Books
M.K. GANDHI’S HIND SWARAJ: A Critical Edition
annotated, translated and edited by Suresh Sharma and Tridip Suhrud. Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2010.AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH: A Table of Concordance by Tridip Suhrud. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.
RECENT years have seen an exciting resurgence in Gandhi studies. While the Mahatma’s political positions and their ideological or philosophical underpinnings have continued to attract academic scrutiny, a body of new work has also emerged, marked by its close attention to the texture and detail of Gandhi’s thought and practice. New research on Gandhi’s self-practices in diet, celibacy and medicine, and the finer particulars of his views on religion and ethics, are examples of this. For instance, Akeel Bilgrami’s reflections on Gandhi as philosopher, Leela Gandhi’s research on his early vegetarian initiatives in London, and Ajay Skaria’s inquiry into his conception of the ashram and his thoughts on history – different as they are from each other in important ways – engage with the complex grain of Gandhi’s thinking, writing and life in addressing the more prominent themes.
Gandhi’s critical relationship with modernity has dominated – directly or indirectly – these recent discussions. The more sensitive readers of Gandhi cannot but recognize the impossibility – and the inadvisability – of reducing this relationship to a simple opposition between the traditional and the modern, or between the West and India. Hind Swaraj is perhaps the most striking case in point: Gandhi makes his most scathing criticism of modern civilization in this book, not by invoking Indian thinkers, ancient or contemporary, but by drawing on western critics of modernity, such as Tolstoy, Ruskin or Carpenter. Nonetheless, Hind Swaraj takes as its primary ground the rhythms and practices of everyday life that, for Gandhi, marked India’s difference from the modern western world.
Discussions of Gandhi’s texts – even Hind Swaraj, described by the author as his ‘seed text’ – have often been hampered by an inadequate acknowledgement of the trajectories of their conception, composition and transmission. The text that we know as Hind Swaraj was published in Gujarati under the title Hind Swarajya in the Indian Opinion, the newspaper Gandhi edited in South Africa, in December 1909 and was subsequently issued as a book in Natal the following month. Copies of the book were intercepted on arrival in Bombay on 10 March 1910, and the book was soon proscribed in India for its criticism of British rule in the country. The seizure of the book prompted Gandhi to dictate a hasty paraphrase of the Gujarati original to Hermann Kallenbach, which was published barely ten days later in South Africa under the title Indian Home Rule.
As Gandhi clarified, the English version of Hind Swaraj is not a ‘literal translation’ but a ‘faithful rendering of the original.’ Gandhi took considerable liberties with the original, for example in choosing the word ‘nation’ to convey the sense carried by praja in the original, or in translating dharmishta as ‘true Christian’. There were elisions, and new elaborations. The English rendering was intended as an intervention in a discursive field that was quite different in many respects from the one in which the Gujarati original had made its appearance. Hind Swaraj was revised in 1938 for publication in a special issue of the journal Aryan Path devoted to a discussion of this text. Those revisions were retained in most of the subsequent editions. It was Anthony Parel’s 1997 edition of Hind Swaraj in the series ‘Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics’ that examined the textual integrity of Gandhi’s ‘seed text’ in detail. Parel used the 1910 text as his point of departure, and highlighted some of the most glaring differences between Gandhi’s English rendering and the Gujarati original.
The attractively designed new, critical edition of Hind Swaraj prepared by two eminent scholars of Gandhi – Suresh Sharma and Tridip Suhrud – is a comprehensive volume that takes full cognizance of the life of this text in Gujarati, English and Hindi. Like Parel, Sharma and Suhrud take the 1910 English edition as the base text. However, they place the Gujarati original on par with the English text by annotating all significant departures in Gandhi’s translation and thus drawing attention to the different cognitive and discursive spaces where Gandhi’s most incisive thoughts on modern civilization were articulated. Thoughtfully formulated marginal notes suggest alternative translations to take fuller account of the nuances of Gandhi’s Gujarati. The editors also gloss significant texts, figures and events referred to in Hind Swaraj, and indicate alterations made to the text in later editions. In addition, Sharma and Suhrud have prepared a new and complete Hindi translation, which offers the reader closer proximity to the Gandhi’s Gujarati original by drawing on the historical kinship between words and a textual dynamic that is distinctive to Indian vernaculars.
The editors’ introduction, while taking the reader through the textual history of Hind Swaraj, suggestively raises some of the profound issues that the book places before us today. Gandhi’s attempt here, the editors say, ‘was to take measure of the meaning and worth of the modern impulse from a ground of cognition clear beyond its ambit’ (xiii). In their view, ‘the weave in Hind Swaraj [comprises] two distinct strands: self-sense and sense of the world in India untouched by modern civilisation, and books-discourses in Europe which sought to voice deep unease and anguish against modern civilisation. Perhaps the telling absence in this context concerns India touched and recast by the modern’ (xiii).
Hind Swaraj was his only work that Gandhi translated, and the implications of this travel between languages was far from simple, as the fortunes of the words swaraj, swarajya and ‘home rule’ reveal: ‘The largest number of words and expressions used in Hind Swaraj to represent in English an idea signified by a single word in the original is in reference to swaraj,’ the editors point out. ‘That perhaps speaks of the complex semantic dimensions the word carries and encodes’ (xxiv). Sharma’s and Suhrud’s notes are acutely sensitive to such shades of sense and what they tell us about the spaces of meaning and expression within which the life of Hind Swaraj unfolded.
A separation between life and work or, for that matter, the private and the public, is difficult to maintain in a study of Gandhi’s thought. Biography in his case is central to the textual corpus. Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments With Truth is in that sense a site of convergence of his life and thinking: this autobiographical text brings together a life-narrative and an elaboration of ethical and political thought. This is evident in Gandhi’s famous response to one of his early readers who was perplexed by his decision to undertake the typically western project of writing about one’s life. Gandhi astutely clarified that he was not writing an autobiography, but merely the story of his experiments with truth, but since his life largely comprised such experiments, their story was bound to take the form of an autobiography.
The textual history of Gandhi’s celebrated autobiography, like Hind Swaraj, is complex. The Gujarati original was published serially in Navjivan from 1925 to 1929, and the first four parts were translated into English by Mahadev Desai. The fifth part, with its fifteen chapters, was translated by Pyarelal. The English version was ‘revised by Gandhi for subject-matter and Meera Behn for language’ and published in book form in two volumes, in 1927 and 1929 respectively. A new English edition was published in 1940, which included the thorough revisions suggested by a reader who desired to remain anonymous. The editors of the Collected Writings of Mahatma Gandhi identified S.V. Srinivasa Sastry as this contributor. Tridip Suhrud’s recent publication offers us a table of concordance that lists all the passages in the first English edition that were amended later, the changes suggested by Sastry in each case, and those that were introduced into the English text of 1940.
Most of the changes in the second edition pertained to punctuation. Suhrud details the main areas where Sastry intervened. Mahadev Desai’s propensity to deviate from customary English clause structures and conventions regarding commas was the main cause for correction in most instances. Some sentences were rewritten, and the stylistic feel of the autobiography was made more idiomatic. What we do not know, however, is the precise nature and extent of the changes introduced when the text was translated from the Gujarati original into English. Did these changes involve the central vocabulary of concepts and ideas? What semantic complexities will My Experiments reveal if we were to approach its translated life in the way Sharma and Suhrud have approached Hind Swaraj?
Both these volumes are not just important additions to Gandhi scholarship in our times, they signal a coming of age of Gandhi studies in terms of textual attention. No doubt, the first edition of the Collected Works was an exemplary instance of scholarly sensitivity to textual detail. The second edition, in its print as well as electronic versions, thoughtlessly introduced numerous errors and omissions into this outstanding corpus. Thanks to protests from concerned Gandhi scholars, in which Suhrud played a significant role, the second edition has been withdrawn. Suhrud’s and Sharma’s efforts are not merely directed at ensuring textual fidelity in an empirical sense. Their editorial work touches upon, and intervenes in, crucial intellectual issues in Gandhi scholarship. These hinge on the relations between Gujarati and English as languages and as sites of discursivity.
We know that along with Hind Swaraj, three other texts by Gandhi were banned in 1910. These were Gandhi’s summaries of Ruskin’s Unto This Last, Plato’s Apology and Mustafa Kamal Pasha’s speech. In contrast to these translated works, Hind Swaraj was Gandhi’s first original work in Gujarati. What is it to write an original work of thought in the vernacular, as distinct from English, the language of modern cosmopolitan intelligibility? And that too from South Africa, to be published in a newspaper that had columns in Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil and English? When one translates this original into English, how is the vernacular discursive space, or cognitive space, allowed to interrupt the domain of English? Through what channels within the world of cosmopolitan discourses does it circulate, and what effects does it produce? In what ways does it pluralize the seemingly uniting world of English?
Hind Swaraj and My Experiments are the two major texts in the Gandhian corpus that not merely permit but insist that they be approached with these questions in mind. These issues are not merely the background to a discussion of Gandhi’s thought or its critical relation to modernity: they are central to – in fact, constitutive of – any serious inquiry into Gandhi’s thought. The two significant contributions from Sharma and Suhrud engage these questions by underlining the textual and hermeneutic coordinates of Gandhi’s thought.
Udaya Kumar
IDENTITY POLITICS IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR edited by Rekha Chowdhary. Vitasta Publishing, New Delhi, 2010.
TWENTY contributions in this volume essay identity politics in Jammu and Kashmir, as also across the Line of Control. Coming at a time when the Kashmir Valley is boiling with anger and chanting azadi all over again, this latest contribution deserves serious consideration. It not only raises disturbing questions regarding the constituents of identity, but more how identity creates political communities and shapes their demands for situating them and their ‘autonomy’ in a larger political construct – nation – often times ignoring sub-identities. It also comes at a time when autonomy demands, such as separate statehood for Telangana, are simmering in other parts of the country.
Rekha Chowdhary contextualizes the multifaceted socio-political issues outlining how the peace process in 2002-03 further augmented the ‘sharpening of multiple identity politics’ and ‘triggered claims and counter-claims activating not only various identity politics but also bringing to the centre-stage the question of representation, in a very big manner.’ The Kashmiri identity has been controversial due to its unilinear religious nationalism seeking ‘azadi’ due to the predominance of Islam in the valley, particularly since the controversial mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990. However, the multidimensional contexts of diversity in Jammu and Ladakh, both in the local and larger context of the state, barring a reactive reassertion in the case of the Amarnath Yatra controversy in 2008, have so far been dormant. Her conceptualization hints at a ‘reactive identity’ assertion emerging out of relative regional deprivation, different manifestations of a multilayered minority-majority complex and overlapping identities.
The first section – Identities and Politics in Jammu and Kashmir – has Balraj Puri prescribing ‘multi-plural’ states because ‘non-recognition of regional identities, constitutionally and politically, encourages communal identities’, whereas ‘regional, ethnic and linguistic identities are the most effective cementing force between different religious communities.’ The challenge in the new context for the multiple identities that have coexisted for centuries, according to Riyaz Punjabi, is ‘to reallocate them mainly in their cultural domain’, thereby emphasizing the role of accommodative and assimilative edges of Kashmiri identity.
Attributing the current conflict to the breakdown of the Rosseauvian social contract in the state, Neera Chandhoke argues that ethnic conflict is essentially about who will control power and highlights the institutional weaknesses coming in the way of power sharing and ensuring cultural rights. In the context of the current autonomy demands in various states, she rightly points to the unsustainability of every ethnic group being allowed its ‘own’ state. Gul Mohammad Wani contends that both the historical and current socio-political attributes of ‘Kashmiriyat’ have been unable to resolve the identity questions created by the post-colonial state system. Recurrent questions about the Indian identity of Kashmiri Muslims and the Kashmiri identity of Kashmiri Pandits only serve to muddy the political environment. Incidentally, Mohammad Ishaque Khan supports Wani’s analysis that Kashmiri identity has over time veered closer to a Muslim and Islamic identity.
Rekha Chowdhary, looking into identity in a heterogeneous Jammu region, argues that Hindu-Muslim identities blur due to coexistence and overlap with caste and tribe. The real and perceived ‘neglect’ of Jammu, appropriated historically as well as in the current sensitive situation by the political right – RSS, BJS/BJP and Praja Parishad – has aggravated regionalism, which has been further accentuated by the centrality of Kashmir’s political conflict, in turn reducing the negotiating leeway of the elites with both the state and the Centre. No wonder, obvious low economic indices aggravate sub-regional discontent. Sonam Chosjor illustrates how idyllic Ladakh remains an ignored dimension of the Kashmir discourse.
In section II (Religion, Identities and Inter-community Relations), Rekha Chowdhary argues that though restricted to the valley Muslims, the beginnings of religious undertones in the 1987 election influenced the 1989 eruption, a feature that was magnified by the targeted killings and the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. The Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit dichotomy has served to take this debate further into socio-political and policy realms, particularly the analysis that the tragic events of 1990 have led to an imagined construction of a historical divide by the Pandits, even as the Muslims nurse the grievance that by identifying with the Hindus of ‘India’, the Pandits never supported Kashmiri nationalism. Arguing that Kashmiri nationalism was not intrisically ‘jihadi’, Mohammad Ashraf Wani’s analysis reveals that beginning 1950s onwards, religion-based economic nationalism emerged as jobs began drying up. Yoginder Sikand focuses on socio-cultural and religious syncretism of the Sufi shrines in the Jammu region which create voices that critique both the radical Islamists as well as right-wing Hindu groups.
Ravinderjit Kaur argues that though the Chittisinghpura and Mehjoornagar (2001) incidents have bruised the psyche of a minuscule and invisible minority, the Sikhs, their decision to stay on in the valley after the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits was appreciated by the locals and separatists alike. Analysing the emerging consciousness amongst the Jammu Muslims (not part of the valley agitation), Lalit Gupta explores their distinct identity in the state and in the region that has witnessed the rise of Hindu rightist politics in response to separatist and autonomist demands in the valley.
In Section III (Exodus and Identity Politics of Kashmiri Pandits) Shyam Kaul, Pramathesh Raina and Badri Raina bring out the millions of paradoxes that are packed in the history, society and current politics of the Kashmiri Pandit community, each paradox also being a part of the history, society and current politics of the valley. There are two significant aspects of the discourse here under the current situation. First, can the Pandits go back and, if so, would they be accepted by their Muslim brethren in the valley remains a dilemma. Second, what about their desire to be back in any case, reflected in the proposal by Pramathesh Raina to set up a village for them.
Krishna Misri, Anuradha Basin Jamwal, Vibhooti Ubbott and P.S. Verma analyse ‘Identity Politics of Women and Dalits’ in section IV. The first three essays focus on womanhood and gendered identity in a region in turmoil for six decades, particularly the past two decades. Misri analyses their difficult existence in terror-torn and militarized situations, both of which pry on the perceived soft existence of womanhood. Jamwal almost complements Misri’s arguments: ‘Gender identity in Jammu and Kashmir, however, continues to play a subservient role to the larger political identity based on caste, religion and regional divides.’ On the Amarnath conflict, Ubbott concludes that women came out openly for the Amarnath issue, but not for their own gender concerns, as has usually been assumed for women in such situations worldwide. Verma’s essay on Dalit politics shows why they do not enjoy an autonomous status in a state where they are concentrated in small pockets.
Finally, Ershad Mahmud’s comprehensive discussion on ‘Socio-Political Reality of Pakistan Administered Kashmir’ brings in a significant perspective generally missing in discussions on Jammu and Kashmir. Because of considerable outmigration, which has created a remittance economy, even though PoK is not really ‘integrated’ into the Pakistan polity, its politics has been unable to carve out an autonomous space.
This gives rise to some very fascinating research questions. What might have happened had Jammu and Kashmir not been divided and disputed in the manner in which it has been? From the discordant voices in the Kashmir valley in India, to the ‘Kashmir’ across the border, the political echoes from the Raisina Hill in Delhi and the power architecture in Islamabad – all refer to the dispute of J&K, even though the focus is only on issues of the Kashmir valley. This has blinkered our perspectives on identities and their politico-institutional arrangement in the state. Obviously, the increasing Islamic mobilization of a Kashmiri identity demanding azadi ignores the multiple identities in the state. A state-based identity is unlikely to be forged with mobilization based on a singular or even dual ethnic marker. The security based policy perspective, so favoured by Delhi, remains far too myopic to respond to anything but a political crisis. The troubling question, just how many different identities can a state in India easily contain and manage, remains unresolved.
The different essays lay bare the diversity of the ‘state’, which like elsewhere, is more a political than a natural construct. It also reveals the politically slender nature of the ‘dispute’ when seen from the perspective of the myriad people that inhabit the regions of Jammu, Rajouri, Poonch, Kargil, Kashmir, Ladakh, Mirpur, Gilgit or the Northern Areas. Indeed, the under-development of each of these areas, barring smaller pockets housing the officialdom, remains the only consistent reality, though the figures of fund transfers from New Delhi to Srinagar might perhaps suggest otherwise. Yet, underdevelopment is the least discussed of the issues in the ‘dispute’ and the many voices of Jammu-Kashmir (the only hyphenated state in India). Naturally, for the people to take a position on the ‘dispute’, whether with a singular or integrated identity, is difficult. No wonder, despite the considerable deployment of state energy and resources, we have yet to witness meaningful social transformation. Another intriguing question that this book, in particular Mahmud’s article, throws up – What would happen if ‘Azad’ Kashmir too directs the chant of azadi in tandem with the people of the Kashmir valley to the Government of Pakistan?
Ajay K. Mehra
KNOWING DIL DAS: Stories of a Himalayan Hunter by Joseph S. Alter. Penguin Books (Indian edition), New Delhi, 2010.
AT first glance, this book is simply the story of Dil Das – a hunter – and his recollections of various hunting expeditions mainly in the 1960s and ’70s. But to a more attentive reader, it could well be the story of a man who sought to redefine his identity and on terms of his choosing. Paradoxically, it is the fact that he does not quite succeed that provides the impetus for the book in the first place and gives it an air of poignancy that indisputably places it in a zone well beyond the usual, hearty shikar stories. Dil Das was by birth a poor auji dudwalla from the village of Pathreni in the Garhwal region, but it was his identity as a hunter that was meaningful to him and one that he emphasized and clung on to in his declining years, even after his hunting companions had all gone their separate ways.
The larger part of the book deals with Dil Das’ own narration of hunting trips to various places in the Himalayas in search of game such as kakar, ghoral, tiger, leopard, ducks, pheasants and partridges. The details embedded in these accounts create vivid images of the land and lifestyle while underscoring the fact that these belong to the past: Kalij pheasants hiding in the grass in a village near Mussoorie, pillows made of home-cured kakar hide, people being rushed to hospital in a tin tub strung up on a pole, and milk sold for Rs 2.50 a litre from cans plugged with a bit of wood and a twist of leaves. As a sort of counterpoint to Dil Das’ anecdotes is the voice of Joseph Alter. Alter is one of the many young American boys from missionary families, students of Woodstock School in nearby Landour, who began their forays into the forest with Dil Das. He eventually trains as an anthropologist and out of ethnographic interest – the reasons for which he elaborates in the preface and first chapter – he records Dil Das’ accounts and later prunes them into this book (first published in 2000).
In the first anecdote, Dil Das begins by saying, ‘I didn’t even know which gun was which.’ And then he and Ray Smith proceed to shoot an unidentified animal: they think that it is a barasingha or leopard and after shooting it, discover that ‘…this thing we had shot had stripes!’ This creates quite a stir and Dil Das makes a quick transition: ‘…from that day onward I was a hunter.’ He learns rapidly from Campbell sahib, whom he refers to as his guru, and his extraordinarily sharp eyes make him both, a renowned hunter and a skilful guide. As Alter vividly describes, Dil Das once ‘…began to talk my eyes into the right place.’ As his prowess and confidence increase, Dil Das’ opinion of the forest guards in the region correspondingly drops and one must admit that they seem to do very little to redeem themselves. At one point, with all the authority of a pahari, he dismisses a guard as ‘…a mere government servant, a peon’ because he can ‘…walk on cliffs that the forest guard cannot go.’
In addition to the many white hunters in the area, he also guides nawabs, governmental bigwigs and once, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In one memorable episode, reminiscent of the Saki masterpiece ‘Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger’, he and John Coapman literally rig a leopard shoot for an aged conservator. However, it is the former group whom he considers his friends: they companionably share home-brewed liquor, meat from the hunts, and guns and ammunition, though tellingly, they remain up to the end sahibs. As Alter observes, it is only when Coapman, a significant character in Dil Das’ life, finally leaves Landour that Dil Das realizes that he does not control the terms of intimacy with these people since they come and go as they please and hence it remains an unequal friendship.
Despite all the male-bonding and inherent machismo of shikar, it is evident that Dil Das has a softer side; for instance, he is considerate of his young daughter and lets her play her childhood games instead of doing household chores even when her mother is ill, and when recounting his last wife’s struggle with cancer and her death, his pain is obvious.
Throughout the book, Alter’s entries into the text give the narrative not only a context but also a binary form, switching as it does between Dil Das’ voice and his own. His reflections on Dil Das’ life touch on a gamut of issues and reveal the strong influence of both, his upbringing and academic background: colonizer versus subaltern; missionary versus peasant; high caste versus low; well-off versus poor; diasporic versus rooted. These are examined within the time frame of the three odd decades that span Alter’s introduction to Dil Das until the latter’s death in 1986, but many of the issues these binaries highlight remain unresolved and therefore, make his ambivalence both understandable and relevant to ongoing debates about the nature of power, culture, authorship, identity, interactions and so on. Another thorny issue he ruminates on is the morality of this sort of postcolonial/evangelistic/ethnographic encounter; that it might well damage the people who are its focus and whom it seeks ‘to save’. His discussion on the political economy of milk production and consumption in the region is particularly interesting and captures the deeper social inequalities that he is sensitive to, the crux being those who produce the milk often cannot afford to consume any of it themselves.
But the starkest contrast is provided by the attitudes of the narrators: where Dil Das seems to cherish hunting for the opportunities it provides in terms of identity, confidence, friendship and a sense of purpose (to the extent of refusing to discuss the part of his life spent as a dudwalla), Alter is most uneasy about the encounter of cultures that it represents, the impact it had on Dil Das and the implications for his own sense of identity; he even refers to himself ‘as an anthropologist with an incriminating past.’ Ironically, it is precisely this soul-searching from his perspective that threatens to overshadow Dil Das’ own telling at several junctures. Try as Dil Das might, neither life nor narrative quite follows the course he envisions; the subaltern’s narrative never manages to achieve subversion and therein lies its poignancy.
Barring minor editorial slip-ups (‘…bares some affinity’) and inconsistent use of italics, this book is a well-written, thoughtful account that is both about and by an unusual hunter. Considering that the number of pages totals up to less than 200, it is admirable that Alter has managed to interweave Dil Das’ narrative with such a broad range of issues. Moreover, the index at the end of the book makes it easy for the reader to go back to specific topics or anecdotes of interest. This book forms an illuminating contrast to another shikar classic of the same region – Jim Corbett’s The Man-Eaters of Kumaon – and will appeal to an equally large audience, not least because it can be read in such different ways, from a straightforward shikar story to a personal account of hybrid history.
Madhuri Ramesh
