Books
12 RULES FOR LIFE: An Antidote to Chaos
by Jordan B. Peterson. Penguin Allen Lane, London, 2018.Dukkha, a Sanskrit term that translates roughly to ‘pain’ or ‘unease’ in English, was the word used by the Buddha to describe one of the basic conditions of our human existence – to be in a perpetual state of want and incompleteness. The word is thought to derive from prehistoric Indo-Aryan terminology for a ‘bad axle-hole’ (du = ‘bad’ + kha = ‘opening’). Bad, because the axle-hole was not properly centred in the middle of the wheel, resulting in a misalignment that led not only to a bumpy ride, but also to a violent and destructive grinding that with each grating revolution corroded the integrity of the overall structure from the inside out.
It’s no surprise, then, that we often refer to life as a grind, against forces mostly out of our control, whether they be biological, social, or even metaphysical. Escape, or at least, relief, from this inherent condition of existential grinding, by bringing the proverbial axle-hole to the centre, was the principle aim of the Buddha’s ancient teachings. Psychologist turned popular internet guru Jordan Peterson purports a similar aim in his recent self-help manual, 12 Rules for Life.
The work comes at the tail end of Peterson’s recent and meteoric rise to public prominence and serves as an accessible general introduction to the ideas that have garnered him some attention lately. The text is, by his own admission, a distilled recapitulation of his only earlier book, Maps of Meaning (1999), an academic work that broadly explored the nature and function of ‘meaning’ in human societies. 12 Rules for Life serves to emphasize the ethical takeaways from this earlier work and though it differs in its simplified self-help format that, like its precursor, it offers a similar blend of evolutionary psychology, exegetical readings of myths and scripture, and political musings coupled with anecdata from Peterson’s personal and professional life.
The rules themselves are hardly new or disagreeable and range from conventional – Rule 8. Tell the truth; or, at least, don’t lie – to paternalistic – Rule 6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world – all the way to actually pretty good advice – Rule 4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today – Rule 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient) – And though there are a dozen individual rules, a close reading reveals them all to be variations on three more reductive ethical principles: (i) Take personal responsibility for your life and its conditions; (ii) Establish clear higher order values and goals; and (iii) Learn to delay gratification in order to pursue these values and goals.
The platitudinous gloss of this sound age-old wisdom, though, is decidedly the least interesting and engaging dimension of the work. The beating heart of the book and the engine of its best-selling cogency pulses deeper underneath, within Peterson’s underlying conceptual commitments and throughout his slick rhetorical style.
One big idea developed in the book is Peterson’s conjecture that dominance hierarchies, such as those that stratify our human societies along the various dimensions of class, wealth, race, sex, etc., are not artificial social constructs, but in fact, deeply embedded and permanent biological fixtures that organize all complex life in general. This heavy-handed speculation is readily presented as fact and
substantiated by a few loose lines of argumentation.Early on, in Rule 1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back, Peterson claims that dominance hierarchies necessarily form whenever there is competition for resources between individuals and forwards a broad evolutionary argument that proposes dominance hierarchies were naturally selected for when complex life evolved 350 MYA because they were in some way a ‘fit’ organizational structure.
Later, in Rule 11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding, Peterson makes a curious socio-psychological argument for the supposed permanence of hierarchies. He argues that, because hierarchies facilitate the social competition that gives our individual lives a type of meaning, if we were to dismantle them for the sake of ‘absolute equality’ it would result in the elimination of meaning and value altogether, leaving, he writes, ‘nothing worth living for’, suggesting that hierarchies are in some necessary way linked to the generation of all ‘meaning and value in life’.
Peterson moves on to acknowledge that the unfortunate result of hierarchical social organization is a skewed distribution where a few individuals accumulate disproportionately large shares of resources while the remaining majority get less and less, but ultimately only to ask the reader to accept this stark ‘difference in outcome’ as the price that needs to be paid for having something ‘worth living for’.
These misunderstandings of a well defined scientific concept such as ‘fitness’ in biology and the hasty presumptions of relations between phenomena as necessary where no such causal connections have been demonstrated are emblematic of Peterson’s broader relationship with scientific conscientiousness and empirical data throughout the work.
Frequently, a conjectural claim is laid down as a scientific truth and then scaffolded with a disparate selection of decontextualized empirical data. The claim, blended together in this way with the varied data, then seems to paint a rationally coherent and empirically consistent picture of the matter at hand. This rhetorical approach is undeniably convincing to any rationally inclined person who lacks the scientific training to critically examine the cited data in its original contexts of use and research. The empirical data viewed in these particular contexts, and in relation to other contradictory data in the same field of study, often reveals the larger scientific picture to be much fuzzier and certainly less capable of demonstrating the broad, conjectural, and non-falsifiable claims Peterson often misrepresents as self-evident scientific truths.
The sub-titular ‘Antidote to Chaos’ is revealed in Rule 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient) which can be considered the culmination of the book’s ethical thesis. Peterson explains that when we find for ourselves a higher-order good, some value to place at the top of our own personal moral framework, our lives begin to orient themselves towards something beyond the mere and immediate gratifications of the day. This commitment to the pursuit of a clear higher-order good results in a top-down reframing of what exactly we consider valuable or important in our lives.
This reframing makes intelligible for us a new ‘Way’, or potential life trajectory, to follow. This way forward not only takes us to a better place, but in the process of taking it, we generate meaning in our lives by striking a new balance between chaos and order, one more harmonious than the last. This process-generated meaning is the antidote to chaos.
To his credit, Peterson states his own higher order good as contributing to ‘the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering’ in the world, and when he discusses the experience of this suffering that we all endure at one point or another in our lives, he does so compassionately and thoughtfully. His inside view of what it is to be human – to be caught up in the chaos of the world – reflects an acute understanding of individual behavioural problems and is expressed with a sincerity that leaves little doubt of his dedication to the project of helping people improve their lives. It is the combination of this gripping existential relatability in his communication and the seeming empirical coherency of his thought that makes Peterson’s ethical discoursing so compelling to so many listeners.
Perhaps, then the irresponsible and selective use of science to forward decidedly unscientific notions can be overlooked, for it is in service of the greater, nobler, task of galvanizing individuals to better themselves. But even then, there still remains a looming contradiction between Peterson’s prescriptions for the individual and those for society at large that begins to cast a shadow of a doubt on his own stated higher-order good.
Although the ‘Way’ forward to a more meaningful and harmonious balance in life is prescribed for the individual, when it comes to discussions of social and political progress, there are explicit warnings against activism and change that seeks to augment existing cultural and institutional frameworks, since this risks releasing, he writes, ‘unimaginable monsters’ that ‘lurk behind the walls’ which have been ‘provided so wisely by our ancestors’.
Intensifying this dissonance is the complete silence on structural forms of violence in society (which surely perpetuate individual suffering) throughout the work. This conspicuous silence considered alongside Peterson’s own stated higher-order good of alleviating ‘unnecessary suffering’, darkly suggests that he believes this suffering of the disenfranchised is in some way necessary.
There is an undeniable usefulness to Peterson’s basic behavioural advice, and though it is communicated persuasively, the repeated interjections of regressive social polemics attempting to normalize economic and structural inequities make for a jarring read. This resulting incongruity coupled with the dubious use of scientific language and data unfortunately renders the book little more than an exercise in re-articulating age-old wisdoms – and moreover, cashing in on a charged and divisive political climate.
There are indeed many individuals in need of a proverbial sword and shield to fight off their demons and Peterson fervently seeks to provide them with these implements, but his primitive fear of the proverbial monsters that lurk beyond our walls blinds him to the grating presence of those that have remained within their confines ever since they were first constructed.
Safee Ali
Writer, Toronto
THE UNDOING DANCE by Srividya Natarajan. Juggernaut, Delhi, 2018.
AS far as controversies go, the devadasi and the debates about her history continue unresolved more than seven decades after an act to prevent the dedication of girls and women to temples was passed. The tradition is centuries old. Almost every significant temple in southern India has a sthalapurana that serves to legitimize the courtesan’s connection to both the deity and the royal patron who endowed the temple. Srividya Natarajan’s The Undoing Dance, a tale of several generations of devadasis, also begins with such a legend – manufactured, the book goes on to tell us, to lend legitimacy to the king, not just the courtesan. Her fictional history spanning three generations of the last of this devadasi family promises to afford a glimpse into lives that are otherwise lost.
Whatever the social epistemology of the local legends might be, the debate over what the very term ‘devadasi’ represents is still fresh. In January 2018, a well known Tamil poet was in trouble for referring to a research paper that described Andal, a 12th century woman saint poet as a ‘devadasi who died in Srirangam’. He had to subsequently retract and clarify that ‘devadasi’ means a ‘female servant of god’ and not ‘prostitute’. Andal is the only woman among the twelve Alwars – Vaishnava poets of Tamil literature. The conservatives were offended that a saint-poet was called a devadasi, and those who were sympathetic to the devadasi were justifiably irritated by the poet’s apology. But why is it impossible that Andal could have been a devadasi?
The devadasi was not just an artist – a dancer, a singer and perhaps a poet. She also clearly represented an expression of sexuality regulated through social, cultural, religious as well as economic strictures of her time. Her story has been both glorified and vilified. I draw on this recent episode to speak of the relevance of Natarajan’s historical fiction.
In her telling, Natarajan helps to re-entrench those lines already drawn. Those sympathetic to the cause of the hereditary caste practitioners of music and dance will find in The Undoing Dance exactly what they are looking for. Those who unhesitatingly believe in the hoary tradition of Bharata in ‘bharatanatyam’, will see nothing wrong in the sanitizing of the form as it moved to a ‘middle brow’ proscenium. Fiction has the power to bring history alive, to do more than elucidate history’s theories. The Undoing Dance perhaps could have made more of fiction’s possibilities.
The Undoing Dance is a book about many things: the turn of the century plight of the Isai Vellalar community to which the devadasis belong, the Brahminical hold over the cultural life of Madras and the edging out of hereditary practitioners. It is also about the crude transformation of ‘tradition’ and craft to serve the ‘pure vanity’ reproduced in the industrialization of the art of dancing and the fervour of nation building with which modernity recast the art and the lives of its practitioners. The author chooses her narrative voice carefully, speaking through several characters whose lives weave in and out of the central narrative of the devadasis’ fate around the time of independence. It speaks elegiacally of the sudden twists in the lives of these women whose identity, caste, profession, livelihood, sexuality and more fundamentally, their art were all faced with an impending and permanent loss.
It is through Rayaji, the last of these traditional practitioners and her generation, that Natarajan voices the fullness of both lament and hope. In the early part of the last century, while Victorian and Hindu ‘puritans’ alike both pity and denigrate the devadasi, Rayaji sees some of her community ‘leave the fold’ to join the reformists. Her daughter Kalyani marries a Brahmin man to escape her past and thus enters the puritanical world of brahminical orthodoxy that regulates both the art and private lives with the same exigencies. Hema, her husband’s daughter, Padmasini the upper caste dancer, Vijaya the Brahmin mother-in-law, Balan her husband, are all characters we know, partly predictable and wholly real.
Natarajan’s writing is the most lyrical when she describes the dance rather than when she speaks for the dancer. One gets a sense of what it means to ‘move like light on a river’, to improvise ‘like a poet full of drink’, of what goes into the making of the dance. Her metaphorical richness slips a little when she moves into the skin of the character. When the pressure of propriety demands that Kalyani give up dancing, the image of amputees with phantom limbs somehow seems less evocative. The natural resonance is lost when the characters are made to speak in the voice of their tropes. For instance, when devadasis describe themselves as ‘fertility walking on two legs’, or when the rigid Brahmin orthodoxy of Kalyani’s mother-in-law Vijaya marks itself through bitter four letter expletives, it is the trope that speaks, not so much the character in the narrative.
The concerns of history and the threads of the story seem to stand apart from each other in the tapestry that Natarajan tries to weave of love, betrayal, art, loss and transformation. It is a well told tale of lives entangled in their love or revulsion for an art form whose instrument is the woman’s body, an instrument on which desires both public and private play themselves out through history. One wishes perhaps that The Undoing Dance spoke more of the instrument, the dance, the form and its power. The dance is memory and Natarajan describes its transmission – from one inscribed body to the next – through minor glimpses in her narrative. A bent iron bar in a window, a girl’s waist bound in red cloth, thighs burning after every class, learning the steps, doing the ‘abhinayam without a mistake’. Isn’t there more to it? Why can’t the Brahmin girls dance like the devadasis? Why do they ‘act’ when the devadasis can ‘enact’? What is the knowledge the dancer holds in her body? No insights on these questions arose as I reached the end of The Undoing Dance.
I read The Music Room by Namita Devidayal nearly ten years ago. Fragments from her description of what her music is and what it meant to her teacher, how that music held together through generations and through history, still remain with me. I wanted to read a book like The Music Room, about dance. I wish I could say this was that book. I wish The Undoing Dance had been about the dance and not just about the dancer’s social being. What is lost in the telling of Natarajan’s tale is the interiority of the dancer, the possibility of a vocabulary of what a dancer ‘sees’, ‘creates’ in her mind and how her body evokes that truth. Perhaps that is asking for more than what is possible. Perhaps dance is inherently more ‘social’, a dancer’s interiority more public than private.
There is no doubt that the erasure of the history of the devadasi needs to be looked at with a new lens. Somewhere in the mists of time where the origins of this dance are buried, there are many legends and elegies of the women and men who practiced it, shaped it and gave it life.
Natarajan draws the line in her narrative clearly and with a zeal that is at times the undoing of the fictional form within which she has chosen to critique this rather important and controversial history. Intelligent and witty writer that she is, she might have done better to allow the voices of her characters to speak in a voice more natural than the imposed tone that they sometimes adopt. It is clear who the targets are, and whose side the author is on. Where one voice could speak through many, it speaks instead for them. In a fictional telling, that is something better left to the reader. The truth that fiction speaks is also partly held in what it conceals.
Aparna Uppaluri
Dancer; works on gender justice at the Ford Foundation, Delhi
EMERGENCY CHRONICLES: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point by Gyan Prakash. Hamish Hamilton, London/Penguin Viking, Delhi, 2018.
Gyan Prakash, who teaches history at Princeton, is perhaps the first professionally trained historian to write an account of the Emergency. Most previous descriptions of those fateful months when democracy stopped in India have been by well informed journalists or politicians. The expectations from this book are, therefore, different: in the blend between narrative and analysis, the stuff of good history writing, the balance, the expectation is, should tilt towards analysis or the narrative should be so deep and deft that an analysis should emerge from the retelling.
Prakash begins his book in dramatic fashion with a vivid description of a little known but telling episode of the Emergency to which he was an eyewitness. So was I since as Prakash’s contemporary at Jawaharlal Nehru University I was present on campus and watched the drama being enacted from the windows of the university library. This is the abduction of Prabir Purkayastha from the campus on 25 September 1975. Prabir, as we all knew, was an activist of the Student Federation of India, the student front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). JNU was a small campus those days and all of us knew Prabir as a quiet and thoughtful young man, who unlike many of his comrades on campus, was very well read. He was picked up from the campus on the mistaken notion that he was D.P. Tripathi, a very important leader of the SFI, second only to Prakash Karat, who later rose to become the general secretary of the CPI(M). The immediate reason for this kidnapping was an altercation that Tripathi had had with Maneka Gandhi (wife of Sanjay) earlier that morning. Prabir had been present when this had taken place. Maneka had threatened punitive action and within a few hours the abduction took place.
This incident, as Prakash notes, was typical of what was going on during the Emergency which had been imposed at the end of June. It exhibited the arbitrary use of state power, the whims of the Gandhi family, especially the ruthlessness of Sanjay Gandhi, the collusion of bureaucrats and also on occasions their craven incompetence. The abduction is the scene-setter. Prakash writes, ‘Indira [Gandhi] did not concoct the Emergency regime out of ether; nor did Prabir Purkayastha’s daylight abduction from JNU come out of nowhere. Historical forces with roots in the past and implications for the future were at work in the extraordinary turn of events of 1975-77. They signalled a twist in the functioning of the postcolonial state she had inherited from her father and his associates in the national movement’ (italics mine).
The italicized words in the quotation above are what distinguishes Prakash’s book from previous accounts of the Emergency. The tendency is to see the Emergency as a fallout of a series of conjunctural happenings – the Allahabad High Court judgement, the JP movement, the railway strike and so on. The analytical focus of Prakash’s book is to locate the Emergency in certain structural contradictions embedded in the Indian polity.
Prakash situates these contradictions in the Constitution which has embedded within it a tension between the freedoms of a sovereign people and the priorities of the state. The former created spaces and opportunities for social and economic transformations for and by the people, while the latter wanted to confine such movements within the parameters of law and order, security and state-making. The first pertained to the people; the second to administrators and governance. This tension was somewhat inevitable in a new republic born out of a long mass struggle which was eager to avoid what Ambedkar in his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly memorably called the ‘grammar of anarchy’. The challenge was to maintain ‘a fine balance’ – Prakash’s phrase – between these two facets of the Constitution. The balance held under India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru only to be seriously ruptured under his daughter Indira Gandhi.
The latter inherited an India plagued by severe food shortages when India lived, according to a quip by Amartya Sen, from ‘ship to mouth’ and of tumultuous social discontent. In the first general election under her premiership, the Congress suffered major setbacks in many provinces. To win back the popular vote and to consolidate her power, Indira Gandhi in the late 1960s pursued a policy of left populism. Within the Congress, she broke from the traditional leadership and in policy making she nationalized banks, abolished privy purses of princes and nurtured the friendship of Soviet Russia. In all this she was advised and guided by her principal secretary, P.N. Haksar who was supported by some ex-communists, among them Mohan Kumaramangalam and Ashok Mitra. It is now clear from the biography of P.N. Haksar by Jairam Ramesh, which is based on Haksar’s papers (Intertwined Lives: P.N. Haksar and Indira Gandhi) that PNH (as Haksar was often called) set about centralizing power and policy making in the prime minister’s office and began meddling with the bureaucracy and the judiciary.
The raison d’ etre for all this was to facilitate and hasten India’s social and economic transformation. Garibi hatao was the slogan that won back popularity for Indira Gandhi. Jairam Ramesh’s narrative makes it clear that Haksar and his cronies with the blessings of Indira Gandhi were bypassing the processes of democratic decision making and building a cult around her. The liberation of Bangladesh only further consolidated Indira Gandhi’s position. Haksar was perhaps unaware that he was putting in place the scaffolding for the Emergency of which he, ironically, was to be a victim. He had successfully tilted the balance in favour of governance and the state albeit in the name of social and economic transformation of the people.
In economic terms, Indira Gandhi paid the price of populism through rising prices and the consequent social discontent (the JP movement was one manifestation of this); in political and constitutional terms there were challenges to her arbitrary use and concentration of power (the Allahabad High Court judgment was one fallout of this). Running out of options and ill-advised, she suspended democracy through the imposition of an emergency. The excuse was that against ‘disorder’ the country had to be governed and administered. One of the facets of the Constitution had been taken to its logical and extreme limit.
Prakash is very good in providing the long context of the Emergency. But there is one question to which his book does not provide an adequate answer. Why did Indira Gandhi turn against the left? One convenient answer was that she was entrapped by her younger son Sanjay, who it is believed had some kind of ‘hold’ on her and it was he who called the shots during the Emergency and he was virulently anti-left. Till someone unravels what this ‘hold’ was, this kind of explanation is deeply unsatisfactory. Jairam Ramesh’s book suggests that Indira Gandhi had felt let-down by Haksar – by 1973-74 she no longer trusted him or thought of him as being competent. She began to move out of the shadow of her leftism. She was more interested in power than in socio-economic transformation of the people. Sanjay Gandhi with his views was a convenient hammer with which to clobber the left. The son did not use the mother: the mother used the son. Or perhaps it was symbiotic.
Following Prakash’s analysis it is possible to argue that the tension he locates in the Constitution remains and this makes it possible for India to be governed through a process in which democracy is perpetually fragile and an undeclared emergency an ominous and perennial possibility.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
Chancellor and Professor of History, Ashoka University, Sonipat
IRAN: A Modern History by Abbas Amanat. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2017.
AN impressive number of books over the last four decades has considerably changed our understanding of modern and contemporary Iran. But this understanding has been slow to take shape and have an impact. The general reader and those of us interested in Iranian history beyond what comes up in the news on a daily basis have long needed a good synthesis of the recent scholarship on modern and contemporary Iranian history. The publication of Abbas Amanat’s Iran: A Modern History has now largely met this need. Abbas Amanat, a professor of history and international studies at Yale University and the director of the Yale Programme in Iranian Studies is a well known figure among scholars and students of Iranian Studies. He has revolutionized Iranian historiography with his treatment of the longue durée of Iranian history.
In his last book, Professor Amanat explores the roots of Iranian modernity over half a millennium. He tries to establish a ‘relationship between the rise of a state with an enforced religious creed – in this case, the Safavid Empire upholding Shi’ism – and emergence of a modern nation state in later centuries.’ As a result, the author deals with the subject in a chronological order, with an emphasis on historical figures and events. These highlights are in turn fleshed out by a comprehensive analysis of what Amanat considers to be the underlying causes for change in modern Iran. In addition, the author makes an insightful and penetrating investigation on the political and intellectual developments of each period, particularly the Qajar and Pahlavi eras, which were represented by major political transformations and social changes in Iran. Though all of this is presented in a volume of nearly 1000 pages with numerous footnotes, a bibliography and pictures, yet it is very accessible, leaving the reader not only with a clear understanding of what happened in modern Iran, but also why it happened.
Undoubtedly, this is an ambitious book – not just another history of modern Iran, but the history. In many respects it succeeds. Professor Amanat positively gallops through a comprehensive account of Iran from the Safavid period to the present. He has not selected only the juicy bits – the geo-strategic significance of the Safavids, the nomadic unrest and the foreign occupation of Iran, selective projects of modernization under the Qajar dynasty, the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, the social, economic and political transformation of Iran under Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and finally the Iranian Revolution of 1979 with its huge ideological chasms and political tensions. He fills in what happened in between with important political and intellectual developments, such as dissident Shi’i messianic aspirations or the rise of new ideologies, ranging from Marxist-Leninist to ultra-nationalist and Islamic extremist in the second Pahlavi era and voices of dissent in the Islamic Republic of Iran, so that events are joined up and the narrative complete.
A closer look at Professor Amanat’s book reveals his acute interest in the concept of political authority in Iranian history and the Persian theory of government. As he writes in his introduction: ‘Crucial to the rudiments of political authority in Iran, and perhaps the oldest in its political culture, is the idea of the shah, the universal title for Iranian kings up to modern times…The Persian theory of government envisioned certain checks and balances to restrain the brute and bridled exercise of power…Few shahs over the long course of Iranian history managed to maintain the formidable ‘balance’ of both the polity and society at large without being isolated to the point of checkmate.’
Next to the royal authority, Ababs Amanat points to the persistence of messianism, ‘as a distinctive feature of Iranian religious culture’, in the making of Iranian history. This meant that ‘the sisterhood of the religious establishment and the temporal state (din vadowlat), which was at the heart of Persian political culture and at least since the Sasanian era, was only renewed in the Safavid era, and then again in the Qajar period. Up to the middle of the 20th century, the clergy remained in partnership, at least implicitly, with the dynastic state and the nobility.’ If we add to this the Shi’i consciousness with its ‘utopian perspective’ and ‘the myth of divine justice’, we will have a better understanding of the Mahdi cult and the movements of protest in modern Iran. According to the author, ‘Starting with the Safavi order itself in the fifteenth century and followed by the Noqtavi, Sufi Ne’matollahi, the Shaykhi doctrine and later the Babi movement, the Mahdi cult in Shi’ism contested clerical authority and its overly legalistic reading of religion.’
In the same line of thought, Abbas Amanat describes the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 as ‘a form of secularized messianism’ during which ‘both the western-inspired reform and the indigenous messianic trends converged into a relatively coherent discourse giving voice to an emerging urban intelligentsia and their demands to end arbitrary rule, open the political space, and create modern legislative and judicial institutions.’ So, what went wrong in the Iranian modern history which ended up with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and four decades of religious authoritarian rule? Abbas Amanat tries to answer this question at the end of his voluminous book in a short epilogue where he explains briefly the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the post-revolutionary Iranian society. According to him, the Islamic Revolution ‘completed the dismantling of the old landed elites’ which had started with the Pahlavis. More important, state modernization not only changed the patterns which were set by the Safavids, but it also helped to build ‘an oppressive autocracy’ reaffirmed by the Islamic regime after the Revolution.
Amanat, however, ends his book on an optimistic note on post-revolutionary Iranian society composed of ‘a vibrant and eager younger generation better informed about the world outside, and by and large immune to the state’s militant ideological hegemony.’ These emerging generations, affirms Amanat, are products of Iran’s collective memory that ‘helped define and redefine a national identity defiant of repressive authorities.’ They are, as the great Persian poet Hafez says, the ‘memorable echoes under the revolving dome’ of Iran.
Ramin Jahanbegloo
Professor and Vice Dean, Jindal Global University, Sonipat
SHEIKH MUHAMMAD ABDULLAH’S REFLECTIONS ON KASHMIR by Nyla Ali Khan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2018.
IN addition to her seminal work The Life of a Kashmiri Woman (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014), Nyla Ali Khan has once again brought to the fore a critical intellectual contribution to unpacking the historical trajectory of the Kashmiri subaltern. Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir clearly articulates the ‘progressive’ nature of the Kashmiri subaltern. It epitomizes the early politicization of Kashmir’s indigenous political space and the spawning of what can be aptly termed an ‘organic intellectual’.
Although, historically labelled as a paradox, the contribution of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah to the political conscientization and mass mobilization of the native Kashmiris cannot be denied. While many scholars have captured the life and political trajectory of Abdullah, Khan offers a more nuanced approach by bringing Abdullah’s voice encapsulated in his letters, speeches and press contributions to the fore. This significant corpus offers the contemporary scholar, historian, politician, and lay person a basis for analysing Abdullah’s ideas, philosophies and vision for a progressive Kashmir.
While acknowledging Abdullah as her maternal grandfather (p. 5), Khan’s balanced approach exhibits the academic rigour needed in scholarship by pursuing Abdullah as ‘a fallible human being’ (p. 1), confronted with political choices that may have rendered him in an unpopular position. In addition, Khan’s voice resonating in both the contemporary media, online spaces, as well as her many publications, finds a fitting space in further entrenching her own ideological view that the ‘depoliticization of the indigenous political space and the criminalization of dissident politics on both sides of the border are particularly troubling’ (p. 177).
Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir must be situated in an era of political abyss, where the ‘voices’ of the native Kashmiris were silenced due to a lack of political conscientization of the masses and an oppressive regime. This draws immense significance for the contemporary Kashmiri subaltern that have found themselves immersed in a political vacuum within a depoliticized fragmented Kashmiri society, culminating with the erosion of indigenous politics and the delegitimization of the voice of dissent. It is within this context that Abdullah’s function as an organic intellectual in steering the growing aspirations of the Kashmiri subaltern and the strategic use of the Reading Room Party in sustaining a public discourse space, becomes critical for the contemporary Kashmiri subaltern.
Embedded in Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir are the many nuances that speak to the legitimization of the voice of dissent, and a politics of the people, which is pluralistic and progressive. Khan’s opinion that ‘a consciousness cannot be built without a mechanism of political training, ideological education, and progressive action’ (p. vxi), is further substantiated with a close reading of Abdullah’s letters and speeches. It also echoes the political sentiments of the early 1930s and 1940s, in which socialist ideals on political education were finding its fitting position as an agent of socio-political and economic reform.
Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir is divided into five key chapters. In the first chapter, Khan provides a historical contextualization for the reader. Khan begins by briefly capturing the rise of Abdullah amidst a rather controversial political milieu. This is followed by a historical exposition on the formation of the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference and its evolution into the National Conference. The underlying ethos is the shift towards a more secular ideal, which resembled the pluralistic nature of Kashmir. It served to unite the Kashmiri subaltern around a philosophy of ‘collective politics’ as opposed to the division along religious lines. To further contextualize the shifting socio-political dimensions of the Kashmiris, Khan alludes to the ‘Quit Kashmir Movement’ (pp. 12-14) and the ‘Standstill Agreement’ (pp. 15-18). The reader is provided with a succinct background that provides them with a glimpse of the critical position that Kashmir played amidst India and Pakistan establishing themselves as nation states.
The second chapter sees Khan bring to the fore five key letters written by Abdullah. These letters addressed to different entities capture the thoughts of Abdullah in his own words at different historical junctures in Kashmir’s early trajectory. While it would be impossible to highlight the content of all five letters in this review, the letter addressed to Chaudhry Noor Hussain in 1960, highlights Abdullah’s continued commitment to the people of Kashmir and his colleagues:
‘You are aware of our people’s struggle for freedom carried on through the last three decades. Destiny left it to me to spearhead that struggle through suffering and sacrifices, in which particularly people of the Valley, Poonch, and Mirpur had the major share. It has been my proud privilege to suffer with my people and for them. Nothing can be a nobler and higher aim of human life than a dedication to the cause of emancipation of an enslaved and downtrodden people’ (p. 28).
Abdullah’s continued association with his colleagues and the people of Kashmir, amidst his own disposition of being imprisoned serves to further enhance the ‘organic’, ‘internal’ space that Abdullah occupied. A space that is reminiscent of being the people’s leader and an influential voice.
The third chapter sees Khan’s construction of fifteen speeches by Abdullah dating from 1953 to 1970. These fifteen speeches capture the historical trajectory of the Kashmiri subaltern and the evolving nature of Abdullah’s thoughts. For example Abdullah’s speech at Hazratbal, Srinagar on 15 March 1968 articulates his political trajectory and recants some of the feelings of his detractors (pp. 61-65). It further serves as an exposition of how Abdullah evolved his ideas in response to the shifting socio-political terrain.
The fourth chapter focuses on a Press Conference on 6 March 1968 held in honour of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah (pp. 119-124), and an interview of Abdullah for the Supplementary Issue (1968) of the Shabistan Urdu Digest, New Delhi (pp. 119-174). The latter serves as an extensive engagement with Abdullah focusing on his trajectory as a politician, his ideologies, and brief reflections on his personal life.
In the final chapter, Khan provides some concluding remarks on the book. Khan summarises the book by arguing for a new logic to prevail within the Kashmir context. Khan, similar to Abdullah, reaffirms that ‘the espousal of violence as a means to redress political injustice and socio-economic inequities’ will not solve the Kashmir issue, instead it will destroy those who ‘rationalize and romanticise it’ (p. 176). Khan reaffirms the need for the recognition of all actors, ‘the redress of wider political, socioeconomic, and democratic issues in Kashmir requires reconceptualizing the relationship between political actors and civil society actors’ (p. 178).
Khan brings to the fore a very important collection of historical data that can be used to further engage a critique of early Kashmiri subaltern formation and the politicization of Kashmir’s indigenous political space. Over the past decade, we have witnessed a renewed activism in Kashmir. The noteworthy uprising spawned by young Kashmiris in 2010, equipped with nothing more than stones in their hands and an emancipatory ideology, have altered the socio-political temperament within the state. The succeeding years culminating in the 2016 skirmishes and clashes, saw a further spirited challenge to the state.
However, these symptomatic uprisings have often been politically exaggerated and misconstrued, thereby undermining the shifting nature of the Kashmiri subaltern. Their current struggle in challenging the power, controls and constraints of the current political milieu can be seen as an attempt to (re)construct the indigenous political space and reposition their voices. It is within this context that an understanding of the shifting nature of the Kashmiri subaltern in the early 1930s becomes crucial. The 1930s is indicative of an era of a politics of construction, which was progressive yet inclusive and symptomatic of building consciousness from the grassroots.
While Khan may not have intended to produce a historical trajectory of the Kashmiri subaltern, Abdullah’s reflection on Kashmir serves to foreground the changing nature of the Kashmiri subaltern. In so doing, Khan gives space and legitimization to the voice of the native Kashmiris, which is lacking in many of the other scholarly contributions. Khan further foregrounds Abdullah’s politics of ‘inclusion’. This becomes critical in understanding the role of state and non-state actors as agents for systemic and structural change. Embedded in Abdullah’s thought is the critical role that the different actors played in constructing a pluralistic and progressive political space within early Kashmir. Furthermore, Abdullah redefines the critical role of civil society and the mobilization of the native Kashmiris in holding the echelons of power accountable to the people.
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir offers the type of discursive space to engage with history, learn from past intellectualizing and shift the current narrative towards one of a politics of (re)construction. The task endeavoured in this book is a tedious one, a journey which would have taken substantial commitment. Hence, this compendium by Nyla Khan should find a fitting place to rekindle constructive dialogue around the thoughts of an organic intellectual – Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah – and his ideas of an inclusive, pluralistic and progressive Kashmir.
Denzil Chetty
College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa, Pretoria
