Books

A HISTORY OF BANGLADESH by Willem van Schendel. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009.

BANGLADESH AND PAKISTAN: Flirting With Failure in South Asia by William B. Milam. Columbia University Press, New York, 2009.

THE ROAD MAP TO DEMOCRACY: An Analytical View on Bangladesh by Jahangir Kabir. Palok Publishers, Dhaka, 2009.

BANGLADESH ELECTION 2008 AND BEYOND by A.T. Rafiqur Rahman. University Press, Dhaka, 2008.

ONE could credibly argue that English language literature on Bangladesh suffers from thematic disequilibrium. While there is an abundance of books on development, books on political matters, or even general introductions or histories, are few and far between, rarely exceeding one or two per year from international publishers. Most of the books on Bangladesh written for a general audience, such as James Novak’s delightful Bangladesh: Reflections on the Water, artfully composed and brimful with insights, lack the scholarly objectivity and scientific aspiration needed to satisfy the appetites of serious scholars, or function as readings in classrooms.

That is why one is extremely happy to see the publication by Cambridge University Press of a new, well-researched and nicely crafted general history of Bangladesh. The book, simply entitled A History of Bangladesh, is written by Willem van Schendel, Professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam and will function as an enlightening introduction to Bangladesh for the general reader as well as to university students.

Van Schendel explores the history of Bangladesh in a linear chronological narrative, leading from the geological origins of the Bengal delta, over the emergence of urban centres around the 5th century BCE, to the Mughals and the modern era. He describes how, throughout its history, the delta has functioned as a crossroads integrated into networks of trade, pilgrimage, politics and cultural flows, as well as a port to the world for the people living in the Gangetic plains. Having established dominance in Bengal through the battle of Plassey in 1757, the British used the province as a staging ground for their gradual incorporation of the subcontinent into the British Empire, exposing it to a mixed set of administrative reforms while maintaining much of the Mughal administrative legacy, such as the zamindari system.

The division of Bengal in 1905, widely regarded as an attempt by the British to quell anti-colonialist movements in the province, ironically functioned to strengthen anti-colonialist forces all across India. It also, Van Schendel argues, underlined religious identities and established ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ as clear-cut political categories. Bengal played a central role in this development: the Muslim League was founded in Dhaka in 1906 and became a leading force in the movement for a Muslim homeland, realized after Partition in 1947.

Crippled by geographic separation, the loss of administrative centres, and the challenge of formulating a new national identity, the ‘experiment in state-making’ that was Pakistan proved troublesome. Already from the start, there were signs of tension between the two wings, including the insistence of the West Pakistani leadership that Urdu be the national language, which upset the sensibilities of the Bengalis and spurred the Language Movement of the early 1950s, one of the forerunners of the Bangladeshi independence struggle and a focal point for national identity politics to this day.

Van Schendel explains how the continuation of economic disparity between the two halves, West Pakistani high-handedness, repression, and a number of symbolic friction points, proved a fertile political soil for leaders supporting greater autonomy for East Pakistan. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League capitalized on the mood of the people in presenting his Six-Point Programme, which initially demanded a confederate structure but would gradually evolve into an outright demand for Bangladeshi sovereignty.

About half the book is devoted to the period after 1971, the year in which Bangladesh gained independence after a nine month long war against Pakistan, in which crucial assistance was offered by intervening Indian forces. The war won, the new Bangladeshi leaders were challenged to build a new state and deliver economic development, which they attempted with mixed results, sowing disappointment among the wider population. Van Schendel argues, quite conventionally, that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been ‘far more effective as an opposition leader than he was as a statesman’ and that he failed to establish a state administration independent of his personal leadership.

Van Schendel’s account is naturally highly selective. Apart from a general historical overview, it contains a number of forays into special themes, such as a chapter devoted to an analysis of the roots of aid dependence, and another to a sociologically oriented account of the rise, in the decades after 1947, of a new cultural elite in the eastern delta. While these chapters are schematic and somewhat arbitrarily chosen, they throw light on important aspects of the Bangladeshi experience and add valuable nuances to an introduction of this type.

Of these thematic chapters, the most absorbing, aptly named ‘Bursting at the seams’, is devoted to a discussion of demographic and environmental stress factors that continue to test Bangladesh. Van Schendel describes how Bangladesh is strained to the breaking point under the confluent pressures of rapid population growth, degradation of the biosphere, rapid urbanisation and, obvious to anyone who has experienced the country’s recurring power outages, an evolving energy crisis. Bangladesh is about the same size as Greece, but has more people than Japan or Russia. With more than 1,000 persons per square kilometre, it is by far the most densely populated country in the world, putting extreme strains on space and resources. Likewise, domestic migration challenges infrastructure and creates urbanisation at a pace that planners continuously fail to keep up with. At the birth of Bangladesh, Dhaka had one million inhabitants. Today, at least 15 million people crowd the streets of the burgeoning capital, a number expected to rise to 24 million by 2025, making the city one of the world’s largest. Despite impressive growth in agricultural productivity and decreasing fertility rates, Bangladesh is likely to face a Malthusian challenge of formidable proportions.

The author also writes interestingly about the formulation of a national identity to underpin the process of state formation. He argues that the first generation of leaders, who had mixed popular Bengali customs with the ways of the bhodrolok (gentlefolk) were gradually replaced by ‘mofussilisation’, the culture of the nouveau riche of the industrial class, making the street-smart hoodlum, the mastan, a new cultural hero, articulated through pop culture and emerging as key political players from the 1980s. Political parties have often relied on the mastan to organize mass gatherings and generate funds through extortion and other corrupt practices. Over time, Van Schendel implies, this informal level of governance came dangerously close to replacing the whole state apparatus.

Van Schendel does not spend enough time on the political climate of the last ten to twenty years, but offers an interesting discussion of the rise of the military as power brokers in Bangladesh politics, manifested in the string of military governments that ran the country between 1975 and 1990. Van Schendel argues that the army has ‘continued to loom as the life- or-death-dispensing power behind the throne of successive civilian governments.’ He finds the explanation of this in the Pakistani influence and Punjabi customs, which ‘bequeathed its martial traditions to the Bangladesh state.’ That the army has retained its willingness to play the role of arbiters in state affairs became all the more clear in January 2007 when, amongst a high-tension electoral campaign lined with violence and protest, the military intervened to install a new civilian caretaker government, which went on to push through an ambitious agenda of electoral and governance reform, leading up to the elections of December 2008.

However, reading William B. Milam’s Bangladesh and Pakistan: Flirting with Failure in South Asia, one understands that there are clear differences between the military in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Milam, a former American Ambassador to Bangladesh (1990-93) and Pakistan (1998-2001), has authored what he labels an ‘interpretative book’, in effect a comparative history of the two countries since their independence, garnished with many personal anecdotes. The book makes a useful addition to the analytical literature of the two countries and will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in recent events in South Asia.

Drawing parallels and delineating differences between Bangladesh and Pakistan, Milam focuses on a number of motifs, such as the role of religion, and how it has influenced politics and interacted with culture in the two countries. He traces the processes of Islamisation under state patronage, where political leaders from both countries have entered into ‘Faustian bargains’ with religious parties, gradually eroding the secular-nationalist visions of the founding leaders. While both countries have seen expansion of jihadism in recent decades, the problem is much worse for Pakistan, Milam argues. There is little evidence that militant Islam has much support among the wider population in Bangladesh, he claims, mainly on account of the syncretic and liberal versions of Islam that have been dominant in Bengal.

Overall, Milam is much more hopeful about the prospects for Bangladesh. While he describes Pakistan as a Praetorian state, where the military has become the dominant political force, he argues that the military in Bangladesh has shown greater aversion to the direct exercise of political power, as exemplified by its unwillingness to support the dictator Ershad in 1990 and its voluntary relinquishing of power in December 2008. Elsewhere, Milam has argued that Bangladesh ‘can be the model for the Pakistan army to reduce its involvement in the politics of the country.’

Hence, the ‘failure’ referred to in the book’s title is more likely, and more dangerous, for Pakistan than for Bangladesh. Still, Milam worries that Bangladesh may return to the type of dysfunctional governance and ‘poisonous, zero-sum, political culture’ that has characterised the country in the last decades. Democracy, Milam writes, ‘requires more than hope’; it requires ‘a history of deep institutions, such as a judiciary, that protect and enhance democratic structures, and a culture of openness and tolerance that promotes democratic give and take.’

A similar message is at the centre of Jahangir Kabir’s book, The Road Map to Democracy, a caustic treatise published a few months after the December 2008 parliamentary election. Focusing on Bangladesh’s attempt at nation building and democratization after 1971, Kabir, a retired military officer, writes with the moral fervour of a truth teller, sprinting around his topics with great energy, and offers biting characterisations of a degraded political class. Unfortunately, his argument is blunted by linguistic deficiencies and a disjointed composition, making his book more of a tossed salad of thoughts and impressions than the ‘analytical view’ it professes to be.

Nevertheless, he does not diverge far from other observers when he claims that democracy has been, at least up to the 2008 election, a ‘vote buying orgy once in five years’, where politicians ‘behave like royalties’, and black money, violence and corruption rule the day. According to Kabir, politicians have primarily been interested in enriching themselves, causing a credibility crisis, a loss of faith in the politicians and in the bureaucracy, not the least in the eyes of the army. His analysis of the troublesome civil-military relationship, although patchy, is one of the greatest values of the book, leaving one with the impression that very few politicians in South Asia command the respect of the armed forces.

Kabir’s vision is to restore a government that is truly representative of the people. He argues that the centralization of power in Dhaka, and among the political class, is a major explanation to the political instability in Bangladesh. The suggested solution is quite conventional, namely to ‘ensure utilization of political power with adequate checks and balances’, which means decentralization of governance into a three-tiered system, with democratic representation at the local, regional and national levels.

While policy-makers should probably not look to Kabir for the details of reforms, they can from his text learn a lesson about the urgency of change. For a more detailed treatment on reforms, they should look elsewhere, including to a text authored by A.T. Rafiqur Rahman, Bangladesh Election 2008 and Beyond, which contains a number of relevant proposals. Rahman, a Professor of Public Administration at City University of New York with wide experience of national and international administration, recognizes many of the problems identified by Kabir and Van Schendel, choosing, however, to focus on how one could address them.

Noting the ambiguous constitutional status of the 2007-2008 caretaker government, as well as some of its policy blunders, Rahman supports most of its reform priorities and argues that most of the population saw it as a ‘positive force’. He lays out a forceful argument for institutional reform to build a sustainable democracy and for continuing the reform agenda of the caretaker government. He rightly prioritizes the Parliament, which needs to become an effective arena for national politics, including through strengthening rules and regulations for committees, shortening the grace period for absence (which have been misused in the past), and improving the understanding of the role of parliament among politicians.

Another key reform highlighted by Rahman is strengthening democratic structures inside the political parties, currently operating on dynastic and oligarchic principles, heavily centralized around the person of the party leader, with very little influence from lower levels and grassroots in policy-making and appointments. This is an obstacle for democratic consolidation in Bangladesh and one can only hope that the current government listens to Rahman’s advice of increasing democratic inclusion, ‘to ensure that party does not transform itself into a family and dynastic affair or a preserve of a small coterie, out of touch with its workers and supporters.’

Rahman’s idea of ‘compact ministries’ is also attractive, i.e. halving the number of ministries from today’s 40 to 20. Reducing the girth of Bangladesh’s bureaucracy, in particular at the top, appears like a justified prescription, given that Japan, a country of comparable population, has only 14 ministries.

It is clear to the reader of the above books, especially the two coming out of Bangladesh, that there is among the academic community, as well as among representatives of the military class, a deep sense of disappointment with how the political system has so far evolved in Bangladesh. This disappointment is wedded to a strong wish to see it change into something healthier, to reform the governance system of Bangladesh and build a stronger democracy. Rahman rightly thinks that no such change will come ‘unless political culture is changed to align our values and practices with our political behaviour and actions’, a claim that finds resonance in the reformist thrust of Kabir’s book and is corroborated by the analyses of Van Schendel and Milam.

Now, changing political culture is not an easy task. There is no quick technical fix, even if institutional reforms may help, over time, to push things in the right direction. Reading the above authors, one understands that addressing the root conflicts in society, whether based in class, religion or identity, demands not only an institutional framework, but also leadership – on the part of politicians and other members of the elite – of a kind that Bangladesh is still waiting for.

Magnus Lundgren

 

JINNAH: India-Partition-Independence by Jaswant Singh. Rupa and Co., Delhi, 2009.

WHEN, after five years of research on Pakistan’s founding father, political-practitioner-cum-author, Jaswant Singh, unveiled the English and Hindi editions of his imposing new work, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence – political pundits in Delhi and Islamabad were caught unaware. Few of those present at the book launch ceremony at the auditorium of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library could have envisaged that the cycle of chain reactions triggered off by this occasion would result in something more than the proverbial midsummer storm in a South Asian tea cup.

Hours before the book launch, party mandarins were ensconced behind closed doors at the BJP headquarters, even as their counterparts across the divide in the Congress Party had already begun attacking the content of the volume – long before they could possibly have read through the 600-odd pages of the book. With amateur historiography at full flood within the hierarchy of the BJP, and with the shock expulsion of one of its venerated founders from the ranks, the party machine soon drew first blood. It was left for Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi from the BJP western stronghold to deliver the executioner’s blow with missionary zeal and impose a ban on the sale of the book.

Looked at in retrospect, the BJP had acted in indecent haste, trampling over even the minimal vestiges of freedom of expression the party should have been committed to in a functioning democracy. The entrenched hierarchy unceremoniously ejected Jaswant Singh from the party without providing him even a formalistic opportunity to answer the charges. In nearby Pakistan too, an intense debate started within hours of the release of the book. Somewhat predictably, a lunatic fringe there triumphantly paraded their trump question to a bewildered public: Had the Hindu right-wing unveiled a new conspiracy to puncture the wobbly chassis of a post Sharam-al-Shiekh entente cordiale? That Jaswant Singh was a victim and not the perpetrator of the current controversy was an irony totally lost upon Pakistan’s right-wing, as a new re-examination of the alternative courses open to Jinnah in 1947 fuelled a new-found interest within the country he founded.

There has been no shortage of historians in the 20th century to plead the cause of Pakistan’s founder. Hector Bolitho, Hormasji Seervai, Stanley Wolpert and Ayesha Jalal are prominent, along with a host of lesser known chroniclers. Over the last 60 years, Jinnah’s life has been painstakingly recreated in Pakistan (with close to the kind of reverence that Soviet historians were wont to reserve for the founder of their republic, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin). At the formidable Archives for the Freedom Movement in Islamabad, the task of collating several thousand Jinnah papers fell until recently to the lot of the late Dr. Zawar Zaidi (formerly of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London), who had only recently released the 14th (and by no means the final) volume in an ongoing project for the Jinnah Papers. This collection takes as its starting point of reference the periodisation of Jinnah’s five decade long career as earlier laid out by the dean of Jinnah historians in Pakistan, Professor Sharif-al-Mujahid. It is this logical periodisation which Jaswant Singh too appears have followed closely in his political biography, as he traces the early years of Jinnah’s career in the Indian National Congress.

Jinnah emerged as a rising star on the stage of Indian nationalist politics, as Sarojini Naidu had then described in her oft-quoted phrase, ‘India’s leading ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.’ His subsequent and somewhat rapid retreat from the centre-stage of nationalist politics at the height of a charismatic political career, and a decade spent in the political wilderness thereafter, are reflective of the failure of his attempts to forge a consensus between the leaderships of both the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League on a mutually acceptable package of constitutional safeguards for Muslims. These, if successful, may have laid the foundations for a future undivided India.

As the unchallenged heir to the liberal and anti-imperialist traditions of the Congress left-group that had dominated nationalist politics from the third quarter of the 19th century to the eve of the First World War, Jinnah was the standard-bearer of a revered political dispensation that included nationalist giants such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. But the standard bearer was to grow increasingly disenchanted with the collapse of the euphoria that followed the Lucknow Pact of 1916 between the Congress and the Muslim League. Nor was Jinnah’s eclectic secularism enthused when Gandhi returned from South Africa to a hero’s welcome in India and unleashed a qualitatively new kind of momentum in mass movement politics. Jinnah firmly believed that this movement was rooted in a quasi spiritualism endowed richly with rhetoric and metaphor (dare one add substance) of an unacceptable Hindu revivalism.

Equally distasteful to Naoroji’s heir was the preoccupation at this point in time of the nationalist segment of the Muslim polity (with Gandhi’s unbridled blessing) to actively engage with a Khilafat based pan-Islamism. All this led Jinnah to scorn this new-found cause as a wholly inappropriate diversion from the task of squarely confronting the central and often conflicting dilemmas that challenged the goal of a united nationalist platform. While Gandhian charisma and a nascent, factionalised Muslim bourgeoisie, coalesced to promote a new climate of pan-Islamic folly, Jinnah vigorously resisted any attempt to demonstrate a meaningful solidarity with his co-religionists in the Khilafat movement, whom he construed as having embarked upon a hopeless odyssey to reignite the dying embers of a doomed Caliphate. Jaswant negotiates the hazardous contours of this terrain with an eye for meticulous historical detail, treating the subject with a refined candour virtually alien to the communalist historian in the region.

The 1920s were years in the political wilderness for Jinnah. At the end of this decade, sunk in a period of deep personal mourning following the demise of his estranged but beloved wife, Ruttie Petit Jinnah, he recognised the near collapse of his much acclaimed ambassadorship of Hindu-Muslim unity. As Jaswant Singh compellingly demonstrates, viewed in retrospect the 1928 Nehru Report was the final nail in the coffin of an increasingly sterile Lucknow Pact that Jinnah had so triumphantly and skilfully engineered to bring about, and in which, he believed, lay the foundations of a durable concordat between Hindus and Muslims on a Congress-based unity platform.

The lukewarm support lent by the Muslim League leadership to Jinnah’s aborted unity platform during this period in the wilderness further eliminated any prospects for his much vaunted ambassadorship. By the end of this period, Hindu-Muslim unity appeared to be an unreachable dream atop a very distant horizon. Put simply, Jinnah now needed to evolve a new strategy to combat a new situation. This strategy, as it emerged over the next few years, focused on a new role for Jinnah to achieve the elusive goal of unity by pursuing an entirely different route. The new role was that of a self-appointed ‘sole spokesman’ for the Muslims of undivided India, a spokesman who would mobilize India’s Muslims in lending their unqualified support for the introduction of a viable package of constitutional safeguards against the future possibilities inherent in a ‘brute’ majority rule by Hindus (class analysts would substitute ‘Hindus’ with an ‘Hindu elite’).

Jinnah sincerely believed that facilitating a measured transition to a joint Congress-League stewardship of India by adopting this new route was the only way forward, although he gradually came to realize that it was a path strewn with many inherent dangers. As Jaswant points out, a major pitfall lay in the role of India’s British rulers in Delhi and Westminster who, in the drift towards 1947, missed no trick in keeping India’s Hindus and Muslims apart. In this alone lay the guarantee for a continued rule by the British in India, though as the celebrated Pakistani-born historian Ayesha Jalal points out, there was initially very little evidence that this new strategy was at all working.

Prior to the 1940 Resolution there appeared scant evidence to demonstrate that Jinnah had advanced significantly towards the achievement of his goals by the adoption of the sole spokesmanship strategy. A cursory reference to the composition of Muslim members in the provincial legislatures in India’s Muslim-majority provinces in 1940 would indicate that Jinnah’s revitalised League was a relatively minor political force, and its leader a very limited spokesman indeed for India’s Muslims, far less being the only one. Contrast this with a fully developed situation in 1945, by when Jinnah had single-handedly managed to virtually demolish the claim of the Indian National Congress to speak for any Muslim of great import (except perhaps for a few remaining stalwarts in the Congress such as Maulana Azad, and a sprinkling of Muslim groups sympathetic to the Congress such as Ghaffar Khan’s Red Shirt movement in the NWFP).

Jaswant analyses the relevance of the sole spokesman factor on the eve of Partition and concludes that the bagging of an incredible 99% of the urban Muslim vote in the United Provinces when viewed alongside the significant progress in cornering the Muslim vote in the Muslim majority provinces (Punjab was to come his way a year later in 1946), together indicates the success with which Jinnah had mobilized the Muslims of India on a unified platform. It is a tribute to Jinnah’s political sagacity that he was able to galvanize India’s Muslims into a contending force in order to achieve the much wanted safeguards – and in doing so he had also sustained, with remarkable virtuosity, the momentum in the League’s drive to demonstrate a significantly bolstered negotiating strength for his position.

Looked at this way, it makes some sense for contemporary observers to view Jinnah’s escalating demand for Pakistan as a historic negotiating tactic that promised the eventual creation of a grouping of Muslim majority states on India’s eastern and western flanks as a self evident, if not ill-thought out, fallback position for the Muslims to bend the intransigence of the Congress leadership on the issue of a weighted Muslim representation. But the necessity of yielding to a reasonable power-sharing formula with inbuilt constitutional safeguards for India’s large minority of Muslims was to develop into a series of political demands that were deemed unacceptable by the Congress leadership in any form – Pakistan or no Pakistan – more so if this leadership viewed such demands as merely ‘a historic negotiating tactic.’ Once Jinnah announced his agreement to an Indian federation in 1946, the subsequent rejection of the Cabinet Mission Plan ironically left him with no recourse except the fallback position. But we seem to be moving ahead of the Jaswant Singh narrative. It seems sufficient at this point of the argument to state that the sole spokesmanship of Jinnah finally resulted in a strategy that was to pave the way for the eventual dismemberment of India.

This dissection and elaborate reflection on Jinnah’s failed quest for unity stands at the heart of Jaswant Singh’s volume. Describing with minute precision the intricate criss-crossing of the conflicting factors that constrained the pronouncements and policy twists of the Congress and League leaderships, the political animal within Jaswant Singh negotiates with consummate skill and potent historical reflection the hazards of the pre-Partition terrain in Indian politics and the many micro-tensions that confronted this period of turmoil. If at all Jaswant has any preconceived ideas on this matter, they arise primarily from a determined desire to reject the grossly oversimplified, black and white analytical parameters that have to date dominated the tradition of national historiography on both sides of the divide.

Jaswant seeks to replace this oversimplification with a more painfully reasoned analysis, one presented in many hued shades of various grey. Were his critics in Congress and the BJP to point out that Jaswant hardly accords the same importance or depth in his elaborate historical construct to analyse the motivation and constraints of senior Congress leadership, his honest reply would be that this volume essentially focuses on the role of Jinnah and not primarily on that of the other actors in this momentous event. Their actions bear analyses only to the extent that Gandhi, Nehru and Patel were able to elicit either a modification or a new turn in Jinnah’s political strategy or thinking. What is perhaps closer to the truth is that Jaswant Singh believes that a partition could in the final analysis have been avoided if only both the Congress and League leadership had adopted swift counterstrategies for damage containment in that a continuing unity for India could have helped avoid the consequential tragedy that India’s peoples, especially its Muslims, would have to face.

If Ayesha Jalal is the pioneer of the powerful analytical concepts that had earlier defined Jinnah’s role as the sole spokesman, then Jaswant Singh’s work should be rightfully considered as the leading mechanism for communicating the consequences of this policy to larger South Asian audiences. All this makes more sense when you add to Jaswant Singh’s two volumes in English and Hindi, the upcoming Bengali edition of the book to be released in October and an Urdu edition which is scheduled for release in Pakistan in December. The many-pronged contours of Jaswant’s multilingual crusade to communicate a better understanding of the role of Pakistan’s founder – warts and all – in the partition of South Asia thus emerge with greater clarity.

In order to achieve this end, Jaswant attempts to remove many of the popular misconceptions as also reinforce many of the self-evident half truths of this era, thus creating grounds for possible and gradual reconciliation of two heavily polarized and contending schools of nationalist historiography in South Asia. But his singular attempt to tread a middle of the road path with balance and moderation has managed to enrage both the Congress and the BJP in India, and induce the polemic of a new right-wing revisionist reaction that is likely to come up in the near political future in Pakistan. Jaswant’s desire to effect a gradual healing of the wounds inflicted by the partition of the subcontinent seems to have found few initial takers in the established hierarchy in India and is similarly likely to be subjected to a revisionist posture by members of Pakistan’s academic community in the near future. Where the final balance will rest in this matter is anybody’s guess.

While describing the events that cover the last 12 months towards Partition, Jaswant scrutinizes with remarkable lucidity the anatomy of the final break – the somewhat inexplicable torpedoing of the fateful Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 which Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah had all initially given their assent to. It is this plan for an Indian Federation that Nehru subsequently rose to reject in a press interview soon afterwards. I am in agreement with Nehru biographer M.J. Akbar’s contention, made at Jaswant’s book launch that Nehru could not possibly have acted alone. Neither Gandhi nor Patel, in fact no Congress leader of any stature, contradicted the contents of Jawaharlal’s subsequent interview when the storm arose, the inference being that the decision to torpedo the plan arose through a collective consensus of the senior Congress leadership.

If the Cabinet Mission Plan seemed unworkable and unacceptable to the Congress leadership, so too should have been the eventual dismemberment of a united India. When Jinnah called for direct action in a conflict-ridden Kolkata, where violence had already been sporadically breaking out, it marked the final death-knell to the realization of his dream of constructing a single united platform to govern India’s Muslims and Hindus. The rejection of the Cabinet Mission Plan marks the emergence of an uncontrollable and irreversible drift towards the partition of India one year later. Much more thought needs to be expended on the final turning point on which hinges the vilification of the Congress and the League leaderships by subsequent communal historiography. The opportunity had been irretrievably lost and the consequences for the future of South Asia had exacted a heavy toll in the march of our subsequent contemporary history.

Jaswant Singh marks the passing away of prospects for unity in the last century with an inherent sadness. In his historic 11th August 1947 address in Karachi before the Constituent Assembly of the new state of Pakistan, Jinnah appears forceful but sad, as he echoes memories of that lost dream: ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques…Any religion or caste or creed has nothing to do with the business of the State.’

But the business of the state had indeed changed in Pakistan. The Provincial Information Officer of the Government of Pakistan neatly snipped off those very portions of Jinnah’s unequivocal statement on the freedom of worship and on religious tolerance that were so crucial to Jinnah’s essential vision; a vision that had been stoked and nurtured in the crucible of a fire lit by Naoroji, Mehta and Gokhale.

What Jinnah said in the 11 August 1947 address was dear to his heart. The battle for constitutional safeguards for the Muslims was now over by the creation of a Muslim majority state of Pakistan. Religion was not to be a primary focus or even a matter concerning the business of the state. In the new Pakistan, each citizen, whether Muslim, Hindu or Christian, was to be given his due place. But the clock of history is not so easily reversed. The new arrangement of Jinnah’s ideology, rephrased at first timidly by the Provincial Information Officer, would be subject to heavy rewriting and indeed eventual reversal, to bring it more closely in line with the nascent ideology of Pakistan’s newly emerging coalition of interests – opportunistic politicians, religious obscurantist and a resilient warrior class; a rainbow coalition that would gradually usurp Jinnah’s newly founded state and effect its eventual dismemberment a mere 24 years later.

Jinnah’s speech of 11 August 1947 was thus the last hurrah for India’s leading ambassador of unity. Barely a year later he would be dead and the power-brokers who took over the management of his legacy would succeed in dismantling almost every vestige of his founding ideology. That the leadership of the Indian National Congress in their intransigence – however willing or unwilling – became supreme collaborators in the realization of this historical irony makes the ensuing tragedy of Partition even more poignant, if one were to attempt to paraphrase Jaswant’s reasoning somewhat freely.

In his political biography Jaswant Singh brilliantly dissects Jinnah’s central dilemma and produces over 525 pages of carefully reasoned commentary and reflections – all this occasionally punctuated by a niggling pedestrian preoccupation with a sprinkling of the more outlandish do’s and don’ts from both sides of the historical divide in South Asia. But this happens only very occasionally. In large measure, the candour and honesty of the self-appointed chronicler shines through as Jaswant prepares to unveil his careful, moderate construct of Jinnah’s role in the making of twentieth century South Asian history. In doing this, Jaswant neither castigates Patel, as claimed by the newly emergent mandarins of popular BJP historiography, nor does he stoop to vilify Gandhi or Nehru, as declaimed by some of the wilder Congress enthusiasts. There is indeed no evidence for the allegation that Jaswant holds Patel responsible for the eventual destruction of the autonomy of the princely states, which his popular critics allege Jaswant was sympathetic to – in a spin of the ever-present allegation of caste politics, a popular weapon to damn opponents in India’s political arena.

To be fair, Jaswant can be strongly critical of Jinnah as when he describes the Jinnah-Gandhi talks. The honesty of his narrative clearly reflects an ailing Jinnah’s exasperation and indeed intransigence with Gandhi’s views. Jaswant’s impartiality is further emphasized when he delivers the ironic coup de grace in recounting what he believes to be the central paradox of Pakistan’s creation in 1947 by virtue of ‘the two nation theory’. The evolution of two splintered wings of Pakistan at Partition, with an almost equally large number of Muslims abandoned within the boundaries of the remaining Indian state, causes Jaswant to conclude (somewhat harshly but by no means unfairly) that Pakistan’s creation by Jinnah led to a virtual abdication of responsibility for the fate of India’s remaining Muslims who had voted for the League and were now left behind in political isolation in the midst of a formidable Hindu majority concentration.

Nobody should pretend that Jaswant’s book is an authoritative or entirely unique chronicle of the historical events of Partition; nor is it the final, definitive biography on the life of Jinnah. Indeed, the book could be better described as an anthology of consistent historical reflection on the events of Partition, but with the added advantage of hindsight allowing us to evaluate the unintended (some might violently disagree, as some might say ‘portended’ instead) consequences of partition. Above all, He the historian is candid, honest and fair. Jaswant Singh covets no award for literary work or even merit an undue recognition as a master historian in writing this book. Throughout his narrative, he remains committed to an endless search for the elusive truths contained within the enigma of Partition. As a consequence of his effort, rapid translations of the book in several South Asian languages are being made available in the near future. As a piece of communication strategy, Jaswant’s book is brilliant. As a means of narrating history, it essentially confines itself to being a sustained reflection on the complexities and consequences of events that occurred in the mid-twentieth century, which has led him to devise an honest historical construct that seeks to answer fundamental questions which preoccupy our minds sixty odd years later: Was the Partition of India necessary or even inevitable? Or was the decision indeed desirable?

Clearly Jaswant has not sought for himself the accolade of a giant among historians, but what is true is that he has made a gigantic stride forward in reconciling many conflicting historical realities in a fair and impartial manner. With a healing hand and in a spirit of South Asian reconciliation, he has attempted (and I believe successfully) to initiate a new historical construct, more plausible, balanced and certainly more tolerant than what many fellow historians have towards a personality like Jinnah, who has invariably been vilified, if not outrightly demonized, in India. If Ayesha Jalal is the more remarkable Jinnah historian, Jaswant is clearly the more versatile and significant mass communicator. His volumes on Jinnah in their multilingual editions will open the way for a more informed and a fairer discourse on the history of 1947.

More than any of the other contending perspectives on Partition, Jaswant Singh’s book has already begun the task it set itself to permanently change the way mainstream Indians and even Pakistanis view Jinnah’s historical legacy in the future. That in itself is no mean achievement. If this had been accomplished with a measure of mud-slinging and vilification heaped upon the person of Jaswant Singh, this is but an indication of the stature of many of his most venomous critics, who range from invective hurling political red-necks to self-righteous intellectual pygmies. If consequently, Jaswant Singh emerges as humane, candid and above all overwhelmingly fair, this is a telling comment on the diminutive stature of his hardest detractors.

Hameed Haroon

 

THE CLASH OF CHRONOLOGIES: Ancient India in the Modern World by Thomas R. Trautmann. Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2009.

Thomas R. Trautmann’s The Clash of Chronologies: Ancient India in the Modern World brings together essays published elsewhere into the convenient confines of a paperback. The essays in the collection vary considerably: from keynote addresses to textbook introductions, from encyclopaedic surveys to more specific concerns. They replicate the conversational rhythms of a well-loved teacher as he steps easily and gracefully between past and present, East and West, anthropology and history, Sanskrit and Tamil.

The book is divided into six sections, reflecting the preoccupations of a lifetime of scholarship. ‘Time and History’ has essays examining ancient Indian systems of chronology as well as the impact of the Darwinian revolution upon conceptions of time. ‘Kinship and Marriage’ studies both India’s centrality in framing the discourse on kinship, while also providing an introduction to specific Indian structures of kinship. ‘Languages and Nations’ looks at the role played by colonial language politics in constructing ideas of language, race and nation. ‘Orientalists and Orientalism’ spans diverse themes: from the continuing imperatives of mapping space and time to differences between missionary and orientalist histories. The last section, ‘Structures of Rule’ offers two essays on long-term political structures of ancient India which sit uncomfortably in the collection as a whole.

For most of these essays, colonialism provides the framing narrative. Studies of colonial knowledge production, Trautmann argues repeatedly, need to be grounded in empirical work which examines ‘the kinds of knowledge which were brought to the colonial situation, from both parties to the colonial relation’ (p. 108). In doing so, not only the archive but also a sense of the problematic expands. As against grand formations of ‘self’ and the ‘other’, the project of colonial knowledge appears multiple and varied and within colonialism, the intellectual histories of various civilization meet and conjoin.

Such an analysis finds application in his study of the ‘Madras School of Orientalism’. Trautmann has done much to recover histories of Orientalism beyond Fort St. William and what he dubs the ‘Calcutta consensus’. The grand and tragic figure in this narrative remains Francis Whyte Ellis, the Collector of Madras ‘who died at age 41 in South India, but lived long enough to publish a spectacular proof of the Dravidian language family.’ Ellis worked to set up the College of Fort St. George with a board of pandits and munshis teaching South Indian languages to incoming civil servants. For a brief, incandescent moment until his untimely death, the college appears as a centre of ‘conversation’ between two intellectual discourses, two ways of viewing the world.

This discussion spills over into two important essays – ‘Hullabaloo over Telugu’ and ‘Dr. Johnson and the Pandits’ – focusing on the controversy surrounding the publication of a Telugu grammar by an Englishman named William Brown. A committee of experts rejected Brown’s book, based in part on the comments of a pandit from Madras, B. Sankaraiah. In response, Brown hit back, bolstering his position with the arguments of another pandit, Purushottam of Masulipatnam. These arguments between three Englishman (all called William!) and two pandits are interpreted by Trautmann as ‘a wonderful record of British-Indian conversations about language’ (p. 98). The idea of ‘colonialism as conversation’ occurs repeatedly, even to the extent of describing colonial knowledge as a ‘dialogic formation’ (p. 110).

But the fact is that such ‘conversations’ were not conducted in neutral terrain. Colonialism is no simple two-way relationship: regardless of their inputs, the Indians held subordinate positions in intellectual and imperial hierarchies. Those involved in such debates are invariably the pandits or ‘scholarly classes’. But when and how does the pandit or maulvi become the representative ‘Indian’? Rather, one could see the knowledges produced by the Orientalism as framed by the encounter between two elites. The languages and traditions framed as normative by colonialism were those of Brahmanical patriarchy: they weeded out dialects and suppressed the voices of women and lower castes. There are also serious problems with labelling Orientalist knowledge ‘dialogic’ when we know how its framing narratives were used by communal, casteist and chauvinist political forces.

Throughout the book, themes occur and reappear, overlap and feed into each other. Trautmann is unabashedly an advocate of structural connections and his training as an anthropologist leads him to discuss categories such as kinship systems and language families which do not normally appear in overviews of history. In doing so, he provides an indication, however briefly, of the myriad possibilities of subcontinental histories and the underlying structures which continue over time.

This allegiance to structures, to the ‘deep past’, reminds one of Braudel. In this, Trautmann is quite exceptional, for historians have been quick to dismiss Braudel’s conception of time without understanding it in the least. For Braudel, history as social science was fundamentally concerned with duree, referring not to time per se, but to length of time or duration. The relationship between societies and structures constitutes the longue duree, making for patterns of change extending over long periods of time.

Trautmann’s interest in structures extends to ideas as well. So much so that the project of many of these essays is to construct an intellectual history in the longue duree. This is a history of ideas not in terms of ‘Kuhnian paradigm shifts or Foucauldian transformation… but on the contrary, as a project of the longue duree…’ (pp. 94-95). Thus, he argues, our notions of geography were first framed by Ptolemy in Roman Egypt; our notions of linear chronology by Eusebius, the Bishop of Constantine; our notions of comparative anthropology by Biblical histories of the spread of nations. Colonialism did not frame these discourses; it only built upon them.

While the idea of knowledge as an aggregate built up through ‘vast, largely anonymous and collective efforts’ is a compelling one, the problem of the gaze still remains. Thus, while discussing James Rennell’s ‘Map of Hindoostan’ (1785), drawn after the British conquest of Bengal, Trautmann speaks of how ‘in some sense, India is just an occasion for Rennell, and his project was framed long ago in Alexandria’ (p. 172). But does not such a perspective consign histories of India to be perpetually framed ‘from the outside, looking in’?

The problem with such an argument is that it also risks defining ancient Indian history as a series of gaps and lacks. For instance, in the debate on ‘ancient Indian historical consciousness’, Trautmann shows that the argument that ‘rude nations’ like India lack history arose because Orientalist scholars were grounded in Christian notions of time. But ultimately, he argues the ‘deficiency’ of histories in ancient India can be explained by the ‘intellectual formation’ of the time. Further, ‘the ancient Indian sciences, viewed globally, show as their negative side a relative inattention to history, biography, geography, mapping and the like, and as their positive side a strong preference for a kind of timeless, placeless conceptualising with a search for durable types that are taken to be normative’ (p. 51). The problem with such an argument is that it risks repeating the narratives of western triumphalism that Trautmann himself decries. There is also a problem with proclaiming a global view of history so long as the perspective remains steadfastly a European one.

To what extent does ancient India actually intervene in these essays? The answer is ‘very little’. The overriding frames of reference are colonial, and the examples taken from the ancient past are few and far between. The understanding of culture is framed in terms of texts, more specifically Brahmanical ones. For instance, the ‘Indian’ sense of time appears as a monolith and is reduced to the Brahmanical conception of yugas, kalpas etc. The existence of alternative, secular forms of recording such as the regnal years seen in inscriptions is bypassed in the discussion. Even the ‘modern world’ of these essays rarely extends beyond the colonial period. While both language politics and personal law are subjects of discussion for the colonial period, their contested histories in the troublesome present do not intervene to complicate the picture.

These problems arise because there seems to be a mismatch between what the title and introduction proclaim the book to be about and what this book actually seems to be about. It is strange that while the underlying themes of most chapters have to do with structural continuities, the title speaks of the ‘clash of chronologies’, a theme not central to the book as a whole. Perhaps Trautmann would have been better off with a simpler title like ‘Collected Essays’. A few printer’s devils seem to have crept in such as ‘sruitsul’ for fruitful (p.xviii) and modem for modern (p. 11) which can be corrected in subsequent editions. Taken as a whole, this book is more than the sum of its individual parts.

Trautmann’s work deserves to be read again and again for his understanding of the structural continuities that link cultures across time. As he puts it, in a wonderfully evocative sentence: ‘The past lives in the present; and it does so not only in negative ways, as ghosts and wounds that do not heal, but positively, actively, through our thoughts and actions, through our iterations of words, concepts, ancient inventions and ways of doing things, forms of reckoning and forms of eating, in short, forms of being in the world’ (p. xv). Here the past is neither reinvention nor a simple parallel, but is instead something deeper and more fundamental to the way we live our lives.

Meera Visvanathan