S.P. Mookerjee: is he a Kashmiri martyr?
Off the shelf
by V. N. Datta

THE book under review is a tribute to the memory of one of the most remarkable countrymen, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee (1901-1947). Shyama Prasad had a distinguished record of public life, and was highly respected for his integrity of character, honesty of purpose and love for the country, for which he was willing to make any sacrifice. He died young at 46, and his death, while in incarceration, became a subject of a fierce controversy.

Harish Chandra and Padmini’s "Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee: A Contemporary Study" (Noida News, pages 370, Rs 500) largely presents an oral account of Dr Mookerjee’s life and work by his contemporaries and administrators, focusing particularly on the circumstances leading to his sudden death, which are generally regarded as "mysterious".

This volume also contains Dr Mookerjee’s mother Jogmaya’s correspondence with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nahru, Dr Mookerjee’s official correspondence with the British colonial government as Minister and his public speeches delivered during his active political life.

I am no votary of oral history which is suspect because it is a reconstruction in retrospect. But an eye-witness account stands on a different footing for ensuring authenticity as it has to be subjected to the canons of criticism for at least approximation to, if not for the validity of, truth.

Shyama Prasad’s father, Sir Aushotosh Mookerjee, was a towering personality, a man of many parts, a visionary endowed with remarkable administrative acumen, who made Calcutta University a great seat of learning and research. Shyama Prasad started his career as an educationist and became Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University when he was only 33. In 1934 as a representative of Calcutta University, he was elected to the Bengal Legislative Council.

The refusal of the Congress to form a coalition ministry with Fazl-ul-Haq’s Krishak Proja Party came as a rude shock to Shyama Prasad, which he regarded as bankrupt statesmanship. He joined the Fazl-ul-Haq Ministry as Finance Minister in 1941 but when the Congress leaders were thrown into jail during the 1942 Quit India movement, he felt uncomfortable, protested and resigned on February 12, 1943.

Shyama Prasad opposed vehemently the partition of India. In 1944 he advised Gandhi not to hold talks with Jinnah in Bombay since he thought such a move would add to the latter’s stature. In his public speeches he strongly criticised Gandhi’s appeasment of the Muslim League and condemned it as an "object surrender" and exhorted his countrymen to appeal to the Mahatma to abandon his wrong path.

When he realised that partition was inevitable, he mobilised all resources he could against the partition of Bengal and knocked out the clever and vicious plan of H.S. Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal, which was designed to merge the whole of the province with Pakistan.

With his later resignation from the Nehru government because of his differences over the Nehru-Liaquat pact (1950), he formed the National Democratic Party as an opposition bloc in Parliament. He became the founder-president of the Bhartiya Jana Sangh in October, 1951, which opened for him a new career in public life.

The volume contains ample material on Shyama Prasad’s death. It provides vital information on his support to the Hindu Praja Parishad in its campaign for full and complete integration of the Jammu and Kashmir state with the Union of India. At a big rally in Jammu in August, 1952, he declared: "I will get you the Indian Constitution or lay my life for it". He was determined to demand the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution which, according to him, had established a "sovereign republic within a sovereign republic".

Accompanied by two party workers, Vidyaguru and Tara Chand, he entered Jammu and Kashmir state without a permit. On May 11, 1953, he was arrested, taken to a private bungalow in Nishat Garden, Srinagar, and died there on June 23, 1953.

This volume contains Shyama Prasad’s mother Jogmaya Devi’s letters to Nehru which make sad reading. Naturally, she felt distressed at her son’s death, and insisted on an official inquiry into it. She is challenging, defiant and furious, while Nehru is defensive, sympathetic but unyielding. She was convinced that there was a design on the part of both the state government and the Union of India to liquidate her son and thereby eliminate powerful political opposition. Despite public demand, the government of India refused to hold an enquiry.

Shyama Prasad was kept in a small cottage in Nishat Bagh overlooking the splendid Dal Lake and the hills. He was not allowed to walk in the garden. He could walk along the garden path which took him two or three minutes. He had been suffering from pleurisy for long, and naturally lack of physical exercise made him breathless. He lost his appetite.

Due to the long distance to the town, medical help was not readily available. When he was removed to the hospital in the midst of his deteriorating condition, he was admitted to the gynaecological ward. No medical advice was sought from Jammu or Delhi.

Shyama Prasad used to maintain a diary which was lost. The diary would have given details about the state of his health. Possibly it was destroyed but for want of evidence, it is just a surmise. From the evidence listed in this work (which may be one-sided and therefore partial), it appears that there was negligence and inadequate medical attention. There was no proper diagnosis, nor was serious attention paid to the patient.

Even after his death, D.P. Dhar, Deputy Home Minister in Sheikh Abdullah’s Ministry saw to it that the news of Shyama Prasad’s death was not put out in the 6 pm AIR news bulletin. The authorities also delayed the plane carrying his body so that it could reach Calcutta at night to ward off public fury at the airport during day time.

S. Gopal’s biography of his father Radhakrishnan shows how the senior was deeply attracted to Sir Aushutosh who had appointed him as George V Professor of Philosophy at Calcutta University. Radhakrishnan had also great affection for Shyama Prasad with whom he maintained cordial relations, particularly when he was lecturing at Oxford, and the latter was studying in Loncoln’s Inn, London.

When Radhakrishnan found Nehru and Shyama Prasad involved in a political controversy hurling accusations against each other, he tried to mediate and bring about peace between the two but in vain. Radhakrishnan felt deeply upset over Shyama Prasad’s death and insisted on an enquiry.

The book throws light on the complexity of Jammu and Kashmir politics and the role played in the murky and wild game of politics by some of politicians like Sheikh Abdullah, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and Karan Singh. We see here how politicians went out of their way to gratify their enormous political ambition by sacrificing national interests.

After Shyama Prasad’s death, the permit system was abolished, national flag was unfurled in the state, and the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and presidential powers were extended. On all these sensitive matters a controversy has erupted again in the state.

This work, though produced with higher motives and lot of labour to perpetuate the memory of a great patriot, is disappointing on many counts. It is replete with misprints and lacks an organising principle, and unity of purpose because the material in it has been collected haphazardly. There are no biographical notes on the personalities that figure in the text. Nor is there any attempt to analyse Shyama Prasad’s political ideas and activity.

Generally speaking, Shyama Prasad is regarded as a rank communalist who thought only for the consolidation and unity of Hindu community to the neglect of other segments of Indian society. He ridiculed the notion of socialism and all that goes with it. He dubbed Nehru an idealist who was out of tune with the reality of things.

The volume contains a short perceptive article by Hiren Mukherjee, the communist leader. According to him, Shyama Prasad could not be glibly branded as a communalist like his party workers, though possibly he became one in the heat of the movement provoked by circumstances.

Hiren Mukherjee thought that at the root of Shyama Prasad’s thinking was liberalism and added that he was a middle of the road liberal. Liberalism denotes rationality, equality before law, freedom of speech and thought, social justice, and goodwill towards all.

I think that Shyama Prasad exemplified the finest values of the 19th century Bengal Renaissance. What Aurobindo Ghosh did in the realm of religion and philosophy, Shyama Prasad did in education and politics.

 
Nibbling at Europe as culture centre
Review by Rumina Sethi

The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation by Vassilis Lambropoulos. Princeton. University Press, Princeton; Pages 471. $ 29.95.

IN "The Order of Things" Foucault writes, "The classical order of language has now drawn to a close. It has lost its transparency and its major function in the domain of language." A significant corollary to Foucault’s statement may be traced to the demystification of Eurocentrism. Though language was the inevitable form of representation before the 19th century, it is no more close to knowledge.

Foucault himself has supported this claim believing language to be "a necessary medium" for any kind of knowledge which wishes to offer itself in discourse. But he also maintains that such language, though deemed inert, always leans towards the one using it "as soon as that subject expresses what he knows". The uses and misuses of language in recent debates have, to a large extent, neutralised and exposed the science of Eurocentrism.

One of the reasons why the West rose to hegemonic power, for instance, is that the starting point for historical narratives is taken to be 1400 AD by historical "synthesisers" like Fernand Braudel and Arnold Toynbee, a time when the world systems which had evolved much earlier had declined. History would be so different if the starting point had been situated in the Hellenic-Roman-Middle Eastern-Indian Ocean system dating around the early Christian era or in the eastern Mediterranean to China system beginning in the ninth century.

Another bias comes from "partial testimony" and "levels of generality" generated by the archivists and the synthesisers respectively. In addition, the histories written by the victor almost always convert the weakness of the dominated into their own strengths to an extent that the variables used in the histories explaining the rise of the West are inevitably the mirror images of those used to claim western superiority. Yet there are hardly any history textbook which argues in this vein.

In his recent book "The Rise of Eurocentrism", Vassilis Lambropoulos treats the controversial subject of the western hegemonic tradition, especially its development since the Protestant Reformation. His argument centres on the politics of "interpretative imperative" and thus he goes on to explain the various Hellenic-Hebraic dialectical formations and the Hebraisation of culture in the 20th century. Lambropoulos’s work is significant in present-day discussions concerning exegesis, canonicity, interpretive authority, tradition, originality and textuality, as he argues with much scholarship how the hermeneutics of interpretation constitutes, to take one example, the dominant impression of an unblemished, idolised Hellas — or a neglected, marginalised Israel. All such intellectual formations, in his view, bear the distinctive imprint of their political, religious and philosophical structures.

Lambropoulos is inclined to link scholarship and power since the formation of any intellectual heritage is not simply a romantic exercise for disinterested seekers. It is interesting that, as Edward Said before him, he considers culture to be a vehicle for the imperialist venture rather than an area of art and learning alone. Following Gramscian parameters by treating culture as an instrument of political control, Lambropoulos has the ambitious scope of defining the patterns of relationships between the western world and its overseas territories.

Both Said and Lambropoulos are extremely useful in any discussion that brings the role of knowledge and power into the understanding of intellectual formations in the cultural sphere, and the consequent dialectical tensions between, say, Auerbach’s Homeric-Biblical, Schiller’s naive-sentimental, Holderlin’s Hellenic-Hesperian, Lukach’s epic novel or even Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian archetypes. What makes Lambropoulos interesting is his willingness to consider both historical and legendary material in his interpretation of reality.

In spite of existing polarities, he endorses Walcott’s belief that the Iliad can still be read as a Caribbean epic without a recourse to distinguishing between "biblical narrative based on resentment and mythical narrative based on desire". Within this debate, another Caribbean writer’s ideas are worth mentioning. Wilson Harris advocates the need for fiction with the multidimensionality of seascape, skyscape and riverscape. He uses ways of crossing boundaries through intuitive response and imagination.

Blake’s "Tyger" from the perspective of Amerindian jaguar myths gives it a different place in the South American calendar. These links can be forged, he believes, not be intellectualising but by the working of imagination. But his thinking still leaves a concern about actual experience which is invalidated by the crossing of boundaries.

Any reasoning, then, can only be an interpretation, imaginative or otherwise. The subtitle of Auerbach’s "Mimesis", Lambropoulos reasons, should in fact read "The interpretation of the representation of reality in western literature" and not "The representation of reality in western literature".

True to its claims, the purpose of Lambropoulos’s book lies not in analysing dominant modes of representation, but in interpreting them. Of course, he agrees that "to those who are happy to be explained, emancipated, assimilated into the civil rites of interpretation, anyone not sharing the aesthetic communion appears uncivilised and threatening".

Lambropoulos does not chart a linear history or a chronological narrative of how reason and morality followed the spiritual, but through a series of digressions each beginning with a prominent 20th century aesthetic position (Martin Bernal, Horkheimer and Adorno, Levinas, etc.), examines in detail and with clarity the various ideals of autonomy. Auerbach can serve as illustration here since "Mimesis" exemplifies a strong biblical view of lilterary history.

All of Auerbach’s selected texts are from within the canonical European tradition, and are furthermore arranged with the Bible in mind which in his view is the Absolute Book. It follows that there exists no other literature before it. In fact, no other literature, in his view, can match the glorious achievements of the western masters. As Lambropoulos writes of Auerbach’s "Story of Literature": "The notion of the tradition itself is not discussed, and its authority is recognised unquestionably. The unity, borders, jurisdiction and goals of that authority are established. The driving implications is that the West has its own Bible, although a secular one, which is its literary canon." Two things emerge from Auerbach’s claims to historical truth: that there is only one literature worth reading, and that there is only one way of reading it, the biblical way.

But then these are familiar characteristics of Enlightenment thought: subjectivism, objectivism, positivism and totalitarianism. In privileging man and the principle of self, the Englightenment rationale put man at the centre of the universe, and turned individuality into individualism. Such subjectivism in turn distanced man from the world. The world became an object of observation and exploration, an alien which was infinitely discoverable.

Enlightenment quantified too and generalised the particular, thereby enabling the creation of a total, manageable system. The programme of Enlightenment had to fail however, besieged as it was with inner contradictions: "The grandiose enterprise that was launched to liberate humanity from the grip of mythological thinking... collapsed into a new mythology, which is all the worse, since it is still mesmerised by delusions of power.... Before, people were paralysed by the mythology of superstition; now the reign of reason has produced its own mythology, rationality. In another sense, we are even more helpless now, having been deceived by our best potential.

By bringing myth and reason together and the contradictory interplay of knowledge and power, Lambropoulos is able to reveal the circular trajectory of Enlightenment reasoning, argued cohesively in his analyses of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Odysseus and their views on the barbarity of anti-semitism.

Horkheimer and Adorno proposed Judaism, or "de-Hellenisation", or even the complete annihilation of the Greek element from western learning, as a project of "atonement" for wrongdoing. Their message was: repeat, repent, return. Accordingly, they created a sinister model of Greek thought, representing 30 centuries of western civilisation, from Odysseus to Hitler. Horkheimer and Adorno could hardly have been able to create a culture of atonement if it had not been for inventing a mythology of their own. Lambropoulos demystifies the extreme position of Horkheimer and Adorno, and guards against further essentialisms while examining the various perspectives adopted by Lukach, Marx, Bauer, Sartre, Weber and Derrida.

It is clear that in fashioning distinct identities, the rhetoric of "otherness" is significantly important since identities are prone to becoming essentialist rather than relational, viewed as they then will be from a position external to the actuality of relationships between cultures or from a privileging epistemology centred in unequal relationships. From this position, the other is always Hebraic: the essential Other is the Jew who has to qualify for the test of proficiency in Hellenic culture in order to enter into the civic society of interpretive rights.

Lambropoulos here skilfully extricates himself from paying homage to either of the two schools. He reaches instead for an area of post-modern interpretation — "interpretation at its last historical phase" — in which the canon does not matter so long as "everything is read, treated like text, interpreted, Biblicised". Lambropoulos writes: "Both the separatist and the assimilationist positions, both the humanist and the anti-humanist attitudes find in Hebraism the post-modern universal that asserts the moral superiority of contemplation, the cultural ethics of atonement." Undoubtedly, this is another transfiguration into pure faith.

Are we then to understand that Lambropoulos extends ultimately the Derridean model? Derrida, too, like Horkheimer and Adorno, blames the Greeks for the overwhelming oppression of Hellenism. As in "Writing and Difference", he posits: "The Greek father who still holds us under his sway must be killed; and this is what a Greek — Plato — could never resolve to do, deferring the act into a hallucinatory murder. A hallucination within a hallucination that is already speech. But will a non-Greek ever succeed in doing what a Greek in this case could not do, except by disguising himself as a Greek, by speaking Greek, by feigning to speak Greek in order to get near the king?"

Derrida must really settle his score with Heidegger’s Greeks than, in fact, with Plato. In other words, Derrida argues that Hebraism is not Judaism but its difference from the Hellenic and, further, that the Hebraic can kill the Greek father only by speaking the language of the alien.

Towards the end, Lambropoulos asks: can there be a Hebraic culture at all? In Derridean terms, "the Jew and the poet" are not circumscribed by the Greek polis as both can attain the promised land of language. Judaism is on its way to becoming a universal condition: we are all Jews, and all things Greek are anti-semitic. Or, the authority of theoria is simply eroded.

This links up with deconstruction both being and not being a liberating enterprise. It questions authority but in the end, sanctions it, being really an affirmative movement. Deconstruction implies the awareness that interpretation and emancipation, reading and the freedom from it, the Hellenic and the Hebriac turns of culture are all supportive units of the Protestant project of modernity.

Indeed, Lambropoulos’s new book sets up a discursive space for cultural politics, while adequately bringing out his optimism that it is not entirely impossible to conceive of a scholarship that neither corrupts history nor is indifferent to human reality.

Hungary and India: Aspects of Political System edited by Vinay Kumar Malhotra. Creative Books, New Delhi. Pages xviii+258. Rs 500.

HUNGARY is a small, land-locked, non-English speaking country. It has emerged as a pluralist parliamentary democracy in central-east Europe in a unique way. It is moving towards free market. It is perhaps the only former communist country where the government has not collapsed despite being ruled by a coalition for one whole decade.

The book under review throws light on the Hungarian political system and its peculiarities; evaluates the latest trends and developments inIndia; highlights its features which can be of some interest to the Hungarians; evaluates similarities in both systems and examines the procedural mechanism which may help in improving the Indian system.

Generally speaking, Hungary is on the threshold of a new era. Emerging from communism, it has laid the foundation of democracy. It has adopted free market. Keeping in view the drastic steps required for bringing about results, it has gone ahead with an economic restructuring programme which, by and large, is based on privatisation.

After the collapse of communism, like any other European country, Hungary was perhaps destined to set up the parliamentary system with the Head of State being the President. The relationship of the President with the government is determined by democratic principles of checks and balances. Institutions like ombudsman and state audit officer are introduced for strengthening the functioning of the government. And ideologically committed leadership is set to be replaced by a group of dynamic technocrats. The so-called "post-Kadarist technocratic elite" is said to have played a key role in the democratic transition.

Public opinion has been the most effective factor in Hungarian politics. It is directed towards the maintaining, strengthening and stabilising the system. Since 1990, the Parliament has worked as real "law-making factory". The MPs are elected by direct and secret votes on the basis of universal suffrage, believing in the "principle of opportunity" for all to prove their worth. The Hungarian voters do not give two terms to any ruling party and thus follow the "anti-incumbency wave", every party is given a chance in elections.

Moreover it is the only former communist country where coalition governments have served a full term. This shows that the multi-party system is based on consensus. Furthermore, the principle of separation of power has been re-established.

Interest groups did exist even when the Communists were in power. It is difficult to determine the extent of influence but its increasingly stronger role in Hungarian politics cannot be denied. They are still "developing and maturing". Undoubtedly the sort of professional relations between the government and the interest groups definitely facilitate and benefit in building mutual confidence.

The most important group which emerged prior to the fall of the communist regime involved "environmentalists".

The passage of laws on the Creation of Legal Foundation(1987) and on Freedom of Associations and Assembly (1989) are worthy of attention, which opened the floodgates of rapid development of interest groups.

The establishment of the National Interest Reconciliation Council was the first concrete effort to open a dialogue with the social partner on the question of industrial policy. But the fact remains that the era of democratic policies ushered in 1990 is much less favourable to the major interest groups because of the "balanced inconsistency" in the approach adopted by the first democratically elected Hungarian Democratic Forum.

On one side, they were making decisions without any influence but, on the other, established and expanded the authority of the old tripartite system. In addition to it, it also passed legislation to legitimise interest groups. The most important development was allowing them to participate directly in parliamentary committee sessions.

Inferior product quality, world market competitiveness, technological backwardness, economic stagnation and growing indebtedness are some of the reasons for bad economic conditions. The so-called process of transformation helped in narrowing down the gap between the development level and living standards in Hungary. But the launching of the transformation process without any theoretical foundation, correct strategy and the aid of external forces had created hurdles in the so-called "radical therapy".

At the same time, the outstanding objective of the economic development programme was the opening up to the world economy by accelerating the process of liberalisation to woo foreign investment. Moreover an increasing proficiency in the financial sector (banking, financial institution and insurance) are some of the factors nudging the expansion of the private sector.

Truly speaking, both India and Hungary have no geographic nearness and follow different ideologies; even cultural and social activities are diverse. However the so-called liberalisation and modernisation of their economies are favourable for expanding Indo-Hungarian economic ties. In fact the old and traditional ties are being reaffirmed. Moreover, India’s foreign policy is guided by the desire to maintain continuity and opening new vistas of international collaboration. The "Gujral doctrine" and the common minimum programme are strengthening the base. Really, there is nothing new in the so-called "new initiatives"; it is rather an extension of the Nehru vision. Thus we are trying to adjust to new realities with the old strategy of foreign policy.

Globalisation, liberalisation and the coalition system are unique commonalities, and Malhotra has rightly observed that "new opportunities created by democratisation and economic liberalisation in the nineties have expanded India-Hungarian relations in diverse fields."

AMARJIT CHANDAN has been writing poetry since the early seventies but could not make a headway at that time. His early Naxalite phase was mainly steeped in sloganism spawning haphazard doggerels; so were his actions as a political activist.

It seemed as if he was suffering from revolutionary meningitis which had no cure except to quit or escape from the "dark tunnel". He did both and landed in the erstwhile capital of world imperialism, London.

The settlement pangs rattled him for some time which he tried to work through his early essays. Then he turned to poetry under the benign wings of the Muses. But this phase soon ended and he went on a backward journey as if a schizophrenic to escape the rough and tumble of life. The literary product is not disappointing though.

The poet has a unique knack of naming his collection of poems — "Jarhan"(roots), "Beejak" (sower), "Chhanna" (bronze bowl with inward inclined edges), "Guthli"(pouch), "Gurhti" (first feeding of honey and jaggery to the new-born).

This paradigm shift in the case of Chandan has not only been caused by a change in time and place but by a change in perception of reality — from through red revolutionary glasses to ochre, mystic ones. This development is on expected lines.

The youthful angularities have smoothened out like the pebbles at the lower reaches of a river. Civil society has coined its own terms for such a phenomenon — "matured" or "mellowed". So now Chandan has metamorphosed from a fire-spitting red "dragon" to an ochre-clad mellowed mystic.

This change is indicative of an immanent reshuffling of the existential categories. Spirit takes precedence over matter, the ideal over idea, the metaphysical over the corporeal, ontology over ideology, essence over appearance, ascetic meditation over political activism, penitence over power, solitude over multitude and silence over tumult.

For a man who is the product of the student turmoil of the late sixties of last century, this is a sea-change. He no longer talks about the "decadent bourgeois culture tottering on its last legs". Nor of the crimson dawn breaking out in the east. The blazing fire has cooled. The Indian revolution has petered out into a whimper without a bang. The passage from "motherland" to the "promised land" is really tortuous, replete with opportunistic escapades and facile compromises. When one cannot move forward, one has to look back; even staying at a spot in a moving world is a journey into the primordial recesses where a multitude of odd artifacts are stored as antiques and curios for the posterity to marvel at. It is just like "primitive" crafts being exhibited in the most modern saloons of Paris or London.

Chandan now behaves like a mini Aurobindo and London is a poor substitute for Pondicherry. In both cases the fiery revolutionaries "retreated" and sought refuge in "divine life".

And for the readers (audience) alienated from the roots of their native soil these poems appear like so many memory residuals buried under a thin layer of modern metropolitan kitsch. But for those who go through the maelstrom of life that creates language out of its gruelling praxis, this native diction is just run-of-the-mill.

In the famous preface to "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) Wordsworth and Coleridge had pleaded strongly for the language of shepherds and peasants as an ideal medium for poetic compositions. At that time it was a revolutionary contribution to poetic diction vis-a-vis the "gaudy and inane" terminology of the neo-classical age that preceded.

Inspite of all these observations, Chandan’s neo-romantic intervention has its own role to play. Some poems appear like a gentle shower on a sultry day. In a poem "Tere Andar" from "Chhanna" (Navyug Publishers, New Delhi) the poet says, "Terian akkhan ’ch raat matak rahi hai/Tere sir te dhuppan di chunni/Suhagan akkhian har shai nu chumdian/Ajj mainu tera var milia hai/Raatan te dhuppan de nigh vich/ugg rihan mai teri mitti andar/Terian ragon ’ch mai weh rihan/utar rihan mai terian duddhian ’ch/Same di chattan simdi - koi nadi janam lai rahi hai/Tere andar lukia main tere vich zahar ho rihan/Terian akkhan vich." (In your eyes lies the enticing night. Your head wears the scarf of sunshine. Amorous eyes kiss everything around. I am blessed with your boon today.I am germinating in your soil in the warmth of nights and days. I am flowing in your veins and oozing through your breasts.The rock of time drips and trickles into a stream. Concealed inside you, I am revealed through your eyes.)

Such meditative poems show a deep influence of Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda and Octovio Paz. In Punjabi they create a new idiom and a new poetic diction that go beyond the tradition of Prof Puran Singh and Bhai Vir Singh.

Strangely, two poems with the same title "Chupp" appear in both anthologies, "Chhanna" and "Gurhti". But at both places they are differently realised .

The "Chupp" in "Chhanna" reads like this: "Chupp sundi hai/chupp/jo mahadhmake de bee andar hai/shabad de vich/neendar di kuuk de andar hai/Aad ton pehle/Anth de magron/Same ton bahar/har shai andar/chupp nahi sundi/shor barha hai/yadan da/sahwan da/lafzan da/kann vajde han/chupp di daat devo mere rabb ji/Jeevan di chupp da." (Hark! I hear the silence which is lodged in the seed of the big bang. Silence rules before the word is uttered. Silence is the language of the dead. Silence is in the sound of sleep. Silence is before the beginning and after the end. Silence is beyond time though within everything. Silence becomes inaudible as noise dominates — noise of memories, of breathing and of words. The ears vibrate — an aural illusion.OGod, bless me with silence — the silence of life!)

In the following poem "Chupp" from "Gurhti", the latest collection, the poet recites: "Chupp hai sare pase/Banda hi hai jo chupp nu bolan lagda/Shaian de nam rakkhan lag da/Phir kiyun kiyun karda/Chaldi gaddi chupp musafir/Kujh kharhka sunde han/Kujh nahi sunde/Aawaz jiyun chupp di mitti vich uggia rukkh hai/Aawaz chupp di khalrhi hai/Eh phal hai/Eh anda hai/Aawaz di chupp na’ has dandan di preet laggi hai/Aawaz chupp nu chhuh ke murhdi hai/Chupp sufne vich bole/Bagan de ghor anere andar/koi kise da na lainda hai dar ke/chupp hor duungi ho jandi hai/Bahut chupp hai chupp gungi hai/chupp hai sare pase."(Silence prevails all over the place. Only man breaks the spell of silence beginning with the naming of things around him and seeking answer to his queries. Some passengers in the moving train perceive the noise, others do not. Sound is like a tree grown in the soil of silence. Sound is the skin of silence — its fruit, its egg. Sound and silence have an intimate relation like laughter and teeth. Sound rebounds after having touched the soul of silence. Silence speaks through dreams. In the inky darkness of groves where somebody utters a word with fear in the heart, silence deepens still further and dumbness prevails all over the place).

Sometimes Chandan does reflect on the destiny of the immigrants in the western world, a favourite theme of all Punjabi writers in Britain, Canada and the USA. In a poem, "Is mulk vich"(from "Chhanna") he says that the alien sheds memories in this land one after the other and silence becomes his speech, turning him into a deaf and mute. The wind then translates his silence into English.

From being a man the immigrant turns into being a dehumanised alien. He keeps owning what does not belong to him. He wears socks and suits. It seems the wheel of time has broken one of its teeth here; that is why the watch does not move forward nor does the needle in the groove of the gramophone record.

While making an appraisal of the 20th century, the poet says that the winners lost after having won. The relentless battle between falcons and sparrows went on. The book was defiled by the monkey and the man armed with a nuclear bomb became the son of a bitch. Then he raises a toast in the name of those who came and departed and also to those who were to come but had not turned up. A toast to those who will come today or tomorrow and keep their word.

In an ode to Punjab in "Gurhti", the poet expresses his feelings thus:"My Punjab is as big as the world itself — infinite, limitless. All rivers flow through it. Everybody here listens to silence which appears in the form of a call by a hermit (fakir). Punjab is a drum as big as the earth itself — God himself beating it. Shiva does the dance of death (tandav) Krishna and Ranjha play on the flute. The azure horse neighs. Dhareja whirls in dance at the snap of fingers.Sohni, Heer and Sahiban sing bridal songs. Dulla chats with Puran. Guru’s name is the pinnacle of glory. Then Punjab becomes a father without affection and a son separated from the mother (womb), always in search of excuses to stake his life.

With such ruminations the poet longs to go back to his primal stirrings. The loss of revolution is the gain of mystic meditation in Punjabi world of letters. "Chhanna" also carries a philosophical introduction by Satya P. Gautam of Panjab University, which succinctly summarises the thematic diffusion of the anthology with a very strong espousal of the cause of the Punjabi language and culture.

The Partition in Retrospect edited by Amrik Singh. National Institute of Punjab Studies, New Delhi. Pages 458. Rs 450.

THE departure of the colonial masters and independence that it meant were a matter of jubilation for the entire country, but not for Punjab and Bengal. Tranquility has certainly not been a strong point in Punjab’s history and recurrent vicissitudes have not only redrawn its map but has also affected the psyche of its people. However, partition was the bloodiest of all as one million people perished and over 10 million were displaced in the largest peacetime mass migration this century has witnessed.

Undoubtedly, there is no dearth of written material on partition: official records and documents, private papers, agreements and treaties, history, analyses and reminscences. Vast newspaper reports and reams of government papers exist on the rehabilitation of refugees. There have also been symposia on the theme of partition.

Our relationship with our neighbour is paradoxical — as countries, we remain sworn enemies, the latest defence armour being nuclear, but on the people-to-people basis we exude warmth and bonding. The memories of partition are most painful to survivors, yet they recapitulate with nostalgia the land they lost and literature on both sides is full of this.

It is time we analysed and discussed partition — 50 years is distant enough for an objective overview and also close enough for recapitulation by survivors. In any case, it is time to take a fresh look at the event. The National Institute of Punjab Studies and the India International Centre, two august academic bodies, held a seminar and the book is a collection of papers by scholars. The papers have been thematically grouped under "Towards partition", "The Punjab tangle", "The division of Bengal" and "Perspectives on partition" and, of course; "The partition and beyond". Each section has a separate foreward, as well as a discussion on issues central to the theme.

For students of history the contents would be very familiar but as the dust cover suggests, this volume endeavours to offer a fresh outlook, through a series of dispassionate analyses. The immediate post-partition era when emotions were highly surcharged and communally tinged led inevitably to stereotyping, biases and heresies. Similar tints were visible in historiography and so 50 years hence there is the emergent need for objectivity. Many historians have risen to the occasion, as we see in these analyses.

There are numerous theories of partition. Simplistically, the British version is that it was impossible for two dissimilar and irreconcilable religious entities to coexist. Pakistanis propound the theory of a Hindu-dominated Congress wanting to destroy the Muslim indentity and in India, we insist that Pakistan was the result of Jinnah’s inflexibility and his quest for a Muslim nation.

To overcome some disbeliefs and prejudices which cloud Indian historigraphy of this period, K.L. Tuteja’s paper on "Hindu consciousness, the Congress and partition" is worth reading. His viewpoint is quite similar to that of Mushirul Hasan. "The common belief that the Muslim community as a whole subscribed to the two-nation theory is far from the truth. That the Muslims did not demand Pakistan as a monolithic and homogenous community is evident from the simple fact that 35 million of them preferred to stay back in India and have continued to live in this country after partition."

He continues: "The historical process leading to partition has unequivocally revealed that apart from Muslim communalism, Hindu communalism was an active player in the social and political life of the country." He has traced the growth of Hindu communalism from the 19th century to independence.

In Punjab, Hindu-Muslim rivalry started when educated Muslims envied the dominant position of the Hindu middle classes in government jobs and educational institutions. The British policy of reservation for Muslims led to a Hindu reaction. Bodies like the Hindu Mahasabha, the Arya Samaj, the RSS and even the Congress in later stages exacerbated communalism among the Hindus as is analysed in this paper.

Every paper focuses on a particular facet of partition. Bimal Prasad has sought to vindicate Jawaharlal Nehru’s position on partition, for which he has often been criticised for not being as strongly opposed to it as Mahatma Gandhi was. However, "he was not wrong in imagining that the struggle for India was as good as lost. What was important was to ensure that the terms of division were such as to cause as little damage as possible to what was left after that division." Moreover, Nehru, he says, successfully scotched the attempt outlined by the Mountbatten plan to Balkanise India.

In the same section is a paper which would evoke immense interest in today’s context — when the relevance of Gandhi is being analysed, questioned and even criticised in plays, films and books — "The tragedy and triumphs of Mahatma Gandhi" by B.R. Nanda.

Understandably, he eulogises the Mahatma; however, he has also countered the criticism of Gandhi by later-day commentators as to why he did not go on a fast unto death to prevent partition. He says, "To prevent partition, there was no point in Gandhi’s fasting or starting a civil disobedience (movement) against the British who were not susceptible to such moral pressure and were in any case leaving the country. Nor would there have been any point in his undertaking a fast in West Punjab or East Bengal where he had been painted for years as an enemy of Islam. The leaders of the Muslim League were proof against the nuances of satyagraha; they would have at once denounced Gandhi’s fast as a trick to cheat them of the prize of Pakistan which lay within their grasp."

What is even more relevant are the Mahatma’s words: "The first thing is that politics have divided India today into Hindus and Muslims. I want to rescue people from this quagmire and make them work on solid ground where people are people. Therefore, my appeal here is not to the Muslims nor to the Hindus as Hindus, but to ordinary human beings, and take many other steps so that they can make life better." Sadly, in 1947 there were mainly two religious groups and today there are many ethnic, caste and religious clusters gnawing at the vitals of the nation founded in 1947.

In the context of Punjab, the Akali participation in the freedom struggle is prominent; however, in the national context there is only a prefunctory mention. Similarly, Master Tara Singh needs elevation as a national hero.

Unfortunately, even in the Khalsa, tercentenary year his role has been more or less ignored. Prithipal Singh Kapur’s paper highlights "The role of Master Tara Singh".

Certain less-known facts of history are also discussed. "During the various Round Table Conferences, it became clear that a policy of appeasement of Muslims was being followed by the British in a subtle manner. Sir Geoffery Corbett, Secretary of the Round Table Conference, suggested the separation of Ambala division from Punjab to make the Muslims overwhelmingly predominant in Punjab. This was strongly opposed by the Sikh delegates. Master Tara Singh could see clearly that the communal tangle in Punjab would result in the partition of Punjab and he mentioned this apprehension to Mahatma Gandhi in 1931. The latter termed it as an instance of ‘communal approach’. To this Master Tara Singh retorted, ‘Communalism can be fought only with retaliatory manoeuvres of the same kind’."

The introduction to the section "The Punjab tangle" is akin to oral history since the editor witnessed the events. "It is difficult to say who was responsible but both Jinnah and Mountbatten who did not choose to grapple with the issues relating to the transfer of power in detail are more responsible than others. The other two principal decision-makers were Nehru and Patel. Their failure to anticipate events was a colossal miscalculation and cannot be condoned. The fact of the matter is that whatever may be said in extenuation of what happened, this is what rankles in the minds of most people and has passed into folk memory as an event which continues to drip with blood."

As mentioned above, eyewitnesses and coreligionists are inevitably subjective in their writing. However, Iftikhar H. Malik’s "Pluralism, partition and Punjabisation: politics of Muslim identity in British Punjab" is a fascinating and relatively objective narration of events from British Punjab to the present East Punjab and Pakistan. There are answers to many querries which arise today such as: "Why did Muslim Punjab become the roller-coaster for Muslim nationalism and how did it conveniently begin to de-emphasise its Punjabiat? Was it out of the fear of another ‘1947’ that Punjab sought allies elsewhere such as from amongst the Urdu speakers or was it due to the very feeble nature of self-consciousness as Punjabi Muslims denoting a broad receptivity for a larger Pakistani identification, or was it simply a consolidation of plural Muslim culture that the issues of Punjabi identities amongst Pakistani Punjabis were left to their critics from Bengal, NWFP or Sindh?"

J.S. Grewal’s paper "Partition and the Sikhs", gives the inside story of the Boundary Commission negotiations, the efforts at declaring Nankana Sahib as "a sort Vatican" and the obduracy of the Muslim League to it. The very mention of Punjab’s contemporary history brings to mind J.S. Grewal and Indu Banga, two veterans in research on Punjab to discuss and juxtapose partition with Pakistan.

Amidst many publications on partition as well as symposia on this period, the sufferings of women and children have never been focused, and if focused only marginally. (Urvashi Buttalia has a book on the subject.) Satya M. Rai has researched intensively on partition and written a great deal on this. Her paper "Partition and women: the case of Punjab" is essential reading and needs discussion. The pathetic plight of women on either side of the border as victims of gender vulnerability cannot be overlooked. The unfortunate victims of rape, abduction and children born in unfortunate circumstances never fitted into any slot of social norms and as a resultant became social baggage to be shunned.

The facts and figures brought to light of these hapless individuals are heart-rending. The harrowing and gruesome events, and legal battles and procedure, which these women and children got sucked into, are historically correlated. Sadly, as Satya M Rai concludes, the plight of Punjabi women, even half a century after, does not seem to show any signs of real progress, empowerment or emancipation.

As one comes to the section on the division of Bengal, there is a very interesting contrast, as Amrik Singh points out in his preface. "Unlike Punjab, the bond of language and culture was much stronger in Bengal than in Punjab. This became incontestably clear a quarter century later when Bangladesh chose to secede from Pakistan. Cultural bonds between the two Bengals asserted themselves at this critical juncture. This factor combined with the mishandling of the situation by the Pakistan government led to a brutal assault on Bengali nationalism in March, 1971, and the eventual establishment of Bangladesh by the end of that year."

In the penultimate section which I consider the most significant, partition is analysed in retrospect. I repeat that this is relevant as we now can view the event dispassionately. In the words of Amrik Singh "Scholars in Pakistan will see this point of view only after scholars in India give evidence of having recognised that the non-Muslim attitude towards the Muslims was far from friendly and rooted in the past, rather than the present or the future. In plain words, there has to be a certain amount of rethinking within India before that kind of rethinking can take place in Pakistan. Presumably, this process which is bound to take place one of these days had not yet started even after 50 years of partition."

V.N. Dutta, a great scholar on the freedom struggle, has given his interpretation of partition and blamed the Congress for losing a golden opportunity for rapprochement in 1937 when it refused to share power with the Muslim League. This greatly offended the Muslims and widened the feeling of distrust and hostilities between the two. Again in 1939, the Congress lost its bargaining power and opened the field for the League.

He concludes with what is provocative and imperative for historians, "A critically evaluated historiography which may expose some gaps and suggest further lines of enquiry," particularly on partition.

One of the most interesting and divergent themes is Aizaz Ahsan’s paper, "Partition in retrospect: a premordial divide." He is the leader of the opposition from Islamabad. He propounds this theory: "Indus (Pakistan) has a rich and glorious cultural heritage of its own. This is a distinct heritage, of a distinct and separate nation. Out of last 6000 years, Indus has indeed remained distinct and separate from India for almost five and a half thousand years. Only the three ‘universal states’, those of the Mauryans, the Mughals, and the British, welded these two regions together in a single empire. And the aggregate period of these ‘universal states’ was not more than 500 years."

He explains: "So has been the case with the civilisations that have flowered on the banks of these two mighty streams. They came close to each in some periods of history. Each took stock of the other and then each went along its own individual, distinct and opposite way. Thus has the Indus always been distinct and separate from India. If this were understood, as has been endeavoured in these submissions, there would perhaps be less reason for conflict and more for peaceful co-existence between India and Pakistan.

There would also perhaps be a better understanding of the irrepressible centrifugal pull being exerted today by Kashmiris who have throughout history formed an integral part of the Indus region."

So it was logical that the division was an inevitability. Yet, he concludes, now we should accept this division and move forward to overcome the maladies that plague both nations, illiteracy, poverty and disease.

Book extract
Anomalies of capitalism

This chapter is from Paul M. Sweezy’s "Post Revolutionary Society’’ published by Cornerstone, Kharagpur.

MANY people are familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s little book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", which has had an important and salutary effect on ways of looking at and analysing the history of the natural sciences, and which has also aroused considerable interest among social scientists.

Kuhn challenges the traditional view that science develops through a gradual process of accretion, with a host of theorists and researchers building up the scientific edifice a few bricks at a time and always on the basis of the accomplishments of their predecessors. Not so, says Kuhn; science develops through a series of revolutions, each rejecting much that has gone before and starting on new foundations.

His key concept is that of the "paradigm" which means roughly a way of looking at reality — or that part of reality which falls within the scope of a given science. To take the best known example, the paradigm of the cosmos which dominated human thought for thousands of years was geocentric, with all the heavenly bodies being assumed to move around a fixed earth as its centre. Astronomy based on this paradigm was developed and codified in the Ptolemaic system and held the field until the Copernican revolution, which abandoned the geocentric for a heliocentric paradigm.

Kuhn’s idea is that when a new paradigm takes over — never, incidentally, without a struggle — it provides room for a more or less lengthy period of what he calls "normal science," that is the work of scientists who accept the new paradigm and seek to answer the questions and solve the problems which it poses or allows to be raised. But after a while "anomalies" begin to crop up — observations or research results which do not square with the paradigm and cannot be explained in terms of normal science to which it gives rise.

What then happens is that efforts are made to elaborate and complicate the paradigm so that it will accommodate the anomalies, a process resulting in an increasingly messy collection of ad hoc additions and exceptions (as in the proliferation and modification of epicycles by post-Ptolemy astronomers), culminating in a scientific crisis. The way out is then found — usually by persons not trained in the accepted ways of perceiving and doing things — in a revolution which establishes a new paradigm.

The whole process of normal science-anomalies-crisis-revolution then repeats itself. (I might add that this way of viewing and analysing the history of science is very congenial to Marxism, though Kuhn himself is far from being a radical: there have long been conservative as well as radical dialectical thinkers.)

I want to suggest that Marxism, considered as a science of history and society, has in certain important respects reached a stage of crisis in Kuhn’s sense. The underlying paradigm, together with the normal science to which it gave rise, have in the course of last century produced an interpretation of the history of the modern world which is enormously powerful and which has had a profound influence far beyond the community of Marxists.

In barest outline, this interpretation sees the history of the modern world from roughly the beginning of the 16th century as consisting of the following major, and to some degree overlapping, stages: (1) the emergence of capitalism as the dominant mode of production (primitive accumulation plus bourgeois revolutions in the core countries); (2) the mercantilist stage of capitalism; (3) the competitive industrial stage of capitalism under British hegemony; (4) the monopoly imperialist stage of capitalism beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century; (5) the global crisis of capitalism-imperialism beginning with World War I; (6) the spreading proletarian revolution beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the emergence and spread of socialism as successor to capitalism and transition to the community society of the future.

The foundations of this interpretation of the history of the modern world were laid in the pre-1848 writings of Marx and Engels (especially "The German Ideology" and the "Communist Manifesto". Theoretical deepening and elaboration came in the first volume of "Capital" (published in 1867). And the edifice was extended, amplified and, in a sense, completed by the great revolutionary leaders of the 20th century, Lenin and Mao Zedong.

It is a magnificent intellectual and scientific creation — far superior to anything achieved by bourgeois social science, if indeed we may use that term at all, considering that at least since the beginning of the global crisis of capitalism bourgeois thinkers have been vastly more concerned with ideological justification of the system than with scientific: understanding of its history and future. But — and this is the point I want to emphasise — as history unfolded in the closing decades of the 20th century, we find more and more anomalies in the Kuhnian sense — that is deviations between observed reality and the expectations generated by the theory.

Obviously I couldn’t attempt to explore all these anomalies in the space available to me, and to tell the truth, the task would in any case be far beyond my ability. But I do want to draw attention to what I think is probably the most important of these anomalies. For Marx, socialism was a transitional society between capitalism and communism. While he purposely refrained from drawing up blueprints, there is no doubt about what he considered the most fundamental characteristics of communism: it would be a classless society, a stateless society, and a society of genuine and not merely formal or legal equality among nationalities, races, sexes and individuals. These goals would certainly be very long term in nature and might never be fully achieved. But just as certainly they establish guidelines and rough measuring rods. Only a society genuinely dedicated to these goals and shaping its practice accordingly can be considered socialist in the Marxian meaning of the term.

Now, as I have already indicated, the generally accepted Marxian interpretation of modern history leads us to expect that capitalism will be overthrown by proletarian revolutions, and that these revolutions will establish socialist societies. The theory, in fact, is so taken for granted as a reliable clue to what is happening in the world that every society which originates in a proletarian (or proletarian-led) revolution is automatically assumed to be and identified as a socialist society.

And this is where the anomalies begin. None of these "socialist" societies behave as Marx — and I think most Marxists up until quite recently — thought they would. They have not eliminated classes except in a purely verbal sense; and, except in the period of the Cultural Revolution in China, they have not attempted to follow a course which could have the long-run effect of eliminating classes. The state has not disappeared — no one could expect it to, except in a still distant future — but on the contrary has become more and more the central and dominant institution of society. Each interprets proletarian internationalism to mean support of its own interest and policies as interpreted by itself. They go to war not only in self-defense but to impose their will on other countries — even ones that are also assumed to be socialist.

All this, I think, is now fairly obvious, and of course it is raising havoc among socialists and communists. I think it is no exaggeration to say that by now the anomalies have become so massive and egregious that the result has been a deep crisis in Marxian theory.

What is the way out? One way, which is clearly being taken by some Marxists, is to throw out the whole theory, abandon Marxism altogether, and retire into a state of agnosticism and cynicism — if not worse. But the trouble with this is that Marxism works as well as ever — and I would even say better — as a way of understanding the development of global capitalism and its crises. The particular anomalies I have been alluding to have no bearing on the validity of Marxism in this crucially important sphere. The part of Marxism that needs to be put on a new basis is that which deals with the post-revolutionary societies (with which, of course, Marx and Engels had no experience).

We do not need to rule out the possibility of a post-revolutionary society’s being socialist in the Marxian sense. That would be foolish and self-defeating. But we do need to recognise that a proletarian revolution can give rise to a non-socialist society. I believe that it is only in this way that we can lay the basis for eliminating the disturbing anomalies I have been discussing.

Having recognised this, we can then proceed along one of two lines: (1) the hypothesis that the only alternative to socialism is capitalism, and (2) the hypothesis that proletarian revolutions can give rise to a new form of society, neither capitalist nor socialist. I believe that the second line is the fruitful one. The trouble with the capitalist hypothesis is that it quickly leads to as many anomalies as the socialist hypothesis. I wrote earlier that none of the so-called socialist societies behaves as Marx thought they would. Much the same can be said, only more so, if they are assumed to be capitalist societies: Marxists know a lot about the way capitalism works, and none of the post-revolutionary societies conforms to the pattern. They have plenty of contradictions of their own, but they do not take the same form as the contradictions of capitalism. If this is so — and I don’t know of anyone who claims to be able to analyse their development in terms of capitalism’s "laws of motion" — how can calling them capitalist lead to anything but confusion and frustration?

The new-society hypothesis, on the other hand, while not telling us anything about how these societies function, does pose exciting challenges for scientific work — and inevitably has profound implications for political practice. I firmly believe that it points to the path we should follow and offers us the best hope of resolving the crisis of Marxian theory which is now visibly tearing the international revolutionary movement apart.