SACW | Feb. 19-22 , 2009 / Bangladesh: Ekushey / Nepal: Media / India: Threats to Secularism / Tributes to Victor Kiernan

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | February 19-22, 2009 | Dispatch No. 2607 -  
Year 11 running
From: www.sacw.net

[This issue of SACW is dedicated to the memory of the Victor Kiernan,  
the prominent historian and friend of South Asia. Large numbers of  
non urdu speaking South Asians first read and discovered the works of  
Faiz and Iqbal through their English translations by the great Victor  
Kiernan.]

[1] Bangladesh:  In the spirit of Ekushey fight for a secular state  
(Editorial, New Age)
[2] Nepal: CPJ Letter to the Prime Minister re unpunished attacks on  
the Media and Media workers
[3] Sri Lanka: Book Review - Asoka Bandarage's "The Separatist  
Conflict in Sri Lanka" (Reviewed by Mahes Ladduwahetty)
[4] India: Stand up for free speech as defined in the secular  
constitiution, not as defined by the mullahs (Vir Sanghvi)
[5] India: Hindu Spiritual Leaders Demand Dropping of Word Secular  
from Indian Constitution!
[6] UK: Women Against Fundamentalism Needed More Than Ever (Rahila  
Gupta)
[7]  V G Kiernan (1913 - 2009) : Three Tributes
        (i) Obituary - Victor Kiernan (Eric Hobsbawm)
       (ii) Victor Kiernan: A tribute (Tariq Ali)
       (iii) Illusion Of An Epoch - Victor Kiernan: historian and  
India’s friend (Rudrangshu Mukherjee)
[8] Literature / Disapora : A book review of Peggy Mohan’s  
"Jahajin" (Aditi Bhaduri)
[9] Announcements:
  - Urgent Meeting with Sikkim Activists (New Delhi, 23 February 2009)

_____


[1] Bangladesh:

New Age, 21 February 2009

Editorial

THE SPIRIT OF EKUSHEY YET TO BE FULLY REALISED

Though the central premise of our historic language movement more  
than half a century back was the establishment of our mother tongue  
as one of the state languages of Pakistan, the movement was  
essentially part of a larger struggle for the realisation of our  
secular-democratic rights. And while the language movement was  
largely successful given that it thwarted the sinister designs of our  
rulers in the western wing to declare Urdu as the only state language  
of Pakistan, our struggle for a secular-democratic state required  
many more movements to be waged, and culminated in our glorious war  
of liberation through which Bangladesh gained independence.  
Unfortunately, however, the successes of our struggles against our  
Pakistani occupiers have not resulted in the unimpeded and unhindered  
enjoyment by the free people of Bangladesh of the secular-democratic  
rights for which so many had fought so valiantly. Instead, the spirit  
of the language movement — which began as a student movement but soon  
grew into a mass movement as the common people realised that the  
language issue was inextricable from their freedom and dignity — has  
unfortunately been lost in our ritualistic commemoration of Amar  
Ekushey throughout the month of February, and particularly on this  
day each year.

    If we are to truly commemorate Amar Ekushey and pay homage to  
those who laid down their lives on this day over half a century ago,  
we should give manifestation to the real spirit of the language  
movement. Therefore, the proper commemoration of Amar Ekushey will  
entail that we strengthen our fight for a secular state against all  
forms of communalism and discrimination, regardless of how entrenched  
the instruments of communalism and discrimination may be. It entails  
that we fight against all forms of exploitation — political, economic  
and social — no matter how difficult the odds of prevailing in that  
fight may seem. And it entails that we continue to fight to establish  
and to sustain democracy, no matter how impure and imperfect that  
democracy is. Only when we are able to establish a secular democracy  
with equality and justice for all can we claim to live up to the  
spirit and the hope of Amar Ekushey.

    Moreover, February 21 is now recognised by the United Nations,  
and celebrated around the world, as the International Mother Language  
Day — which is a recognition of all languages, large and small, and  
the right of all people to speak in their mother tongue. We should  
never forget that Bangla is not the mother tongue of all the people  
of Bangladesh. Many other languages are spoken by the different  
ethnic minority communities and our government has a responsibility  
to protect and promote those languages just as it has the  
responsibility to protect and promote Bangla. We urge the government  
to take that responsibility seriously.

_____


[2] CPJ CONCERNED ABOUT RISE IN UNPUNISHED ATTACKS IN NEPAL


Committee to Protect Journalists
330 7th Avenue, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10001

February 17, 2009


Rt. Honorable Prime Minister of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal
Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers
Singh Durbar
Kathmandu
Nepal

Dear Prime Minister Dahal:

On December 29, your government signed an agreement with local press  
freedom group the Federation of Nepali Journalists (FNJ), ending a  
week of protest by journalists against a series of attacks on media  
outlets which peaked in late December. That agreement promised that  
those attacks would be addressed.

Yet nearly two months on, conditions for journalists continue to  
deteriorate. Your government must urgently address the climate of  
impunity for violence against journalists that threatens Nepal's media.

Involvement by cadres of your Maoists' Unified Communist Party of  
Nepal or their supporters is suspected in the 2008 murder of  
Janadisha editor and Maoist activist J.P. Joshi, who reported on  
local party disputes, and the 2007 killing of Birendra Shah in Bara  
district, central Nepal. Local journalists and civil society groups  
investigating January's brutal killing of radio and print journalist  
Uma Singh, in Janakpur in the Terai plains region, now suspect local  
Maoists had a hand in her death, too. Among other suggested motives,  
including a family dispute over land, Nepal's National Human Rights  
Commission suspects she was silenced by Maoist workers, who allegedly  
abducted and murdered her father and brother in 2006, according to  
the My Republica news Web site.

Nepal places eighth on CPJ's Impunity Index, which tallies countries  
that consistently fail to prosecute journalist murders. As the leader  
of the coalition government, and as head of your party, you have a  
unique responsibility for reversing this trend. We urge you to obtain  
justice in older murder cases, such as that of Dailekh district's  
state Radio Nepal correspondent Dekendra Raj Thapa, who many local  
journalists believe was murdered by Maoists in August 2004. Although  
Thapa's body was discovered and exhumed last year, his killers have  
not yet been brought to justice.

Non-fatal but nonetheless gravely serious attacks on the press are  
reported with alarming frequency by media outlets and local press  
freedom groups throughout Nepal. Often targeting Nepali-language  
media and taking place outside the capital, Kathmandu, these  
incidents do not always draw the attention of the international  
community. Fear of repetition or escalation of these attacks breeds  
self-censorship among journalists, who sometimes avoid publicizing  
violent acts beyond their local communities.

Kathmandu-based newspapers are emphasizing the climate of fear  
building in the media community nationwide as reports of these  
attacks accumulate. "Things were never this bad for the Nepali media:  
not in the conflict years, not even during the royal emergency,"  
according to Kailali district FNJ leader Dirgharaj Upadhyay in a  
recent Nepali Times editorial. "It was much easier to fight the ham- 
handed autocrat king," veteran journalist Kanak Mani Dixit wrote on  
My Republica, highlighting "an infrastructure of impunity and absence  
of accountability that is more entrenched than ever before."

When your government acknowledges these incidents, it denies  
involvement. Yet unpunished violence by Maoist sympathizers  
contributes to an environment in which acts of aggression against  
journalists--whether overtly politicized or otherwise--appear to be  
sanctioned by your leadership. Both the frequency and the methods  
used in attacks carried out by your supporters provide a model for  
those undertaken by other political and criminal groups. This  
seriously undermines the rule of law, and negates your public efforts  
to negotiate peace with militant groups in the Terai region. They, in  
turn, embrace the same tactics.

In public comments you all but dismissed December's attack on the  
offices of the prominent publisher Himalmedia in Lalitpur, near  
Kathmandu, carried out by a group described in local news reports as  
Maoist trade unionists. Two days after that attack, members of a  
youth group belonging to the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist  
Leninist--a member of your coalition government--set fire to  
thousands of copies of Ankush daily in Parsa district, according to  
local news reports.  The group stormed the paper's offices after it  
published an article about the party's local government  
representative. "You can't publish whatever you like," they told the  
staff, according to a report on the Kantipur Online Web site.

This week, a group of students followed that approach. "We could do  
anything against those writing and airing news against us," the  
students, who were not given a political affiliation in published  
reports, told staff at Tinau FM radio in Rupandehi district when they  
seized control of station offices for an hour on February 10,  
according to Kantipur Online. They had taken issue with a news item  
about a student charged with vandalism, according to Kantipur and the  
local branch of the Federation of Nepali Journalists. The same day,  
students also broke into the offices of Mechikali newspaper, where  
they burned 1,000 copies of the newspaper for carrying the same  
story, according to the reports.

  "Five journalists around the country presently face credible death  
threats," Dixit wrote on February 2 for My Republica. His brother,  
Kunda Dixit, was among those targeted in the Himalmedia attack. On  
February 3, journalists in Saptari district in the Terai plains  
staged a protest against the local administration for failing to  
arrest an activist belonging to a local Terai armed group. Jitendra  
Khadka, a local correspondent for Kantipur Publications, said a  
person identifying himself as the activist had threatened to kill him  
over a report he had written about a clash between the group's  
supporters and local businessmen, but police did not follow up.  
Saptari journalists have since censored stories about armed groups,  
according to a My Republica report. "There [has] never been such  
widespread self-censorship here," according to the Republica report,  
published February 10 from Janakpur in the wake of Uma Singh's  
murder. "Panic-stricken women journalists in the region are starting  
to quit their profession," according to a Kantipur Online report on  
February 11.

Until your government takes the lead to instigate thorough  
investigations and prosecutions of attacks on journalists, anyone  
with a grievance against the media will be emboldened to terrorize  
news outlets and their staff. If the media succumbs to this  
intimidation, the country's attempts to establish democracy will have  
proven a failure.

Justices at the Patan Appellate Court awarded 15,000 rupees (US$200)  
in compensation to journalist Mina Tiwari Sharma on February 10 after  
determining she was wrongfully held in 2002 during the state of  
emergency declared by the former king of Nepal, according to local  
news reports. The editor of Eikyavaddatha newspaper was held along  
with several journalists accused of links with Maoist groups. During  
Nepal's decade-long civil war, many news outlets strove for  
objectivity, incorporating the then-rebel Maoist viewpoint, to the  
point where it endangered their security.

Bringing justice to individual journalists who were imprisoned in the  
past is an appropriate way for your government to redress these  
wrongs. The same applies to present-day crimes against the press.  
Prosecute those who attack journalists, across the political and  
social spectrum, so that journalists who express the same objectivity  
today are not persecuted. We look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Joel Simon

Executive Director


_____



[3]  Sri Lanka:

The Island
18 February 2009

Book Review :

THE SEPARATIST CONFLICT IN SRI LANKA - TERRORISM, ETHNICITY,  
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Author: Asoka Bandarage
279pp, Routledge, Contemporary South Asia Series

Dr. Mahes Ladduwahetty

Dr. Asoka Bandarage’s timely book on the Sri Lankan conflict was  
launched on February 4, 2009, under the auspices of the Georgetown  
University’s Mortara Center for International Studies and the South  
Asia Forum. She was introduced by Dr. Joseph A. Ferrara, Associate  
Dean of the Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute where Dr.  
Bandarage teaches. Dr. Bandarage’s address at this well attended  
event covered the salient sections of her book, taking the political  
history of the conflict from pre-Independence, through the post- 
Independence years and into the current period with its new  
possibilities of a resolution.

There has been a significant dearth of scholarly works on the Sri  
Lankan conflict, and Dr. Bandarage’s book helps fill that vacuum.  
While its target is basically the academic community of political  
scientists, it is also an immensely readable book that relates a  
gripping tale to the lay reader interested in this conflict. She  
takes the reader through the historical underpinnings of the  
conflict, its British colonial history, the background events that  
led to the 1983 riots, the Indian intervention and its failure, and  
into the current internationalization of the conflict with its  
ramifications. It deals with the multiple actors, political, military  
and diplomatic, both internal and external, who entered the stage  
during the period covering the nearly 4 decades in which the LTTE was  
called to arms by Tamil political leaders; leaders who continue to be  
described by supporters as being "moderates’ and ‘Gandhian’ despite  
the LTTE’s modus operandi of violence of the most ruthless kind. The  
several cycles of the LTTE’s near defeat and revival, coupled with  
the entrance of international conflict resolution players such as the  
Norwegians who actively aided the LTTE, as well as the cycles of war  
and ceasefire/negotiations that have been experienced by the Sri  
Lankan people with hope and anguish in turn, all in the background of  
successive Sri Lankan governments with their political agendas as  
well as partisan politics, are dealt with and analyzed.

Dr. Bandarage’s new and significant contribution towards  
understanding the Sri Lankan conflict lies in the broadening of its  
perspective which generally had been presented and understood,  
especially internationally, as a straightforward bipolar, ethnic  
situation involving the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority of Sri  
Lanka, and which therefore needed, as has been proposed thus far, a  
bipolar solution.  Dr. Bandarage explores and presents the rationale  
to support a new, more complex multipolar model. Woven into it,  
through addressing both history and the several actors involved are  
the various issues of contention, like language, caste, and  
socioeconomic factors that contribute to the complexity of the  
conflict. What emerges is thus a model of still growing complexity  
with its interacting local, national and regional (India/Tamil Nadu),  
as well as international components. She draws attention to the role  
today, of the Tamil diaspora as the LTTE’s financiers and  
propagandists, as well as to a new ‘Third sector’ comprising the NGOs  
and INGOs with their humanitarian focus and links with the LTTE’s  
propaganda network, leading to increasing impact on the international  
sectors’ understanding of and reaction to the conflict.  Likewise,  
the international news media influenced by connections with the  
LTTE’s propaganda machine is serving as the lens through which the  
world is being presented the image of the Sri Lankan conflict. The  
book serves as an eye opener, broadening the perspective of the  
conflict to include aspects which had been kept peripheral in the  
debate thus far.

Most importantly, Dr. Bandarage has brought into the equation the new  
factors that have serious impact on the political resolution of the  
conflict. Policy makers need to take into account the more complete  
story presented by her. The Think-Tank communities have remained  
somewhat static in their mind-set of a federal/confederal model for  
resolution of what is deemed to be a purely ‘ethnic’ conflict. That  
in the Sri Lankan context, the devolved or federated regions  
envisioned in these models have been designed in order to satisfy  
only the LTTE and the Tamil people, and that the existential ground  
realities would not make such models be viewed with satisfaction by  
Sri Lanka’s other communities, especially the majority community,  
have not been given adequate consideration by the conflict resolution  
experts. Especially, in light of complexity of the interplaying  
factors as well as the changing and emerging demographics in the  
island, the author emphasizes a need for policy makers and those who  
influence them to look at other solutions of a more integrated nature.

One question I would have liked to have seen addressed is the  
revisionist history of Sri Lanka that has emerged in the last 2-3  
decades, with wild claims now made that even Kandy was a Tamil  
kingdom. With the Internet being the current information resource,  
with repetition, lies become transformed into fact in Goebellian  
fashion, and find their way into encyclopedias. Hopefully, Dr.  
Bandarage or another expert in Sri Lanka’s political history will  
address this problem.

Dr. Bandarage’s book could not have been published at a more critical  
time. The world’s attention on Sri Lanka these days is riveted via  
media slants on the humanitarian drama of the several thousand Tamil  
civilians trapped into providing a ‘human shield’ for the LTTE’s last  
battle with the Sri Lankan security forces, in a shrinking wedge of  
land on the North-Eastern coast of Sri Lanka. The civilians provide  
the LTTE’s ticket to another ceasefire, and to their hope of taking  
the fight to another round of re-arming and re-fitting, with the aim  
to confront Sri Lanka’s security forces yet again at another distant  
date. LTTE propaganda has concurrently reached a new level of  
intensity. The book therefore covers a topic of current international  
interest. In the coincidence of this book’s publication with the new  
Obama administration taking office in the USA, it should also serve  
as a useful resource for policy makers to look afresh at the Sri  
Lankan conflict and its political resolution.

The hardcover edition is high-priced and therefore affordable mainly  
by libraries of Universities and other academic institutions with  
interests in the South Asian region. There is a demand for a  
Paperback Edition, and the possibility that one may soon be out is  
great news. It is a book for every student of Sri Lankan politics and  
history, and in fact is one that Sri Lankans should have on their  
bookshelves as an information resource and reminder of a segment of  
history that must never be allowed to repeat.


_____


[4] India: Defend free speech as defined in the constitiution, not as  
defined by religious fanatics


Hindustan Times, February 21, 2009

STAND UP TO THE MULLAHS

Vir Sanghvi


If you have missed the controversy that led to the arrest of the  
editor of The Statesman in Calcutta for offending religious  
sentiments — which you might have, because the national media  
downplayed the issue — then here’s what it is about.

The Statesman reproduced an article by Johann Hari, the young liberal  
British commentator, from The Independent. Hari’s politics are clear:  
he stands up for secularism (for which he has won awards), tolerance  
(he has defended Islam against such critics as Mark Steyn) and  
environmental concerns.

The column in question was about attempts by the governments of some  
Islamic states to alter the UN’s commitment to free speech. These  
governments argue that free speech must be restricted on grounds of  
offence to religion and that discussions of certain issues relating  
to the rights of women must be curtailed because they could be anti- 
Islamic.

Hari makes the obvious objections to all of this and then says that  
religion can often be oppressive. So, why should people be stopped  
from speaking out against it? He quotes examples of regressive  
practices from all religions and says that just because these occur  
in accounts of the lives of gods, messiahs or prophets, that does not  
make them above criticism.

Who could possibly object to that?

Well, a small section of politically-motivated Islamic fanatics in  
Calcutta, that’s who.

As the people who rioted did not seem like typical Statesman readers  
(they were not genteel Bengalis, aged 60 and above), it is a fair  
assumption that some cynical leader of an extreme faction of the  
Muslim community told his followers about the ‘grave insult to Islam”  
and sent them off to riot.

The CPI(M) government then arrested The Statesman’s editor and  
publisher. But the arrest — though clearly unjustified — seems to  
have been largely symbolic. They were quickly released and the mobs,  
satisfied that “action had been taken”, melted away.

Several points need to be made about the incident.

First: The article itself. There is not one line in Hari’s piece that  
I would disagree with. If religions deserve respect, then so does  
atheism. Followers of religions have every right to their views and  
practices. But so do atheists have the right to criticise religion.  
Nothing in this world is above criticism.

Two: The rioters said they were offended by a passage in the article  
where Hari referred to the Prophet’s marriage to a much younger woman  
and his directive to burn Jewish villages. (In all fairness, he was  
as critical of other religions and of the Israeli assault on the West  
Bank.)

The rioters say that nobody can criticise any aspect of the Prophet’s  
life.

Why?

There’s no shortage of books and articles criticising Jesus,  
suggesting that he might have been secretly married (as in The  
DaVinci Code), arguing that the resurrection was a hoax or that Mary  
was never a virgin.

Similarly, would mainstream Hindus be offended if somebody wrote that  
Hindu mythology features practices that we would find abhorrent  
today: one wife for five husbands as in the Mahabharat, the  
compulsive philandering of Krishna or the appalling mistreatment of  
Sita (the agni pariksha etc)?

Some Hindu extremists may protest but I doubt if they would get very  
far with their objections. The community, as a whole, would shrug its  
shoulders and many Hindus will agree with the critics.

And yet, it is an article of faith with Muslims — even moderate ones  
— that the Prophet’s life is beyond reproach.

Does this make any sense?

Three: It is now clear that the liberal society has been suckered  
into relaxing its standards for free speech by militant Islamists.

Let’s take the most obvious example. Every liberal I know is outraged  
by the attacks on MF Husain. Why shouldn’t he paint nude Saraswatis?  
That’s his right. If people are offended by the paintings, they  
shouldn’t see them.

So far, so good. But now imagine that Husain had painted an extremely  
reverential portrait of the Prophet. (Never mind cartoons, nude  
pictures etc.)

There would have been riots. And even secular liberals would not have  
supported him.

We would have said: Islam prohibits any visual representation of the  
Prophet so Husain has committed a great crime.

But so what if Muslims cannot visually represent their Prophet? Why  
should non-Muslims be bound by their religious edicts? Why should non- 
believing Muslims be forced by liberal society to obey the  
restrictions of their religion?

Believers should follow what the Holy Book and the mullahs say. But  
why should the rest of us? Why should we abandon our right to free  
expression?

Nobody I know has ever explained why the double standards are justified.

Four: The reason we are suckered into accepting these double  
standards is because Muslim politicians play good cop-bad cop.

Look, they say, we are all for freedom of speech. But if you say  
anything that the fanatics object to, then they will take to the  
streets, burn property and hurt innocent people. We will do our best  
to pacify our community, but you must remove any provocation that  
will cause the hardliners to revolt.

Turn this around. How would Muslims have reacted if Hindu moderates  
had said to them: Look, we think this whole Ram Janmbhoomi thing is  
nonsense. But the BJP will gain support on this platform. So why  
don’t you agree to move the Babri Masjid? It’s not even a functioning  
mosque. That way, we remove the provocation and rid the hardliners of  
their issue and ensure communal harmony.

Well, Hindu moderates did say this. And we know how moderate Muslim  
politicians reacted.

Five: The real reason we give in to Islamic fanatics is the desire  
for a peaceful life or, to put it another way, cowardice.

Every one of their objections is always framed in terms of violence.  
Ban The Satanic Verses or we will kill Salman Rushdie. Apologise for  
the Danish cartoons or we will offer a reward for the head of the  
cartoonist. Arrest the editor of the Statesman or we will shut  
Calcutta down by rioting in the streets.

Faced with these threats, we abandon our principles and say things  
like, “Come on, is a single article worth the death of so many  
people?” or “Let’s just ban the book, otherwise these guys will keep  
rioting.”

The fanatics know this. They have identified the cowardice at the  
heart of our liberalism. So every demand is a) pitched in terms of  
protecting the religious sentiments of the Muslim community or b)  
facing murder, mayhem and more.

Almost every single time, we cave in.

Either we say that Islam is a peaceful religion.

Or we get death threats.

And finally: Isn’t it time to finally stand up to these thugs and  
blackmailers? It is up to the Muslim community to rein in its  
fanatics and some moderates are indeed trying to do this.

But as far as secular society is concerned, our position should be  
clear. We believe in free speech as guaranteed by our Constitution,  
not as defined by the mullahs.

Anything less would be a betrayal of the liberal, secular values we  
hold dear.

[The above article is also available at: http://www.sacw.net/ 
article685.html ]

_____


[5]   India: Secularism Under Attack

http://www.sacw.net/article676.html

What do ’Hindu’ spiritual leaders talk when they meet?

Seers Demand Dropping of Word Secular from Indian Constitution!

by Ram Puniyani, 20 February 2009

What do spiritual leaders talk when they meet? One thought it may be  
the matters pertaining to the ‘other world’ that is the focus of  
their attention, away from the profane World, which is the matter of  
concern for ordinary people. One thought they may be deliberating on  
the issues of moral values of the religion. But it seems that is not  
the case. Recently when many of them met in Mumbai they showed that  
the saffron garb is the mere exterior, this color of renunciation and  
piety, is no representative of their political core. On the top of  
that they use saffron color to hide their sectarian ideas and narrow  
politics in the name of religion. The only difference in their case  
being that their politics is couched in the language of religion.  
That their ideas are full ‘Hate’ for others, unlike the values  
Hinduism which teaches us Vasudhaiva Kutumbkam (whole World is my  
family). This got revealed once more.

Recently many a chiefs of Akharas and other assorted Saints came  
together at the First Conference of Dharma Raksha Manch (29th Jan  
2009) in Mumbai. They were brought together by Vishwa Hindu Parishad,  
apparently for the agenda was Combating terrorism. They called for  
dropping the word secular from Indian constitution and replacing it  
with word religious. They Ram Temple, Malegaon blasts, terrorism, and  
amongst other things and demanded that they need Manu’s parliament  
and not Christ’s. They drew attention to terrorism breeding in  
Madrassa, and hit out at media for using the term Hindu terrorism.  
Finally Beginning Mid Feb. (2009) they plan to take out series of  
yatras (religious marches) covering large parts of the country, with  
the call for ending Jihad.

Who are these assorted Holy seers, coming together on the call of  
Vishwa Hindu Parishad? VHP itself is the creation of RSS in the mid  
sixties. Initiative was taken by RSS chief and his close lieutenant  
to get different established mutt’s to form VHP. It primarily became  
a religious wing of RSS, involving the Hindu achrayas etc, and  
attracted especially traders, affluent processionals and those who  
did not want to openly associate with RSS, as at that time RSS stood  
fully discredited in people’s eyes due to its association with  
Nathuram Godse, who killed Mahatma Gandhi.

VHP got involved in the identity issues strengthening the  
conservative politics and Ram temple became its central rallying  
point. Along with this it called for Dharma Sansad (religious  
parliament) where they stated that in the matters religious, in this  
case Ram Temple, the decision of saints is above the judgement of the  
courts. Place of Lord’s birth became a matter not of History but of  
faith, and who else can decide these issues than these custodians of  
faith.

This congregation of holy seers has taken place long after their  
earlier meetings around Ram Temple issue. It seems it is their next  
innings where the focus is also on terrorism apart from its earlier  
concerns. At the same time they are reiterating that Indian  
Constitution is not welcome; let’s go back to Manu Smriti. In a way  
there is nothing new in this. The RSS politics has always been  
against the Indian Constitution, against the values of secularism,  
democracy as these stand by Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Right  
from the time Constituent Assembly was formed, RSS opposed the same,  
saying that ‘we’ already have the best of Constitutions in the form  
of Manu Smirit so why a new Constitution. It was backed by eulogies  
for Lord Manu by the RSS ideologue M.S. Golwalkar, who also at the  
same time has heaped immense praise on the methods of Hitler. Later  
K.Surshan also openly called for scrapping of Indian constitution and  
bringing Manu Smriti instead.

While the saints are overtly for the subjugation of Muslims and  
Christians, at the same time their agenda is to push back the concept  
of equality for dalit, Adivasis and women. Interestingly RSS came up  
as a reaction to social changes of caste and gender during the  
freedom movement. Our national movement stood not only for freedom  
but also for the transformation of caste and gender towards equality.  
Barring some exceptions the concept of democracy and secularism go  
hand in hand. Freedom movement was the epitome of these political and  
social processes, leading to the emergence of secular India. Today  
RSS has many mouths to speak and many fora to articulate its agenda.  
VHP is the crude version of expressing its agenda while BJP, due to  
electoral compulsions, puts the same agenda in more subtle ways.

The VHP agenda is quite striking in combing the Holy language with  
profane goals. It will totally ignore the problems of ‘this World’;  
the problems related to survival and Human rights and will harp on  
identity issues. This brings in a politics which targets the  
‘external enemies’, Muslims; Christians, and intimidates internal  
sectors, dalits; Adivasis and women, of society. Its call for doing  
away with the word secular is nothing new in that sense. Its demand  
to do away with secular word and secular ethos shows that their  
Holiness is restricted to the appearance, while they want to maintain  
their social hegemony through political means. Secularism is not  
against religion. The best of religious people like Maulana Abul  
Kalam and Mahatma Gandhi had been secular to the core. They knew the  
boundary line very well. Also they used the moral values of religion  
to create bonds of fraternity (community) amongst the people of  
different religions. There were others who created Hate against the  
other community, and that too in the name of religion. One can cite  
the parallel and opposite roles of Muslim League on one side and  
Hindu Mahasabha-RSS on the other.

The seers, respected because of their Holy garb are misusing their  
appearance at the service of sectarian politics, they are playing the  
role of handmaidens of the divisive politics. Secularism precisely  
means that secular, this-worldly, issues should be the base of  
politics. So the genuine religious person like Gandhi could  
distinguish between the moral values of religion which should be  
adopted in life while shunning the identity related issues from  
political life, "In India, for whose fashioning I have worked all my  
life, every man enjoys equality of status, whatever his religion is.  
The state is bound to be wholly secular." It is a matter of shame and  
disgust the identity of a religion is being used to pursue the  
political goals of an organization, supplementing the goals a  
communal political party by appealing in the name of religion.

At the same time to further demonize the Muslims it is taking up the  
issue of terrorism in lop sided manner. The slogan end of Jihad is a  
way to hide the anti Muslim agenda. There is an attempt to put the  
blame on Islam and Muslims for terrorism, which is totally false. A  
political phenomenon is being presented as the one related to  
religion. So Islamic terrorism word is acceptable to them! All  
terrorist are Muslims formulation is acceptable to them. But how dare  
you use the word Hindu terrorism if Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Swami  
Dayanand Pande and their ilk is involved in acts of terror? In this  
meet, overseen by RSS representatives, lot of anger was expressed for  
the Maharashtra ATS for starting investigations against Sadhvi and  
Company.

The timing of the meet and the planned Yatras is more then striking.  
As we await elections, the VHP is trying to revive Ram Temple as an  
issue and will also be talking of terrorism; about Afzal Guru and  
will be reprimanding the state for ‘torturing’ Pragya Thakur. As a  
matter of fact VHP and this motley crowd of saints is an adjunct to  
the electoral goals of BJP. It articulates emotive things which BJP  
will not be able to do because of election commission and the media  
watch.

Of all the techniques evolved by RSS, the use of these Holy men for  
political goals may be the worst insult of the Hindu religion. While  
these Holy seers infinite in number, many of them have succeeded in  
building up their own five star Empires, there are others who are  
sitting on the top of already established mutts. What unites them  
through VHP is the politics of status quo, the opposition to  
democracy. We had saints, who talked against caste system and social  
evils. We had Kabir, Chokha Mela, Tukaram and the lot who stood for  
the problems of the poor, and now we have a breed, whose agenda is to  
undermine the prevalent social evils of dowry, female infanticide,  
bride burning, atrocities on dalits and Adivasis. Their goal is to  
keep talking about the spirituality and religiosity which is so  
different from the concerns taken up by the likes of Gandhi and the  
whole the genre of Saints of Bhakti tradition in India. One hope the  
people of India can see this clever game of communal politics and  
differentiate the grain from the chaff.


_____



[6]   UK:

http://www.sacw.net/article679.html

UK: LONG AND UNFINISHED FEMINIST BATTLE AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISM

by Rahila Gupta, 21 February 2009

An all-too familiar affair

Women had been fighting fundamentalism on the streets of London for  
years before The Satanic Verses

The 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Rushdie has been publicly  
debated by almost the same chorus of voices, now a little older and  
with some welcome recantations, that was heard then.

Dissenting women’s voices are little in evidence although it is women  
who are the first to feel the chill of religious fundamentalism when  
their precarious freedoms begin to atrophy. This does not mean that  
these voices do not exist, just that their position can be  
inconvenient for the dominant narratives driving the public debate.

Long before the wider society woke up to the problem of religious  
extremism in its midst, perhaps from the mid-80s onwards, women’s  
groups like Southall Black Sisters (SBS) were becoming aware of the  
growing religious restrictions on the women they were seeing.  
Militant Khalistanis fighting for an independent theocratic Punjab in  
India were making their presence felt in Southall and life was  
becoming more difficult as a result for young women on the streets.

So when the Rushdie affair broke, SBS realised that this was the not  
just an isolated case of religious fervour. They organised a meeting  
of white and black feminists from a range of political traditions,  
ethnic and religious backgrounds which culminated in the founding of  
Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) in 1989.

The group felt strongly about the need to tackle the resurgence of  
fundamentalism in all religions worldwide, partly to challenge the  
demonisation of Islam by the state and the liberal intelligentsia and  
partly to develop an effective strategy to fight reactionary  
religious forces in all our communities. WAF had its moment in the  
limelight because the media were caught up in a feeding frenzy and  
were keen to cover the Rushdie affair from every possible angle.  
Other campaigns against Hindu, Catholic and Jewish fundamentalism did  
not get the same level of publicity. As a result it became identified  
with being anti-Islamic by the anti-racist lobby who saw it as  
feeding into Islamophobia, exactly the opposite of what WAF wanted to  
achieve.

The contradictions arising from WAF’s position of resisting racism,  
sexism and religious fundamentalism were perfectly demonstrated by  
the WAF picket outside parliament in 1989 – approximately 50 women  
were marooned between a march of young Asian men calling for a ban on  
The Satanic Verses and National Front (NF) supporters. Instead of  
tackling the NF, the Asian men verbally and physically attacked WAF  
which then had to rely on the police for protection whereas  
previously WAF members would have been marching alongside their Asian  
"brothers" against police and state racism!

The fallout from the Rushdie affair was the widespread growth of  
religious identities at the expense of racial and gender identities.  
Secular anti-racists began to declaim, even reclaim, their Muslim  
identity. Muslim women increasingly adopted the hijab as a symbol of  
pride in their religious identity, not recognising or even accepting  
the fact that it set women back by placing the onus on women’s safety  
on their modest dress and behaviour rather than male aggression. The  
left displayed a reluctance to challenge reactionary forces within  
our communities because it might be seen as racist.

The state’s response has been divided to say the least: the "fighting  
extremism" agenda after 7/7 has seen the active wooing of so-called  
"moderates" (often linked to extremist organisations overseas) who  
may be moderate on the question of public order but certainly not on  
the question of women. This has led, for instance, to an explosion of  
religious schools and the growing acceptance that some form of sharia  
law should be accommodated within the legal system. However, last  
week it emerged from a leaked counterterrorism draft strategy that  
anyone who promotes sharia law could be classed as extremist! At the  
same time police officers report that the government’s terror agenda  
is hampering their work on forced marriage because of the  
government’s reluctance to alienate community leaders.

Pragna Patel, a founder member of WAF, reflects on how things have  
changed since then: "Little did we know how far the state would go  
towards appeasing demands by religionists and conceding essential  
public spaces which is problematic for women and an immensely  
worrying development."

WAF is needed now more than ever before.

______


[7]  V G Kiernan (1913 - 2009) : Three Tributes


(i)

The Guardian, Wednesday 18 February 2009

OBITUARY - VICTOR KIERNAN

HISTORIAN WITH A GLOBAL VISION OF EMPIRES, MARXISM, POLITICS AND POETRY

by Eric Hobsbawm

Victor Kiernan, who has died aged 95, was a man of unselfconscious  
charm and staggeringly wide range of learning. He was also one of the  
last survivors of the generation of British Marxist historians of the  
1930s and 1940s. If this generation has been seen by the leading  
German scholar HU Wehler as the main factor behind "the global impact  
of English historiography since the 1960s", it was largely due to  
Victor's influence. He brought to the debates of the Communist party  
historians' group between 1946 and 1956 a persistent, if always  
courteous, determination to think out problems of class culture and  
tradition for himself, whatever the orthodox position. He continued  
to remain loyal to the flexible, open-minded Marxism of the group to  
which he had contributed so much.

Most influential through his works on the imperialist era, he was  
also, almost certainly, the only historian who also translated 20th- 
century Urdu poets and wrote a book on the Latin poet Horace. The  
latter's works he, like the distinguished Polish Marxist historian  
Witold Kula, carried with him on his travels.

Like several of his contemporaries among the Marxist historians,  
including Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Edward Thompson, he  
came from a nonconformist background. In his case it was a lower- 
middle-class, actively congregationalist family in Ashton-on-Mersey,  
though in his time as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he used  
his Irish name as an excuse to justify a lack of zeal for the British  
monarchy.

He came to Trinity College from Manchester grammar school in 1931 and  
remained there for the next seven years as an exceptionally brilliant  
undergraduate, research scholar and, from 1937, fellow. In 1934, the  
year of his graduation (double starred first in history), he joined  
the Communist party, in which he remained for the next 25 years. His  
first book, British Diplomacy in China 1880-1885 (1939) announced his  
consistent interest in the world outside Europe.

Unlike his Trinity comrade John Cornford, about whom he wrote with  
remarkable perception, his public profile among Cambridge Communist  
party members of the 1930s was low. Only those with special interests  
were likely to meet him, a boyish face emerging in a dressing-gown  
from among mountain ranges of books on the attic floor of Trinity  
Great Court. This was because he soon took over the officially non- 
existent "colonial group" from the Canadian EH Norman, later a  
distinguished historian of Japan, diplomat and eventual victim of the  
McCarthyite witch-hunt in the US, and first of a succession of  
communist (and later ex-communist) historians who looked after the  
"colonials" - overwhelmingly from south Asia - until 1939.

Marxism and the irresistible friendship of Indians moved Victor, in  
1938, to use one year of his four-year Trinity fellowship to visit  
the subcontinent. This was nominally "to see the political scene at  
closer hand and with some schemes for historical study" and he also  
had a Comintern document for the Indian CP.

He was to stay there until 1946, mainly as a teacher at a Sikh  
college and, somewhat unexpectedly, at that stronghold of the raj and  
its rajahs, Aitchison college, both in Lahore. He returned, "reading  
Thucydides on the Peloponnesian war" in his cabin, with a cargo of  
friendships, a permanent passion for the great (and progressive) Urdu  
poets Iqbal and Faiz whom he translated, but with no apparent trace  
in his subsequent life of a short-lived marriage to Shanta Gandhi,  
whom he had got to know in London in 1938. Few of his British friends  
were even aware of it, or expected to see this quintessential  
bachelor don with a wife, before his fortunate second marriage in  
1984 to Heather Massey.

He returned to Trinity, an unreconstructed, but always critical,  
communist with vast plans for a Marxist work on Shakespeare. His  
referee denounced his politics when he applied for posts at Oxford  
and Cambridge universities, but - such was Britain in 1948 - did not  
mind the charming subversive contaminating the history department at  
Edinburgh University. There he remained until retirement from a chair  
in 1977, to all appearances at ease with himself, though not, except  
for some science fiction, with the post-1945 cultural world. He  
returned from long bicycle rides across the Pentlands to a flat at  
the top of an austere staircase in the New Town, to write - not least  
the diary which he had kept since 1935 - and amaze students and  
admiring friends by his surprise that they did not know as much as he.

He settled down in the 1950s to publish on everything: from  
Wordsworth to Faiz, evangelicalism to mercenaries and absolute  
monarchy, Indo-Central Asian problems, Paraguay and the "war of the  
Pacific" of Chile, Peru and Bolivia, not forgetting a full-scale  
study of the Spanish revolution of 1854. In the 1960s he discovered  
his unique gift of asking historical questions, and suggesting  
answers, by bringing and fitting together an unparalleled range of  
erudition, constantly extended by one of the great readers of our  
time. He became the master of the perfectly chosen quotation inserted  
into a demure but uncompromising survey of a global scene. Nobody  
else could have produced the remarkable works on the era of western  
empires he wrote after the middle 1960s, and by which he will be  
chiefly remembered, notably The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man,  
Yellow Man and White Man in an Age of Empire (1969).

Age increased his output and the range of his writings. Co-editing A  
Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1984), he wrote entries on  
agnosticism, Christianity, empires in Marx's day, Hinduism,  
historiography, intellectuals, Paul Lafargue, nationalism, MN Roy,  
religion, revolution and war. Before the end of the 20th century he  
published books on State and Society in Europe 1550-1650 (1980), The  
Duel in European History (1989), Tobacco: A History (1991),  
Shakespeare Poet and Citizen (1992), Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare  
(1996) and Horace Poetics & Politics (1999) on his admired poet.

To mark his 90th birthday, the future general secretary of the  
Communist party (Marxist) of India edited Across Time and Continents,  
a selection of Victor's writings and reminiscences of the  
subcontinent which had been closer to his heart than any other part  
of the 20th-century world.

His wife Heather survives him.

• Victor Gordon Kiernan, historian, born 4 September 1913; died 17  
February 2009


o o o

(ii) VICTOR KIERNAN: MARXIST HISTORIAN, WRITER AND LINGUIST WHO  
CHALLENGED THE TENETS OF IMPERIALISM

Kiernan pictured at Cambridge in 1935 with the Indian communists  
Savitri and Somnath Chibber Kiernan pictured at Cambridge in 1935  
with the Indian communists Savitri and Somnath Chibber

Victor Kiernan, professor emeritus of Modern History at Edinburgh  
University, was an erudite Marxist historian with wide-ranging  
interests that spanned virtually every continent. His passion for  
history and radical politics, classical languages and world  
literature was evenly divided.

His interest in languages was developed at home in south Manchester.  
His father worked for the Manchester Ship Canal as a translator of  
Spanish and Portuguese and young Victor picked these up even before  
getting a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, where he learnt  
Greek and Latin. His early love for Horace (his favourite poet)  
resulted in a later book. He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge  
where he studied History, imbibed the prevalent anti-fascist outlook  
and like many others joined the British Communist Party.

Unlike some of his distinguished colleagues (Eric Hobsbawm,  
Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Edward Thompson) in the Communist  
Party Historians Group founded in 1946, Kiernan wrote a great deal on  
countries and cultures far removed from Britain and Europe. A flavour  
of the man is evident from the opening paragraphs of a 1989 essay on  
the monarchy published in the New Left Review:

In China an immemorial throne crumbled in 1911; India put its Rajas  
and Nawabs in the wastepaper-basket as soon as it gained independence  
in 1947; in Ethiopia the Lion of Judah has lately ceased to roar.  
Monarchy survives in odd corners of Asia; and in Japan and Britain.  
In Asia sainthood has often been hereditary, and can yield a  
comfortable income to remote descendants of holy men; in Europe  
hereditary monarchy had something of the same numinous character. In  
both cases a dim sense of an invisible flow of vital forces from  
generation to generation, linking together the endless series, has  
been at work. Very primitive feeling may lurk under civilized  
waistcoats.

Notions derived from age-old magic helped Europe’s ’absolute  
monarchs’ to convince taxpayers that a country’s entire welfare, even  
survival, was bound up with its God-sent ruler’s. Mughal emperors  
appeared daily on their balcony so that their subjects could see them  
and feel satisfied that all was well. Rajput princes would ride in a  
daily cavalcade through their small capitals, for the same reason.  
Any practical relevance of the crown to public well-being has long  
since vanished, but somehow in Britain the existence of a Royal  
Family seems to convince people in some subliminal way that  
everything is going to turn out all right for them... Things of today  
may have ancient roots; on the other hand antiques are often  
forgeries, and Royal sentiment in Britain today is largely an  
artificial product.

Kiernan’s knowledge of India was first-hand. He was there from  
1938-46, establishing contacts and organising study-circles with  
local Communists and teaching at Aitchison (formerly Chiefs) College,  
an institution created to educate the Indian nobility along the lines  
suggested by the late Lord Macaulay. What the students (mostly wooden- 
headed wastrels) made of Kiernan has never been revealed, but one or  
two of the better ones did later embrace radical ideas. It would be  
nice to think that he was responsible: it is hard to imagine who else  
it could have been. The experience taught him a great deal about  
imperialism and in a set of stunningly well-written books he wrote a  
great deal on the origins and development of the American Empire, the  
Spanish colonisation of South America and on other European empires.

He was by now fluent in Persian and Urdu and had met Iqbal and the  
young Faiz, two of the greatest poets produced by Northern India.  
Kiernan translated both of them into English, which played no small  
part in helping to enlarge their audience at a time when imperial  
languages were totally dominant. His interpretation of Shakespeare is  
much underrated but were it put on course lists it would be a healthy  
antidote to the embalming.

He had married the dancer and theatrical activist Shanta Gandhi in  
1938 in Bombay, but they split up before Kiernan left India in 1946.  
Almost forty years later he married Heather Massey. When I met him  
soon afterwards he confessed that she had rejuvenated him  
intellectually. Kiernan’s subsequent writings confirmed this view.

Throughout his life he stubbornly adhered to Marxist ideas, but  
without a trace of rigidity or sullenness. He was not one to pander  
to the latest fashions and despised the post-modernist wave that  
swept the academy in the 80s and 90s, rejecting history in favour of  
trivia. Angered by triumphalist mainstream commentaries proclaiming  
the virtues of capitalism he wrote a sharp rebuttal. "Modern  
Capitalism and Its Shepherds" was published once again in the New  
Left Review in October 1990:

Merchant capital, usurer capital, have been ubiquitous, but they have  
not by themselves brought about any decisive alteration of the world.  
It is industrial capital that has led to revolutionary change, and  
been the highroad to a scientific technology that has transformed  
agriculture as well as industry, society as well as economy.  
Industrial capitalism peeped out here and there before the nineteenth  
century, but on any considerable scale it seems to have been rejected  
like an alien graft, as something too unnatural to spread far. It has  
been a strange aberration on the human path, an abrupt mutation.  
Forces outside economic life were needed to establish it; only very  
complex, exceptional conditions could engender, or keep alive, the  
entrepreneurial spirit. There have always been much easier ways of  
making money than long-term industrial investment, the hard grind of  
running a factory. J.P. Morgan preferred to sit in a back parlour on  
Wall Street smoking cigars and playing solitaire, while money flowed  
towards him. The English, first to discover the industrial highroad,  
were soon deserting it for similar parlours in the City, or looking  
for byways, short cuts and colonial Eldorados.

The current crisis would not have surprised him at all. Fictive  
capital, I can hear him saying, has no future.

Tariq Ali

Victor Gordon Kiernan, historian and writer: born Manchester 4  
September 1913; Married 1938 Shanta Gandhi (marriage dissolved 1946),  
1984 Heather Massey; died 17 February 2009.

This article appeared earlier in The Independent, 20 February 2009

o o o

(iii)

The Telegraph, February 22, 2009

  ILLUSION OF AN EPOCH - Victor Kiernan (1913-2009): historian and  
India’s friend

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

The death of Victor Kiernan at the age of 95 a few days ago probably  
represents the passing of an era. This is not because he lived well  
beyond the biblical three score and ten, but because he was among the  
few survivors from a group of intellectuals who formed the Historians  
Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Most members of that  
group believed that he was the most erudite and widely read among  
them all.

Born in 1913, he came to Trinity College, Cambridge from Manchester  
Grammar School. In Trinity, he took a double starred first in history  
and won the research fellowship of the college. It was in Cambridge  
that Kiernan turned to Marxism and joined the communist party in  
1934. He left the party in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of  
Hungary in 1956. Kiernan was part of a large exodus from the CPGB  
that included Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, John Saville and the  
two Thompsons, Edward and Dorothy. The only historian from that group  
who retained his party card was Eric Hobsbawm.

Kiernan’s conversion to communism is not difficult to comprehend. To  
many of his generation, the Depression made the collapse of  
capitalism imminent, and Nazism seemed the ultimate menace to  
civilization. Communism and Soviet Russia appeared as alternatives to  
many, from historians to scientists, from Hill to Haldane. Men like  
Kiernan believed then, mistakenly as history showed, that communism  
and Soviet Russia offered a more humane prospect. In defence of a  
more humane and civilized society, young men like John Cornford,  
Kiernan’s friend from Trinity and the hero of his generation, went  
out to fight in Spain and die. A few days before he died in battle —  
he was only 21 — Cornford wrote in a poem from Spain: “And history  
forming in our hands/ Not plasticine but roaring sands….We are the  
future....’’ Similar sentiments inspired an entire generation. The  
call of communism was part romantic, part rational. Above all, there  
was the certainty that time and history were on their side, and the  
confidence that the world could be correctly interpreted and changed.

Kiernan’s political and intellectual interests did not remain  
confined to Europe and the West. In Cambridge in the Thirties, he  
acted as friend, philosopher and guide to many Indians who went up to  
that university, among whom were Renu Chakrabarty, Mohan  
Kumaramangalam and Arun Bose. It was perhaps such friendships and his  
interest in the world outside Europe that made Kiernan decide in 1938  
to spend one year of his six-year fellowship in India. His original  
intention was to stay in India and see the political situation for  
himself. He stayed till 1946, teaching in Lahore and working closely  
with the Communist Party of India, which was then headed by P.C.  
Joshi whose friend Kiernan became.

The visit in 1938, however, was not entirely innocent. Kiernan  
carried with him, no doubt at the behest of Rajani Palme Dutt (known  
as RPD, the leader of the CPGB who ran the CPI by remote control from  
London with orders from Moscow), a Comintern document. This is an  
interesting sidelight on how the CPI functioned. Just as Kiernan’s  
academic trip was used by the Comintern to send a secret message to  
the Indian party, in 1948 when Mohit Sen went up to Cambridge as a  
student, he was given by the CPI the basic documents of its new  
understanding and a coded letter to RPD — both typed on very thin  
paper and placed under the bottom layer of a matchbox. The party  
asked Mohit to take up smoking so that his carrying a matchbox would  
not appear incongruous. The poor man coughed and spluttered all the  
way from Bombay to London.

Kiernan was later to recall his joy when he heard in Bombay of the  
liberation of Paris from the Nazis. He, in fact, wrote a tribute on  
the occasion, “an attempt to explain to Indians something of what  
Paris meant to Europe”. This was to have been read over the radio by  
Kumaramangalam who arrived at the radio station late and Kiernan’s  
declamation went unheard.

Back in Britain, Kiernan failed to get elected to a fellowship of an  
Oxbridge college as his referee denounced his ideology and politics.  
He settled for a job at Edinburgh University, where he remained  
professor of history for his entire working life. Kiernan’s  
intellectual interests were vast — he translated Iqbal and Faiz from  
Urdu; his passion was Shakespeare and late in life he wrote two books  
on the bard, and another on Horace. He had a fine monograph on the  
duel in European history and another on absolutism. He wrote on Spain  
and China. The book for which he is best remembered is The Lords of  
Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial  
Age. The title — taken from Oliver Goldsmith’s “Pride in their port,  
defiance in their eye,/ I see the lords of humankind pass by” —  
reflected Kiernan’s immersion in literature. The book was an  
extraordinary tour d’horizon of a large theme and revealed Kiernan’s  
enviable capacity to store away bits and pieces of information picked  
up from his wide-ranging reading. Sherlock Holmes called such a mind  
an attic but it made for very attractive history writing.

Perhaps because of his many interests, Kiernan never produced the  
magnum opus he was capable of. He did not quite become the historian  
of the stature of Thompson and Hill. When the latter dedicated a book  
to Kiernan, the dedication read, “Wit, provocateur and generous  
friend of fifty years.” The choice of words is not without significance.

Throughout his life, Kiernan retained an abiding love and interest  
for India (including Pakistan). In spite of this, like many Anglo- 
Saxons of his generation, he failed to appreciate the cultural  
differences between India and the West. I remember one leisurely  
morning at St Antony’s College, Oxford (Kiernan had come to speak at  
Tapan Raychaudhuri’s South Asia History seminar), when we argued  
about Wajid Ali Shah. He had just seen Shatranj ke Khiladi and kept  
saying that Ray had depicted the king too sympathetically. Wajid Ali  
Shah, he said, was a hopeless king. I tried to explain to him that he  
was judging the Awadh ruler by Western standards of governance and  
thus making the same mistake as Dalhousie and Outram. Victor winced  
at being compared to imperialists but refused to see the point. He  
was always affectionate and friendly and had an impish sense of  
humour. He was chairing a seminar in Oxford and spotted me in the  
back row. When the discussion veered round to 1857, he surprised me  
and others by saying, “Dr Mukherjee, who is fielding way out in the  
country, should at this point be called up to field close in.” I was  
flattered and charmed by the unexpected recognition from a very  
senior historian.

He could also be devastatingly honest about himself. When the Soviet  
Union was tottering to its fall in the late Eighties, Kiernan  
announced to a seminar audience in the UCLA, “All my life I have  
chased an illusion” or words to this effect. This makes one wonder  
what kind of relationship he had with his self-confessed acolyte, a  
Malayali young man whom he taught in Edinburgh in the late Sixties.  
Did that young man learn from Kiernan to be honest, to be open-minded  
about his Marxism, to question and to doubt? The name of that man is  
Prakash Karat. What did Karat tell Kiernan about his party’s  
performance in West Bengal and in India? Was his history-telling  
honest to his historian-mentor? Above all, if comrade Karat had read  
with care The Lords of Human Kind, he would not look at the world  
with pride in his port and defiance in his eye.

I would have loved to have asked Victor what he thought of his Indian  
acolyte. The answer would have been witty, provocative and not less  
than honest.


______


[8]  Literature and Disapora - Book Review:

Deccan Herald

ERASE & REWIND
Aditi Bhaduri

A tale of fear and adventure, of lost homelands and new found hearths.

Jahajin
Peggy Mohan
Harper Collins
2008, 268pp.

It was the magical land of Chinidad. Always sunny, always full of  
work, where employment like food never ran out, where a sturdy roof  
over one’s head was always guaranteed, and where there were promises  
of no more illnesses or deaths through hunger and starvation. And it  
was to this magical land of Chinidad that those like Deeda — starved  
and ill, decided to make their way to, across continents and the  
accursed and forbidden kala pani.

Thus begins the story of the journey and life overseas of the  
community of Indians, largely missing from sociological and  
anthropological discourses in India — the indentured labourers to the  
West Indies, the Jahazibhais and Jahazibehens. Half-fact, half- 
fiction, Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin traces the route taken by these  
migrants from the village of Basti to the shores of Trinidad. In  
cramped trains from Faizabad to what was then Calcutta, walking  
drenched in the rain to the Hooghly, and then the three-month voyage  
around the stormy Cape of Good Hope and up the Atlantic to sunny  
Trinidad. And when the ship entered the sea after setting sail from  
Diamond Harbour, and Deeda, who till then had known that she would  
return home after earning some money, turned her head to get one last  
look at the coastline that she was leaving behind her, suddenly  
understood, ‘as clear as the sky, that I was never going back, that I  
would live and die across the kala pani...’

Through her personal narrative and through interviews with the now  
110 years old Deeda Mohan weaves a tale of fear and adventure, of  
lost homelands and new found hearths. Even as Deeda, who came to  
Trinidad with Mohan’s great grandmother, rewinds back to the past and  
narrates in her native Bhojpuri — a Bhojpuri frozen in the time of an  
immigrant’s journey — about how she negotiated new paths and forged  
new identities, Mohan gets a peek into her own roots.

  The emotional, physical and spatial shift that occurs is fraught  
with uncertainty and pain at leaving behind all that is familiar and  
known and the excitement and hope of embracing the new and unknown.  
“We stopped looking back...The sad notes of beeraha we had sung as we  
crossed that other ocean had brightened into a new song, a song with  
no dark corners, and no storms.’ And so it came that when Deeda  
receives an offer to go back, back across the kala pani over which  
she came, she knows that her past is, like her native Bhojpuri,  
frozen in her memory. The patois with the sugarcane fields clad  
Trinidad is now her reality.

Yet roots tug and Mohan comes round full circle when she takes up a  
research project on the Bhojpuri language and, on a fellowship, lands  
in India, from where four generations ago her ancestors had set sail.  
Though Mohan’s Jahajins may have apparently moved ahead of their  
fellow Indians in much of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh — driving Toyotas  
and wearing jeans — the changing Bhojpuri they spoke brought home to  
Mohan that living cultures are dynamic and not caught in a time-warp.  
And then there’s the Saranga and Sada Birij tale which is interwoven  
into Deeda’s and Mohan’s narrative and we understand the many shades  
of migration that can occur in a single journey — through which the  
Chinidads ultimately become Trinidads for the migrant.

_____


[9] Announcements:

URGENT MEETING WITH SIKKIM ACTIVISTS

As you are aware, members of Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) in  
Sikkim have been at the forefront of a remarkable struggle for  
justice and democratic governance. Their historic actions have led to  
the cancellation of four destructive dam projects .

Unfortunately, despite assurances from the government of Sikkim, a  
democratic process of decision making on development and dam projects  
in the state has not taken place. Instead, the government, through  
the Sikkim Power Development Corporation  has been pushing forward  
with the process of land acquisition for a new dam, the Panan hydro- 
electric project. Several members of the Lepcha community, including  
students are in jail.

A delegation of local community leaders will be in Delhi on Monday,  
February 23 to discuss the evolving situation.

We invite you to this crucial meeting,

Smitu Kothari, Intercultural Resources
Himanshu Thakker, South Asian Network for Dams, Rivers and People

Venue:
Intercultural Resources, 33D, DDA-SFS Flats, Vijay Mandal Enclave
New Delhi 110016

Time: 2.30 pm, February 23
Phone: 011-65665677


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