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Teaching Against Communalism: The Role of Social Science Pedagogy |
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Written by Ananya Vajpeyi
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First published in
Economic & Political Weekly: Perspectives, December 21, 2002,
www.epw.org.in
Introduction
Of late, the discussion in the public sphere as regards Communalism and
Education has centered around two problems. One, the communalization of
higher education, particularly of disciplines such as history and
philosophy; and two, the danger of institutions of religious education
– be they mathas, madarsas, or missions – becoming the proponents of
political ideologies and thus the breeding grounds of communally-minded
subjects. However, there does not seem to have been much attention
directed towards trying to imagine how educational processes and
institutions could be used in order to analyze Communalism and, through
such a process of analysis, persuade young citizens to turn away from
it. Communalism has so far been an ideology that anti-communal forces,
of both a secularist and an anti-secularist stripe, have tried to
address in the informal sectors of pedagogy, namely: activism,
awareness campaigns, documentation and theorization; no one has sought
to bring it squarely into the realm of social science pedagogy. This
article attempts to identify some of the issues involved in building a
syllabus that systematically teaches university students what
Communalism is, with a view to encouraging a principled rejection of
its ideas and practices by the youth of this country, no matter what
their religious affiliation.
To
begin with, let it be said that the very attention to Communalism by
both activists and theorists alluded to above, has produced a vast
literature on every aspect of the subject, in a range of media. Let
us look at the contribution of the various disciplines in the social
sciences and the humanities first. A History of Communalism,
examining its roots in colonial governmentality and law, is easily
presented. The role of key actors in the social reform, nationalist
and popular movements during the latter half of the 19th
and the first half of the 20th centuries in furthering or
hindering the discourse of Communalism has been thoroughly examined.
Historians have also shown the differences between inter-religious
and inter-sectarian strife in South Asian premodernity, and communal
conflict in colonial and post-colonial India. Similarly the Sociology
of Communalism, revealing its constitutive connection with modern
ideologies of caste, is now available to us. So also an analysis of
the growth of Communalism that attributes it to economic
backwardness, class disparities, state-sponsored developmentalism and
big science is not hard to cull. Since the beginning of the Nineties,
traditional Marxist analyses of Communalism have been
supplemented by an examination of the effects of economic
liberalization and globalization on the hardening of communalist
positions and the funding of communal organizations, whether Hindu,
Muslim or Sikh.
Nor
is there any dearth of Political Studies that correlate the
demands, successes and failures of participatory democracy,
representative government, the multiparty system and electoral
politics with the changing fortunes of Communalism. In Political
Philosophy, many scholars have tried to understand the
relationships between, on the one hand, Communalism, and on the
other, Nationalism, Secularism, religious belief, colonialism,
fundamentalism, separatist movements, culture, traditions of
inter-religious harmony, liberalism, Tolerance, and so on. There is
an emergent discourse on Communalism and fascism, and one can
anticipate comparative work on Communalism and racism. In Legal
TheoryPsychology of Communalism and communal
violence are present in the literature. The Anthropology of
Violence has naturally homed-in on communal riots and communities
of riot-survivors as objects of study. In modern Indian languages,
particularly Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and English, the entire
genre of Partition Literature centers round Communalism; more
recently the riot has served as much as a source for literary
representation as for ethnographic data. In Gender Studies
there has been an attempt to triangulate women, Communalism and the
law; to show the important relationship between the construction of
women's identity and communal identity; and to record the accounts
of women who have been the victims of communal violence.
there is at least some effort to draw a Venn diagram
demonstrating the intersection of the history of personal law
regimes, constitutional rights pertaining to the freedom of religion
and religious conversion, the powers and responsibilities of the
secular state, the role of the judiciary, and Communalism. It is also
not difficult to put together a dossier of landmark judgments, acts
and bills on matters relating to Communalism.
Outside
the organized disciplines, citizens' groups have extensively
documented communal violence and its aftermath, in text and on film,
in the form of reports, narratives, statistics, interviews, etc. They
have also investigated the breakdown of the law and order machinery
during episodes of communal conflict, especially the nefarious role
of the police, armed forces, and other state apparatuses, and made
their findings publicly available. The Internet serves as an ideal
site for the circulation of such information. Documentary
filmmakers and filmmakers in parallel cinema have helped
build an impressive body of fictional as well as non-fictional films
on this theme. Photographers have always had a special part to
play in raising the nation's conscience through their images of
communal violence. In addition, more or less organized anti-communal
awareness campaigns and protest movements routinely
produce tracts, pamphlets, posters, songs, journals, plays and other
educational materials for performance and distribution among the
general public, especially students. Some groups have also, over
time, organized concerts, art shows and other cultural expressions to
promote communal harmony. Often times the musical or other outcomes
of these events are commercially available. Newspaper, magazine,
TV and radio reports of communal activities and violence, in all
major Indian languages, constitute a huge archive on their own.
In
other words, there is no paucity of materials for someone seeking to
construct an undergraduate or postgraduate syllabus about Communalism
in India today. The questions then are: How are these materials to be
collected, organized and taught in a systematic and reasoned manner
even as the raison d'être of a course of this kind is
to alert young citizens to the dangers of Communalism and make them
antipathetic towards it? What kind of training and preparation would
the instructor herself require before she could take on the
responsibility of such interested pedagogy? What are the ethics of
teaching against the subject that is being taught? Is there
some danger that anti-communal mobilization will become domesticated
once it is incorporated into academic syllabi, and thereby lose its
political efficacy, its critical edge, as it were? Can those who are
very committed to an anti-communal politics be trusted to teach in a
rational and dispassionate manner? Conversely, can uninterested
teachers be trusted to get across an unequivocally anti-communal
message whilst teaching about Communalism?
2
An
experiment in teaching against Communalism is currently being
conducted at the National Law School of India University, in
Bangalore. Final year LLB as well as first and second year LLM
students have the option of taking a seminar titled "Casteism,
Communalism and the Law: An Introduction" taught by this author.
The class runs from October 2002 to January 2003, under the aegis of
the Center for the Study of Casteism, Communalism and the Law, a new
entity within the school managed out of the Department of Sociology
at the NLSIU. Students are aged 21-23 on average, and the class size
is over 40, of which no less than 30 are present on any given day1.
On Communalism, students get some exposure to the major secondary
scholarship: Ashis Nandy, Romila Thapar, Gyandendra Pandey, Akeel
Bilgrami, Bipan Chandra, Veena Das, Asghar Ali Engineer, Urvashi
Butalia, Aijaz Ahmad, Harjot Oberoi, Christopher Jaffrelot, Rajeev
Bhargava, Mushirul Hasan, Rajni Kothari, Peter van der Veer, Sumit
Sarkar and Ashutosh Varshney, to name just a few. In addition they
read Gandhi and Ambedkar, and watch documentaries by filmmakers like
Anand Patwardhan and Amar Kanwar. In different versions of the class,
perhaps future students will be made to read other foundational
authors, like Nehru, Savarkar, Jinnah, Iqbal and so on.
The
details - strengths or gaps - of this particular syllabus aside,
what is the typical dynamic in a classroom of this sort? The teacher
is forced to ask herself: Are there enough, or indeed any
students from minority communities represented in the class? If, for
example, there are absolutely no Muslim students enrolled, then does
that necessarily affect the general direction of debate, and the
final consensus that may or may not be reached? Do others take up the
position of those who are absent? These types of questions routinely
come up regarding Black and other minority students on American
campuses. In India, do students speak as members of religious
communities, or as citizens, or does their voice alternate between
these two identities? What is the exact point when a person stops
arguing in a rational disinterested fashion, and assumes the role of
defender or spokesperson of the community to which she belongs? What
topics suddenly spark an emotional response, irrupting the structure
of an on-going discussion?
I
found, for instance, that a module on "Rama and the Ramayana
in the Political Imagination of Modern India" elicited a heated
reaction from my class, and helped put many of the broader themes of
the course on the table2.
We talked about the porous - or shifting - line between religion
and culture, the relationship between political mobilization and
cultural and / or religious symbols, the place of history versus that
of mythology in identity politics, the persistent role of the past in
the present, the difference between religious belief and religious
ideology, or Hinduism and Hindutva, and so on. It might appear that
this topic, of the Rama figure and the Ramayana narrative, is
rather literary, and cannot speak much to the problem of Communalism.
But my hunch, that choosing so recognizable a civilizational icon
would crystallize some abstract questions for the students, while
simultaneously grounding the current communal conflict in deeper
cultural politics, in fact turned out to be correct. A religious
discourse would proceed along one axis of the "meaning" of Rama
and Ramayana; social science has its own work of exegesis cut
out for it.
We
discussed not only the historicity of Rama cults and the traditions
of performance and worship associated with this hero / deity all over
South, Southeast and East Asia, but also present-day issues before
the Indian nation: Ram Janmabhumi, Ram Mandir, and, in the aftermath
of Gujarat 2002, the ominous reverberation of the slogan "Jai Shri
Ram". One of my students remarked to his classmate, loudly so that
I might overhear him, that perhaps soon a class on the Mahabharata
and Communalism would be offered in the Law School. Jokes aside, it
does seem to be necessary to engage cultural artifacts - across
religious traditions - head-on within the social scientific
framework. The idea here is certainly not to invent a separate Social
Science for India, as critical indigenists have repeatedly suggested
(failing, apparently, to see the absurdity of such a plan). It is not
even principally to explore what cultural texts and practices are
about in and of themselves, but rather to understand what they come
to mean in given socio-historical contexts, and how they are used to
create, represent and mobilize communities. The identities of groups
are more often than not grounded in acts of collective
interpretation, and we need not only to examine the objects of
interpretation, but also the interpretive act itself, the better to
grasp what drives the subjects of interpretation in their groupness.
3.
In
trying to comprehend why and how group identity is performed, in
particular communal identity, surely the key is to achieve some
insight into Violence. However, Violence is difficult to address in a
pedagogic context, or so I've felt. Common sense dictates that
Violence against Women has a special place in Women's Studies,
Racial Violence in the Study of Racism - so also there is no
getting around Communal Violence in a syllabus about Communalism (or
indeed Caste Violence in a syllabus about Casteism). The question is
how to make sure, on the one hand, that the entire course isn't
overwhelmed by this single theme of Violence; and, on the other hand,
how to ensure that the discussion of Violence doesn't become
pornographic, inflammatory or in some other way ethically
questionable. There is also the more philosophically complex problem
of whether, in attempting to discover the meaning of a violent act,
we aren't somehow justifying it. A semiotics of Violence should not
end up in a justification of it.
In
the event of having to decide what to prescribe on a reading list and
what to leave out without recourse, in advance, to a well-developed
theory about positioning Violence as a topic of pedagogy, I found
myself making all sorts of pragmatic choices. I included sections of
Valentine Daniel's Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an
Anthropography of Violence, even though it is a difficult book
for an undergraduate class, but excluded Appadurai's essay "Dead
Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization"3.
I spoke to my students at length about the latter, but
couldn't bring myself to ask them to read it for themselves.
Television coverage and newsmagazine images of the Gujarat violence
have been explicit enough, but I could not screen Gopal Menon's
documentary Hey Ram! Genocide in the Land of Gandhi for my
class. I have to confess that these were intuitive preferences and I
exercised nothing more or less than a teacher's prerogative in
prescribing or proscribing materials. But in future I would like to
have access to a philosophically robust and empirically grounded
principle on the basis of which to determine how and how much to
focus on Violence. Right now it's not clear to me whether such a
principle would come from a theory of education, from social
scientific theory, from the discipline of psychology, or from some
mixture of all these. The experiences of other teachers in dealing
with the subject of Violence in classrooms across the country would
serve as a valuable input for comparative assessment and learning.
In
the course of the semester a senior colleague at NLSIU asked me to
help him, informally, in preparing a public lecture he was to
deliver, on "The Problems of Social Harmony in India". He
suggested that I draw on the readings in my syllabus about Casteism,
Communalism and the Law to point him in the right direction. It was
then it struck me that we had discussed threadbare in this class
every aspect of social conflict, but had never really turned to the
idea of social harmony, and the related ideas of "national
integration" and "unity-in-diversity". Have these ideas become
non-objects in Indian social science? Or are they, as erstwhile
slogans of the secular state, as official constructions left over
from the Congress Party era, merely objects of ridicule for
contemporary social scientists? Or can we perhaps see through them to
the other side, to the philosophically complex category that is just
as important as Violence, namely its opposite, Tolerance4?
Chatterjee
has theorized "toleration" in relationship to Secularism, but
that was in the shadow of the demolition of the Babri Masjid a decade
ago5.
With the riots in Gujarat we seem to have crossed a new threshold in
the widespread public acceptance as well as the open state
sponsorship of communal, especially anti-Muslim, intolerance. Two of
my students opted to work on Hate Speech as a legal concept for their
research projects due at the end of the semester. India does not have
any laws pertaining to Hate Speech - these young legal minds wanted
to argue both the need and the form of future (or rather, by their
lights, inevitable and therefore imminent) legislation in this area.
It is not just the BJP but also the Congress that has conducted a
particular kind of election campaign in the Gujarat poll this year,
the speeches of candidates from all sides being equally offensive.
The message of intolerance is being broadcast all over the land, both
by those who are in power and by those who aspire to it. One logical
reaction would be to prepare ourselves legally to deal with its
growing entailments in our political practice, whether they be
shockingly communal election speeches or other ideological propaganda
materials full of hate and unabashedly so - posters, CDs, films,
pamphlets, etc.
Appadurai
(Ibid.) has talked about "political obscenity" in the
context of especially cruel, indeed inhuman, acts of ethnic violence.
But such obscenity has now spilled over from the domain of brute
physical force into the hitherto-civil realm of language and other
symbolic representation too. When a kar sevak en route to
Ayodhya to build a temple over the ruins of the Babri mosque (and of
our secular polity) sings a Ram bhajan, it is not a simple
expression of his devotion to his god, free of the desire to taunt
his Muslim countrymen. Gone are the days when a painting of Shivaji
or a statue of Ambedkar could be read as the carriers of innocent
meanings, like Marathi pride or Dalit pride. Prejudice is the ugly
Siamese twin of such pride - the two always go together. No
glorification of the Self today is untainted by the denigration of
the Other (if indeed it ever was). Hence the difficulty, faced
equally by the Sangh Parivar and by the fundamentalist ideologues
across the border, in constructing a believable narrative for their
respective nations, the Hindu Rashtra and Pakistan, both of which,
like it or not, carry the baggage of an already always miscegenated
history. Is it not important, then, to address ourselves afresh to
the enfeebled and attenuated notions of Harmony and Tolerance, to
recharge them with a sense of purpose? Is there any other way to make
sense of our past, to live out our present and to imagine our future
as an irresistibly plural and prolific people?
Simeon
has pointed out that one of the biggest analytic failures of Indian
social science was to get taken in by the segmented character of
Communalism on the subcontinent, and to see instead Muslim, Hindu,
Sikh and other communalisms6.
These have all along been understood as distinct, with each one
having its own history, structure and effects upon the nation. He
argues that in fact there is only one phenomenon, namely Indian
Communalism, and this is really nothing other than the Indian version
of fascism. We should look back and recognize this unitary force as
the cause and driver of the Partition (and, extrapolating from such
an insight, also perhaps of the many wars with Pakistan since then,
and the many communal conflagrations that have occurred within the
country since 1947). Elsewhere in the world, the basis of fascism is
usually a "fabricated and exclusive ethnic identity". In India
there are many such identities, hence the misleading appearance of
discrete and dissimilar communal discourses. In actuality Communalism
in India has a generic character, that Simeon tries to capture:
Indian fascism's
ideological method defines democracy in arithmetical rather than
institutional terms, despises democratic values; and accords
superiority to hateful ethnic mobilization over the requirements of
civic order and criminal justice. It uses so-called traditional
values to express a fear of women and hostility to gender equality;
it also glorifies violence as a ‘masculine' virtue.
Further
Simeon points out that the currency of Communalism - a term that he
uses interchangeably with "Indian fascism" - is sentiment. In a
situation of conflict, we hear of communal "passions" being
inflamed, of the "feelings" of this or that community being hurt.
Very often the supposed provocation could be an event that occurred
way back in history, through the agency of individuals and groups
long dead and gone, but the reaction to this is nevertheless here and
now. It seems that in our society there are no mechanisms whatsoever
to process these free-floating emotions of hatred, anger, jealousy,
fear and humiliation - hence riots, those public detonations of
pent-up collective sentiments. But riots are just one expression of
the politics of sentiment. Simeon alerts us that:
The most significant
consequence of this trend is the justification that self-appointed
guardians of morality have obtained for violence and defiance of law,
for cultural policing, book burning, and the intimidation of artists
and creative activity in general. Film screenings have been
disrupted, writers and painters threatened and beaten up, academic
work and speculation subjected to the promise of dire consequences.
It
seems to me that there is an urgent need, in such a highly charged
and oppressive environment, to develop the idea of Tolerance. This
has to be a habit of mind that regulates the behavior not only of the
state towards its citizens, but of these citizens towards one
another. All parties need to keep a check on the negative emotions
and hate-filled words that have so quickly, before our very eyes,
vitiated our public life almost beyond recognition. Ironically, we
may have to begin thinking about Tolerance in a systematic fashion
precisely because in the absence of such thinking the discourses that
surround us have become intolerable, certainly to anybody with the
slightest faith in democracy.
4
Teaching
against Communalism necessarily means teaching for Secularism, even
though there is no simple opposition - Ideology +A v
Ideology -A - to be posited between the two7.
I was surprised at the extent to which there appeared to be a natural
- as opposed to a constructed - consensus among my students that
Secularism as a concept is defunct. Some thought this was because it
is an import from the West and from Christianity; others thought this
was because the Constitution had never been able to define or
redefine the term properly for India (Secularism = the state's
equi-distance from, indifference to, or equal love for, all
religions?). Some thought it was always official ideology rather than
popular conviction; others thought that the Congress Party had taken
Secularism with it to the grave. Some even bought into the
smoke-and-mirrors doctrine of the Hindu Right that Secularism is
Pseudo-Secularism, and Religious Nationalism is Real Secularism. No
one seemed to think that Secularism is successful sometimes and fails
at other times; that even if it has lost its way it can be brought
back on track; that some synthesis can be effected between its many
senses and some significance recuperated from this new hybrid
category. But no one could deny, either, that we have no real choice
than to make it work, not in spite of or against our many
religious traditions, but precisely in their midst. Secularism may
have been reduced to an empty signifier today, but other than filling
it once more with meaning - meaning and teeth - it's not at all
clear what the political alternative might be.
As
a mental exercise, I asked my students to picture a day in their life
in the Hindu Rashtra. I posed to them a series of questions,
polemical and yet deadly earnest, in the style of Arundhati Roy.
Which items of their regular clothing would they be willing to give
up in the name of properly Hindu dress? Which of their beloved foods
would they happily bid farewell to? What types of music would they
gladly sacrifice for the cultural purity of this imaginary nation,
which architectural monuments would they eliminate, how many arenas
of their existence would they willingly shrink and desiccate in order
to count as dutiful citizens of this Promised Land? How would they
complete a single sentence in any modern Indian language with so many
words disallowed for being of foreign origin? What would they
remember of a past become taboo, and where would they hide their
censored memories? The fact is that Indians have no idea what the
fascist utopia actually entails. We mistake a nightmare for a dream
and wish it could come true. Those of us who yearn for some such
space, not recognizing it for the dystopia it is, do so not so much
from ideological conviction as from sheer ignorance of the real
meaning of an exclusive, authoritarian majoritarian state for our
small everyday pleasures and freedoms, for our assumption that we
count, each one. Those of us who gather in the shade of our swords
or shakhas know that when we step out, a constitutional
sun still shines on us and under the rule of law we can breathe easy.
Glib talk in the national press and media about Gujarat being the
"laboratory" of Hindu Nationalism masks our collective inability
to project ourselves as the dissection rats in these ghastly
experiments with untruth8.
Who
wants to live in Hindu Rashtra? If some big national newspaper had
conducted a poll, my guess even so recently as a year ago would have
been that most every Indian who took a moment to think about this
question would have answered, "Not me". But such trust in the
fundamentally secular character of our people begins to appear naïve
today. The citizens of Gujarat - at least those who still have left
the freedom to vote - seem happy to choose between light and dark
shades of saffron. They are deciding the future government of their
state within the communal parameters set by the Hindu Right but
ratified or acquiesced to by all major political parties. What does
this mean? That no one wants an alternative? Or that since none seems
forthcoming - not from the discourses of politics, not from the
state or national leadership, and not from civil society - the
people have resigned themselves to a more or less communal fate? How
must an anti-communal option, one that will prevent social strife,
economic ruin, cultural impoverishment and political destruction, be
created and presented, not just to Gujaratis but to all Indians? More
importantly, how must the very desire and demand for such an option
be rekindled among ordinary folk? How are we to reject this reduction
of us - humans and citizens - to guinea pigs in the laboratories
of communal ideology?
Education
may be a way. Many times I found some of my students falling in with
the on-going discussion, and then suddenly becoming recalcitrant. At
such moments, of retreating into unreflexively communal positions
that to all appearances had already been discredited in the class by
consensus, they often uttered phrases that I felt could not have
entered their heads except verbatim from the speech of their elders.
These sutras of casual, everyday Communalism, picked up in the
house and school from parents and teachers, were reproduced
unthinkingly, uncritically, at points in the class-room conversation
that were at first surprising to me but later began to be
predictable. Islam is rigid; Hinduism is tolerant. Muslims are
foreign; Hindus are native. Muslims provoke; Hindus react. Today's
broken mosques pay for yesterday's broken temples. There's no
such thing as Hinduism. There's no such thing as a non-Hindu India.
Hindutva is politics, Hinduism is religion; the latter need have no
fear of the former, because the spiritual triumphs over the material.
Muslims proliferate because they are polygamous; Hindus are dwindling
because they do not proselytize. We have all heard such things said,
at the dinner table, in front of the television, and at other sites
of bourgeois domesticity. The domestic sphere is where adults air
their frankest prejudices and children absorb them. Sometimes
stereotyped images of Self and Other, folk theories about belonging
and exclusion, solidarity and enmity, that would have been at hand in
the privacy of the home, spilled out into the quasi-public space of
the classroom. When a very deep chord of such unprocessed -
primordial? - conviction was touched, some of my students could not
filter out, either by following the dictates of reason or by
deferring to the protocols of civility, the communal attitudes they
had heard expressed in the family environment.
Not
even the pressure, implicit in the very nature of the power-imbalance
between teacher and student, to conform to what could be construed as
my position, nor the embarrassment at being immediately contradicted
by more politically-correct classmates, helped contain these communal
articulations from time to time. So 21-year olds pronounced wisely on
Nehru's failures, Indira Gandhi's wiles, Rajiv Gandhi's
blunders, and V. P. Singh's mistakes. Their interpretations of the
recent past of our nation were remarkably assured. They seemed to
remember the Partition, the Emergency, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984,
the anti-Mandal agitation, Babri Masjid, Pokharan, and Godhra, not
merely as members of a TV-watching, movie-going generation, but as
though they had been there. I was grateful that this kind of
visceral identification with a given community did not extend into
the remote past. For that would have made these young minds
feverishly relive centuries of war, invasion, genocide, desecration,
and thus experience, as if first-hand, the agonies of a history
imagined, anachronistically, to be riven by communal strife.
A
syllabus is easily constructed; a literature review smoothly
conducted. The problem here is of trying to communicate a set of
values through a self-reflexive, self-critical, ethical and yet
interventionist pedagogy. It is hard to open anyone's mind. But the
young are receptive, ready to revise their views - which as we have
seen, are often really the undigested views of their parents - if
persuaded by rational means. Teaching against Communalism may be a
way prevent the fearful dream of a Hindu Rashtra from becoming a
reality that no one, let's face it, could possibly want to trade
for a life in secular democratic India.
1The
part of the course that focuses on Casteism is not discussed in this
article. For a copy of her taught syllabus on "Casteism,
Communalism and the Law", readers may write to the author at:
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.
2The
title for this module was suggested by Sheldon Pollock, "Ramayana
and Political Imagination in India" in The Journal of Asian
Studies: Vol. 52, No. 2 (May 1993): 261-97.
3Arjun
Appadurai, "Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of
Globalization" in Public Culture, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Winter
'98); 225-47.
E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies:
Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
4Let
us grant that no one in our public sphere even half-heartedly
invokes the literal contrastive of Violence, viz., Non-Violence, any
more. At this point in our history as a nation, from no end of the
political spectrum, along any axis, of caste, community, class or
ideology, do we hear any invocation whatsoever of Gandhi's ahimsa
as a principle of personal ethics or civic life
5Partha
Chatterjee, "Secularism and Toleration" in the Economic and
Political Weekly, July 9, 1994; 1768-77
6Dilip
Simeon, "A Finer Balance - An Essay on the
Possibility of Reconciliation". Unpublished manuscript of a
lecture presented at the Documenta 11 Symposium on Truth, Justice
and Reconciliation, New Delhi, May 9, 2001.
7Being
secular does not merely mean being anti-communal!
8The
other word besides "laboratory" that I find problematic in the
media's frequent use of it to describe Gujarat, is "showcase"
- that unfortunate state is simultaneously a laboratory and a
showcase for the ideological and practical workings of Hindutva.
What does the experiment here consist in? Communalizing minds and
dividing people? What are the new products of this experimentation
that get proudly displayed to the rest of the nation? Better ways to
rape and kill humans, to burn and loot property, to make a mockery
of the institutions of law and order? The Sangh Parivar may be using
such vocabulary in their internal publications - why do the
national press and TV channels repeat these words and give them
general currency? We have to be vigilant lest even seemingly
innocent acts of reference become acts of validation. The semantics
of Communalism can permeate and infect our very language to the
point that we find ourselves saying things we do not mean,
complicit, willy-nilly, in an ideology we do not subscribe to.
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