[sacw] SACW Dispatch #1 | 17 Oct 00

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #1
17 October 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

____________________________

#1. Far Right Camp Meeting Celebrates its Vision of a Hindu India
#2. India: RSS sees Nepal as part of 'Akhand Bharat'
#3. India: Muslims, Christians and Communists are threats to this 'Hindu
Nation'
#4. India: A Tribute To Irfan Habib
#5. India: Lecture/Max Mueller/Bombay/Oct 20th

____________________________

#1.

The New York Times
October 16, 2000
Page A3

A Camp Meeting Celebrates the Vision of a Hindu India

By CELIA W. DUGGER

AGRA, India, Oct. 15-Dust rose in dervishes across the dun-colored parade
ground here, swirling around the legs of almost 60,000 uniformed men and
boys from more than 7,000 villages. Those foot soldiers in the quest for a
Hindu nation stood in ruler-straight lines that stretched as far as the eye
could see.

They had come to a three-day camp to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the National Volunteers Association. It is
a powerful, disciplined and, some believe, dangerously divisive
organization that has given rise to a raft of affiliated groups, including
the Bharatiya Janata party that now leads India's coalition government.
After an hour of toe touches, deep knee bends and push-ups, the volunteers
sat cross-legged in the dirt and lay down their long bamboo staffs to
listen raptly to their leader, K. S. Sudarshan. He inspired them with a
vision of India as an ancient and tolerant Hindu nation, but warned that
the country was threatened from within by Christian churches that he
described as foreign dominated and funded.

Although Christians have lived in India for 2,000 years and make up only 2
percent of its one billion people, he raised the specter of Christian
conversions diminishing the dominance of Hindus and leading to secessionist
movements. He criticized Christian and Muslim Indians who have refused, in
his eyes, to embrace their Hindu heritage. He called on Christians to sever
links with "foreign" churches and set up a Church of India. And he
condemned Roman Catholic missionaries who believe that only their path
leads to salvation.

"How can we allow such people to work here?" he asked from his podium high
above the ground. A larger-than-life likeness of the Hindu god Krishna
loomed behind him.
Fifty-three years after India gained its independence from British rule,
Mr. Sudarshan's movement is still agitating for a redefinition of the
nation's founding secular values. They were enunciated in the 1950
Constitution, which guarantees "the right freely to profess, practice and
propagate religion." And they were ardently defended by India's first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed that religious minorities could
retain their identities and still be loyal Indians.

In contrast, the Hindu nationalist ideology defines India as a Hindu nation
whose people share a common geography, culture and ancestry. In this view,
Muslims and Christians were converted from Hinduism and need to be
reintegrated into the Hindu mainstream =97 a theme first sounded in the
1920's and articulated by Mr. Sudarshan today.

After the closing ceremony, thousands of volunteers, all dressed in
paramilitary-style khaki shorts, white shirts and black caps, rushed from
their rigid grid on the field toward the dignitaries sitting on red velvet
couches in the blazing sun. A group of them surrounded Home Minister Lal
Krishna Advani, who started in the R.S.S., moved to the Bharatiya Janata
party, and is now believed to be in line to inherit the mantle of
leadership from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who joined the R.S.S.
back in the 1940's.

As orders blared from a tower of loudspeakers, Mr. Advani joined the rows
of men in making the movement's salute (hand held stiffly across the chest,
palm down) on the count of one, lowering his head on two and dropping his
arm on three.
His presence here was another tantalizing clue in one of the country's
favorite parlor games: Are the R.S.S. and the B.J.P. =97 the political part=
y
that is part of the Sangh Parivar, or R.S.S. family =97 hand in glove or at
each other's throats?

The answer seems to be a little of both. There is a natural tension between
them. Mr. Sudarshan's movement, which is striving to build a Hindu nation
from the grass roots up, is purist in its ideology. The ruling party, which
is striving for political power, has set aside many of its Hindu
nationalist planks to win the support of regional parties with secular
outlooks. It is no longer pushing for the construction of a Hindu temple on
the site of a demolished 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for example.

But the movement and the governing party also need each other. The party
relies on the movement's vast network of committed volunteers at election
time. And the movement enjoys a measure of political influence because of
its close ties to the party.

"The relationship is a bit like that between the Christian Coalition and
the Republican Party," said Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at
Notre Dame and an expert on India.
More than half a million boys and men attend the daily meetings of the
R.S.S. in 45,000 local branches all over India. The group's appeal is part
Boy Scouts, part crusaders. Many became volunteers for the daily physical
exercise, sports and camaraderie, but were later fired by the association's
idea of nationhood.

The camp here in Agra was an organizational feat, subdivided into many
smaller neighborhoods where sanitation, roads, electricity and cooking
facilities had all been installed by the association.
At 4:30 this morning, a bugle woke the swayamsevaks, or volunteers, while a
full moon still dangled over the grounds. By 6 a.m., as dawn broke and a
pinkish-orange orb of sun rose, they had lined up for exercise drills.
Afterward, they sang a song calling on the volunteers to awaken to threats
from India's enemies and traitors. The high-pitched voices of young boys
cut through the low hum of the men's singing.

Many of those here were new recruits. Rajkumar Gupta, 13, could explain
little of the group's ideology. He studies in a school run by an affiliate
of the association. He and the 160 students in the school had come with
their teachers "because the school told us to."
Abhinay Kumar Sharma, 15, was attending his second camp and he had learned
some of the association's thinking. "The Sangh is here to fight social
evils, for example, conversions to Christianity," he said. "This is a Hindu
nation and conversions are divisive and this will lead to the division of
the country."

Lal Singh, a 65-year-old farmer, echoed the same theme, saying: "Conversion
is wrong. This is against our culture. And in these other religions, this
sense of humanity and service to man is not there, while it is in our
religion."
Yashpal Singh Nayak, 26, a traveling perfume salesman, worried that
extended families are breaking down into nuclear families and that women
are leaving their faces unveiled in front of elders and males. "If it
continues like this," he said, "it will be a serious threat to Indian
culture."

_____

#2.

Source: Tehelka.com

Nepal laid claim to at RSS' 75th anniversary Shivir

Johny M L writes about the furore that the RSS generated in its depiction
of Nepal as part of Akhand Bharat at its 75th anniversary, by design or
default

New Delhi, October 15

The "single unified Hindu nation" (Akhand Bharat) theory of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) once again threatens to become a prime contentious
issue. A booklet titled Amritpath, which was distributed in the Rajya
Raksha Shivir, the diamond jubilee celebrations of the RSS at Shastripuram,
Agra, depicts a unified India in which Nepal is shown without distinct
geographical boundaries.

The booklet, published by the pro-RSS Marathi weekly Vivek (conscience) has
created a storm in the Himalayan kingdom. Nepal's major opposition party,
the Nepal Communist Party (United Marxist-Leninist) severely criticised the
RSS for violating the sovereign rights of the country. Although the
Government of Nepal is yet to react, RSS leaders have already kickstarted
the organisation's damage control machinery.

Dr Vinayak Shankar Tatwadadi, head of the RSS Foreign Cell, has clarified
that the map merely emphasises "the cultural unity of the subcontinent". He
is reported to have said that the publication of the map was without any
"political meaning".

The booklet, published by the pro-RSS Marathi weekly Vivek has created a
storm in the Himalayan kingdom "There is no reason for opposition," he
said. "Nepal is a Hindu country and culturally closer to us. The
publication has no political motive."

However, the Communist Party of India (CPI) is not ready to take this
argument at face value. "The RSS agenda of Akhand Bharat is known to all,"
says D Raja, CPI general secretary, echoing the feelings of his comrades in
Nepal. "But now they want to make it more official. They have selected the
jubilee celebration as a right occasion to declare this."

Speaking to tehelka.com, D Raja demanded an explanation from the RSS about
the stated "cultural unity of the subcontinent". "We would like to know
(what) kind of cultural unity they are talking about," he says. "They are
talking about a Brahmanical cultural unity. The RSS wants to bring all the
democratic institutions under this Akhand Bharat concept."

Accusing the RSS of having a mediaeval mindset, Raja says that in modern
democracies the sovereignty of nation-states is recognised the world over.
"The sovereignty of nation-states has to be accepted by every other
nation. The violation of it is fascism," he says.

______

#3

Indian Express
12 October 2000

Thou Will be Banished

by Ram Puniyani

The RSS Sarsanghchalak, Mr. K.S. Sudarshan on 7nd Oct. Vijayadashmi rally
in Nagpur said that all foreign missionaries should be thrown out, and a
Swadeshi Church be established to bring all the denominations of
Christianity under a single head (I.E. 8th Oct.2000). His demand was that
as in China the state should establish a single church while doing away
with the foreign connection.

RSS and Christians:
What Mr. Sudarshan said is a mere straightforward articulation of what he
has been saying since quite sometime. The major ideologue of RSS,
Mr.Golawalkar, laid down the attitude of RSS towards minorities in his book
'We or Our Nationhood Defined' where he wrote that Muslims, Christians and
Communists are internal threats to this 'Hindu Nation'. The previous RSS
chief, Mr. Rajendra Singh, had also stated that 'Muslims and Christians
will have to accept Hindu culture as their own if Hindus are to treat them
as Indians' (Asian Age Nov 23, 1999). Last 3-4 years we have seen a rising
tide of Anti-Christian violence. The aim of this violence has been to
ensure that they stop the alleged 'forcible conversion' of 'innocent'
adivasis. They have also been accused of using foreign funds to indulge in
this conversion activities of theirs'. By now one is familiar with
different scattered atrocities on Christian priests and nuns but what can
probably never be erased from one's memory is the ghastly killing of Pastor
Stains along with his two minor sons.

Pastor Stains was of Australian origin and spent most of his life for the
service of Leprosy patients, a la Baba Amte; something, which his Australia
born widow, is pursuing even now with equal amount of courage despite the
heavy loss to her personal self. The major charge against Stains was his
foreign origin and of course his allegedly indulging in forcible
conversions. The process against him was conspired by one Dara Singh who
had lot of nebulous links with RSS progenies like BJP, Bajarang Dal etc.
Enough linkage exists of his relations with Hindutva ideology and he
himself has indicated of his desire to work for RSS's political wing BJP's
ally Shiv Sena, which is another political outfit working for the
achievement of Hindu Rashtra like the RSS itself.

Foreigners in India-Indians in Foreign Lands
Christianity has been in India from AD 52 and despite the activities of
missionaries from last nineteen and a half centuries, and the British rule
for close to two centuries their population as per the 1991 census stands
at 2.32 percent. The missionaries have been coming to India from centuries
and local people have also taken to missionary work though only Mother
Teresa and pastor Stains may be the most known amongst them. Whatever be
the limitation of the charity work, it did inspire Swami Vivekanand to
start the Ramkrishna Misssion and many other such activities have been
modeled on the systematic charity work done by Christian missions.
It is not only in the religious sphere that people have been coming and
settling here as people from here are going and settling in other
countries. Contribution of Annie Beasant and Sister Nivedita to Indian
society can never be forgotten or ignored. People like Mother Teresa,
despite many a flaws in their approach and ideology have established their
commitment to community, rising above the national boundaries, beyond any
shade of doubt. Today there are enough Mahendra Singh's having important
slots for themselves in Fiji's, enough Swaraj Paul's and Hinduja's managing
their financial empires from foreign lands. To match it there are Mahesh
Yogi's, and scores of Ashrams scattered all round the globe. Even RSS
affiliate VHP has spread its wings in different countries.
RSS Prescriptions:
The call of RSS is through and through anti-Constitutional. It is another
matter that RSS does not hold to the values of Indian Constitution.
Immediately after being nominated as RSS chief Mr Sudarshan said that
Indian Constitution should be scrapped and a new one based on Hindu
Scriptures be brought in. The missionaries of foreign origin working in
Indian are well within the parameters prescribed by the Indian
constitution. The charge that foreign funds are not routed through Home
ministry, is just to create an illusion of illegality of such transactions
as already these funds are routed only through Home ministry and are
subject to the audit rules of this land. The demand to severe the links
with Vatican and create a state sponsored church like the one in China is
an infringement on the social ethos of the society which is possible only
in authoritarian states. Obviously RSS has strong urge to borrow the
authoritarian values be they from the one's imposed by the Hitler's Nazi
Germany, Mussolini's Fascist Italy or the norms of China which do not
permit individual freedom, where the state dictates the life of the
individual and the society. The RSS fears of earlier Islamisation and now
Christianisation of India, which seems to be guiding these demands, are
from the world of make believe, serving the purpose of consolidation of
elite Hindu vote bank and politics of Hindu Rashtra.

(Dr. Ram Puniyani is Prof. at IIT Mumbai)

_____

#4.

Frontline
14-27 October 2000

A tribute to Irfan Habib

by ASHOK MITRA

The Making of History: Essays presented to Irfan Habib edited by K. N.
Panikkar, Terence J. Byres and Utsa Patnaik; Tulika; pages 678, Rs. 900.

WHY not say it, Irfan Habib is an extraordinary phenomenon. As a
historian, he has few peers. His research on The Agrarian System of Mughal
India, published in the 1960s, immediately became a classic. Recognition
as a fearless exponent of Marxist historiography rained down on him. His
initial work pertained to the medieval era of Indian history. He has
ceaselessly produced tracts on aspects of this historical period, each of
which bears the stamp of his intellectual depth and clarity of writing.
His mind and interest did not, however, long stay confined to any
particular, narrow phase of events and occurrences. He soon spread out;
nothing from the very ancient period to the outer fringes of modern Indian
history has escaped his attention. The po int has to be emphasised over
and over again: whatever he has written has been the product of
scholastic endeavour of the highest order: reasoning, primary data not
unravelled in the past, application of such data towards formulating
credible hypotheses, and the entire corpus built, stone by stone, into a
magnificent edifice which can be held in comparison only with other
products emanating from Irfan Habib's mind and pen. It is the combination
of quantity of output and quality of excellence which has e nabled his
works reach the reputation of being the other word for supreme excellence.

Inevitably, he has attracted attention as much within the country as
outside. Honours have come to him easily. What is of stupendous additional
significance, his interpretation of data, building of premises based on
such data and expansion of the underly ing reasoning, have never strayed
away from their Marxist foundation. He has been unabashedly Marxist in his
scholastic activities, and has never made a secret of his intellectual and
emotional inclination. No run-of-the-mill braggart, his output, every line
of it, every expression of his format, has spelled out his faith and
belief. Ours is a hide-bound society; it breathes reaction from every
pore. Nonetheless, it has been unable to either bypass or be indifferent
to Irfan's towering scholarship. Not only has he been accorded the highest
academic distinction in an educational institution which has its fair
share of retrograde thoughts and demeanour. Even the country's
administrative establishment could not fail to take cognisance of his
intellectual prowess. Thus the Chairmanship of the Indian Council of
Historical Research was offered to him. He held this position for well
over a decade, and it was no vacuous adornment of a throne. He used the
opportunity to wonderful effect, guiding and counsellin g historical
research at different centres of learning in the country. The result shows
in the secular advance in the quality of history teaching and writing in
the different Indian universities.

But research interests have not held back Irfan in a narrow mooring.
Alongside his individual research activities and the scholastic work he
has encouraged around him, his focus of attention has continued to be his
students. He has lived for his students , and it would be no exaggeration
to claim that he is prepared to die for them. A little facetious research
will prove the point: about half of his colleagues on the faculty of
history in the Aligarh Muslim University happen to be his former students.
It would still be a travesty to infer that he built his students in his
own image. He has been a radical thinker, a weather-beaten socialist
prepared to combat all ideological challenges, and yet his catholicism as
a teacher is by now a legend. Even those whose stream of thought is not in
accord with his wave-length have nonetheless found in him the most
painstaking teacher who would not deny a student, any student, what he,
rightfully or otherwise, can expect of a teacher.

Irfan's style of exposition has an elegance of its own: he is an
accredited socialist, and yet his command of language, and the manner in
which he puts it across, have the hallmark of the legatee of a benign,
civilised aristocracy. Maybe in this matter his heredity has been a natural
helper.
That does not still tell the entire story of his dazzling career. It is
possible to come across scores and scores of arm-chair socialists and
radicals whose faith has not nudged them into political activism. From
that point of view too, Irfan Habib is altogether out of the ordinary. He
has been, for nearly three decades, an accredited member of a
revolutionary political party; he has not concealed this datum from any
quarters. Quite on the contrary, that identity has been his emblem of
pride. He has bee n prepared to serve the cause of the party whenever
called upon, without however compromising or neglecting his academic
responsibilities. It is this blend of intense- if it were not a heresy,
one could say, almost religious-belief and fearless partic ipation in
political activism which has marked him out in the tepid milieu of Indian
academia. His activism, one should add, has widened beyond the humdrum
sphere of political speech-making and polemical writing (although, even in
his absent-mindedness, his polemics has never descended to the level of
empty rhetoric). Irfan's social conscience has prodded him into trade
unionism, what many academics would regard as waywardness of the most
shocking kind. Irfan could not have cared less for such snobbery. He has
also encouraged his students to combine radical thought with political
engagement. He has been at the forefront of organisers of teachers'
movements. To cap all, he has been the main inspirer and mobiliser of the
non-teaching employees of his uni versity and elsewhere. He has suffered on
all these accounts including, for a period, suspension from his
university. This was an outrage, and social pressure forced the university
to revoke its insensate decision.

TO fail to mention his relentless opposition to communal revanchists of all
genres will be an unpardonable omission. Muslim fundamentalists have made
him their favourite target; of late, Hindu communalists have joined the
ranks of this motley crow d. Irfan has not for one moment cowered before
this rabble. A quiet, tranquil person in his natural disposition, there is
a reservoir of fire in him which has been continuously directed against
society's reactionary scum.
For this truly extraordinary scholar, his friends, colleagues and admirers
have now assembled, in the form of a festschrift, an extraordinary
collection of 23 essays. The Making of History is a labour of love and
regard; it is, at the same time, a compendium of much of academic
excellence as of social awareness. And it is a magnificently produced
volume, for which full credit devolves on the publishers.
THE festschrift opens with a perceptive and comprehensive Introduction
covering the major aspects of Irfan Habib's pursuits and fascinations. The
essays that follow are arranged in five sections, each of which reflects
Irfan's research interests i n different phases. In this brief survey, it
is not possible to render justice to each of the different contributions
and their authors. The reviewer therefore proposes to draw attention to
only some of the essays and seeks forgiveness from the other aut hors.
An additional preliminary comment is perhaps necessary concerning the
nature of the contributions: barring one or two exceptions, each essay
bears the imprint of a Marxist approach. That is understandable in the
light of Irfan's personal inclinations. In that sense, The Making of
History is a fusion of subjectivity and objectivity. The contributions
include one British, one from Bangladesh and two from Japan.
The first section covers a span of ancient Indian history. Romila Thapar,
in her commentary on Rigveda as a mirror of social change, is as incisive
and scintillating as ever. She and Suraj Bhan who discusses the
Aryanisation of the Indian civilisation, a rrive at more or less the same
conclusion, Romila a little elliptically and Bhan much more directly: the
post-Independence endeavour on the part of some groups to invest Vedic
culture superiority over other civilisations of the ancient world
constitutes a much overdrawn picture; all that can be said to its credit,
or discredit, is that the social stratification which has been the
perennial curse of Indian civilisation has its genesis in Vedic times.
The articles in the second section combine analytical rigour and
historical insight to explicate the social processes unleashed toward the
end of the Mughal period and the accompanying transition of society from
the feudal to the semi-feudal mode. Iqtida r Alam Khan traces the
antecedents of market formation and narrates the tales of peasant
exploitation as well as peasant resistance. Muzaffer Alam and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam dig into both archival accounts and contemporary literature.
Theories are formulate d in this section on the basis of prior intuitions.
These are emended via ferreting of data; new hypotheses thereby rear their
head. A charming example is provided by J. Mohan Rao's excursion into
production and appropriation relations in Mughal India. In what is almost
an aside, Hiroyuki Kotani discusses rural and urban class structures in the
Deccan and Gujarat in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the
piece is both a throwback to ancient times and a preview of the
nineteenth-and twentiet h-century social complexities.
The third section pushes us into the proximity of the colonial era. The
four essays in this section divide themselves into two even groups. The
first two papers, by Terence J. Byres and Amiya Kumar Bagchi, are pristine
examples of the inter-meshing of ec onomic theory and economic history,
with emphasis on building new theoretical constructs. Byres posits an
inverse relationship between land productivity and size of holding for
Mughal India, basing himself on Irfan Habib's pioneering work and laments
the lack of a study, a la Irfan, on the agrarian system of British India.
Bagchi's tract on the working class as the historian's burden is
breathtaking in its sweep. His premise does not have an altogether
specific Indian context; the essay connotes a historicity which has a
universal appeal; the endless saga of the repression of the working class
and their resistance to it is nonetheless illumined by examples picked
from Indian annals, north and south, east and west.
The other two essays in the section are gems of statistical exploration
intended to reveal the extent and magnitude of colonial exploitation.
Shireen Moosvi painstakingly gathers together data from different sources,
adding her own collation of primary d ata, to establish the empirical
truth of the stagnation, and in certain periods, the actual delcine of
both per capita income and real wages in the colonial era. On the other
hand, Utsa Patnaik wades into the Luxemburgian theme of external exploit
ation. Her fresh estimates of eighteenth century British trade as a
transfer device from tropical colonies will be quoted, this reviewer has
not the least doubt, in future texts attempting to describe the colonial
nightmare.
Section four again has a theme-wise bifurcation. The first two essays, the
contributions of Javeed Alam and Aijaz Ahmad, constitute a devastating
critique of a genre of academic pretensions that have gained prominence in
recent years. To be fair, the pro tagonists of such scriptures are often
well-meaning in their interpretations. They have, however, been affected
by the malady of either left-wing adventurism or straightforward
frustration. Both Aijaz Ahmad and Javeed Alam are punctilious in the
construc tion of their hypotheses, and the common conclusion one reaches
from assimilating the message of their two essays is that modernity and
post-modernism have added at best some footnotes to Marxist
historiography. The articles by Mihir Bhattacharya, Ratnab ali Chatterjee
and Malini Bhattacharya dwell on the two-way relationship between
historical occurrences and the cultural process. Mihir discusses the
impact of the grim Bengal famine of the 1940s on the sensitivity of two
outstanding Bengali novelists, M anik Bandyopadhyay and Bibhutibhusan
Bandyopadhyay. Ratnabali Chatterjee analyses the archaeological evidence of
the early traces of nationalism in the cultural nuances of medieval
Bengal. Malini Bhattacharya is severe in her attack on the modern-day tre
nds to package so-called ethnic products, including folk songs, musical
tunes and handicrafts, for crass commercial purposes. She tells us that
the indigenous artists, whatever their sphere of creativity, articulated a
deeply felt secularism, from which we should draw inspiration.
Section five ushers in many of the themes of contemporary controversy. K.
N. Panikkar analyses the links between culture and nationalism and their
anti-thesis represented by communal politics. He does not stray from solid
facts, and yet spares no invecti ve for the social reactionaries where
such invective is richly deserved. Mushirul Hasan revisits Indian
partition. He invites the new generation of historians to cast away the
conventional format of Partition studies and concentrate on stressing the
hith erto neglected literature on inter-community relations, Partition and
national identity. Mushtaq H. Khan sheds light on a problem which has till
now scarcely drawn the attention of Indian scholars: what he describes as
class, clientelism and communal pol itics in Bangladesh. K.M. Shrimali's
meticulous review of the archaeological evidence pertaining to earlier
times has two objectives: first, to question the empirical foundation of
the alleged conversion of Hindu religious structures into mosques, et al,
in the Muslim epoch, and second, to prove how flimsy is the claim of a
Rama temple predating the Babri Masjid in the Ayodhya location.
The final section relates to economics of the modern era. C.P.
Chandrasekhar discusses the ongoing economics reforms focussing on the
public sector undertakings and suggests that these reflect the construct
of a true pompadour non-civilisation. Th e last essay in the volume, by
Prabhat Patnaik, is of an altogether different genre. Prabhat depicts his
essay as a simple model of an imaginary socialist economy. His modesty is
misleading, for his construction is not of an imaginary socialist system, b
ut of an idyllic system, which carries forward the Marxist-Leninist
ideological postulate beyond Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange and Michal
Kalecki. Prabhat's conceptual model of an internally consistent socialist
economy, this reviewer is firmly of the view , will still the disquiet of
many doubting Thomases.
The volume ends with a detailed and conscientious list of Irfan's
publications, which will be of immense use to future research scholars.
All told, The Making of History is a most appropriate tribute to Irfan
Habib's unrelenting commitment to history and the social sciences. Several
of the contributions in the volume, one is tempted to suggest, are bound
to make history!

_____

#5.

Urban Cultural Interventions: Contested Space and two
SAHMAT projects: Ayodhya 1993 and Old Delhi 1957/1997.

Ram Rahman gives a lecture on Friday October 20th, at
the Max Mueller Auditorium, Kala Ghoda, Bombay, 6.30
pm. Presented under the auspices of UDRI, the Urban
Development Research Institute as part of their
lecture series.

Ram will present two of SAHMAT's projects which dealt
directly with the city as symbol and specifically with
contests of historical interpretation, myth, and
political and cultural ideology. He will also show and
talk about his photography of Delhi as an ongoing
project on a multi-layered visual document of the new
urban metropolis.

______________________________________________
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