Books

THE MAHABHARATA by Caturvedi Badrinath. Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2006.

Caturvedi Badrinath has written a monumental study on the Mahabharata, a re-examination for the contemporary concerns. His intentions are good, and the labour he has put in is admirable; it is no mean task, by any standards, to write 592 pages of text supported by 91 pages of notes, index and concordance. The tone of this re-examination of the Mahabharata is suggested by the following sentences:1

The direction the Mahabharata takes is a continuation of the one that the Upanishads had taken. The latter had broken away from vedic ritualism and its belief in the magical efficacy of ‘acts’ and had turned human attention to the inwardness of the self instead… The yajna or sacrificial act is replaced with self-understanding... The Mahabharata radically changes the meaning of yajna, tapas, karma, and tirtha; and in making them relational, it gives them a deeply ethical meaning.2

The ideas have been repeated in several places. Sample:

One of the deepest revolutions that took place in Indian thought was that of the Upanishads: the second was that of the Mahabharata.

And they were not far apart in time.

The Upanishadic revolution consisted in lifting the human mind from the outward vedic ritualistic acts that had the aim of obtaining, with assumed magical power if practised as prescribed, the things of the world one desired. The Upanishads moved the mind from acts to understanding, from rituals to enquiry...

The revolution of the Mahabharata... was even a deeper revolution than that of the Upanishads insofar as it rooted itself in the concrete empirical realities of human experience...3

Thus it is clear that the reading model is developmental in which, from a world of magic and occult techniques of obtaining worldly wealth, the society moves to the Truth with a capital T through rational, scientific disciplines like ethics – a highly respected discourse in this book.

Such is the route taken by all evangelist enterprises; they all trace a path from the pagan mind to the depaganised belief system, coherent and distinguished from its predecessors by normatively assigning the earlier foundations to the dark world of ignorance. Reading Indian thought in this manner, one gets admitted to the distinguished gallery of enlightened systems like Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and Modernism.

Provoked repeatedly into shame because they did not possess a Book, some Hindus opted for the Vedas as the Canon, maintaining consequentially that the readings and the interpretations by our continued scholarship were in fact ‘corruptions’ of the original, shining ideas bristling with Purity textualized into the Vedas. So starting from Arya Samaj, we have a stream of opinion-makers emphasizing that there was nothing wrong with our rituals; no-violence-no-sex was the governing principle and our ancestors were in fact Perfect Gentlemen. All stories of violence and sex, which disgusted the Europeans, were in fact inventions of the ‘priests’, eager to have a share in the meat and hooch4 , imposed upon the ‘cosmological’/‘introspective’ outer/inner voices. Some others, as revolted as the European Sanskritist with the details of Vedic rituals, opted for the Upanishads as the Canon. This was the route taken by the Brahmo Samaj which assigned the Upanishads a prime slot in the revealed texts, after the Bible, naturally.

Detect any ‘Plato on Homer’ in all this? The Ideal Republics of the Reformers of Hinduism have no room for the poet.

‘Hindus’ do not discourage the addition of new gods and new texts. So each reformer has a following, but that is about all. Anybody with ‘solutions to problems’ is going to be welcomed by some persons. But all attempts to integrate ‘Hinduism’ into a genealogy of faith have had incomplete success because if there is one thing which does not fit the ‘Hindu’ mind, it is the Tyranny of the Truth.

‘Hinduism’ is not about solutions. It is about problems, but has the candour to point out that in tackling them one is moving into uncharted territory. It is not Science, much less Technology. It is Poetry. ‘Hinduism’ is a deconstructionist religion. If this is jargon, let it be, because all discourse is jargon.

Our author clearly loves the Mahabharata. But he is also in love with rationality. So we have:

To the pre-eminently rational dharmic mind, the theory of unseen fate was hardly satisfactory. For not only did it constitute no ‘explanation’ but it also amounted to abandoning oneself to caprice; and caprice was one thing that the dharmic mind, suffused with the idea of order, had resolutely banished from its scheme of things. So as to bring providence within rational categories of thought, and make it intelligible, it was identified with kala, ‘Time’...

It is not man but kala, that determines every human situation. That is the uncompromising view also of Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata. He maintained it from the beginning to the end of that work...5

But of course, it is not sustainable. So a little further, we have:

Rejecting predetermination by some mysterious kala, also rejecting fate as the decisive factor, Bhisma suggests to Yudhisthira...6

Let us take ethics as an illustrator. On pages 517-519 we have a retelling of an episode from the Mahabharata. The war is over and Gandhari, overcome with grief at the loss of her sons, holds Krsna accountable; she curses him that his clan will also be destroyed exactly as her family was. Krsna replies that he knows it. The significance of this reply is not examined by our author. A statement to the effect that the clan of Krsna is so powerful that if Krsna does not destroy it, nobody else can, is completely omitted. What our author has to say is this:

Put aside the knotted question of causality. Put aside the equally knotted question of culpability. Here was the plain requirement of compassion and grace, kindness and gentle speech, to a sorrowing mother, no matter what her sons might have been like. The Mahabharata portrays Krsna having in him none of these towards her. But he had none of these towards the tragic Karna or towards the dying Duryodhana either.

Soon after Duryodhana was killed in the last battle between him and Bhimasena in a straight battle by mace, but in a way that was on the part of Bhima in complete violation of a cardinal rule of such contest, Krsna proclaimed his accountability, though not his culpability. Speaking to Yudhisthira, he admitted, but without regret for what he declared was a necessity, that the war could never have been won for the Pandavas except through means that were deceitful.7

After this, there is a detailed extract from the Mahabharata supporting the statement made last. Then, without warning, the following is slapped on us:

The entire Mahabharata is about not only that the ends do not justify the means, but also about the nature of the ends themselves, in relation to one’s self and the other.

This reviewer fails to understand why anybody should think that the Mahabharata is about things like ‘ends and means’. One may choose other texts and other role-models; Mahatma Gandhi for example is far more explicit. But it is hardly digestible that the Mahabharata is something beyond Krsna. If Krsna is not easy to understand through a ‘character analysis’, surely the methods of literary critics who work hard on ‘the character of Ophelia’ and ‘the character of Hamlet’ are inadequate.

‘Secular’ is a favourite word of the author; indeed, according to him secularism and rationality would seem to be the chief virtues of the Mahabharata. This, coupled with the ‘radical shift’ which supposedly informs the Mahabharata, and the stand that positions of the Mahabharata are not those of ‘Hinduism alone’, mark his reading. As an illustration, let us look at this version of moksa:

Despite its plainly universal meaning, and its secular nature, the idea of moksa became obscured by the religiosity of theistic practices... Thus moksa has been perceived as a religious idea, and that, too, of the Hindus.... there were huge quarrels about moksa, when moksa is freedom from all quarrels...

Let us put them aside. For, ...the Mahabharata says: Those who are busy memorising the Veda, the sastras, and other texts, but do not understand their true meaning, memorise the text uselessly.8

From Yaska, the author of the Nirukta, on which the ‘ritualistic’ exegesis on the Veda by Sayana is based, to Kabir, the ‘rebel’ Bhakti poet and saint, there is hardly a thinker in India’s multicoloured history of ideas in ‘religion’ who has not maintained that, ‘Those who are busy memorising the Veda, the sastras, and other texts, but do not understand their true meaning, memorise the text uselessly.’ The ‘radicalism’ hoisted onto the Mahabharata is in fact a basic premise of the Indian thought process. If there are ‘quarrels’, these are at the level of the actual technicalities of the analysis of the ‘true meaning’. In any case, they are ‘quarrels’ only in the sense there are ‘quarrels’ amongst various cosmological theories in contemporary physics.

‘Secularism’ is a dangerous word, whether applied as in the traditional sense of ‘opposition to Church’, or as in the muddled political usage fashionable in the contemporary Indian intellectualese. ‘Hinduism’ has no Book, no Church, no excommunication rules, no fixed interpretations, no ‘theism’ and hence, no ‘atheism’. Like all pagan systems – incidentally, it is the only surviving example which is still functional – it has local ‘rites and rituals’; neither adherence nor nonadherence to any one or more of these makes or unmakes a Hindu. Let it never be forgotten that the Hindus never created an identity for themselves, that ‘Hindu’ is simply a Persian word meaning ‘the contemptible Indian’, and that this does not differ semantically from the ‘Gentoo’ coined by the European visitors for the native heathens who could not be classified as ‘Moors’. The word ‘secular’ is simply not applicable to any of the ideas in the Hindu thought corpus.

Indeed, moksa may not be a religious idea since the Hindus have no ‘religious’ ideas, but if it is not an idea of the Hindus, whose idea is it? Do we have any other system, ‘religious’ or not, which has any idea approximating moksa?

There is always a pat reply, ‘What about Buddhism’? Did Buddha say he is not a Hindu? Beyond criticism of certain practices such as the ‘Vedic sacrifice’, deemed to be abhorrent by him, did he challenge anything associated with ‘Hinduism’ today except the philosophical positions taken by various other schools? Why did Kabir and many other saints of medieval India claim they were talking about sucham Beda, the ‘microkernel’ Veda, in their teachings? Must the confrontational model of Jews versus Gentiles, repeatedly invoked in Christians versus Pagans, Catholics versus Protestants, Progressives versus Reactionaries, be regarded as the sole instrument of understanding a people’s articulation?

One would like to ask: How is it that Bhagavatpada Adi Sankaracarya and Ramanujacarya, to name only two of our thinkers who ‘quarrelled’ about moksa, did not know that ‘moksa is freedom from all quarrels’, but Caturvedi Badrinatha does? Is our author seriously suggesting that Abhinavagupta was merely quarrelling when he set out his Svatantrya theory of moksa against other theories? Will he say, for example, that Jacques Derrida was quarrelsome? Why this special treatment to our thinkers?

This special treatment originates from a very simple premise: Indian thinkers dealt with the same questions that the postpagan West took up. Since the answers are already spelt out by the great minds of the postpagan West, any statements that Indian thinkers make about life, nature, human race, and social functioning, must be in concordance with the current notion of what is politically correct. Anything deemed ‘primitive’ by the EuroAmerican thinker is either not part of the ‘true Hindu thought’, or is best relegated to a distant past superseded by later Hindu minds. Hinduism is an ‘advanced religion’; if some odd corners come up, they have to be smoothened so that Hinduism can be fitted into the procrustean bed. But this premise is wrong.

Every rationalist enquiry must have an enemy and Caturvedi Badrinath also has one; it is the dharmasastras which he calls ‘adharmasastras, that is the codes of injustice, inequity, and violence.’9 This is strange, to say the least, since the dharmasastras accept the Mahabharata as one of their most authoritative sourcebooks. Further, there is nothing in the Mahabharata to suggest that it is even remotely opposed to any statements of the dharmasastras; to the extent that any quote can be extracted from the Mahabharata to contradict some quote from a dharmasastra, a quote to that effect can almost certainly be extracted from that particular dharmasastra itself.

No modern scholar tries to ask why the contradictory statements, let us say on caste or on women, were not regarded as contradictory statements by our writers not familiar with western scholarship. One simply assumes they were naive at best, too weak to offend the ‘hardliners’ in the dharmasastra industry.

Our author does the same. This makes him naturally quite uncomfortable when questions of the caste system and the status of women come up. We have only explanations of the following kind:

When varna and jati were presented in the later dharmasastras and absolute social theory, they were at complete variance with the pluralistic facts of Indian life. They were at complete variance too with the ethical foundations of social relationships, without which nothing that is sane and moral can ever survive anywhere. The Mahabharata is concerned with the foundations, with the dharma, of all social arrangements everywhere. But it was the dharmasastra and their literal exponents, the sastri and not the Mahabharata, that came to dominate the social structure in India. They laid the foundations of a social system that could produce only social conflict and human degradation. The Mahabharata is saying in a voice impassioned, often even anguished, that should any social arrangement degrade and debase human worth, it would be adharma and will produce only violence.10

The Mahabharata apparently speaks not with anguish alone, it also speaks with ‘a hidden sense of laughter’.11 Why can’t this benefit of reading be extended to the dharmasastras? Actually both the dharmasastras and the Mahabharata are in tune, and to the extent that the dharmasastras dominated Indian life, the Mahabharata also did. Neither the Mahabharata nor the dharmasastras stand in need of a ‘benefit of reading’; it is only required that one approaches these texts with the same sense of humility that one does when reading a text from the postpagan West. Let it remain the privilege of the postpagan West to discuss exactly at what stage of progress the religion of the Greek and the religion of the Romans were when Christianity dawned on them. Let us not invent an ‘age of darkness’, an ‘age of ignorance’, a daur-e-jahiliyya into our past simply to be at par with other advanced religions and other advanced civilizations.

The facts of a social situation vary from one place and one time to another place and another time. The ancient Egyptian royal line is supposed to have encouraged incestuous marriages; this is not acceptable to many societies including the modern Egyptian society. Does that make the ancient Egyptians worthy of contempt? Should we regard this custom as an ‘aberration’ in the otherwise great ancient Egyptian civilization? Do we have the right to be judgemental about people who refuse to be drawn into moral courts that we have set up in our wisdom?

Caturvedi Badrinath in his Introduction says that he is not a Sanskrit pandit and apologises for any possible errors in the translations for which he takes full responsibility. He is in good company here, for we have many experts on Ancient India who have no knowledge of Sanskrit. They, however, are far less candid than he is in admitting this. The translations, while they can be improved, are not always the problem, except at times. One instance is the following: on pages 455-458, there is a discussion beginning with, ‘Perhaps for the first time anywhere, it is in the Mahabharata that an argument against capital punishment was advanced.’ It ends with the quoted verse:

vitrasyamanah sukrto na kamad ghnanti duskrtin

sukrtenaiva rajano bhuyistham sasate prajah

which has been translated thus:

The purpose of governance is not to kill the wicked, but to create conditions in which people can be good.

The sentence that appears as translation is a nice instruction but that is not what the verse says. The verse says:

When terrorised, the doers of good do not whimsically kill the doers of evil. The kings rule their subjects only by good acts (and hence should not punish by death whimsically).

This simply says that capital punishment is to be awarded only in the rarest of rare cases: a maxim of contemporary law also. This is hardly an argument against capital punishment. That capital punishment, whimsically awarded, is an evil act by the king for which he must pay is a recurring theme in Indian literature. To quote an example, in the Cilappadhikaram, the famous Tamil epic, the king hastily puts to death Kannaki’s husband believing him to be a thief without full investigation; as a result not only the king but his kingdom as well are destroyed by Kannaki’s curse. You do not need the Mahabharata to argue that capital punishment should be awarded only after all options are exhausted and there is no hope that the culprit will not repeat the crime if released. To give another example, on page 311 the quoted verse

striyastu yad bhaved vittam pitra dattam yudhisthira

brahmanyastaddharet kanya yatha putrastatha hi sa

sa hi putrasama rajan vihita kurunandana

has been translated thus:

In the money and property of a woman inherited from her father, the daughter has a right as the son has, because as the son so the daughter. Daughter is like son – this is the established principle.

But the verse talks about the money given to a woman, not inherited by her. This verse merely says that a woman has full control over stri-dhana, which includes but does not consist entirely of the money given to her by her father. The right of control by a woman over her stri-dhana is repeatedly emphasized by all the dharmasastras, and was part of the law even before the various modifications by the Indian state after independence.

One more example and I stop the enumeration. On page 528, the Yogavasistha verse

jirnam bhinnam slatham ksinam ksubdham ksunnam ksayam gatam

pasyami navavatsarvam tena jivamyanamayah

has been translated thus:

What is worn out, broken, loosened, powerless, disturbed, crushed, or destroyed, consider that a new beginning.

The actual translation is not what the verse says:

What is worn out, broken, loosened, powerless, disturbed, crushed, or destroyed, I regard as only new; and that is how I live disease free.

There is a lot of difference between ‘a new beginning’, which is an optimistic missive to be never defeated, and ‘regarded as new’ which denies that any decay took place. The first version believes in change, the second regards change as hallucination. The Yogavasistha, an extreme text in Vedanta of which even the Advaita scholars are a bit wary, regards change as hallucination; its (no)position is known as ajatavada, the view that ‘nothing ever happens’.

However, as I said above, the translations are not always the problem. The problem is that our scholars in general work on the translations, and not on the text. This helps in directing a text towards one’s desired interpretation.

I consider it important to record explicitly that I defend to the hilt the right of Caturvedi Badrinath to read the Mahabharata as he deems fit and to put this reading in the public sphere. Further, I do not think that any harm is done if his readers agree that the Mahabharata is a document from which a great many values, acceptable to our social planners, can be derived. Having said that, I think there is a real danger that if this kind of reading goes unchallenged, the net outcome will be not that people will read the Mahabharata to get some benefit, but that they will desist from reading the Vedas under the belief that these are merely sets of tricks by charlatans and desist from reading the dharmasastras under the belief that these merely constitute instruments of an oppression chamber.

I hope the time never comes when there is no courage left in us to approach our texts and our people without the blinkers acquired in the nineteenth century. I hope the time never comes when we think that before the Hindu College and Raja Ram Mohan Roy, this country had no means of understanding what we are, were, or will be. But given the increasing dominance of contemporary depaganization drives, one can’t be too sure either.

Let me close with a glimpse of how our people have been reading the Mahabharata by quoting a popular verse:

kaninasya muneh svabandhavavadhuvaidhavyavidhvamsion / naptarah khalu golakasya tanayah kundah svayam pandavah / temi panca samanayoniratayastesam gunotkirtana- / daksayyam sukrtam bhavedavikalam dharmasya suksma gatih

The muni (= Vyasa, the ‘author’ of the Mahabharata) is a child of a premarital union, he defiles the widows of his brothers and thus his grandsons are children of the golakas (= children born out of a union with a paramour to a widow). Out of them, the Pandavas are kundas (= children born out of a union with a paramour to a woman whose husband is still alive). Further, these five Pandavas share a single woman as their bed partner. And yet, by singing their praise (that is, by reading the Mahabharata) imperishable and irreducible good deed is done.

Indeed, the way of the dharma is hard to discern.

Wagish Shukla

Footnotes:

1. The parts that have been given emphasis by me appear in italics.

2. Page 15.

3. Page 530.

4. Our author has given a new twist to this ‘meat and hooch’ argument: on pages 402-403, he ascribes the proverbial anger of the Brahmin to the ‘simmering resentment at being on principle excluded from what he could have had.’

5. Page 491.

6. Page 499.

7. Page 499.

8. Page 591; I have modified the grammar of the translation supplied by the author slightly, but not changed it in any significant way.

9. These words are taken from page 312 but such comments on the dharmasastras occur frequently in the text.

10. Page 396.

11. Page 403.

 

POLITICAL PROCESS IN UTTAR PRADESH: Identity, Economic Reforms and Governance edited by Sudha Pai. Pearson/Longman, Delhi, 2007.

THE just concluded Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), centrestaged state politics as no other election has in recent times. Coming at a time when the presidential elections are due and the choice of a candidate is mired in bizarre calculus, the results of the UP elections have made parties, leaders and experts alike appreciate afresh the importance of a broad-based social alliance, the magic mantra that the Congress seemed to have forgotten since 1989 and no other party could successfully invent for electoral success in India’s political wonderland. The book under review, planned and compiled much before the elections, comes at an appropriate time to answer some of the questions of UP’s and India’s electoral puzzle. Since social coalitions for electoral mobilizations are built around identities, both acquired and ascriptive, formation and assertion of identities is the main focus of analysis.

Arranged in three parts (history, politics since 1989 and the economy) the volume puts the political process in UP under a microscope. It is a significant effort in understanding politics in the state which in 1902 emerged as a colonial politico-administrative construct named the ‘United Provinces of Agra and Oudh’ under British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent and transited to a new name, Uttar Pradesh, in independent India. However, the political importance of the regions put together in this construct remained as important, if not more, as it was during different stages of colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle. Gyanesh Kudaisya’s perceptive analysis of the historical process of emergence of UP as the heartland lists its five overlapping constructions – the colonial, the nationalist, the post-independence, ‘as the power house of the nation’s Muslim project’ and the Sangh Parivar’s construction since the late-1980s. As we leaf through the well-researched articles in the volume, the sixth construction, that of a dalit-led sarvajan project, the one formulated for electoral success by the BSP leader Mayawati, who till 2004 would wage a bitter fight against manuvad, emerges clearly. In packing too much in a sentence, however, Kudaisya has left us with a confusing account of Presidencies and reorganization of states (last but one sentence of paragraph one on page 12).

Vishalakshi Menon’s competent detailing of political mobilization in the 1930s and 1940s and Salil Mishra’s insightful analysis of the politics of coalition must be read together to understand the intertwined dynamics of mobilization and coalition formation and their implications for the contemporary politics in UP and in India. Mishra’s chapter dwells on both social and political dimensions of coalitions and the difficulties faced in building and operationalizing either. A cleavaged, intolerant and unaccommodative approach, as in 1937, proved disastrous in the long run, a lesson that must not be forgotten in the current phase of coalition building as well.

Seven chapters in Part II deal with politics of identity, parties and electoral process. The analyses begin in early 1980s and look at BJP’s majoritarian project based on Hindutva nationalism (Abhay Dubey, Smita Gupta and Badri Narayan Tiwari), Samajwadi Party’s backward caste politics (Anil K. Verma) and dalit politics as represented by the Bahujan Samaj Party (Nicolus Joul, Sudha Pai and Vivek Kumar). Obviously, though it is not stated, the focus is on ‘post-Congress’ politics of the state that remains so crucial to the political destiny of India. Nevertheless, the omission of the Congress in the analysis appears a methodological error. The decline and the virtually wiping out of the still only national party in the country deserved scrutiny, more so because it virtually offered its political space to BJP, SP and BSP to strategically build their political foundations and where for the past some years it has been struggling to regain lost ground, unsuccessfully of course. The question remains whether it will succeed, and if not, why not?

Critical to electoral success in India’s identity-based politics is the mobilization of identities in a social coalition, which needs parties with sound organization and a leadership with vision. In the assessment of the rise and fall of the three parties, each of the three processes – mobilization, organization and leadership – get sufficiently factored in. Dubey and Gupta competently delineate Brahmin disenchantment with the BJP, thereby leading to its decline. Sudha Pai too attributes the realization amongst the Brahmins of Uttar Pradesh that the BJP was a ‘marginalized force’ as their reason for moving away from the party and gravitating towards the BSP. However, the factors for and the timing of the disenchantment still remain unclear. In discussing the backward caste politics Verma has brilliantly dealt with the Samajwadi Party’s predicament and the nature of political transformation in UP since the early 1990s.

The rise of the dalit political identity as a political force and its transformed all-embracing political character remain the core of this significant study, an understanding which stands vindicated by the recent state elections. Joul’s analysis of identity formation and Pai and Kumar’s analytical detailing of political mobilization, are brilliant studies of a leadership which strategized, first the mobilization and then the party’s transformation from ‘bahujan’ to ‘sarvajan’. Kumar, for example, not only captures how the dalit core of the governmental machinery was used by Kanshi Ram and Mayawati in building the party, he quotes BSP president Mayawati, whose electoral calculus nearly two years prior so her famous victory in May 2007 comes across as prophetic.

‘The upper castes will not cast their votes in favour of [the] Bahujan candidate. But Bahujan caste voters should transfer their votes totally in favour of the upper-caste candidates in every constituency where they are contesting on [the] BSP ticket, though in such constituencies the upper castes will not vote en masse for the upper caste candidate contesting on the BSP ticket. But in the process, even if [the] upper-caste BSP candidate get 2 to 3 per cent of the upper caste votes, the BSP as a party can enhance its tally from the present by 50 to 60 seats. This will give the BSP a chance to form a majority government for the full five-year term in the state’ (p. 265).

The third part of the book, equally insightful, which deals with the effects of ‘bad politics’ on the economic development of the state, especially in the reforms era carries two subtexts. First, this dimension is equally crucial to the political process and no party and leader should lose sight of it and, second, these contextual constraints will not disappear overnight just because Mayawati has managed to secure an electoral majority.

This book enhances considerably our understanding of state politics and its criticality for the national politics in India, a strategy which the Congress perfected but decided to forget, costing the party dearly. However, the volume’s leap from 1947 in the first part to the 1990s in the second and the absence of an essay analysing the ‘post-Congress’ Congress in the state remain a major gap. An editorial conclusion linking issues of organization, leadership, recruitment and mobilization in political parties on the one hand and coalitional issues and strategies as appearing in the historical and the contemporary parts and drawing prospective perspective would have added value.

Ajay K. Mehra

 

HEADLINES FROM THE HEARTLAND: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere by Sevanti Ninan. Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2007.

WHENEVER I read a book such as this, I feel elated as well as sad. Elated because of the quality of the research work that has gone into making the book, and sad because the book is not in Hindi. Every year, millions of rupees are spent by the Indian government to ostensibly promote Hindi – the forthcoming international jamboree known as Vishwa Hindi Sammelan (World Hindi Conference) in New York is a case in point. Over the years, the ever-fattening Hindi departments in our universities have become veritable factories for mass production of PhD theses. However, one is yet to see a single worthwhile empirical study of the media revolution that has swept through the Hindi heartland in the post-1947 decades in general, and in the post-liberalisation years in particular. It’s poor consolation that, preceded by two equally excellent books of Australian scholar Robin Jeffrey and Italian researcher Francesca Orsini, at least this study is by an Indian media expert.

The book primarily offers a detailed study of the various processes that have been at work to make a media revolution possible in the Hindi-speaking areas of North India, often derisively called the cow belt. Taking a cue from Orsini who extensively discussed Habermas’ concept of public sphere in the specific context of the Hindi community, Ninan tries to explain how it was re-invented by the so-called regional Hindi newspapers by making direct contact with the neo-literate readers who, as beneficiaries of economic progress, were steadily acquiring purchasing power. Newspapers such as Aj, Jagran, Amar Ujala, Dainik Bhaskar, Prabhat Khabar, Rajasthan Patrika, and Hindustan gradually became multi-edition newspapers and experimented with localization of news, thus offering the a fare which readers could easily relate to. The new emphasis on interacting with the reader prompted some newspapers such as Jagran and Hindustan to even invite their suggestions, reactions and news ideas via SMS. The two-way access – labelled as ‘democratisation of access’ by the author, did not necessarily result in a better media product. In fact, it was often the other way round.

The author brings into sharp relief the paradoxical nature of the growth of Hindi journalism over the past two centuries. When it was in its infancy, Hindi journalism reflected the social, political, literary and cultural concerns of the society. No wonder that their content was of much higher quality. In those days too Hindi newspapers and magazines aimed at making money, but they were not driven by naked forces of market and commerce. Today, the opposite is true. In the name of ‘localisation of news’, nearly all the multi-edition Hindi newspapers trivialize news by cramming their front pages with inconsequential local news items without giving much thought to their relevance.

The strength of this book lies in the rich empirical data that it offers by way of statistics, extensive interviews with newspaper proprietors and media persons working at all levels, consumers of news and advertisers. It underscores the point that much of the media revolution would not have happened had the fat boys of advertising world not turned their gaze to the countryside in the Hindi heartland. Advertisers woke up to the fact that the residents of small towns and villages were slowly and steadily acquiring more and more disposable incomes, implying the making of a vast market. Local editions of Hindi newspapers were ideal sites to advertise their commodities. Thus, advertising revenue played a big role in the phenomenal growth of the Hindi newspaper industry over the past two decades.

One wishes that the author had paid some attention to the way these newspapers minted money while spending very little on news gathering or editorial staff. In most newspapers, no norms were followed in terms of salary structure, division of labour in the news room and upgradation of the staff’s journalistic skills. However, she does mention in some detail the abuse of stringers by newspapers forcing them to spend more time and energy on collecting advertisements rather than on functioning as local reporters. On the basis of interviews with a number of senior journalists as well as proprietors, she comes to the conclusion that this practice is now being abandoned. But this does not square up with the currently prevailing situation. It is common knowledge in media circles that millions of rupees were earned by various Hindi newspapers by virtually selling editorial space for this or that political party or candidate in the recently concluded elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly. Also, the pressure on local stringers to collect advertisements for the newspaper has not appreciably eased.

Political aspirations of newspaper owners, their entry into the Rajya Sabha after serving the interests of a particular political party through their newspaper and thus ingratiating themselves to the political establishment, have also attracted the author’s attention and she has laid bare the process with commendable objectivity. The way newspapers such as Aj, Jagran and Amar Ujala supported the BJP’s communal campaign over the Babri mosque in the early 1990s and violated all norms of journalism has also been discussed. It’s ironical that some of these newspapers have today founded institutes of journalism where they are imparting training to future journalists.

Hindi newspapers do not feel the need to inform their readers about international events. Only Hollywood grabs their attention. National news too is given short shrift. In the zeal to become ‘modern’, they have fashioned a hybrid language that is neither Hindi nor English. The attempt is to use more and more English words on the pretext of liberating the language from the clutches of the purists and making it more colloquial. This trend has caught on and is changing the complexion of the Hindi language. It’s strange because the newspapers are trying to ape the lingo of the hip, young college-going crowd of the metropolis, even as their local editions are trying to cater to a predominantly semi-urban and rural readership. While the author has touched upon this phenomenon, a lot still remains unexplained.

In a book of such high quality, it is intriguing that transliteration of Hindi phrases into the Roman script is often careless. Also, one doesn’t understand why the author believes that ‘Khari Boli literally means pure speech.’ In fact, what it means is ‘rough’ or ‘coarse’ speech which, unlike Braj, Awadhi or Bhojpuri, is not very pleasant to the ear.

Kuldeep Kumar