Violent Belongings
Author: Kavita Daiya
Publisher: Yoda Press, Rs450
The author fails to bring out the real nature of the Muslim league and the Pakistani state despite dealing with the issue of ‘Partition, gender and national culture in postcolonial India’, says Saradindu Mukherjee
One major reason social sciences, especially in India, fail to inspire students and inhibit many from taking up a career in these fields is the growing cynicism about the content, quality and the purpose of such studies. The book, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India, reflects it clearly.
Kavita Daiya, author of this book, teaches English at an American university. She is the granddaughter of a hapless Hindu refugee from Karachi. And yet, ironically, she refuses to understand the real cause of Partition and the nature of the Pakistani state while intending to trace the “relationship between culture and violence in the modern world”, besides examining the contemporary ethnic and gendered violence.
Though the author begins with the grim story of the massacre of Sikhs at Chitti Singhpora in Jammu & Kashmir in March 2000, it is devoid of any analysis. Ideally one could have explained this ghastly incident with reference to a typical demographic/political phenomenon, underwritten by a theological sanction.
Next, Daiya falls back on the pamphleteering style of some ‘secular’ activists/academics when she makes a mandatory reference to a distorted representation of what happened in Gujarat in 2002, with both logic and sequence turned on their heads. While talking about the “fire on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims that killed 59 people in Godhra”, she carefully smothers some facts. She, for instance, talks of the state-supported mob violence against Muslims. There is, however, nothing on record to prove that the violence was state-sponsored/abetted. If at all anywhere such coordinated pogroms against minorities are taking place, these are in Pakistan and Bangladesh and even in our own Jammu & Kashmir; and the victims of these systematic religio-ethnic cleansings are Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists. The author’s intention become further clear when she is seen to be withholding the religious identity of those who burnt the Sabarmati Express in Godhra in 2002 — a negationism of the worst kind.
Daiya writes, “After August 6, 1946, ethnic riots involving Hindus and Sikhs against Muslims escalated all over the subcontinent.” While we may regard her August 6 reference to be August 16, she withholds the fact that the “Direct Action” day was announced by Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his murderous gangs belonging to the Muslim league,. Either Daiya is ignorant of these facts or she is deliberately lying in order to rehabilitate the founder of Pakistan, the architect of one of the brutal mass murders in recorded history.
For the seekers of truth, the fact remains: The Direct Action on August 16 was a rabble rousing call by the Muslim league to attack Hindus of Calcutta (Dhaka, too, saw the bloodlust but had been deliberately smothered by our ‘eminent’ intellectuals). This was followed by the Muslim league’s savage attack on Hindus of Noakhali, and only after these two attempts at genocide, that Hindus in a few villages in Bihar retaliated. Yet, she suppresses the fact that the initial attacks were made by Muslims.
She sounds simplistic in saying that the violence associated with Partition does not square well with Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent movement. In fact, violence on an unprecedented scale occurred when Gandhi’s first major political movement (Khilafat-Non cooperation) unleashed the Moplahs against Hindus of Kerala. She ignores the role played by revolutionaries — from Khudiram Bose and Bhagat Singh to Subhas Chandra Bose. Of course, compared to the American and Algerian independence, ours was less violent.
The author writes, “Partition constitutes a field of transformation and a discourse that became the condition of possibility for the gendered ethnicisation of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial South Asia”. It’s perhaps not too easy to comprehend. In all, this style of presentation, many would suggest, is explained in terms of methodology of research, now being taught. One is again not sure about its usefulness. While dealing with some of the most blood-curdling incidents in history, one needs to be objective — something which is sorely missing in this book.
The reviewer teaches history in University of Delhi