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India: Definitions
and Clarifications
Unlike and unmindful of many a middle-path historian in India who often meanders about without saying anything substantial on his part, Massey is not only irreverent ["By stressing the virtues of non-violence, pure thoughts and good works, (Emperor) Ashoka can be accused of castrating the whole nation politically and militarily"], but hard hitting and direct to the point [" Hinduism made caste an integral part of religion and invested it with the sanction of divine law. No other religion has done that"], in his speech and assessments. Many an icon and thesis has been laid bare by the weight of Massey’s relentless and fearless counter-attack supported by fact, meticulous research and due diligence. There have been so many books written on India that initially one felt whether this was to be another exercise in boredom and repetition. Not so here, where the different facets of a man’s personality are held up to a mirror for all to see and then make up their own minds as they thought fit, "incidentally, Gandhi himself strongly disapproved of inter-caste dining or marriage. He said that the notion of inter-caste dining was a strange, foreign idea imported from the West". Or the softer side of Jinnah, which few in India believed that he possessed, "his friend, Jamshed Nusserwanjee, a Parsi, recorded that Jinnah wept when he saw the plight of a group of displaced Hindus in a camp in Pakistan". Writing about Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal, Massey writes, "Motilal was overbearing and while showering his son with good advice managed, in effect, to dent his son’s self-confidence." About the then Minister of Home Affairs Vallabhbhai Patel the author says, "Patel achieved what neither the Mughals nor the British were able to do. He broke the back of India’s age-old princely order. He is rightly celebrated as the Bismarck of India." Straight from the shoulder stuff, without any stuffing or padding. Massey was certainly not pandering to the whims of the Hindus or the Muslims and neither does he have a constituency in mind as he wrote this absorbing account, which uncovers many new aspects of our history. Let me give you a few more observations from his account. First Emperor Babur’s view about the Hindustan he saw as per his memoirs, "The beauties of social life are unknown to them. Intellectually, they are duds. Uncouth of manners, they are incapable of understanding the viewpoint of others." On the fall of the Sikh kingdom, Massey blames three Indian rulers, the Muslim ruler of Bahawalpur who assisted the British, the Raja of Patiala "bought off by Hardinge" and the Dogra Raja of Jammu Gulab Singh, a vassal of Ranjit Singh but who "colluded with the governor general". About Op Bluestar, Massey has this to say, "Indira Gandhi, daughter of the revolution whose father and grandfather had fought the good fight for India, managed to commit an outrage that neither the Mughals nor the British dared to envisage even in their wildest moments of madness. ... The Army of independent India, now officered entirely by Indians, massacred more Indians inside the Golden Temple than Dyer had at the nearby Jallainwala Bagh". He writes about Golwalkar of the RSS who "advocated a ‘pure Hindu India’, and Bahadur Shah who at his trial was charged with treason though he had never been a British subject, and who "pathetically, (he) pleaded for clemency saying that he was forced to side with the sepoys or else be killed together with his whole family". Massey’s book will not be welcomed by many, but the fact remains that he has done a singular service to the cause of chronicling a history as it actually unfolded, and not as many would have liked it to have been tailored to their own advantage.
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Lahore