started his own business of iron work,” Godse recounted. “His business grew fast, and within a year he also started supporting the family.” Godse once again became politically active. “With Dattatreya pitching in to support the family, I started getting some spare time,” he recounted. Around 1941, with an improvement in the family’s circumstances, he resumed his political activities. “Once again I

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above: After Godse’s newspaper Agrani was penalised for its extremist rhetoric, he started another newspaper under the name Hindu Rashtra. opposite page: Narayan Dattatreya Apte was Godse’s main accomplice and was hanged along with him.

likely that the idea of a Hindu Rashtra Dal first emerged in the Mahasabha circle and won support from the section of the RSS that was extremely loyal to Savarkar. In any event, the new outfit, which was launched in early 1942, had the support of both, though no one admitted it openly. It consisted not only of those belonging to the Hindu Mahasabha but also of “trusted” RSS volunteers. One of the principal outcomes of the establishment of the Hindu Rashtra Dal was Godse’s friendship with the man who would accompany him to the gallows seven years later. Narayan Dattatreya Apte had never been a member of the RSS and was, therefore, not previously known to Godse. But once the two met, Apte became Godse’s partner and alter ego. The 31-year-old Apte was one year younger than Godse. He was a teacher in the American Mission High School at Ahmednagar, and had been in Poona since 1941 to complete his teachers’ training course. Like Godse, Apte had been a devoted acolyte of Savarkar since at least 1938, months after the Hindutva ideologue was freed from his Ratnagiri confinement and became the president of the Hindu Mahasabha. “Since the time you were released from your Internment at Ratnagiri,” Apte wrote in a letter to Savarkar, dated 28 February 1938, “a divine fire has kindled in the minds of those groups who profess that Hindustan is for the Hindus; and by reason of the pronouncement which you made upon accepting the presidentship of the Hindu Mahasabha confidence is felt that that hope will materialise into a reality.” It is unclear whether Apte’s zest was genuine. Letters he wrote to Savarkar during 1938–39 are obsequious and seem to have been written with the objective of getting his help for a personal project—setting up rifle-training clubs in different parts of Maharashtra. An astute marketing man, Apte cultivated a personal relationship with Savarkar to take the help of his loyal friends in obtaining students and licences for his rifle clubs. By May 1939, he had already started such clubs in Ahmednagar, Poona, Satara and Sholapur and THE CARAVAN

done preparatory work in places such as Chalisgaon, Jalgaon and Dombivali. His rifle clubs, however, fell into disuse after the Second World War broke out late that year and the government refused to renew their licences. By this point, Apte had joined the Hindu Mahasabha and become a loyal devotee of Savarkar. the two disciples of savarkar were the main organisers of the Hindu Rashtra Dal’s foundation camp, held at Poona in May 1942. According to Godse’s March 1948 statement, a total of “160 swayamsevaks and sympathisers” attended the HRD camp. “Shri Kashinath Limaye started working as prant pramukh”—state president. During this time, Limaye remained the sanghchalak of the Maharashtra prant of the RSS, a post he held from 1934 to 1965. This shows that the RSS was directly involved in forming the HRD—an organisation said to have been set up for secret activities that an open organisation could not undertake—and that the HRD was not simply a Hindu Mahasabha offshoot consisting of hardcore Savarkar loyalists. The RSS, it seems, was aware of the uncomfortable optics of this link with the HRD, but could do little more than remain silent as long as Limaye was alive. However, after Limaye’s death in 1980, Walter K Andersen and Shridhar D Damle—two US-based researchers, whose access to the Nagpur headquarters of the RSS was as conspicuous as that afforded earlier to Curran—planted misinformation about Limaye in their 1987 book The

Godse’s new outfit, the Hindu Rashtra Dal, launched in 1942, had the support of both the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, though neither organisation admitted it openly.

the apostle of hate · essay Even Andersen and Damle admit the presence of “a number of swayamsevaks” in the HRD when it was formed. A printed advisory sent to potential participants at the HRD’s second annual camp, which was to be held at Ahmednagar in 1943, said, “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s prant sanghchalak KB Limaye will stay in the camp for two-three days. You will, therefore, get an opportunity to listen to his precious thoughts.” The advisory, issued under the names of Godse, Apte and GM Nalavade, a Hindu Mahasabha leader, also listed six teachers who would be taking ideological classes. At least two of them—PG Sahasrabuddhe and DV Gokhale—were prominent RSS members from Poona. While Sahasrabuddhe was part of the RSS’s ideological division, Gokhale was an RSS pracharak. Limaye, who operated from Sangli, was quite useful to the RSS during the Second World War, when, with the government bans on uniform and drills in British provinces, the Sangh was des-

perately trying to expand its activities in states ruled by Hindu princes. An Intelligence Bureau report of June 1943 said that “the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, in its anxiety to avoid any action which would draw the attention of the authorities in British India to its activities, is endeavouring more and more to entrench itself in the Hindu States where, according to one report, it hopes to perfect its organization and training unhindered.” The process might have been intensified after September 1944, when the British government issued an order providing provincial governments further power to control parades and camps. Sangli was one of the princely states where the RSS—primarily due to Limaye’s efforts—already had a strong base when the partial ban was imposed in 1940. This may well have been the reason the rulers of the princely states of Sangli and Kolhapur gave Golwalkar permission to hold the RSS’s officers’ training classes in 1943. Sangli oversaw

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Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism. Without giving any reference, the book claims—partly in its main text, and partly in a footnote—that Limaye, due to his differences with Golwalkar, resigned from the RSS in 1943 and stayed out for two years, rejoining it and resuming charge only in 1945. Archival documents of the period simply reject the theory of any rupture between Limaye and the RSS before Gandhi’s assassination. In his memoir Sangliche Diwas (1937-1945), Narhari N Kirkire, a former RSS member, recalls Limaye representing the RSS in a 1944 meeting with the ruler of Sangli. Kirkire, who claims to have seen the episode personally, credits Limaye for making him an RSS swayamsevak. Had Limaye stayed out of the RSS between 1943 and 1945, he would not have represented the organisation in 1944. Records suggest that Limaye and Godse were not the only RSS men openly participating in HRD meetings.

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the apostle of hate · essay the expansion of the Sangh activities in the neighbouring princely states, including Kolhapur, Ichalkaranji, Jamkhandi, Miraj, Kurundwad, Budhgaon, Aundh, Phalton, Bhor and Akkalkot, until the Defence of India Rules, together with the control orders of 1940 and 1944, were withdrawn in September 1946. Given the Limaye’s pivotal position in the RSS, his absence from the organisation during the critical years from 1943 to 1945, if it really occured, could not have remained a secret. Under the direct command of Hedgewar since 1932, he had spearheaded the growth of the RSS in modern-day Maharashtra. Thus, Andersen and Damle’s claims have to be seen with circumspection, just like those of Curran. The launch of the HRD instantly elevated Godse’s profile among the followers of Hindutva in Poona. His stature rose in the Hindu Mahasabha as well. This was reflected in Godse’s decisive role in settling a crucial internal debate in the Mahasabha. As the historian Ramachandra Guha documents in Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914–1948, after the All India Congress Committee passed the Quit India resolution, demanding the immediate end of British rule, Gandhi, Nehru and other top Congress leaders were arrested on 9 August 1942. The arrests led to widespread unrest throughout India. In Bengal, the protests were so intense that, on 14 August, the Hindu Mahasabha leader NC Chatterjee wrote to BS Moonje that “the entire Hindu population is with Gandhiji and his movement and if anybody wants to oppose it, he will be absolutely finished and hounded out of public life.” On 31 August, the working committee of the Hindu Mahasabha adopted a resolution demanding the immediate declaration of India’s independence and the formation of a provisional national government. “If the British Government still persists in its policy of callous indifference to India’s national aspirations and does not respond to this demand for the recognition of India’s freedom and the formation of a National Government, the Hindu Mahasabha will have no other alternative but to revise its present programme 44

and to devise ways and means whereby Britain and her Allies will realize that India as a self-respecting nation can no longer be suppressed,” the resolution said. A few days later, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee asserted that if forced to take action, the Mahasabha would launch “civil disobedience” and go for “direct action.” However, Godse, perhaps because of his living relationship with the RSS, was dead against the Bengal unit’s efforts to give up the old line of cooperation with the British government. Working in tandem with some other Bombay-based members of the Mahasabha’s working committee, he forced the party to stick to its previous policy instead of venturing out and getting “engulfed in a bottomless pit”— which was how the RSS viewed the Quit India movement. The RSS stayed away from any confrontation with the government, as BN Bhargava wrote in

tried to arouse emotion by building up a series of apparently disconnected sentences delivered in repetitive bursts but in varying tones.” The HRD soon became an influential body in Poona. By the end of 1943, it also had active branches in Bombay, Miraj, Sholapur, Barshi, Pandharpur and Indore. Just like Apte, Godse wanted Savarkar to become the “dictator” of the HRD. Savarkar refused, but promised to provide direction for the organisation. Nevertheless, the object of the HRD was the propagation of “Hindu Rashtra Vad”—Hindu nationalism—“as propounded by Vir Savarkarji.” Godse’s ambitions grew once Apte moved to Poona again from Ahmednagar, in early 1944. (In 1942, he had moved back to Ahmednagar after completing his teachers’ training course.) Determined to widen the compass of their activities, the two commenced a vigorous campaign to collect money for

When, in the summer of 1945, Savarkar came to Poona for the marriage of his daughter Prabhat, Godse acted as his man friday. Shantabai Gokhale, an important leader of the Hindu Mahasabha in the city, saw him hovering on the periphery of the Savarkar family. his biography of Golwalkar, because it “felt that it was the time to organise and strengthen the people, and not to land ourselves in jail and remain immobilised for years.” During its Delhi meeting in October that year, the working committee passed another resolution, which reflected Godse’s position by rescinding its 31 August decision to support the Quit India movement. Godse now became a dedicated political leader, making outlandish attacks in forceful speeches. “His facts were often wrong, his opinions usually contradictory and aggressively didactic, and his attitudes theatrical,” Shrinivas D Acharya, a 93-year-old RSS member who has been living in Poona since 1941, told me. As a young swayamsevak, Acharya attended several Godse speeches during the 1940s. “His voice was shrill, and he used vigorous gestures while speaking,” he said. “He THE CARAVAN

the launch of a newspaper. During the war, newsprint was a scarce commodity, so there were restrictions on starting newspapers. With donations—a major part of which came from Savarkar—they revived a defunct Marathi newspaper called Agrani. The first issue of Agrani, with Godse as its editor and Apte as its general manager, was published on 25 March 1944. Though there is no evidence to suggest any relation between them, 1944 saw the launch of two more Marathi newspapers, by men associated with the RSS. One of them, Vikram, was started in Sangli by Limaye. The other, Tarun Bharat, was launched at Nagpur by the Narkesari Smarak Mandal Trust. All three papers were bitterly critical of the Congress and detested Gandhi for his philosophy of non-violence, as well as his tolerance of, and advocacy of equal rights for, Muslims.

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“Following the launch of the daily, Apte and I became completely occupied,” Godse said in his March 1948 statement. “It became difficult to find time for the activities of Hindu Mahasabha and Hindu Rashtra Dal. So around the end of the year, we told the swayamsevaks of Hindu Rashtra Dal that because of the newspaper we won’t be able to spare time for them and that they should themselves run their branches … We informed the swayamsevaks that the newspaper was facing a financial crisis and that we would be able to give time for Hindu Rashtra Dal only after the crisis was over. The expansion of Hindu Rashtra Dal stopped after we diverted our attention.” From now on, Godse’s life as a political activist was driven by an absolutely ruthless determination to achieve the goal set by his masters and their ideology: the Hindu nation. It seems that he had also developed an exalted notion of his own abilities, recognising himself as a leader in chrysalis. Articles abusing Gandhi and packed full of communally charged rhetoric appeared in Agrani with great frequency.

Godse continued working as Savarkar’s aide. When, in the summer of 1945, Savarkar came to Poona for the marriage of his daughter Prabhat, Godse acted as his man Friday. Shantabai Gokhale, an important leader of the Hindu Mahasabha in the city, saw him hovering on the periphery of the Savarkar family. Gokhale, who was trying to find a middle path between Savarkar’s decision to keep the wedding ceremony extremely austere and his wife Yamunabai’s desire for a more extravagant celebration, told Savarkar that she would manage everything in just five hundred rupees. “Tatya then called for Nathuram and asked him to give five hundred rupees to Shantabai,” Vasudha Paranjpe wrote in Ek Junjar Stri. “While giving the money, Nathuram asked Shantabai as to when he would get the details of expenditure. Within eight days, she replied before taking the money and coming out.” As Godse’s confidence increased, so did the frequency of his visits to Tilak Smarak Mandir, which had become the hub of all the prominent Hindutva leaders of Poona. In discussions, he JANUARY 2020

above: (Left to Right) Godse, Apte and Vishnu Karkare undergo trial. Godse originally wanted Madan Lal Pahwa (behind Apte) to shoot Gandhi, but Pahwa refused.

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agrani’s open defiance of the government began attracting attention of the authorities in Bombay around 1946, particularly for its advocacy of violence. Before long, the government cracked down on the paper, demanding a heavy security to guarantee its good behaviour. The money would be forfeited the next time it tried to violate law and order. With the support of a good number of pro-Hindutva men, the paper managed to pay the security amount. One of the donors was Jugal Kishore Birla, a scion of the Birla business family who contributed R1,000 to Agrani in October 1946. Birla emerged as an important benefactor of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS—in early 1947, he bought a large number of steel helmets for RSS volunteers. The restrictions imposed on Agrani led Godse to hold several rounds of meetings, in late 1946 and early 1947, with the Congress leader Morarji Desai, then the home minister of Bombay. Desai mentioned these meetings in his memoirs, The Story of My Life. “Godse’s writings … were full of incitement to the Hindus,” Desai wrote. “Whenever he came to see me I expressed my disapproval of his activities. He visited me sometimes to discuss the security order which I had passed against his paper for carrying writings inciting violence. I had even forfeited his security.” Interestingly, Desai’s memoir never refers to Godse as a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, but only as an RSS worker. “He had been a worker of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh in Poona and also the editor of a paper,” he wrote. It gradually became clear that nothing—not even a hefty fine—was going to change Godse. He remained as unbending as ever and continued to rail against Gandhi and Muslims. Just before Independence, the government demanded another sum from the paper, but Godse dissolved Agrani only to start it under 46

was known for his extreme and violent views, which were often heard with a sense of alarm. “I couldn’t make much of that queer fellow Nathuram Godse,” Acharya told me. “But I knew one thing: he was going to get somewhere.”

another name: Hindu Rashtra. He and Apte occupied their respective earlier positions in the new paper, which was a replica of Agrani both in tone and content. The articles Godse wrote left no doubt about what he was against, though there was still considerable doubt over what he was for. In an article published on 6 September 1947 in Hindu Rashtra, Godse talks of riots in different places in Pakistan and calls on Hindus to retaliate. In another article, which appeared the next day, he branded Congress leaders as “the THE CARAVAN

assailants of all our valour, courage and manliness,” and suggests “the removal of such leaders who are obstacles in the path of bravery.” During the rest of 1947, Godse seemed content firing off regular articles of this nature. But Partition, the terrible outbursts of violence in Punjab and Bengal, and his failure to rouse the communal feelings of Poona’s Hindus affected him so strongly that he kept himself aloof from Independence Day celebrations. He began experiencing lows. One such occasion was recorded by MS Dixit, a member

the apostle of hate · essay of the Hindu Mahasabha who had contributed several articles to Godse’s paper. In a book titled Mi Ma Sri, Dixit recalls Godse asking him why the thirteenth-century Marathi saint Dnyaneshwar died a premature death. Dixit replied that he did not know. “I will tell you,” Godse said. “With all the suffering, this saint kept preaching karmayoga”—a concept that calls for good works—“but people remained inactive. This annoyed him and he took Samadhi”—embracing death by entering into deep meditation. “This was in a way suicide. Do you agree?” “Is it an issue worth contemplation?” Dixit asked him. “Then leave it.” Godse’s depressive thoughts may have surprised Dixit because he had mostly seen him full of energy, making bombastic claims. This particular conversation reveals a couple of important things about his mental state at the time: a depressive streak, and an exaggerated sense of self-importance as he compared his inability to rouse Hindu passions to Dnyaneshwar’s failure to make people respond to his preaching. Apte, meanwhile, introduced Godse to Perry Mason books and Hollywood films with violence and adventure, for which he developed a great

But Partition, the terrible outbursts of violence in Punjab and Bengal, and Godse’s failure to rouse the communal feelings of Poona’s Hindus affected him so strongly that he kept himself aloof from Independence Day celebrations. fondness. He would often walk alone into Poona’s Capital Theatre, where he would quietly watch films such as Scarface and The Charge of the Light Brigade. by the end of 1947, Godse was getting fatigued with his journalistic career. His interest in his newspaper began diminishing. What caused this remains unclear, but towards the end of December, Godse was already having a series of lengthy and reflective conversations with Apte regarding their future course of action. It was in these conversations that they determined that Gandhi had to be killed. But who would carry out the killing was still a question, for

Godse at this stage could not muster the resolve to perform the act. On 2 January 1948, the two had a meeting with Vishnu Ramkrishna Karkare, a friend of Apte and another Savarkar loyalist who headed the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmednagar and ran a restaurant-cum-lodge: the Deccan Guest House. During the meeting, held in one of the rooms of the guest house, Godse talked about the futility of making public speeches and writing newspaper articles and stressed the need to kill Gandhi. Karkare promised to help and offered the services of a Partition refugee “who would be prepared to perform any daring act.” He then called in a young man and introduced him as Madanlal Pahwa. In his pre-trial statement, Godse said that he decided to carry out the assassination because Gandhi “had been constantly helping Pakistan.” During his trial, he gave a different account, which seemed to contradict his own argument regarding the genesis of the idea to kill Gandhi. He said that he decided to take the extreme step on 13 January 1948, when Gandhi started his indefinite fast to restore communal amity in Delhi, which he viewed as a move to “compel” the Indian government to pay R55 crore to Pakistan as agreed in the negotiated separation, which the government refused to do. Testimony by Apte and Karkare also identified Gandhi’s pro-Muslim and pro-Pakistan attitude as the reason they targeted him. However, Pahwa seems to have been given a different reason altogether. According to a statement by Pahwa, Karkare told him on 5 January “about the secret scheme of taking the life of Mahatma Gandhi. He had said that Gandhiji was the only obstacle in the establishing of the Hindu Raj.” Whatever the reason, Godse, despite being convinced that he was the saviour of the Hindus, was not prepared to assume the task of committing the crime himself. Pahwa, thus, was chosen as the scapegoat. The 20-year-old youth from the Montgomery district of Pakistan’s Punjab province, like many other refugees, was seething with anger at what had befallen him and held Gandhi personally responsible for his suffering. For nearly two months after reaching Bombay in October 1947, he wandered in search of employment and took up odd jobs, such as selling books, crackers and fruits, before deciding to shift to Ahmednagar in December. His mentor at Ahmednagar, Karkare, first put him to the task of mobilising refugees settled at Visapur, a settlement close to the town. He then started using him as his henchman for tormenting Muslim hawkers and shopkeepers, hurling bombs into their settlements and breaking up meetings of political leaders opposed to the Hindu Mahasabha. JANUARY 2020

opposite page: The gun, and one of the three bullets, that Godse used to shoot Gandhi.

the apostle of hate · essay

universal history archive / getty images

right: Crowds watch the cremation of Gandhi in 1948.

The pace of events quickened when, on 9 January, Pahwa met Godse and Apte in the presence of Karkare for a second time—this time in the Hindu Rashtra office at Poona. Pahwa was not told that he was supposed to pull the trigger. “While we were taking tea,” Karkare said in his statement, “[With] Madanlal a little away from us, Apte quietly told me that some arms were to be taken by me to Delhi, I should see them first. He also stated that within five or six days it was decided to kill Gandhiji and asked me if Madanlal was prepared to come with us. I told him that Madanlal was ever ready to do any act and would be taken with me.” Within half an hour, Apte arranged Karkare’s meeting with Digambar Ramchandra Badge, a local arms dealer whose business depended largely on his association with Hindu communal groups. Badge would provide for the purpose a hand gre48

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nade, a revolver and a slab of guncotton—an explosive made of nitrocellulose. A week later, all the members of the group—including Badge, his servant Shankar Kistaiya and Gopal Godse—were on their way to Delhi. In Bombay, while preparing to continue his onward journey to Delhi, Pahwa knew that “these persons had an idea of attacking Gandhiji or some other prominent leader.” But he still did not know that it was he, not Godse or Apte or any other member of the group, who would be at the forefront of the plan. It was late on 19 January, a day before Gandhi was to be attacked during a prayer meeting in Birla House, that Karkare, in his role as joint overseer of the plan along with Godse and Apte, first broke the news. Pahwa was sharing a room with Karkare at the Hindu Mahasabha Bhawan in Delhi. While Pahwa was in his bed, trying to sleep, Apte came

the apostle of hate · essay to the room and took Karkare out with him. “Before I could get a sleep in the room at Mahasabha Bhawan, Karkare returned to the room within about five or ten minutes and whispered to me whether I would be in a position to kill Gandhiji,” Pahwa recounted later. “I stealthily said that I would not be able to do such an act.” Things began to go wrong the moment Pahwa refused to spearhead the plot. The following day, Godse, Apte and Karkare began trying to salvage the situation. A new plan was drawn up and Badge was assigned to shoot Gandhi. Pahwa was entrusted with the task of igniting the guncotton slab at a spot far removed from Gandhi, almost outside the prayer ground. The blast was not meant to hurt anybody, but to distract the attendees. It would be followed by different members of the group throwing hand grenades. In the chaos, Badge would shoot Gandhi. Gandhi’s prayer meeting began in the afternoon of 20 January at the Birla House compound. Some distance from where the meeting was taking place, Pahwa, as instructed, exploded the gun-

They finally came to a fresh decision: they must stop searching for a “third person” to shoot Gandhi. “We felt it urgent to kill Gandhi,” Godse said in the March 1948 statement. “Instead of looking for a third person, I decided to go personally in front of Gandhi and empty the pistol in him. We also decided that Apte and Karkare would come along only to provide support to me.” How long Godse harboured the thought that he himself would shoot Gandhi has remained a mystery. In his book At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture, the psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy argues that Godse saw killing Gandhi as a means to regain the masculinity that he had remained uncertain about since his childhood, and thus may have given it more thought even before the first assassination plot failed. While speculation can throw up a number of explanations for Godse’s actions, in his public statements, Godse only ever offered political rhetoric as justification for the act. The beginning of Godse’s change of heart seems to have coincided with

Inamdar wrote in his memoir that he never saw Savarkar speaking with, or even turning his head towards, Godse—despite the two sitting side by side. “He had, I thought, perhaps resolved to act in court, his defence against the charge of conspiracy with Nathuram or with any one of the accused.” cotton. He looked for the car in which he was supposed to get away with Apte, Badge and Godse, but it was no longer there. A woman who had been observing Pahwa pointed him out as the man who caused the explosion, and he was quickly overpowered by police. “I thought that I was cheated,” he later said. as darkness fell, Godse and Apte escaped on a night train to Kanpur. After spending all of 21 January at the railway station there, they caught another train the following morning to Bombay. After reaching Bombay, on 23 January, they remained underground, accessible only to Gopal and Karkare. They tried to devise a new plan.

his daylong stay at the Kanpur railway station after the failed attempt. “There we heard so many people expressing disappointment over the failure of the attempt to kill Gandhi,” Godse told his interrogators. “They held Gandhi responsible for killing of Hindus in Pakistan and wished that he should have been killed in the bomb attack. This kind of response made me believe that we were on the right track.” Even though it seemed like a suicide mission, Godse really thought he would be hailed by the larger public, especially by Hindu and Sikh refugees. He decided to take the risk. Along with Apte, Godse flew to Delhi on 27 January and took an overnight JANUARY 2020

train to Gwalior, where he obtained a reliable pistol with the help of a longtime Hindu Mahasabha friend, Dattatreya Sadashiv Parchure. They returned to Delhi on 29 January. The next day, around 5 pm at the grounds of Birla House, Gandhi was supposed to address a prayer meeting. Just as he was about to reach the dais, Godse sprang before him and fired three bullets into Gandhi’s chest. The murder swung the public mood, but not in the manner Godse had expected. Instead of Godse being hailed, Gandhi became an even bigger icon. After the initial shock, there began a massive—and sometimes violent—wave of public and government backlash against the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. As the months passed and the trial began at the Red Fort, Godse experienced another nasty surprise. This was noted in some detail by PL Inamdar, who represented Parchure during the Red Fort trial, and later in his appeal to the Simla High Court. After the trial began, Inamdar and Godse became close. Inamdar wrote in his memoir that he never saw Savarkar speaking with, or even turning his head towards, Godse—despite the two sitting side by side. “He had, I thought, perhaps resolved to act in court, his defence against the charge of conspiracy with Nathuram or with any one of the accused,” Inamdar noted. He added: During the various talks I had with Nathuram, he told me that he was deeply hurt by this—Tatyarao’s calculated, demonstrative non-association with him either in court or in the Red Fort Jail during all the days of the Red Fort Trial. How Nathuram yearned for a touch of Tatyarao’s hand, a word of sympathy, or at least a look of compassion in the secluded confines of the cells! Nathuram referred to his hurt feelings in this regard even during my last meeting with him at the Simla High Court! No one knows whether Savarkar or the RSS mourned when Godse—the former’s protégé and the latter’s sworn volunteer—was hanged on 15 November 1949. s 49

The siege in Kashmir, the NRC in Assam, the CAA as the law of the land: The rise and rise of the Hindu Nation ESSAY / POLITICS

zishaan a latif for the caravan

ARUNDHATI ROY

This essay has been adapted from the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture for 2019, presented at the Cooper Union in New York City on 12 November.

while protest reverberates on the streets of Chile, Catalonia, Britain, France, Iraq, Lebanon and Hong Kong, and a new generation rages against what has been done to their planet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking about a place where the street has been taken over by something quite different. There was a time when dissent was India’s best export. But now, even as protest swells in the West, our great anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements for social and environmental justice—the marches against big dams, against the privatisation and plunder of our rivers and forests, against mass displacement and the alienation of indigenous peoples’ homelands—have largely fallen silent. On 17 September this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gifted himself the filled-to-the-brim reservoir of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River for his sixty-ninth birthday, while thousands of villagers who had fought that dam for more than thirty years watched their homes disappear under the rising water. It was a moment of great symbolism.

intimations of an ending · essay In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves—its size and changing shape, its depth and diversity. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world, at least not yet, but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic. Right now, seven million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens, and risk being declared stateless. The Indian government has announced its intention of extending the NRC to the rest of India. Legislation is on its way. This could lead to the manufacture of statelessness on a scale previously unknown. The rich in Western countries are making their own arrangements for the coming climate calamity. They’re building bunkers and stocking reservoirs of food and clean water. In poor countries—India, despite being the fifth largest economy in the world, is, shamefully, still a poor and hungry country—different kinds of arrangements are being made. The Indian government’s 5 August 2019 annexation of Kashmir has as much to do with the Indian government’s urgency to secure access to the rivers that run through the state of Jammu and Kashmir as it does with anything else. And the NRC, which will create a system of tiered citizenship in which some citizens have more rights than others, is also a preparation for a time when resources become scarce. Citizenship, as Hannah Arendt famously said, is the right to have rights. 54

The dismantling of the idea of liberty, fraternity and equality will be—in fact already is—the first casualty of the climate crisis. I’m going to try to explain in some detail how this is happening. And how, in India, the modern management system that emerged to handle this very modern crisis has its roots in an odious, dangerous filament of our history. The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a convulsion that could alter the foundations of India, and rearrange its meaning and its place in the world. The Constitution calls India a secular, socialist republic. We use the word “secular” in a slightly different sense from the rest of the world—for us, it’s code for a society in which all religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law. In practice, India has been neither secular nor socialist. In effect, it has always functioned as an upper-caste Hindu state. But the conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be, is the only shard of coherence that makes India possible. That hypocrisy was the best thing we had. Without it, India will end. In his May 2019 victory speech, after his party won a second term, Modi boasted that no politicians from any political party had dared to use the word “secularism” in their campaigns. The tank of secularism, Modi said, was now empty. So, it’s official. India is running on empty. And we are learning, too late, to cherish hypocrisy. Because with it comes a vestige, a pretence at least, of remembered decency. India is not really a country. It is a continent. More complex and diverse, with more languages—780 at last count, excluding dialects—more nationalities and sub-nationalities, more indigenous tribes and religions than all of Europe. Imagine this vast ocean, this fragile, fractious, social ecosystem, suddenly being commandeered by a Hindu supremacist organisation that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion, One Constitution. I am speaking here of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925—the mothership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Its founding fathers were greatly influenced by German and Italian fascism. They likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of THE CARAVAN

Germany, and believed that Muslims have no place in Hindu India. The RSS today, in typical RSS chameleon-speak, distances itself from this view. But its underlying ideology, in which Muslims are cast as permanent, treacherous “outsiders,” is a constant refrain in the public speeches of BJP politicians, and finds utterance in chilling slogans raised by rampaging mobs. For example: “Mussalman ka ek hi sthan—Kabristan ya Pakistan.” Only one place for the Mussalman—the graveyard, or Pakistan. In October this year, Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, said, “India is a Hindu Rashtra”—a Hindu Nation. “This is non-negotiable.” That idea turns everything that is beautiful about India into acid. For the RSS to portray what it is engineering today as an epochal revolution, in which Hindus are finally wiping away centuries of oppression at the hands of India’s earlier Muslim rulers, is a part of its fake-history project. In truth, millions of India’s Muslims are the descendants of people who converted to Islam to escape Hinduism’s cruel practice of caste. If Nazi Germany was a country seeking to impose its imagination onto a continent (and beyond), the impetus of an RSS-ruled India is, in a sense, the opposite. Here is a continent seeking to shrink itself into a country. Not even a country, but a province. A primitive, ethno-religious province. This is turning out to be an unimaginably violent process—a kind of slow-motion political fission, triggering a radioactivity that has begun to contaminate everything around it. That it will self-destruct is not in doubt. The question is what else, who else and how much else will go down with it. None of the white-supremacist, neo-Nazi groups that are on the rise in the world today can boast of the infrastructure and manpower that the RSS commands. It says that it has fifty-seven thousand shakhas—branches—across the country, and an armed, dedicated militia of more than six hundred thousand “volunteers.” It runs schools in which millions of students are enrolled, and has its own medical missions, trade unions, farmers’ organisations, media outlets and women’s groups. Recent-

intimations of an ending · essay ly, it announced that it was opening a training school for those who wish to join the Indian Army. Under its bhagwa dhwaj—its saffron pennant—a whole host of far-right organisations, known as the Sangh Parivar—the RSS’s “family”—have prospered and multiplied. These organisations, the political equivalents of shell companies, are responsible for shockingly violent attacks on minorities in which, over the years, uncounted thousands have been murdered. Violence, communal conflagration and false-flag attacks are their principal strategies, and have been at the very core of the saffron campaign. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a member of the RSS all his life. He is a creation of the RSS. Although not Brahmin, he, more than anyone else in its history, has been responsible for turning it into the most powerful organisation in India, and for writing its most glorious chapter yet. It is exasperating to have to constantly repeat the story of Modi’s ascent to power, but the officially sanctioned amnesia around it makes reiteration almost a duty. Modi’s political career was jump-started in October 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, when the BJP removed its elected chief minister in the state of Gujarat, and installed Modi in his place. He was not, at the time, even an elected member of the state’s legislative assembly. Five months into his first term, there was a heinous but mysterious act of arson in which 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in a train coach. As “revenge,” Hindu vigilante mobs went on a well-planned rampage across the state. An estimated 2,500 people, almost all of them Muslim, were murdered in broad daylight. Women were gang-raped on city streets, and tens of thousands were driven from their homes. Immediately after the pogrom, Modi called for elections. He won, not despite the massacre but because of it. He became known as Hindu Hriday Samrat—the Emperor of the Hindu Heart—and was re-elected as chief minister for three consecutive terms. During Modi’s 2014 campaign as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP—which also featured the massacre of Muslims, this time in the district of Muzaffarnagar in the state of Uttar Pradesh—a Reuters journalist asked him whether he regretted the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat under his watch. He replied, in all sincerity, that he would regret even the death of a dog if it accidentally came under the wheels of his car. This was pure, well-trained, RSS-speak. When Modi was sworn in as India’s fourteenth prime minister, he was celebrated not just by his support base of Hindu Nationalists, but also by India’s major industrialists and businessmen, by many Indian liberals and by the international

The conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be, is the only shard of coherence that makes India possible. That hypocrisy was the best thing we had. Without it, India will end. media, as the epitome of hope and progress, a saviour in a saffron business suit, whose very person represented the confluence of the ancient and the modern—of Hindu Nationalism and no-holdsbarred free-market capitalism. While Modi has delivered on Hindu Nationalism, he has stumbled badly on the free-market front. Through a series of blunders, he has brought India’s economy to its knees. In 2016, a little over a year into his first term, he appeared one night on television to announce that, from that moment on, all 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes—over eighty percent of the currency in circulation—had ceased to be legal tender. Nothing like it had ever been done on such a scale in the history of any country. Neither the finance minister nor the chief economic advisor seemed to have been taken into confidence. This “demonetisation,” Modi said, was a “surgical strike” on corruption and terror funding. This was pure quack economics, a home remedy being laid on a nation of more than a billion people. It turned out to be nothing short of devastating. But there were no riots. No protests. People stood meekly in line outside banks for hours on end to deposit their old currency notes— the only way left to redeem them. No Chile, Catalonia, Lebanon, Hong Kong. Almost overnight, jobs disappeared, the construction industry ground to a halt, small businesses simply shut down. Some of us foolishly believed that this act of unimaginable hubris would be the end of Modi. How wrong we were. People rejoiced. They suffered, but rejoiced. It was as though pain had been spun into pleasure. As though their suffering was the labour pain that would soon birth a glorious, prosperous, Hindu India. Most economists agree that demonetisation, along with the new Goods and Services Tax Modi announced soon after—promising “one nation, one tax”—was the policy equivalent of shooting out the tires of a speeding car. Many argue that the official figures the government has since put out about economic growth, depressing as they already are, are experiments with the truth. They argue that the Indian economy is now in recession, and that demonetisation was the catalyst. Even the government admits that unemployment is at a 45-year high. The 2019 Global Hunger Index ranks India 102nd out of 117 countries. (Nepal comes in at 73rd, Bangladesh 88th and Pakistan 94th). JANUARY 2020

intimations of an ending Âˇ essay But demonetisation was never about economics alone. It was a loyalty test, a love exam that the Great Leader was putting us through. Would we follow him, would we always love him, no matter what? We emerged with flying colours. The moment we as a people accepted demonetisation, we infantilised

ourselves and surrendered to tinpot authoritarianism. But what was bad for the country turned out to be excellent for the BJP. Between 2016 and 2017, even as the economy tanked, it became one of the richest political parties in the world. Its income increased by 81 percent, making it nearly five times richer than

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its main rival, the Congress Party, whose income declined by 14 percent. Smaller political parties were virtually bankrupted. This war chest won the BJP the crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh, and turned the 2019 general election into a race between a Ferrari and a few old bicycles. And since elections are increasingly about moneyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

intimations of an ending · essay and the accumulation of power and the accumulation of capital seem to be convergent—the chances of a free and fair election in the near future seem remote. So maybe demonetisation was not a blunder after all. In Modi’s second term, the RSS has stepped up its game like never before. It is no longer a shadow state or a parallel state. It is the state. Day by day, we see examples of its control over the media, the police, the intelligence agencies. Worryingly, it appears to exercise considerable influence over the armed forces, too. Foreign diplomats have been hobnobbing with the RSS leadership. The German ambassador (of all ambassadors) trooped all the way to the RSS’s headquarters in Nagpur. In truth, things have reached a stage where overt control is no longer even necessary. More than four hundred round-the-clock television news channels, millions of WhatsApp groups and TikTok videos keep the population on a drip feed of frenzied bigotry. On 9 November, the Supreme Court of India ruled on what some have called one of the most important cases in the world. On 6 December 1992, in the town of Ayodhya, a Hindu vigilante mob, organised by the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad—the World Hindu Council—literally hammered a four-century-old mosque into dust. They claimed that this mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple that had marked the birthplace of Lord Ram. More than two thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the communal violence that followed. In its recent judgement, the court held that Muslims could not

dar yasin / ap

below: A protest in the neighbourhood of Soura, in Srinagar. Despite the government’s lockdown of the Kashmir Valley, and amid official claims of a return to “normalcy,” news emerged of repression, fear, anger and incandescent resistance.

The RSS’s founding fathers were greatly influenced by German and Italian fascism. They likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany, and believed that Muslims have no place in Hindu India. JANUARY 2020

prove their exclusive and continuous possession of the site. It turned the site over to a trust—to be constituted by the BJP government—tasked with building a temple on it. There have been mass arrests of people who have criticised the judgement. The VHP has refused to back down on its past statements that it will turn its attention to other mosques. Theirs can be an endless campaign— after all, everybody came from somewhere, and everything is built over something. With the influence that immense wealth generates, the BJP has managed to co-opt, buy out, or simply crush its political rivals. The hardest blow has fallen on the parties with bases among the Dalit and other disadvantaged castes in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. A major section of their traditional voters has deserted these parties—the Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashriya Janata Dal and Samajwadi Party—and migrated to the BJP. To achieve this feat—and it is nothing short of a feat—the BJP worked hard to exploit and expose the caste hierarchies within the Dalit and disadvantaged castes, which have their own internal universe of hegemony and marginalisation. The BJP’s overflowing coffers and its deep, cunning understanding of caste have completely altered the conventional electoral math of caste politics. Having secured Dalit and disadvantaged-caste votes, the BJP’s policies of privatising education and the public sector are rapidly reversing the gains made by affirmative action—known in India as “reservation”—and are pushing those who belong to disadvantaged castes out of jobs and educational institutions. Meanwhile, the National Crime Records Bureau shows a sharp increase of atrocities against Dalits, including lynchings and public floggings. This September, while Modi was being honoured by the Gates Foundation for making India open-defecation-free, two Dalit children, whose home was just the shelter of a plastic sheet, were beaten to death for shitting in the open. To honour a prime minister for his work on sanitation while tens of thousands of Dalits continue to work as manual scavengers—carry57

intimations of an ending · essay ing human excreta on their heads—is grotesque. What we are living through now, in addition to the overt attack on religious minorities, is an aggravated class and caste war. in order to consolidate their political gains, the RSS and BJP’s main strategy is to generate long-lasting chaos on an industrial scale. They have stocked their kitchen with a set of simmering cauldrons that can, whenever necessary, be quickly brought to the boil. On 5 August 2019, the Indian government unilaterally breached the fundamental conditions of the Instrument of Accession by which the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir agreed to become part of India in 1947. It stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood and its special status—which included its right to have its own constitution and its own flag. The dissolution of the legal entity of the state also meant the dissolution of Section 35A of the Indian Constitution, which secured the erstwhile state’s residents the rights and privileges that made them stewards of their own territory. In preparation for the move, the government flew in more than fifty thousand troops to supplement the hundreds of thousands already stationed there. By the night of 4 August, tourists and pilgrims had been evacuated from the Kashmir Valley. By midnight, the internet was cut and phones went dead. Schools and markets were shut down. More than four thousand people were soon arrested. That included politicians, businessmen, lawyers, rights activists, local leaders, students and three former chief ministers. Kashmir’s entire political class, including those who have been loyal to India, was incarcerated.

The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of an all-India National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya—are all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging passions, all they need to do is to pick a villain from their gallery and unleash the dogs of war. There are several categories of villains—Pakistani jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi “infiltrators,” or any one of a population of nearly two hundred million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of being Pakistan-lovers or anti-national traitors. Each of these “cards” is held hostage to the other, and often made to stand in for the other. They have little to do with each other, and are often hostile to each other because their needs, desires, ideologies and situations are not just inimical, but end up posing an existential threat to one another. Simply because they are all Muslim, they have to suffer the consequences of each other’s actions. In two national elections now, the BJP has shown that it can win a brute majority in parliament without the “Muslim vote.” As a result, Indian Muslims have been effectively disenfranchised, and are becoming that most vulnerable of people—a community without political representation, without a voice. Various forms of undeclared social boycott are pushing them down the economic ladder, and, for reasons of physical security, into ghettos. Indian Muslims have also lost their place in the mainstream media— the only Muslim voices we hear on television shows are the absurd ones of those few who are constantly and deliberately invited to play the part of the primitive, Islamist maulana, to make things worse than they already are. Other than that, the only acceptable

We know what happened in Europe when an organisation with a similar ideology imposed itself first on a country and then sought Lebensraum. We know that it happened because the rest of the world did not pay heed to the early warnings from those who saw and heard enough to know what was coming. 58

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public speech for the Muslim community is to constantly reiterate and demonstrate its loyalty to the Indian flag. So, while Kashmiris, brutalised as they are because of their history and, more importantly, their geography, still have a lifeboat—the dream of azadi, of freedom—Indian Muslims have to stay on deck to help fix the broken ship. (There is another category of “anti-national” villain—human-rights activists, lawyers, students, academics, “urban Maoists”—who have been defamed, jailed, embroiled in legal cases, snooped on by Israeli spyware, and, in several instances, assassinated. But that’s a whole other deck of cards.) The lynching of Tabrez Ansari illustrates just how broken the ship is, and how deep the rot. Lynching is a public performance of ritualised murder, in which a man or woman is killed to remind their community that it lives at the mercy of the mob. And that the police, the law, the government, as well as the good people in their homes, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who go to work and take care of their families, are friends of the mob. Tabrez was lynched this June. He was an orphan, raised by his uncles in the state of Jharkhand. As a teenager, he went away to the city of Pune, where he found a job as a welder. When he turned 22, he returned home to get married. Soon after his wedding to eighteen-yearold Shahista, Tabrez was caught by a mob, tied to a lamppost, beaten for hours and forced to chant the new Hindu war cry, “Jai Shri Ram!”—Victory to Lord Ram! The police eventually took Tabrez into custody, but refused to allow his distraught family and young bride to take him to the hospital. Instead they accused him of being a thief, and produced him before a magistrate, who sent him back to custody. He died four days later. In its latest report, released in October, the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. According to the Indian news site The Quint, there have been 113 deaths by mob violence since 2015. Lynchers, and others accused in hate crimes including mass murder, have been rewarded with public office and honoured by ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Modi himself, usually garrulous on Twitter, generous with condolences and birthday greetings,

intimations of an ending · essay goes very quiet each time a person is lynched. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect a prime minister to comment every time a dog comes under the wheels of someone’s car. Particularly since it happens so often. Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, has said that lynching is a western concept imported from the Bible, and that Hindus have no such tradition. He has declared that all the talk of a “lynching epidemic” is a conspiracy to defame India. We know what happened in Europe when an organisation with a similar ideology imposed itself first on a country and then sought Lebensraum. We know that it happened because the rest of the world did not pay heed to the early warnings from those who saw and heard enough to know what was coming. Perhaps those warnings did not sound balanced and moderate enough to a masculine, Anglo-Saxon world, suspicious of any overt display of distress or emotion. A certain kind of over-the-top emotion, however, is still clearly acceptable. There was plenty on display here in the United States on 22 September 2019—five days after Modi’s birthday party at the Narmada dam site—when fifty thousand Indian Americans gathered in the NRG Stadium in Houston for the “Howdy, Modi!” extravaganza. It has already become the stuff of urban legend. President Donald Trump was gracious enough to allow a visiting prime minister to introduce him as a special guest in his own country, to his own citizens. Several members of the US Congress spoke, their smiles too wide, their bodies arranged in attitudes of ingratiation. Over a crescendo of drumrolls and wild cheering, the adoring crowd chanted, “Modi! Modi! Modi!” At the end of the show, Trump and Modi linked hands and did a victory lap. The stadium exploded. In India, the noise was amplified a thousand times over by carpet coverage on television channels. “Howdy” became a Hindi word. Meanwhile, news organisations ignored the thousands of people protesting outside the stadium. Back home, some of us frightened ourselves by flipping between “Howdy, Modi!” and Laura Poitras’s short docu-

mentary about the 1939 Nazi rally that filled Madison Square Gardens. Not all the roaring of the sixty thousand in the Houston stadium could mask the deafening silence from Kashmir. That day, 22 September, marked the forty-eighth day of curfew and communication blockade in the valley. Once again, Modi has managed to unleash his unique brand of cruelty on a scale unheard of in modern times. And, once again, it has endeared him further to his loyal public. When the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill was passed in India’s parliament on 6 August, there were celebrations across the political spectrum. Sweets were distributed in offices, and there was dancing in the streets. A conquest—a colonial annexation, another triumph for the Hindu Nation—was being celebrated. Once again, the conquerors’ eyes fell on the two primaeval trophies of conquest—women and land. Statements by senior BJP politicians, and patriotic pop videos that notched up millions of views, legitimised this indecency. Google Trends showed a surge in searches for the phrases “marry a Kashmiri girl” and “buy land in Kashmir.” It was not all limited to loutish searches on Google. Within weeks of the siege, the Forest Advisory Committee cleared 125 projects that involve the diversion of forest land for other uses. In the early days of the lockdown, little news came out of the valley. The Indian media told us what the government wanted us to hear. Kashmiri newspapers were completely censored. They carried pages and pages of news about cancelled weddings, the effects of climate change, the conservation of lakes and wildlife sanctuaries, tips on how to live with diabetes and frontpage government advertisements about the benefits that Kashmir’s new, downgraded legal status would bring to the Kashmiri people. Those “benefits” are likely to include the building of projects that control and commandeer the water from the rivers that flow through Kashmir. They will certainly include the erosion that results from deforestation, the destruction of the fragile Himalayan ecosystem and the plunder of Kashmir’s bountiful natural wealth by Indian corporations. JANUARY 2020

Real reporting about ordinary peoples’ lives came mostly from the journalists and photographers working for the international media—Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times and Washington Post. The reporters, mostly Kashmiris, working in an information vacuum, with none of the tools usually available to modern-day reporters, travelled through their homeland at great risk to themselves, to bring us the news. And the news was of night-time raids, of young men being rounded up and beaten for hours, their screams broadcast on public-address systems for their neighbours and families to hear, of soldiers entering villagers’ homes and mixing fertiliser and kerosene into their winter food stocks. The news was of teenagers with their bodies peppered with shotgun pellets being treated at home, because they would be arrested if they went to a hospital. The news was of hundreds of children being whisked away in the dead of night, of parents debilitated by desperation and anxiety. The news was of fear and anger, depression, confusion, steely resolve and incandescent resistance. But the home minister, Amit Shah, said that the siege only existed in peoples’ imaginations; the governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Satya Pal Malik, said phone lines were not important for Kashmiris and were only used by terrorists; and the army chief, Bipin Rawat, said, “Normal life in Jammu and Kashmir has not been affected. People are doing their necessary work … Those who feel that life has been affected are the ones whose survival depends on terrorism.” It isn’t hard to work out who exactly the government of India sees as terrorists. Imagine if all of New York City was put under an information lockdown and a curfew managed by hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Imagine the streets of your city remapped by razor wire and torture centres. Imagine if mini Abu Ghraibs appeared in your neighbourhoods. Imagine thousands of you being arrested and your families not knowing where you have been taken. Imagine not being able to communicate with anybody, not your neighbour, not your 59

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loved ones outside the city, no one in the outside world, for weeks together. Imagine banks and schools being closed, children locked into their homes. Imagine your parent, sibling, partner or child dying and you not knowing about it for weeks. Imagine the medical emergencies, the mental-health emergencies, the legal emergencies, the shortages of food, money, gasoline. Imagine, being a day 60

labourer or a contract worker, earning nothing for weeks on end. And then imagine being told that all of this was for your own good. The horror that Kashmiris have endured over the last few months comes on top of the trauma of a thirty-yearold armed conflict that has already taken seventy thousand lives and covered their valley with graves. They THE CARAVAN

have held out while everything was thrown at themâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;war, money, torture, mass disappearance, an army of more than half a million soldiers and a smear campaign in which an entire population has been portrayed as murderous fundamentalists. The siege has lasted for more than three months now. Kashmiri leaders are still in jail. The only condition under

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sanna irshad mattoo

The Indian government has made it clear that the only option for Kashmiris is complete capitulation, that no form of resistance is acceptable—violent, non-violent, spoken, written or sung. Yet Kashmiris know that to exist, they must resist.

above: Local people treat a young Kashmiri man in a mosque in Soura, after security forces fired pellet guns at protesters. In preparation for stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its statehood and special status, the Indian government sent more than fifty thousand troops to the territory, to supplement the hundreds of thousands already stationed there.

which they are offered release is the signing of an undertaking that they will not make public statements for a whole year. Most have refused. Now, the curfew has been eased, schools have been reopened and some phone lines have been restored. “Normalcy” has been declared. In Kashmir, normalcy is always a declaration—a fiat issued by the government or the army. It has little to do with people’s daily lives. So far, Kashmiris have refused to accept this new normalcy. Classrooms are empty, streets are deserted and the valley’s bumper apple crop is rotting in the orchards. What could be harder for a parent or a farmer to endure? The imminent annihilation of their very identity, perhaps. The new phase of the Kashmir conflict has already begun. Militants have warned that, from now on, all Indians will be considered legitimate targets. More than ten people, mostly poor, non-Kashmiri migrant workers, have been shot already. (Yes, it’s the poor, almost always the poor, who get caught in the line of fire.) It is going to get ugly. Very ugly. Soon all this recent history will be forgotten, and once again there will be debates in television studios that create an equivalence between atrocities by Indian security forces and Kashmiri militants. Speak of Kashmir, and the Indian government and its media will immediately tell you about Pakistan, deliberately conflating the misdeeds of a hostile foreign state with the democratic aspirations of ordinary people JANUARY 2020

living under a military occupation. The Indian government has made it clear that the only option for Kashmiris is complete capitulation, that no form of resistance is acceptable—violent, non-violent, spoken, written or sung. Yet Kashmiris know that to exist, they must resist. Why should they want to be a part of India? For what earthly reason? If freedom is what they want, freedom is what they should have. It’s what Indians should want, too. Not on behalf of Kashmiris, but for their own sake. The atrocity being committed in their name involves a form of corrosion that India will not survive. Kashmir may not defeat India, but it will consume India. In many ways, it already has. this may not have mattered all that much to the sixty thousand cheering in the Houston stadium, living out the ultimate Indian dream of having made it to America. For them, Kashmir may just be a tired old conundrum, for which they foolishly believe the BJP has found a lasting solution. Surely, however, as migrants themselves, their understanding of what is happening in Assam could be more nuanced. Or maybe it’s too much to ask of those who, in a world riven by refugee and migrant crises, are the most fortunate of migrants. Many of those in the Houston stadium, like people with an extra holiday home, probably hold US citizenship as well as Overseas Citizens of India certificates. The “Howdy, Modi!” event marked the twenty-second day since almost two million people in Assam found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens. Like Kashmir, Assam is a border state with a history of multiple sovereignties, with centuries of migration, wars, invasion, continuously shifting borders, British colonialism and more than seventy years of electoral democracy that has only deepened the fault lines in a dangerously combustible society. That an exercise like the NRC even took place has to do with Assam’s very particular cultural history. Assam was among the territories ceded to the British by the Burmese in the peace 61

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ants—masters of the art of farming on the rich, silty, riverine plains and shifting islands of the Brahmaputra, known as chars—to migrate to Assam. To the British, the forests and plains of Assam were, if not Terra nullius, then Terra almost-nullius. They hardly registered the presence of Assam’s many tribes, and freely allocated what were tribal commons to “productive” peasants whose produce would contribute to British revenue collection. The migrants came in the thousands, felled forests and turned marshes into farmland, where they cultivated food as well as jute. By 1930, migration had drastically changed both the economy and the demography of Assam. At first, the migrants were welcomed by Assamese Nationalist groups, but soon tensions arose—ethnic, religious and linguistic. They were temporarily mitigated when, in the 1941 census, as a gesture of solidarity with their new homeland, the entire population of Bengali-speaking Muslims—whose local dialects are together known as the Miya language—returned Assamese as their mother tongue, thereby ensuring that it retained the status of an official language. Even today, Miya dialects are written in the Assamese script. Over the years, the borders of Assam were redrawn continuously, almost dizzyingly. When the British partitioned Bengal in 1905, they attached the province of Assam to Muslim-majority East Bengal, with Dhaka as its capital. Suddenly, what was a migrant population in Assam was no longer migrant, but part of a majority. Six years later, when Bengal was reunified and Assam became a province of its own, its Ben-

The demand for a National Register of Citizens in Assam arose out of this unique, vexed and complex history. Ironically, the word “national” here refers not so much to India as it does to the nation of Assam. THE CARAVAN

below: Anar Hussain, from Barpeta district in Assam, saw his two young daughters excluded from preliminary drafts of the National Register of Citizens. The Supreme Court’s order for an updated NRC delivered millions in Assam into a labyrinth of bureaucracy, legalese, documentation, court hearings and all the ruthless skullduggery that goes with them.

zishaan a latif for the caravan

treaty signed after the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826. At the time, it was a densely forested, scantily populated province, home to hundreds of communities—among them Bodos, Cachar, Mishing, Lalung, Ahomiya Hindus and Ahomiya Muslims—each with its own language or speech practice, each with an organic, though often undocumented, relationship to the land. Like a microcosm of India, Assam has always been a collection of minorities jockeying to make alliances in order to manufacture a majority—ethnic as well as linguistic. Anything that altered or threatened the prevailing balance became a potential catalyst for violence. The seeds for just such an alteration were sowed in 1837, when the British, the new masters of Assam, made Bengali the official language of the province. It meant that almost all administrative and government jobs were taken by an educated, Hindu, Bengali-speaking elite. Although the policy was reversed in the early 1870s, and Assamese was given official status along with Bengali, it shifted the balance of power in serious ways and marked the beginning of what has become an almost two-century-old antagonism between speakers of Assamese and Bengali. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the British discovered that the climate and soil of the region were conducive to tea cultivation. Local people were unwilling to work as serfs in the tea gardens, so a large population of indigenous tribes people were transported from central India. They were no different from the shiploads of indentured labourers the British transported to their colonies all over the world. Today, the plantation workers in Assam make up fifteen to twenty percent of the state’s population. But unlike, say, the Indian-origin population in South Africa, in India, shamefully, these workers are looked down upon by local people, and continue to live on the plantations, at the mercy of plantation owners and earning slave wages. By the late 1890s, as the tea industry grew and as the plains of neighbouring East Bengal reached the limits of their cultivation potential, the British encouraged Bengali Muslim peas-

intimations of an ending · essay gali population became migrants once again. After the 1947 Partition, when East Bengal became part of Pakistan, the Bengal-origin Muslim settlers in Assam chose to stay on. But Partition also led to a massive influx of Bengali refugees into Assam, Hindus as well as Muslims. This was followed in 1971 by yet another incursion of refugees fleeing from the Pakistan Army’s

genocidal attack on East Pakistan and the liberation war that birthed the new nation of Bangladesh, which together took millions of lives. So Assam was a part of East Bengal, and then it wasn’t. East Bengal became East Pakistan and East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Countries changed, flags changed, anthems changed. Cities grew, forests were felled, marshes were

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reclaimed, tribal commons swallowed by modern “development.” And the fissures between people grew old and hard and intractable. The Indian government is so proud of the part it played in Bangladesh’s liberation from Pakistan. Indira Gandhi, the prime minister at the time, ignored the threats of China and the United States, who were Pakistan’s allies, and sent in

intimations of an ending · essay the Indian Army to stop the genocide. That pride in having fought a “just war” did not translate into justice or real concern, or any kind of thought-out state policy for either for the refugees or the people of Assam and its neighbouring states. The demand for a National Register of Citizens in Assam arose out of this unique, vexed and complex history. Ironically, the word “national” here refers not so much to India as it does to the nation of Assam. The demand to update the first NRC, conducted in 1951, grew out of a student-led Assamese Nationalist movement that peaked between 1979 and 1985, alongside a militant separatist movement in which tens of thousands lost their lives. The Assamese Nationalists called for a boycott of elections unless “foreigners” were deleted from the electoral rolls—the clarion call was for “3D,” which stood for Detect, Delete, Deport. The number of so-called foreigners, based on pure speculation, was estimated to be between 5 and 8 million. The movement quickly turned violent. Killings, arson, bomb blasts and mass demonstrations generated an atmosphere of hostility and almost uncontrollable rage towards “outsiders.” By 1979, the state was up in flames. Though the movement was primarily directed against Bengalis and Bengali-speakers, Hindu communal forces within the movement also gave it an anti-Muslim character. In 1983, this culminated in the horrifying Nellie massacre, in which more than two thousand Bengal-origin Muslim settlers were murdered over six hours. (Unofficial estimates put the death toll at more than double that.) According to police records, the killers belonged to a neighbouring hill tribe. The tribe was not Hindu, nor known to be virulently ethno-Assamese. The motivation for that sudden, brutal spasm of violence remains something of a mystery. Unsubstantiated whispers attribute it to manipulation by RSS workers present in Assam at the time. In What the Fields Remember, a documentary about the massacre, an elderly Muslim who lost all his children to the violence tells of how one of his daughters had, not long before the massacre, been part of a march asking for “foreigners” to be expelled. Her dying 64

Nobody had any clue about what could or would be done to the five million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected. There was no question of them being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many people be locked up in detention camps? words, he said, were, “Baba, are we also foreigners?” In 1985, the student leaders of the Assam agitation signed the Assam Accord with the central government. That same year, they won the state’s assembly elections and formed the state government. A date was agreed upon: those who had arrived in Assam after midnight of 24 March 1971—the day the Pakistan Army began its attack on civilians in East Pakistan—would be expelled. The updating of the NRC was meant to sift the “genuine citizens” of Assam from post-1971 “infiltrators.” Over the next several years, “infiltrators” detected by the border police, or those declared “Doubtful Voters”—D-Voters—by election officials, were tried under the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, passed in 1983 by a Congress government under Indira Gandhi. In order to protect minorities from harassment, the IMDT Act put the onus of disproving a person’s citizenship on the police or the accusing party—instead of burdening the accused with proving their citizenship. Since 1997, more than three hundred thousand D-voters and Declared Foreigners have been tried in Foreigners Tribunals. Several hundred are still locked up in detention centres, jails within jails where detainees don’t even have the rights that ordinary criminals do. In 2005, the Supreme Court adjudicated a case that asked for the IMDT Act to be struck down on the grounds that it made the “detection and deportation of illegal immigrants nearly THE CARAVAN

above: One of the silty, shifting char islands of the Brahmaputra. The notorious impermanence of these remote islands has meant the absence of land deeds, schools and hospitals, and most signs of modernity. Here, the NRC has spawned a new vocabulary: “legacy document,” “link paper,” “certified copy,” “re-verification,” “reference case,” “D-voter,” “declared foreigner,” “voter list,” “refugee certificate.” The saddest phrase in it is “genuine citizen.”

courtesy sanjay kak

impossible.” In its judgement annulling the act, the court noted, “there can be no manner of doubt that the State of Assam is facing ‘external aggression and internal disturbance’ on account of large scale illegal migration of Bangladeshi nationals.” Now, it put the onus of proving citizenship on the citizen. This completely changed the paradigm, and set the stage for the new, updated NRC. The case had been filed by Sarbananda Sonowal, a former president of the All Assam Students’ Union who is now

with the BJP, and is currently the chief minister of Assam. In 2013, the Supreme Court took up a case filed by an NGO called Assam Public Works that asked for illegal migrants’ names to be struck off electoral rolls. Eventually, the case for finalising the modalities of the NRC was assigned to the court of Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who happens to be Assamese. In December 2014, a two-judge bench of the Justices Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman ordered that an updated JANUARY 2020

list of the NRC be produced before the Supreme Court within a year. Nobody had any clue about what could or would be done to the five million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected. There was no question of them being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many people be locked up in detention camps? For how long? Would they be stripped of citizenship? And was India’s highest constitutional court going to oversee and micromanage a colossal bureaucratic exercise involving 65

intimations of an ending · essay more than thirty million people, nearly fifty-two thousand bureaucrats and a massive outlay of funds? Millions of villagers living in far flung areas were expected to produce a specified set of documents—“legacy papers”— which prove direct and unbroken paternal lineage dating back to before 1971. The Supreme Court’s deadline turned the exercise into a nightmare. Impoverished, illiterate villagers were delivered into a labyrinth of bureaucracy, legalese, documentation, court hearings and all the ruthless skullduggery that goes with them. The only way to reach the remote, semi-nomadic settlements on the shifting, silty “char” islands of the Brahmaputra is by often perilously overcrowded boats run by local people. The roughly two-and-a-half thousand char islands are impermanent offerings, likely to be snatched back at any moment by the legendarily moody Brahmaputra and reoffered at some other location, in some other shape or form. The settlements on them are temporary, and the dwellings are just shacks. Yet some of the islands are so fertile, and the farmers on them so skilled, that they raise three crops a year. Their impermanence, however, has meant the absence of land deeds, of development, of schools and hospitals. In the less fertile chars that I visited in early October, the poverty washes over you like the dark, silt-rich waters of the Brahmaputra. The only signs of modernity were the bright plastic bags containing documents which their owners—who quickly gather around visiting strangers—cannot read but kept looking at anxiously, as though trying to decrypt the faded shapes on the pages and work out whether they would save them and their children from the massive new detention camp they had heard is being constructed deep in the forests of Goalpara. Imagine a whole population of millions of people like this, debilitated, rigid with fear and worry about their documentation. It’s not a military occupation, but it’s an occupation by documentation. These documents are peoples’ most prized possessions, cared for more lovingly than any child or parent. They have survived floods and storms and every kind of emergency. Grizzled, sun-baked farmers, men and 66

women, scholars of the land and the many moods of the river, use English words like “legacy document,” “link paper,” “certified copy,” “re-verification,” “reference case,” “D-voter,” “declared foreigner,” “voter list,” “refugee certificate”—as though they were words in their own language. They are. The NRC has spawned a vocabulary of its own. The saddest phrase in it is “genuine citizen.” In village after village, people told stories about being served notices late at night that ordered them to appear in a court two or three hundred kilometres away by the next morning. They described the scramble to assemble family members and their documents, the treacherous rides in small row boats across the rushing river in pitch darkness, the negotiations with canny transporters on the shore who had smelled their desperation and tripled their rates, the reckless drives through the night on dangerous highways. The most chilling story I heard was about a family travelling in a pickup truck that collided with a roadworks truck carrying barrels of tar. The barrels overturned, and the injured family was covered in tar. “When I went to visit them in hospital,” the young activist I was travelling with said, “their young son was trying to pick off the tar on his skin and the tiny stones embedded in it. He looked at his mother and asked, ‘Will we ever get rid of the kala daag [stigma] of being foreigners?’” And yet, despite all this, despite reservations about the process and its implementation, the updating of the NRC was welcomed by almost everybody in Assam, each for reasons of their own. Assamese Nationalists hoped that millions of Bengali infiltrators, Hindu as well as Muslim, would finally be detected and formally declared “foreigners.” Indigenous tribal communities hoped for some recompense for the historical wrong they had suffered. Hindus as well as Muslims of Bengal origin wanted to see their names on the NRC to prove they were “genuine” Indians, so that the kala daag of being “foreign” could be laid to rest once and for all. And the Hindu Nationalists—now in government in Assam, too—wanted to see millions of Muslim names deleted from the NRC. Everybody hoped for some form of closure. THE CARAVAN

After a series of postponements, the final updated list was published on 31 August 2019. The names of 1.9 million people were missing. That number could yet expand because of a provision that permits people—neighbours, enemies, strangers—to raise “objections.” At last count, more than two hundred thousand objections had been raised. A great number of those who have found their names missing from the list are women and children, most of whom belong to communities where women are married in their early teenage years, and by custom have their names changed. They have no “link documents” to prove their legacy. A great number are illiterate people whose names or parents’ names have been wrongly transcribed over the years: a H-a-s-a-n who became a H-a-s-s-a-n, a Joynul who became Zainul, a Mohammad whose name has been spelled in several ways. A single slip, and you’re out. If your father died, or was estranged from your mother, if he didn’t vote, wasn’t educated and didn’t have land, you’re out. Because, in practice, mothers’ legacies don’t count. Among all the prejudices at play in updating the NRC, perhaps the greatest of all is the built-in, structural prejudice against women and against the poor. And the poor in India today are made up mostly of Muslims, Dalits and Tribals. All the 1.9 million people whose names are missing will now have to appeal to a Foreigners Tribunal. There are, at the moment, 100 Foreigners Tribunals in Assam, and another 1,000 are in the pipeline. The men and women who preside over them, known as “members” of the tribunals, hold the fates of millions in their hands, but have no experience as judges. They are bureaucrats or junior lawyers, hired by the government and paid generous salaries. Once again, prejudice is built into the system. Government documents accessed by activists show that the sole criterion for rehiring members whose contracts have expired is the number of appeals they have rejected. All those who have to go in appeal to the Foreigners Tribunals will also have to hire lawyers, perhaps take loans to pay their fees or sell their land or their homes, and surrender to a life of debt and penury. Many of course have no

intimations of an ending · essay land or home to sell. Several people faced with this have committed suicide. After the whole elaborate exercise and the millions of rupees spent on it, all the stakeholders in the NRC are bitterly disappointed with the list. Bengal-origin migrants are disappointed because they know that rightful citizens have been arbitrarily left out. Assamese Nationalists are disappointed because the list has fallen well short of excluding the five million speculated “infiltrators” they expected it to detect, and because they feel too many illegal foreigners have made it onto the list. And India’s ruling Hindu Nationalists are disappointed because it is estimated that more than half of the 1.9 million are non-Muslims. (The reason for this is ironic. Bengali Muslim migrants, having faced hostility for so long, have spent years gathering their “legacy papers.” Hindus, being less insecure, have not.) Justice Gogoi ordered the transfer of Prateek Hajela, the chief co-ordinator of the NRC, giving him seven days to leave Assam. Justice Gogoi did not offer a reason for this order. Demands for a fresh NRC have already begun. How can one even try and understand this craziness, except by turning to poetry? A group of young Muslim poets, known as the Miya poets, began writing of their pain and humiliation in the language that felt most intimate to them, in the language that until then they had only used in their homes—the Miya dialects of Dhakaiya, Maimansingia and Pabnaiya. One of them, Rehna Sultana, in a poem called “Mother,” wrote: Ma, ami tumar kachchey aamar porisoi diti diti biakul oya dzai Mother, I’m so tired, tired of introducing myself to you When these poems were posted and circulated widely on Facebook, a private language suddenly became public. And the old spectre of linguistic politics reared its head again. Police cases were filed against several Miya poets, accusing them of defaming Assamese society. Rehna Sultana had to go into hiding. That there is a problem in Assam cannot be denied. But how is it to be solved? The trouble is that once the torch of ethno-nationalism has been lit, it is impossible to know in which direction the wind will take the fire. In the new union territory of Ladakh—granted this status by the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status—tensions simmer between Buddhists and Shia Muslims. In the states of India’s northeast alone, sparks have already begun to ignite old antagonisms. In Arunachal Pradesh, it is the Assamese who are unwanted immigrants. Meghalaya has closed its bor-

Among all the prejudices at play in updating the NRC, perhaps the greatest of all is the built-in, structural prejudice against women and against the poor. And the poor in India today are made up mostly of Muslims, Dalits and Tribals. ders with Assam, and now requires all “outsiders” staying more than 24 hours to register with the government under the new Meghalaya Residents Safety and Security Act. In Nagaland, 22-yearlong peace talks between the central government and Naga rebels have stalled over demands for a separate Naga flag and constitution. In Manipur, dissidents worried about a possible settlement between the Nagas and the central government have announced a government-in-exile in London. Indigenous tribes in Tripura are demanding their own NRC in order to expel the Hindu Bengali population that has turned them into a tiny minority in their own homeland. Far from being deterred by the chaos and distress created by Assam’s NRC, the Modi government is making arrangements to import it to the rest of India. To take care of the possibility of Hindus and its other supporters being caught up in the NRC’s complexities, as has happened in Assam, it has drafted a new Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, which it hopes to pass in the next session of parliament. (The bill was passed on 11 December, to create the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA.) The CAB says that all non-Muslim “persecuted minorities” from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan—meaning Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians—will be given asylum in India. By default, the CAB will ensure that those deprived of citizenship will only be Muslims. Before the process of the NRC begins, the plan is to draw up a National Population Register. This will involve a door-to-door survey in which, in addition to basic census data, the government plans to collect iris scans and other biometric data. It will be the mother of all data banks. The groundwork has already begun. On his very first day as home minister, Amit Shah, issued a notification permitting state governments across India to set up Foreigners Tribunals and detention centres manned by non-judicial officers with draconian powers. The governments of Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana have already begun work. As we have seen, the NRC in Assam grew out of a very particular history. To apply it to the rest of India is pure malevolence. The demand for an updated NRC in Assam is more than forty years old. There, people have been collecting and JANUARY 2020

intimations of an ending · essay

Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening. 68

In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation… All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots … The foreign races in Hindustan ... may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens’ rights.

below: Beros Moni Das holds a photograph of her oldest son, Bhaben, with his sisterin-law. Bhaben, excluded from a draft of the National Register of Citizens released in 2018, killed himself on 3 March 2019. “We won’t talk about NRC from now on,” his mother remembers him saying that day. It is estimated that more than half of the 1.9 million people excluded from the final list of the NRC are non-Muslims.

He continues: To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by. How do you translate this in modern terms if not as the National Register of Citizens coupled with the Citizenship Amendment Bill? This is the RSS’s version of Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, by which German citizens were only those who had been granted citizenship papers—legacy papers—by the government of the Third Reich. The amendment against Muslims is the first such amendment. Others will no doubt follow, against Christians, Dalits, Communists—all enemies of the RSS. The Foreigners Tribunals and detention centres that have already started springing up across India may not, at the moment, be intended to accommodate hundreds of millions of Muslims. But they are meant to remind us that India’s Muslims truly belong there, unless they can produce legacy papers. Because only Hindus are considered India’s real aboriginals, who don’t need

We can only hope that, someday soon, the streets in India will throng with people who realise that unless they make their move, the end is close. THE CARAVAN

saumya khandelwal

holding on to their documents for fifty years. How many people in India can produce “legacy documents”? Perhaps not even our prime minister, whose date of birth, college degree and marital status have all been the subject of national controversies. We are being told that the India-wide NRC is an exercise to detect several million Bangladeshi “infiltrators”—“termites,” as our home minister likes to call them. What does he imagine language like this will do to India’s relationship with Bangladesh? Once again, phantom figures that run into the tens of millions are being thrown around. There is no doubt that there are a great many undocumented workers from Bangladesh in India. There is also no doubt that they make up one of the poorest, most marginalised populations in the country. Anybody who claims to believe in the free market should know that they are only filling a vacant economic slot by doing work that others will not do, for wages that nobody else will accept. They do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. They are not the ones destroying the country, stealing public money or bankrupting the banks. They’re only a decoy, a Trojan horse for the RSS’s real objective, its historic mission. The real purpose of an all-India NRC, coupled with the CAB, is to threaten, destabilise and stigmatise the Indian Muslim community, particularly the poorest among them. It is meant to create a tiered citizenship, in which one set of citizens has no rights and lives at the mercy, or on the good will, of another—a modern caste system, which will exist alongside the ancient one, in which Muslims are the new Dalits. Not notionally, but actually. Legally. In places like West Bengal, where the BJP is on an aggressive takeover drive, suicides have already begun. Here is MS Golwalker, the supreme leader of the RSS in 1940, writing in his book We, or Our Nationhood Defined:

intimations of an ending · essay those papers. Even the four-century-old Babri Masjid didn’t have the right legacy papers. What chance would a poor farmer or a street vendor have? This is the wickedness that the sixty thousand people in the Houston stadium were cheering. This is what the president of the United States linked hands with Modi to support. It’s what the Israelis want to partner with, the Germans want

to trade with, the French want to sell fighter jets to and the Saudis want to fund. Perhaps the whole process of the all-India NRC can be privatised, including the data bank with our iris scans. The employment opportunities and accompanying profits might revive our dying economy. The detention centres could be built by the Indian equivalents of Siemens, Bayer and IG Farben. It isn’t hard

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to guess what corporations those will be. Even if we don’t get to the Zyklon B stage, there’s plenty of money to be made. We can only hope that, someday soon, the streets in India will throng with people who realise that unless they make their move, the end is close. If that doesn’t happen, consider these words to be intimations of an ending from one who lived through these times. s

Drawing the White Curtain Winters of disquiet in Kashmir

PHOTO ESSAY / CONFLICT PHOTOGRAPHS BY SOHRAB HURA TEXT BY TANVI MISHRA

last year, during what locals were touting as the coldest winter in 12 years, I made a visit to Srinagar. Despite it being the tail end of chillai kalan—the period from late December to the end of January, the coldest and harshest part of the season—the city received a fresh fall of snow. Winter in Kashmir has three stages. Chillai kalan gives way to chillai khurd and eventually to chillai bache—bache means “little child”—which is gentler than the previous two and gives way to spring. As a first-time visitor to Kashmir, I was told by Kashmiri friends that my trip would be incomplete without a foray, even a short one, to Gulmarg—to experience it in peak winter as much as to see the markers of militarisation along the route there and at the destination. As the city roads gave way to the highway, every so often we saw army convoys cross in the opposite direction. Upon reaching Gulmarg, the atmosphere appeared festive. Every few metres, Kashmiris wearing pherans—a traditional garment— ropes slung across their shoulders, pulled enthusiastic Indian tourists down the slopes on makeshift wooden sledges. The scene was heavily reminiscent of the British, during the Raj, being pulled along in hand-drawn carts while perched on cushioned seats; the situation was only somewhat lightened by the comic element of the vacationers’ discomfort as they tried to maintain some poise. There were also more conspicuous echoes of occupation. As we turned a corner, we spotted a couple of skiers resting near a lodge, while a soldier in army fatigues, white snow boots and dark glasses stood guard nearby, holding an assault rifle. The tourists’ excited shouts 71

were interspersed with the whirring of a helicopter that, I was told, was flying to an army base at the top of the hill. Gulmarg was a reminder of the duality that is Kashmir: a population simmering under a seemingly tranquil surface. While the media represents Kashmir as being ridden with conflict, it is, at the same time, regarded as a “paradise,” its beauty coveted as a backdrop to Bollywood dance sequences. This dichotomy is palpable in the photographer Sohrab Hura’s ongoing work Snow. Photographed over five winters, since 2015, it takes shape across the three stages of winter in Kashmir. On the surface, the work conforms to the widely held notion that winter, by its sheer severity, slows down all activity in the Kashmir Valley. “People would themselves talk about how winter was always a period of calm, and how, as the season would turn and it would get warmer, the land would also get more volatile,” Hura said. The reality is that the season only conceals the conflict from plain view for outsiders, and brings but a nominal dip in its intensity. The loss suffered by the population, as individuals and collectively, is too large to be erased by a change in season. For the non-Kashmiri, too,

once you start looking, there are abundant signs of a society that is seething. On Hura’s first visit to Kashmir, he went to Srinagar, and then Gulmarg. He had gone as a tourist, to see snowfall, with a friend. Hura recalled that he was overwhelmed by “the generosity and warmth of the people,” and returned having felt humbled. However, by the time he was leaving, he realised that he had been “in a sort of a bubble,” having gone only in search of something as innocuous as snow despite knowing a bit of the troubled history of the place. In his desire to “experience something magical,” he had “conveniently become blind to many realities there.” He realised that he had to uncover more. Snow’s opening sequence carries a sense of Hura’s first forays into Kashmir. It shows a landscape bathed in white, fresh snow so soft that children are buried in it nearly halfway if they step in. But “the tranquillity and beauty,” Hura said, “is nothing but deception.” He deploys the tranquillity connoted by

such scenes, and by snow itself, “as a mask in my work that I have to slowly peel away.” Hura spoke repeatedly about such figurative masks. Though he momentarily paid disproportionate attention to the beauty of winter in Kashmir, soon the grim everyday reality of the place grew more amplified. He recalled “heavy militarisation and security that was suffocating, the stories of state violence that felt sharper after experiencing the paradise in that place.” The more he “saw, understood and realised, the initial mask of ignorance might have intermittently been replaced by a mask of denial.” But that mask, he added, “has been on all our faces. It is on the face of the person whose first question about Kashmir is if it is a dangerous place.” He recounted various memories from his childhood “that pushed me into forming impressions of Kashmir from afar,” including the kidnapping of six European

tourists in Kashmir in 1995, the Kargil war in 1999 and the militant attack on the Amarnath Yatra in 2002. Hura said that such events, and the mainstream narratives surrounding them—laced with incomplete and distorted information—mould the view of Kashmir among many who have grown up in India. “When a narrative, no matter how absurd, is repeated and amplified to us independent of our scrutiny, its seed is bound to be sown somewhere inside us.” It was only much later, Hura said, “that I’d get to know about the Kunan–Poshpora mass rapes that had taken place in 1991. Along with it, I’d also realise the constant denial of it by people around me.” Each visit brought more realisations to challenge the reality he had earlier been made to believe. Hura’s work defies preconceived notions about Kashmir and is devoid of familiar markers of conflict in the region. He offers a tender view of the bylanes of small-town Kashmir, inviting us to get to know the place as he did. As an outsider, he said, “I have been very dependent on listening to people’s stories in shaping the way I’ve been ‘looking’ at Kashmir.” Some of those he met were friends, while others were strangers who invited him to their homes for a meal or a cup of tea. Several images—of a young child swing-

ing on an elder’s back, of a clever makeshift wicket dug into the snow for a game of cricket, or of a boy hiding a ball of snow behind his back—seem like photographic anecdotes of his interactions. The takeaways lie in the details. In a photograph of a boy wearing slippers in the snow, his familiarity with the chill, his pheran covering his bare legs just above the ankles, betrays his identity as a Kashmiri. Hura talked about Kashmiris as “the biggest stakeholders in deciding their own fate”—despite majoritarian Indian sentiment rejecting their right to self-determination. He said he is not interested in adding to the “noise” over Kashmir—one that is typically devoid of Kashmiri voices—that has come with the burgeoning of nationalism. “No matter how much I might have read or researched on the conflict in Kashmir from a distance, I’d still never be able to fathom the complexities that exist there,” he added. “The one thing that is very clear to me is this separation of identities between the Kashmiris and me, an Indian.” The subtlety in Hura’s work does not disguise Kashmir’s historical struggle for freedom. Rather than directly showing violence, he often chooses to rely on metaphor. An

image of a red-tinted stream evokes an ominous mood. It was likely made during Bakr-Id, when “entire streams in villages would run red from the animal sacrifice.” Hura recalled that one of his friends, who grew up in Kashmir during the years of armed struggle in the 1990s, once told him, “Yahan pe khoon ki dariyan behti thi”—Rivers of blood used to flow here. For the friend, those rivers became expressions of the state’s sacrifice of people. “What I had first thought to be a poetic allusion has in fact always been straight-forward reality to the people there,” Hura said. Hura intersperses such photographs with others showing instances of everyday life. But even seemingly innocuous images carry, given the context, allusions to conflict—to enforced disappearances, to mass graves and torture, to the indiscriminate use of pellet guns by government forces that, since 2010, have at least partially blinded hundreds of Kashmiris. One photograph shows a man making a bed in the privacy of his home. In the 1990s, the army looked out for extra bedding when searching people’s homes; families found to have any could be suspected of secretly sheltering militants, prompting interrogation. Kashmiris claim that

similar search operations have begun again since the Indian government effectively abrogated Article 370 last year, and imposed a security clampdown in the aftermath. As one moves through Hura’s work, the palette of the images shifts from the wash of white to the dusty brown of naked ground and bare chinar trees—chillai kalan moves into chillai khurd. A droplet is suspended from a mud cliff, almost as if pausing before the season turns. Hura said that on his last few visits, “winter calm has felt more like a mirage.” The sentiment has seemed especially true this winter, even to many at a distance from Kashmir, which has been under an internet shutdown and intensified military siege for five months. Snow concludes with the onset of spring, which lifts the cover of snow and brings greater “visibility” to the underlying conflict. “I cannot afford to remain stuck in the silence of snowfall,” Hura said. “This silence becomes a precursor to my recognising a reality that is loud and impossible to not acknowledge.” He added that, “in a way, this silence was also a time for listening, for me… I think we are living in a time when the need to listen is urgent.”

BOOKS On the Same Page

Agha Shahid Ali’s translations of revolutionary poets / LITERATURE MANAN KAPOOR

in the late 1940s, the 18-year-old American poet WS Merwin made a pilgrimage to Saint Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC to meet another poet—Ezra Pound. Though Pound was under indictment for treason against the United States, following radio broadcasts during the Second World War in which he declared his support for Benito Mussolini, Merwin admired the poet and had wandered into the hospital looking for advice from a revered figure. Pound argued that if Merwin was serious about being a poet, he should write 75 lines every day. “But at your age you don’t have anything to write about,” he continued. “You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to translating.” In a career that spanned almost seven decades, Merwin followed Pound’s advice to learn the art of translation so as not to be at the mercy of other translators. He translated poetry into English, from languages including German, Russian, Chinese, Egyptian, Welsh, Urdu, Japanese, Persian and Sanskrit. Translating gave Merwin more control over English—so much so, that it led the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali to declare, in an interview, that “Merwin became Merwinesque by translating.” Shahid, who knew Merwin personally, is now located in this exquisite lineage of poets who learned to break the barriers of language through their work in translation. Shahid is celebrated most for The Country Without a Post Office, a collection of poems that reflects on the Kashmiri people’s resistance, and the suffering brought on by the Indian government’s 86

THE CARAVAN

repression. He spent the last decade of his life reinvigorating modern American poetry by popularising the ghazal as a poetic form in the West and introducing the sensibilities and excesses of Urdu traditions into conventions of English poetry. But Shahid was also a prolific translator who familiarised the American audience with poets such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Mirza Ghalib. By working as a translator—a legacy that is often overlooked—he enriched his poetry, adding depth to it. His translations of Faiz, first published as The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems in 1991, have gained a new meaning in the current political milieu of the subcontinent. Translating his works helped Shahid formulate a language that was aesthetically elegant as well as politically charged, through which he expressed the suffering of the Kashmiris, as well as his own. Today, at a time when Shahid is one of the defining literary voices of Kashmir, it is important to look at the manner in which, and the reasons why, he translated poets such as Faiz and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who, like him, were poets who documented injustice and whose work resonated with millions. in may 2018, I met the historian and translator Saleem Kidwai at his house in Lucknow to speak about Shahid. The living room had a framed photograph of Kidwai and the singer Begum Akhtar placed on a table—someone had gifted the photograph to him but had oddly chosen to crop Shahid

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out. “The photograph was taken right after a concert in New Delhi,” Kidwai told me. “There’s even a Doordarshan recording of Begum Akhtar, where at one point, she looks at the both of us while singing and smiles.” Smiling somewhat coyly, he told me about their friendship with Begum Akhtar. As we spoke about Shahid and Akhtar, Faiz came up—almost as if one could not talk about them without mentioning him. “He loved to recite Faiz, always Faiz!” Kidwai said as we sipped coffee, with a pile of Shahid’s books in front of me.

“He had inherited Faiz’s poetry from his father. He made sure to send a copy of each collection till he died.” While Shahid was growing up in Kashmir, Faiz’s poems were recited on both sides of the border. Faiz had once stayed at Shahid’s house in Srinagar, before Partition. In the introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette, Shahid wrote that Faiz was an essential part of his childhood: “I must have then begun to internalize Faiz, because I often found myself repeating these, as well as other lines, to myself. Without having any JANUARY 2020

clear sense of what the lines meant, I still somehow felt the words, felt them through their sounds, through the rhythms of my father’s voice.” But it was Begum Akhtar who amplified his admiration for Faiz. At Shahid’s house, tapes of Begum Akhtar were played even in the 1950s, and the children of the house were exposed to her music at a very young age. Agha Iqbal Ali, Shahid’s younger brother, remembers that their parents attended and hosted mushairas—symposiums of poetry—in Kashmir in the 1950s and 1960s. “We were all 87

on the same page · books supposed to be upstairs, but we were kids, so we’d come downstairs and try to understand what was going on, listen to the performance since we weren’t allowed there,” he told me. “We were very young and we obviously didn’t understand what was going on, but the ‘wah wah’ got to us. When we heard the ‘wah wah,’ I remember that we repeated it along with the elders and would break into laughter. But this environment had an impact on Bhaiya—and even all of us—and as we matured, we started understanding this world. So naturally, when he met Begum Akhtar, he was already aware of her music and influence and all she could do.” In 1968, Shahid moved to Delhi, for his master’s degree in English literature at Hindu College, and met Akhtar through Kidwai. Shahid and Kidwai would make it a point to attend all her Delhi performances. “We were her chamchas who would follow her around everywhere,” Kidwai told me. “We never missed a chance to meet her.” Through her renditions of various ghazals, Shahid became aware of the potential of the form, writing in the introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette:

in Grand Street. Though poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, CP Cavafy, Octavio Paz, and Osip Mandelstam had deeply influenced Shahid, he shared aesthetics as well as political concerns with Faiz. Both poets, though separated by generations, geographies, and languages, never sacrificed the aesthetic for the political subject matter. “The subject must happen to the poem, not be forced upon it,” Shahid once said in an interview. Once Shahid was captivated by Faiz, he was disarmed. Naturally, then, Faiz’s absence

In some ways, Begum Akhtar’s ghazals—especially the ghazals of Faiz—led Shahid to realise the potential of the form, of the effect the repetition could create, or all that could be done with the couplets, and the power they had. Two years after Begum Akhtar’s death in 1974, Shahid moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in English literature at Pennsylvania State University. Once he was there, he realised that no one had heard of Faiz. “To have to introduce Faiz’s name seemed a terrible insult to a very significant element of my culture,” he later wrote, 88

babu ram / hindustan times archive

What Begum Akhtar did was to place the ghazal gently on the raga till it, the raga, opened itself to that whispered love, gave himself willingly, guiding the syllables to the prescribed resting places, till note by syllable, syllable by note, the two merged into yet another compelling ethos. She, in effect, allowed the ghazal to be caressed into music, translated as it were.

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from Western culture was appalling for him. In 1980, Shahid wrote to Faiz, asking him for permission to translate his poems. At the time, Faiz had been exiled by Zia-ul-Haq and was living in Beirut, working as an editor with The Lotus Magazine—a trilingual magazine of international literature jointly funded by the Soviet Union, Egypt, East Germany and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In the letter, Shahid bribed Faiz with a rare Begum Akhtar tape, in which she was singing his po-

on the same page · books ems, and asked if he could translate Faiz’s ghazals. Two weeks later, Faiz replied, saying, “Feel free to make adaptations of my poems. Please send the Begum Akhtar tape.” And so, Shahid’s translation, which would take nearly a decade to manifest as The Rebel’s Silhouette, began. Two weeks before the communications blockade and mass arrests in Kashmir, which followed the effective abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, I met Shahid’s elder sister, Hena, in Srinagar. She told me how Shahid would come to Kashmir during the summer vacations when he was teaching at Hamilton College, and how his mother, Sufia, who was well-versed in Urdu, helped him

Shahid wanted to capture Faiz’s emotional excitement and recreate his energy in English. He took liberties, including rearranging lines for emphasis. translate Faiz. The first step, Hena told me, was that Shahid and his mother selected poems that they felt would best suit English. Once the poems were decided, they would transliterate the poems, which Shahid would subsequently work on for months. “There were times when he would spend days and days on one line,” she told me. “One time, I woke up at 5 am and saw that the light in his room was on—Bhaiya had stayed up all night working on one line. Just one line. Imagine! That was the level of precision involved.” Shahid gauged that Faiz had been made to sound too formal in the English language, and concluded that there was no way in which Urdu— especially Faiz’s Urdu—could be recreated in English. Reading the English translations of various Urdu and Persian poets, he had become aware that his task as a translator was not to remain faithful to the original or carry out a literal translation but to fashion a new poem altogether—one that would read, to someone without knowledge of the Urdu original, like a poem in its own right. Shahid had also come across Merwin’s translations of Ghalib, which had been commissioned by the Pakistani critic Aijaz Ahmad. “What emerged was sometimes, spectacular, sometimes magical, sometimes passable—but always interesting,” Shahid wrote in his introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette, “Merwin and Rich’s efforts struck me as particularly compelling, some of which have inspired me in my attempts.” This example led Shahid to the understanding that while it was not crucial for the translator to be a master of the language from

which they were translating, they needed to be a “poet of the language” into which they were translating. In his introduction, Shahid also pointed out the duality of meaning in certain words in Urdu. He noted that the words tera dard can be read as “the sorrow you’ve caused” as well as “the sorrow you feel,” which poses a problem for the Western translators of Faiz who were not as comfortable with Urdu. While Faiz’s long-time translator Naomi Lazard translated the line, “tera gham hai to gham-e-dahar ka jhagra kya hai”, as “The torments of the world meant nothing/ you alone could make me suffer,” and the Marxist historian Victor Kiernan translated it as, “The time’s pain nothing, you alone were pain,” both of them failed to address the duality of “your sorrow.” Shahid tackled it by extending it to three lines:

opposite page: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the Pakistani poet, was popular while Agha Shahid Ali was growing up in Kashmir. In his introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette, Shahid wrote that Faiz was an essential part of his childhood.

How could one weep for sorrows other than yours? How could one have any sorrow but the one you gave? So what were these protests, these rumors of injustice? Shahid wanted to capture Faiz’s emotional excitement, to recreate his energy in English. He took some liberties, leaving a line here, adding a word there, and even taking a line from the bottom and placing it on top. In Shahid’s version of “Evening,” for instance, he rearranges lines for emphasis, placing the line “history to tear itself from this net” before “silence to break its chains,” so that there is a silence, followed by the forceful phrase, “a symphony of conch shells.” The sky waits for this spell to be broken, for history to tear itself from this net, for Silence to break its chains so that a symphony of conch shells may wake up the statues and a beautiful, dark goddess, her anklets echoing, may unveil herself. Shahid’s translations of Faiz are similar to, but never identical to, the Urdu original in terms of metre, movement as well as the choice of words. Faiz ends the poem with the lines “koi but jaage, koi sanvli ghunghat khole”—a moment when a statue comes to life. Kiernan translated it as “Some idol awaken, some swarthy beauty open her veil,” while Lazard tackles it by translating it as “it waits for a goddess to awaken, her dark veil cast off.” Shahid, on the other hand, writes, “and a beautiful, dark goddess,/ her anklets echoing, may unveil herself.” Shahid’s goddess is dark—a direct reference to Kali—and the act of “unveilJANUARY 2020

on the same page · books ing” stems from and belongs to a tradition that is deeply rooted in the culture of the subcontinent, that is often seen as the moment on the silver screen and also as the moment of revelation in the myths.

opposite page: The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Shahid shared concerns of a homeland lost to endless conflict and a feeling of living in exile. Shahid’s translations came at a time when Darwish’s poetry was relatively unknown in the West. 90

by the mid 1990s, Shahid was ready with the manuscript of The Rebel’s Silhouette and had established his position as an exceptional translator, publishing various translations in esteemed journals. Ever since Shahid had set foot in the United States, the hypocrisy of the US media and its biases in the Israel–Palestine conflict had frustrated him. Once, in an irate manner, he called out the New York Times for a report titled, “Palestinian’s Poem Unnerves Israelis.” He wrote that the Times “is not interested in the culture of the Palestinians nor, really, in that of any of the Arabic-speaking peoples.” He questioned their knowledge of Palestinian poets and wrote, “Professors and students in the country’s Master of Fine Arts writing programs have read the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, but who has heard of Darwish or any other Arab poet?” So, when the academic Edward Said approached Shahid for translations of Darwish’s poems, he instantly agreed. Along with Ahmad Dalal, Shahid translated 11 poems by Darwish as “Eleven Stars over Andalusia,” which is a direct reference to Yusuf’s dream from the Quran. Shahid had sympathised with displaced people and histories throughout his life, and his translations of Darwish—though only an Arabic speaker can comment on the fidelity of his versions—in Rooms are Never Finished are deeply arresting. In the 11 poems that Shahid chose, Darwish speaks of an Arab’s loss of Muslim Granada as a metaphor for Palestine. He also evokes the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who had written gacelas—ghazals—in the 1940s, a form he had inherited from his Andalusian Moorish heritage. The act of translating Darwish’s poetry was quite personal to Shahid; he often claimed to be in a “self-imposed” exile, preferring this term over “expatriate.” In a review of Rooms are Never Finished, published by Poetry Foundation, the American poet Craig Arnold wrote that in his translations of Darwish’s poetry, Shahid “has shown us how the terms of loss may be not merely personal, but shared—in every sense of the word, common.” In Shahid’s translations, Darwish dazzles as an Arabic poet whose longing for his homeland allows him to compress history and reality into one, and transcend time as well as space, while speaking about Palestine without ever evoking it. Shahid’s translation of “In Exodus, I Love You More,” for instance, conveys the strain and heaviness in Darwish’s voice: THE CARAVAN

Palm trees have become weightless, the hills have become weightless, and streets in the dusk have become weightless; the earth has become weightless as it bids farewell to its dust. Words have become weightless, and stories have become weightless on the staircase of night. My heart alone is heavy, so let it remain here, around your house, barking, howling for a golden time. Numerous writers and translators, such as Munir Akash and John Berger, went on to translate Darwish’s poetry, but Shahid’s translations came at a time when Darwish’s works were unknown, and his decision to translate them was as politically charged as his choice of Darwish’s poems about exile and loss of the homeland. despite shahid’s initial apprehensions about translating ghazals, by the late 1990s, he had transformed and pioneered ghazal writing in America. In the late 1990s, he edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English—an anthology of ghazals written by American poets—wrote numerous essays about the form, and his collection of ghazals was posthumously published as Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals. Shahid familiarised the American audience with the formal demands of the ghazal. In the introduction to the anthology, he wrote, “the ghazal is made up of couplets, each autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself,” and added that “one should at any time be able to pluck a couplet like

The act of translating Darwish’s poetry was quite personal to Shahid; he often claimed to be in a “selfimposed” exile, preferring this term over “expatriate.” a stone from a necklace, and it should continue to shine in the vivid isolation, though it would have a different lustre among and with the other stones.” In September, I spoke to Christopher Merrill, the director of the international writers’ programme at the University of Iowa. As we talked about Shahid’s ghazal-writing, he informed me how the form has become “a staple of American creativewriting programmes” because of Shahid, and that he thinks of Shahid as one of the great connecting forces of modern poetry who “bridged the gap between the East and the West.” In the late 1990s, Shahid finally took on the task of translating a Ghalib ghazal. Though he breaks

on the same page · books shines to make him the god whom nothing effaces.

the asahi shimbun / getty images

In fables, one hears of Arabic, Urdu and Persian poets who were asked by their masters to memorise thousands of verses of other poets by heart only to forget them before writing their own. This practice allowed them to learn from their precursors and to keep the tradition alive. In doing so, they expanded the universe of the metaphors and at the same time, acquired a barometer against which they could measure their works. In a similar vein, when Shahid turned to his poems, he had gained Faiz, and by extending metaphors from the verses of Faiz and Ghalib that were deeply strained in Urdu tradition, he helped break the boundaries of English poetry, introducing new ideas and themes that enriched the language. “Poetry is what is gained in translation,” the poet Joseph Brodsky had stated, and Shahid understood how translation, too, was a way of extending the language. At times, to recreate moments from his “Urdu past,” he would often translate, imbibing the phrases of others, touching the geographies and languages through his words. When Faiz died, in 1984, Shahid wrote an elegy to him, which was published in the collection The Half-Inch Himalayas. In the poem, he recounted his correspondence with Faiz, how he grew up with Faiz’s words and how Faiz “became, like memory, necessary”:

the formal demands to fully covey the sense of grief—in his English ghazals, Shahid strictly followed the formal demands of the Persian ghazal—he managed to retain the poem’s essence. A couplet from the original reads: “ranj se ḳhugar hua insaan to mit jaata hai ranj/ mushkileen mujh par padi itni ki aasan ho gai.” The couplet belongs to Ghalib, but Shahid used it thrice in his poetry. Naturally, it cemented its position in Shahid’s oeuvre and he, trying to stay faithful to the essence of the couplet and invoking its musicality through the use of refrain, translated it as:

See me! Beaten by sorrow, man is numbed to pain. Grief has become the pain only pain erases. Another couplet from the ghazal, which Merwin and Adrienne Rich too translated in Ghazals of Ghalib, that Shahid reworked numerous times to capture its essence, to recreate the true feeling of being in love, is perhaps a testament to his achievements as a translator: All is his—Sleep, Peace, Night—when on his arm your hair JANUARY 2020

Twenty days before your death you finally wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack of Beirut you had no address…I had gone from poem to poem, and found you once, terrible alone, speaking to yourself: “Bolt your doors, Sad heart! Put out the candles, break all cups of wine. No one, now no one will ever return.” In “From Amherst to Kashmir,” part of his collection Rooms are Never Finished, Shahid writes about the journey back to Kashmir with his mother’s body—“a coffin carrying a coffin”—as 91

on the same page · books

he chronicles his sense of loss, using the battle of Karbala as a metaphor. In the third part of the poem, he speaks of how they attempted to translate Faiz’s poem “Memory” together, and writes, “‘Memory’—two years after your death they tell me—has no translation.” He goes on to translate the poem in the fifth part, and extends his grief through Faiz: Desolation’s desert. I’m here with shadows. Of your voice, your lips as mirage, now trembling. Grass and dust of distance have let this desert bloom with your roses One reason The Country Without a Post Office is so evocative and elegiac is because Shahid breaks the conventions of English and uses a language 92

that is deeply steeped in the traditions of the subcontinent and its culture. Thus, in “Farewell,” a poem that laments the loss of the other, one can sense the influence of “Hum Joh Tareeq Rahon Mein Mare Gaye,” Faiz’s elegy to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—US citizens who were executed, in 1953, on charges of spying for the Soviet Union—which Shahid had translated as “We Who Were Executed.” Apart from Faiz, Shahid’s reading of Darwish’s poetry is evident throughout the collection, when he reflects on the distance between the past and the present or when he imagines what ought to be, when he talks about his homeland as a place in the past or about the human toll of the conflict. When Shahid translated Darwish’s poems in Rooms are Never Finished, then, he did so with Kashmir as a metaphor for his lost homeland. Unlike other Western THE CARAVAN

translators of Darwish’s poetry, Shahid could understand what it means to be far away from a homeland that is under occupation, a place where, in Shahid’s words, “We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark.” The German poet Paul Celan translated a dozen poets before writing his poetry, which led him to break the syntax of German to express his Jewish experience of the Holocaust. This led Anne Carson to remark that “Celan is a poet who uses language as if he is always translating.” Shahid, too, altered the syntax of English to express his subcontinental experience in a language that he considered his own. In Shahid’s collections such as Half-Inch Himalayas, written during the 1980s when he was still working on the translation, Faiz’s presence in his poetry is almost palpable. His use of phrases such as “One morning, she says, the air/

on the same page · books was dew-starched” and “Mecca scarlet-women/ with minarets of gold,” as well as his description of the Dacca gauzes as “woven air, running/ water, evening dew” reveals how he introduced Urdu sensibilities to English. “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved,” Faiz wrote in a letter to Alum Lewis in the early 1940s. The loss of—and the agonising wait for—the beloved were subjects of Faiz’s poetry that Shahid consciously inherited. This is most apparent, perhaps, when he writes, “I enter this: The Beloved leaves one behind to die” in the canzone “Lenox Hill,” or when, in “The Fourth Day,” he exclaims, “The Beloved is gone/ The Beloved is gone.” Staying within a tradition, and at times borrowing from it, helped Shahid stay loyal to the cultures and languages to which he belonged— something he was constantly aware of. The question of loyalty was crucial for Shahid, and one of the reasons he chose to work on ghazal writing in English—a point where the two cultures and literary traditions met. But as Shahid translated Faiz, he learned more about Urdu poetry and the

One evening this September, Patkin told me he believed that in art, the metaphor was everything. “In Shahid’s translation of Faiz, metaphor has been taken to the level of witchcraft,” he said. English language, and it helped him to find the right words to express his subcontinental experience as well as his life in America, and remain a part of both cultures at the same time. In his introduction to the translation, he wrote, “These loyalties, which have political, cultural, and aesthetic implications, remain so entangled in me, so thoroughly mine, that they have led not to confusion but to a strange, arresting clarity.” This sense of clarity helped him explore his subjects in the remarkable manner and style of Faiz and Darwish. in the late 1990s, the Israeli-American artist Izhar Patkin and Agha Shahid Ali met for the first time, in New York. Izhar wanted to paint Shahid’s poems for a collaborative project that was the brainchild of his friend Anne Macdonald—an editor from San Francisco. As a patron of the arts and writing, Macdonald felt that while artists ended up making money, writers lived up to the cliché and were always underpaid. She wanted to start a publishing company, with the

primary focus on a series of collaborative projects between artists and writers, and wanted Patkin’s to be the first. Though Patkin agreed instantly, the search for his writer counterpart went on for almost twenty years. It was only when the American novelist Jim Lewis suggested Agha Shahid Ali that Patkin found the poet he wanted to work with. Over the course of the next few months, they met numerous times, and grew close, but did not work on the project. “One year had passed,” Patkin remembered, “but we never discussed anything. We were too busy talking about the world.” In February 1999, Shahid was diagnosed with brain cancer, and told Patkin that they should start thinking about the project. But Patkin had already envisioned what he wanted to do, though he had never discussed it with Shahid. “I wanted to make rooms of veils, that one could enter. But I was surprised when I realised Shahid had something similar in mind,” Patkin told me. “Our meeting point should be the veil,” Shahid suggested when they met for the first time. “It’s funny that a Jew and a Muslim should meet at the veil,” Patkin replied. Shahid asked him how he wanted to go on about it, and Patkin said: “Well, let’s not do the Jew-Muslim, feel-good thing. Let’s give them hate.” “Ah! Darling, perfect,” Shahid had started laughing at this point, “We should have separate book launches from the start, nobody should know we’ve been talking to each other. We’re going to milk this to death.” They chose “Veiled Threats” as the working title of the project and Shahid promised him that he would write a poem for Patkin to paint. Before his death in December 2001, Shahid had faxed Patkin a canzone—a 65-line poem with a strict rhyme and metre. Deeply layered with concerns that he had written about throughout his life, the canzone is, arguably, one of Shahid’s toughest works. But along with “The Veiled Suite” and “The Dead are Here,” Patkin had also decided to paint Faiz’s “Evening,” “You Tell Us What to Do” and Darwish’s “Violins,” because they resonated with Shahid’s poetic sensibilities. One evening this September, Patkin told me he believed that in art, the metaphor was everything. “In Shahid’s translation of Faiz, metaphor has been taken to the level of witchcraft. And for a visual artist the meaning is in the metaphor, in the figure itself that comes alive like the statue in the poem. You can see, as an artist, that Shahid and Faiz are on the same page. Their voices are very compatible and there isn’t much distance between them. Basically, it’s the same voice—he didn’t have to translate because the voice was already there.” s JANUARY 2020

opposite page: Agha Shahid Ali, in March 1990, at a small college in Pennsylvania. He spent the last decade of his life reinvigorating modern American poetry by popularising the ghazal as a poetic form in the West and introducing the sensibilities and excesses of Urdu traditions into conventions of English poetry. 93

THE BOOKSHELF

ONE DROP OF BLOOD

PLASSEY

THE BATTLE THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF INDIAN HISTORY

THE STORY OF KARBALA Ismat Chughtai Translated by Tahira Naqvi

Sudeep Chakravarti

This is a new translation of the renowned Urdu author Ismat Chugtai’s final novel Ek Qatra-e-Khoon. A reimagining of the bloody battle of Karbala in 680 CE, it chronicles the life of Imam Hussain, Muhammad’s grandson, and his family and friends, as their small army clashed with the forces of the second Ummayad caliph, Yazid I.

The journalist Sudeep Chakravarti revisits the battle of Plassey, fought on 23 June 1757, between the forces of the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, and East India Company troops led by Robert Clive. He sets it against the broader political context of the time, and explores the stories of the battle’s other protagonists.

women unlimited, S575, 440 pages

aleph, S799, 440 pages

SEBASTIAN & SONS

BANS AND BAR GIRLS

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MRIDANGAM MAKERS

PERFORMING CASTE IN MUMBAI’S DANCE BARS

TM Krishna

Sameena Dalwai

A new work of nonfiction by the musician and activist TM Krishna, this book explores the history of makers of the mridangam—a musical instrument used in Carnatic music—in Thanjavur, Chennai and elsewhere. It draws upon Krishna’s extensive fieldwork and interviews to investigate the workings of caste in this industry as well, focussing on a community of Dalit Christians who produced the instrument.

In August 2005, the Maharashtra government banned dancing by “bar girls” in over a thousand dance bars in Mumbai, effectively leaving around seventy-five thousand women without livelihoods. In this book, the lawyer and author Sameena Dalwai weighs up the legal arguments for and against the ban, and argues that this move was influenced by globalisation and an increasing moral panic, but also largely by caste bias against the predominantly oppressed-caste women who danced in bars.

westland, S799, 284 pages

women unlimited, S595, 242 pages

THE CARAVAN

THE BOOKSHELF

THE QUARTER

1971

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY FROM BANGLADESH, PAKISTAN AND INDIA

Naguib Mahfouz

Anam Zakaria

In 2018, the Egyptian academic Mohamed Shoair came across a handwritten manuscript of stories by the prolific Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, labelled “For publishing 1994.” Eighteen of these had not been previously published, and are collected in this new edition of stories set in the Cairo neighbourhood of Gamaliya.

The historian Anam Zakaria uses textbooks, field research, museum visits and extensive interviews to examine the ways in which the year 1971 has been memorialised in Bangladeshi society. She also studies the differences between the ways it is remembered in Pakistan, where it is associated with the “Fall of Dacca,” and India, where it is associated with a narrative of humanitarian intervention and the rise of the country as a military power.

pan macmillan, S500, 98 pages

penguin, S699, 304 pages

THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ON PALESTINE

THE ABSENT DIALOGUE

POLITICIANS, BUREAUCRATS, AND THE MILITARY IN INDIA

A HISTORY OF SETTLER COLONIAL CONQUEST AND RESISTANCE

Anit Mukherjee

Rashid Khalidi

In this book, Mukherjee takes a deep dive into civil–military relations in India, asking questions about military officers’ education, defence planning, promotion policies and weapons procurement. He goes on to argue that India’s military effectiveness has been compromised by the nature of the armed forces’ relationship with the country’s bureaucracy and political establishment.

In this book, the historian Rashid Khalidi draws on his family archives, including the reports of scholars, judges and journalists, to chronicle the explicit denial of nationhood for Palestinians throughout the twentieth century. He begins in 1899, when the mayor of Jerusalem— who was an ancestor of Khalidi’s—reportedly wrote a letter apprehending the dangers of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine, and said, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” The author also traces the history of Palestinian nationalism and the role of Britain and the United States.

oxford university press, S1100, 336 pages

hachette, S599, 336 pages JANUARY 2020

SHOWCASE

Festival

Reth Festival all images courtesy reth

29 JANUARY TO 2 FEBRUARY NARAYAN NIWAS PALACE AND NACHANA HAVELI, JAISALMER

Curated by Laila Vaziralli and Dipankar Jojo Chaki, this residential festival for creators will feature workshops on sustainable printmaking, sand animation, folk instruments and Mughal miniature painting, as well as musical performances. For more information, write to ujjalab@gmail.com THE CARAVAN

SHOWCASE

Theatre

Locha Gotcha 1 JANUARY PRITHVI THEATRE, MUMBAI

courtesy ekjute theatre group

Directed by Manav Pande, Locha Gotcha is a play that follows the journey of an intelligent lower-middle-class boy. His reality gets a science-fiction twist when he takes over two aliens. For more information, write to vandana@mindworkz.in

courtesy olafur eliasson / neugerriemschneider

Art

India Art Fair The twelfth edition of the India Art Fair features work by Indian and international artists, with over seventy-five exhibitors spanning 20 global cities. It will also host conversations, screenings, performances and live events. For more information, write to ekta@mypeepul.com

courtesy aicon art

30 JANUARY TO 2 FEBRUARY NSIC GROUNDS, DELHI

JANUARY 2020

on 22 january 1905, tsarist forces violently disrupt a peaceful protest march in St Petersburg, Russia. The protestors were members of the St Petersburg Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers, founded, in 1903, by the Orthodox priest Georgy Apollonovich Gapon. The Assembly was the latest in a series of “police unions,” labour organisations started by tsarist authorities as counterweights to the unionisation efforts of growing revolutionary parties. These organisations, controlled by police agents, sought to meet some of the economic and cultural needs of the workers while encouraging their inherent social conservatism. Gapon sought to avoid embroiling his Assembly in 98

industrial disputes, instead organising dances, concerts and lectures, and using his status as a priest to lobby the state. In 1904, the interior ministry officially recognised the Assembly. Although both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks boycotted the Assembly, it drew a large membership. After four Assembly members were arbitrarily fired from the Putilov Ironworks, in December 1904, the factory’s workforce went on strike. By 20 January 1905, two-thirds of St Petersburg’s industrial workers had joined sympathy strikes. Gapon decided to petition the tsar, Nicholas II. Drafted in obsequious tones, the petition asked for better working conditions, but also for a constituent assembly elected by THE CARAVAN

universal suffrage and an end to the Russo–Japanese War. Gapon notified the authorities about the petition and a planned march to the Winter Palace. The palace refused his request for an audience with the tsar. On 22 January, over fifty thousand protestors marched, carrying portraits of the tsar and religious icons, and singing hymns. They initially faced no resistance, but as they reached the Narva Gate, soldiers suddenly opened fire, killing over a hundred protestors and injuring several hundred. “There is no god any longer!” an enraged Gapon exclaimed. “There is no tsar!” The massacre sparked a strike wave throughout Russia, culminating in the Revolution of 1905.

nawrocki / classic stock / getty images

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