DELHI BY HEART

by Raza Rumi

  Major T was extremely well-read and would jokingly term his love for books as ‘lust’ for books. In those years of my life, I found his discourse most fascinating and radical as it was at variance, sometimes completely, with the official version of history. Not that I agreed with him in entirety. He nevertheless opened my inner eye to the complex vastness of Indian history and helped me to discover how difficult it was to accept any version of history, even of the present, as the final one.

  Hailing from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan, members of Major T’s family had been supporters of Bachha Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) and his Khudai Khidmatgaar movement. By extension, this meant that he was predisposed to the Indian nationalist view of history. How odd that he was to live in a country which his ancestors believed should not even exist.

  He would often quote Azad, Nehru and Gandhi and was unreserved in his views on the Muslim League and its somersaults in the first half of the twentieth century. Over time, his views evolved and, like some other historians, viewed the Partition as the collective endeavour of powerful interests and groups within Muslims who wanted to perpetuate their dominant position—the salariat classes of the United and Central Provinces, bureaucrats, Muslim entrepreneurs of Sindh and Bombay and of course, the pirs and feudals who thought that Pakistan was the best vehicle for safeguarding their class interests.

  Indeed, for me, this struck a dissonant chord at an impressionable age. On the one hand, I had grown up with the inevitability of Partition, and, on the other, I was confronted with a semi-Marxist discourse on Independence and Partition. Over time, Ayesha Jalal, the eminent Pakistani historian, helped answer my questions by putting things in a more accurate perspective. The central thesis of her widely acclaimed book, The Sole Spokesman, was that Jinnah, as the spokesman for Muslims, used Partition as a bargaining chip within the United India context, and it was the pressure from the Indian regional movements, such as those of Bengal and Punjab, and the intransigence of the Congress leadership, that led to the creation of a separate country for Muslims. The irony is that Jinnah stood for a united India and wanted maximum rights for the Muslim majority provinces. The Cabinet Mission Plan was the last opportunity for India to remain undivided but Congress scuttled this opportunity. The regional interests in the Punjab and Bengal were capitalized by the Muslim League in opposing an all-powerful centre. The ‘two nations’ argument of the Muslim League resonated with the Muslims in the Muslim majority provinces in the northeastern and northwestern ends of India.

  The Indian Parsi author, H.M. Seervai, whose brilliant monograph is attached to the book, A Constitutional History of India, argues along the same lines. He is direct and unsparing in his attack on Gandhi, Nehru and Patel for their reluctance to accept the Cabinet Mission Plan, thereby pushing Jinnah and his followers towards Partition. The Mission proposed a three-tiered federal structure for a united India within which the constitution-making process could be effected. In this federal model, the centre’s authority would be limited to communications, defence and external affairs. The three sub-federations A, B and C were able to bind the provinces within them not to abandon their respective sub-federation or ‘group’ until after the constitution-making process had been completed and elections were held. Jinnah was comfortable with this proposal but its rejection by the Congress, as Seervai explains, made Partition inevitable.

  The divide and rule policy of the British, as epitomized by Lord Linlithgow’s famous line, ‘For the Hindoo-Mohameddan communal amity is a dangerous threat to our interest in the Indian subcontinent’, is well known. Yet, this is simply inadequate to explain all that happened. Suffice to say that history has no postulates and now Pakistan is a country on its own and has survived, and rather well too, given all the problems it faced internally and regionally. However, stereotypes are difficult to shed. They raise their little heads time and again and fervour for textual orthodoxy fostered by nation states does not help at all.

  For many years, until a revision was attempted under General Musharraf ’s rule, textbooks had defined the existence of Pakistan only in relation to Hindus, and hence Hindus had to be demonized as much as possible. It was mostly after the separation of East Pakistan in 1971 and during the era of General Zia-ul-Haq when I was growing up, that the Hindu rhetoric became intense.

  The ‘pre-Ideology’ textbooks did not profess hatred. Even in a new-born Pakistan, created through a bloody Partition, early textbooks were free of the pathological hate that later crept into the narratives. For instance, early history books contained chapters not only on the oldest civilizations of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, but also on early Hindu mythologies such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. They covered too, rather extensively, the Hindu kingdoms of the Mauryas and the Guptas. Gandhi was also respected and Congress intransigence was a popular line instead of ‘Hindu machinations’.

  It was under Zia-ul-Haq that Pakistani history suddenly began with the Arab conquest of Sindh and swiftly jumped to the Muslim conquerors from Central Asia, wallowing in the glories of Shah Walliullah, Iqbal’s dream and then Jinnah. An entire history got rewritten.

  In these re-fashioned versions, Pakistan wanted to appear as a truly Islamic state. The Ulema,14 who had once bitterly opposed the creation of Pakistan, were converted into heroes of the Pakistan movement. Not to mention that the Quaid-e-Azam, Mr Jinnah, was also described as a pious, practicing Muslim.

  Thus the Hindu-Muslim ‘differences in culture’ led to India’s ‘evil’ designs against Pakistan (the three wars with India). I remember reading that in December 1885, an Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, established a political party named the Indian National Congress to politically organize the Hindus of India. And that Hindu nationalism was imposed upon Muslims and their ‘culture’ and that the All India Congress turned into a purely Hindu organization.

  Mercifully, Major T’s teaching disproved many of these myths for me. But many among my generation have not learnt anything other than what was taught at schools through a careful re-creation of history.

  Another historian of the Zia era, K.K. Aziz, whom I happened to know in person, was a strong voice, albeit a lone one, when he published his famous book called The Murder of History in Pakistani Textbooks. Aziz highlighted countless inaccuracies, distortions, and prejudices in each officially prepared and prescribed textbook. He undertook a brutal yet incisive postmortem of sixty-six textbooks, making a list of distortions. For instance, he quoted the following statement from a textbook:

  After the partition of the sub-continent, Hindus and Sikhs started a properly planned campaign of exploiting Muslims generally in the whole of Bharat and particularly in East Punjab, as a result of which, Hindus and Sikhs, enemies of mankind, killed and dishonoured thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of women, children, the old and the young with extreme cruelty and heartlessness.

  To which Aziz replied, ‘Hindus and Sikhs were not the only aggressors in the riots of 1947; Muslims also killed, raped and looted wherever they had the opportunity.’15 He had a personal reason for saying this. He had migrated from his beloved Batala in East Punjab and was unable to return until his old age. His beloved town and ancestral home had changed altogether. He could not stop crying for days.

  In the words of Dr Tariq Rahman, eminent linguist and historian, the mutilation of history was to sound the nation state with loud martial aims:

  First, the non-Muslim part of Pakistan is ignored. Second, the borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. Third, the Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of Hindus and the British and the righteousness of the Muslims. After the Partition, in which Hindus are reported to have massacred Muslims while Muslims are not shown to have treated the Hindus in the same manner, India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan. The separation of Bangladesh in 1971 is portrayed as proof of this Indian policy rather than the result of the domination of West Pakistan over East Bengal. Above all, the 1948, 1965 and 1971 wars a
re blamed entirely on India, and Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. The armed forces are not only glorified but treated as if they were sacrosanct and above criticism. All eminent personalities associated with the Pakistan movement, especially M.A. Jinnah and Iqbal, are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed. Indeed, the overall effect of the ideological lesson is to make Islam reinforce and legitimise both Pakistani nationalism and militarisation.16

  It is not surprising that while the Hindu extremists lamented the negative role of (Muslim) invaders, Pakistani textbook authors inserted this stuff:

  … during the 11th century, the Ghaznavid Empire comprised what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. During the 12th century, the Ghaznavids lost Afghanistan, and their rule came to be confined to Pakistan… By the 13th century, Pakistan had spread to include the whole of Northern India and Bengal… Under the Khiljis, Pakistan moved further southward to include a greater part of Central India and the Deccan… Many Mongols accepted Islam. As such, Pakistan remained safe for Islam… During the 16th century, ‘Hindustan’ disappeared and was completely absorbed in ‘Pakistan…’ Under Aurangzeb, the Pakistan spirit gathered in strength. This evoked the opposition of the Hindus… After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the process of the disintegration of Mughal Rule set in, and weakened the Pakistan spirit… The shape of Pakistan in the 18th century was thus more or less the same as it was under the Ghaznavids in the 11th century.

  But this stereotyping was not taking place in isolation. The parallel tweaking of textbooks was also taking place in India. Since 2005, the Congress government has been trying to scrap thousands of textbooks through the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the central government body that sets the national curriculum. Thus over time, India has also been subjected to the ‘saffronization’ of history where India’s Muslim rulers have been portrayed as barbarous invaders and the medieval period set as the dark age of Islamic colonial rule which erased the glories of the Hindu empires that preceded it.

  One textbook held that the Taj Mahal, the Qutab Minar and the Red Fort, three stars of Islamic architecture, were designed and commissioned by Hindus. The illustrious historian, Romila Thapar has been attacked for identifying the ‘Aryans’ (venerated by the saffron brigade as the founders of the Indus Valley civilization) as nomadic tribes who actually came from Central Asia or the Middle East. Thapar was therefore asked to leave the Indian Council for Historical Research immediately after the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) assumed office in 1999.

  Under this saffronization, references to the caste system, or the ancient practice of beef-eating were either downplayed or simply eliminated from historical narratives. Hindu nationalists and revivalists have clamoured to emphasize the separateness of Hinduism and its resilience in the face of ‘foreign’ invasions. A pro-BJP writer exclaimed, ‘If highlighting only Muslim rule in India as a gift to humanity and dismissing the pre-Muslim period as a dark age amounts to history, we are against that sort of history.’ Most poignantly, the deletion of Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu extremist in 1948 was a huge travesty.

  In Delhi, I discover how more than 23,000 Vidya Bharati schools operated by the Hindutva movement17 across India, teach that Jesus Christ, through his travels in the Himalayas, drew his inspiration from Hinduism. That a Hindu named Samudragupta built the Qutab Minar originally known as Vishnu Sthambha, and the Taj Mahal was actually a Hindu temple known as Tejo Mahalaya (Shiva’s Palace). Most interesting was the Red Fort which I discovered was a Brahmin palace that the Hindu-hater, Shah Jahan, took over and converted into his royal residence. And the most critical one—that the biggest holocaust, that is, the Partition, was in effect unleashed by the Muslims against Hindus in India.

  In 2002, the NCERT undertook to rewrite Indian history texts. Its director, J.S. Rajput, remarked in an interview, ‘Every country should write its history from its own point of view. Our history books have been written from a Euro-centric view because we were a colony for so long. History books should instill a sense of pride in the young mind and should be rooted in our culture.’ Perhaps the difference between Pakistan and India is that, while in the former, only a handful of individuals have been raising their voices, in India, organized groups and the media actively condemned this sort of intellectual vandalism. The Indian History Congress, a large association of academic historians, in its 2002 conference, vowed to show vigilance in view of such brazen attempts to communalize textbooks and saffronize history.

  P.N. Oak, head of the Institute for Rewriting Indian History, has also emerged as a revisionist icon. Oak argues in his books, Some Blunders of Indian Historical Research and the Islamic Havoc in Indian History, that contemporary Indian history is nothing but myths circulated by British historians and followed by secular Marxist and pro-Muslim Indians. Similarly, another icon for the Hindutva brigade is Francois Gautier, who with his pseudo sense of history, has reinforced that ‘Hindu-bashing’ has been a popular pastime among secular historians.

  In 1998, a BJP Minister, Murali Manohar Joshi appointed Hindutva sympathizers into the Indian Council of Historical Research. Some of them were representatives of the World Hindu Council’s panel which insisted that there was a historically verifiable temple at the site of the Babri Mosque.

  Another boost in revisionism was the work of Koenraad Elst titled Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam only to be supported by Francois Gautier’s book Rewriting Indian History. These books depict Muslims to have contributed nothing to India other than ‘death, destruction and subjugation’. Gautier’s words are just the inverse of those of the Pakistani right:

  Let it be said right away: the massacres perpetrated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis or the massacre of Armenians by the Turks, more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.

  Gautier also provides legitimacy to the inhuman propaganda against Gandhi: ‘Gandhi did enormous harm to India… for ultimately, no one contributed more to the Partition of India, by his obsession to always give in to the Muslims; by his indulgence of Jinnah, going as far as proposing to make him the Prime Minister of India’. Another poor attempt to justify the heinous stab right into the heart of post-Independence India by the fanatic Nathuram Godse.

  Thus this re-invention of the past is a shared attribute. In Bangladesh, the Pakistani past has also been erased from textbooks and historical records. The leading Pakistani poet, the inimitable Fehmida Riaz, who is a favourite of mine, was disappointed during her stay in India with the growing trends of exclusion—an anathema to the plurality of India. I thought of her poem ‘Naya Bharat’ (New India):

  You turned out to be just like us;

  Similarly stupid, wallowing in the past,

  You’ve reached the same doorstep at last.

  Your demon [of] religion dances like a clown,

  Whatever you do will be upside down.

  You too will sit deep in thought,

  Who is Hindu, who is not.

  Keep repeating the mantra like a parrot,

  Bharat was like the land of the brave…18

  In 1967, the Bombay High Court issued a landmark judgement on historiography and historicity that could very well be made popular across South Asia,19 ‘History is not to serve as a handmaid of a particular school of thought. History must be impartial and objective. To rewrite history according to the views which are popular or which are necessary for bolstering up nationalistic egoism or jingoism, is perversion of history.’

  Irfan S. Habib, another eminent historian who would be considered a Muslim apologist, has undertaken an incisive study on the errors and half-truths in Indian textbooks.20 Some examples are—Mughal emperor Babur deliberately chose a site for a mosque in a place where the ‘tenth and last avatar of Vishnu was to appear at th
e end of the yuga.’ Similarly he questions—the English East India Company established in 1600 in India? India, ‘a land of free looters’? Lenin leading merely a coup in Russia in 1917?21

  Numerous such errors of commission and omission were detected by Habib and his associates. For instance, some of the textbooks have erased accounts of Akbar’s social policies such as prohibition of the slave trade, disapproval of Sati and prohibition of involuntary Sati. Serious exclusions in dealing with the histories of kingdoms lead to an association being made between violence, cruelty and Muslims, rather than showing these as generic trends common to all medieval ruling classes.

  I came across a candid personal account by India’s eminent playwright, Vijay Tendulkar, wherein he recounted his experiences of studying in a school where Muslim children were stereotyped as ‘butchers’ and killers ‘of cows and animals’.22 Tendulkar’s words were chilling:

  The bias which had been intentionally and unintentionally sown in our minds when we were children now grew into confirmed opinion. Muslims were an aggressive, rowdy, savage, rabid minority… dogs with a cut tail. Their leaders used them for their gains and like fools, secular Hindu leaders were playing into their hands at the cost of the interests of us Hindus who were a majority but suffered at the hands of a mere minority. As a growing boy in my teens, I too held this view though not with the fanatic rage of the typical white-collared Hindu of that time.

  In states where the BJP is the ruling party, college libraries have been directed to stock titles such as Why Hindu Rashtra? Hum Mandir Wahin Banayenge (That is where we will build the temple), Shilanyas se Shikhar ki Ore (From laying the foundation stone to attaining the peak), among other gems. In Gujarat, after the pogrom, the state government still pursues a relentless agenda of exclusion and demonizing the other.