Cultural Space of the Tamils

Cultural Space of the Tamils

T.S. Natarajan

New Century Book House (P) Ltd

(In Tamil)

Tamils  constitute a unique ethnic group of India  and the most distinguishing feature of their lives is their close affinity to their language, so much so that a separatist movement had grown in the southern state during the 60s against perceived imposition of Hindi.  Though, the movement had died and the political parties which spearheaded the movement have, over the years become part of the governing coalition(s) at the national level, Tamils as a people continue to feel that their culture requires separate identity.  Of all the ethnic groups in the country, Tamils are perhaps the most passionate about their language.

What are the elements which constitute the ‘composite-whole’ called the Tamil culture (Tamil Kalacharam).  Does it form a part – even if a unique – of a domineering Hindu culture? Or whether it has captured a distinct space despite the basic Hindu religious dimensions defining it?  What role did other cultures – both invading and non-invading – play in shaping the emergence of Tamil culture?

This book is not an ethnographic study of the origins of formation of Tamil culture.  It is basically a study based the Tamil literary works. One defining feature of Tamil culture pointed out by the author is the secular cultural life inherited by the Tamil people from the ‘sangam age’.   In the opinion of the author, secularisation in the cultural space had taken place during the sangam age, which was amply reflected in the poetry of this period.  For example, the much celebrated ‘man-woman courtship’ portrayed in the poetry of this age is a standing testimony to the non-religious life practices of the Tamil people.  In the opinion of the author, the critical period in the cultural transformation of Tamil social life was the three-century rule by a succession of Pallava kings between 6^th and 9^th Centry.  It was during the Pallava reign did both Shaivaite and Vaishnavaite religions were introduced into Tamil country.  The hold and rights of the working peasants slowly were snatched from them and repositioned as temple property through the institutions of Bramodhayam and Devasthanam.  Later on, temple land management became an economic activity on its own.

The author points out that the foundations of a land-oriented social arrangement were dislodged by the introduction of a divisive religious rule.  This gave raise to large scale religious violence, especially destruction of Buddhist Viharas and religious schools.  A new elite in the form of Brahmins were established and this elite was sustained by generous grants in the form of fertile lands.  Large scale migration of Brahmins from the north followed.

We have heard this trajectory on the development of Tamil culture and society in the past.  In fact, this comes close to the Dravidian ideological positions of anti-brahminism and  anti-north Indianism.  The argument about secular human foundations in Sangam literature, Thirukkural and Silapathikaram cannot be disputed.  In fact, notions of Tamil cultural supremacy over northern, sanskritic culture is founded upon this non-religious world-view which bounded ancient Tamil social life inextricably with nature in a secular way.  The Dravidian movement claimed to be the inheritor of this legacy of    non-religious world-view.    

This is essentially a historical   construction to suit modern political needs.  Granting for a moment the validity of this ideological position, the question which needs to be answered is: what accounts for the religious history of Tamil Nadu?  Great Saivaite and Vaishnavaite devotional compositions also occupy an important place in the Tamil Literary firmament.  This period cannot be explained as a deformity or aberration of an otherwise secular Tamil History.  The author does well to explain the humanistic-universality found in a vaishnavaite literary work such as “Kambaramayanam”, the Tamil version of Ramayan.  The author says, “Granted that Kambaramayanam was a vaishnavaite work.  But, beyond the macro level identification with a religious school, what the work upholds on an emotional plane is universal human advancement.  It does not neglect or sacrifice the epical virtues to the pull of  religious or sectarian propaganda.  The overwhelming role of Kambar was towards  solidification of Ramayanam as an epic and in an emerging hegemonic, all powerful State structure, leave behind an identity which could be claimed by the Tamils as their own.    Even though, Kambar depicted Rama as an ‘Avadhara Purushan’ (an epochal Human being ), he did not depict him as a divine standing in contrast to a fallible man.  Kambar merged both these entities to proclaim the victory of humanity.  It is  the merger of the divine and human elements which made the epic a successor to the long line of secular literature dotting Tamil literary history.”

Natarajan also reflects on the superior literary compositions of some of the saints belonging to the backward communities, such as, ‘Nammalvaar” (Vaishnavaite) and ‘Thirunaavukkarasar’ and ‘Manikavasagar’(Saivaite).  He also reflects on another aspect of religion and religious literature, that is, the transportation of its adherents to an ecstatic world.  Amongst religious literature, there are those which implore conjoining of individual identities (preserving individual ones) of various groups and others which have an unitary orientation, submerging separate identities.

Thus, the author gives to religion an important role in shaping the identity of Tamils.  In this respect, the cultural history of Tamils is not very different from other ethnic groups, though Tamil culture has some distinct characteristics which mark it out from the rest, the most distinguishing of them being a phase of history when cultural life was distinctly secular and non-religious.

Islam and Jihad

Islam and  Jihad

A.G. Noorani

Leftword, 2002

No writing on Islam, its ideology and belief systems would be authentic, states A.G. Noorani, noted scholar and legal expert, unless one has a firm base and solid foundation in the language of the region where it was founded, viz.  Arabic.  Contrasting the approach of Asians and Arabs to Koran, A.G. Noorani in his slim but highly erudite work, “Islam and Jihad” quotes Heikal: “Asian Muslims tended to take the Koran literally, while Arabs were more inclined to interpret it.  Reading the texts in their own language enabled Arabs to set it in historical context, keeping  in mind observations by religious authorities, but Asians were less able to look beyond it – partly because other works had not been translated into their languages, but more importantly because the Arabic language was the tongue of Islam.  Deprived of linguistic context the Koran inevitably takes on a slightly different character, forcing non-Arab readers to rely more on the texts than on the way the ideas are expressed.”   Adding to this handicap of our understanding of Islam  is the long-running and almost unending campaign of western ideologues, poets and literatures – Dante, Gibbon, Milton, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Byron, Shelley and Thackeray all contributed  their mite and buttressed Europe’s age-old antipathy towards Islam – against Islam which has been carried forward to this day by western historians, political scientists, political leaders and journalists.   A.G. Noorani calls this carriage of ideas “the burden of history”.   The rest of the non-Islamic, including third world societies such as India, simply import this anti-Islamic propaganda through their English language press which wields a disproportionate amount of influence in shaping political opinion in these countries.

As the back cover of the book announces, A.G. Noorani deals with questions which engage the minds of non-Muslims, such as, What is it about Islam that provokes so quick and unrestrained a response?  What is the meaning of Jihad and is it synonymous with warfare?  Is there a concept of religious tolerance and pluralist society in Islam? And, how can Islam respond to the challenge of modernity?  Noorani traces the antipathy of West towards Islam to the near success of,  first the Arabian army and naval fleet and then the Turkish forces in conquering the entire Europe.  Edward Gibbon writing in 1781 recounted collective fears of Europeans when he wrote in his “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, “A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than Nile or Euphrates and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames.  Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools  of oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to the circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelations of Muhammad”.  This was the “spectre of Islam” which was haunting Europe in the eighth century, just a 100 years after the death of Prophet Mohammad.  

But these prognostications were unrealised as Charles Martel defeated at Poitiers the forces of Abd al-Rahman in 732.    Even though the Arabs returned a few years later, their expulsion from France was completed by 759.  But some parts of Europe like Spain had experienced Arab rule which was nearly eight centuries, that is, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries.  Then came the turn of the Turks to conquer Europe.  After Constantinople fell to their forces in 1453, the Turks reached the gates of Vienna twice in 1529 and in 1683.  In the 19^th Century, the Ottoman empire spread across North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and parts of Balkans.  The Ottoman empire was liquidated only after the end of first World War in 1919.  It is anybody’s guess, what would have happened had the Sultan sided with the allies rather than Germany?

In Noorani’s view, it is this near conquest of Europe by the Muslim armies – Arabs and Turks – which has shaped the attitude of Europeans towards Islam.  The envy and anger manifested itself in the writings of some of the greatest writers of Europe.  Dante in his “Inferno” consigns Muhammad and his disciple Ali to the eighth circle of Hell!  A.G.Noorani  quotes copiously from historians and political scientists to support his claim, which even Renaissance and Reformation in Europe could not obliterate.  Noorani asserts that Islamophobia predates 9/11, which only brought to the surface again the deep – rooted prejudices of the west against Islam.

It is against this backdrop that Noorani navigates the tricky terrain of the Islamic notion of “Jihad”.  He points out that the notion of Jihad or holy war had ceased to exist in the Muslim world after the 10^th century until it was revived by American support and encouragement in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1979. Evidence also seems to support the veracity of this claim.  Except perhaps of the movement for revival of the Khalifat, none of the political movements in the Islamic world have been wholly influenced by the notion of jihad.  Not the national  movement in Algeria to evict the French colonial power, nor in Iran, whose democratically elected government in the 50s was overthrown in a coup sponsored by Anglo-American governments, who felt threatened by the nationalisation policy of the Iranian government. The Palestinian campaign was also completely secular; in fact, one of its tallest leaders, George Habbash, who led the militant Marxist, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was a Christian.  

       

 It was CIA, Saudi Intelligence and ISI of Pakistan which combined together to set up the Pan Islamic Mujahidin groups, with fighters from many countries pouring in to evict the Soviets from Afghanistan. Once life has been given to a movement of this kind, it invents and reinvents its purpose and rationale and very rarely do these movements confine themselves to the original objectives of its creators. 

What is the theological meaning of the word ‘Jihad’?  The Author says, the highest form of jihad is to speak the truth in the face of an unjust ruler quoting  an authenticated saying of the Prophet Muhammad.  Noorani takes the aid of one Dr. Roland E. Miller, an Islamist to distinguish between the spiritual Jihad  and the worldly, physical form of  jihad.  Spiritually, it means engaging in a battle against sin and Satan in one’s own life.  This is greater jihad.  Applied to the physical realm, the exertion means righteous warfare.  This is called the lesser jihad.  The greater jihad is fighting one’s own animal tendencies, to bring the passions under control.  But, man has a tendency to overestimate himself and to underestimate his spiritual potential.  He has a tendency to control and exploit his environment and other human beings.  Jihad must be waged against such tendencies.

This theological enunciation of the concept of jihad is good enough. But what explains the widespread belief that it is Jihad in its most virulent form which continues to inspire Muslims to wage wars and in the present times, acts of terrorism against non-Muslims? The ‘Jihad’ has also got a moral purpose – justice for the underprivileged and in this backdrop jihad has also come to mean the advocacy of social justice in a widening circle that also includes economic participation and prosperity for Muslims and non-Muslims as well.  This mixture of modern, secular aims with religious precepts which accounts for the aforementioned popular perception among non-Muslims  of the Muslims being inspired by religious jihad.  What is a legally-valid form of protest – even if violent – in other contexts is being seen as religiously inspired when the same occurs in Islamic societies.

But the author blames the Muslims too for not reading the pronouncements of the Prophet and the Quran in the modern context.  For instance, the Prophet had said that he is not a Muslim who eats his fill while his neighbour goes hungry.  In the opinion the A.G.Noorani, this 1400 old injunction must mean the economic uplift of the underprivileged in the present context.  But economic equality and rights of the underprivileged do not mean much to the rulers of present-day Muslims States. 

Jinnah Vs Gandhi

Jinnah Vs Gandhi

Roderick Matthews

Hachette India, 2012

Who was responsible for partition of India in 1947 is a question answered in innumerable ways.  There is a veritable partition industry flourishing in the sub-continent in which historians, academicians, scholars and even politicians have heavily invested.

A comparative assessment of two the towering personalities who shaped the history of the sub-continent had been made, in passing,  by many.  A book entirely devoted to such an assessment is rare indeed!  There is a lot that is familiar, especially in the evaluation of Jinnah, in this book too. Jinnah’s long association with the Congress, his antipathy towards mixing religion with politics, his slow movement towards advocating Muslim rights, their separateness and finally towards claiming a separate homeland for them have been recalled in this book too.  Similarly, the emergence of Gandhi as the undisputed leader of the Congress has also been chartered.  What is new in this book is the critical assessment of their respective politics and their attitudes towards Indian nationhood.

The Mahatma’s politics of morality has been much eulogised.  Gandhi’s technique of Satyagraha, his reliance on non-violence to achieve political goals and his insistence on  adoption of right means to achieve desired ends have been dwelt upon and analysed by many. One aspect of Gandhian politics which had made some scholars uneasy is his mixture of politics with religion.  The answer to this relationship between politics and religion in the Gandhian scheme is contained in  this book and it comes not from Matthews but from Prof. Anthony Parel.  Matthews quotes Prof. Parel’s assessment of Gandhi in his introduction to the centenary issue of “Hindu Swaraj” published in 2009 and it needs to be quoted in some detail.

“The reason why the Indian masses acclaimed Gandhi as an avatar and a saint is because Gandhi was directly placing himself in a tradition of Hindu / Buddhist philosophy. All the ramified discussion surrounding him is reducible to his understanding of the four ‘canonical aims’ of life in the ancient Indian tradition: dharma (worship, spiritual duty), artha (the pursuit of power and worldly things), kama (sensual pleasure) and moksha (release, salvation, transcendence). For Gandhi, politics was artha as a means towards moksha.  Release, or self-realisation, was both a political-nationalist cause and a personal-spiritual pilgrimage.  This is the link.  Gandhi’s original contribution to Indian philosophy was in the way he insisted that the route to moksha was not through dharma – right practice, duty, obedience to religious precepts – but through artha – the pursuit of worldly power.  The view that artha is not necessarily a form of degradation but could act as a dignified means to the end of moksha explains why Gandhi remained so uncontaminated by his political environment.  He did not wish to indulge in politics for its own sake.  For him, artha was to remain just artha; it was not to develop slyly into kama.  The reacceptance of artha is  a revolution, the greatest single development in Indian political thought since the Buddha.”

“Gandhi was  also a renunciate pilgrim, hoping to become worthy of moksha through self-sacrifice and abnegation.  His hope for India, then the world, was that others could share the revelation that artha was only one among the elements of life, that kama should be kept in check, and that dharma was not a matter of petty detail but of purity of heart.  These elements made up his spiritual and political practice; all the rest of noise.”  Brilliant!  It was this intricate relationship between moksha (broadly national independence) and artha ( through the instrument of politics) which confounded observers  and led them to discern the mixture of politics and religion in Gandhi’s practice of politics.

What about Jinnah?  What were the contours of his political thought and his political practice?  If it was the link between Politics and Religion  in Gandhi which was the problem area, the abrupt break from nationalist aims and decent into ‘communal’ politics of Jinnah has invited criticism and even ridicule.  Was there any way of understanding the politics of Jinnah?  The author says one way of understanding Jinnah was that his end had always remained protection of the Muslim community, an end he aimed to achieve without too great regard to means.  He never abandoned his aim after 1909.  He only changed his tactics, but not his objective.  Initially he placed his faith in electoral safeguards and weighted representation and at last in separatism.  He was comfortable with the British in achieving  his basic aim of protecting Muslims and later on, as the British were leaving India, Jinnah sincerely believed that it could be done only in a loosely devolved federal India, not the unitary and centralised India that Congress had in mind.

Even at the beginning of his political carrier when  he joined Congress, Jinnah’s aim and commitment remained the same.  He joined Congress because he saw it as a repository of liberal values which leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji and G.K. Gokhale practiced.  Liberalism offered him the best guarantee to build a tolerant, diverse and modern country where Muslim rights would be protected.  With the advent of Gandhian Congress, he saw the liberal Congress withering away and replaced by a overarching, dominant Hindu version, which he disliked.  Events in post-Independence India and Pakistan have disproved his assumptions.  Congress ruled India has largely upheld – with all its failures – liberal values whereas Pakistan slipped into ill liberalism and  intolerance.

                                                        

White Mughals

White Mughals

By William Dalrymple

Penguin, 2002

In his book, “City of Dijins”, William Dalrymple touched upon the phenomenon of the early English merchant-conquerors marrying into Indo-Islamic families and practicing their customs –   dress, language and some even embracing their religion, Islam.  Though rare, this tribe of English-Mughals were a significant presence in the late 18^th Century.  The East India Company tolerated them early on, but  the later Viceroys, pressurised by missionary groups, clearly discouraged this practice.

By the early 19^th Century, the British learnt their lessons from the American Revolution.  No  settler population was to be allowed in colonial countries to develop an identity of their own.  In India, this was particularly so, because the early soldier-settlers were from economically poorer sections of the English society.

One can only speculate on what would have happened had this trend of British settlers adopting native ways was allowed to proceed unhindered.  What form would it have assumed over a period of time?  Would these while Mughals have enlarged themselves into a significant settler population, emboldened to threaten the hold of the company  and imperial rule from London?  Would this settler-population have formed a coalition and partnership with the native Indians and pushed forward the arrival of modernity to India? Or would it have assumed a separate identity and occupied a dominant position and constituted themselves into a new elite akin to the settlers in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)? 

The story of While Mughals is the marriage between James Kirkpatrick, the English Resident at Hyderbad and Khairunnissa, the grand niece of the Prime Minister of Hyderabad.  Dalrymple exhibits his formidable skills of research while narrating the story through letters, personal memoirs and manuscripts of the late 18^th-early 19^th Century.  

The pull of personal romance and the counter-pull of imperial compulsions for territorial acquisition runs through the story. There were two streams of thought amongst the British of this period, one, which was considerate towards the native rulers and the other, imperial, which set aside personal considerations for advancement of imperial goals.  James Kirkpatrick along with William Palmer, English Resident at the Maratha capital, Pune represented the former while Lord Wellesley, the new Viceroy belonged to the latter.

Despite human failures – of which James Kirkpatrick had many – he held  his ground against the Viceroy and stood behind his wife till the end.  He did not ditch her till his lonely death at Calcutta, which comes as a surprise after two hundred years.  The personal conduct of James in his relationship with Khair-un-nissa opens up the possibility of a different relationship between the British and Indians as a whole and the new trajectory the history of the sub-continent would have taken had there been more practioners like him.

Falling over Backwards By Arun Shourie

Falling over Backwards – An essay on Reservations and Judicial Populism

By Arun Shourie

Rupa & Co,  First published in 2006

No praise is adequate for the courage with which Arun shourie has focussed on a problem which has bedevilled the nation for so long.  Reservation for members of social groups in government jobs, admission to educational institutions, especially of higher learning on the strength of belonging to particular castes has been source of rich debate and controversy.  The baneful effects of reservation on efficiency of public administration has long been denounced by many, including Arun Shourie himself, but the strength of this book lies not so much in dealing with the cynical fashion with which politicians have made use of the tool of reservation for creating a client base to enhance their electability to Parliament and Assemblies, but how the Judges of High Courts and the Supreme Court have often come to the rescue of these advocates of reservation.

The book starts with a letter dated 27^th June, 1961 written by Jawaharlal Nehru to the Chief Ministers of States, which contains this sage advice:  “The only way to help a backward group is to give opportunities of good education.  This includes technical education which is becoming more and more important.  Everything else is provision of some kind of crutches which do not add to the strength or health of the body.”  The letter also contains a prophetic warning, “If we go in for reservation on communal and caste basis, we may swamp the bright and able people and remain seconds-rate or third-rate.  I am grieved to learn how far this business of reservations has gone based on communal considerations.  It has amazed me to learn that even promotions are based sometimes on communal or caste considerations.  This way lies not only folly but disaster.”  Fifty One years later, the issue of promotions for SC and ST is on the front-burner and giving sleepless nights to the “Managers” of the governing UPA coalition in balancing the interests of BSP and SP.

There is yet another dimension to the reservation syndrome, which many may not have noticed.  Again it was Pandit Nehru, who had focussed on it when he stated in the Constituent Assembly while discussing the issue of reservation in government jobs for Scheduled Castes, “Such devices in fact end up harming the section they are intended to benefit – the section gets isolated from the general populace; the natural empathy that the society as a whole should have for that section gets eroded.”

Warnings apart, what happened to the constitutional provisions are a study in itself, of how amendments have been made to the Constitution to override, if not nullify, pronouncements of the Courts upholding ‘equality provisions.’   As Arun Shourie tells us that  in 1951 when the  Supreme Court in the State of Madras Vs Smt Champakam Durairajan case rejected the argument of the Madras government and insisted that directive principles cannot override fundamental rights, it led the first constitutional amendment with an additional clause added to Article 15 (4), providing: “Nothing in this article or in clause (2) of article 29 shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.”  The Indira Sawhney judgment led to placing the Tamil Nadu Backward Classes, SCs and STs (Reservation of Seats in Educational Institutions and of Government Posts in Services under the State) Bill 1993 in the Ninth Schedule which could not be challenged in Courts.   This happened in July, 1994.   

The Constitution was also amended for the 77^th time in May, 1995,  when the Supreme Court held that reservation could be made only at the entry level to a service and set apart promotions on the basis of caste, introducing a new clause (4A) to Article 16 which provided:  “Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any provision for reservation in matters of promotion to any class or classes of posts in the services under the State in favour of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes which, in the opinion of the State, are not adequately represented in the services under the State.”  Arun Shourie is at his diligent best while enumerating how amendment after amendment – 81^st, 82^nd, 85^th and 93^rd – followed after each Supreme Court pronouncement on reservation in Government posts.    As pointed out above, the pattern continues with the latest attempt at amendment to pacify BSP, again after a SC verdict!

Arun Shourie also  touches the holy cow of the Indian Constitutional System, the Judiciary.  He narrates how the Judiciary helped the State to move on this path.  Judicial pronouncements, ironically  enough, helped the executive as the SC stretched the scope of reservation further,  even beyond what the government would have hoped or desired.  He shows how judiciary by its enthusiasm for creative interpretation of the Constitution, justified the ‘elasticity of the principles of reservation.’ One example of such an interpretation – marked by much verbosity and therefore, very hilarious - would suffice. This was Justices Krishna Iyer and Chinnappa Reddy pronouncing in the case involving Railways which decreed reservation both at the entry level as well as promotions and provided for more than 50% reservation.  The learned Justices enunciated the ‘principles of elasticity” and argued thus:  “We, as Judges dealing with a socially charged issue of constitutional law, must never forget that the Indian Constitution is a National Charter pregnant with social revolution, not a Legal Parchment barren of militant values to usher in a democratic, secular, socialist society which belongs equally to the masses including the harijan-girijan millions hungering for humane deal after feudal-colonial history’s long night.  We could not apprehend the social dimension of the stark squalor of SC & ST by viewing Article 16 (4) through a narrow legal aperture but only by an apercu of the broader demands of social democracy, without which the Republic would cease to be a reality to one-fifth of Indian humanity.  Our constitution is a dynamic document with destination social revolution.  It is not anaemic nor neutral but vigorously purposeful and value-laden as the very descriptive adjectives of our Republic proclaim.  Where ancient social injustice freezes the genial current of the soul for whole human segments our Constitution is not non-aligned.  Activist equalisation, as a realistic strategy of producing human equality, is not legal anathema for Articles 14 and 16.   To hold otherwise is constitutional obscurantism and legal literalism, allergic to sociologically intelligent interpretation.”  After this extended enunciation of the purpose of the constitution, the Justices locate the sources of interpretation, in the following words:   “We do not have to venture upon a voyage of discovery to find the spirit and sense of the Constitution; we do not have to look to any extraneous sources for inspiration and guidance; they may be sought and found in the Preamble to the Constitution, in the directive principles of State Policy and other such provision.”

The judicial wheel had, indeed, has turned full circle from the Champagam Durairajan judgment of 1951!