Re: [silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 13:49 +0530, shiv sastry wrote: Ram Guha's gushing acceptance of shared Pakistani culture and cuisine is a result of his having schooled in Dehra Dun and having lived in Delhi. Not too many South Indians would have accepted a shared culture and cuisine with Pakistanis until a decade or two ago, but attitudes are changing. but the same south indians then cannot also claim a shared culture and cuisine with north indians in delhi or dehra dun... indeed, perhaps this was ram guha's point, that there is in many ways more shared culture and cuisine (whether tandoori food or not letting girls go to school) across the northern subcontinental region, cutting across religions and national boundaries, than between different parts of india itself.
Re: [silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
On Friday 17 Aug 2007 6:30 pm, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: but the same south indians then cannot also claim a shared culture and cuisine with north indians in delhi or dehra dun... indeed, perhaps this was ram guha's point, that there is in many ways more shared culture and cuisine (whether tandoori food or not letting girls go to school) across the northern subcontinental region, cutting across religions and national boundaries, than between different parts of india itself. Correct. So shared culture and religion (or a shared interest in cricket) are not prerequisites for just getting along. The dynamic that operates between India and Pakistan are outside this shared culture cliche. shiv
Re: [silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
Found this in the archives Ingrid Srinath asked: On 8/12/07, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for posting this. There are some minor factual inaccuracies, but I write to express my delight at seeing the author echo something that I have felt and stated in various places - i.e that the birth of Pakistan was the first blow in favor of pan-Islamic fundamentalism do you also agree with the author that the birth of muslim nationalism in india was a consequence of nehru/gandhi/congress hubris? That actually played a useful role as per my current information. Muslim nationalism in India was based on Maududi's Islamist theory that found expression in Iqbal's views. Iqbal was the man who wrote Sare Jahan se accha Jinnah was a staunch Congressman who was rebuffed by the Nehru/Gandhi Congress - possible because he made his political speeches in English - the only language he knew. He retreated out of politics to England, but came back later. Jinnah was influenced by Iqbal, and felt that Muslim nationalism was a good plank for him to ride to power and to oppose the hated Hindu Congress. Jinnah's ambition was useful to Churchill in opposing demands for independence during the war - and Churchill was under pressure from BOTH the Indian Congress and Roosevelt. The Pakistan idea was born out of Maududi and Iqbal's Islamist exclusivism, Nehru-Gandhi hubris, Jinnah's ambition, and the geopolitical needs of Great Britain. But Pakistan, or some form of partition would have been inevitable anyway . Pakistan was the best we got and was good for India (my opinions) My main source on the details of history of partition in the years 1940 to 1947 are from the book by Narendra Singh Sarila entitled In the shadow of the Great Game - the untold story of Partition However I am now reading Ramchandra Guha's India after Gandhi - a new book of 700 plus pages (I am on page 36) and my views could get modified. Ram Guha is a TamBram younger brother of a classmate of mine from medical college. I owe it to my classmate to ensure that Ram gets at least some royalty shiv
Re: [silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
On 8/12/07, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for posting this. There are some minor factual inaccuracies, but I write to express my delight at seeing the author echo something that I have felt and stated in various places - i.e that the birth of Pakistan was the first blow in favor of pan-Islamic fundamentalism do you also agree with the author that the birth of muslim nationalism in india was a consequence of nehru/gandhi/congress hubris? -- The future is here; it's just not widely distributed yet. - William Gibson
Re: [silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
On Saturday 11 Aug 2007 9:56 pm, Dave Kumar wrote: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/13/070813crbo_books_mis hra Thanks for posting this. There are some minor factual inaccuracies, but I write to express my delight at seeing the author echo something that I have felt and stated in various places - i.e that the birth of Pakistan was the first blow in favor of pan-Islamic fundamentalism The last paragraph of the article you linked says: Meeting Mountbatten a few months after partition, Churchill assailed him for helping Britain’s “enemies,” “Hindustan,” against “Britain’s friends,” the Muslims. Little did Churchill know that his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades. ♦ shiv
[silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
I hesitate to start this discussion with some of the opinionated folks out there (oh, who am I kidding?), but I found this to be very interesting. It is a book review in the New Yorker, although it is really just a column that doesn't really review the book. The original article is quite long, but I thought worth the read. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/13/070813crbo_books_mishra [snip] Many of the seeds of postcolonial disorder in South Asia were sown much earlier, in two centuries of direct and indirect British rule, but, as book after book has demonstrated, nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable. In Indian Summer (Henry Holt; $30), Alex von Tunzelmann pays particular attention to how negotiations were shaped by an interplay of personalities. Von Tunzelmann goes on a bit too much about the Mountbattens' open marriage and their connections to various British royals, toffs, and fops, but her account, unlike those of some of her fellow British historians, isn't filtered by nostalgia. She summarizes bluntly the economic record of the British overlords, who, though never as rapacious and destructive as the Belgians in the Congo, damaged agriculture and retarded industrial growth in India through a blind faith in the invisible hand that supposedly regulated markets. Von Tunzelmann echoes Edmund Burke's denunciation of the East India Company when she terms the empire's corporate forerunner a beast whose only object was money; and she reminds readers that, in 1877, the year that Queen Victoria officially became Empress of India, a famine in the south killed five million people even as the Queen's viceroy remained adamant that famine relief was a misguided policy. Politically, too, British rule in India was deeply conservative, limiting Indian access to higher education, industry, and the civil service. Writing in the New York *Tribune* in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx predicted that British colonials would prove to be the unconscious tool of a social revolution in a subcontinent stagnating under Oriental despotism. As it turned out, the British, while restricting an educated middle class, empowered a multitude of petty Oriental despots. (In 1947, there were five hundred and sixty-five of these feudatories, often called maharajas, running states as large as Belgium and as small as Central Park.) Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority's right to rule. British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity, and made partition inevitable. This was a deeper tragedy than is commonly realized—and not only because India today has almost as many Muslims as Pakistan. In a land where cultures, traditions, and beliefs cut across religious communities, few people had defined themselves exclusively through their ancestral faith. The Pashto-speaking Muslim in the North-West Frontier province (later the nursery of the Taliban and Al Qaeda) had little in common with the Bangla-speaking Muslim in the eastern province of Bengal. (Even today, a Sunni Muslim from Lahore has less in common with a Sunni Muslim from Dhaka than he has with a Hindu Brahmin from New Delhi, who, in turn, may find alien the language, food, and dress of a low-caste Hindu from Chennai.) The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries. As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain a bulwark of British rule in India. Certainly Churchill, who did not want his views on India to be disturbed by any bloody Indians, was disinclined to recognize the upsurge of nationalism in India. Imperial authority in India rested on the claim that the British, as representatives of a superior civilization, were essentially benign custodians of a fractious country. But as an Indian middle-class élite trained in Western institutions became politicized—more aware of the nature and scale of Indian political and economic subjugation to Britain—self-serving British rhetoric about benevolent masters and volatile natives was bound to be challenged. And no one undermined British assumptions of moral and legal custodianship better than Gandhi, who was adept both
Re: [silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
Forget the piece, isn't that photograph, by Margaret Bourke-White, just stunning? On 8/11/07, Dave Kumar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I hesitate to start this discussion with some of the opinionated folks out there (oh, who am I kidding?), but I found this to be very interesting. It is a book review in the New Yorker, although it is really just a column that doesn't really review the book. The original article is quite long, but I thought worth the read. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/13/070813crbo_books_mishra [snip] Many of the seeds of postcolonial disorder in South Asia were sown much earlier, in two centuries of direct and indirect British rule, but, as book after book has demonstrated, nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable. In Indian Summer (Henry Holt; $30), Alex von Tunzelmann pays particular attention to how negotiations were shaped by an interplay of personalities. Von Tunzelmann goes on a bit too much about the Mountbattens' open marriage and their connections to various British royals, toffs, and fops, but her account, unlike those of some of her fellow British historians, isn't filtered by nostalgia. She summarizes bluntly the economic record of the British overlords, who, though never as rapacious and destructive as the Belgians in the Congo, damaged agriculture and retarded industrial growth in India through a blind faith in the invisible hand that supposedly regulated markets. Von Tunzelmann echoes Edmund Burke's denunciation of the East India Company when she terms the empire's corporate forerunner a beast whose only object was money; and she reminds readers that, in 1877, the year that Queen Victoria officially became Empress of India, a famine in the south killed five million people even as the Queen's viceroy remained adamant that famine relief was a misguided policy. Politically, too, British rule in India was deeply conservative, limiting Indian access to higher education, industry, and the civil service. Writing in the New York *Tribune* in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx predicted that British colonials would prove to be the unconscious tool of a social revolution in a subcontinent stagnating under Oriental despotism. As it turned out, the British, while restricting an educated middle class, empowered a multitude of petty Oriental despots. (In 1947, there were five hundred and sixty-five of these feudatories, often called maharajas, running states as large as Belgium and as small as Central Park.) Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority's right to rule. British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity, and made partition inevitable. This was a deeper tragedy than is commonly realized—and not only because India today has almost as many Muslims as Pakistan. In a land where cultures, traditions, and beliefs cut across religious communities, few people had defined themselves exclusively through their ancestral faith. The Pashto-speaking Muslim in the North-West Frontier province (later the nursery of the Taliban and Al Qaeda) had little in common with the Bangla-speaking Muslim in the eastern province of Bengal. (Even today, a Sunni Muslim from Lahore has less in common with a Sunni Muslim from Dhaka than he has with a Hindu Brahmin from New Delhi, who, in turn, may find alien the language, food, and dress of a low-caste Hindu from Chennai.) The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries. As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain a bulwark of British rule in India. Certainly Churchill, who did not want his views on India to be disturbed by any bloody Indians, was disinclined to recognize the upsurge of nationalism in India. Imperial authority in India rested on the claim that the British, as representatives of a superior civilization, were essentially benign custodians of a fractious country. But as an Indian middle-class élite trained in Western institutions became politicized—more aware of the nature and scale of Indian political and economic subjugation to
Re: [silk] New Yorker book review re: partition
On 8/11/07, Dave Kumar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I hesitate to start this discussion with some of the opinionated folks out there (oh, who am I kidding?), but I found this to be very interesting. It is a book review in the New Yorker, although it is really just a column that doesn't really review the book. The original article is quite long, but I thought worth the read. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/13/070813crbo_books_mishra http://www.slate.com/id/2172001/ A slate piece that sort of reviews the book and also talks about supposed parallels between India's partition and Iraq today. Thaths -- Homer: He has all the money in the world, but there's one thing he can't buy. Marge: What's that? Homer: (pause) A dinosaur. -- Homer J. Simpson Sudhakar ChandraSlacker Without Borders
