Evocative epic

Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten by Rajmohan Gandhi; Aleph; Price: Rs.695; 432 pp

Rajmohan Gandhi is the paternal grandson of the Mahatma, and maternal grandson of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the first Indian governor-general of independent India. Few Indians have such a distinguished lineage. That should have been the ideal stepping stone to politics. Though he unsuccessfully contested a Lok Sabha election against Rajiv Gandhi in Amethi, and was later a member of the Rajya Sabha (and like this reviewer a resident editor of Indian Express), he chose academics and writing as his profession.

The loss to politics and journalism was a gain to literature, in particular historical literature. Rajmohan’s strengths as an intellectual came through in his writings which included biographies of Mahatma Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel, and a comparative study of India’s 1857 Mutiny and the American Civil War.

So, what veered him to Greater Punjab i.e. much of present-day Pakistan, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh? As he explains in the preface of Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten, his first awareness of Punjab came in 1945, when charges of treason against the British Empire were filed against three Punjabis, a Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, who had served as officers of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) which had allied with the Japanese against the British.

Following a visit to Lahore a half  century later, his interest deepened when he discerned a striking similarity between that city and Delhi, not simply in its Mughal monuments but also in the composition and culture of their inhabitants. “In Lahore, I also learnt that many in the city continued to miss, more than half a century after 1947, Hindus and Sikhs,” writes Rajmohan. “Surely this former Punjab, a single entity so different from today’s two Punjabs, required to be understood.”

This quest took him to archives, libraries and museums, in India and Punjab, as well as the South Asia collection of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne. Research was supplemented with interviews of people who experienced the horrors of the partition of Punjab in 1947, during which the largest migration of people in living memory — some 10 million — took place and almost a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs perished in brutal massacres.

“A hundred years ago, British Punjab, stretching all the way from Attock in the north-west to the borders of Delhi, seemed ideally placed to lead the subcontinent towards economic progress and inter-communal understanding,” writes the author. Why didn’t Punjab fulfill its promise, and what’s the explanation behind the communal atrocities of 1947, considering that the region’s main religious communities — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs — had lived in harmony for several centuries?

To answer these questions, Rajmohan delves into history. According to him, a defining date was 1707, the year Mughal emperor Aurangzeb died. Fratricidal wars of succession followed, fatally weakening the Mughal empire. In the vacuum entered the Marathas from the West, Sikhs from within, and a series of devastating cross-border Muslim invasions. Nadir Shah of Persia overran northern India and eight years later, Ahmed Shah Abdali, an Afghan-Pashtun of the Durrani tribe, invaded the hapless country ten times.

It was a narrative of decline for almost a century in north India until a one-eyed, short and pock-marked Sikh, Ranjit Singh, consolidated Punjab under unitary rule. Shrewd, far-sighted, secular and a brilliant strategist, he led his army capturing Lahore when he was barely 19, and Delhi two years later. He also conquered Kashmir, Multan and Afghanistan to become the first Indian conqueror to ride the streets of Peshawar.

The Sikhs and Gurkhas constituted the last resistance to British domination of India. While Ranjit Singh was alive, they kept their distance but when he died, they played Sikh chieftains against each other and defeated them in hard-fought battles. But under British rule, Punjab prospered as never before. Outstanding civil servants including the Lawrence brothers, Henry and John, won the affection and support of the Punjab public. Roads and canals were built. The rule of law was established, and sati and female infanticide were banned. Punjabis rewarded the British when the Indian Mutiny of 1857 broke out. Many of the soldiers loyal to the British were Punjabis. As a result, by 1900, half of the entire Indian army comprised Punjabis.

Liberal values also came with the British. True, the British exploited India. But of all the European colonial powers, they were perhaps the most enlightened, bequeathing a legacy of education, social reform and industrial infrastructure.

A turning point in the Raj’s happy relationship with Punjab came under the disastrous governorship of Michael O’Dwyer, and his suppression of the burgeoning nationalist movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 followed, and Punjab was never the same again.

During and after the Second World War, it became clear that Indian independence was a matter of time. Could the subcontinent have remained united and avoided Partition? Rajmohan relates how Mahatma Gandhi tried to avert the split by suggesting that Jinnah head a united India. Nobody, except Jinnah perhaps, took him seriously. Nehru agreeing to serve under Jinnah — both vain and egotistical — was out of the question. Could the bloodshed of Partition have been avoided? The writer paraphrases the British position: “You asked us to quit. We will oblige. Now, it’s up to you.”

Rajmohan ascribes the atrocities of Partition to the British government announcing the date of leaving India, June 1948, only 16 months before, and even this early date was further advanced to August 15, 1947. Instead of being calmed, Punjab was inflamed. A hastily summoned peacekeeping force was of little use. Blood-thirsty mobs, often led by soldiers who had fought in the Second World War and had surreptitiously retained their arms, went on the rampage, looting and killing. Trains arrived at stations, full of corpses. Punjab had changed forever. Or had it? The author believes ‘Punjabiyat’ or ‘Punjabiness’, for want of better translation, can still be restored between the two Punjabs of India and Pakistan.

This reviewer has his doubts, given that Pakistan has clearly opted for Urdu and closer alignment with the Arab world. But there is little doubt that Rajmohan Gandhi has written an evocative, epic  account of this vibrant region of the subcontinent.

Rahul Singh

Many facets of Muslim women

Questioning the Muslim Woman: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality by Nida Kirmani;  Routledge, Price: Rs.695; 227 pp

Few issues have been more fiercely debated than the status of the ‘Muslim woman’ in contemporary India. Thousands of books by polemicists, journalists and academics, have been written on the subject, most of them generating more heat than light.

This remarkable book is an exception. It differentiates itself from much of the writing on this sensitive subject by interrogating the very notion of the ‘Muslim woman’. Like everyone else, writes Nida Kirmani, professor of sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan, Muslim women have multiple identities. And contrary to popular assumption, they don’t identify themselves solely by religion. Therefore according to the author, stereotyping Muslim women is wrong, being too broad to merit serious consideration.

Based on a study of the socio-cultural dynamics of a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Delhi, Kirmani portrays how Indian Muslim women construct and negotiate their multiple identities — of religion, gender, class, language, education background, regional origins, minority status and so on — privileging some over others, depending on context, without letting a single identity define them. Adopting an anthropological approach, Kirmani spent several months in Zakir Nagar studying the lives of Muslim women. She gets a good view of things and discovers (not unsurprisingly) that religion is only one of several identity markers, and not necessarily the most important.

The markers which assume salience for them and when, depend on a host of factors, says Kirmani. Her subjects of study, markedly diverse in terms of socio-economic and ethnic background, interpret what it means to be Muslim and women, variously. Much depends on their background, of course, but also on personal experiences. Educated middle-class women, for instance, negotiate their multiple identities very differently from uneducated slum-dwellers. The appeal of a pan-Islamic umbrella identity is obviously more important for ‘educated’ women than for those who work as daily-wage labour.

Similarly, how Muslim women interpret Islam and its injunctions governing relations between the genders varies greatly, as does their level of interest in, and commitment to Islam. Likewise, their perception of people of other religious identities is influenced by class, education and occupational background. Negative perceptions of other Muslims — the attitudes of educated Muslim women towards poor and illiterate believers and those from under-developed regions of the country, puncture the myth of a monolithic Muslim community and weak, submissive and ‘obedient’ Muslim women. They are not uniformly ‘oppressed’, as hardened Islamophobes and uninformed non-Muslims tend to believe. Nor, too, are women uniformly ‘privileged’ and ‘protected’, as Islamist ideologues and apologists for Muslim patriarchy want us to believe, writes Kirmani.

Despite the diverse ways in which Muslim women identify themselves, the predominant sentiment is that they are marginalised because of gender and regressive interpretations of the Quran which accords women inferior status. This might read like a depres-sing, indeed hopeless, story. But then, there are always two sides to every story. One wishes Kirmani had highlighted cases of Muslim women in Zakir Nagar who are making practical efforts to help themselves and their sisters with the promise of a new turn. Surely, there are some women whose voices offer encouragement and hope.

Given her commendable initiative in getting the women of Zakir Nagar to open up and talk, Kirmani could have given her book greater depth and nuance had she explored how ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ Muslim women, with little or no formal education, interpret the harsh tenets of Islam (as currently practiced) in gender-sensitive and women-friendly explanations.

Be that as it may, this book is definitely a major contribution to the  debate on the status of women under Islam, cautioning us to be wary of making generalisations about a very heterogeneous sisterhood. It also provides valuable insights into the multiple self-definitions of Indian Muslims, which are often ignored in facile and polemical discourse.

Yoginder Sikand