South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

4 | 2010 Modern Achievers: Role Models in South Asia

Laurent Gayer and Ingrid Therwath (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/2997 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.2997 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Printed version ISBN: 1960-6060

Electronic reference Laurent Gayer and Ingrid Therwath (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 4 | 2010, « Modern Achievers: Role Models in South Asia » [Online], Online since 08 December 2010, connection on 08 March 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/2997 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ samaj.2997

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Modelling Exemplarity in South Asia Laurent Gayer and Ingrid Therwath

Martyrs and Living Martyrs of the People’s War in Nepal Marie Lecomte-Tilouine

The Amar Chitra Katha Shakuntala: Pin-Up or Role Model? Nandini Chandra

‘I Never Held Money with my Teeth’: Constructions of Exemplarity in Abul Fazl Farooqi’s Nasheb-o-Faraz Laurent Gayer

A Controversial Role Model for Pakistani Women Faiza Mushtaq

‘Shining Indians’: Diaspora and Exemplarity in Bollywood Ingrid Therwath

Heroes in the Bedroom? Iconoclash and the Search for Exemplarity in India Malvika Maheshwari

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Introduction. Modelling Exemplarity in South Asia

Laurent Gayer and Ingrid Therwath

1 In 2007, Prashant Tamang, a young Indian police officer of Nepalese origin, became the winner of the third edition of the television show ‘Indian Idol’. This victory was made possible by the mobilization of Tamang’s profession—the Indian Police force—and of his ethnic community—Indians of Nepalese descent—both in India and abroad. The young man had captured the imagination of these two groups with his musical talent but also with his life-story and personality. Born and educated in Darjeeling, Tamang had joined the police force to support his family after his father’s demise, and it is in the Calcutta police orchestra that he perfected his musical gift. Along with Tamang’s family values and self-made-man-ship (he never received any formal musical education), his supporters seem to have appreciated that ‘[Tamang] thinks of himself as a simple person, with simple thoughts and simple living’.1 Although role models can also, like saints, derive their appeal from their exceptionality, Prashant Tamang’s fans looked up at him as a role model for his simplicity, as suggested by the following comments, which were posted on an Internet forum discussing the results of the show: I admit Amit’s the better singer but being an idol isnt just abt great singing. It’s also about being a role model for others and Prashant is a great one coz he’s so humble n down to earth! Besides, Prashant didnt have any formal training to begin with so stop dishing his voice. U have to touch the hearts of people n Prashant has done tat to millions of people with his nature n also attitude!2 2 The modelling of Prashant Tamang as an exemplary figure by his supporters, with the support of the Indian audiovisual industry, epitomizes many of the themes developed in this issue of SAMAJ. Like many of the candidates to exemplarity discussed in this issue, Tamang was imagined by his fans and promoters as a ‘person of accomplishment’ (Mines 1994: 16), and more specifically as a virtuous self-made man with strong family values. As many contributions to this issue suggest, this conjunction of inherited virtues and personal achievement, combining an ‘ontological conception of value’ with the ‘logic of the proof’ (Albert 1999: 19), is one of the distinguishing trends of contemporary politics of exemplarity in South Asia. And although inherited elements have not disappeared from South Asian definitions of exemplarity, ontological signs of

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distinction such as belonging to a ‘good family’ seem to be gradually losing hold over these definitions. Another particularity of exemplarity in South Asia, also revealed in Prashant Tamang’s success story, is the socially circumscribed appeal of the region’s new role models, compared to the more universal resonance of heroes of the past. It is these transformations currently taking place within the politics of exemplarity in South Asia that this issue of SAMAJ aims to uncover.

3 The role of literature, cinema, and the press in shaping a public sphere along with a national sentiment has generated many in-depth studies, many of which drew their inspiration from the works of Jurgen Habermas (1989) and Benedict Anderson (1983). However, the engineering and promotion of exemplary figures, whether by the state or by other agents, has not received the same attention from social scientists. This is particularly true for South Asia, where the production, diffusion and reception of role models remains understudied as compared to other regions of the world, Afghanistan being a notable exception in this regard (Centlivres 2001, Centlivres & Centlivres- Demont 2002). In West African contexts, for instance, Jean-Pierre Warnier and Richard Banégas (2001) have uncovered the processes at work in the manufacturing and marketing of modern achievers, but to date there exists no such study as far as South Asia is concerned. 4 Most contributions on the subject of exemplarity, heroes and role models, written in the last fifteen years, have come from the ethnology of oral literatures, from education sciences or from cultural history, with a few recent additions from social and religious anthropology (Centlivres et al. 1998, Centlivres 2001, Mayeur-Jaouen 2002). These studies generally focus on folklore characters or national heroes, and on the behavioural changes that these inspiring figures can bring about in teenagers, particularly through history textbooks (e.g. Amalvi 1998). Political scientists and sociologists have shown less concern for the subject in the past thirty years. Not surprisingly, most of the political science and sociology works on this issue were conducted between 1945 and 1970, at the height of the Cold War, when the war between the liberal and the communist camps was also being fought via heroes in popular culture (see for example Mary Sheridan’s (1968) article on heroes and the political engineering of exemplarity in Maoist China). From the 1970s to the 1990s, only a few authors strove to understand the politics of exemplarity. Since then, the end of the Cold War, the advent of global consumption and communication and a triumphant neo-liberal agenda coexisting with ethnic, religious and local dissent have shed a new light on exemplarity as a vehicle for ideology and politics. This issue of SAMAJ wishes to address this multifaceted phenomenon by using a variety of approaches and disciplines ranging from political science to sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, with a great emphasis on fieldwork and on the constructions and representations of exemplarity.

Heroes, martyrs, role models

5 For the sake of clarity, we will distinguish here between three ideal-types of exemplary figures: the hero, the martyr and the role model (the saint could have been added to this triad, but none of the contributions to this issue focuses specifically on such classical figures of exemplarity). The etymology of the word ‘hero’ goes back to classical Greek heros for half-god and defender, or protector. In the Homeric period, a

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hero was a warrior-chieftain of extraordinary strength and often divine ascendance (Bailly 1990). The English term ‘martyr’—derived from the Greek marturos—as well as its Arabic equivalent shahid, which has been imported in all major South Asian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali...), are both related to the act of witnessing. Both in the Christian and Islamic tradition, the martyr is etymologically he or she who proclaims his/her faith by willingly submitting to death (Khosrokhavar 2003: 22).3 As Marie- Lecomte Tilouine shows in her contribution to this issue on the ‘living martyrs’ of the Nepalese People’s War (1996-2006), this imported rhetoric of martyrdom (shahadat) can also accommodate vernacular idioms of sacrifice, such as the Hindu notion of blood sacrifice (bali dan).

6 Heroes, martyrs and saints are transcendental figures of exemplarity (Albert 2001: 19), endowed with supernatural faculties while embodying supra-human values. The major difference between the hero and the martyr is of a strategic nature: the former is generally victorious over his foes whereas the latter has to be put to death to deliver his message. It would thus seem that martyrs must meet with a tactical defeat to triumph on the long run. In other words, martyrs would be tragic figures, whereas heroes would belong to a more epic or dramatic register (Zins 2003: 318). However, this assertion needs to be qualified. In the case of jihadis, for instance, death may signal a worldly defeat in the face of the oppressor but it also amounts to a victory in the eyes of God, seen as the ultimate arbiter of human struggles. And in her contribution to this issue, Marie Lecomte-Tilouine shows how Nepalese Maoists have conflated the figure of the hero and that of the martyr, with the latter literally absorbing the former as the Maoist notion of ‘bir shahid’ (hero-martyr) suggests. 7 However distinct the nature and sources of their exemplarity may be, heroes, saints and martyrs share their exceptionality. Their vocation is to inspire by virtue of their exceptional deeds, not to be emulated by society at large. Their power is conditioned to their rarity and to their distinctive, supra-human qualities, which locates them in a liminal space between the human and the divine. These three classical types of exemplary figures are aristocratic in nature,4 although martyrdom has undoubtedly been democratized in recent times, within the Muslim world (Devji 2005) and beyond (Pettigrew 1997). In fact, the very notion of exemplarity has an aristocratic connotation, at least etymologically: in Rome, the exempla were edifying anecdotes which involved famous personalities and were meticulously archived by aristocratic lineages (gens) (Tourret 2007: 26). It is this aristocratic conception of exemplarity which is presently being challenged in South Asia, through the emergence of more mundane and plebeian role models. 8 The expression ‘role models’ appeared as recently as the late 1950s (Merton 1957). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a role model is ‘a person looked to by others as an example in a particular role.’ Unlike classical figures of exemplarity, role models and ‘great men’ are fully human characters, embodying more profane and immanent values. They stand apart from classical heroes, ‘because their exemplarity is not limited to their expertise in martial arts but extends to all the domains benefiting society’ (Enders 2002: 40). Drawing inspiration from Marat, Mona Ozouf (1984: 144) identifies six different types of ‘great men’: the philosopher, the lawmaker, the magistrate, the orator, the trader and the warrior. This typology echoes Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s (1991) more elaborate analytical model, which suggests that in contemporary Western societies (and more specifically France), ‘greatness’ comes to be

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proclaimed, measured or denied according to six different ‘orders of greatness’, each of which relies upon a distinct conception of the common good. These six ‘orders of greatness’ and the specific political philosophies which inform them (or ‘cités’, to use the authors’ term) are the ‘inspired cité’, the ‘domestic cité’, the ‘cité of opinion’, the ‘civic cité’, the ‘mercantile cité’, the ‘industrial cité’ and the ‘cité by projects.’ The authors’ skepticism about the possibility of extending this model to highly hierarchical societies (like India), which they claim do not adhere to the idea of a ‘common humanity’, is proven wrong by the South Asia context. In his study of a contemporary Indian Muslim entrepreneur’s autobiography, Laurent Gayer shows that Boltanski and Thévenot’s model can indeed be put into conversation with current changes taking place in India’s own ‘economy of greatness’ in a context of political democratization and economic liberalization (see Gayer in this volume). 9 Compared to classical figures of exemplarity such as heroes, saints and martyrs, great men and role models show travails which bring them closer to the hurdles of everyday human life. As such, they are easier to emulate and pertain to a distinctive moral landscape, more attuned to democratic and disenchanted, post-magical times. Whereas heroes and martyrs provide a road-map to the ‘good death’ (the kalos thanatos of classical Greece), role models propose guidelines for a good life. Benjamin Franklin’s (2007: 72) list of thirteen virtues extolled in his Autobiography in the ‘hope that some of [his] descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit’ are a classical illustration of this specificity. Whereas heroes are generally imposed from above, by the State, role models are more prone to emerge from below, through the choices of the populations (Enders 2002: 46), making them a particularly interesting subject for cultural studies and other disciplines concerned with the reception of cultural artefacts. Role models are half moral entrepreneurs, half moral commodities, whose exemplarity proves more ‘volatile’ than that of heroes of the past (Enders 2002: 46), and more consistent with the rise of individualism, capitalism and democratic institutions. Unlike heroes and martyrs, they do not need to kill or die to prove their point. Exemplarity, here, can be understood in a more statistical sense: role models are more banal and as such more representative of their society than heroes and martyrs, whose evocative power derives from the fact of being distinct from other mortals. Here lies the great paradox of modern politics of exemplarity: because they are more imperfect than heroes of the past and have been deprived of the support of invisible forces, role models seem to have a greater ability to lead by virtue of their ordinariness. 10 In practice, the appeal of these increasingly self-proclaimed role models remains limited. While heroes, in spite of being products of specific cultures appeal through their universal exemplarity, role models are necessarily context-dependant and meant to serve a particular purpose. They are more ephemeral than heroes and more functional too. Thus, Malvika Maheshwari’s study of perpetrators of attacks against artists in India very aptly differentiates heroes from role models (see Maheshwari in this volume). The men she interviewed do not wish to—and for that matter could not— project themselves as national heroes. Aware of their own limitations, these iconoclasts rarely mobilize the idea of the nation and have to content themselves with being ‘characters of momentary veneration [rather] than holders of real power’. Nichola Khan reaches the same conclusion in her study of political killers in Karachi, who failed to gain durable and universal respect within their own community (Khan 2010: 60).

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11 Over the centuries, South Asian vernacular languages and literatures have produced rich, complex idioms of exemplarity. Sanskrit has almost two hundred words meaning hero, some of them close to the Greek heros and some closer to what we now understand as role models. For instance, an atipurusha, a first-rate man, an ekavira, a unique man, and a nayaka, a leader, are understood as heroes, while an upanayaka is a secondary hero and pravira, a super-hero. On the derogatory side, a number of substantives like kshemashura, gehekshvedin, gehevijitin, or geheshura, assign negative qualities to ‘house-heroes’ as boasters or cowards, while specific terms exist to lampoon individuals affecting heroism. Different words also exist according to the nature of heroism, be it physical courage, moral strength, compassion, financial generosity, fertility, etc. This polysemy, which was passed on to most South Asian languages, from Hindi to Nepali and Telugu, illustrates the importance of exemplarity in the region and the vast vocabulary available to differentiate between heroes, role models and achievers (Monier-Williams 2008). Urdu also possesses a large choice of terms to signify heroism. Like in Greek or Sanskrit, moral qualities and bravery on the battlefield are key elements in the Urdu definition of heroes. Terms such as surma and bahadur (hero/brave man), as well as abtal parasti (hero worship, derived from Arabic), refer to brave warriors, whereas sar bar avurdah (derived from Persian) is more specific to individuals of exceptional intellectual merit. 12 In Europe, ‘the fabrication and promotion of heroes has been attuned to the rhythm of nation-building’ (Centlivres et al. 1998: 5). In South Asia too, the politics of exemplarity has been linked to nation-building and nationalism, but not only. The notion of Pro Patria Mori, so central to European political history (Kantorowicz 1951), did not, for example, resonate with the same intensity in South Asia. Here, State narratives of exemplarity, like the mythologies surrounding freedom-fighters and nation-builders such as Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah or Ambedkar, coexist and sometimes enter in conflict with exemplarity based on sub-national affiliations like caste, sect and lineage. In this context, the production of exemplarity has not solely taken place within the realm of the Nation-State, which helps to explain the heterogeneity and even the contradictions of contemporary politics of exemplarity in South Asia. This ‘polytheism of values’ and the ‘pluralization of pantheons’ which it induces (Albert 1998: 27) are vividly illustrated by the contributions to this issue of SAMAJ. Significantly, none of these contributions focuses on public figures, but rather concentrate on successful economic or religious entrepreneurs, materially and morally sound migrants, political dissidents or iconic gendered figures. The overview of politics of exemplarity in South Asia provided by these contributions is at best exploratory and does not claim to exhaust the subject. Nonetheless, it attests of the vitality of South Asian societies in modelling new figures of exemplarity, providing individuals and groups with a moral compass for their ‘social navigation’ (Vigh 2006).

Contemporary ‘wars of morality’ and the production of exemplarity in South Asia

13 The structural transformations which have been taking place in South Asian economies in the last decades have been accompanied by new representations of success and achievement. This is particularly visible in India, where the economic reforms that started in the early 1990s have led to the glorification of materialism, the private sector

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and technology (if not necessarily to their pursuit, see Jeffrey 2010). The prestige of the civil service was transferred to the private sector, made more attractive by the economic liberalization of the 1990s—particularly to the upper castes who felt increasingly barred from the public sector by caste-based quotas after the partial implementation of the Mandal report in 1989 and who started voting less, generally withdrawing from the public political sphere.

14 At the same time, the rise of ethno-nationalism, caste-based politics and politico- religious militancy has also generated alternative discourses and exemplary figures throughout South Asia. The media, and in particular the printed press, television and electronic media have played a major part in forging role models and labelling heroes or villains. In 2008, the media coverage of the terror attacks in Mumbai has put a great emphasis on the sacrifice of two members of the security establishment, Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan and the Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad chief Hemant Karkare, often presented by the media and by politicians as ‘deshbhakti’ (patriots, literally country- worshippers) and ‘shahid’ (martyrs).5 Karkare’s case in particular stands out, as he had been at the receiving end of the Sangh Parivar’s ire for his enquiry into cases of Hindu terrorism. With his untimely death, he paradoxically became a role model for those who had waged a defamation campaign against him. Irom Sharmila, a Meitei from Manipur, whose fast unto death and subsequent imprisonment catapulted her nationally and internationally to the status of living-martyr and symbol of indigenous resistance against an oppressive State, is another example of exemplarity as a site of contestation. 15 In the case of Pakistan, the military establishment has redefined the category of the ‘ shahid’ in the context of the country’s contribution to the ‘war on terror’: jihadi militants, when killed by the Pakistani military on Pakistani soil, are no longer projected as ‘martyrs’, a title which is presently reserved by the state to its official agents killed in the line of duty. Martyrs do not exert a monopoly over the production of exemplarity though. Even in deeply militarized societies such as Pakistan, non- violent personalities have acquired the status of ‘great men’ or role models, be they politicians like Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the 1940s (known as the ‘Frontier Gandhi’, Khan led the non-violent movement of the Khudai Khidmatgar, better known as the ‘red shirts’), or more recently social workers (Abdul Sathar Edhi), judges (Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry) or simple individuals struggling against injustice (such as Mukhtar Mai, a young and uneducated Punjabi woman who has been fighting sexual violence against women, after being subjected to a gang rape). These non-violent role models have been no less controversial than their more aggressive counterparts in the region: Abdul Gaffar Khan spent a great deal of the 1960s and 1970s in prison or in exile for his alleged collusion with India; Edhi is detested by many politicians in Karachi; Chaudhry was denigrated even by those who claimed to defend him (Gayer 2009); Mukhtar Mai, for her part, was denied the permission to travel outside Pakistan by General Musharraf, who considered that she gave a ‘bad name’ to the country. 16 These examples highlight the existence of competing role models and ‘wars of moralities’ (Banégas & Warnier 2001) to determine what and who should be deemed exemplary. The highly competitive nature of this ‘market of saviours and exceptional beings’ (Centlivres & Losonczy 2001: 11) invites us to explore the boundaries of acceptability (what makes a character a controversial figure at a certain time, and a more suitable one at another) and the engineering of role models in the very distinct

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contexts of production and reception. In the latter, the ambivalence of heroes and role models needs to be emphasized: even the most revered exemplary figures, such as the javanmard (the ‘man of integrity’) in Iran, are objects of perplexity for their exceptionality and unpredictability. So much so that the javanmard, like many other exemplary figures, ‘sits at the interface between conformism—for he embodies the values of society—and anti-conformism—since his interpretation of these values is somehow extreme’ (Adelkhah 2006: 71). 17 The competitive and ambivalent politics of role modelling must be historicized: the ‘moral lessons’ (Enders 2002: 43) given by heroes and role models are value-laden commentaries on a specific social configuration in a given moment of time. Thus, although some case-studies discussed in this issue do not focus on material ostentation, as in the case of the Maoist fighters in Nepal, others give pride of place to a nouveau riche ethos of wealth accumulation and display which cannot be seen in isolation from the economic reforms undertaken by most countries of the region during the 1990s, and from the high rates of growth and the subsequent increase in middle class numbers experienced by these countries in the following decade. While this may not be a regional specificity (Banégas & Warnier 2001), it surely is a recent evolution that only goes back to a couple of decades. 18 Throughout this issue, the authors point out the modern nature of heroes and role models in South Asia, with a greater emphasis on role models than on heroes. Role models are indeed easier to promote, self-promote and emulate. A number of the achievers presented in this issue, like the Hindu nationalist or Muslim censors studied by Malvika Maheshwari, as well as the real estate developer Abul Fazl Farooqi, studied here by Laurent Gayer, advertise their own exemplarity and claims to moral superiority through self-produced narratives. Abul Fazl Farooqi’s autobiography, Nasheb-o-Faraz, is a modern text in disguise, which borrows from traditional Persianate rhetoric yet seeks to reconcile private moral virtue with material success in an unconventional way. It is worth noting that the more exemplarity is auto-produced, the less universal legitimacy it can claim to, as the new role models and achievers target a very particular audience, as is the case of Dr. Farhat Hashmi, studied here by Faiza Mushtaq. In doing so, they also invite criticism and border onto self-justification. 19 As Fariba Adelkhah suggests in her study of social and political change in post- revolutionary Iran, ‘being modern, in Iran or in any other society, is to reinvent one’s difference’ (Adelkhah 2006: 11).6 This is exemplified, here, by the Amar Chitra Katha mythological comics studied by Nandini Chandra. Through a medium of recent importation,7 the prowess and sacrifices of past or mythical figures were ‘updated’ and ‘reified’ for contemporary audiences (Chandra 2008: 4). The mythological character of Shakuntala, for example, was deprived by ACK authors of its sexual and political ambiguity, to be projected as an ideal-wife according to the moral canons of India’s new middle classes. In a state like Uttar Pradesh, this is also exemplified by the Bahujan Samaj Party’s ‘icon-based politics’, which aims to provide Dalits with a new sense of dignity and a new fighting spirit through the promotion of heroic figures of the past, and in particular of Dalit ‘heroines’ (virangana) (Narayan 2006). In Nepal, as shown by Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, Maoist insurgents have both subverted and drawn inspiration from classical Hindu conceptions of warfare, in order to promote their own narratives of war and martyrdom (see her contribution to this issue and Lecomte-Tilouine 2009). Along with such localized, subaltern and dissident heroes and role models, even the

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most enduring and nationalized exemplary figures of South Asia, be they religious or secular, are in a state of flux, enmeshed in a web of significations that change across time, space, class, or caste.

Values to emulate: South Asian role models between dissent and conservatism

20 This issue of SAMAJ reveals how contemporary politics of exemplarity in South Asia, in addition to having new sites of production, almost systematically carries a material, if not materialistic dimension. The role models examined in the various articles, whether they are religious, politically dissident or cultural figures, are often shown as entrepreneurs whose exemplarity is attested by their financial success. The heralding of rich Anglo-Saxon NRIs on screen as role models paving the way for indigenous brand consumption since the 1990s, studied here by Ingrid Therwath, is a case in point. However, as Laurent Gayer shows in his study of Abul Fazl Farooqi’s autobiography, this sanctification of economic achievements is not systematically associated with the conspicuous forms of consumption and leisurely lifestyles associated with materialism. On the contrary, Farooqi’s self-production of exemplarity suggests that worldly asceticism constitutes a possible alternative to ostentatious nouveau riche lifestyles for South Asian aspirants to the status of model achievers.

21 The praise of material success and/or materialism sung by contemporary role models in South Asia is often concomitant with social conservatism, with a particular emphasis on gender relations as emphasized by Nandini Chandra’s, Ingrid Therwath’s, Malvika Maheshwari’s and Faiza Mushtaq’s contributions. The very nature of heroes and role models lies in their use as tools for the reinforcement of a certain social order, sometimes after a crisis or through momentary transgression. In contemporary South Asia however, they seem to serve two opposite agendas. On the one hand, a variety of role models, whether self-proclaimed or not, posit themselves or are posited as champions of both capitalist modernity and cultural neo-traditionalism. On the other hand, a perhaps less visible but equally potent category of role models advocate dissent and contestation. Through the imagery and rhetoric of martyrdom, they enable marginalized, oppressed and subaltern figures to enter the mainstream media and debate. While the former set of role models try to reconcile moral uplifting with material success, the latter is inscribed in a more classical and heroic tradition of honour gained on the battlefield, and/or through selflessness and sacrifice. In between these two poles of exemplarity—one aiming at the reproduction of supposedly traditional moralities and the other at their subversion— lies a third, more hybrid configuration, exemplified here by Faiza Mushtaq’s contribution. If Farhat Hashmi, the founder and leader of the Pakistani Islamic women’s movement of Al-Huda, is such a ‘controversial role model’, it is because she challenges simultaneously traditional religious authorities and liberal-secular elites with her emphasis on female assertion through Islamic education. Between the neo-traditionalist and revolutionary role models covered in this issue, Farhat Hashmi occupies an intermediary position—that of a moralist reformist, challenging gender conventions and political configurations from within the Islamic tradition. 22 Despite their differences of production and agenda, these three types of role models inform us on the meaning of achievement and success in contemporary South Asia and

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illustrate the pangs of societies coming to terms with modernity and mass consumption as well as with statehood and redistribution. 23 Heroes, martyrs, saints and role models certainly provide political and moral entrepreneurs with powerful tools of mobilization and identification. Through an ‘ancestry effect’ (Albert 2001: 20), they inscribe a given community into a shared history and moral landscape, thus reinforcing its sense of pride and solidarity. In other words, the fabrication of exemplarity paves the way for political ‘manipulations’ (Centlivres & Losonczy 2001: 11). Yet, functionalist perspectives on the politics of exemplarity fall a bit short. All figures of exemplarity may well be social or political artefacts. But this is not to say that they are exclusively produced by manipulative elites with vested interests. Exemplarity resonates differently within different groups and it is coproduced by the audience (or the adepts) of exemplary figures, who always have their word to say about the exceptionality of their models. Moreover, exemplarity is not a given, fixed attribute: it is continuously renegotiated between adepts, political or moral entrepreneurs, and society at large. As a consequence, the nature of a specific character’s exemplarity may undergo profound transformations across time and social space. Finally, the outcome of politics of exemplarity is unpredictable, once it is endorsed socially and incorporated into specific regimes of ‘subjectivation’. Following Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, we understand this notion as the historically situated process through which groups and individuals strive to construct themselves as moral subjects in front of power (Foucault 1976, 1984, Butler 1997). What matters, here, is not so much the result of this process (subjectivity, identity...) but rather the process itself (Bayart 2004). What this literature suggests is that subjection, rather than agency, is the condition for the emergence of the political subject. However, as several empirically grounded studies recently demonstrated (e.g. Mahmood 2005), subjection is only the beginning and certainly not the end of the story. Thus, in the case of Egyptian women involved into the Islamic revival movement, Saba Mahmood shows that these women’s subordination to Islamic values apparently detrimental to their ‘agency’ has actually reinforced their capacity for action (Mahmood 2005). The same trends can be observed in South Asia, as several contributions to this issue demonstrate. The Nepalese Maoist fighters studied here by Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, the Indian iconoclasts dealt with by Malvika Maheswari, the Pakistani adepts of Farhat Hashmi covered by Faiza Mushtaq or the real-estate entrepreneur whose autobiography constitutes the focus of Laurent Gayer’s paper have all found empowerment through subjection, be it to a party, an ideology, a charismatic leader or God himself. In South Asia as elsewhere, the political relevance of exemplarity lies in its effect of ‘empowering subjection’ (Audrain 2004). And this holds true for both the adepts of men and for the increasing number of adepts of women of exceptional merit.

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Centlivres, Pierre; Losonczy, Anne-Marie (2001) ‘Introduction’, in Pierre Centlivres (ed.), Saints, sainteté et martyre, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, pp. 7-13.

Chandra, Nandini (2008) The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967-2007, Delhi: Rupa.

Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Devji, Faisal (2005) Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, London: Hurst.

Enders, Armelle (2001) ‘Le héros national: problème d’histoire contemporaine’, in Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen (ed.), Saints, sainteté et martyre, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 37-46.

Foucault, Michel (1976) Histoire de la sexualité, t.1, La volonté de savoir, Paris: Gallimard.

Foucault, Michel (1984) Histoire de la sexualité, t.3, Le souci de soi, Paris: Gallimard.

Franklin, Benjamin (2007) Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Teddington: Echo Library, [1791].

Gayer, Laurent (2009) ‘L’affaire Chaudhry: le mouvement des robes noires pakistanaises’, Savoir / Agir, 6, pp. 143-49.

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Habermas, Jürgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: Polity, [1962].

Jeffrey, Craig (2010) Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kantorowicz, Ernst (1951) ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’, American Historical Review, 56, pp. 472-92.

Khosrokhavar, Farhad (2003) Les nouveaux martyrs d’Allah, Paris: Flammarion [2002].

Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie (2009) ‘Regicide and Revolutionary Warfare in Nepal: The Metamorphosis of a Hindu Warrior Kingdom’, in Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival, and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 220-36.

Mahmood, Sabha (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Merton, R. K. (1957) ‘The Role Set: Problems in Sociological Theory’, British Journal of Sociology, 8, pp. 106-20.

Mines, Mattison (1994) Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Monier-Williams, Monier (2008) A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European languages, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass [1899].

Narayanan, Badri (2006) Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics, Delhi: Sage.

Ozouf, Mona (1984) ‘Le Panthéon, l’Ecole Normale des morts’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Lieux de mémoire, t. 1, La République, Paris: Gallimard.

Pettigrew, Joyce (1997) Martyrdom and Political Resistance: Essays from Asia and Europe, Amsterdam: VU University Press.

Sheridan, Mary (1968) ‘The Emulation of Heroes’, The China Quaterly, 33, pp. 47-72.

Tourret, Marc (2007) ‘Le héros antique et la cité’, in Odile Faliu & Marc Tourret (eds.), Héros d’Achille à Zidane, Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, pp. 23-8.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre (1989) L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne, Paris: Gallimard.

Vigh, Henrik (2006) Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau, Oxford/New York: Berghahn.

Zins, Max (2003) ‘Morts pour la patrie! La symbolique de la guerre de Kargil de l’été 1999 et la politique des funérailles du gouvernement nationaliste hindou’, in Pierre Hassner & Roland Marchal (eds.), Guerres et sociétés: Etat et violence après la guerre froide, Paris: Karthala.

NOTES

1. As suggested by a supporter on his website: http://movienepal.com/?page_id=1011 2. Comment posted by ‘Renu’ on 24th September 2007 on the website whoisdeep.com: http:// www.whoisdeep.com/2007/09/23/indian-idol-3-winner-kaun-hoga-wo/ 3. Islamic martyrs singularize themselves from their Christian counterparts in their relation to violence: the former kill and die in battle whereas the latter usually stick to non-violent means of

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protest and let themselves be put to death by their adversary; in practice, though, the Church sanctified death in combat until the First World War (Kantorowicz 1951). 4. Thus, in Classical Greece, heroes longed for a ‘good death’ to join the exclusive group of the aristoï, the ‘greatest’, eternally remembered and honored (Vernant 1989). 5. See for instance: Raja Menon, ‘Pilgrimage, for a brave son’, Indian Express, 28 November 2008, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pilgrimage-for-a-brave-son/398134/ 6. Adelkhah here draws inspiration from cultural anthropologist James Clifford and his notion of the ‘reinvention of difference’ (Clifford 1988). 7. In the Indian subcontinent, the development of comics on an industrial scale dates back to the late 1960s and the development of ACK, whose artists primarily drew their inspiration from Marvel comics but also from ‘local practices drawn from artisanal traditions’, which gave the characters depicted in these stories a ‘primordial look’ (Chandra 2008: 5).

INDEX

Keywords: achievers, conservatism, exemplarity, heroes, martyrs, materialism, morality, role models, subjectivation

AUTHORS

LAURENT GAYER

Research fellow, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Centre universitaire de recherche sur l’action publique et le politique, Amiens), currently posted at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi

INGRID THERWATH

Research fellow, head of the International Relations department at the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi

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Martyrs and Living Martyrs of the People’s War in Nepal

Marie Lecomte-Tilouine

Introduction

1 In Nepal, the armed wing of the Maoist movement (PLA) grew up as a collective of martyrs-to-be, whose examples were disseminated as soon as they fell, and enticed new volunteers. Its dynamic relied on self-sacrifice rather than heroic prowess, and despite its Marxist ideology, the PLA recalls the Revolutionary Guard in Iran1 and shares similarities with suicide bombers. In both cases, recruited volunteers whose overt motives are not based on self-interest become living martyrs at the time of their engagement and from then on record their testimonies before facing death.2 During the People’s war (1996-2006), these testimonies not only took the form of letters addressed to relatives, but emerged as a literary genre, providing invaluable material with which to investigate the conception of martyrdom and the question of its exemplarity. I will focus on the role it played for Nepalese Maoists and for their party during the People’s war and in the period that followed the peace agreement of November 2006, but will leave aside the most recent developments in Nepalese political life, notably the emergence of a form of competition between the different political forces, vying to capitalize on the benefits of martyrdom.

2 More than the result of diffuse forces such as mimesis,3 or martyropathy (Khosrokhavar 1998), the martyr boom in Nepal rose within an organized movement, which initially had only immaterial means at its disposal. Martyrdom acquired a strong power of attraction in that it fundamentally asserts that anyone, whether illiterate, poor or of the lowest status, is of ‘priceless’ value, and can contribute to the magnificent project of changing the order of things by putting his or her life at stake.

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History of the concept of martyrdom in Nepal

3 To characterize the Maobadi martyrdom is an endeavour made complex by the variety of influences which contributed to its formation. Among them, is the nebulous heritage that the notion conveyed when it came to Nepal, probably in the 1940s, as the Arabic loanword shahid. Shahid, like the Greek root martur, means witness. In Arabic, the shahid is a witness of his faith or of his love. But in South Asia, the latter dimension took on secondary importance,4 and the shahid’s faith became a secularized sign of nationalist and political commitment, especially in the 1930s, during the struggle for independence in India, whereas it combines nationalist, political and religious dimensions in contexts influenced by Islam, such as Punjab or Kashmir.5 In Nepal itself, martyrdom was informed by the political events within which it emerged: first the anti-Rana movement in the 1940s,6 then the anti-Panchayat actions from the 1960s onwards, and in particular the People’s Movement of 1990 (or Jana Andolan I). It thus developed in relation to struggles against central government and to demands for democracy without including any major religious or nationalistic dimension. Revolutionary China has also influenced the Nepalese (and Indian) Communists since the 1940s,7 as shown by the images they use, such as the martyr’s death as weightier than a mountain.8 Yet, the Maobadis’ Nepalization of Mao’s formula, in which Mount Tei is replaced by Mount Everest, is symptomatic of their specific construction of martyrdom, which gained momentum within an international context marked by Islamist armed movements and terrorism. In fact, in Communist China, the figure of the lieshi (martyrs) only emerged in 1949 and was therefore not operative during the war, but instead came as a response to war casualties (Sheridan 1968, Diamant 2001, Hung 2008). By contrast, with the launching of the People’s war in Nepal, martyrdom immediately became a generalized phenomenon, regrouping a great variety of people and experiences in a single framework, which they contributed to inform in turn. These experiences were publicized by two weeklies (Janadesh and Janaawaj) in poems, songs, personal accounts and extracts of diaries, many of which were written by martyrs or addressed to martyrs, in news on martyrdom and numerous tributes to martyrs written by close relatives. The Maobadis’ immediate construction and use of martyrdom, simultaneous to their armed action, fits in well with their notion of ‘fusion’, which initially designated the fusion of urban insurrection and protracted war, but also applied to their capacity to lead war and cultural revolution at the same time, whereas these formed two distinct phases in China.

4 Despite its previous existence, it was thus not before the launching of the People’s War that the concept of martyrdom acquired its full force.9 The ‘boom’ in martyrdom which invaded Nepal’s political and cultural scene is no better underscored than by a person using the pseudonym ‘Living Martyr’ who, commenting on new martyrs nominated by the government with the following ‘Appeal to open martyrdom Ministry’, said ‘Wah! Martyrs martyrs everywhere. Char jaat chattish sahid ko sajha phulbari hami! Kati ramro! Good job cabinet/government! … We should be proud, India does not have half as many martyrs.’10 5 Together with a surge in the number of martyrs, the People’s War brought about a wave of Living martyrs, who survived the war and stand at the crossroads between the living and the dead, witnesses and historians. I will argue that they combine all the

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ingredients to secure immortality, while fallen immortals have already lost their individualities to play a collective and anonymous role.

Self-sacrifice versus sacrifice

6 In Nepal, martyrdom perverted the logic of legitimate violence, the conception of war and death. Whereas the alternative for the Hindu warrior was to offer sacrifices or be offered in sacrifice, the Maoist ideology put a term to reciprocity, broke the warlike symmetry, which stemmed from shared values, the same caste status of warriors, and common rules of combat. This symmetry was displayed in archetypal epic scenes of confrontation between two Kshatriya heroes, one as strong as the other, clashing in a duel subsuming the battle, sometimes to kill each other at the end in order to complete the pattern of equality. This model, though more ideal than actually enacted as such, had not been replaced by any other before the Maoists introduced the idea that they were not fighting their alter egos, but their exact opposites: ‘venal royal butchers’ paid to maintain autocracy and feudalism when the Maoists themselves had renounced everything for the liberation of the people and were ready to pay for it at the price of their ‘priceless’ lives. This upset the whole economy of war and death.

7 Yet, whereas the nature of war became fully asymmetrical, the Nepalese revolutionaries sought to restore a sense of symmetry in the form of combat, by acting in accordance with the principle of military confrontation. It is true that they sometimes made use of mines and other forms of sabotage, but they essentially remained attached to deadly face-to-face combat, and led frontal assaults against the most conspicuous strongholds of the enemy. In attacking the citadels of power with a real army, they chose to publicly display their power and the nobility of their methods, to place themselves on par with their enemy. 8 In this respect, the People’s War differs from most modern movements struggling against established forces. In Nepal, the rebels never resorted to political assassinations of key political figures—unlike the Naxalites in India—or to bombing the civilian population—unlike some autonomy movements of northeast India. With the Tamil Tigers they share the fact that they have developed an effective and well-organized army, fit for large-scale action, but unlike the former who are credited with being forerunners in this field the Maobadis never organized suicidal actions. They symbolically offered themselves in sacrifice, but their actual deaths were neither deliberate nor inevitable. Far from suicidal, their actions were carefully planned and tailored to their military capabilities. Death was a possible but unintended outcome. Admittedly, it was much more probable than in times of peace and was accepted in advance as an inevitable part of action. Then, death was ‘received’, voluntarily, and turned them into martyrs. This ultimate end offered fighters an opportunity to transform their demise into a deed, and, in their understanding, to provide a share of the symbolic capital (the ‘needed blood’) necessary for the final victory of the revolution. Surya Kiran’s (2003) experience as a PLA fighter illustrates this moment: My consciousness (hos) abandoned me… I tried to break the circle [of the enemies] and looked for the weak point, but there was none. I thought that if I survived, I would let my blood flow for the revolution another time, and if I died, it would flow this time. I looked at my friends who were like a piece of my heart for the last time, and I jumped at the speed of the wind. Then bullets rained down on me. They penetrated houses; the Chure Mountains echoed the sound of rifles, forest birds

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cried… Once again the bullets rained down. The first time, they touched no part of my body, but the second time I could not remain unharmed by the continuous firing. My blood started to flow. I fell. I told myself, I should say one last time: Long live the People’s War, but I refrained because I realized that in this position I was safe… I stayed silent in the bush for half an hour… and when I felt that there was nobody... I started to walk. 9 In the ultimate confrontation with death, martyrdom thus offered the rebel a means of salvation, and the bravado that accompanied it, in the form of his last cry, was the final burst signifying that death was not defeat, but a choice. This is thus not the same path chosen by disillusioned youngsters, who become shahid through suicide.11

10 PLA fighters’ engagement was different from that of Maoist political activists or ‘cultural warriors’ because of their closer relationship with death. But all party members were likely to be killed and were recognized as martyrs by the party upon their death, sometimes even when it was accidental. The term also applied to non- committed people killed by government forces, and to those who went missing. Yet, it is obvious that some martyrs were more legitimate than others, and that the PLA fighters killed during the battle constituted the ideal-type of martyr. Their very enrolment was depicted as an initial sacrifice, following which their life was suspended, and their death was merely ‘the fall of their material form’. With their death caused as it was by a ‘butcher’, the rebels remained the agents of their self-sacrifice. Initiated consciously, fully actualized when they ‘obtained martyrdom’ (shahadat prapta paunu), as something knowingly accepted, the martyrs’ death deprived the opposing party of heroism in battle and its ability to offer them up in sacrifice. Conversely, with no other way out, the rebels would ‘annihilate’ their enemies, denying them the glorious death of the warrior by not offering them in sacrifice. A noble, voluntarily chosen death and the coveted status of martyr awaited the rebels, while the enemies were simply ‘erased’ or even ‘cleansed’ in an unprecedented movement of purification. By offering themselves in sacrifice through their commitment, Maoist soldiers became living dead, martyrs-to-be. Like the Tamil Tigers who flaunted a cyanide capsule pendant, the Maobadis wore the sign of their imminent demise on their foreheads: a mourning headband (kaphan) or a red star, which, in their movement designates a martyr rather than the unity of the workers. Detached from their ‘material form’ (bhautik rup), they mortified it so that violence and persecution had no effect on them, except to strengthen their determination. By this action on the self, the People’s War perverted the sacrificial logic presiding over war, its bilateral structure. 11 The ideas, images and emotions that surrounded and defined martyrdom were expressed in an array of Maoist literature, especially poetry, which is its most exalted form (Lecomte-Tilouine 2009, chapter 8). This popular genre arose spontaneously in comrades’ diaries and was disseminated through Maoist weeklies during hostilities. In this subliminal expression of war, self-sacrifice confers a kind of abstract immortality, which benefits the movement. Transformed into stars, martyrs shed light on the world plunged into the darkness of feudal and imperialist obscurantism, facilitating the progression of their comrades.12 The starry sky formed a projection-space for revolutionary fighters, themselves wearing a red star on their foreheads, and likely to join the plethora of their immortal and celestial comrades. The martyrs also passed on their ‘dreams’ and entrusted their comrades with making them come true. Inhabited by the fire of fury, hungry for revenge and justice, their comrades’ death drove them into

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an apocalyptic world of which poetry accentuates the fantasy, mixing horrifying images with a kind of joy in a broad reversal of values. 12 This extremist view of the world developed outside the official rhetoric, though it is not possible to determine whether it was prompted by party leaders or merely encouraged. Parallel to the Prachandapath, it forms a meaningful, telling, and intelligible body of texts, born directly from the war and ‘written with the martyrs’ blood’. Sustained by frequent quotations by the Supreme Leader, a sign of its orthodoxy, popular Maoist literature primarily relies on the experience of the warrior as the ultimate form of revolutionary exemplarity. The Prachandapath played a different role: endowed with performative qualities, it was the most powerful weapon of the revolution and the substance that irrigated it. Revolutionary fighters seized upon its main concept, that of ‘fusion’, and applied it to areas far more fundamental even than that of the strategy proposed by their ideologue, wielding, as they say, the gun in one hand and the pen in the other, and thereby sweeping away the distinction between kshatra and brahman, i.e. action/politics versus ideology/spirituality. 13 Those who appropriated the Maoist revolutionary thought set it up as a vast self- sacrificial undertaking: advocating the use of violence, the party’s ideology was enriched by the perception of those who engaged in action, and who reformulated the Marxist Prachandapath in a pseudo-religious vocabulary obsessed with martyrdom, as the only way to undermine the government and put an end to oppression and exploitation. The transformation of the world by the People’s War was to take effect on the individual, the government, and ultimately society. The primary beneficiaries of its power of transformation were, quite logically, the combatants of the armed wing, and especially its weakest members, including women and Dalits.13 Despite a hierarchy deemed necessary for the ‘organization’, they found equality within its ranks, in part because of the Maoist egalitarian ideology, but also because each of them was equally likely to offer their life and become a martyr. Numerous combatants highlighted the fact that with a gun in their hands there was no longer any difference between high and low, rich and poor, men and women. They converged on this point with the Girardian idea of a violent collective which erases differences, but formulated it in a more convincing manner, emphasizing that everyone can handle modern weaponry with the same dexterity, thereby cancelling out not only social distinctions, but also physical differences.14 14 Beyond the weapons which endowed each and everyone with the same destructive power, in the PLA, everyone was identical in that they shared the same ideas, especially a same conception of death as an inevitable event that must not be feared but taken advantage of. In Maoist terms, this idea differentiated ‘those who have understood’ from others. It was scrutinized in Maoist newspapers, either in slightly clumsy and abstract texts born from ‘Scientific Thought’, or in enthusiast poetry, as the two extracts below respectively illustrate: How could we change the world without understanding the meaning of social and natural life and of death? How could we recognize the meaning of life and death without dialectics? Dialectics make those who died in the red history survive for centuries. Thousands of immortal persons sacrificed in the war of liberation, in conquering death thanks to the proletarian thought that understood death, have left an eternal will. They have left a teaching: that we have to see victory in thousands of defeats (Vidhanakumar 2003). Sacrifice / They are impatient to go to the front, / because they know that death in war is not death, / it’s the bloody seed from which golden communism will grow...

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/ Now, I start to see a priceless life in my death…/ Because I understood, yes in truth, that it will be a priceless sacrifice for Communism (Sushil 2005). 15 The acceptance of death was not only a major theme in revolutionary literature; fighters also constantly put this forward. Thus, when I asked Pavan what the reason was for their victory, he answered: ‘Being a soldier in the Royal Army is a profession like any other, it’s for money. We, we were not paid, we undertook to liberate the country and were ready to die for it, to pay with our blood’. Pavan took part in all major attacks in western Nepal from 2002 onwards, while his brother was a soldier in the Royal Army; he thus knows the two camps well. His evocation of the strength of conviction and sacrifice signed his affiliation to the Maoist party, but it is clearly a personal statement too.

16 Ready to ‘pay’ with his/her blood instead of being paid to kill, the martyr was qualified as ‘heroic’ (bir shahid). In this manner, s/he literally absorbed the hero, and the shift from one figure to another captures the transformation of war observable within the People’s War. Epic heroes, both in great pan-Hindu epics and in heroic ballads of western Nepal, are superheroes endowed with qualities beyond those of ordinary humans: they are stronger, taller, more skilful or cunning. Thus, to take the most famous of them, Bhimsen is a colossus, and his brother Arjun, the most skilled among archers. The hero fights for his camp more than for a cause, and challenges another hero, his alter ego. His victory is uncertain faced with that other superman displaying the same qualities. The heroic martyr of the People’s War, by contrast, has no particular talent. Whether a man or a woman, the heroic martyr is weak. They describe themselves as poor and poorly armed. Only the cause they have adopted and the collective they have joined confer superiority on them. The martyrs can win while losing, because their deaths contribute to the final victory of the revolution by bringing energy to their comrades, and by enticing their relatives to pursue the struggle. Their victory is thus fully dependent on others, to whom they address messages in the form of poems, songs or diaries, and particularly on their comrades, without whom the circumstances of their deaths would remain unknown, and they would merely perish anonymously. 17 The revolutionary soldiers saw the success of their struggle as a victory of the vanquished, bolstered only by their resolution to risk their lives. They were therefore taken by Abhimanyu, the tragic hero of the Mahabharata who decided to break the circle of enemies, knowing he could not come out alive. The episode is fundamental in that it is said to mark the end of the order governed by war rules and the beginning of the Dark Age in which we live. Indeed, the enemies all united against the young man instead of challenging him in a duel one after another, as was the rule. It is remarkable that the breaking of Hindu laws of war was operated by self-sacrifice and that, longing for another change, Maoist warriors adopted the same method, and saw in this episode an image of their own struggle. They do not sing the prowess of the hero or heroine, but consider that their death is a victory, in being deliberately chosen in accordance with their ideals: By the supremacy of self-sacrifice, / They were vanquished, you were victorious. / By the drop of your blood which flowed, / By your convictions, your ideals, / By the lacerations of your wounds (Shashikiran 2005). 18 The poet evokes three elements: self-sacrifice, belief, and brutal killing, which contribute to the definition of the revolutionary martyr, even if they are not all necessary. Only the fighter or the activist killed by the enemy combines these three

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dimensions and forms the most revered figure, though ordinary people killed by government forces or party members who die a natural or accidental death are also seen as martyrs. By their brutal death, the former receive a kind of bloody baptism expressing the revolutionary cause, while the latter are killed while fully committed to it.15

19 The ideal martyr, who combines all three components, is thus a superhero, since s/he escapes the rules that constrain ordinary humans by the ability to embrace death during his/her lifetime. They voluntarily immerse themselves in a kind of antechamber of the afterlife, which, in poetical works, is described as an initiatory passage. There, the self-sacrificial warrior appropriates the forces of coercion by metaphorically applying fire, blood and chains to their own bodies. Through mortification, they subtract themselves from the ultimate sovereign power, the power of death, and thereby deprive the governing forces of their substance: they turn them into counter- productive power, which not only has no more control over their selves, but also contributes to strengthening that against which they are fighting. 20 Revolutionary commitment thus represents a deliberate withdrawal from the ordinary world, which is reminiscent of renouncing. Like a renouncer, PLA fighters rid themselves (tyag garna) of any comfort, of their selfishness, their families, and even their own ‘material forms’. Like one who renounces, they are inhabited by fire, the fire of rage that consumes them from within and purifies them. Revolutionary commitment is also depicted as an offering on the fire altar of the revolution (krantiko vedima hominu), and as a blood sacrifice (bali dan), in such a way that it mixes all the available sacrificial registers. Whether burnt within, offered to fire, or bled white, warriors offer themselves in sacrifice while they are still alive, and well before any armed action. This reverses their values: sorrow becomes happiness and death the greatest achievement, beautiful and desirable in the form of the martyrdom that brings glory and eternity.16 On the other hand, fighters sometimes expressed anguish on their way to the battlefield, where the embodiment of their fate accompanied them in the form of the ‘volunteers’ ready to carry off the victims, the medical station prepared to accommodate them, and even the mass grave dug before the outset of the attack. But rather than their own death, they feared that of their comrades and the uncertainty about who was going to die. There, the alter ego’s martyrdom leads to a state in which thinking about one’s own death becomes possible, as Balcan, Brigade commander in the PLA, expressed: ‘I’ve lost many friends: two died on my lap while I was looking at them. I tried to save them; I heard their blood running. I still see them … When comrades offered themselves in sacrifice, we told ourselves: ‘if they can die, why can’t we? It gave us energy, mental strength’.17 21 Martyrdom clearly upsets Jankélévitch’s (1966) definition of death as something unthinkable in the first person, but admissible in the second. PLA soldiers accepted their own death, but could not cope with that of their alter egos, and simply imagining it induced a sorrow that mixed in with their joy, in such a manner that they were constantly in a paradoxical state, where they needed to reconcile the extremes. Their lives were ruled by ‘dialectics’, which came to express every aspect of the People’s War, from its ideology to each of its participant’s feelings.18 22 The kind of ‘Thought’ provided Maoist fighters the necessary strength to cope with their weaknesses and to transform their sadness into fury to win the battle. It even allowed them to turn the conditions of action for their benefit: generally described as

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initially unfair to them, either because it rained, snowed, because the night was dark or too bright, the revolutionaries’ task was to ‘turn the obstacle into an asset’ (anukul pratikulma badalne) as the saying goes. The Thought, their all-powerful weapon, is ideal and eternal. As a kind of Atman, the ultimate reality which also constitutes the self for the Hindus, it is both integrated and remains exterior: nothing can affect it. It resides in the immaterial and immortal part of each revolutionary, which survives death. The enemies they fight are also as abstract as their Thought: it is feudalism, imperialism, and injustice. These are sometimes confused with the agents maintaining them, leading the police and army to be portrayed as evil beings, especially in poetry. But in battle accounts, they are usually treated as people ‘who have not understood’, and to whom commanders offer the possibility of surrendering shortly after the start of hostilities, and then subject them to training classes in order to transform their ideas. 23 Martyrs also survive through their spilled blood, which, as the blood of the demon Raktabija, is a life-giving blood: it forms blood seeds (raktabij) giving birth to a hundred New Warriors.19 Blood, once impure, acquired a sacred value. It irrigates the motherland and causes the revolution to blossom; it strengthens the soil and forms bloody foundations (ragatko Jag) for revolutionary buildings. It is also with martyrs’ blood that history is written, and even poetry, hence the special status that the party conferred on their texts, which formed real messages between the immaterial immortals and those whose material form had not yet fallen. 24 The birth of the soldier from the martyred body was not only an image, it was also ritualized. The new recruit literally incorporated the martyr’s bodily substance by marking his/her forehead with his/her blood, or red powder. The generative power of the martyr’s sacrifice has numerous resonances in the Hindu world. As the martyr is not quite dead, and immediately generates a hundred other selves, there is no ritual to transform him/her into an ancestor. Their death does not pollute their families, an old Hindu rule that already applied to death in war.20 Yet, war was traditionally initiated by the symbolic killing of the enemy and the celebration of victory, whereas the Maoists commemorated their martyrs before fighting and displayed the signs of their possible death. Somehow, they thus celebrated their forthcoming defeat, but insofar as it would finally bring victory. In this manner, they changed the rules of the game by playing loser-takes-all. Consistent with this rule, they acknowledged only martyrs as war heroes, while no ceremony, medal or distinction rewarded the surviving fighters. They remained a collective made up of brigades, battalions, and abstract noms de guerre until martyrdom personified them individually. They would then recover their true names, that of their parents, of their villages and the link between their previous life and their ‘life in the party’. Only then would their courage, art and skill be lauded. 25 Fame, which forms an essential aspect of the martyr’s immortality, also finds resonances in local epics. Like the hero of western Nepal’s ballads, whose name ‘crosses the four ages’, the names of those who adopted the revolutionary cause and died for it were said to be ‘carved’ or ‘inscribed in golden letters’ in the pages of History. The meaning of death thus became secondary to commitment, which gave access to immortality, whereas ordinary Hindu dead are meant to disappear.21 The martyr’s immortality was thus frequently presented as a ‘victory over death’. 26 In the heat of war, the party ensured the martyrs’ publicity by establishing their name rolls and their annual commemorations on the day the first of them fell, and by organizing numerous ceremonies, tributes, associations of martyrs’ families, minutes of

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silence during their meetings and even immediately prior to attacks. In a less formal manner, on their way to the battle, PLA fighters often learned the news of some of their comrades’ martyrdom, and some military units or attacks bore the names of martyrs. 27 Undoubtedly, the party instrumentalized martyrdom, but it is also obvious that the fighters themselves saw it as a prestigious transformation and took steps for their lasting memory, ensuring that elements were left to sustain their future immortality after they had gone. In addition to the large amount of writings they produced, often just before an attack, they frequently had their picture taken, as I noted flipping through the album of a ‘cultural warrior’ in Rolpa, which contained a large number of photographs of people whom he introduced to me as martyrs. He and his comrades had taken the habit of photographing each other prior to any action, in case they did not come back, in order to ‘make their name’ (nau banaune). Comrades also ensured each other’s posterity by mutually writing tributes.

Saral Sahayatri, writer and commander

28 Saral is brigade commander in the 3rd division of the People’s Liberation Army. Second son of a family of nine children, he entered into politics at the age of 10 and joined the PLA at the age of 18, in 1999. He took part in many operations, always carrying with him a notebook in which he wrote poems, tributes and stories whenever he could. When he was sent to the front, he confided his precious notebook to some comrades for them to keep it in a safe place, ensuring the preservation of his work if he himself were to disappear.

29 This personal information is supplied in the preface of his Stories of the Revolution (Krantika kathaharu) before Saral himself addresses the reader: I thought it would be instructive to explain how I wrote these stories. One day, Comrade Kavita [Poetry], our section commander, asked me, ‘Sushil (at that time my name was Sushil), if I became a martyr, what would you write about me?’ I hesitated a moment and answered: ‘And you, if I became a martyr, what would you write?’ She gave a small laugh and her answer has remained etched in my memory: ‘My name is Poetry, so I would write a beautiful poem about you’. And I told her then: ‘I would also write a nice story in memory of you’. I could not become the source of inspiration to Kavita for a beautiful poem, but she became a martyr on the Rumjatar front and I immediately composed a text in her memory. I had only been wounded, and I wrote part of this text while my friends were carrying me on a stretcher through the mountains. Before that, I had already written a few lines, but no stories (Sahayatri 2008). 30 The scene is instructive. It reveals the desire for immortality through a written tribute shared by both fighters. It also shows that if death in battle turns revolutionary warriors into martyrs, only their friends can compose the text that narrates their death and provides the posthumous glory to which all aspire. This necessity makes them not only warriors but also potential writers, who may one day have to fulfil the duty to keep alive the memory of those who offer their bodies to ‘carve their names in history’. It was in doing his duty as quickly and heroically as possible that Saral became an author, writing his first story on a stretcher for his martyred comrade. In this case, the request and the promise of assistance in the quest for immortality are reciprocal and openly expressed, highlighting a widespread phenomenon in the Nepalese People’s War. In this context, it was not a question of one or two martyrs, whose memory would

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be preserved by national and international media, but of thousands of people joining in the action. Only the direct witnesses, i.e. the fighters themselves, could turn into History the facts and figures of this collective quest for immortality through martyrdom.

31 Saral says that he wrote many texts during the war, most of which have been lost, burnt by the enemy or abandoned to rot in some place where he could not return. This loss is painful to him and makes him think of the many other texts that have been lost in the war. He sees this as a necessary sacrifice, similar to that of human lives: ‘Today, it seems to me that as the sacrifice of hundreds and thousands of soldiers is necessary for the revolution to advance a step, hundreds of creations must be sacrificed for the creation of a single soldier to survive’ (Sahayatri 2008). His collection is one of those surviving creations, whose value resides in all those it testifies to. 32 Like the surviving creations, the surviving soldiers or ‘living martyrs’ played a central role. The term ‘living martyrs’ originally applied to Brahman political opponents sentenced to death by the government but not executed because of their caste status (unlike their friends) (Fisher 1999). Within the People’s War it was extended to unaccounted combatants declared martyrs but then reappeared and was applied, metaphorically, to all combatants of the PLA whose lives were sacrificed for the revolutionary cause. 33 The living martyrs of the first category have exercised a real power of fascination, for they literally embodied the immortality ascribed to martyrs, the reality of their presence, normally consisting of images that haunt their comrades forever. We are also tempted to see in their status an effect of the performative nature of the ceremony to declare them martyrs, the fact that ritual reality prevails over physical reality, because it transforms it. In Nepal, a person whose funerary rituals have been carried out by his family is traditionally considered dead to the latter and cannot come back or, at least, has to undergo a ceremony of rebirth. In the same way, a declared martyr who reappears is dream-like, and his testimony is endowed with a certain transcendence. 34 Since their establishment in UN monitored camps at the end of 2006, numerous PLA soldiers have written their life stories, focusing on their participation in the People’s War. Several among them had never written anything before that, like Pavan whom I talked to in March 2009 while he was on leave in northern Gulmi and busy writing his life story. The construction of Nepalese history by its own heroes is thus ongoing and may paint a different picture in the years to come. But some of the war accounts already published by PLA soldiers will probably remain in the annals, such as Comrade Ajayashakti’s Andhisang khelda (i.e. Playing with the torment) (Ajayashakti 2009), arguably one of the most captivating. This autobiography of a Living martyr as Sarul Pun Magar (alias Invincible Power) is presented on the cover, offers particularly rich anthropological material in that the author enrolled early in the Maoist armed wing, was born into a poor family that lived in a remote region and belonged to the barely literate Magar ethnic group.

The story of Sarul, a living martyr

35 Sarul has never been to school and he views his own literary work as one of the achievements of the revolution: ‘The Nepalese revolution brought many things. It made those who didn’t write write. It made those who didn’t read read.... It forced me to

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write’.22 Sarul was born around 1978-79, and his village of Maikot in Rukum district was then ruled by the hereditary chief of Hukam: ‘Dev Gharti ruled over this region, nobody broke a twig without his permission. People could not do their own work before finishing all the work in his house’. His son Uddhaman succeeded Dev, and led a long crusade about the boundaries between the villages of Hukam and Maikot, creating two factions: the power holder and his supporters in Hukam, their opponents in Maikot, all members of the same Magar group, like Sarul. Things turned sour in 1987 when Uddhaman entered Maikot to head a procession of about twenty policemen, prompting a general fight. Armed with a large stick, he broke jars of alcohol and seized chickens (without the author mentioning the reason for his anger). He then became the incarnation of evil in Maikot: ‘For us children, Uddhaman was a demon, bhut... and we played at being Uddhaman and others, the villagers’.

36 It is thus around a negative exemplary figure that a climate of revolt initially emerged in this village, which later became a bastion of the revolution. Uddhaman is a concentrated mixture of authority, abuse and violence, and is backed by the government in his ability to mobilize the police for personal reasons. At least this was young Sarul’s perception. With the advent of multiparty politics in 1990, the local conflict naturally took on a political hue, and when the villagers learned the news of the abolition of the Panchayat system in April 1990, they understood it as a victory over Uddhaman: ‘My uncle came and told us that supporters of the partyless regime had lost and that the multiparty had won, and that we should no longer be afraid of Uddhaman’. The men of the Panchayat then rallied to the Congress party and won the 1991 election: ‘In our village, they said that Uddhaman’s party won, that we lost’. 37 The Congress now subsumed evil and Uddhaman’s opponents joined the party opposing their enemy’s party: the Maoists. A conflict then took hold in the village, which Sarul, like many other Maoists in the base region, calls the ‘class struggle’. Uddhaman is then said to kill cows to accuse his Maoist opponents of cow-slaughter and to try to have them imprisoned on those grounds. Up to this point in the story, only Uddhaman is active. The first ‘violence in return’ occurred in October 1994 when thirty villagers seized Uddhaman’s son and beat him up. A week later, a police operation was launched from the District Headquarters, but this time, three to four hundred villagers awaited the police and threw stones and logs at them. 38 By contrast with the terrorizing police raids led by the Congress, the Maoists started operations ‘at the service of the people’: in February 1995 a group came to Maikot to repair roads, shelters and fountains, and Sarul joined them. Another group came to dance and sing in October 1995 during the Sija Operation, and Sarul joined them again. He started to dream of becoming a gurilla (guerrilla), which in his village implied a superman with magical powers: ‘A gurilla kills hundreds of people. He can even fly from one mountain to another. He can fight by hiding in a tiny crack or under a leaf... I was amazed... It made me sprout wings: if I too could follow the gurilla training, I would hit this bastard Uddhaman and the police’. Sarul learned that he would first have to work 10 or 12 years for the party to gain its trust before starting his training, yet in the winter of 1995, his decision was made, he would be a gurilla. 39 Sarul’s depiction of the situation in Maikot during the years preceding the People’s war is consistent with several other accounts. In the districts of Rolpa and Rukum, which became the Base Region, village conflicts took on a national dimension when they were transcribed in partisan terms and the police became involved in them. In the context of

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Maikot, Uddhaman is a real metonym of power, which probably helped to forge the idea that it was possible to fight the government with a small organization, by punishing and driving away its representatives. 40 From mid-December 1995, Maikot villagers prepared the People’s War by gathering their guns, 200 in total, and grinding pounds of powder. Their primary purpose was to ‘attack Uddhaman and the police’, as his maternal uncle told Sarul. But the conflict was probably no longer a mere wrangling about cows and boundaries, since among the village ‘leaders’ mentioned by Sarul two were accused of Ganesh Shah’s murder, a member of the Congress and of the Rukum District Development Committee. Two days before the official launching of the People’s War, Sarul’s uncle returned to Maikot to establish a ‘protection organization’, which included 10 to 57 people per ward, placed under the command of a chief, and Sarul became a member. They received instruction to stand guard armed with large sticks. On February 13, 1996, Maikot celebrated the official launching of the People’s War, with cries of ‘Long live the People’s War! Down with the reactionary regime! Immortality to the martyrs!’ From then on: ‘It was the beginning of a new life: the days when we slept under warm blankets, and ate until our bellies were full were over, the days had arrived when we slept, starving, in caves, rock shelters and under trees’. 41 The villagers greeted the news of the first killing by guerrillas of police officers with dances of joy and they felt avenged. Sarul learned that the heroes of this operation were hidden in a nearby cave and his ‘spirit was elated at the prospect of finally seeing the gurillas’. But he who expected to find supermen was very surprised to discover that he knew most of them. His desire to join them increased, even if he was yet again told: ‘to be a gurilla you shouldn’t be afraid to die, you must be brave and be able to do anything’. In the end, Sarul did not follow the training he dreamed of, but was gradually integrated. His first armed action consisted in infiltrating ‘white areas’ and keeping guard outside houses armed with a rifle, while his comrades spread propaganda inside. When the first comrades fell as martyrs, the link uniting them tightened: ‘We parted by shaking hands and vowing to each other to fight until the final victory, even if one was to die on the battlefield’. Sarul was sent to the west to conduct operations against ‘feudals’. Then, the Special Task Force was created in 1997 to fight against the elections boycotted by the Party. It was still very limited in size: three platoons in all, and the Rukum platoon that Sarul was part of, included only 21 people. In September 1999, his unit was dispatched to attack the police station in Mahat, full of enthusiasm after listening to their commander’s speech and ‘the heart warmed at the idea of reducing the enemy to ashes. People and activists wished us success for the operation, waving red handkerchiefs. As for our comrades, they said: ‘This time tomorrow either we will be victorious or we will be martyrs’.’ (Ajayashakti 2009: 19). Their success was greater than expected: they captured a high-ranking police officer, and gained much confidence. 42 A few months later, in February 2000, Sarul had his first direct experience with martyrdom. En route to attack the police station in Gharti gaun, his section commander Sangkalpa was joking about the stretcher they were carrying, saying that the luckiest among them would sleep on it, and this made the group laugh. The action was successful: ‘encouraged by the villagers, who danced, sung and marched with torches’, the rebels killed 17 policemen and wounded 18, seized about 50 weapons and a lot of ammunition. But Sangkalpa was seriously wounded and lay on the very stretcher he

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had joked about. Sarul was very impressed; he mused: ‘Who will be a martyr? Who will be wounded? These things are hidden in the entrails of the battlefield’. He and his comrades buried Sangkalpa in the sand, ‘mourning his death while laughing at the victory’ (Ajayashakti 2009: 21). 43 In Sarul’s understanding, this commando raid was ‘the beginning of the police’s defeat’, with the latter withdrawing from most villages to join the district headquarters. ‘Once the police left the villages, we began to establish people’s governments’ (Ajayashakti 2009: 22). Only five police outposts still stood in Rolpa and four in Rukum, which their neighbours encouraged the rebels to attack. But the party had other ambitions and decided to target a district headquarters. The choice fell on Dunai, the chief town of Dolpa district, and the preparations for its attack were held in Maikot, where the entire population was instructed to supply the PLA. Biding their time, the guerrillas were asked to participate in farm work to help the villagers: The people were surprised to see us work with our weapons on us. They asked us: ‘Why don’t you put them down for a moment, aren’t we like your family?’ And we answered: ‘We left our families, our property and have renounced everything for society. These are the weapons that will transform society, and they are as dear to us as our relatives’ (Ajayashakti 2009: 28). 44 It is clear from this anecdote, as well as from Sarul’s altercations with his father about his commitment, that the comrades’ solidarity had become so strong by then that it separated them from their original communities.

45 The Dunai attack finally took place, but Sarul devotes only a few lines to its depiction, choosing to focus on his retreat, or another account of martyrdom. ‘Brother, leave me here and run away. It’s a thousand times better that you survive rather than die for me’, says the wounded Sakunta to Sarul, who carried him on his back while the enemy surrounded them. But Sarul was not willing to obey and obtained the assistance of another comrade. They relayed each other to carry Sakunta while the other covered them, all night long, showing the strength of mutual assistance among guerrillas. Sakunta was very ill, he desperately wanted to drink and his comrades who had risked their lives to save him from the battlefield were heartbroken at not being able to bring him any relief. Sakunta died and Sarul still regrets having failed to save him: he could have made him drink his urine, or attempted to stop his bleeding, he says. 46 Sarul participated in several other attacks, on Kotbamga (Kalikot) or Rukumkot. ‘Without us realizing it, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years went by’. In October 2001, he was sent to the east in order to strengthen the insurgency there, and took leave from his friends with these words: ‘If we survive, we will meet again on the battlefield, if we die, we’ll be known as martyrs’ (Ajayashakti 2009: 38). He then undertook a long journey which reminded him of the Long March, and during the difficult climb, he recalled his sacrifice for the welfare of society, his victory over death. 47 Then Sarul took part in the attack on Salleri, and once again he does not dwell on the engagement itself, but on his bitter retreat. This time, it is he and one of his friends who are shot. His companion dies on the spot but some comrades manage to carry Sarul up to the forest to prevent him from being fired at. Sarul is laid in a clearing and sees his body as a red rhododendron flower, a symbol of revolution. He hears his comrades wondering whether or not he will survive, and one of them saying, ‘He’s going to receive martyrdom, for sure’. Sarul protests and they make a stretcher out of a blanket to carry him. They reach a ridge where, exhausted and dying of hunger, they

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leave two of their number to watch over him and promise to come back the next day at 8:00 to take him. Sarul tries to cope with his terrible pain by thinking of the Chinese novel Camkila rato tara 23 in which the hero’s father suffers serious injuries without uttering a sound (Ajayashakti 2009: 42). But he ends up passing out, and when he recovers his senses, he realizes that his two companions have disappeared, leaving him two biscuits and a bottle of water. Sarul is incredulous: ‘A comrade can’t abandon another comrade like that’, and he convinces himself that they are going to come back. He spends some time hovering between hope and resignation, thinking that his ‘sacrifice is imminent’. Night falls and ‘those stars that fight the darkness encourage [him] to struggle against death’ (Ajayashakti 2009: 46). When he wakes at dawn ‘shaking like a shaman’, the hope of seeing his comrades helps him to hold on. But time passes and no one comes; the sun rises and a terrible thirst seizes him. The forest and surrounding peaks turn red, then black, Sarul slumps, and ‘his breath’ leaves him. He still has the instinct to urinate in his bottle and drink, and then falls unconscious. When he wakes up, ‘his breath restored by the urine’, he continues to sink into unconsciousness and emerges intermittently, but his hope of living grows, and with it, he is seized with anguish and starts to weep. When my comrades were martyred, my heart was broken, my mind blacked out, but I did not cry like that. I knew that the revolution cannot take place without casualties, but the fact that my friends had abandoned me made me suffer enormously… Me who said to my comrades when we were surrounded by the enemy on the battlefield, ‘Friends, break the circle, save your life, don’t sacrifice yourselves for me if not necessary’, why did they abandon me in this state in such a safe place away from the enemy? Rather than abandoning me, it would have been much gentler to kill me with a bullet. And with these thoughts in mind, for a very long time, I poured out all the tears in my body (Ajayashakti 2009: 47). 48 Sarul hears a dog barking in the distance and starts crawling in that direction. He ends up reaching an old man’s cowshed at night, where he passes out. The old man, first terrified, takes pity on him, and hides him under a large pile of hay. Meanwhile, hundreds of policemen roam the countryside, and Sarul hears some of them questioning the old man, who lies to protect his guest. Unfortunately, the police set up camp for the night in the cowshed on the very haystack in which Sarul is hidden, forcing him to fight off sleep all night long so as not to reveal his presence by snoring. Sarul stays under the hay for six days, unable to move. His wounds become infected. The old man, concerned with the smell that might reveal his presence, decides to take him somewhere else. He and his son carry him up to a monk’s dwelling in the middle of the night. There, Sarul is offered alcohol, which soothes his pain, and allows him to sleep at last. His health improves; he manages to get some medicines and extracts three bullets lodged in his body using a blade. After spending ten days at the monk’s dwelling, not knowing where to go, Sarul sets off on the road again and undertakes a painful and agonizing journey in the hope of joining his party. Betrayed by the state he is in, people fear to help him and even the parents of one of his comrades refuse to offer him shelter. He finally succeeds in contacting his party by phone and his reunion with his comrades is the source of intense emotion because Sarul was declared dead and his martyrdom ceremony had already been celebrated. Comrade Kumar, feeling ‘like in a dream’, tells him: ‘We have had 14 martyrs at Salleri, 15 with you, but you’ve come back as a living martyr’. While Kumar lists the names of their martyred comrades, Sarul sees them: ‘One after another, they came dancing before my eyes’.

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49 Sarul grew up during the first years of the Maoist movement in a village struggling against an authoritative headman whom they tried to defeat by joining the opposition party. With the launching of the People’s War and his enrolment as a gurilla, Sarul is sent to various places and for different military actions, which he mostly evokes by describing his experiences of retreating with the wounded, his assistance to them and his painful helplessness once out of danger. When he is sent to eastern Nepal his experience is diametrically different: he is now the wounded one, and though his state is not desperate, and the place he has reached is safe, his comrades abandon him. He owes his life to ordinary people (an old herder, a Buddhist monk, and a young girl), who, by their mere humanity, prove more courageous than his co-fighters, though Sarul never formulates this, nor seeks to denounce their behaviour. He is simply the victim of human weakness and finds the strength to surpass it and to fight death thanks to the resources he had acquired as a revolutionary: a model taken from a Chinese novel, and images from Maoist poetry. 50 Written partly in prison where Sarul spent several months24 soon after having met his friends, Playing with the torment is a witness account. A ‘pacified’ text like this, free of emphasis and warlike exaltation, makes use of a quite different tone from the narratives written during the heat of the action, even those signed by the same author. 25 A clear-cut style and a kind of simplicity contribute to making Sarul’s story a particularly touching narrative. Like him, numerous fighters have taken up writing, indignant that they had been misappropriated and their feelings and experiences betrayed by writers who never ‘made anything tremble but their table’.26 As I was told by Balcan, a poet and Brigade commander in the PLA,27 ‘We’re the main characters of this story and we must pass it on to future generations ourselves’. Those who took part in the People’s War consider that they actually transformed society, and caused the monarchy’s downfall. They see their struggle as unprecedented, and the subject of future history books, if not of mythology. Balcan continues: I believe that we have accomplished historical work, that’s what is important. What we have achieved, our fathers and grandfathers could not even have imagined it. The dream we had, we made it come true for future generations, and when we disappear it will be kept on paper. Me, in my life, I’ve handled the gun and the pen: both are rebellious (bidrohi), and I’m formulating [my experiences] in literature… Only others can write about those who handle the gun, or else we need to write it ourselves… Since we’re the real characters in this story: why not write it down?… Our story is true and our literature, written in a rough (rukho) style, is realistic: we don’t know how to embellish our text, how to ‘make it into a circle’ these things ‘shot by the gun’, and how to make them beautiful. 51 While numerous fighters are now busy recording their past experiences, which, in Balcan’s terms, form ‘a treasured literature’, others are bitter, could never envisage turning to writing, and long to take up arms again.

We should have gone on fighting for another ten years

52 Among those who feel left out and wish to continue the fight, the young Uma is still ‘ready to die’, though she was initially abducted and made to join the PLA at the age of 12. She shared her experience with me in March 2010: They [the Maoists] took me from school. My brother was a policeman and they said he’s resigning, but my brother didn’t want to, so they took me away… At my first

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battle, I was frightened, and then, I was no longer afraid: there was nothing else to do except kill or die… In our group of seven, only two of us survived… My friend and neighbour, Krishna Gurung,28 who went off with me, was killed… Even when it’s someone we don’t know, we suffer, so when it’s a neighbour ... Victory seemed bitter to me, but what could I do? I couldn’t follow him where he went. Whether he was buried or thrown away, I don’t know… We had to carry the wounded for four or five hours. We left behind those of our friends who wouldn’t survive: we couldn’t take them, we also had bags to carry. We looked to see who would survive. We dug a grave deep like this, in case we died, but jackals and dogs would dig them out afterwards… I wanted to do more even if I had to become a martyr, I didn’t want to leave. Later, I asked myself what’s the use of fighting. It is us who are fighting, it is us who are dying: the leaders, they don’t die… I didn’t mind dying, but I didn’t want my friends to die. 53 When I asked her ‘And you yourself, did you kill anyone?’ she replied: I don’t know. In wartime, we can even kill our friends. We played in the fire and smoke, and we didn’t know who we were killing. I don’t know who I shot, but I killed a person with a knife. It was a real bastard who stole, raped girls, that sort of a guy. We killed him seven times, that is to say he was warned seven times… For us in the People’s Liberation Army, the policy was ‘kill, cut, strike’, whereas the activists, they knew a lot. At first I didn’t know anything, then I realized that we were fighting to make the rich and poor equal, but that isn’t likely to happen!... The only time journalists have spoken about me, was to announce my death. It was in Bagsila: in fact, I was not even hurt, I had just passed out, but the army did nothing to me, convinced that I was dead. Then they published my picture in Kantipur and you can see me lying like that. And when my friends came to take my body, I was perched in a tree, watching them... One night, we slept in a cave; I was wounded and couldn’t sleep. A jackal howled and then bit my leg, maybe he wanted a taste of me, thinking I was dead... We should have gone on fighting for another ten years. 54 ‘Ten years, what for?’ I enquired. ‘To crush the activists and leaders. If I could, I would fight again’ was her answer.

55 Clearly, Uma’s violence is not only due to her position within an authoritarian organization. She endorses it and sees herself as a righter of wrong: she threw a brick at her teacher’s head because he baited her, she made the party seize her father’s property because he left her, she beheaded a ‘son of a bitch’ who mistreated women after they complained to her, and she took part in the war to change a world she did not like. Whereas her childhood father figures mistreated her, she found a family in the violent collective of the PLA, made up of ‘many friends who loved her’. She feels betrayed by the leaders who agreed to sign a peace agreement and put an end to her enchanted life as a free and empowered individual. Now her violence is directed against them. Uma is very practical: she never refers to her martyred comrades’ glory but still wonders what happened to their dead bodies. She admits that they had to leave the desperately wounded because bags were of more use to them. She rubbed shoulders with death throughout her teenage years, and was taken for dead on several occasions, but it makes her laugh, in the same way that she laughs when she explains how technically difficult it was to behead someone or when she describes how she was tortured in jail. The day I interviewed her, along with one of her comrades, they both expressed their disappointment that all that they had achieved during the war was wasted, that so many people had died for nothing. And they looked at me half- surprised, half-amused, when I asked them: ‘didn’t they become immortal stars whose names are inscribed in the pages of history?’ We then started a discussion on who had ‘made a name for themselves’, and admitted that apart from one journalist, Krishna

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Sen, whom fellow journalists have given a lot of media coverage, no other martyr has risen to fame. 56 In fact, the Maoist party was centred on its two charismatic leaders, who were active in constructing the ‘concentration of the leadership’ and its durability, in order to wage a war to overthrow the old regime. The leaders planned all the armed action but never exposed themselves. Viewed from this angle, martyrdom may be understood as a mere instrument. Indeed, the only way to fight a war without any material means is to rely on symbolic capital, appealing enough and destabilizing enough to generate a revolutionary mass movement. This capital relied on the notion of ‘pricelessness’, in both meanings of the expression, that which costs nothing and that which is highly valued, applying both to life and death, and mixing them up. As the poet quoted above says: ‘I began to see a priceless life in my death’. Yet, this apocalyptic rhetoric was not backed by the construction of a pantheon of martyrs whose hagiography could have quenched the thirst for fame. Indeed, the party chose as its symbol the first martyr who fell after the launching of the People’s War. But this 14-year-old boy did not have enough charisma or accomplishments to his credit to become anything other than a kind of ‘unknown martyr’, representative of all the other victims. 57 Like him, most martyrs of the People’s war are somewhat substance-less in the way they have been commemorated. Their first textual tributes were stereotyped, offering what could be qualified as short biographical data, revealing their real identities, and retracing their education and revolutionary careers: the age at which they enrolled (and sometimes the reason for doing so), the successive positions and grades they held within the party, the military operations in which they took part. The moving part of these tributes consists in the author’s feelings when learning the news of his or her comrade’s martyrdom, which is given a prominent place; then, they end with the affirmation of their determination to take their revenge. These texts did not expand on the lives of individual exemplary figures, but rather inculcated a feeling of anger against the government responsible for their deaths. As time has passed, collections of such tributes to martyrs have been published, but their content is no different, and the accumulation of such bio-data is no more likely to provide solace. Thus one is tempted to say that martyrdom represented a driving force in the heat of the action, by demultiplying engagements within the martyrs’ close relations, but now that time has passed, one can but retrospectively note that it was a failed quest for individual fame. 58 On the other hand, the living martyrs of the revolution, who were not honoured during the war, are presently carving their names into the pages of history by writing their witness accounts ‘in the best possible form’. They stand as a testament to the martyrs, and their words are sacrosanct, especially when they experienced near-death. The surviving warriors are the only legitimate voices,29 and are likely to remain telling examples, endowed with enough pathos and substance to inspire other political movements. This configuration is apparently not unique to Nepal,30 showing that individual immortality (in this world) is not automatically secured by self-sacrifice. Yet, the memory of these hundreds of nameless youngsters who offered their lives to build a paradise on earth will remain an example, in that they form the dramatic and moving basis from which a few figures will become historical models for the future.31

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ajayashakti (2003) ‘Dumkibas kamandodekhi Takukot redsamma’, Janadesh, 12 (10), URL: http:// www.cpnm.org (www.cpnm.org is still accessible through http://www.archive.org)

Ajayashakti (2009 [2066 VS]), Andhisang khelda, Nepal: People’s Liberation Army 5th division.

Blom, Amélie (2007) ‘Kashmiri Suicide Bombers: Martyrs of a Lost Cause’, in Amélie Blom; Laetitia Bucaille & Luis Martinez (eds.), The Enigma of Islamist Violence, London & New York: Hurst & Columbia University Press, pp. 71-88.

Caulagai, Lakshmi Prasad (2007 [2064 VS]), Janasenako jivan, Butwal: Janaavahana saptahik.

Diamant, Neil J. (2001) ‘Between Martyrdom and Mischief: The Political and Social Predicament of CCP War Widows and Veterans, 1949-66’, in D. Lary & S. MacKinnon (eds.), Scars of War. The Impact of Warfare on Modern China, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 162-88.

Fisher, James (1999) Living Martyrs, New Delhi: OUP.

Gaur, Ishwar Dayal (2008) ‘Lover-martyrs in Punjabi Literature’, in S. Singh & I. D. Gaur (eds.), Popular Literature and Pre-Modern Societies in South Asia, New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, pp. 222-38.

Gayer, Laurent (2006) ‘Le ‘jeu de l’amour’: trajectoires sacrificielles et usages stratégiques des martyrs dans le mouvement Sikh pour le Khalistan’, Cultures et conflits, 63, pp. 113-33.

Gerami, Shahin (2003) ‘Mullahs, Martyrs, and Men: Conceptualizing Masculinity in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, Men and Masculinities, 5, pp. 257-74.

Girard, René (1972) La violence et le sacré, Paris: Grasset.

Jankélévitch, Vladimir (1966) La mort, Paris: Flammarion.

Khosrokhavar, Farhad (1998) ‘Le modèle Bassidji’, Cultures et Conflits, 29-30, pp. 59-118.

Hung, Chang-tai (2008) ‘The Cult of the Red Martyr: Politics of Commemoration in China’, Journal of Contemporary History, 4, pp. 279-304.

Kiran, Surya (2003 [2060 VS]) ‘Dusmanbat mukta bhaera ranabhumima ramna paunda’, in A. Subedi (ed.), Dusmanka killaharu kabja garda, Kathmandu: Naulo bihani, pp. 51-3.

Larzillière, Pénéloppe (2003) ‘Le ‘martyr’ palestinien, nouvelle figure d’un nationalisme en échec’, in Alain Dieckhoff & Rémy Leveau (eds.), Israéliens et Palestiniens: La guerre en partage, Paris: Balland, pp. 80-109.

Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie (2008-2009) ‘What ‘really’ happened in Dullu’, EBHR, 33-34, pp.143-70.

Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie (2009) Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal. Collected Essays, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie (2010) ‘Fighting with ideas. Maoist and popular conceptions of war in Nepal’, in Laurent Gayer & Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), Armed Militia of South Asia: Fundamentalists, Maoists and Separatists, London & New York: Hurst & Columbia University Press, pp. 65-90.

Margalit, Avishai (2003) ‘The Suicide Bombers’, The New York Review of Books, 16 January.

Prabhakar (2005) ‘Vaigyanik drishtikon ra yojana nai vijayako adhar ho’, Janadesh, 14 (35), URL: http://www.cpnm.org

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Prachanda (1998) ‘Two Momentous Years of Revolutionary Transformation’, The Worker, 4, URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Prachanda (1999) ‘Third Turbulent Year of People’s War: A General Review’, The Worker, 5, URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Prachanda (2003) ‘Let’s Concentrate Total Force to Raise Preparations for the (Strategic) Offensive to a New Height Through Correct handling of Contradictions’, Maoist Information Bulletin, 6, URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Prachanda (2004) ‘A Brief Introduction to the Policies of the CPN (M)’, The Worker, 9, URL: http:// www.cpnm.org

Sahayatri, Saral (2008) Krantika kathaharu, Nepal: People’s Liberation Army.

Sapana; Sacet (2007 [2064 VS]) Raktim yuddhako yatra, Nepal: R. Thapa Magar ‘Dovhan’ and M. Moktan publishers.

Sharma, Dev (2003) ‘Dukh nai sukh ho’, Janaawaj, 1 (43), URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Sharma, Om (2005) ‘Janayoddhale yasari gare Pili kyampa kabja’, Janadesh, 14 (36), URL: http:// www.cpnm.org

Shashikiran (2005) ‘Abhimanyulai salam’, Janadesh, 14 (14), URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Sheridan, Mary (1968) ‘The Emulation of Heroes’, The China Quarterly, 33, pp. 44-72.

Shrestha, Ganga (2003) ‘Pyaro mrityu’, Janaawaj, 1 (43), URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Stern, Jessica (2003) Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, New York: Harper Collins.

Sushil (2005), ‘Balidan’, Janadesh, 14 (40), URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Thapa Chal, Sobha [‘Kirti’] (2007 [2064 VS]), Kathin yatrako yatri (Traveller of a difficult travel), Nepal: People’s Liberation Army, 3rd Division.

The Worker (1997) ‘Strategy and Tactics of Armed Struggle in Nepal’ [Document adopted by the Third Plenum of the CC of CPN (Maoist) in March 1995], 3, URL: http://www.cpnm.org

The Worker (2004) ‘Glorious Eight Years’, 9, URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Vidhanakumar (2003) ‘Gokule brihat morca ra ka. Vivekko nirnayak ladai’, Janaawaj, 1 (52), URL: http://www.cpnm.org

Whelpton, John (2005) A History of Nepal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

NOTES

1. A guard who ‘acquired more power and eventually subsumed the regular army’, see Gerami (2003: 267). 2. On suicide bombers, see Stern (2003: 51) and Margalit (2003). 3. Which lies at the origin of collective violence for Girard (1972). 4. As shown by Gaur (2008), the lover-martyrs of Punjabi literature are now marginalized. These legendary figures refuse the patriarchal normative code, and ‘de-construct the single narrative of martyrdom which historians have draped in a communitarian ambience’. Yet, the dimension is still found in the ‘love’ or ‘passion’ for martyrdom expressed in various Shi’ite contexts. On some aspects of the Sikh martyrs’ love, see Gayer (2006).

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5. However, most political movements using the martyrdom idiom, which is closely related to sacrifice, share formal analogies with religious organizations. 6. The Nepalese proto-martyrs are the Praja Parishad activists executed in 1941 on Juddha Shamsher Rana’s order (Whelpton 2005: 67). More recently, the status of First martyr was conferred to Lakhan Thapa, who was executed in 1877 by the first Rana Prime minister, Jang Bahadur Rana (Lecomte-Tilouine 2009). 7. The Nepalese and Indian Maoist cultures developed at about the same time and use a common language. As far as martyrdom is concerned, the contents of the journal People’s March, suggest a stronger focus on hierarchy among the Naxalites, with a great majority of tributes to martyrs dedicated to prominent leaders (and a number of them to Bhagat Singh…). They do not deal with the emotion created by martyrdom, but rather insist on the loss for the organization. Similarly, the journal does not include poetry or songs, contrary to the Nepalese ones. Some Indian customs, such as the shahid yatra (during which the martyr’s ashes are sometimes scattered) and martyrs’ columns, are not reported in Nepal. One main difference between the two contexts is that the Maoist party in Nepal developed as a strong organization covering the whole country, while the ‘lack of regular communication between the various zones’ is deplored by the CPI(Maoist) in India. The global nature of the Nepalese People’s war led any victim of the government forces to be hailed as Maoist martyrs, while in the Indian context, the tendency instead is to consider only dead Maoists true martyrs (People’s March, in its December 2007 issue, reports the death of Com. Rammehar ‘martyred due to an attack of malaria’ and of Com. Punna Rao, due to ‘ill health’). 8. On Mao’s eulogy ‘Serve the People’, see Hung (2008). 9. Similarly, the Kashmiri jihadist groups in the 1990s ‘had no monopoly on the term ‘martyr’ (shahid), used by the Pakistani army and non-Islamist Kashmiri organizations alike. But they were the only ones who used it as a strategy to prepare young people to die’ (Blom 2007: 72). 10. The passage in Nepali reads: ‘We are a nice garden of 4 castes and 36 martyrs, how great!’ The formula refers to the depiction of Nepal by its founding king, Prithvi Narayan Shah, as a garden of 4 castes and 36 classes (4 jat, 36 varna) (http://www.nepalnews.com). Another commentator proposes to rename Nepal, the Nation of Martyrs, while a third one objects: ‘They are simply a newly discovered Ethnic Group, as such a new state should be added to the Federal structure for them, and it should be called Martyrwan’. 11. Nepalese Maoists had no doubt about their final victory, contrary to young Palestinians (Larzillière 2003). 12. See Thapa Chal (2007): ‘In your memory. My dear comrade Pavitra…/ Always at night I watch the sky / It seems to me that among the stars / One star is you / In it, I see your reflection / I see you, really you /…Those who die in the revolution are martyrs / They survive forever, even dead / Martyrs become stars in the sky / This is why I’m searching you among stars / Yes your material body is no more but / You show me the way’. 13. On the Maoist conception of war and its transformative effect, see Lecomte-Tilouine (2010). 14. Equal empowerment by weapons is a major Maoist theme: Prachanda’s slogan was ‘a gun for each citizen’, at the September 11, 2009 meeting in Kathmandu. 15. Yet, their being designated as martyrs was contested. Thus in Dullu, people whispered during the ceremony addressed to a district committee member whose death had been accidental. And, in the same locality, a mass protest was launched when a man forcibly appointed as head of a ward in the Maoist People’s government, was covered by a Maoist flag after being killed by the army. On these two incidents, see Lecomte-Tilouine (2008-2009). 16. See the poems ‘Unhappiness is happiness’ by Dev Sharma, or ‘Dear Death’ by Ganga Shrestha. 17. Interview, Jutpani PLA Camp, September 2009. 18. Dialectics also gave birth to a particular way of expression. Thus, when Prabhakar (2005), the western division commander, was asked by a journalist: ‘Was the attack [on Pili] prepared long in

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advance?’ he answered: ‘We did not prepare it long in advance, though on the other hand, we did’. 19. See, for instance ‘Raktabij’ (Bloodseed), a poem by Sapana and Sacet (2007): ‘We the Bloodseeds/Sprout of the revolution/ Grow of gunpowder and blood/ Grow amidst Blood’. 20. Islamic martyrs are also exempted from purification at their funerals; instead, they are buried with their bloody clothes as testimony, see Margalit (2003). 21. Three generations of ancestors are venerated by the Hindus, then the dead disappear forever. 22. All quotes in this section are from Ajayashakti (2009). 23. Li Hsin-T’ien (1972), Shan-shan-ti hung-hsing (Bright Red Star), Beijing: JMWH, 172 p. 24. Sarul was taken to a Maoist doctor, who extracted five other bullets from his body, then to a hospital in India. He was arrested at the border. His life in jail is another part of his epic, before he joined the PLA again. 25. A text signed by Ajayashakti (2003), using forceful statements, and a plethora of adjectives illustrates this contrast: ‘blood-drinking murderers behave like drunken tigers… feudal supporters, like enraged, dogs go here and there biting people… immoral persons behave like Krishna and rape girls’. 26. The expression is taken from Pasang (Caulagai 2007). It is true that accounts by Maoist war reporters can be very conformist and merely resemble propaganda. An extract of Om Sharma’s report of the battle of Pili reads: ‘A warrior fell. Another warrior seized his fallen rifle and went to the camp’s barbed wire. No warrior worried about being wounded while fighting. Rather than worrying about their own bodies, they worried about the revolution. Even on the threshold of death, wounded warriors asked: ‘What is happening in the battle?’... It’s the rule that blood runs in war’. Among those who came as volunteers, there was no tangible terror: it was more a question of joy and enthusiasm. The volunteers said: ‘The PLA is fighting against the enemy’s camp. It is normal that we go and carry the wounded. In the revolution, one should help in whatever manner one can’ (Janadesh, 14 (36), 2005). 27. Comrade Pradip, whose pen name is Balcan, ‘Red Demon’, was born into a poor Tamang family of Makvanpur and enrolled in the party in February 1999 at the age of 18. I interviewed him in September 2009 in the PLA camp of Jutpani. 28. Names are fictive. 29. For the brigade commissar Caulagai (2007: 50-1), ‘If not written by a wounded or disabled heroic warrior this subject (i.e. war accounts) becomes imaginary’. 30. Sheridan (1968) retraces how, in China, the war’s nameless heroes gave birth to more personal ones whose diaries, written in the first person, were published between 1963 and 1966, and then to a multitude of Red Guard heroes. 31. I wish to thank John Whelpton for his useful remarks.

ABSTRACTS

In Nepal, the Maoists’ armed wing (PLA) developed as a collective of martyrs-to-be, whose example was disseminated as soon as they fell through tributes, poems and ceremonies. Its dynamic relied on self-sacrifice rather than any heroic prowess, and acquired a strong power of attraction in that it fundamentally asserts that anyone, whether illiterate, poor or of the lowest status, is of ‘priceless’ value, and can contribute to the project to change the order of things by

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putting their lives at stake. The People’s War also brought about a wave of ‘Living Martyrs’, who survived the war and who are now busy recording their past experiences. They combine all the ingredients in terms of pathos and achievement to become historical figures and models for the future, while fallen immortals have already lost their individualities and play a collective and anonymous role.

INDEX

Keywords: fighters, Maoism, martyrdom, Nepal, People’s War

AUTHOR

MARIE LECOMTE-TILOUINE

Senior Researcher, CNRS-Centre d’études himalayennes, Paris

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The Amar Chitra Katha Shakuntala: Pin-Up or Role Model?

Nandini Chandra

1 Amar Chitra Katha (ACK, literally ‘the Immortal Illustrated Stories’) comics were started by Anant Pai in 1967, under the aegis of India Book House Pvt. Limited, as an attempt to correct the colonial bias of children’s literature in India. The comics were modelled on the British and American Classics Illustrated series, which mostly adapted works of fiction into comics, with a preference for the adventure tale and the exotic. The emphasis in ACK however was on the retrieval and presentation of the glorious heritage of India, usually taken to stand in for ancient India. Hindu myths, legends and classical Sanskrit texts were thus mined for evidence of a great and superior culture. Even as they collected stories from ancient sources, ACK authors deployed the individual biography mode. Thus, the storyboard form in which ACK adapted the various tales, legends and dramas played upon great individuals as role models, according to the established pedagogical tradition of children’s literature in India, as much as the hagiographical model prevalent in pre-modern and early modern contexts to describe the lives of saints. The individual biography was also useful in terms of addressing a primarily English speaking upper caste, middle class child audience, for whom the bourgeois individual was the standard. The focus on the individual was thus imprinted on the narrative line, the drawing style, and the almost hegemonic appropriation of the realist ethic, seen as the only appropriate mode through which the veracity of these ancient stories could be indisputably established. In this article, I will look at the elevation of the Shakuntala story to the second title of the ACK corpus, and the implications of Shakuntala as a possible female role model in a cautionary tale about all that can go wrong if you fall for a stranger, and more disastrously consent to sleep with him, in the context of gender dynamics of the comics and the post-colonial Indian reality at large.

2 The existing comic culture in the sixties mainly consisted of foreign comics, The Phantom1 and superheroes, characterized by a sensationalist plot and a lurid imagination. UNESCO’s call in 1967 to use comics as a tool for communicating cultural values provided the much needed thrust to Pai to start his indigenous intervention. In

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addition to the task of indigenizing the content, making them safe and sanitized as it were, the makers of ACK were also burdened by the comic imperative of keeping the sensationalism intact. The pedagogical force of the comics was then undeniably in tension with this need to grapple with the form of the comic itself, how to insert the educational message and remove all unsavoury associations with the market without diminishing the sensationalist plot. The subsequent production of ACKs under an educational trust, with its implicit subsidies and benevolent intentions, did help to shape the comics as separate from the western comic mode. The fact that the comics were a private initiative, and had sales ranging between one million at their peak in 1981 to 28,000 at their lowest point in 1992, when the print industry underwent a general slump, did very little to diminish their aura as a disinterested service. Its endeavours to become an effective pedagogical tool are seen, for instance, in its much publicized attempt to hold a seminar on ‘The Role of Chitra Katha in School Education’ in February 1978. ACK insisted that its use of the comic medium had native antecedents. The claims of having been inspired by indigenous bas reliefs at Bharhut, Sanchi and Ajanta were deemed necessary to offset any charges of western imperialism that the comic form might carry, but it also helped to project its value as a reliable guide to cultural heritage. 3 In tandem with this overall pedagogical thrust, ACK inflected its narratives with signs of heroism and martyrdom. The ‘Freedom Fighter’ series situated in the nationalist period manifests this most prominently. But in some ways, the entire corpus of the ACK may be seen as an elaboration of this logic of heroism. Unlike the twin locus of other children’s literature in the home and school, ACK narratives have an ambivalent relationship with both spaces. While schools are in urgent need of reforms, the home is seen as oppressive and restrictive. In the hagiographies of the saints for instance, the nagging mother figure will not let the child take up the life of an ascetic. In the series on the revolutionary heroes too, the mother India trope is played down, a flagrant contrast with the wider children’s literary sphere, but also going against the grain of a more pervasive popular nationalist symbolism. In fact, women as satis (wives sacrificing themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyre) rather than mother figures were seen to be better triggers for men to get their act together. Unless it was absolutely and historically necessary to show women in the mother mode—the various narratives of Bankim Chandra such as Devi Choudhurani and Kapala Kundala, or the figure of Jijabai in Shivaji— ACKs refrained from invoking the mother figure very liberally. 4 Perhaps the freedom imperative of the narrative, which needed the protagonist to leave both home and school in order to explore a wider world, was the reason for this toning down of the mother image. For the mystic or the freedom lover, the home was definitely oppressive. At the same time, while the serene ambience of the gurukul (the traditional school) sequestered in the lap of nature was idealized, it was not so much this association with nature that was the object of eulogy as the fact that they were places where one learned the first lessons in contending schools of scholarship. In fact, a truly great student could even learn to challenge his/her own mentor, and teach him a thing or two. The audacity needed for this kind of iconoclasm could only be honed in the training grounds of life, beyond school and home. Adventure for children was then inscribed in terms of the exposure to real brute force, necessary education for them to get on in life, rather than the artificially created safe environment of schools.

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5 How was this conflict in the pre-bourgeois world of the comics negotiated within the logic of children’s literature as a field firmly entrenched in bourgeois subjectivity? The ensuing tension resulting from an ostensible display of sexualized and brutalized violence, absolutely de rigueur in children’s publishing, was then sought to be cushioned by the logic of cultural relativism, which pretended that these things needed to be seen in their proper historical context, thus securing a license for what is deemed as openly inappropriate and reactionary within a modern national progressive ethos. The pressing pedagogical need to create modern role models from this historically given past however mandated more universal standards, since these historicized figures were being hailed as modern both in resonance and relevance.

Female role models

6 Needless to say, most of ACK's heroes were males. But ACK is also characterized by an unusually substantial (for comics) presence of women as far as the sixties comics culture is concerned. Of the large number of titles devoted to women, the majority was drawn from a mythological or legendary universe, and those which were part of history were not slotted in the history series. Thus by virtue of being de-historicized, they were particularly amenable to being iconized. What was the nature of this iconicity? Were heroines meant only for the inspiration of a female readership? What kinds of ideals and aspirations did they set up for young girls reading or looking at the comics?

7 This essay will look at the Shakuntala comic, which was the second title in the series, and came out in 1971. The first one Krishna (1967) is a very obvious choice, underlining as it does the expansive and reformist Vaishnav ethic of the comics at large, through the embodiment of an intimate personal form of devotion that took the edge off the Brahminical caste and ritual ridden version of Hinduism, giving it an endearingly anthropomorphic touch in the loveable figure of the child-god Krishna. Shakuntala, coming three years after the mascot god, could only have been a very considered decision. One of the considerations could be the fact that Shakuntala is the mother of Bharata, the eponymous founder of Bharat or India. While this secondary significance of women as mothers and consorts is part of an unquestioned patriarchal dynamic in which ACK is invariably steeped, it nevertheless tends to project women as individuals in their own right. As asserted before, motherhood is not very idealized in ACK. In any case, Shakuntala is hardly known for her role as a strong mother figure or as a strong figure at all. If she is an icon of something, it is that of coy femininity, a sign that ACK visuals reserve for most female protagonists, even as their more empowering characteristics are mediated through verbal signs of intelligence, smartness and character. 8 The eclectic adaptation from both the Hindu epic Mahabharata and the poet Kalidasa versions of the Shakuntala story sheds a little more light on her depiction in ACK.2 The need to imbue the somewhat empty damsel in distress of the Kalidasa play with the rebellion and anger of the Mahabharata heroine at least indicates that the publishers of ACK are interested in the subjectivity of Shakuntala, the woman. Very briefly, while the Mahabharata story projects Shakuntala as the wronged forest woman, who is ravished by King Dushyant on his hunting sojourn and then deserted, the Kalidasa play transposes this story into an overtly romantic plot, where the king’s abandonment is re-written as enforced forgetting, rationalized as the outcome of a curse incurred by

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Shakuntala, practically absolving him of the accusations levelled against him by the feisty Mahabharata Shakuntala.3 In fact, the romance proceeds precisely from the remorse and agony undergone by King Dushyant when the signet ring with which he had pledged his love to Shakuntala is recovered from the stomach of a fish, and his memory returns. 9 It is obvious that the story of Shakuntala in itself is not very complimentary of her in terms of establishing a corpus of strong, independent Hindu womanhood, but it nevertheless offers all kinds of powerful suggestions for a foundational myth of Hindu India. For instance, through its detour into the story of Bharata (of whom nothing much is known to merit a separate comic), it helps to confirm Hindu India’s so called descent from a pure line of Aryan kings, with roots going back to Vedic sages and gods. So Shakuntala’s story would seem to be merely a colourful story with which to introduce Bharata as our venerable ancestor. However, the blatant adjustments made to the original versions of the Shakuntala story reveal an ambivalence that has at its heart the pressing need to bridge the gap between the traditional feminine ideal and sexual aspirations of modern Indian women. One way of doing this is to set up these ancient goddesses, nymphs and classical heroines as being totally unfettered, in movement and thinking. But this lack of inhibitions or fetters is only available to the upper caste Vedic women. It is paradoxical that while the distinction makes them exceptional, licensed to freedoms that are not allowed to their lower caste sisters for instance, this exceptionality poses no restriction to them being used in an exemplary way, as models for emulation.4 How is this achieved? 10 Across the wide heterogeneity in the representation of women, there is one singular trait that defines them, which is that of voluntarism. Whether she is a sati sacrificing herself at the altar of her husband’s funeral pyre—an incarnation of a female self- sacrificing principle—or a shakti, the female embodiment of power, wreaking havoc in the enemy lines, these two female embodiments are united in so far as they exercise what is fetishized as individual choice, translated as an emblem of female agency. However, the question before us is how the combination of reality effects, induced by ‘the clever deployment of the tactile aura of oil painting’ that opens up ‘for a mass clientele a novel mode of entering and possessing the pictorial image’ (Guha Thakurta 1991: 97), and of the ‘commodification of women’ and ‘tropizing of the feminine’ (Uberoi 1990: 42) can bring about the agency result. In other words, what are the mediations through which the deceptive allure of the sexualized female body appears as a sign of empowerment? 11 The ACK’s ideological position on women can be read off from the inside cover of ACK's Ranak Devi: The status of women in India through the ages has been conditioned by social, economic and political factors [italics mine]. In ancient India, women were treated with respect. Although women had to look to men for protection, they did not have to live in seclusion. No restrictions were placed on their movements, nor were they denied the right to education. Gradually women came to be relegated to a position of little or no importance in society. In medieval India, where battles were fought frequently, the woman came to be confined to her house lest there be a threat to her person and honour. In spite of the precautions taken, there were instances of women becoming helpless victims of power politics—pawns in the ego games of rival kings.5

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12 The allusion to the ‘social, economic and political factors’ indicates the unalterable hierarchy of the mythic world, where men hold the key to production, and women are granted freedom of movement and the right to education. The idea, it seems, is not so much to deny the existence of a pre-modern patriarchy, but to prove its superiority to the western model, and further, to suggest how the glorious Vedic past was thrown into disorder by the Muslim marauders in the medieval period. In the Vedic past, women not only had respect and autonomy, but they could also look to men for protection. The ‘helpless victims of power politics’ is, of course, a reference to the political marriages that were arranged between the Mughals and Rajput princesses. The entire passage is striking because it talks about the past in the language of bourgeois individualism, which allows the practice of sati to be articulated as the supreme act of the self. For instance, as Clarisse Bader notes, Savitri, Brahma’s consort, not only ‘identifies her life with her husband’s… but her death with his’ (Chakravarty 1989: 46).

Amar Chitra Katha’s Shakuntala

13 The most distinct thing about the ACK women, and one that continues to resonate with the popular version of the emancipated feminine in other media as well, is their lack of inhibition, wittingly or unwittingly translated as sexual or libidinal freedom. This lack of inhibition ironically goes together with the signifiers of shyness and being demure. In Hindi films, for instance, the mandatory song and dance sequence around the tree involves the heroine in moves that reveal her body to be an extension of natural growth: vines, flowers, trees. The ACK Shakuntala is drawn precisely in this vein, her love of nature seen to be consonant with her freedom to love and choose a partner, her coy femininity adding to the free sexual vibes (Figure 1).

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Figure 1

14 The emphasis on the sexualized and fantasized presence of classical heroines was able to deflect attention from the legitimized male predatory behaviour and the son preference bias of these texts, implying that nothing could be done to these women without their consents. Ironically, the extensive show of flesh and implied voluntarism also ushered in the spectacle of monogamous conjugality within a polygamous context. Whatever the undesirable connotations of classical women sun-bathing in the ancient sun, it seems that ACK was not too concerned with regulating the traffic in risqué signals. Through a close reading of the comic Shakuntala, I will however try to engage with the conflicting traffic of meanings arising from the conscious and unconscious deployment of over sexualized women in ACK, and how that aided or inhibited the more pedagogic aim of creating female role models. 15 As remarked earlier, the ACK Shakuntala draws from what seems, at first, a completely arbitrary mix of the assertive Mahabharata figure and the more coy and feminine one in the Kalidasa play. But this seeming arbitrariness or eclecticism is actually mediated by the constraints of a middle class audience, which regards gender as a discrete and reified category, giving primacy to the sex of the class-, caste- and racially-marked body. In the case of Vedic upper caste women though, their beauty is so completely a signifier of their femininity that its gendered excess marks them typically as women of high and noble birth. The overwhelming beauty of the classical heroine is then marshaled in all comics in order to suppress all other markers of identity that might deflect attention from the fact that they are women and only women. 16 In Kalidasa’s play, there are lots of references to the painterly quality of Shakuntala’s beauty (Thapar 1999). With her head resting on her hand, she looks like a painting. The friends put the ornaments on her the way they have seen it done in paintings. When the king is suffering the ‘Shakuntala disease’,6 the only thing which distracts him from

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his anguish and remorse is the lifelike painting he makes of her, though in his view this fails to do adequate justice to the beauty of the real Shakuntala. However, the apsara (celestial nymph) Sanumati recognizes the visceral quality of the painting, and can see why the king might delude himself that the real Shakuntala is sitting in front of him. It is clear that beauty, in order to be effectively represented, has to be both still life and visceral, to conjure the illusion of a physical presence. 17 ACK chooses to interpret this ancient reference to the almost hypnotic and illusionistic quality of the beautiful in terms of the language of realism. Predictably enough, it assumes that this beauty can be rendered only through the most recent and valued 19th century academic photorealism albeit in a bazaar derivative form. It must be remembered that under the long drawn project of conservation of the ancient Indian architectural art which started around the 1870s, the cave paintings of Ajanta had been copied out by students of the J.J School of Art (under Principal John Griffiths) trained in the academic realist style. The ancient style was valued above all for its perspective, shading details and foreshortening (Guha Thakurta 2004: 58). The painting of Shakuntala that Dushyant drew for a modern comic book audience was not however a realist mediation of an Ajanta-like drawing (Figure 2). ACK realism is de-historicizing, deliberately disavowing the historically determinate varieties of verisimilitude: the gods and heroes are not to be identified as figments of people’s imagination in different historical epochs, but as actually representing real primordial gods and heroes. What is more, heroes and gods must be drawn with the same brush so that the godly/Aryan connection of Hindu humans is firmly and indisputably established. Shakuntala’s beauty is then a product of this kitschy art form that developed in the mid-20th century south-western coastline, deployed to guarantee her divine ancestry. In other words, she is beautiful only to the extent that she has Aryanized godly ancestors.

Figure 2

18 The fact of the Shakuntala title being the second in the series connects to this foundational Aryan imagination if we take the story of Shakuntala to be an origin myth of the land of Bharata, or the birth of Bharata, the founding Aryan father. Ironically however, the claim of a pure and continuous line of descent from Bharata downwards is compromised by the very realism ACK has adopted to tell its tale. This is because the Shakuntala comic was drawn by a Malayali (Malayalam speaking from the state of Kerala) artist K.P. Shankar (dates unknown), who couldn’t help inflecting his heroes and heroines with a pronounced Malayali look and feel (Figure 3). The figures were

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stouter and more rounded, and generally they resembled the characters he was later to draw in comics exclusively situated in Kerala such as Techolli Othenan. This militated against the macro-cosmology of ACK where the south was characteristically the home of demons commonly understood as belonging to a Dravidianized ancestry. The north Indian physiognomy of the Aryans was in turn split into manavas (humans) and devas (gods) evident in the three part typology formulated by Ram Waeerkar (1936-2003?),7 one of the pioneering artists of the ACK pantheon. It is interesting that the illustrator Shankar was subsequently used only for Malayali titles as opposed to the mythological titles with their pan-Indian reach. In drawing the heroes from Hastinapur in this South Indian manner, he complicated the question of beauty to an extent.

Figure 3

19 How do we understand the constituent elements of the concept of Aryan beauty? In the comic, demons appear in only one frame. They are painted green, obese, intended as grotesque (Figure 4), and in no way comparable to the fair-skinned protagonists, but the more intangible Dravidian features nevertheless lurk underneath the outlines of the non-demon protagonists as mentioned above. Is it adequate to differentiate the Aryan from the Dravidian simply through skin colour? What about other features? What do we make of the complicated history of assimilation brought about through the North Indian Brahmin migration to the south?8 To a large extent, the leitmotivs of ACK, its fixation on the south-western coast of the country, as a source of its stories, stems from the founder Anant Pai’s origins in this Konkan belt. It is believed that the purest of the Brahmins namely the Saraswats and Namboodris had migrated to the south led by Parshuram (a Brahmin warrior) in a time coterminous with the mythological events (Chandra 2008: 27-84). Following this, it would seem that what is physiognomically identified as southern features in the present is therefore deceptive since it preserves features of the most hallowed North Indian genetic makeup, embodied in the purity of

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the purest south Indian Brahmins. But simultaneously, the idea of assimilation completely challenges the idea of purity. The painter Ravi Varma (1848-1906), the father of India’s neo-realism in many ways, had already anticipated this in blithely drawing the Hindu noble pantheon with a Malayali look and feel, being a Malayali himself. The problem lies in the way this ‘Malayali’ look distributes itself between the Brahmins’ nobility and the native population.

Figure 4

20 Generally, I have observed that the greatest innovation and flexibility was available to the artists in drawing not the Aryan heroes, but the non-Aryanized demons, tribals and Muslims. Since they did not fit into the protocols of a modular academic realism, the artists could be more experimental vis-à-vis their demon portraits. Some of the most vivid, visceral figures in ACK are of the demon others (Figure 5). However, in this second title from the ACK corpus, the single frame devoted to the demons paints them in a hurried way as a blurred swathe of colours, betraying an uncertainty about their physiognomic contours. At the same time, Shakuntala, the quintessential Aryan belle, has to be drawn in a manner that will bring forth her full sensual potential. The vagueness of the demons testifies to an unresolved confusion over the particular schematic division to be deployed between the northern Aryans and southern Dravidians in ACK, fuelling contradictory resonances. For instance, like in the play, Shakuntala is chaperoned by her two female friends virtually acting as her hand maidens. Unconsciously perhaps, it is these two who have the pronounced Malayali look, the regional inflection highlighting their subordinate status.

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Figure 5

21 As the ACK series evolved, each and every aesthetic and editorial decision had to go through a series of conscious mediations in consideration of the dual interest of representing a remote historicized reality and presenting that reality in such a way that it had appeal for a middle class audience. For instance, Shakuntala’s beauty foregrounded and embellished through an array of cinematic poses and angles seems to translate the coy and delicate feminine of Kalidasa into the Hindi film aesthetic of the saucy heroine (Figure 6). However, despite the oblique flirtations and dainty airs, we are completely taken by surprise when she proposes marriage to Dushyant. That is neither the style of the classical nor of the Hindi film heroine. What do we make of this proposal within the contending romantic paradigms?

Figure 6

22 ACK’s attempt to appropriate the classical romantic genre strove to relocate the romance from a heroine-centred narrative to one firmly focused on a nationalist imaginary. The national romantic was interested in demonstrating the freedom of the

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Indian woman within a broadly patriarchal set up. In tandem with the insidious mechanism of the comic mode, while the trope of the free woman was etched with much fanfare, the larger patriarchal frame was constructed through a more veiled negotiation of words and images. It was not easy after all to openly avow the potentially censorious elements of the story like sexual openness, polygamy and son preference. How would ACK craft a nationally appropriate romantic narrative out of antique erotic tales (as in the Mahabharata) where the kings’ sexual predatoriness and the woman’s devaluation, after she has fulfilled the ritual obligation of providing a male heir, are taken as casual facts? Kalidasa’s Shakuntala offers a dramatic mediation of this realist world view in so far as it dilutes the hero Dushyant’s intransigence by inserting the drama of enforced forgetting. We can begin by seeing how Anant Pai translates this into the still modern format of the comic and his vision of a scientific mythic universe. 23 At the outset, classical romantic traditions were concerned with a pointed interest in the erotic ravishment of the heroine, and to that extent they were distinct from the modern romantic genre which is more about the exploration of a feminine subjectivity. This feminine subjectivity may include the ravishment motif, but if we were to take Janice Radway’s (1991) study of the modern western romance, the context of that ravishment is intended to overcome the fear of rape or address issues of nurturance and care that are not fulfilled within the heterosexual patriarchal marriage. Ultimately, the function of the romance is to assure the women readers of the desirability of committing to a monogamous bourgeois marriage (Radway 1991: 214). The female as reader, and consequently what she feels, is thus the core of the modern romantic moment. In contrast, female subjectivity does not occupy such a central place in the classical romantic genre. 24 It is fairly well known that Kalidasa’s Shakuntala is a significant diminution of the Mahabharata’s Shakuntala in terms of assertiveness and independence. Nonetheless, Kalidasa preserves certain useful attributes of Shakuntala’s individuality in so far as it supports the romantic plot structure. The ACK Shakuntala, although based on the Kalidasa play, completely erases any signs and dilemmas of the romantic narrative as it straddles the pre-bourgeois and the bourgeois culture. Generally in ACKs, all romantic nayikas (heroines) are visually alluring and ravishing in the tradition of the Sanskrit canon, but the comics edit out the most minimal subjectivity needed to maintain the romantic tension in any productive way. The apsaras (heavenly nymphs) are glorified seductresses. Virginal romantic nayikas like Vasavdatta, Ratnavali and Shakuntala (Figure 7) are comely, but their sexuality is robbed of any threatening potential that a more substantial selfhood would grant them. On the level of the romantic discourse culled from the original sources, one knows these particular romantic nayikas are not threatening because they are fervently committed to their lords and masters irrespective of their multiple wives, and despite the awareness in most cases that their amorous life is going to be short lived compared to that of their husbands. The ACK text does not provide us with the relevant information. At the level of imagery, therefore, one is hard pressed to understand why despite being drawn in evidently pin-up exposure mode, they don’t violate the ethic of Hindu modesty. What prevents classical heroines being illustrated as pin-up models from affronting upper caste Hindu sensibilities? Is it sufficient to argue that all women in ancient times dressed skimpily?

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Figure 7

25 The ancient women if at all threatening are so on account of other reasons such as the conditions they might attach to the marriage contract. For instance, Satyavati, the fisherman’s daughter in the comic Bheeshma who catches the eye of Shantanu, agrees to the union only on the condition that her future son be made heir to the throne. To a degree, even the romantic nayika and the comely apsara are known to have laid down conditions before a union, to suggest that marriage was more a contract than a sacred bond. In any case, the important point is that classical romance operated within a deeply materialist paradigm, well attuned to the ruling needs of sex, legal status and rights, kinship rules and reproduction. The same cannot be said of the modern genre which by definition is defiant and necessarily seeking to escape the social constraints indicated by these needs. Ironically, it is committed to the understanding of love as a sacrament and an escape into a personal utopia. Thus, if ACK were to play up the contractual nature of the pre-bourgeois romance, it would invariably risk flattening out the romantic strains in the modern sense. Let us take a look at what ACK does with some of these ‘non-romantic’ tropes in Kalidasa’s play. 26 Consistently throughout the play, Shakuntala’s love is presented foremost as erotic desire - ‘love violently tortures my limbs’. In the comic, however, the confession of desire and lust is completely sanitized as ‘I do not know what you think of me but I think you are the most wonderful man on earth’ (Figure 3) followed by an exchange of ‘I love you’ (Figure 8). This is followed by a flagrant violation of the content of both the Mahabharata and the Kalidasa versions. Shakuntala is made to propose marriage: ‘Let us exchange garlands and marry as forest people do’ (Figure 8). Both in the Kalidasa version and the Mahabharata version, she actually hesitates to give in to the king’s amorous advances and asks him to control his passions. In the Mahabharata version, there is not only no initiative taken by Shakuntala to consummate her marriage, but

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she also draws up a pre-nup, as it were. She agrees to sleep with him only after he has pledged to make their future son heir to the throne. Obviously, she has some idea about the other wives. The ACK investment of sexual assertiveness stands out oddly considering there is nothing else to suggest that the woman has any initiative. Nor does it add to the romantic pitch of either the courtly or the modern contexts. In both traditions of romance we are considering, women are to be taken forcefully rather than shown as initiating sex. Their libido is confined to the presentation of a nubile self. 27 I can only think of the following explanation for the ACK transgression: the risk of presenting the king in a hurry to ravish Shakuntala would foreground his predatory nature, not tolerable in a national-popular hero. But even worse is the prospect that Shakuntala could actually plead or command the king to exercise restraint. Her eventual consent could also make her appear character-less or as a shameless woman, as someone negotiating sexual contact, not appropriate again in someone projected as the mother of the Indian nation. The best option then was to allow her to initiate the gandharva marriage (contracted by mutual consent without formal rituals) and make it appear part of the ethnography of ancient forest people, something that they customarily do.

Figure 8

28 In continuation with the erotic ravishment of the heroine, the play repeatedly emphasizes the virginity of Shakuntala as ‘a flower no one has smelled, a bud no fingers have plucked… honey untasted, unbroken fruit of holy seeds’ and the thrill of savouring virgin flesh. There is also repeated mention of the many wives, and the sorrow and jealousy of at least one wife who is lamenting the transience of her romantic liaison with the king (Hamsavati’s song reproaching her husband for new loves). Then there is the fear and foreboding of Shakuntala’s friends who are afraid that

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the king is merely using her as a play thing and will discard her: ‘We have heard that kings have many loves. Will our dear friend become a sorrow to her family after you have spent time with her?’. Similarly, the wise people, the ascetics, all advise Shakuntala to be patient with the king’s occasional harshness and be friendly to the co- wives. All these elements are an indication of how for the woman in love, the expectations are really modest. As the play proceeds, we see that the fear of her friends is of course confirmed but the counsel of her elders ignored as Shakuntala loses her cool in the face of the king’s loss of memory, attesting to the fact that there is more to her than the pre-stipulated codes of femininity. Indeed, women are acknowledged as the signifiers of a different moral economy as evident when Dushyant expresses his revulsion for hunting provoked at the sight of the gentle Shakuntala (‘the thought of hunting disgusts me when I see Kanva’s daughter’). 29 But apart from gesturing to women’s alternative moral economy, the play completely confirms the fears surrounding the sexual use/abuse of the romantic nayika. It shows the king behaving in a rather sneaky way vis-à-vis his other wives. He is afraid of the palace women finding out about his passion for a forest maiden. He lies to the buffoon (a figure totally omitted from the comic) lest he reveal his guilty secret to them. On the other side, Shakuntala’s friends are afraid of Kanva’s reaction to the lovers’ indiscretion, and are surprised that he is not angry, all pointing to the fact that the gandharva option was not as acceptable as it is made out to be in the comic version. Shakuntala exercises caution even when consumed with desire. She wants a formal sanction of the union either through her elders or friends. It’s not a private decision, whereas the king would rather like it to be clandestine and immediate. The gandharva option is definitely not something that is encouraged. The sage Kanva and the elders (like Gautami) repeatedly refer to the fact that Shakuntala’s kinsmen had not been consulted in the haste with which the king married her, euphemism for the force or rape that is a staple of romantic literature. The ACK version, however, removes all traces of this ambiguity and tension, whether it is the elaborate debates around the decision to go for a gandharva union or the tension surrounding the polygamous context of the romance. The fact that classical romance recognized that the needs and rights of women within marriage were far from assured, but had to be secured through a system of conditions and provisos, is of course elided in the comic. 30 When Shakuntala is leaving the forest in the play, part of her grief stems from the knowledge that she will not be coming back any time soon. But in the comic, she is shown as confidently consoling her friends by assuring them about her frequent visits back home: ‘I will come to meet you often’ (Figure 9). In the play, when Shakuntala asks Kanva if she will ever be able to return to her original home, he tells her that once their son takes over the reins of the kingdom, the two will be free to surrender their worldly bonds and return to the hermitage. The ACK narrative shears this implicit exile of the female ascetic implied in her surrender of the forest life. The need to present marriage first and foremost as a humane and kindly institution, which allows women to maintain close contact with their paternal homes, is meant to blunt the cruelty and alienation implicit in patri-local residence.

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Figure 9

31 Perhaps anger at the hero’s callous and cruel behaviour is the only element common to both traditions of romance, ancient and modern. This may be because it allows the man to be fully vindicated once the misunderstanding or deception involved in his behaviour toward the heroine has been resolved. In the bourgeois context, the anger also allows the women to vent out feelings that are generally suppressed under the construction of women as soft-spoken and gentle. In the Kalidasa text, it allows Shakuntala to allude to the potential arrogance of the king: ‘evil man, you see everything distorted by your own ignoble heart’. Also, her anger does not either spare her escorts from the hermitage when they decide to abandon her: ‘Am I deceived by this cruel man and then abandoned by you?’ Of course, the absence of anger in the comic prevents any critique of kingly power or of the unfair rules of patriarchy. Instead we are made to see an abject woman, her emotions directed not so much at the king’s deception and falsity but at the fact of her victimhood. Most significantly, her back is turned on the readers when she says the only harsh thing to him: ‘Oh Dushyant! It is wicked of you to disown your wife’ (Figure 10). Also, her addressing him by name rather than as Noble King/husband or Puru King (as in the source texts) is suggestive of an intimacy that is not only anachronistic but also allows the comic to cater to its bourgeois audience’s need for a false semblance of equality in conjugal relations. The abandonment by her kinsmen is not allowed to sink in fully either, since the sage at the court instantly adopts her so that it appears that she has not been forsaken entirely. After that, the narrative comes to a speedy enough conclusion with Dushyant begging forgiveness, and reiterating the promise of a happy married life.

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Figure 10

32 The flattening of the romantic narrative, making the king totally blameless from the start so that there is no anger at his misdemeanour, ensures that there will be no pleasure at his remorse later. After all, there is no apsara Sanumati in the comic to take pleasure in the king’s remorse and suffering, or to appreciate Shakuntala’s pining for a husband who ostensibly disgraced her. What is more, the narrative divests the heroine of all but one instance of agency, the initiative in proposing to the man, which undercuts the romantic tension even further. Even in her relationship to nature in the hermitage, the tenderness that she is famous for is turned around so that it is the birds, animals and trees that cling to her and feel the pangs of parting, not she. She is shown too busy consoling them. Her grief is on account of their grief. 33 Similarly, the comic accentuates her lost, absent minded profile, not worldly enough even to register the curse or take care of the ring. It is true that, even in the play, her friends do not let her in on the mystery of the curse so that she is ignorant of why her husband refuses to recognize her. But the play provides the context for this special pampering of her fragile ecology (‘our friend is fragile by nature; she needs our protection/who would sprinkle a jasmine with scalding water?’). She is also ‘the breath of Father Kanva’s life’, and she is sick. A heat stroke can be a serious affair. But in the comic, without the requisite explanation for this sheltered self, she seems like a case study in feminine distress (Figure 11), not the assertive ACK ideal.

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Figure 11

34 It is almost as if ACK was experimenting with different models of femininity. Shakuntala seemed a good example to inaugurate the long tradition of über-feminine Hindu women, not least because she is Bharata’s mother and by implication the mother of the Aryan race. However, in retrospect she turns out to be quite an atypical heroine - naive and clueless. The text steadily strips her of her sensuous charms enacted through Hindi film expressions and gestures, turning her into a docile indifferent figure. The forest scenes of romance soon give way to a more regulated appearance, defined by ornaments, drapes and veils (Figure 12). Thereafter, the close-ups too give way to mid and long shots, so that the sexiness is literally not in your face anymore (Figure 13). But through this blurring of boundaries between the courtly feminine and the creature of the forest, she ends up confirming the ACK archetype of the ancient heroine most pertinently, as both naturally alluring and implicitly noble. Perhaps, this is what the ideal of the ACK heroine is supposed to represent, a domestic goddess after her token autonomy has been established in a token way.

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Figures 12 & 13

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Continuities between popular culture and contemporary judicial perceptions of women as sexual objects

35 The strong tradition in Indian popular culture of romantic narratives within a marital setting is perhaps a pointer to the social fact of inaccessibility to the other sex in all but caste guided familial/familiar situations.9 Similarly, the ending of the traditional romantic story not so much in consummation or a kiss but the birth of a male child highlights the overlaps between romantic and reproductive sex. The effort to reconcile pre-modern romantic expectations with modern ones is not as far-fetched or difficult as one originally supposes, based on abstract notions of epochal changes. Despite the intra-generic differences across ages and cultural contexts, what is really problematic to the ACK patriarchy in the source texts is the representation of the hero Dushyant as a promiscuous and pleasure loving man, since this has immediate ramifications for how female ravishment is to be construed.

36 While it is true that male predatory behaviour is a punishable offense under a liberal regime which acknowledges the so called rights of women, the popular cultural sphere is full of stories of the celebration and tacit acceptance of such ravishment. Under the Indian Penal Code, the rape laws have more or less continued with the colonial definition of rape as ‘outraging’ the modesty, chastity and honour of women rather than an act of violence on their dignity, equality, sexual autonomy and bodily integrity (Kashyap 2010: 10). The passive submission of the woman in intimate domestic situations then becomes a pretext for acquitting the offender since it immediately delinks the violence from the honour or modesty motive, which can only be done by an outsider.10 Also, cover ups are a routine part of an alternative discourse in which the police habitually refuse to register FIRs (First Information Reports) of rape and sexual violence, especially if the accused happen to be persons of influence and authority. Not only that, the law enforcement agencies and politicians are known to bend over backwards to protect them and their reputation, very often by undertaking vicious slander campaigns against the rape victim, insinuating that she must be a woman of easy morals.11 37 The ACK Shakuntala story is striking because in its over-eagerness to protect Dushyant from the slur of being a sexual offender, it actually compels us to explore the possibility of the story as a rape and run narrative, what in American parlance would constitute a ‘ date rape’. This focus becomes particularly resonant given the recent judicial interrogation of the existing rape laws which neither define nor exhaust all kinds of sexual assault undergone by women. The proposed Draft Bill on Sexual Assault 2010 also seeks to examine the definition of consent enshrined in section 375 of the Indian Penal Code. For instance, the mere absence of resistance or the presence of submission is not deemed an adequate definition of consent. Only unequivocal voluntary agreement by the person would constitute consent.12 Under the Victorian penal clause, consent is only envisaged when the woman is deluded into believing she is married to the man or her consent is given under the promise of marriage, as is the case with Shakuntala. A woman who is not married has no business giving consent. The biggest positive outcome of this amendment is the recognition of consensual sexual relations outside the paradigm of marriage.

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38 The Shakuntala story obviously works within this moralistic marital framework, and the charge of her accusation against Dushyant rests precisely on the promise of marriage. Shakuntala’s petition as a mother of a son trying to find justice in her husband’s court is eerily reminiscent of the unwed mother narrative of Hindi films.13 To that extent, young readers would invariably derive from the story an understanding of consent exclusively and implicitly in monogamous or marital terms, and in turn of love within the very same hetero-normative boundaries. True to their modern romantic logic, Hindi films are at least willing to incriminate the hero for his irresponsible and predatory behaviour, if only to restore his manliness once he has made amends.14 But ACK, it seems, will not incriminate the hero at any cost. It would much rather risk having the nayika’s pre-marital sexual openness read as a sign of loose morals. 39 Within an overall framework of globalization, and the attendant shift in the class character of the various actors entering the media industry, one is less likely to view the risqué projections of item girls and sexualized pin-up models and actresses as an index of desperate socio-economic circumstances, something they are coerced into. On the contrary, the fact of their gratuitous self-commodification and objectification is taken almost for granted. It is autonomous of the logic of capital and completely explained in terms of individual choice. While ACK heroines cannot be seen quite through the same lens—since they are not actresses and as such not real individuals but drawings, sketched by male artists for a commodity driven market (albeit a more restrictive one)—, the libidinal postures they are sketched in are not simply designed to invite the male gaze, but denote a similar consensual frame of reference. The pseudo- subjectivity constituted by the eclectic mix of coy and assertive is then instrumental in achieving the affect of a stereotype-defying emancipated female subject. 40 But even when this pin-up model is bursting with autonomy and self-will, it fails to become a genuine role model. The comic eventually ends on the sad note of domestication, for the sexualized creature is totally diminished. This is not merely a paradox, but also the intrinsic aim of the bourgeois patriarchal project which seeks to constantly neutralize and render undesirable any aspiration toward the creation of female role models. In fact, being a role model is synonymous with an exceptional class or elite status. In other words, only women who are exceptional in terms of their social stature can be exemplary.15 What goes in the name of creating a canon of strong independent Hindu women is not strong independent Hindu women, but strength as membership to the dominant group or class. It is Shakuntala’s high Vedic lineage which is remarkable and the reason for her iconization. But how can readers emulate high Vedic lineage? What young girls can emulate instead is her helpless coy femininity. Bharata, the illegitimate son, through his consecrated position as the founder of Bharat or India, is able to repudiate any illicit associations of the union that leads to his birth. In a homological association almost, Shakuntala’s helplessness stands translated as a short-hand for active female consent!

Conclusion

41 To sum up, a ‘selective tradition’ constituted by a dominant ruling class or group is about the past only in so far as it ‘is intended to connect with and ratify the present’ (Williams 1977: 116). The glorious Hindu past of gorgeous and independent Aryan women then seeks to address anxieties about women’s sexuality and independence in a

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modern secular democracy. The problem is posed in terms of the increasing difficulty of imagining women as role models at a time when Hindu patriarchy, organized around stable caste hierarchies, is exposed to serious threats. The Shakuntala story resonates precisely because it depicts the destiny of a woman at the juncture of such a crisis (the absence of her father or of Dushyant). The story operates virtually like a veiled threat: if the patriarchal structures are not restored, the only other way women can become autonomous is through the tautological move of taking on the entire onus of their lives on their slender shoulders. Only under the condition of entering the full logic of bourgeois voluntarism, where their individual autonomy is the only motor governing their lives, can their elevation be considered.

42 The recent Virgin Comics combined venture between Shekhar Kapur, Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra—a collaboration of different global animation and comic styles—, illustrates the fashionable attractiveness of this principle of voluntaristic empowerment most evocatively, through indigenous superwoman titles like Devis and Snakewoman. Devi, for instance, is an incarnation of Shakti (dubbed the ‘female aspect of the divine’), who takes the form of a modern young girl to fight crime in the city. The promotional trailer shows her as a goddess descended to earth, turned out in tart outfit, naked for the most part except for some thunderbolts covering her modesty. In a Star Wars-style intergalactic battle, she fights off strange evil creatures, thus highlighting the pathos of the lone woman ranger, who in order to be a hero must fight alone and who, if she must fight, is condemned to isolation. Zvelebel, Kamil V. (1992) Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature, Leiden: E. J Brill.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chakravarti, Uma (1987) ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi: Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past’ in Kumkum Sangari & Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 27-87.

Chanda, Ipshita (2003) Packaging Freedom, Feminism and Popular Culture, Kolkata: Stree.

Chandra, Nandini (2008) The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967-2007), New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Friese, Kai (2010) ‘White Skin, Black Mask’, Outlook, 20 March, URL: http:// www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264696.

Guha Thakurta, Tapati (1991) ‘Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons: Emergence of Pictorial Stereotype in Colonial India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 (43), pp. 91-9.

Guha Thakurta, Tapati (2004) Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, New Delhi: Permanent Black.

Kapur, Shekhar (2006) Devi (promotional video), URL: http://videosift.com/video/Virgin-Comics- Presents-Shekhar-Kapurs-Devi.

Kashyap, Aruna (2010) Dignity on Trial: India’s Need for Sound Standards for Conducting and Interpreting Forensic Examination for Rape Survivors, New York: Human Rights Watch.

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Lutgendorf, Philip (2010) ‘Philip’s fil-ums: Notes on Indian Popular Cinema’, URL: http:// www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/RamTeriGM.html.

Majlis-e-Mashawarat (2010) Shopian: Institutional Denial of Justice, Srinagar: Majlis-e-Mashawarat.

Radway, Janice A. (1991) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.

Sangari, Kumkum (1990) ‘Mirabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti’, part 1, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 July, pp. 1464-75.

Sen, Rukmini (2010) ‘Law Commission Reports on Rape’, Economic and Political Weekly, 14 (44), pp. 81-7, URL: http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/188925.

Thapar, Romila (1999) Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories, New Delhi: Kali for Women.

The Tribune. 2007. ‘Consensual Sex is not Rape: SC’, 31 August, URL: http:// www.tribuneindia.com/2007/20070831/nation.htm#9.

Uberoi, Patricia (1990) ‘Feminine Identity and Nationalist Ethos in Indian Calendar Art’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 (17), pp. 41-8.

Williams, Raymond (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

NOTES

1. Phantom, one of the first costumed superheroes conceived by the American Lee Falk, first appeared as a newspaper comic strip in 1936. While it received moderate success in the US and no success in the UK, Falk is supposed to have made his fortune in the outlying colonies, from Australia and India to Sweden and New Zealand. However, it never made it to the darkest jungles of Africa where it was situated. For a personal memoir of the comics, see Kai Friese (2010: §8). 2. The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics dating roughly to the late BCs and early ADs, starting with a heroic bardic core and eventually consecrated into the divine Bhagavata-Gita text. Kalidasa is regarded as one of the greatest poets and dramatists of classical Sanskrit dating to the 5th century CE. 3. All references to the Mahabharata and to the Kalidasa version are from Thapar (1999) which has adduced the English translations of J.A.B. van Buitenen (The Mahabharata. Vol. 1, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973), and of Barbara Stoler Miller (Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 4. For a detailed treatment, see Chandra (2008). 5. ACK, 132, 10 April 1977 (emphasis added). Ranak Devi was illustrated by Dilip Kadam (1952-). 6. The king suffered a curse which erased of his memories of Shakuntala. Once relieved of it, he starts looking for her. 7. According to Waeerkar, ‘The local people in the South were the Dravidas. They were dark- complexioned, thin and not very handsome. To them the migrants from the North appeared healthy, tall and fair complexioned, like God. That is why they say all the gods are in the Himalayas. Those in the Ganga plateau are the Manava. Deva, Danava and Manava are the three ganas (the three distinct species namely gods, humans and demons)…So while Deva referred to the migrated people from the north, settled in the Himalayas, manavas are the local people in the north and the rakshashas are the tribal people in the jungles of Vindhyas’ (Chandra 2008: 80). 8. From the 5th century onwards, as the South was opened to wet agriculture, and as southern kingdoms blossomed, northern Brahmins, regarded as prestigious, were brought down to officiate over courtly ceremonies. The Brahminization of the South also extended to myths such

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as that of the Parshuram Kshetra, and as such it is very difficult to ascertain the question of the Northern Brahmins’ migration to the South in precise historical terms. However, a more established tradition of historians including Romila Thapar, Burton Stein, Clarence Maloney, Iravatham Mahadevan and Zvelebel have suggested that ‘Tamil literacy and civilization diffused in a south-north direction’ (Zvelebel 1992: 23). 9. Ipshita Chanda (2003) makes this point in the concluding chapter (‘Scripts for the Future’) of her book. 10. There are many instances of extremely horrific and sexist pronouncements on the culpability of the rape victim such as the following one given by a Supreme court bench: ‘The apex court noted that if a fully grown up girl consents to the act of sexual intercourse on a promise of marriage and continues to indulge in such activity until she becomes pregnant it is an act of promiscuity on her part, and not an act induced by misconception of fact’ (The Tribune 2007). 11. As recently as May 2009, serial investigations into the infamous rape and murder of two young Kashmiri women, Asiya Jan and Neelofer Jan, by security forces in Shopian brought forth the spectacle of this double legal bind which recognizes rape as illegal, and thus seeks to disprove it by denying the fact of sexual assault. The different investigating teams alleged the women had been drowned, and when forensic evidence pointed otherwise, the entire nexus of official bureaucracy from the lowest to the highest levels sought to fudge the evidence in order to protect the policemen while defaming the women as immoral (Majlis-e-Mashawarat 2010). 12. According to the Sexual Assault Bill Draft, Section 375 needs to be amended to read ‘a man is said to commit rape... thirdly, with her consent, when her consent has been obtained by putting her or any person in whom she is interested, in fear of death or of hurt, or of any other injury’. The words ‘or of any other injury’ expand the scope of this clause to provide for situations of rape by persons in position of trust, authority, guardianship, economic or social dominance. These cases would include incestuous rape and other instances where the victim is totally dependent on the offender who is in a dominant position. See Sen (2010). 13. From B.R. Chopra’s paean to the illegitimate child in Dhool ka Phool (1959) and to Raj Kapoor’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), the paternity suit is a patented highlight of the Hindi film melodrama. 14. According to Philip Lutgendorf (2010: §5), who reads Kapoor’s film as a Shakuntala myth, the film ‘substitutes a weak hero for an erring one and introduces parental and family complications that further exonerate him, and it situates most of its heroine’s humiliation during her long journey to the metropolis’. 15. Talking about the 16th century female poet Mirabai, Sangari (1990: 1472) says ‘the space created by and for exceptional women is restricted space and can be made to ratify the rule for ordinary women’.

ABSTRACTS

This article attempts to understand the pedagogical implications of Shakuntala as a female role model indicated by the prominence given to her character in the comic book series Amar Chitra Katha (ACK). Most of the female heroines in ACK, invariably components of a mythological/ legendary universe, are marked by their feminine allure and beauty. What was the conceivable framework in which overtly sexualized women were allowed to be role models in ACK? How is this identification with beauty squared with alternative ideals of the glorious Hindu/Vedic

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woman as free and independent? How did ACK negotiate the free sexuality of the ancient heroine to produce a normative national narrative of Hindu women as free in a larger spiritual and social sense? How did it read and adapt the ancient story of the Mahabharata along with the Kalidasa play to address its largely middle class urban child audience? How did the glorified pre-modern romance between Shakuntala and Dushyant framed within a predatory male sexual gaze come to acquire such a deep resonance within a modern Indian romantic imaginary?

INDEX

Keywords: children’s literature, comics, consent, India, modern appropriation, monogamy, pseudo-subjectivity, rape laws, role models, romantic heroine, Shakuntala

AUTHOR

NANDINI CHANDRA

Lecturer, Department of English, Delhi University

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‘I Never Held Money with my Teeth’: Constructions of Exemplarity in Abul Fazl Farooqi’s Nasheb-o-Faraz

Laurent Gayer

Introduction

1 Over the centuries, biographical narratives have been a privileged site for the production of exemplarity in South Asia. Whether in prose or in poetry, the lives of eminent personalities were compiled and narrated for the edification of readers and listeners. Candidates to exemplarity rarely produced their own life-stories and this task was generally taken on by their most literate followers, in a ‘necessary relation of non- identity’ between the hero or the saint and his spokesperson (Kaviraj 2004: 87). Heroes and saints may have been too busy to tell their lives. But they were also constrained by ‘rules of reticence’ (Kaviraj 2004: 87), which requested modesty from the high and mighty. To the adepts thus eschewed the responsibility of compiling the most significant events in the life of their spiritual or worldly master and to inscribe him, through his words and deeds, in a prestigious genealogy.

2 However socially pervasive classical and early modern life-stories may have been, their contribution to ‘character development’ is open to question. These extraordinary lives invited persons of lesser merit to ‘become firmer in their conception of their own roles and modes of meritorious conduct’ (Kaviraj 2004: 87). But ordinary beings could not pretend to such moral perfection and, ultimately, the course of events narrated in these life-stories was beyond human control, which limited their pedagogical value (Arnold & Blackburn 2004: 7). With the diffusion of Islam in the Subcontinent, specific forms of biographical narratives (tazkirat) came into being but these other ‘lives as lessons’ (Metcalf 2004) did not fundamentally challenge earlier paradigms of exemplarity. It is only in the late 18th and early 19th century that this hagiographical tradition was supplemented by ‘a new form of biography, in which greater attention was given to complexity of character and personal motivation, to specific places and

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events, and to their role in shaping and explaining individual lives’ (Arnold & Blackburn 2004: 8). These new life narratives never completely supplanted classical hagiographies though. Pre-modern features survived and were recast within ‘proto- modern’ narratives, as exemplified by David Shulman in his study of the life-story of Ananda Rag Pilai, a peculiar case of a ‘biography […] driven by an autobiographical impulse’ (Shulman 2004). 3 Aforementioned ‘rules of reticence’ help to explain the paucity of autobiographical texts in pre-modern and early modern South Asia. Even when heroes did talk, they were not immune to these rules of humility. Thus, in the Babur-nama, one of the earliest and most celebrated autobiographies in South Asian history, the Mughal emperor Babur (1483-1530) claims that ‘I do not want to aggrandize myself with what I have written. What I have written is the truth’ (quoted by Dale 1996: 637). Significantly, a very similar assertion is made in a much latter autobiographical text produced by a 20th century Hyderabadi Muslim woman, who claims that ‘I know that self-praise is a defect, but allow me to say that: ‘My purpose is simply to relate what actually happened / I don’t consider it a credit to my character to talk about myself’ (Ghouse in Vatuk 2004: 151). This reiteration of Babur’s denial of any attempt at self-aggrandizement, by way of a quotation from a qitaʻ by the most prominent Urdu poet of the 19 th century, Ghalib (1797-1869),1 may not have been intentional. Nonetheless, it points towards the enduring legacy of these classical ‘rules of reticence’ within contemporary South Asian autobiographies. 4 Although the earliest South Asian autobiographies date back to the late medieval period, the genre did not develop before the late nineteenth, early 20th century. This emerging genre was dominated by the grand narratives of India’s nationalist leaders, which birthplace was often the colonial prison (Arnold 2004). Yet, from the early 20th century onwards, these canonical autobiographies coexisted with less widely circulated texts narrating, in their own words, the life trajectories of more ordinary characters (Kaviraj 2004, Kumar 2008). Up till now, these commoners’2 attempts at narrating their own lives remain marked by a state of tension. On the one side, contemporary autobiographers are keen to project their life-trajectory as exemplary—at least in the statistical sense—but on the other side they remain constrained by the aforementioned ‘rules of reticence’, which still discourage any attempt at self-aggrandizement, particularly from commoners. 5 This tension is made explicit by Abul Fazl Farooqi (born ca. 1940), the Delhi-based real estate entrepreneur whose autobiography—initially published in Urdu in 2000 before being translated into English in 20063—constitutes the focus of this article. In the opening lines of Nasheb-o-Faraz, Farooqi establishes an ‘autobiographical pact’ (Lejeune 1975) with his reader, spelling out the motives for writing his life-story: Generally, great scholars and intellectuals think of writing a ‘biography’ [savaneh hayat]. Though a common individual [‘am fard] may not cultivate such an idea, his life and character may be as respectable as those of others; he too has an awareness of the bitter and sweet events and experiences of life and he too is conversant with its realities. So if a common man pens down his biography or diary the future generation may particularly benefit from it (Farooqi 2000: 9). 6 As a ‘common individual’, Farooqi has no extraordinary accomplishment to his credit and, thus, may not be deemed eligible to bring the story of his life to the attention of the public. However, he swiftly overcomes conventional ‘rules of reticence’ by invoking public interest, as if his transgression was attenuated by the moralistic agenda

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informing it. Farooqi’s attempt at resolving the tension inherent to his autobiographical enterprise is not entirely successful, though, and all along the text he appears as an uneasy role model.

A moral achiever: Abul Fazl Farooqi’s self-production of exemplarity

7 Abul Fazl Farooqi’s autobiography is a relatively short text, two hundred thirty seven pages long, which was initially published in Urdu before being translated into English by Pharos Media, the editor of the English fortnightly Milli Gazette. 4 Unlike conventional Urdu autobiographies,5 it offers a chronological narrative starting with a brief evocation of the author’s formative years followed by a longer exposé of his professional career. This narrative is not merely descriptive and includes frequent personal considerations of a ‘sociological’ and moralistic nature. Frequent attacks on the moral outlook of India’s Muslim population serve to reinforce the author’s exemplarity and are revealing of his Weltanschauung: that of a pious bourgeois professing an ascetic ethic of capitalism.

Formative years

8 Abul Fazl Farooqi’s life-story is that of a static personality in a fast changing world. In this regard, it conforms to the canons of the Indo-Persianate autobiographical tradition (Metcalf 1993, 2004). Whereas European autobiographies—at least in their Romantic, post-Rousseau avatars—are generally stories of personal transformation,6 South Asian Muslims’ autobiographies tend to take personality as an independent variable: ‘the focus is on a person whose essential character is a given and whose life story is best told by recounting episodes —anecdotes—which yield lessons for moral understanding’ (Metcalf 2004: 120). In this perspective, there is no need to devote long developments to childhood, ‘as autobiographers informed by Romantic individualism and subjectivism unfailingly do’ (Metcalf 1993: 155). In conformity with this literary corpus, Abul Fazl Farooqi only briefly mentions his childhood years. More surprising is his swift evocation of his genealogical background, starting with his parents and omitting any prestigious ancestor—possibly the indication of humble origins, despite the family’s claim to belong to the Ashraf social elite. As an introduction to his khandan (extended family), Farooqi simply informs the reader that his father, Janab Abul Barakat, ‘was a police head constable’ in his native village of Chandair Ballipur (tahsil Rasra of district Ballia, in Uttar Pradesh), where he was born ‘around 1940’. In order to clarify his socio- economic origins, Farooqi adds that the family had ‘some land under cultivation’ and that it was ‘well to do’ (khushhal) (Farooqi 2000: 13).

9 Throughout the brief evocation of his childhood years, Farooqi insists on two interrelated themes: his devotion to his mother and his moral rectitude. In a chapter entitled ‘Under my mother’s shadow’ (aghush-i-madar ke saye mein, a phrase derived from Persian, which literally translates as ‘in the shadow of my mother’s lap’), he claims that ‘Since childhood, I was simple in my behaviour [sada mizaj] and obedient to my mother’ (Farooqi 2000: 15). By the age of six, he had completed his first reading of the Quran and could distinguish between good and evil on the basis of Urdu and Persian texts provided by the ‘Maulvi saheb’ who taught him at home. In this opening

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part of the text, Farooqi thus projects himself as a precocious child with a strong sense of morality, something attested by the fact that ‘most of my friends were older than me’ and that ‘all teachers loved me’ (Farooqi 2000: 24). 10 In 1954, the year of his father’s demise, he moved to Gorakhpur after passing class VIII. He remained there for the next three years, until his XII class examination in 1959. The same year, he got admission at the Engineering Department of the Jamia Millia Islamia, in Delhi. There, he claims to have endured a true moral ordeal. The ‘progressive’ environment of Jamia Millia, which at the time was heavily influenced by communist students and lecturers, deeply disturbed the young man. Referring to this ‘polluted’ (aludah) atmosphere, he writes: ‘as the number of free-thinkers [azad khiyal log] gradually increased at Jamia, the moral environment [akhlaqi surat-i-hal] was badly affected and the academic atmosphere could not remain unpolluted’ (Farooqi 2000: 29). Farooqi was particularly shocked to see the influence of socialist ideas over a former religious scholar, Dr. Salamatullah, who at the time was the head of the Teachers College. If such a ‘torch bearer of the faith’ (‘alim-i-din) could come under the devilish influence of the communists, ‘how could the moral, religious and mental conditions of individuals in the Umma be secure?’ (Farooqi 2000: 30). Despite this appalling environment, Abul Fazl Farooqi managed to obtain a diploma in Civil and Rural Engineering in 1965. With the help of the general manager of the Delhi Transport Undertaking (DTU, presently DTC), Khursheed Alam Khan, who was related to his family, he was offered a post of section officer at the DTC the same year. He remained with the DTC for thirteen years, until he took charge of the small company established in 1970 by his mother, Friends and Co, which was involved in the commercialization of plastic goods and stone crushing. In the meantime, Abul Fazl familiarized himself with the real estate business through his involvement in the Chandra Lok Housing Society of Ghaziabad, of which he was made the general secretary in 1975. Here starts Abul Fazl Farooqi’s tale of his ‘practical life’ (‘amli zindagi), which occupies more than two thirds of the book.

A narrative of moral achievement

11 All along this narrative, Farooqi projects himself as a moral achiever. This posture is epitomized in the following sentence, strategically placed at the beginning of his success story: ‘I took to business, I crossed difficult ditches of business, earned a lot, but Allah is the witness that I never earned a single paisa illegitimately’ (Main ne karobar kiya. Karobar ki dushvar ghatiyon ko par kiya. Khub kamaya, lekin Allah gavah hai ki ek paisa bhi haram nahin kamaya) (Farooqi 2000: 40). Later in the text, he uses a more idiomatic language to capture this exemplary business ethic: ‘I never held money with my teeth’ (Kabhi main ne dolat ko dant se nahin pakra) (Farooqi 2000: 114).

12 Farooqi tells us that if he mentions this business ethic, it is because entrepreneurs of his kind are often suspect of dishonesty. The following extract, which immediately follows the aforementioned statement of good morality, deserves to be quoted at length for it constitutes the longest and most explicit enunciation by Abul Fazl Farooqi of his own exemplarity: Generally people do not have a good opinion about persons doing land business, called property dealers. It is rightly so. But there are exceptions in every matter. Anyway, my case is somewhat different from other property dealers at present. No doubt, a man is made of many mistakes. I might have spoken a lie at times, but I

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never dared to speak a lie intentionally. I never attempted to intentionally deceive anyone. Every aspect of my business would be open and transparent to me and to my customers, irrespective of any consideration of profit or loss. Often after consideration, I have suffered a loss so as to avoid deceiving. Allah immediately benefited me in return (Farooqi 2000: 50). 13 Abul Fazl Farooqi here aims to launder his economic success in the Sunna. Renouncing exemplarity in the statistical sense and instead claiming some form of exceptionality, he works at dissociating from the crowd of real-estate developers in order to project himself as a moral entrepreneur walking in the footsteps of the Prophet: ‘To be a trader is to be virtuous, but the ‘trading mentality’ is cursed. Doing trade according to the Sunna is a means of goodness and protection in matters of both faith and worldly affairs’ (Tajir hona sawab hai aur ‘tajirana zahaniyat’ bʻais ʻazab. Sunnat ke mutabiq tijarat karna din aur duniya donon ke liye bʻais khair-o-salamati hai) (Farooqi 2000: 38).

14 Farooqi’s attempt at moralizing his business ventures and projecting himself as a role model in the process is not limited to an invocation of the Prophet’s own commercial endeavours, though. Echoing contemporary thinkers of ‘Islamic economics’, this pious bourgeois understands Islam as a moral code which purpose is to ‘introduce restraints on the hedonistic individual’ (Tripp 2006: 124). Hence, Farooqi’s evocation of his economic success, and more generally of the sanctity of commerce, is counterbalanced by a virulent critique of materialism and hedonism, which he associates with ‘Western culture’ (maghribi tahzib), presented as the last horizon of ‘Hindu culture’: In many matters they [the ‘standard-bearers of Hindu culture’] are looking for their own culture in that of the West. They regard the music and dances of Western culture as a reflection of their own culture. So, on the basis of some give and take, they are trying to present their ancient culture and civilisation on the Western pattern (Farooqi 2000: 150).7 15 This dual critique of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Western’ cultures culminates in Farooqi’s rabid attack against the practice of dowry, which from his point of view epitomizes the materialistic spirit of the Western-Hindu cultural conglomerate threatening Muslims’ moral integrity. In order to suggest how pervasive this materialism would be in contemporary Indian society, Farooqi confesses that he himself was not immune to the satanic lures of the dowry system. Although his own wedding was characterised by its ‘simplicity’ (sadagi), this was not the case for two of his daughters: I got my two daughters married. I regret that they were both married according to this custom [rasm-o-rivaj]. I had never thought of doing it in that way. I disliked that sort of marriage, still I had to do what society accepted as a matter of practice [dastur]. I have always preferred simplicity, but society is the victim of a malady which has affected the learned and the illiterate alike (Farooqi 2000: 164). 16 This critique of materialism and more generally of ‘Western’ culture and economic models of development echoes that of the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938), one of the earliest promoters of the concept of ‘Islamic economics’ (Kuran 1997), whose poetry Farooqi quotes extensively throughout his autobiography— carefully omitting that Iqbal showed some inclinations towards socialism in the later part of his life.8 Farooqi is also aware of a famous hadith which attributes to the Prophet the following saying: ‘Wealth is the test of my community’.9 In other words, material success would be the greatest challenge to individual and collective ‘moral fortitude’ (Tripp 2006: 65). Unfortunately, from Farooqi’s point of view, most Muslim entrepreneurs have failed this morality test: ‘The conflict of wealth [fitna-i-mal] has overwhelmed a large number of people within the Umma in such a way that they make

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profits from bank interest, and consider the payment of zakat as a burden’ (Farooqi 2000: 133). Unlike these Muslim entrepreneurs gone astray, Farooqi professes a strong attachment to zakat: ‘I have said that I am a businessman, but I am a Muslim first. So I have never been reluctant to pay zakat. I calculate every paisa and generally give away zakat in the month of Ramzan’ (Farooqi 2000: 133). For Farooqi, the collection of zakat is intimately linked to the promotion of the public good (al-khair)10 within the Umma, and he pronounces himself in favour of a collective system of zakat collection, however difficult this may be practically (Farooqi 2000: 134).

17 This religious ‘tradition’,11 or more exactly its understanding by reformist Indo-Muslim intellectuals of the early 20th century such as Iqbal, 12 constitutes Abul Fazl Farooqi’s ‘moral compass’ (Tripp 2006: 194). His ascetic business ethic is also consonant with earlier conceptions of the economy associated with Jain or Hindu merchant castes, whose family firms were ‘embedded in moral relations’ (Roy 2010: 98). Within these ‘moral communities’, the valorisation of social expenditure has generally been concomitant with ‘minimalist lifestyles’ (Roy 2010: 100). And this self-denial of conspicuous consumption has often been framed in the idiom of asceticism, although of a worldly type, which does not preclude the research of wealth and well-being as shown by James Laidlaw in his ethnography of Jaipur’s Jains (1995). 18 Despite its Indian genealogies, which can be traced back to the family firms of the modern Indian world and to later Muslim reformists, Abul Fazl Farooqi’s work ethic resonates with the Protestant spirit of capitalism. As such, it deserves to be ‘put into conversation’ with it, to use the terms of Anand Pandian and Daud Ali in their introduction to a collective volume confronting the conceptions of ‘ethical life’ in South Asia and in the West (Pandian & Ali 2010: 2). This similitude is all the more surprising, at least from an orthodox Weberian perspective, that Weber himself denied the existence of such a ‘spirit’ in India and in the Muslim world at large.13 To be more specific, Abul Fazl Farooqi’s autobiography often echoes that of Benjamin Franklin, although nothing in the former’s text suggests that he ever came across the latter’s Autobiography, abundantly commented upon by Weber. Against the latter, Farooqi’s text confirms that a distinctive Islamic spirit of capitalism, building on a rich ethical and religious corpus, is alive and kicking among the contemporary pious bourgeoisies of the Muslim world (Feillard 2004, Haenni 2005). As we shall see, Farooqi may not be as accomplished an ethic capitalist as current Muslim proponents of the ‘theology of prosperity’ (Feillard 2004: 113, Haenni 2005: 10), since he remains hesitant, even if rhetorically, about the sake of capitalist accumulation and its value in the Hereafter. Nevertheless, his business ethic shows striking affinities with the Protestant ‘spirit of capitalism’ in that it relies upon a similar moral code advocating hard work, asceticism and the systematic organization of one’s life in the service of God. Another affinity between Abul Fazl Farooqi and early Calvinist promoters of capitalism is not so much ideological as sociological and lies in his status of parvenu. As Weber suggests, the most vocal advocates of the capitalist spirit, in the infancy of the capitalist economy, were not old commercial elites but individuals of humble origins who were going through a process of rapid upward social mobility (Weber 2005: 28). Indeed, parvenus are prone to experiment a feeling of discrepancy between their newly acquired wealth and the values of frugality they were socialized in. This may result in a state of moral tension alien to older economic elites.14

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The ups and downs of Abul Fazl Farooqi’s business life

19 What did this moral entrepreneur exactly achieve? This is the object of the largest part of the book, detailing the ‘ups and downs’ (nasheb-o-faraz, the very title of the book) of Farooqi’s business life. This narrative starts with Abul Fazl Farooqi’s most notable endeavour: the development of a Muslim locality of South Delhi named after him, Abul Fazl Enclave (AFE). Due to space constraints, I will not go into the details of this project, which I have already dealt with elsewhere (Gayer 2011). Suffice it to say, for the purpose of this article, that the development of AFE was resonant with Farooqi’s constitution as a moral Muslim entrepreneur serving his own interests as well as those of his community. From the beginning, he conceptualized AFE as a Muslim locality, where his coreligionists ‘could establish their social and family life according to their own culture [tahzib-o-kalchar]’ (Farooqi 2000: 64). The development of this area, adjacent to the Jamia Millia Islamia, started in 1978, after Farooqi acquired land from local (largely Hindu) landlords. But although some of Farooqi’s friends had initially showed interest for acquiring land in the area, many of them backtracked later on and, at the beginning of the 1980s, Farooqi faced the risk of bankruptcy. If he managed to avoid this fate, it is only due to the intervention of India’s prime Islamist organisation, the Jamaʻat-i-Islami Hind (JiH), whose cadres acquired a hundred plots from Abul Fazl Farooqi before the headquarters of the JiH was shifted from Old Delhi to AFE in 1991. For Farooqi, this timely intervention of the JiH was the sign of a heavenly blessing on his project: ‘I felt as if my agreement with the Jamaʻat was favoured by Allah’ (mahsus hua ki markaz jamaʻat se mʻuahidah kaliyatan man Allah tha) (Farooqi 2000: 70). More prosaically, Farooqi’s economic partnership with the JiH was a rare opportunity to find a solvable and reliable business partner. In any case, this is how it is perceived by some residents of the neighbourhood, who believe that Farooqi benefited economically rather than morally from his agreement with the JiH. Thus, for a local Urdu journalist, Farooqi found practical advantages, and not merely ethical contentment, in doing business with an organization of such high moral standards: ‘You know, the land business is very corrupt, it involves a lot of cheating. The people of Jamaʻat, on the contrary, they are clean. So Abul Fazl Farooqi enjoyed working with them’.15 Although the practical advantages of working with the Jamaʻat are denied by Abul Fazl Farooqi’s brother and business partner, Faznullah,16 they cannot be entirely eluded, at least as far as social perceptions of the Farooqis’ business ventures are concerned.

20 If the development of AFE was undoubtedly Abul Fazl Farooqi’s most significant business venture, it was not the last. In 1981, he acquired land in Noida (U.P.) and developed a new colony known as Kasturi Farm Land, which attracted both Hindu and Muslim elites of Delhi (successful entrepreneurs, military officers, IAS officers, ministers...). This project proved highly profitable for Farooqi but also for his customers, many of whom later on sold their plots to the Noida Authority for three or four times their initial value (Farooqi 2000: 86). Around the same time, Abul Fazl Farooqi developed another Muslim enclave within the larger Vasundhara Enclave (Delhi). Built under the Abul Fazl Housing Cooperative Society, the Abul Fazl Apartments catered to the needs of upper middle class Muslims and intended to provide them with a safe and morally sound environment. Special arrangements were made to ensure the cleanliness and ‘purity’ (paki) of these residences, in order to contribute to the moral uplifting of Muslim upper classes while contradicting common clichés about Muslims’ low hygienic standards (Farooqi 2000: 95). The last of Abul Fazl

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Farooqi’s major projects also partook in this agenda of moral reform and social uplifting. Established in 2000 in Noida, the M.A.F. [Mohammad Abul Fazl Farooqi] Academy is a co-educational English-medium school which had approximately 110 students in 2003. Unlike most of Farooqi’s projects, this educational institution is not religiously tainted and aims to attract Hindu as well as Muslim students, in order to prepare them ‘for construction and reformation’ (duniya ki tʻamir aur islah ke liye) (Farooqi 2000: 199).

An uneasy role model: the inner tensions of Nasheb-o- Faraz

21 Abul Fazl Farooqi’s narrative is not merely that of a success story. It is also, and more originally, an attempt at moralising this economic success and projecting it as an act of piety. This conformity to a supposedly ‘traditional’ Islamic moral economy of capitalism does not only help Farooqi sanctify his worldly activities. From his point of view, it is also a major reason for his worldly success, which he projects as an example for other Indian Muslims but cannot help to be uneasy with—or at least to claim so.

Abul Fazl Farooqi and the issue of predestination

22 The Calvinist theory of predestination, so central to Weber’s appraisal of the distinctive Protestant spirit of capitalism, developed in a plural world where Calvinists competed with rival reformed movements (such as the Zwinglians, Mennonites and Anabaptists) but also among themselves (particularly within the Church of England). Calvin himself did not put predestination at the centre of his preoccupations and that stress came later (Higman 1996: 98). It was an outcome of the aforementioned competitive interactions and came to singularize ‘orthodox’ Calvinists by way of a doctrine of worldly success-cum-spiritual achievement which became their trademark—and which remains contested to this day by rival Protestant sects, particularly in the US where the issue of predestination has remained a bone of contention and an agent of religious change since the 18th century (Thuesen 1999). For a successful Sunni Muslim entrepreneur of late 20th century India such as Abul Fazl Farooqi, the issue of predestination resonates very differently than for the ‘godly merchants’ of 16th century Europe (Grell 1996: 254). Nonetheless, it remains a matter of concern. On the one side, the issue of fate (qadr) is generally considered to be ‘solved’ by Sunnis—at least from a theological point of view- since the defeat of the Jabriyya and the Qadariyya at the beginning of the 10th century. But on the other side, Abul Fazl Farooqi lived in a country demographically, as well as economically and politically, dominated by Hindus, whose commonality across caste and sectarian divides largely relies on a highly formalised theory of predestination. As we shall see, this has been a source of anxiety for Abul Fazl Farooqi, as well as an opportunity to wrap his worldly success into an ‘orthodox’ Islamic idiom.

23 In order to fully appreciate Farooqi’s stand on this issue, it is necessary to recall, even if briefly, the nature and outcome of the debate between the Jabriyya, the Qadariyya and those who would emerge as the ‘orthodox’ Sunnis. The Jabriyya and the Qadariyya (whose positions on this matter were adopted by the Mutazilis) professed opposite but equally extreme conceptions of fate (as ‘compulsionists’, the former denied free will in

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the face of God’s decrees, whereas the latter considered that God had granted absolute freedom to mankind, therefore making it the sole culprit for the existence of evil). The ‘orthodox’ Sunni position which emerged victorious from these early theological debates was a middle-ground one. Formalized by personalities such as Ibn Umar, son of the second Caliph Umar (ca. 614-693), it claimed that man was granted freedom of will but that God is omniscient and has knowledge of every human action without any time restriction. This ‘orthodox’ Sunni view on the issue of fate, with its denial of predestination, is shared by Abul Fazl Farooqi. But in his case, this theological stand is less related to coreligionists (even to lay Muslims, more inclined to fatalism than theologians) than to the majority community of the Hindus. This point deserves further investigation as Farooqi’s perceptions of Hindus and the recollections of his personal and professional interactions with them constitutes a substantial part of the book, with an entire chapter being devoted to ‘Hindu-Muslim unity’. In fact, far from promoting inter-communal amity, this chapter consists in a long litany of recriminations against the ‘community of idol worshippers’ (but parast qawm), suggesting that the very few qualities that Hindus may have are all of Muslim-import: I am sure that even today Muslims are much ahead of Hindus in gentleness [sharafat], culture [tahzib] and civilised behaviour [saqafat], for Muslims have been custodians of these virtues. If Hindus have these qualities these days, they should be indebted to Muslims for these (Farooqi 2000: 106). 24 In his indictment of Hindu culture, ethics and faith, Farooqi does not spare the karmic theory of predestination and in one of the rare anecdotes of the text he clarifies his stand on the issue of fate, hereby presenting to the reader a preliminary Islamic assessment of his worldly success. This anecdote consists in a narrative of an encounter with a ‘Panditji’ during a visit to Bhopal. While Farooqi and his wife are walking around the city, where they have come to get photographed in a local studio, this unsolicited ‘Panditji’ rushes towards them and informs them that they will soon give birth to a male heir and make a profit of 100,000 rupees. When both predictions turn out to be true, Farooqi is deeply disturbed, but he concludes that his meeting with the ‘Panditji’ was a ‘test’ (azmaish) and that ‘Maybe the devil himself came to us in the garb of Panditji.’ In conformity to the Sunni ‘orthodox’ view on fate summarized above, Farooqi adds that he and his wife ‘believed that the incident occurred as Allah wanted it to’ (Farooqi 2000: 51). Rather than suggesting a belief in predestination, this episode is on the contrary a critique of such beliefs: the Panditji, who epitomises the belief in karmic laws, is an agent of the devil if not the devil himself and the whole incident attests of the moral autonomy of God’s creatures. Farooqi and his wife had the choice to believe in the divine inspiration of the Panditji, and thus in predestination. If they did not, it is only due to their strict adherence to Islamic ‘orthodoxy’. Thus, when Farooqi later claims that ‘Allah blessed me with great abundance in my business’ (Mere karobar mein Allah tʻala ne bari barakat ʻata farmai hai) (Farooqi 2000: 100), he does not refer to a form of divine ‘grace’ in the Calvinist sense but rather to a ‘blessing’ (barakat) sanctioning a righteous course of action.17

Abul Fazl Farooqi’s moral utilitarianism

25 Although Abul Fazl Farooqi remains evasive on his sectarian affiliation, the chapter which he devotes to his ‘academic and religious inclinations’ (ʻilmi-o-dini rujhan) attests of his Deobandi leanings, and more specifically of his sympathy for the Tablighi Jamaʻat

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and the Jamaʻat-i-Islami (or at least for some of their leaders, such as ‘Maulana Obaidullah’18 and Abdul Azim Khan, respectively). Thus, Farooqi’s claims that ‘these days the original face of Islam has been disfigured’ (islam ki asli shakal maskh kar di gai hai) and that ‘it has become a [mere] collection of rituals’ (rasumat ka majmuʻa ban kar rah gaya hai) (Farooqi 2000: 115)19 are consonant with the worldviews of Deobandi reformists and more specifically with those of Tablighi proselytes and Jamaʻati Islamists, who are equally committed to re-Islamizing the Umma, even if they diverge in their methods and political orientations.

26 This claim to Sunni ‘orthodoxy’, through the practice of a ‘pure’ and self-conscious Islam, devoid of ritualism and Hindu influences, is reiterated by Abul Fazl Farooqi all along the text. According to him, this quality results from his primary socialization, under the moral guidance of his pious mother: ‘As a result of the efforts and blessings [duʻa, literally prayers] of my mother, all aspects of my upbringing were deeply ingrained in my heart and mind’ (Farooqi 2000: 41). In a more agentic mode, Farooqi also looks at his economic success as a triumph of his own free will, claiming that ‘Thank God, I am not a dreaming person [khwab ka insan]; I am a man of action [ʻamli insan]. From the very beginning, I have been believing in ‘building life with action’ [ʻ amal se zindagi banti hai]’ (Farooqi 2000: 40). In another part of the text, he points at the combined effects of his primary socialization and free will all along his life course: ‘It is not that opportunities for becoming a king overnight were not available in the market, but it was my conscious resolve to stick to honesty [imandari par qaim rahun], for the high principles of Islam taught by my mother were ever fresh in my mind’ (Farooqi 2000: 100). This inherited morality coexisting with a powerful subjectivity is continuously reinvigorated through an unmediated relation with God. Here lies the third, and probably the most important of Farooqi’s own explanations to his economic success, which takes the form of a moral utilitarianism: worldly success is a god-sent reward to the moral entrepreneur, the outcome of a process of action/reaction under the prescient gaze of the almighty, which makes moral enterprise a rational choice in this world as well as in the next (although in a more ambivalent way, as we shall see later). It is probably here that Abul Fazl Farooqi’s work ethic presents the closest affinities with the Protestant ethos of capitalism as conceptualized by Weber.20 In his narrative, economic success appears as the result of a contractual relation between the moral entrepreneur and his creator. In this framework, even actions seemingly irrational from an economic point of view—such as suffering a financial loss ‘so as to avoid deceiving’—are ultimately profitable as Allah ‘immediately’ compensates economic loss by opening new business opportunities. What this line of argument suggests is that, on the long run, morality pays. But what does really constitute a moral subject?

Abul Fazl Farooqi’s crisis of subjectivation

27 Abul Fazl Farooqi’s narrative is an attempt by a God-fearing capitalist to constitute himself as a moral subject in a dual and not mutually exclusive movement of subjection (to the power of God) and subjectivism (through a claim of personal authorship over his life trajectory). In other words, this autobiography is a story of subjectivation,21 questioning the conditions of recognition of oneself as a moral ‘subject’, in the two senses of the term. This ‘hermeneutic of the Self’ (Foucault 1984a: 13), consonant with and possibly informed by Iqbal’s theory of khudi, is characterized by a state of tension.

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Farooqi’s subjectivist impulses confront the moral economy of conventional Indo- Persianate autobiographies, with its emphasis on humility and its disqualification of literary hubris (Metcalf 2004). Following Foucault, we can see in Farooqi’s attempt at overcoming this dilemma a response to a ‘crisis of subjectivation’ deriving from ‘a difficulty for the individual to constitute himself as a moral subject of his conducts’ (Foucault 1984b: 131). Farooqi’s moral utilitarianism is an idiosyncratic answer to this dilemma, although not an isolated one in the contemporary Muslim world.22 His ‘Islamic calculus’, which ‘retains the utilitarian idea of the calculation of pain and pleasure as the basis for moral action, but extends it beyond this world to the next’ (Tripp 2006: 123), is not exempt of contradictions though. While endorsing a resolutely utilitarian worldview, including in his relationship to God himself, Farooqi blames Hindus for their own utilitarianism: ‘Every act of theirs is prompted by some interest [mufad]’ (Farooqi 2000: 97). More significantly, if Farooqi projects his material success as an example for other Indian Muslims, he is also adamant to denounce the ravages of materialism (madah parasti). At some point, his ascetic business ethic even leads him to question his success: Today I think that I have lost sixty years of my life. I have everything according to the present standard of living but still I feel I do not possess anything. My wealth cannot do away with my twenty-year old diabetes. I think that had I indulged in thinking about the Hereafter and had no wealth I would have been more fortunate [khush nasib] (Farooqi 2000: 126). 28 At the twilight of his life, Abul Fazl Farooqi seems hesitant about his true realisations and about the kind of example he ambitions to set. On the one side, his material success seems to validate his probity: if God has showered him with so many blessings, it can only be that he was his true servant. Although Farooqi is at odds with the idea of predestination, he echoes here the Calvinist ‘worldly ascetics’, who saw in their economic success a confirmation of their ‘grace’ and a success of God himself, acting through them (Weber 1996: 202). But on the other side, Farooqi poses as a contemplative Sufi, lamenting the vanity of worldly possessions. In his eyes (or at least in those of his projected self), worldly accomplishments do not only seem illusory at the footsteps of death: they threaten to become liabilities in the preparation to the Hereafter, the ultimate horizon of Farooqi’s narrative. At its breaking point, this narrative turns against itself, becoming the battlefield of two opposing conceptions of asceticism: one which embraces the world and one which refuses it. When the author’s ‘Islamic calculus’ is extended to the Hereafter, his worldly success appears as deceitful as a trick of the Devil, while the hubris displayed in its literary evocation takes all the appearances of a capital sin. If we consider that this uneasiness with economic success is not merely rhetorical—or that rhetoric is reality (Metcalf 2004)—Abul Fazl Farooqi clearly stands out from the adepts of ‘capitalist Islam’ (l’islam de marché), who are less apologetic about accumulating wealth in this world and less sceptical about the dividends of their economic success in the next (Feillard 2004, Haenni 2005). For all his doubts, which he does not hesitate to put forward in his narrative, Farooqi seems closer to the ‘worldly dervishes’ talked of by Weber, who may engage in worldly activities but who look for methods of salvation outside of the professional realm. Such methods of salvation, Weber tells us, may have an impact on professional careers, such as for ‘the pious Persian who sees his commerce prosper because of his strict commitment to truth’ (Weber 1996: 212). But whereas early Calvinists and contemporary advocates of the Islamic ‘theology of prosperity’ have found the certitudo salutis in the accumulation

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of wealth, ‘worldly dervishes’ have been doubtful that salvation could be found in worldly accomplishments. Farooqi may be professing a rather ‘light’ or even ‘lip- service’ form of Sufism (although he is keen to emphasise his morality and simplicity, he shows much less concern for spirituality and does not show any inclination towards mysticism). Nonetheless, his apparently oxymoronic statement—suggesting that he would have been more fortunate if only he had been poorer—should not be summarily discarded. Nowhere does this pious bourgeois reveal more explicitly, even if rhetorically, his uneasiness at constituting himself as a role model, not only for matters of literary and social convenience, but more importantly for the feelings of religious anxiety which he claims to be subject to at the end of his worldly journey and which his economic success, however moral it may have been, seems unable to extinguish.

The haji and the parvenu: preliminary remarks on the reception of Nasheb-o-Faraz

29 A word should be said, before concluding, on this text’s reception. Although it was published by regular editors, Abul Fazl Farooqi’s autobiography does not seem to have been commercialized. Most copies were distributed by the author himself to his close circle of friends and relatives. By chance, I was able to access one of the copies of the Urdu version of the text after it was consulted and commented upon by some members of this familial audience. This copy was handed over to me by one of Abul Fazl Farooqi’s grandsons, presently working with the publisher of the English translation of the text. When I consulted this copy of the text, I was struck by the fact that its readers seemed to have focused on a single section: that where Abul Fazl Farooqi mentions his repeated pilgrimages to Mecca. A small piece of paper had even been clipped to the page in question, listing the dates of Farooqi’s successive travels to Saudi Arabia for Haj and Umra. Indeed, the number of these visits is truly impressive: Farooqi completed Haj in 1970, 1982 and 2000, whereas he performed Umra in 1997, 1999 and 2003. This was, apparently, a source of great pride for his extended family, possibly more than any of his business achievements. On the contrary, Farooqi’s moralistic agenda does not seem to have found many takers within his own family. According to the grandson who handed me a copy of Nasheb-o-Faraz, the main reason for Farooqi’s moralistic diatribes against the ‘new generation’ was his having an ‘ill mannered’ (bad tamiz) daughter.23 In fact, the daughter in question is mentally challenged and, as such, occasionally behaves in a way that disrupts social conventions, a curse that Farooqi evokes at length, rather poignantly, in his narrative. Far from equating the mental condition of his daughter with immorality, Farooqi himself sees her as ‘very simple and innocent’ (woh intehai sadi aur uski ada mʻasum hai) (Farooqi 2000: 56). Nevertheless, from the point of view of his grandson, Farooqi’s moralistic discourse would be a cover-up, compensating his shame at having a daughter of ‘bad character.’ So much for the exemplary entrepreneur and the ascetic role model: within his own household, Farooqi seems to have been denied the exemplarity he claims, however ambivalently, in his autobiography.

30 Other reactions I have started gathering beyond Farooqi’s family circle also suggest that his claim to exemplarity was rarely taken at face value. Thus, for a young journalist of the local Urdu press who took the time to read Nasheb-o-Faraz, Abul Fazl Farooqi is a parvenu who lacks the social capital of the upper classes which he aims to

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emulate. His narrative would be a testimony to this, an act of hubris devoid of any literary value: Abul Fazl came from the lower stratus of society. Luckily, he became rich. He lives in a big house and made millions in the country. […] His autobiography is an emotional act. Many came from the lower level and reached the status of crorepati [millionaire], yet they did not feel the urge to write [their autobiography].24 31 What this critique suggests is that, through his autobiographical endeavour, Farooqi tried to elevate himself to the level of the Ashraf literati, without the necessary social capital. And this attempt at upward social mobility through literature would be an utter failure, bringing ridicule rather than social esteem to an amateur litterateur. Zafarul Islam Khan, the publisher of the English version of the text, is not as harsh in his perception of the text and its author, but he is equally reluctant to consider Abul Fazl Farooqi as a ‘role model’. He admits that Abul Fazl Farooqi himself financed the publication of this translation, while suggesting that the primary value of the text resides in its narrative of ‘a kind of success story’: People tend to embellish their role. He [Farooqi] was a businessman, making money. He is a business model, because Muslims don’t know how to do business. In North India at least, Muslims have been zamindars or artisans, not traders. […] I found this text interesting because it is a kind of success story. But I would not call him a role model.25 32 This critical assessment of Farooqi’s text by his own publisher points towards a conflict of qualification. By denying Abu Fazl Farooqi the label of ‘role model’, Zafarul Islam Khan denies him ‘civic greatness’ (i.e. public virtue transcending personal interests) and finds it more appropriate to express his exemplarity (or ‘greatness’, to use Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms [1991]) in terms of a ‘mercantile greatness.’ This operation amounts to a form of disqualification, as Zafarul Islam Khan considers the civic world and its normative principles ‘greater’ than the pursuit of private ends, which he equates the mercantile world with. Abul Fazl Farooqi’s grandson and the aforementioned local Urdu journalist, for their part, deny him ‘domestic greatness’, the former by questioning his moral authority within his khandan and the later by insisting upon his relatively low social extraction. These reactions to Abul Fazl Farooqi’s text thus point towards the difficulties inherent to such self-constructions of exemplarity in the context of contemporary India, where several common worlds coexist and collide,26 and where claims to greatness are no longer taken at face value - supposing they ever where - and are systematically put under trial, by being confronted to distinct and sometimes opposite conceptions of the common good.

Conclusion

33 The subject of Nasheb-o-Faraz is not so much a passive ‘servant of God’ (‘abd) as a self- conscious ‘individual’ (fard) who is acted upon by external forces, both human and divine, but who also claims authorship of his own life. This dual movement of subjectivation echoes that of many contemporary Muslim intellectuals, for whom ‘Re- connection with the self, imagined as a repository of identifiably Muslim virtues, and through the self to a specific understanding of God’s command, becomes the principal undertaking’ (Tripp 2006: 200). In the Indo-Muslim world, this reflexive movement has historical precedents which Abul Fazl Farooqi seems to have been familiar with. Thus, one of the major contributions of Farooqi’s favourite author, the poet-philosopher

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Allama Mohammad Iqbal, consisted in a reassessment of the notion of khudi (self), redefined as ‘individual self-affirmation […], leading to purposeful collective action’ (Jalal 2001: 178). Nevertheless, this exploration of the self is at odds with conventional Urdu life-stories, with their ‘dominant characteristic of passivity’ (Metcalf 2004: 138). More generally, Nasheb-o-Faraz singularizes itself from the majority of Indian autobiographies, which tend to display a complete indifference ‘towards the private, interior lives of their protagonists’ (Kumar 2008: 419). On the contrary, Abul Fazl Farooqi aims to deliver a highly personal account, as suggested by these concluding remarks: ‘Whatever I have narrated in my autobiography is my heart’s voice and I believe myself to be the first listener’ (Farooqi 2000: 172).

34 Throughout this story of subjectivation, Farooqi constitutes himself as a moral achiever, claiming exemplarity by a conjunction of moral rectitude and worldly achievements. But these two poles of Abul Fazl Farooqi’s self-professed exemplarity are not easy to reconcile. Farooqi aims to retrieve the moral from the economic, in order to restore what he perceives as the Islamic moral economy of capitalism. This leads him to articulate a virulent critique of materialism and hedonism, a critique which presents itself as a ‘traditionalist’ response to the perverse effects of modernity. But while pointing towards the ‘lack of fit in the inhabitation of modernity by its subjects’ (Kumar 2004: 442), this narrative also shows how pervasive modern forms of subjectivity can be, even insinuating in the narratives of their most uncompromising opponents. 35 From what I could gather so far, the reception of this text did not meet Abul Fazl Farooqi’s expectations. His readers as well as his publisher have been denying him the civic greatness he makes a claim to through his self-professed high moral standards, which are much more than statements of proper economic behaviour. As Boltanski and Thévenot suggest, the mercantile cité relies upon the ‘moral capacities’ of its inhabitants, who ‘must be able to transcend their singularities so as to agree on external goods […]’ (1991: 42). But the morality Abul Fazl Farooqi makes a claim to is of a whole other nature and is closer to the public virtue associated with the civic cité, i.e. an ability to overcome personal interests for the greater good (l’intérêt général) (Boltanski & Thévenot 1991: 145). The autobiographical pact which he establishes in the opening lines of the text is unequivocal on this point: Farooqi aims to ‘benefit’ the ‘future generation’ through his narrative of moral achievement. What puts him at odds with the model of the civic cité, however, is his restrictive definition of the ‘common world’ he claims to have benefited. To the exception of the MAF School, all his business ventures are presented as contributions to the greater good of Indian Muslims exclusively. Moreover, the high moral standards Farooqi makes a claim to are not reducible to statements of public virtue. They also serve his inscription into the worldly and otherworldly city of God, or to use Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s terms into the ‘cité of inspiration’. And it is in the confrontation of Farooqi’s accomplishments to this model of competence that originate most of the inner tensions of his narrative. The system of allocation of greatness associated with the cité of inspiration relies upon notions which we have encountered all along the text, such as grace (the ultimate measure of greatness in this specific cité) and self-denial (the cardinal virtue of the ‘inspired’—be they mystics, renouncers, artists or political avant-gardes). And as Boltanski and Thévenot suggest, ‘the inspired cité [...] is the place of a permanent tension with the greatness of opinion. Indeed, withdrawing from the world, so as to let inspiration

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flourish, implies the deployment of more or less radical ascetic procedures. But when the ascetic accomplishes extraordinary tasks, he draws crowds and must run away to escape his own fame’ (Boltanski & Thévenot 1991: 115). In the case of Abul Fazl Farooqi, though, this tension was not the outcome of ascetic virtuosity. As he himself makes it clear in the justifications which establish his autobiographical pact, this tension lies in the very nature of his literary project. The self-proclamation of ascetic exemplarity and divine inspiration is oxymoronic in nature. Worse, it suggests madness on the part of the arrogant fool claiming greatness beyond his reach. 36 As far as his audience is concerned, the only ‘greatness’ that Farooqi seems to have been allotted is of a mercantile nature. This is the sense of the distinction made by Zafarul Islam Khan between ‘role model’ and ‘business model’, with Farooqi falling into the second category according to his publisher. These disqualifications point towards the difficulties encountered by economic achievers in contemporary India, once they make a claim to public virtues other than economic. Their justifications are not necessarily taken at face value by the public and may not be sufficient to establish their greatness in the civic cité, which has become the highest normative order of India’s highly stratified but increasingly democratic society.27 37 Finally, it should be emphasised that Abul Fazl Farooqi’s dual register of subjectivation is not an isolated and anachronistic attempt to reconcile submission to God and worldly accomplishments. As far as Indian Muslims are concerned, my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Abul Fazl Enclave28 confirms the appeal of pious capitalism over middle- class Muslim residents of the neighbourhood. This seems particularly true for the highly educated youths who could constitute the vanguard of India’s ‘new’ Muslim middle class29 and who are adamant to succeed economically while clinging to their religious values. The desire manifested by these youths to live in a ‘religious environment’ (dini environment) while participating to the fullest to India’s new economy informs a lifestyle similar to that of the ‘modernists’ gathered around Syed Ahmed Khan in the 19th century, with their ambition to remain strict Muslims while making the best of the economic opportunities offered by the Raj. What remains to be seen is whether this ‘new’ ethic of capitalism will retain an ascetic outlook or evolve into a fully blown ‘theology of prosperity’ which could constitute a morally sound answer to such ‘dilemmas of subjectivity’ (Bertrand 2004: 76) as that experienced by Abul Fazl Farooqi.

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Arnold, David (2004) ‘The Self and the Cell: Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories’, in David Arnold & Stuart Blackburn (eds.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 29-53.

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Arnold, David; Blackburn, Stuart (2004) ‘Introduction: Life Histories in India’, in David Arnold & Stuart Blackburn (eds.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 1-28.

Bayart, Jean-François (2004) ‘Total Subjectivation’, in Jean-François Bayart & Jean-Pierre Warnier (eds.), Matière à politique: Le pouvoir, les corps et les choses, Paris: Karthala, pp. 215-253.

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Boltanski, Luc; Thévenot, Laurent (1991) De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur, Paris: Gallimard.

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Gayer, Laurent (2011, forthcoming) ‘Safe and Sound: The Search for a ‘Good Environment’ in Abul Fazl Enclave, Delhi’, in Laurent Gayer & Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), Muslims of the Indian City, London & New York: Hurst, Columbia University Press.

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Khalidi, Omar (2006) Muslims in the Indian Economy, Delhi: Three Essays Collective.

Kumar, Udaya (2008) ‘Autobiography as a Way of Writing History: Personal Narratives from Kerala and the Inhabitation of Modernity’, in Partha Chatterjee & Raziuddin Aqil (eds.), History in the Vernacular, Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 418-448.

Kuran, Timur (2004) Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicament of Islamism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Laidlaw, James (1995) Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy and Society among the Jains, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lejeune, Philippe (1975) Le pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil.

Metcalf, Barbara (1993) ‘What Happened in Mecca: Mumtaz Mufti’s Labbaik’, in Robert Folkenflik (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, Stanford, Stanford University Press, pp. 149-167.

Metcalf, Barbara (2004) ‘The Past in the Present: Instruction, Pleasure, and Blessing in Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya’s Aap Biittii’, in David Arnold & Stuart Blackburn (eds.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 116-143.

Mir, Mustansir (2006) Iqbal, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Naudet, Jules (2008) ‘‘Paying-Back to Society’: Upward Social Mobility among Dalits’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 42 (3), pp. 413-441.

Pandian, Anand; Ali, Daud (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Anand Pandian & Daud Ali (eds.), Ethical Life in South Asia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-18.

Roy, Tirthankar (2010) Company of Kinsmen: Enterprise and Community in South Asian History, 1700-1940, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Shulman, David (2004) ‘Cowherd or King? The Sanskrit Biography of Ananda Ranga Pillai’, in David Arnold & Stuart Blackburn (eds.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 175-202.

Thuesen, Peter J. (2009) Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tripp, Charles (2006) Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vatuk, Sylvia (2004) ‘Hamara Daur-i-Hayat: An Indian Muslim Woman Writes Her Life’, in David Arnold & Stuart Blackburn (eds.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, Delhi: Permanent Black pp. 144-174.

Weber, Max (1996) Sociologie des religions, Paris: Gallimard.

Weber, Max (2005) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London & New York: Routledge, [1930].

NOTES

1. The two verses quoted here by Dr. Zakira Ghouse were taken from the poem Bayan-i-Musannif (about the author). 2. I will not use the term ‘subaltern’ here, as many of these autobiographers remained part of the economic or cultural elite.

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3. In the excerpts reproduced here, I have generally followed Rizwanullah’s translation for the English edition of the text (Farooqi 2006), except when otherwise indicated. The pagination is that of the Urdu version (Farooqi 2000). For matters of clarity and since this text does not only target specialists of South Asian Muslims or Urdu literature, I have followed a simplified system of transliteration which omits to signal long vowels (ā, ī, ū) as well as retroflex consonants (ṭ, ḍ, as (ﺶ) ’as ‘gh’, the letter ‘šīn (ﻍ) was transcribed as ‘kh’, the letter ğain (ﺥ) etc.). The letter xe as ʻ. Diacritical marks (hamza) are omitted and izāfa are transliterated (ﻉ) sh’ and the letter ’ain‘ as –‘i’-. 4. This English fortnightly exclusively deals with Muslim-related issues, whether in India or abroad. For its detractors, it is the voice of the most conservative elements of India’s Muslim population and it sustains a siege mentality within this population, by focusing on conspiracies (of the West or of the ‘Hindutva brigade’) against Muslims; cf. http://www.twocircles.net/ 2010feb02/milli_gazette_ten_years_community_newspaper.html 5. Chronological story-telling is a rare occurrence in Urdu biographies and autobiographies, which usually consist in a collection of temporally disjoint personal anecdotes and recollections of exemplary personalities (Metcalf 2004). 6. This is not to say that European or North American autobiographers ignored the anti-heroic posture of their South Asian counterparts; see for instance Samuel Johnson’s praise for the autobiographer versus the biographer, where he claims that the latter ‘ endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero’ (Johnson 1963: 262 in Folkenflick 1993: 7). Yet, as this quotation suggests, modern Western autobiographies generally aim to reveal the ‘true’ subjectivity of an individual, something alien to conventional South Asian autobiographies. 7. My translation. 8. This omission may not be intentional on Farooqi’s part, as many Indian Muslims are unaware of Iqbal’s socialist influences and perceive him, on the contrary, as a contradictor of Marx— whom he described in one his latest texts as ‘Moses without an epiphany, Jesus without a cross’ (quoted from Armaghan-i-Hijaz [The Gift of the Hijaz, 1938] by Mir 2006: 60). 9. Farooqi quotes this hadith in its Urdu translation: ‘Meri ummat ka fitna-i-mal hai’ (wealth is the [source of] conflict of my community) (Farooqi 2000: 133). 10. This Quranic term, which Farooqi uses extensively, refers to righteous individuals and communities. Charity (sadqa) is an integral part of the moral economy conveyed by this term. Thus, for Farooqi, ‘al-khair is like taking care of a sick person who needs medicine, good food and care, making all necessary provisions for him so that he gradually regains health’ (Farooqi 2000: 131). 11. As Timur Kuran (2004: x) shows, this religiously sanctioned economic ‘tradition’ was in fact invented in the mid-20th century: ‘until that time the economic content of discourses grounded in Islam’s traditional sources lacked systematization’. 12. There are no references in the text to other poets/philosophers. 13. In particular since, from Weber’s (1996: 212) point of view, there exists no religious ethic of the profession as vocation (Berufsethik) in Islam. 14. This is not systematic though: in his study of Indian Dalits who experienced a rapid process of upward social mobility, Jules Naudet (2008) shows that such feelings of guilt are hard to detect from personal narratives, even though these individuals are keen to ‘pay back to society’ for their success. 15. Interview by author, Abul Fazl Enclave (AFE), May 2010. 16. According to Faznullah, doing business with the JiH was not a sinecure, since the organization had very severe rules of functioning which slowed down its decision process (interview, Abul Fazl Enclave, November 2009).

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17. Yet, as pointed out by one of the anonymous referees, this attitude echoes that of Jains or Hindu banias considering their worldly success as the outcome of their good deeds in their past lives. 18. Possibly the Delhi-based Tablighi leader Muhammad Obaidullah Baliyavi. 19. My translation. 20. See for instance Weber’s (2005: 17)remarks on Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, where he suggests that ‘all Franklin’s moral attitudes are coloured with utilitarianism’. 21. Following Foucault and Deleuze, subjectivation is here understood as covering the techniques and procedures through which individuals or collectivities are constituted as moral subjects— both in the sense of active agents, authors of their own life, and in the sense of participants to a regime of subjection; what matters, here, is not so much the identity of the Subject as his techniques of constitution and ‘recognition’ (Bayart 2004: 222). 22. Although it is doubtful that Farooqi was aware of this literature, some thinkers of Islamic economics, such as the Egyptian Yusuf Kamal, have placed the individual and his search for profit at the centre of their theoretical constructions (Tripp 2006: 123). 23. Conversation, AFE, November 2009. 24. Interview by author, AFE, May 2010. 25. Interview by author, AFE, October 2010. 26. Boltanski and Thevenot (1991: 97) themselves would probably argue that India does not fit in their model, as India remains a hierarchical society at odds with the principle of ‘common humanity’ which constitutes the cornerstone of these authors’ analytical model. Nevertheless, I would argue that the democratization of India and its current ‘silent revolution’, marked by the social and political emergence of Dalits and OBCs, has transformed the lowest sections of the society from ‘sub-human’ to ‘commoners’ or simply ‘the poor’, who remain stigmatized but who can be accommodated into a model of a common, even if hierarchical, humanity. 27. I am referring to Christophe Jaffrelot’s (2003) contribution on the current democratization of India’s democracy, following the recent political affirmation of the country’s lower castes. 28. I started visiting regularly this neighborhood in October 2008. In October-November 2009, I stayed with a local Muslim family and conducted an ethnography of AFE’s ‘Islamist class’ (Ahmad 2009), before conducting a series of interviews with residents of different sectarian and professional backgrounds. The preliminary results of this fieldwork will be presented in Gayer (2011). 29. At this stage, it remains difficult to substantiate this hypothesis of a ‘new’ Muslim middle class, although recent studies tend to suggest that, along traditional elites belonging to the Ashrafiyya, a new blend of Muslim entrepreneur is presently emerging in India (Khalidi 2006).

RÉSUMÉS

Although life-stories have been playing a central role in the construction of exemplarity in South Asia for centuries, the autobiographical genre was a latecomer on the region’s literary scene. It only developed in the late nineteenth, early 20th century and was constrained by conventional ‘rules of reticence’, which discouraged narratives of self-aggrandizement. Nasheb-o-Faraz (Ups and Downs), the autobiography of the Delhi-based real estate entrepreneur Mohammad Abul Fazl Farooqi (born ca. 1940), which constitutes the focus of this paper, is not immune to such ‘rules of

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reticence.’ Nevertheless, Farooqi takes some liberty with these moral and literary codes, and his narrative is a deeply subjective one, through which he aims to project himself as a role model, and more specifically as a moral achiever. This endeavour is not free of internal tensions and, all along the text, Farooqi seems hesitant about the example he ambitions to set. The reception of the text, within his family and beyond, also points to the limits of self-constructions of exemplarity in contemporary India, where the economy of greatness is undergoing major changes in a context of economic liberalization and political democratization.

INDEX

Keywords : autobiography, economic entrepreneurs, ethics of capitalism, Indian Muslims, politics of exemplarity

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A Controversial Role Model for Pakistani Women

Faiza Mushtaq

1 Al-Huda opened its first school of Islamic education in Islamabad in 1994. The institute branched out to Lahore and Karachi over the next few years and by now its network has grown to approximately 70 locations in urban areas all over Pakistan. More than 15,000 women1 have graduated with a diploma or certificate from one of Al-Huda’s courses while many more attend these lessons without enrolling formally. In addition, classes under the Al-Huda banner are carried out amongst Pakistani diaspora communities in North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. The founder and leader of this movement is a woman called Dr. Farhat Hashmi2. Her teachings form the core of study in Al-Huda classrooms and her lectures can attract audiences numbering in the thousands. Her message and fame are carried far and wide through audio cassettes and CDs, books and pamphlets, radio and television programs, and websites.

2 The curriculum at Al-Huda focuses on the texts of the Quran and Hadith,3 including translation from Arabic into Urdu and Hashmi’s extensive commentaries on their meaning, historical context and contemporary relevance. These lessons train women so they can understand and apply canonical Islamic teachings to their own lives, reform themselves, and then share this knowledge with others (Hashmi 2006). Farhat Hashmi’s interpretations are marked by the particular doctrinal stance that is identified as the Ahl-i Hadith branch of Sunni Islam in South Asia. This is a puritanical school of thought that rejects most customary practices and intermediaries to privilege foundational texts and individual religious responsibility.4 Hashmi also advocates non-religious education for women, preaches the value of scientific reasoning and logic, and uses modern management and marketing tools in organizing Al-Huda. 3 This combination of old and new forms of knowledge, of modern and traditional approaches to religious practice, has attracted urban educated women from Pakistan’s upper and middle classes. Many of them take up teaching and administrative positions across Al-Huda’s organizational network, volunteer for its social welfare projects, or stay involved with the group on an informal basis. The wealthy amongst them also make sizable donations of money and property which sustain the movement.

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Enthusiastic Al-Huda participants are animated by a deep admiration for Farhat Hashmi and by a desire to emulate her exemplary qualities of scholarship and piety. However, their willingness to accept her moral authority and alter their behavior is troubling for some of their contemporaries. 4 In this paper, I explore how Farhat Hashmi comes to hold the status of a role model for some women in Pakistan while others fail to be swayed by her appeal and are deeply hostile to her reformist mission. The opening sections analyze the social backgrounds of Hashmi as well as her support base, and are followed by a discussion of her opponents’ views. Al-Huda and Hashmi attract criticism from amongst various social groups in Pakistan but here I focus on two of the most vocal ones: the religious experts who have traditionally been in charge of Islamic institutions of learning, and the urban secular-liberal elites. 5 My analysis highlights the central role of social relationships and the interactions that Al-Huda students and teachers have with each other which convert them into Hashmi’s committed followers. The leader does not achieve her authoritative standing through a collection of static personal attributes. Instead, it is through her organizational innovations that her qualities can be displayed in recurrent collective experiences, where participants see her in action, feel the effects of authority, talk about it, and form bonds with others around them. In other words, Al-Huda’s institutional activities are crucial in turning Hashmi into a role model for her students and providing them with meaningful routines to carry over into their day-to-day lives. 6 Hashmi has built her appeal by deliberately distancing and contrasting Al-Huda with madrasas (Islamic religious schools) and other groups that provide Islamic education in Pakistan. Observers of Al-Huda also tend to highlight the ‘uniqueness’ of its accomplishments (Ahmad 2009: 1). However, the success of this movement has to be evaluated in light of its proximity to, and borrowings from, its contemporary rivals and historical predecessors. This context shapes the expectations and judgments formed about the movement by supporters and opponents alike. 7 My analysis is built upon twenty months of fieldwork at Al-Huda branches in three cities of Pakistan—Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad—as well as a week spent with Al- Huda in Toronto. These ethnographic observations are supplemented by formal interviews with Farhat Hashmi, Al-Huda students and staff members, and other key informants, textual material produced by Al-Huda, official records, and secondary literature.5

Leading by example

8 The official Al-Huda biographical sketch of its founder presents Farhat Hashmi as a figure dedicated to the service of Islam and motivated by her love of learning. Hashmi was born in Sargodha6 in 1957 as the eldest of twelve siblings, and she credits her father as being the most important influence in her early life. Abdur Rehman Hashmi was a lifelong member and local leader of the Jama’at-i-Islami7, and he taught his children the Quran and basic tenets of Islam at home. Farhat Hashmi herself was a head of the Jama’at’s student wing while she attended college in Sargodha. She received a Masters degree in Arabic from the University of Punjab in Lahore, and went on to marry a fellow student, Idrees Zubair. Both of them then taught at the International Islamic University (IIU) in the capital city of Islamabad, before proceeding together to the

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University of Glasgow to obtain their PhD degrees in Islamic Studies. During this period, they also traveled in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, visiting libraries and meeting with prominent Islamic scholars. Shortly after returning to Islamabad, Hashmi left her position at IIU and converted her informal Quran lessons in women’s homes into a full-fledged institute, i.e. Al-Huda, offering year-long structured courses of study. Her husband and daughters have also been involved with teaching at Al-Huda and have now followed her to Toronto where the school has opened a large branch.

9 Hashmi’s journey from the small provincial town of Sargodha to big cities like Lahore and Islamabad would have been less likely a generation ago, and was paved by Pakistani women’s increasing access to higher educational opportunities in public-sector schools like Punjab University and the International Islamic University. Her life as a student, teacher and administrator at these two institutions brought her into close contact with the dominant social discourses and state-sanctioned forms of associational life. This was the time of General Zia’s rule (1977-1988), when the Jama’at-i-Islami found official favor, Arabic training was encouraged and funded by the state, and Saudi Arabia was an important source of patronage and normative guidance. The tentative gains in female education and employment opportunities were confined to a few permissible fields and remained conditional upon women’s acceptance of moral regulation (in their appearance, conduct and spatial segregation) by male authority. 10 Hashmi chose to distance herself from the Jama’at-i-Islami’s political agenda when she launched her own teaching career, and the official narrative of her life makes no mention of her own or her family’s links with the Jama’at. Yet that early involvement clearly helped shape her conviction that individual disciplining and righteous lifestyles are the first step towards social reform, and exposed her to tools like study circles, pamphlets and Islamic literature towards attaining that goal. Travel to the United Kingdom and the Middle East gave Hashmi greater exposure to global networks of Islamic scholarship and modern pedagogical methods, both of which have a clear imprint on Al-Huda’s organization. Her critiques of madrasa education and the practices of Shi’i8 and Barelwi9 groups show clear sectarian influences from Saudi ulama and the Ahl-i Hadith, but are also shaped through interactions with the state and educational institutions in Pakistan. 11 There is nothing immediately striking about Hashmi’s personal appearance. She comes to her classes in casual dress, with muted makeup and few items of jewelry, and covers her head with a loosely-draped colored scarf matching her outfit.10 She is tall and heavy-set, in her early fifties, and wears large round reading glasses. Outside school she is seen in full hijab: an ankle-length black outer robe on the body and black scarf covering most of the head and face (niqab or face veil), leaving only the eyes exposed. This is how she appears to outsiders on television and in printed images, and only women who have attended a lecture or met her in some other capacity are familiar with her face. Her calm and measured voice is thus a much more recognizable feature to anyone who has heard one of her tapes or encountered a lecture on radio or television. Notably, men are also included in this extended audience although they cannot physically attend her lectures. A number of Al-Huda staff members confirmed that both male and female students register for the distance-learning course, and male prison inmates occasionally send letters of appreciation to the organization after being provided Hashmi’s tapes. There is a strand of conventional Islamic reasoning that

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considers the female voice to be sexually arousing, dangerous, and subject to restrictions (Mahmood 2005: 65-66, Hirschkind 2006: 111), which is contravened by the public availability of Hashmi’s religious lectures for both sexes. 12 Hashmi commanded the undivided attention of listeners in every large or small Al- Huda group I observed. Audience members would be scribbling furiously in their notebooks in an attempt to take down every word, or otherwise following along in their open books, and it was rare to find signs of distraction. Hashmi delivers her lectures at a brisk pace in conversational Urdu peppered with English words and phrases and interspersed with fluently recited Arabic verses. Certain standard elements are present in every lecture: urging devoted study of the Quran, Hadith and Arabic language; presenting lessons from the life of the Prophet Muhammad and other figures from Islamic tradition; including examples from current affairs, everyday experiences and her own life; inculcating techniques of self-examination and virtuous conduct. 13 Lambek (1990: 25) argues that mastery of abstract, written textual knowledge ‘is necessary for wielding religious authority [but]… is far from sufficient’, and it makes the bearer’s conduct subject to more stringent demands. Personal performance has to satisfy community standards and ethical imperatives before it becomes legitimate, and is also judged by the consequences it generates (Lambek 1990: 28-33). Similarly, many women in Pakistan who spoke to me in interviews about the appeal of Al-Huda, singled out Farhat Hashmi’s ability to communicate and connect with them in a way that other teachers and religious leaders have not done. All bring some implicit or explicit comparisons to their experiences with Al-Huda, including their school and college studies, childhood Quran lessons or other interactions with maulvis (ritual prayer leaders), dars (Islamic lessons), offered by Islamist parties and other women preachers, and televised or taped sermons and books by well-known Islamic figures. 14 Samar,11 a senior Al-Huda teacher in Karachi, explains how she had been reading various translations of the Quran on her own and thought she knew her religion well, but ‘the spirit’ had been missing. Once she heard Hashmi speak, she says, ‘it affected my heart immediately’. She claims this is because ‘she speaks at your own intellectual level, I mean, somebody who you could relate to… The Quran is of course a timeless book… she makes it relevant for us’. Kiran, another Al-Huda graduate from Islamabad and current instructor in Karachi, says she often used to go to class and feel that ‘Dr. Farhat is speaking about me. That’s the feeling we all get. Like she knows something about me and what I’m going through these days and this is why, exactly, she’s just speaking to me’. 15 Praise for Hashmi’s knowledge is commonly accompanied by the perception of her sincerity, leading many women to believe that she is only giving them direct and transparent access to the word of God. If she had wanted to mislead them, according to this logic, she would not have taught them Arabic, and they trust her interpretation of the texts because they have some tools to judge it with. Mehnaz, a student and donor at Al-Huda in Karachi, claims Hashmi has no ‘sectarian bias…, [has] complete openness to anyone and everyone’, and this assessment is shared by many of my respondents. This unifying theme in the face of sectarian conflict is a prominent part of Al-Huda’s pitch, and is typical of Ahl-i Hadith (and other Salafi) groups (Meijer 2009). 16 Al-Huda women’s testimonials describe their newfound ease at adopting virtuous practices, and cite similar transformations they have seen in multiple others. Frequently used metaphors include being shown a mirror in which the flawed self

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becomes revealed, and an opening of the heart after which God becomes closer. The most visible change in these women involves their adoption of some form of veiling, and giving up practices like listening to music or watching entertainment shows on television.12 Bushra, who teaches a weekly class at Al-Huda in Lahore, quoted this verse from the Quran: ‘I have made it easy for you to take a reminder from the Quran: is there anyone to take this reminder?’ (54: 17). She reflected that ‘you have to be pure before you can take the reminder… that’s what Dr. Farhat does for us, she interprets the Quran so purely for us, helps us relate to the example of Rasul Allah [the Prophet of God, i.e. Muhammad]…, we get hooked’. This dynamic, according to her, extends from individual transformation to collective experience, and becomes ‘the binding force between us… keeps us together’. Some of my respondents bring up the resistance and hostility others show towards Al-Huda, and explain it as a willful misunderstanding of Hashmi’s message. They sound confident that once the skeptics listen to her attentively they will start to act differently, and will come to share their moral concerns. 17 Hashmi is modest about her achievements, and shares the credits for Al-Huda’s success with her followers: ‘It’s not like I have done this alone, it’s been a collective effort from all of us… it’s the students who open up new branches… I just go wherever I’m called’ (Hashmi 2006). She has explained her mission as wanting to ‘help others experience the peace I felt by reading the Koran [sic]… When people benefit from something, they will be drawn to it’ (Ali 2003). She promises women ‘both spiritual benefit and practical guidance’ in her lessons (Gulf News 2002), and many of her supporters echo her words when describing her influence. A number of women dwelt on the theme of discipline and effort demanded by the grueling schedule of studies at Al-Huda which gradually becomes rewarding. They mention how Hashmi gave them the confidence to go out and teach the Quran, giving them the chance to lecture in class while they were her students. 18 Sympathetic observers report that Hashmi’s ‘soothing style articulates a message of personal reform. She reminds listeners of God’s mercy and forgiveness—in stark contrast to the dire warnings of hellfire favored by some mullahs’ (Khan 2004), and that ‘hearing Dr Hashmi is a cerebral experience… She is tolerant, abreast with what is going on in the world today and most of all not racist at all’ (Karachian 1999). This praise often betrays prior assumptions and comparisons against which Hashmi is judged: she is ‘a mild and soft-spoken lady who has none of the fiery disposition that the uninformed liberals would expect’ (Hussain 2000), and ‘herself speaks usually about broader concerns’ unlike other women at religious gatherings (Hyat 2001).

The support base for Al-Huda

19 The influence of Al-Huda as a movement reaches some social groups in Pakistan more readily than others. Gender is a dividing line, although men can access the teachings of the group even if they cannot physically participate in its gatherings. The urban locations of movement activities and the requirement of literacy place significant limits on who can join. These two factors mediate the impact of women’s socio-economic backgrounds, and decisively shape the boundaries of Al-Huda’s target audience.

20 The types of urban neighborhoods, where Al-Huda activities tend to cluster, contain important demographic indicators. In Karachi for instance, these areas include Clifton and Defence Housing Authority (DHA), which are by and large ‘inhabited by the elite of

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the city… [comprising of] bureaucrats, politicians, business executives and industrialists’ (Hasan 1999: 169). Other popular locations are in PECHS,13 North Nazimabad, Federal B Area, and Gulshan-i Iqbal—‘predominantly middle-income residential areas… [where] most of the residents work as middle level functionaries in banks, offices, factories in the city centre, the port or in the industrial estates’ (Hasan 1999: 169). At least 50% of Karachi’s population is estimated to live in its unplanned informal settlements (Hasan 1999: 166), and there is no Al-Huda branch catering specifically to them. 21 The list of Al-Huda locations in other Pakistani cities similarly ranges across upper- and middle-income neighborhoods.14 The chosen locations target residents who are not readily persuaded to leave their affluent enclaves and venture into other areas of their city, whether for work or recreation. The reverse, however, is not true and some of the women from poorer localities who do travel to Al-Huda branches have the option to stay in attached hostels. There are differences of age and class background among Al- Huda participants, and their composition is not as homogenous as it might appear from the outside. Some of the women hail from wealthy families, and make sizable donations of money and property to Al-Huda, others require financial support in order to afford these classes, and many are simultaneously engaged in other educational or occupational careers. 22 In the early years of Al-Huda’s diploma course, a bachelor’s degree was the minimum qualification required of incoming students. This condition was relaxed over time as the number of course offerings and the pool of applicants expanded. Now some Al- Huda programs accept the intermediate degree that colleges in Pakistan confer after twelve years of formal schooling, while others accept students who have completed ten years of education and matriculated from high school. Considering that only 32% of Pakistan’s total adult female population and 55% of urban women meet the criteria of basic literacy (UNESCO 2004: 7), those who finish high school or above are still in a minority. 23 The wealthy elites, who used to dominate Al-Huda gatherings in the early years— professional women, as well as wives of senior military officials, government bureaucrats and industrialists—, are increasingly joined by representatives from middle-income urban groups. Members of the movement widely share a belief that they are part of an ‘educated class’,15 and thus responsible for setting the standards of moral conduct for the rest of society. Farhat Hashmi’s lectures and Al-Huda class sessions frequently cite scriptural sources to argue that those who possess knowledge, resources, or other capabilities also bear greater responsibilities and accountability. I heard many of my respondents repeat the same line of reasoning to deflect criticism about Al-Huda’s elitism and to justify differences of social class and status. Nasreen, a regional coordinator for the organization in Karachi, claims they held programs in a five-star hotel only because the spacious halls could accommodate women ‘from all walks of life’ and, moreover, the domestic servants some women brought in with them to listen to the Quran ‘would never have entered that hotel for any other reason’. She continues: ‘But rich and educated people are the trend-setters, you can’t debate that… if a woman in Lalukhet16 starts wearing the hijab… what impact will it have?’ Tahira, an associate of Hashmi’s from the early days of Al-Huda in Islamabad, argues that the cultural endorsement and material resources of elites are necessary to achieve the movement’s mission of widespread social reform.

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24 Al-Huda consists of urban, literate women who believe that their education sets them apart from others in society whom they judge to be illiterate, rustic and morally suspect. They are aware of differences in class and status within their own ranks, and read them through indicators such as place of residence, style of dress, language— especially command over English—and manner of speech. However, they also emphasize what they have in common as participants in the movement: their mastery of text-based knowledge, the scholarly qualities of their leader Hashmi, and the discipline and moderation acquired through their program of character training. Both the formal presentations and informal conversations within the movement tend to portray condemned, sinful or un-Islamic practices with connotations of backwardness, irrationality and parochialism. In contrast, their own piety and religious knowledge are marked as being rational, analytical, scientific, literal and modern. In one sweep, they distance themselves from the religious learning of the madrasa system while also claiming superiority over the secular educational institutions whose practices they validate. In other words, participation in Al-Huda provides socially recognized symbolic capital to those who are desirous of improving their worldly status as well as to those who are already privileged. 25 Social networks play an important role in disseminating information about Al-Huda. Most of my respondents heard about Hashmi or her tapes and classes through relatives, friends, neighbors or casual acquaintances. A majority of women attend their first Al- Huda gathering because someone else suggests it or accompanies them to it. However, their reasons for staying and for deciding to become more fully involved differ not only from one person to the next but also over time for each individual. Women might join Al-Huda classes because of the boredom, lack of personal fulfillment or elitist concerns that some observers ascribe to them (e.g. Ali 2003, Matri 2003, Hyat 2001), but also due to a variety of other personal motivations, biographical turning points or circumstances. What they learn through their interactions in these Al-Huda settings, and the ties they form with other participants, create new sympathies, and shape the future course of their increasing or decreasing involvement. This finding echoes the conclusions that Munson (2002) reaches in his study of participants in the American pro-life movement. He shows how some form of personalized contact through their social networks initially draws individuals to the movement, rather than any concerns over abortion or any pre-existing pro-life beliefs. It is only after an initial period of activism that these individuals come to understand and identify with a pro-life position, and develop into committed activists. To understand why some individuals are mobilized and others are not, ‘both the focus on individual attributes and on the [macro-level] political process are inadequate’ (Munson 2002: 6). 26 It is also useful to remember Randall Collins’ (2001: 30) warning about ‘draw[ing] too sharp a dichotomy between excitement-seeking…participants, and the ‘morally serious’ participants who come out of a deeper sense of need or dedication’. Instead, he sees a continuum along which the ephemeral and the most deeply committed participants of any movement are arrayed. I also found an ongoing, evolving process by which women’s commitment towards Al-Huda’s goals is shaped, rather than a one-time decision or a single underlying motivation for joining. Individual women bring with them a variety of beliefs and expectations which end up getting modified, reinforced or unlearned through their recurrent participation in group activities. The

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communication of ideas and the generation of emotional bonds are both crucial mechanisms in helping forge new concerns and new ways of acting. 27 There are many ways in which the effects of sustained involvement with Al-Huda manifest themselves in women’s self-perceptions, behavior patterns and social relations. One important consequence of the classroom experience is to cast women from different generations, family backgrounds and social profiles in the mold of students. This a departure from the familial bonds and imagery common in some other Islamist groups where participants address each other as ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’.17 Familial networks are not altogether absent from Al-Huda gatherings, where one finds many mothers and daughters, cousins or other such members of kin groups attending together. However, in the classroom and across the Al-Huda network, these ties are superseded by loyalty towards Hashmi, and women come to relate to each other as fellow students. They look up to Hashmi not as a maternal figure but as a scholar and teacher they all share. The alternative community thus created is fired up by a zeal and higher purpose, and it can potentially override members’ other social relations or obligations. The students willingly subject themselves to the demands and discipline of study, and I witnessed many classroom interactions where the request for more homework assignments or additional study sessions was put forward by students rather than teachers. Many women cite the active and engaged participation of students and the chance to learn the Quran collectively, not alone at home, as adding to Al-Huda’s appeal.

The ulama’s response to dangerous innovations

28 The ulama18 in Pakistan have been vocal in their opposition to Farhat Hashmi and her work with Al-Huda. They often refer to Hashmi as a new fitna—an Arabic term used in the Quran and in Islamic discourse to convey multiple shades of meaning, including discord, trial, mischief and sedition. Many prominent ulama have written and spoken in public forums against her, and have issued formal opinions (fatwas) in response to questions and concerns raised by their followers. They cast Al-Huda’s activities as dangerous and corrupting, and forbid others from attending any of its classes, from listening to Hashmi’s tapes or consuming Al-Huda literature, and from supporting the organization by providing publicity or funds.

29 These ulama’s opinions 19 take it for granted that universities in the West carry out dubious research on Islam, with the aim of marginalizing traditional Islamic scholarship and the role of religion in public life. In this view, Farhat Hashmi’s PhD degree from a university in Glasgow under supervision from non-Muslims does more to discredit her than to certify her expertise or authority for interpreting core Islamic texts. They believe her teaching is dangerous because she can corrupt one’s entire faith by introducing even one wrong belief or insidious thought. In rejecting Hashmi’s authority, the ulama explicitly invoke the weight of their own qualifications and the historical evolution of their role as guardians of sacred knowledge. They compare their lifelong specialized training to the highly skilled work of professionals like doctors, engineers and lawyers, and point out how absurd it would be for laymen to start practicing in those fields. Neither Hashmi nor her students at Al-Huda have gone through the required eight-year basic course of study (dars-i Nizami) taught in South Asian madrasas, and these critics are especially offended by Al-Huda women who start

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teaching the Quran after a one- or two-year short course. They find the method of teaching at Al-Huda to be problematic as it relies only on direct translation of the Quran, ignoring the technical principles of Arabic grammar and rhetoric, Islamic theology and jurisprudence, and the scholarly opinion, debates and consensus developed over 1400 years of intellectual history (Abu Safwan 2003: 40-56). The ulama claim that they are carrying on the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad in providing guidance to Muslims through their exemplary practice, while Hashmi practices a religion of expediency, convenience and fabrications (Shabbir 2009). 30 Hashmi’s conduct as a woman is a deeply troubling and ever-present concern in the writings of these ulama and their followers. They condemn her for not obeying the norms of modesty (purdah), pointing out her inappropriate appearances on the media —where she lets her voice be heard by male strangers—and international travel without a proper male escort (Abu Safwan 2003: 112-5). They disagree strongly with Hashmi’s interpretation of Islamic custom that allows women to pray at a mosque rather than in the privacy of their homes, and use voluminous scriptural and scholarly citations to prove her views wrong. Other unorthodox prescriptions, in their view, include allowing women to offer their ritual prayers in the same style as men, to lead those prayers, and to recite the Quran during the menstrual period (Shabbir 2009, Abu Safwan 2003). They object to Al-Huda’s encouragement of women’s work outside the home, even if the work involves spreading a religious message, and chastize them for allowing male teachers in front of women with covered faces but without a physical barrier dividing the classroom. Some are critical of Hashmi for not taking on her husband’s last name, and accuse her of presenting all aspects of her own example as the authoritative model for women. 31 These ulama’s vehement rejection of Al-Huda stems from a belief that only certain kinds of knowledge are appropriate for women. They expect the general population of Muslims to acquire only the fundamentals of Islamic knowledge covering rituals and obligations, and assign fathers and husbands the responsibility for ensuring that their female wards obtain this learning (Abu Safwan 2003: 47-60). They believe it is especially dangerous for women to attempt the translation and explanation of the Quran because of their limited understanding, and pointedly advise that women confine themselves to matters covered in the Bihishti Zewar20 (Abu Safwan 2003: 60). This hostility towards Al- Huda women’s religious education is compounded by a suspicion of their privileged backgrounds, and many of the ulama pour scorn on Al-Huda gatherings as superficial meetings of fashionable women. They believe that the attractive presentation of religion at fancy locations is all that appeals to these women; the moral and spiritual benefits of instruction in mosques and madrasas are thought to be missing from the ‘clubs and hotels’ where they hold their classes (Abu Safwan 2003: 68). 32 These contestations are valuable in helping to chart the limits of Hashmi’s authority by revealing where her personal and organizational claims are effective and where they fall short. The opposition from a male, professional class of religious experts is in many ways a struggle over who should be allowed to speak for the Islamic tradition. Material and symbolic resources are both at stake, as the ulama’s mosques and madrasas compete for the same pool of private philanthropic funding that Al-Huda draws from. Both sides share many core beliefs and assumptions about the centrality of Islamic knowledge in the regulation of everyday life, and dispute the finer details in their interpretation of religious texts and practices.21 These competing claimants to Islamic

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religious authority hold each other to be in error, and ‘the exaggeration of small differences… [turns] into emblems of group difference’ (Collins 2001: 38).

The liberal critique of an outdated orthodoxy

33 In contrast to the traditionalist critics of Al-Huda, there are Pakistani men and women who are troubled more by Hashmi and her followers’ appropriation of the Islamic tradition than by their modern pedagogical or organizational practices. Their fundamental objection is to the philosophy of this movement that seeks social reform through the enforcement of religious practice and morality. Using arguments inspired by feminism, secular liberalism and alternative understandings of Islam, they criticize Al-Huda on two counts: its dogmatic approach towards religion and limiting prescriptions for women. The urban, educated, upper- and middle-class profile of this group is similar to the backgrounds of most Al-Huda members, and Hashmi’s credentials as a woman with a doctoral education do not disqualify her in their eyes as they do for the ulama. Instead this dispersed group of detractors challenges her moral narrative, the value of her contribution to women’s lives, and her overstepping the bounds of scholarly authority.

34 These commentators highlight the proximity of Hashmi’s interpretation of the Quran to conservative traditions within Islam, and the unquestioning acceptance of her views by her followers. Kamal (2001) describes herself as an educated woman from a ‘Muslim Sufi background’ who ‘cannot accept that a single person can be the repository of so much diverse knowledge, wisdom and expertise’. She is perturbed by the ‘zeal and self- righteousness’ of Al-Huda attendees ‘spouting Farhat Hashmi’s utterances as if they were the definitive word on Islam’ (Kamal 2001). Another self-described Sufi Muslim woman (Koonj 2005) laments the ‘closing of interpretive theological space’ that results from Hashmi’s claim to speak directly from God’s words. This ‘anti-intellectual’ stance, according to the blogger Koonj, can lead to dangerous over-simplifications that pit those who are with Hashmi against all others who are ‘against God’. Others echo the observation that Hashmi ‘fails to recognize the essential flexibility of Islam, and that she is engaged more in developing a cult than encouraging a true understanding of religion’ (Hyat 2001). Some suspect Hashmi of enriching herself and her family through financial manipulation while others blame her for creating disruptive changes in her followers’ lifestyles and views, leading to broken marriages and households. 35 Some observers worry whether Al-Huda’s conservative Islamic activism could lead to endorsement of, or participation in, radical forms of Islamic extremism. Obaid-Chinoy (2005) presents Al-Huda classes as a form of brainwashing, where ‘students nod and murmur in agreement’ and wall posters quoting Quranic passages give ‘instruction on how Muslims should live their lives – guidance on when to smile, cry, tell the truth, when to be angry’. Like the ulama, this group of critics is disdainful towards the religiosity of rich Al-Huda women and suspects that their search for meaningful activities is just a passing fad, now that ‘they have had their sleeveless blouses and coffee parties’ (Ali 2003). Many complain that these women adopt rituals without grasping their meanings, and are obsessed only with trivial concerns—‘issues like sitting or standing during a milad [a religious ceremony] or wearing nail polish during namaz [ritual prayer]’ (Ibrahim 2001). They mock women who start wearing new styles of head and body covering for their shallow understanding of pious norms: ‘Certainly,

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the ‘hijab’, often involving intricately wrapped headscarves, is more fashionable than going into ‘purdah’ or seclusion’ (Hyat 2001). 36 The practice of veiling and segregation leads critics to believe that Al-Huda is teaching women to ‘accept outdated gender roles’ (Obaid-Chinoy 2005). They argue that Al-Huda classes offer a false sense of comfort and sisterly community, making it difficult for the members to recognize or feel outrage against the oppression faced by less privileged women. Kamal (2001) believes that women’s activism cannot be meaningful unless it tackles ‘the real problems faced by Pakistani women: death in the marital home, usurped inheritance, honor killings, trafficking of women, violence against women and sexual harassment’. While the ulama mostly disagree with the methods and female composition of Al-Huda, these liberal critics take issue with the very goals of the movement. For some of them, acquiring religious knowledge and individual self- discipline are not worthwhile objectives at all, while others believe that a moral awakening is complete only if its leads to a larger social good. 37 An inflammatory opinion frequently attributed to Hashmi is her acceptance of polygamy as a Muslim man’s right and, more specifically, her encouraging women to ‘let their husbands marry a second time so ‘other sisters can also benefit’’ (Daily Times 2005). Many of the secular-liberal and moderate Muslim elites in Pakistan are skeptical about Al-Huda’s followers and what they perceive as misogynistic and self-righteous attitudes. These critics are ready to believe that Hashmi preaches women’s subservience to their husbands. Hashmi, on the other hand, is keen to attract recruits from within this social group by presenting herself as a liberal and feminist interpreter of Islam. She explicitly denies accusations of advocating polygamy (Obaid-Chinoy 2005), and claims that she is protecting women’s rights by arguing that the Quran orders a man to marry a woman with whom he has an illegal sexual affair. She frequently protests that her teachings inform women about the rights and dignity that Islam grants them (Obaid-Chinoy 2005, Ibrahim 2001). Hashmi’s critics deploy a discourse of universal human rights to judge her leadership, and find it wanting in standards of morality as well as modernity. Al-Huda fails to impart the ‘expansive, enlightened and empowering’ message of the Quran, according to Hassan (2002), who dismisses Hashmi’s ‘modernist’, ‘liberalizing’ and ‘feminist’ positions as mere public statements.

Creating avenues for mobilization and reform

38 Al-Huda’s focus on study of the Hadith and understanding the Quran in its original Arabic is coupled with an emphasis upon judging one’s own self and others in light of normative principles distilled from these texts. The significance of the movement’s achievement lies in making a standard repertoire of reformist concerns—shared with the Ahl-i Hadith tradition of Islam—relevant and meaningful enough for these women that it starts shaping their actions.

39 Sadaf Ahmad (2009)’s anthropological study of Al-Huda women in Islamabad recognizes the movement’s ability to shape members’ ideas, conduct and relationships, but explains these changes with reference to individual biographies and large-scale cultural processes. In this account, exposure to Al-Huda’s discourse can transform these individual women’s subjectivities because they already possess the relevant cultural codes and values. What is missing in this explanation is the institutional moorings and collective dimension of cultural change. This is a limitation of the

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‘framing’ approach (Snow et al 1986), which suggests that a social movement will find ready adherents if it frames its interpretations to resonate with pre-existing sets of beliefs. Mumtaz Ahmad (2010)’s examination of Farhat Hashmi’s ideas and authority, on the other hand, finds her sophisticated use of electronic media to be a primary reason for her success. Yet, the television appearances or tapes and CDs have a limited transformative impact on their own. The process of learning to emulate a role model and insert her teachings into one’s own life is an ongoing and painstaking one, and is facilitated in the group settings and face-to-face interactions in Al-Huda classrooms. It is through these ties of fellowship and loyalty to a group through which women can sustain their moral commitments, and feel themselves to be part of an authoritative consensus. 40 There are numerous practices and techniques employed in Al-Huda classrooms that produce these results, for instance tailoring the commentary and illustrations towards the practical concerns and experiences of each specific audience, eliciting the active participation of students, and building supportive ties between them. Students learn to apply textual lessons to their own lives and engage in constant self-examination through devices that can be carried outside the classroom and inserted into daily routines, such as cassettes and duas (supplications, prayers) for various occasions. Course packets include checklists with a series of questions for periodic self-analysis, covering personal ethics, social relations, and religious obligations.22 41 Several other providers of Islamic education in Pakistan—who are not part of the ulama fraternity nor trained in madrasas—have been active long before Al-Huda appeared on the scene. In addition to Jama’at-i-Islami’s religious lessons and study circles, there have been pioneering individuals, like Dr. Israr Ahmad and Maulana Tahirul Qadri (Ahmad 2010, Phillipon 2006) who have made some space for women in their non- traditional Islamic teaching institutes. One of the ways in which Al-Huda stands out from these competitors is in its borrowing of structures and practices from formal education: dedicated campus buildings, admission and registration requirements, testing and grading of students, awarding of diplomas and certificates, teacher training and fixed syllabi. Farhat Hashmi’s success is partly due to her timing, i.e. in tapping into the experiences and expectations of Pakistani women as they gained increased access to higher education over the 1980s and 1990s. Al-Huda’s competitive advantage might not last very long as its rivals are already adapting and selectively emulating its methods. These include some former Al-Huda students, one of Farhat Hashmi’s sisters (Nighat Hashmi), and other female instructors who have launched programs of religious study for women in Pakistani cities and who often consciously model themselves and their Islamic courses on Hashmi’s example. 42 Farhat Hashmi is a significant female authority figure because the number of women in contemporary Pakistan holding doctoral degrees or leadership positions is still limited but, even more so, because she has acted as a ‘cultural entrepreneur’ (DiMaggio 1982) to create a viable social movement through which her religious ideas get disseminated. The critical reception for the movement and its female leader underscores just how unusual it is in the history of South Asian Islam for women to take up positions of religious authority. 43 Traditional institutions of Islamic learning and scholarly networks across the Muslim world have historically been dominated by men, with women rarely having access to scholarly credentials or formal positions of authority. Separate madrasas for women in

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the Indian Subcontinent are a recent, post-colonial innovation, and are subsidiary units of organizations run by men. Muslim women, who have held positions of religious leadership, have instead relied more easily upon charismatic authority, and Kalmbach (2008: 38, 41-42) points to a long history of female mystics who have headed Sufi networks and been entitled to inherit charismatic saintliness. In her study of contemporary Islamic activists in Syria, she finds that ‘the authority of many female instructors is based more on reputation, teaching experience and personal style than on formal religious training’ (Kalmbach 2008: 44). Family connections are particularly important for many of these women who benefit from the recognition and status that other (usually male) family members enjoy. Mahmood (2005: 65) similarly points out the lack of formal training for many women teaching in Cairo’s contemporary mosque movement, claiming that ‘the ability to practice da’wa [religious outreach] has come to depend not so much on doctrinal expertise as on one’s moral uprightness and practical knowledge of the tradition’. 44 Hashmi invokes familiar forms of authority by mentioning her family background and asserting her personal moral probity, but displays her formal educational credentials even more prominently. Unlike many contemporary Islamic activists, she claims she can interpret and teach Islamic texts based not just on her practical knowledge but also on her years of study and research on Islam. Gaffney (1994: 30-35) argues that each title used for a contemporary Islamic teacher or preacher denotes a different local conception of knowledge (ilm), conveying the specific functions, degree of activism and social standing attached to that religious specialist. The Al-Huda movement literature emphasizes Hashmi’s doctoral degree, and she is widely addressed by her title of ‘Dr. Farhat Hashmi’,23 linking her to specialized forms of modern knowledge and the prestige associated with them. Many of her followers are as impressed by her citation of multiple scholarly references as they are by her accessible idiom and ability to switch between Urdu, English and Arabic languages when she is delivering a lecture. 45 Modernists, Islamists, Tablighis24 and many others argue against the ulama’s monopoly of Islamic learning based on the assumption that every individual has the capacity to understand and apply religious teachings. Hashmi has also adopted that line of reasoning and preaches it to her followers. In addition, she believes her own authoritative standing is enhanced by her specialized academic training and participation in transnational scholarly networks, enabling her to attack rivals’ interpretations and the structures in which their learning is embedded. The very public context in which her teaching is conducted—classrooms, cassette recordings, media appearances—is a departure from traditional patterns of women providing religious instruction to other women in homes and private spaces. Men are in charge of the curriculum and administration at most madrasas for girls in India (Winkelmann 2005) and Pakistan (Farooq 2005), and at the helm of Islamist movements with women’s wings like the Jama’at-i-Islami. In contrast, the key decision-making roles at Al-Huda are all filled by women. Hashmi’s husband, Idrees Zubair, has been involved with Al- Huda from the beginning as a board member and teacher, but she is primarily responsible for the choices and the energy that have shaped the movement. In spite of this autonomy and absence of direct male control, there are gender-specific limitations that this women’s movement has to either negotiate or accept. 46 Like other women venturing into public life, Hashmi has to strike a delicate balance between assertiveness in carving out new opportunities and compliance with existing

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norms of gender relations in Pakistan. Her strict observance of public veiling and frequent invocations of her own responsibilities as a mother, wife and daughter underscore her conformity with conservative social conventions. Nonetheless, as I showed above, her position leaves her open to attacks from both sides of the gender debate—from those who interpret it as a radical rupture of the status quo, and others who believe she is doing nothing to challenge women’s subordination. 47 The organization of Al-Huda gatherings as female-only spaces, outside domestic or kin- based arenas, has provided many women the opportunities for mobility, sociability and leadership positions that were otherwise not available to them. By claiming to know more about Islam and citing authoritative religious texts in their original Arabic form, these women try to exert influence over male and female members of their families and communities, regardless of their age or customary positions. There are limits to the authority these women can claim in the religious sphere, and certain roles that have been traditionally performed by male religious experts are still reserved for men, i.e. delivering the Friday sermon or the call to prayer, or officiating as a prayer leader for men. Al-Huda opens up new possibilities of action and of imagining womanhood by introducing elite, educated women into structures of transmitting Islamic religious learning and encouraging them to lead busy, active public lives as moral agents. Whether they end up supporting liberal, feminist visions of women’s liberation or undermining them, the changes wrought by this movement are already disrupting existing power relations and institutional arrangements in Pakistan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu Safwan, Mufti (ed.) (2003) Maghribi Jiddat Pasandi aur Al-Huda International [Western Modernism and Al-Huda International], Karachi: Jamhoor Ahl-i Sunnat wal Jamaat Pakistan.

Ahmad, Mumtaz (2010) ‘Media-Based Preachers and the Creation of New Muslim Publics in Pakistan’, in Mumtaz Ahmed, Dietrich Reetz & Thomas Johnson (eds.), Who Speaks for Islam? Muslim Grassroots Leaders and Popular Preachers in South Asia, The National Bureau of Asian Research, Special Report, number 22.

Ahmad, Sadaf (2009) Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Ali, Sahar (2003) ‘Pakistani Women Socialites Embrace Islam’, BBC News Online, 6 November.

Collins, Randall (2001) ‘Social Movements and the Focus of Emotional Attention’, in Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper & Francesca Polletta (eds.), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Daily Times. 2005. ‘Farhat Hashmi Operating in Canada’, 6 May.

DiMaggio, Paul (1982) ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America’, Media, Culture and Society, 4 (1), pp. 33-50.

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Farooq, Muhammad (2005) ‘Disciplining the Feminism: Girls’ Madrasa Education in Pakistan’, The Historian, 3 (2), pp. 64-88.

Gaffney, Patrick D. (1994) The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gulf News. 2002. ‘Scholar to hold Khatem-e-Quran’, 1 December.

Hasan, Arif (1999) Understanding Karachi: Planning and Reform for the Future, Karachi: City Press.

Hassan, Riffat (2002) ‘Islam and Human Rights in Pakistan: A Critical Analysis of the Positions of Three Contemporary Women’, Media Monitors Network, URL: http://www.mediamonitors.net/ riffathassan1.html

Hirschkind, Charles (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, New York: Columbia University Press.

Hussain, Mehvish (2000) ‘In Search of Faith?’, Herald, April.

Hyat, Kamila (2001) ‘Letter from Lahore: Hijab is New Fashion Statement among Wealthy’, Gulf News, 7 March.

Ibrahim, Samina (2001) ‘Interview with Farhat Hashmi’, Newsline, February.

Kalmbach, Hilary (2008) ‘Social and Religious Change in Damascus: One Case of Female Islamic Religious Authority’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 35 (1), pp. 37-57.

Kamal, Simi (2001) ‘The Farhat Hashmi Phenomena: A Critique’, Newsline, February.

Karachian (1999) ‘Review’, Dawn, 20 December.

Khan, Sheema (2004) ‘A Muslim Message More Irresistible than Hate’, The Globe and Mail, 7 September.

Koonj (2005) ‘Dr. Farhat Hashmi in Toronto’, URL: http://koonj.wordpress.com/2005/10/31/dr- farhat-hashmi-in-toronto/

Lambek, Michael (1990) ‘Certain Knowledge, Contestable Authority: Power and Practice on the Islamic Periphery’, American Ethnologist, 17 (1), pp. 23-40.

Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Matri, Shimaila (2003) ‘The Opiate of the Elite’, Newsline, December.

Meijer, Roel (ed.) (2009) Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, New York: Columbia University Press.

Munson, Ziad (2002) Becoming an Activist: Believers, Sympathizers and Mobilization in the American Pro- Life Movement, PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Mushtaq, Faiza (2010) New Claimants to Religious Authority: A Movement for Women’s Islamic Education, Moral Reform and Innovative Traditionalism, PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, Evanston (Illinois): Northwestern University.

Obaid-Chinoy, Sharmeen (2005) ‘Islamic School for Women: Faithful or Fundamental?’, The Globe and Mail, 29 October.

Philippon, Alix (2006) ‘Bridging Sufism and Islamism’, ISIM Review 17, pp.16-17.

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Shabbir, Maulvi Muhammad (2009) ‘Napaki ki halat mein talawat-i Quran aur aurat ki imamat ka hukam [Command on recitation of the Quran during a state of impurity and woman’s leadership of ritual prayers]’, AhleHaq, URL: http://ahlehaq.com/wordpress/?p=23

Shaheed, Farida (2002) Imagined Citizenship: Women, State & Politics in Pakistan, Lahore: Shirkat Gah Women’s Resource Centre.

Snow, David A.; Rochford Jr., E. Burke; Worden, Steven K.; Benford, Robert D. (1986) ‘Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization and Movement Participation’, American Sociological Review, 51, pp. 464-81.

UNESCO (2004) Literacy Trends in Pakistan, Islamabad: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Winkelmann, Mareike Jule (2005) From Behind the Curtain: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India, ISIM Dissertations, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

NOTES

1. Al-Huda does not share official enrollment or attendance figures. My calculation is based upon interviews, my own visits to various sites, secondary accounts, and documents from early years of the organization. 2. Hashmi, Farhat interview by author, 17 August 2006, Toronto. 3. The deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, considered an authoritative source of guidance in Islamic jurisprudence. 4. This stance has also been described as Wahhabism—the official ideology of the Saudi Arabian state—and Salafism, a label for movements that seek to emulate the earliest community of Islam. These labels are contentious as they frequently entail accusations of extremism and foreign influence, and erasures of local histories. 5. The doctoral dissertation in sociology on which this article is based (Mushtaq 2010) contains a detailed discussion of data and methods. 6. An agricultural and trading town in the Punjab province of Pakistan. 7. An Islamist party in Pakistan which participates in national politics, and has an urban following. It was founded in India in 1941 by the influential ideologue, Syed Abul Ala Maududi. 8. A community of Muslims that forms a substantial minority in Pakistan where Sunni Muslims are the dominant majority. 9. One of the sub-divisions within Sunni Islam in South Asia, opposed by other Sunni factions like the Deobandis and the Ahl-i Hadith. Barelwis emphasize devotion to the Prophet Muhammad as well as other saints and spiritual mediators, and participate in rituals of shrine worship, music, singing and popular celebrations. 10. The outfit consists of a qamiz (long tunic) and shalwar (baggy trousers) that is standard attire for Pakistani women. The scarf is referred to as either a dupatta or chadar (a long unstitched piece of cloth, diaphanous or opaque) which can be draped around the shoulders or over the head and shoulders. 11. Names of all interviewees have been changed to preserve confidentiality. 12. See Ahmad (2009) for stories of altered lifestyles and family relations for individual women as a result of their involvement with Al-Huda in Islamabad. 13. Pakistan Employees Cooperative Housing Society. The acronym is more widely used. 14. E.g. in Lahore these are: Defence, Cavalry Grounds, Gulberg, Model Town, Johar Town, Iqbal Town, Shadman, Nespak, and Westwood.

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15. They use both the English term and a roughly equivalent one in Urdu: ‘parha likha tabqa’. Expressions like these are common outside the movement as well, and signify the social, cultural and economic privileges that access to formal education can grant in stratified Pakistani society. Shaheed (2002: 168) reports that the majority of Pakistani women in a national survey see ‘inadequate or no education… as a basic reason for women’s oppressed condition. Women therefore value and seek education as an enabling factor and as an end in itself’. 16. The old name of a lower-middle class Karachi neighborhood (currently Liaqatabad) figuratively associated with backwardness. 17. Al-Huda women tend to address each other by their names, and refer to Farhat Hashmi using terms such as ‘Dr. Farhat’ and ustazah (female teacher). 18. Religious scholars (usually male) with formal training in Islamic subjects who are qualified to teach but also perform a variety of legal, advisory, ritual and other functions. 19. Originally published in Urdu-language Islamic journals, like Zarb-e-Momin and Al-Balagh, or issued by the fatwa departments of prominent madrasas like Darul Uloom Korangi, Jamia Farooqia and Jamiat al-Ulum al-Islamiyya, Binori Town. These Karachi-based publications and institutions are all representative of the Deobandi school of thought in South Asian Sunni Islam. 20. Bihishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments) is a popular advice manual for Muslim women, written in the early 20th century by Ashraf Ali Thanawi (1863-1943). 21. Despite some affinities between the Deobandi and Ahl-i Hadis schools of thought, as Ahmad (2009) suggests in her account of Al-Huda, there are serious and enduring lines of conflict between these two groups in South Asian history. The heated denunciations of Hashmi by her Deobandi critics pick on many of her signature Ahl-i Hadis positions. It is worth noting though, that most Al-Huda participants come from lay backgrounds and are not aware of these theological divides or sectarian labels that are attached to certain ritual practices and beliefs. 22. See chapter three of Mushtaq (2010) for an in-depth analysis of Al-Huda’s organizational practices and classroom learning activities. 23. The title is frequently used by popular male preachers in Pakistan and India like Dr. Israr Ahmed or Dr. Zakir Naik who are qualified as medical doctors. 24. Members of the Tablighi Jamaat, a grassroots Islamic proselytizing movement of lay Muslims that began in India in the 1920s and now has a loosely networked global presence.

ABSTRACTS

Al-Huda is a movement of Islamic education and reform with a dedicated female following in Pakistani cities. Its founder and leader is a woman, Dr. Farhat Hashmi, who has become a well- known public figure in Pakistan. This paper explores how Hashmi derives her authority, displays it, and defends it against challenges. Women who become active participants in her classes claim she transforms their understanding of Islam and inspires them to change their lives. However she is criticized by the secular-liberal elites of the country and by the traditional male leadership of Islamic institutions, who question her religious expertise and are uncomfortable with the role of both gender and class in this movement. This analysis highlights the collective interactions and organizational innovations through which Hashmi’s teachings acquire an authoritative status for selected women.

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INDEX

Keywords: Al-Huda, religious authority, Islam, education, organization, gender, social movements, Pakistan

AUTHOR

FAIZA MUSHTAQ

Visiting Research Fellow, Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi

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‘Shining Indians’: Diaspora and Exemplarity in Bollywood

Ingrid Therwath

1 Popular Hindi cinema has, since the first film was made in India in 1913, played a central role in the formulation of the national identity and in the promotion of normative behaviour. So much so that ‘film is perhaps the single strongest agency for the creation of a national mythology of heroism, consumerism, leisure, and sociality’ (Appadurai & Breckenridge 1996: 8). However, the low-brow, elusive and largely unrealistic nature of the screenplays confined the study of the films’ social, cultural and political implications to a footnote in historical and sociological works for several decades. In this context, the unrelenting interest political parties and successive Indian governments have taken in the production of exemplarity on the big screen and in the control, mostly through censorship and taxation, of cinema is striking. Then, in the 1990s, the rise of Hindu nationalism, the liberalization of the Indian economy and the renewed affection of the Indian middle class for cinema halls, previously deserted in favour of home entertainment, generated more production and more revenue. This period coincided with a new academic interest in Bollywood (Gopal & Moorthy 2008, Silva 2004, Virdi 2003: 210, Prasad 2003).1 Reputed writers specializing in the theory of globalization and cultural studies like Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, although their analysis of cultural consumption and Indian modernity is not based on cinema, nonetheless started to take into account the importance of the big screen in the national imagination. To quote the words of D. Bhoopaty, ‘cinema is widely considered a microcosm of the social, political, economic, and cultural life of a nation. It is the contested site where meanings are negotiated, traditions made and remade, identities affirmed or rejected’ (Bhoopaty 2003: 505). Besides, a growing number of studies by Jyotika Virdi, M. Madhava Prasad, Sumita Chakravarty, Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Rustom Bharucha, Patricia Uberoi, Anthony Alessandrini, Ravi Vasudevan and Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney insist on the concurrence between India’s political and social history and its cinema.

2 Indeed popular Indian cinema in Hindi constitutes a particularly interesting area of study as much because of its history as because of its key role in the creation of the

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national identity and its place in the collective imagination. Directors, producers, distributors, financiers, officials in the Central Board of Film Certification (Censor Board) all seek to ensure the projection of lucrative, aesthetically pleasant and acceptable contents. This results in a prescriptive and normative body of works that have, over the years, reflected and mostly shaped ideas of national identity, gendered behaviour, and acceptability. As Ashis Nandy noted, ‘the popular film is low-brow, modernizing India in all its complexity, sophistry, naiveté and vulgarity. Studying popular film is studying Indian modernity at its rawest, its crudities laid bare by the fate of traditions in contemporary life and arts. Above all, it is studying caricatures of ourselves’ (Nandy 1998: 7). These distorted reflections, one might add, not only exaggerate features but also paradoxically dictate patterns of normality. In this sense, they shape and impose exemplarity by broadcasting role models, figures of idealization and identification at once. Popular cinema is thus a major actor of social engineering. 3 The character of the expatriate Indian perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. Once exposed as a counter-model, it became in the past twenty years the symbol of the Indian achiever, a kind of über Indian able to assert his ethnic and national identity in a globalized world: successful, capitalist, male, family-oriented, technology-savvy and a devout Hindu all at once (Hariharan 2002). A few films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ, Aditya Chopra 1995), Pardes (Subhash Ghai 1997), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Karan Johar 1998), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G, Karan Johar 2001), Kitne Door… Kitne Paas (Mehul Kumar 2002) and Namastey London (Vipul Amrutlal Shah 2007) have given him pride of place and have generated new practices (fashion trends, tourism in the locations shown on screen, see Ramdya 2009) or rejuvenated old ones (like the rekindled observance of the Karva Chauth festival in Northern India). The elites of the popular Hindi film industry, like producer-director Yash Chopra, are very conscious of their role. He for instance declared, during his address at the first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD), a government-sponsored conclave for the Indian diaspora, that ‘our moral responsibility is to depict India at its best. We’re the historians of India […]. The Indian Diaspora must maintain its identity, its roots’ (Chopra 2003). 4 A very culturalist, essentialist and majoritarian view of Indian identity underlines this assertion. Ethnic nationalism and pan-Indianism gained currency during the 1990s while the country’s economy was being opened up after the first liberalization measures in 1991, which benefited most the middle classes and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party’s slogan ‘India Shining’, a peon to urban, yuppie, capitalist growth embodied by the IT sector, symbolized this period. Hence it is not surprising that the Non Resident Indian (NRI),2 who is imagined to be necessarily rich and westernized but who is also known to contribute financially to the Sangh Parivar, became a role model for a fast growing middle class facing the challenges of globalization and its own anguish or feeling of guilt due to a possible acculturation. Unsurprisingly, the popularity of themes related to the diaspora and the nationalist ethnic and cultural discourse aimed at people of Indian origin living abroad reached a peak during the period corresponding to the BJP-led governments (1998-2004). The 1990s and early 2000s could in fact be considered the Golden Age of the NRI, heralded as the emblem of the emerging middle class and the new material aspirations of an India in the midst of economic liberalization. 5 In this context, Indian culture is portrayed as family-oriented, Hindu, the preserve of women within the home and yet ‘portable’ (Uberoi 1998: 306) thus possibly

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transnational. Cinema, more than other media like television, mobile phones or the Internet, constitutes a medium for the enacting, teaching and dissemination of this nationalist discourse heralding the combined virtues of consumerism and devotion and of cosmopolitanism and roots. Chopra confirms this when he confides that ‘Indian films teach in a subtle way, they teach the social conventions, a sense of duty’ (Chopra 2002). This paper shall therefore go beyond the synoptic description and focus on the lessons in Indian identity and desirable conduct given in the last fifteen years through one of Yash Chopra’s favourite characters: the NRI. Once unloved and portrayed as the epitome of moral corruption, he became in the past fifteen years the embodiment of the national ethos as well as of a triumphant capitalism.

Role models central to the definition of national identity

Exemplarity, nationalism and the State

6 All through the 20th century, popular cinema evolved apace with Indian nationalism and politics and developed pro-independence, socialist, reformist, neo-traditional, capitalist, globalized and ethnic themes (Farges 2000: 158). As Joël Farges explains, cinema is a ‘distant and distorted echo of periods of Indian history, from the independence movement to the state of emergency’ and ‘acts (in the viewer’s imagination) like a collective and individual memory and which has had the time, over almost a century, to ‘become’ India’ (Farges 2000: 164, 168). Right from the 1900s and through the early decades of the 20th century, the big screen became the blank page on which nationalist pride was inscribed in a mythological vocabulary. Cinema, a medium which Indians took to with great ease and rapidity, has indeed been part of the nationalist historiographic project since the early years of the 20th century. Twenty films were made in India in the 10 years after the first Indian motion picture was released in 1913. Seven years later, at the time when the country was embarking on the swadeshi movement, a first Film Enquiry Committee was set up in order to recommend the substitution of British imports with locally-made films and an Indian magistrate named as its director. In spite of British censorship, the number of films with a social concern and pro-independence stance increased in the 1920s and 1930s (although the films dwelling on social issues generally insisted on the civilizing impact of colonization). During the Second World War, the quick pace of industrialization facilitated important investments in cinema while the reduced sea traffic gave rise to a large black market. Cinema became at the time a real local industry that mattered in the national economy.

7 Soon, after independence, regional parties, like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) founded in 1949 in Tamil Nadu, used this media to voice regional demands. Realizing its potential in terms of control/subversion, publicity, and social engineering, the central government very rapidly tried to assert its control over this industry through the creation of the Central Board of Film Certification in 1951 and the setting up of the Film Finance Corporation, an all-India public funding body, in 1960. The state-control over cinema became blatant during the Emergency when the movie Kissa Kursi Ka (whose director, Amrit Nahata, happened to be an opposition MP from the Janata Party) was banned and the prints confiscated or even destroyed in 1977 because of its hardly

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veiled criticism of Indira Gandhi’s regime (Bhoopaty 2003). The intervention of the state raises the question of agency and reception: who dictates the terms of exemplarity? And can it be dictated at all? 8 Of course, the government or state departments do not provide film-makers with guidelines regarding the heroes on the big screen. However, all through the years of Nehruvian socialism, screenplays reflected the ideals of the young nation-state. During the 1960s, with the 1962 war with China and the 1965 war with Pakistan, films adopted a more belligerent and chauvinistic tone. Later, in the 1970s, while the country was undergoing a profound social transformation, Amitabh Bachchan embodied the angry young man perhaps symbolizing the nation going through a crisis. The 1990s, following the rise of Hindu nationalism during the 1980s and the country’s economic liberalization in 1991, witnessed the emergence of a new generation of films glorifying consumerism even as they made religion and feminine docility the core of the definition of Indianness. Admittedly, ‘in essence, cultural practices and products do not have any political leanings’ (Martin 2000: 178) and culture only acts as a pointer. Nevertheless, one should be careful not to disregard the highly symbolic aspect of the representations portrayed as authentic and apolitical (Sircar 1995: 326). As a matter of fact, irrespective of the historical period, Indian cinema has always crystallized a view of Indian identity that it later projected and imposed more or less forcefully in order to comply as much with the current governmental ideology as with the market. The shift from the expatriate as a counter-model to the NRI as the epitome of modern India follows the same logic.

Once unloved and depraved outsiders…

9 The presence on screen of characters of Indian origins who are settled abroad is not a new phenomenon. It has however not been given due academic consideration (with exception to Deshpande 2005, Brosius & Yazgi 2007, and Mehta & Pandharipande 2010). The very first Indian documentary, shot in 1902, focused on a certain Mr. R. P. Paranjpye, a former scholar at Cambridge (Alessandrini 2001: 320). Less than twenty years later, in 1921, Bilet Pherat [On Returning from Abroad, N. C. Laharry], the first Bengali film, dealt with loss of one’s roots and the corruption of Indian values after living abroad. But the expatriate Indian did not gain currency on the big screen until 1967 with An Evening in Paris (Shakti Samanta) and Purab Aur Paschim [East and West, Manoj Kumar] three years later (the terrain had been prepared by Sangam in 1965, which shows foreign locations and Indians moving freely around the world for leisure). This period corresponds to the coming of age of the first generation of Indian migrants in the United Kingdom, the adolescence of the second uprooted generation and the mass influx of educated Indians in the United States after the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. However, the overseas Indians are portrayed in both films as depraved persons or as outsiders whose very Indian identity is dubious. In An Evening in Paris, for example, there is no question of immigration as the hero Sam, played by Shashi Kapoor, is not Indian and is neither presented as a videshi [foreigner] nor as a pardesi [outsider]. Even though Sam is visibly Indian, speaks Hindi fluently and strongly defends the honour of Indians when arguing with his friend Michel, he introduces himself as a Frenchman as if his place of residence were a determining factor for defining his nationality. This illustrates the way Indian nationality was viewed at that time: it was based above all on

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the law of the soil and circumscribed by national borders before mass migrations redefined the sense of national belonging.

10 In Purab Aur Paschim, the emigrant, whose Indian origin is this time not denied, is presented in an extremely unfavourable light. The young hero played by Manoj Kumar is called Bharat [India] and quite explicitly embodies the nation. He visits London to meet the Sharmas, friends of his father. Mrs. Sharma, brought up in England, drinks, smokes and calls her husband ‘Darling’ (according to conservative Hindu etiquette, the wife should not use her husband’s first name and always treat him as parmeshwar [god]). Their daughter, Preeti, smokes and drinks like her mother, wears mini-skirts and, in a supreme gesture of acculturation, has dyed her hair blond. The son’s name drives the point home: Orphan. Manoj Kumar, who is also the film’s director, paints a psychedelic picture of a metropolis obsessed by consumerism and sex. Living abroad means here living in a den of depravity and uncensored appetites and losing or renouncing one’s original values. In these conditions, emigration can only be shown as a negative phenomenon and the migrant as ‘the moral antithesis’ of the real Indian (Uberoi 1998: 308). Manoj Kumar however grants his characters redemption at the end of the film: either through death (for Orphan) or a return to the native country (for Preeti). In the 1980s, this trend continued ‘amidst angry heroes who were fighting against corruption and coming to terms with social upheavals in India and its role in the capitalist world order’ but, by the end of the decade ‘film sets and costumes began to illustrate a look and feel of urban centres (openly displaying the brand names of Coca-Cola, Ralph Lauren, Nike, etc.)’ (Dudrah 2006: 67-8). 11 Until the 1990s, the foreigner was thus an absolute counter-example and anti-hero whose salvation lay in a dramatic change of status, like Orphan or Preeti. This ideological construct of migration as a morally reprehensible act, Rosie Thomas (1996: 170) points out, is deeply rooted in Indian lore and goes back to the character of Ravana, the king of Lanka, in the Ramayana. Until the late 1980s, emigration still bore the seal of moral disgrace. At the time, prominent economists like Jagdish Bhagwati went to length to evaluate the actual cost of the brain drain in order to levy a tax from expatriate Indians (Bhagwati & Dellafar 1973). This attitude starkly contrasts with the peons the successive governments have sang of NRIs in the past ten years, priding themselves on the potential benefits of migration in the form of remittances, FDI, image and lobbying. 12 Nevertheless, during the next decade, foreign characters of Indian origins suddenly acquired a totally different connotation. The term vilayat gave way to pardes to designate the place of residence of overseas Indians. Vilayat, a Persian word derived from the Arabic vilaya meaning ‘province’ in contrast to the Persian homeland of Mughal rulers, was used during the colonial era to designate England and Europe, i.e. what was outside India, and was always associated with immorality and social aberration. The root of the word pardes is des, meaning country, home. The suffix par- corresponds to both per- and pro- in Latin, evoking an idea of movement and of being proactive. Pardes is therefore much more positive than vilayat and does not actually entail either a spatial or a moral distance with the homeland (pardes can even sometimes designate a place within the national territory). Actually, more than half the films with the word pardes or pardesi in their title seen between 1931 and 2010 were made after the 1990s.3 These recent films always vehemently champion Indian values through a dominantly essentialist and culturalist discourse, but these values can now

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be transposed outside the national territory. In the moral code upheld in this type of film, some values occupy a central place and are mentioned frequently like sharm, lihaz, izzat [shame, modesty, honour], three virtues presented as the preserve of women (Karudapuram 2001). This new generation of neo-traditional films combining ethnic nationalism and the praise of materialism therefore also seek to champion a patriarchal structure that idealizes the woman sublimated by either virginity or motherhood while insisting on her submissiveness. In addition, the emigrant is no longer accused of forgetting his roots and values: it is the host country (for example, firang (foreign) or Angrezi (English) culture) and, more generally, Western culture that are held responsible if at all. Ideal Indians have hence become deterritorialized models of national identity.

… then portable tenets of Indian identity

13 J. C. Sharma, a former Indian diplomat and member of the government-appointed High Committee on the Indian diaspora, remarked that ‘Bollywood was selected long back for the purpose of connecting the Indian people residing across the world. Hence both intra & inter connectivity is facilitated by Bollywood. Showing of an Indian film became a focal point of connectivity’ (Sharma 2010). In addition to fostering a sense of community going beyond the national borders (Deprez 2010: 145, Gowricharn 2009), most of the recent films with expatriate characters show that being a part of the national ethos is no longer determined by nationality or place of residence but by blood ties and morality.4 This new generation of films made during the last fifteen years thus reflects the insidious change from a jus soli to a jus sanguini conception of citizenship. The migrant, promoted to the rank of blood brother, has therefore ceased to be a symbol of the ‘Other’ and has become instead the prototype of the new Indian, globalized and modern, but always a nationalist at heart. The fact that he belongs to the nation is constantly underlined through the use of the possessive pronoun before the words ‘country’, ‘India’ or ‘Hindustan’ and, despite going through all types of ordeals, his ‘Indianness’ is always reaffirmed at the end of the film. For instance, the rich American of Indian origin played by Amrish Puri in Subhash Gai’s Pardes sings ‘I Love My India’ and recites ‘Karam Mera India, Dharam Mera India, Vatan Mera India, Sajan Mera India’ [India is my destiny, India is my religion, India is my motherland, India is my beloved]. As for the expatriates in DDLJ, they talk with great emotion of ‘apna desh’ [my country], ‘meri hi mitti’ [my soil], ‘hamare desh ki mitti’ [our country’s soil]. To borrow Benedict Anderson’s words, ‘in these ‘natural’ ties, one senses what one might call ‘the beauty of Gemeinschaft’’ (Anderson 1983: 143). Far from being isolated cases, these examples are representative of the ethnic nationalist discourse developed for the diaspora in films made during the years 1990-2000, and remind one of the slogan ‘Global Indian Family’ devised by the Indian government for the first PBD. Punathambekar noted that ‘in positioning and drawing the diaspora into the fold of a ‘great Indian family’, K3G articulates everyday struggles over being Indian in the diaspora to a larger project of cultural citizenship that has emerged in relation to India’s tentative entry into a transnational economy and the centrality of the NRI (non- resident Indian) figure to India’s navigation of this space’ (Punathambekar 2005: 152). The same holds true for other movies of that period.

14 These Bollywood films project the NRI as the model Indian using very classical tropes of nationalist discourse and representations like anthems, flags, references to the

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motherland, etc. Two basic principles govern the visual, structural and textual organization of these NRI-centric films: ubiquity and synchronicity, the ability to match place and time. Popular Hindi cinema actually illustrates the idea of the nation elaborated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture: it is above all a narrative and discursive strategy in which temporal and spatial representation holds a central place. He agrees on this issue with A. D. Smith and Benedict Anderson and remarks that ‘the difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One’ (Bhabha 1994: 140-1, 149). Following the same logic, recent Bollywood films focusing on the diaspora and heralding a set of conservative and essentialized Indian values, seek to do away with the distance separating the expatriates from India, rebuild an ‘ethnoscape’ and bring together the permanence of tradition and the time of modernity to create an ‘ethno-history’ (Smith 1996: 450, 454) that will give the viewers a sense of national continuity and pride embodied by the NRI. Long tracking landscape shots and quickly alternating views from India and abroad testify to this desire to recreate a new geography. The first scene in DDLJ is a perfect illustration of this technique. As the viewer discovers Choudhury Baldev Singh (Amrish Puri), England and Punjab are juxtaposed (just as in the film’s narrative structure) through the frequent mention of ‘apna desh’, ‘apna Punjab’ [my country, my Punjab] as well as through back and forth cuts. ‘Punjab’, the final word in Choudhury Baldev Singh’s introductory monologue, signals the start of the narration while the camera moves from an easily identifiable Trafalgar Square to an equally emblematic although unidentified Punjabi mustard field with young shalwar qamiz-clad [a traditional suit] girls running to the score of ‘Ghar Aaja Pardesi’ [Come back home, outsider]. 15 The arrival of Rohan in London in K3G is another instance where ubiquity and palimpsest are effectively used as nationalist rhetoric devices. When the young man arrives in the British capital, wide-angle shots of London’s celebrated monuments (Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, the London Eye) taken from a helicopter precede a panoramic view of the city followed by a succession of quick shots showing signs of the London Underground and the big department stores playing on the effect of consumerist accumulation as in Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) and Purab Aur Paschim. But, while the viewer is discovering London, Vande Mataram, India’s national song, can be heard in the background as young girls walk down the streets in shalwar qamiz with orange and green dupattas [scarves] to recreate the tiranga, the national tri- colour (while a group of white girls perform a few Bharatnatyam moves). At the end of the sequence, the scenes of London make way for indoor shots. The viewer sees the back of a woman walking through a house holding a worship platter in her hands. She bows down before a very large portrait of her parents-in-law then turns to face the camera as the scene closes on the notes of the patriotic song ‘Sare Jahan Se Accha’ [The best country in the world]. Anjali, as a woman, represents India (besides, she is the only character who wears traditional clothes) and ensures a religious, symbolic and geographical continuity while holding together the family living abroad (Uberoi 1998). The akhand bharatiya parivar [undivided Indian family] also symbolizes a new version of akhand Bharat [undivided India, as dreamt by the Hindu nationalists], the stability and perpetual unity of Hindu and North-dominated India even outside the national territory. Films like Karan Johar’s Kal Ho Naa Ho (KHNH, Karan Johar 2003) go even further in exploiting geography for nationalist ends. As Namrata Joshi observes in the magazine Outlook: ‘Karan may have got the geography of New York all wrong, but, quite interestingly, manages to portray it like an Indian city, a place where Gujjus and

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Punjabis can melt. In fact, the boisterous old grand-mom considers Punjab a part of New York. ‘NRIs in KHNH don’t carry the baggage of roots. They need not keep coming back to India. They can die in America and still remain Indian,’ says [the social scientist Shiv] Visvanathan’ (Joshi 2003). Religious hymns and national anthems, like in the ‘Jana Gana Mana’ scene in K3G, further emphasize the conflation of spaces and strengthen, when performed on screen and inside cinema halls across the world, a sense of belonging to the Indian national fold. Indeed, ‘there is a special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests—above all in the form of poetry and songs. Take national anthems, for example, sung on national holidays. No matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity. At precisely such moments, people wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody. The image: unisonance’ (Anderson 1983: 145). 16 Two particular scenes, one extremely well known and the other often overlooked, offer very telling examples of the type of model Indian the filmi NRI embodies. The former comes from DDLJ after the two young and unmarried Raj and Simran have a drunken night in Switzerland. When Raj lets her believe that they have slept together, she bursts into tears of rage and covers her face in shame. He then proceeds to reassure her by telling her: main janta hun ki tum mere bare mein kya sochti ho. Tum samajhti ho ki main bahut hi ghatiya kism ka awara larka hun. Par main itna bhi gira hua nahi hun Simran. Main ek Hindustani hun aur main janta hun ki ek Hindustani larki ki izzat kya hoti hai. Main sapne mein bhi tumhare sath aisi harkat nahi kar sakta [I know what you think about me. You think that I am a worthless boy but I am not that bad. Simran, I am an Indian and I know what her honour means to an Indian girl. Even in my dreams I could not do something like that to you]. 17 Raj, the almost generic name of Bollywood heroes, can remain Indian even in migration and defines his Indianness by his upholding of patriarchal values. The genre of the romantic comedy is by essence conservative since it is based on the assurance of a return to a moral and social order. Hindi romantic comedies projecting NRI role models go even further since they do not merely seek to reconcile individual aspirations with duties to the community: they seek to recreate and propagate a fetishized version of tradition and normalize reactionary if not sometimes illegal practices (like forced marriages in Namastey London).

18 The other scene, in Pardes, demystifies the idea of a unified transnational Indian community and identity. The family of Baldev Singh, settled in the USA but still Indian at heart, is contrasted to the family of Amirchand. Amirchand’s son and wife, who have just witnessed Baldev Singh’s celebrated arrival, resent the difference in treatment they are getting from their neighbour Suraj. They point out that Amirchand too is an NRI… from Sri Lanka. The point of this juxtaposition is comic relief as well as providing a clarification about the much-desired NRI status. Indeed, the model Indian is not only a man who has retained conservative family values while living and earning money abroad: he must have done so in an appropriate country, preferably the USA, the UK or Australia, a white capitalist country (Deprez 2010: 143-4). All else is subject to ridicule in films that ‘have relocated what we might call the seismic centre of Indian national identity somewhere in Anglo-America. In other words, it has brought the NRI decisively into the centre of the picture, as a more stable figure of Indian identity than anything

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that can be found indigenously’ (Prasad M. 2003). And yet, the NRI became a central component of the definition and projection not of Western but of Indian modernity.

‘The new aristocrats’ of Indian modernity

The economic agenda of NRI exemplarity

19 The film Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (Sooraj R. Barjatya 1994) really serves as a landmark in the recent evolutions of commercial Hindi cinema. It marked the renewed affection of the middle class for cinema halls, breaking hence all revenue records, and began, only three years after the liberalization of the Indian economy, a trend of unabashed consumerism advocated on the big screen (Alessandrini 2001: 324-5). All major blockbusters in the next ten years, a majority of which focused on NRIs, promoted consumption of generally imported brands through international product placements while key actors became known as brand ambassadors and dramatically increased their income through advertising (Rao 2007, Uberoi 1998: 314). These films showcase a ‘designer India’ (Punathambekar 2005: 158) and NRIs act in them as facilitators (Prasad M. 2003) of the transition between a State-controlled Nehruvian socialist economy and an increasingly open national market. Indeed, ‘in the romance genre the Non-Resident Indian provides an imaginary terrain in which to explore the ‘iconography of abundance’. It adds a twist to the trajectory of commodity fetishism in the decade of sudden economic changes at the close of the twentieth century in India. The NRI is Hindi cinema’s new aristocrat’ (Virdi 2003: 202).

20 The NRI, a synthesis of modernity and tradition, provides an answer and a new model at a time when the Indian identity is undergoing a transformation (Pulkit 2008: 37) and is ‘the consumable hero of globalized India’ (Deshpande 2005). As Purnima Mankekar noted about DDLJ, the NRI is largely represented as a man who comes to India to invest in a business venture or in a life-partner (Mankekar 1999). Other films like Pardesi Re (Kewal Krishna 2002) testify to this change: in this film, Rangini comes to India as the President of the London ‘NRI Association’ to recruit a classical singer. In K3G, Rohan drives a Lamborghini and luxury sports bikes, while the elder brother moves around in helicopters which make his father say casually (and in English) that ‘we must get a couple more of those’. Actually, popular Indian cinema in Hindi always revolves around a series of binary oppositions depicting a conflict or a major social change. The NRI/desi [local Indian] couple thus offers a new way of interpreting the tension between neo- conservatism and consumerism, swadeshi patriotism and Anglo-Saxon style capitalism. The choice of capitalist role models, by contrast with the Nehruvian type embodied by Raj Kapoor or the anti-State angry young man interpreted by Amitabh Bachchan, does not only stem from changes in attitude towards consumption in India after 1991, but is also largely dictated by economic motivations. After all, the overseas territory has over the years become a crucial financial component of a film’s total revenue and directors and producers also cater to an increasingly lucrative niche market that adds to the equally increasing urban yuppie audience in India. Exemplarity in this case is therefore also meant to please a particular audience, which will identify the NRI figure as a modern achiever. 21 In 1997, the Financial Times wondered somewhat cynically, ‘Which of us in London or Los Angeles has ever seen a Hindi popular movie?’ (Andrews 1997). This type of remark

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would be more unlikely today since most of the major international capitals have hosted Bollywood festivals and films been broadcasted on mainstream TV channels. The Government of India set up the Export Promotion Council as early as in 1958 to promote the export of Indian films mainly to the United States and United Kingdom and, in the early 1980s, Indian films were being distributed in over a hundred countries (Bhoopaty 2003: 159), in addition to being present wherever the Indian diaspora settled since the days of silent films. Successive Indian governments as well as distributors have always tried to exploit a captive expatriate market by providing the Indian diaspora with a common national cultural identity through the audiovisual media. This strategy, although focused primarily on the expatriate Indians, now aims to reach a broader non-ethnic audience (although in 2009, the cinema industry’s growth has decreased and was mainly based on domestic theatrical collections, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry; KPMG: 17-18), along with the Indian high income, urban and young audience. The NRI role models on screen aim at pleasing these audiences, already familiar with international migrations and capitalism. 22 The distribution network for popular Hindi films is divided into seven territories: Bombay, Delhi/Uttar Pradesh, North India/West Bengal, Central Circuit, Eastern Circuit, Southern Circuit (the six major domestic territories are further divided into 14 territories), and Overseas Territory. Even though the receipts collected in the seventh territory are subject to international taxes and NRIs represent only a small fraction of the population, some types of films, like romantic comedies and family psychodramas (types of films that have been increasingly made since the 1990s), are particularly successful at the box-office. Thus the Overseas Territory often brings in as much money as the last two national territories taken together.5 In the early 2000s, up to 70% of receipts could be generated by sales abroad (Jaisani 2002). For example, the film Agni Varsha was distributed in 22 countries and made 70% of its profits outside India. More recently, 3 Idiots was released overseas with almost 400 prints of which 210 were in the USA (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry; KPMG: 21). In addition, FRAMES, the annual conference of professionals from the commercial Indian cinema sector, has been devoting an entire section to ‘Cross-Over Cinema’ for several years in an effort to optimize the links with the Indian diaspora in the United States, particularly through The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE)—a group of Indian entrepreneurs based in the Silicon Valley—and the Indian National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) to fully exploit the ‘seventh territory’. Another sign of openness is that a section devoted to India on the international stage has been included in the Delhi International Film Festival since 20006 and popular cinema also occupied an important place in the discussions of the successive PBD. Furthermore, big screen stars now go more frequently on promotional tours to the United States and the United Kingdom where their films have been top box-office hits for several years, while major blockbusters increasingly have their premieres overseas. Yash Chopra even received an award from the British Tourism Authority in 1998 for having shot his films in Britain and for thus promoting tourism, while being conferred an honorary doctorate by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 2010. Besides, the British Tourism Department has devoted an entire chapter to ‘the romance between Bollywood and Britain’ on its website.7 Since 1997, following the rise of films meant for the diaspora, the biggest Indian distribution and production companies of opened offices in the United States (Power & Mazumdar 2000) and more and more films are now being produced in partnership with Western production companies, like My Name

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is Khan (MNIK, Karan Johar 2010) co-produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment and Fox Studios (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry; KPMG 2010: 17). 23 Another factor that led to NRI-centric films catering to a niche of expatriate Indians and yuppies is the decrease of cinema seats: earlier, cinema theatres could seat more than 2,000 persons but they are being progressively replaced by multiplexes that can accommodate only 200 to 300 viewers (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry; KPMG 2010: 26-27, Joshi 2001: 331). Finally, the preference for expatriate role models settled in Western English-speaking countries can also be linked, along with the ideological agenda of unhindered capitalism, to the 60 to 66% share the USA, Canada, the UK and Europe have in the revenue contributions within the overseas territory and to the steady income generated by the urban Indian audience who can afford to pay between 100 and 600 rupees per ticket in multiplex cinemas (the first multiplex opened in India in 1992) compared to 1 to 150 rupees in a single-screen hall in one of the big metropolitan centres of the country. The exemplarity of NRIs stems therefore from their simultaneous position as long-distance nationalists, transnational capitalists and lucrative viewers.

The political agenda of NRI exemplarity

24 Through the NRI models, the romantic or family comedies with a NRI hero sell ‘Brand India’ to the world while furthering the cause of capitalism and social conservatism in India.8 Indeed, they provide the Indian elite, both private and governmental, with a way to celebrate the advent of India on the world stage. Bollywood films constitute a source of pride because Indian commercial cinema is now the subject of exhibitions, festivals, televised documentaries, courses conducted in prestigious universities and special functions (Silva 2004). An Indian can therefore rejoice that ‘today, apna [our] Bollywood has become cool’ (Kabir 2005). These films, whose screenplays are adapted to meet the expectations of NRIs as well as to provide Indians with guidelines to liberal modernity, are also part of the larger ambitions of India as a visible country and constitute an important component of its soft power (Dunoyer 2010: 43-50). Interestingly the 2004 BJP election campaign slogan ‘India Shining’, which was vilified for disregarding the gruesome realities in the lives of many Indians, was initially meant to serve, along with the ‘Incredible India’ line, as an international promotional tool. The depiction of NRIs as ‘Shining Indians’ serves the same publicity goal well beyond the changes in government. In 2008, Prime Minister Manhohan Singh, for instance, acknowledged, in front of Indian Foreign Service probationers, that the soft power of India in some ways can be a very important instrument of foreign policy. Cultural relations, India’s film industry—Bollywood—I find wherever I go in Middle-East, in Africa—people talk about Indian films. So that is a new way of influencing the world about the growing importance of India. Soft power is equally important in the new world of diplomacy (Singh 2008). 25 Amit Khanna, a senior executive in the industry, even talks of ‘Pax Indica’ established thanks to India’s film exports, a cinematic ‘Pax Indica’ that resonates well in developing countries and in the Arab world because of the conflation of conservatism and consumerism. As for the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, it celebrated, in the March 2010 issue of its publication, the commercial success of MNIK outside India while noting that it ‘has a universal story to tell’ (Pravasi Bharatiya 2010: 36-37, Power & Mazumdar

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2000: 54). Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, the NRI was heralded as a role model for Indians at home thanks to his encounter with the West, his absorption of a certain consumerist version of modernity associated to his retention of core traditional and often patriarchal values. A film like MNIK actually constitutes a particularly striking example of the evolution of exemplarity on the Indian big screen. Here, the expatriate Indian is not so much presented as a model for his compatriot. On the contrary, he is presented as a model for Westerners thanks to his sense of solidarity and courage in the face of adversity. This, and the fact that the film is almost entirely set in the USA, that it offers a reflection on race relations in America only and that it does not dwell on distinctive Indian topics, may be construed as the sign of the coming of age of Bollywood as a truly global media addressing a global audience and as a symbol of the ambition of India as a world power. Indeed, it is now for Westerners and not fellow Indians to learn from NRIs.

Conclusion

26 Expatriates portrayed in Bollywood films inform the relationship of most Indians with their non-resident alter egos and, through them, with the West and its economic model. The diaspora also represents a sizeable market for films whose protagonists are a definition or reaffirmation of the Indian identity transformed by globalization. However, while the agency of film financiers and government policies explains the advent of the NRI as a new 21st century Indian role model, it raises the inevitable question of reception. The success of exemplarity, once carefully crafted and floated out, lies in its adoption, its embrace by the targeted audiences. Film-watching is a central practice in the re-enactment of Indianness (through the congregation of, very often, ethnic-clad but geographically dispersed migrants) in diaspora, while being one of the most common forms of entertainment in India. But this does not systematically entail the adoption of filmi NRIs as role models as a few ethnographers have found out (Rao 2007, Punathambekar 2005). On the one hand, migrant audiences seem to appreciate the references to a lifestyle certified as authentic, to religion, respect for the family and the patriarchal system, i.e. to a fetishized India manufactured in Bombay (Deshpande 2005: 203). As Nikhil Khattau, the General Secretary of the Indo-US Association, an organization aimed at facilitating cultural understanding and providing material assistance to Indians leaving for the United States and Americans arriving in India, once remarked, ‘I did not like K3G all that much. There are too many tears, too much nostalgia, too many festivals. The characters spend their time praying and fasting. Real India is not like that but that is how the diaspora wants to see it’ (Khattau 2002). The spectacle of clean and centrally approved ethnicity can indeed be a useful tool for migrants trying to project the image of a model minority and make away with old stereotypes of Indians as snake-charmers (Punathambekar 2005: 157). It is also very much used in order to teach acceptable gendered behaviour, especially by mothers to their daughters (Punathambekar 2005: 159).

27 However, while this holds for the affluent section of the Indian diaspora in North America mostly, the many Indian migrants struggling with income and a hostile living or working environment have a much more critical take on the exemplarity of filmi NRIs. One Balwinder Sodhi, a NRI working in a hotel in Boston and supporting his family in Punjab with his salary, feels for example that ‘one has to really struggle to

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experience a good life in America… and why do movies not bother to depict the struggles Indians like me go through? Just our everyday life… it is not like the families in the suburbs who only think of us when they go to a restaurant or take a cab in the city’ (Punathambekar 2005: 158). He echoes the discontent of many expatriates, concomitant with the distortion between the projected NRI figures and the often less glamorous realities of emigration. In India also, the NRI role model does not always meet acceptance, particularly in provincial towns where film-goers sometime feel alienated by the new Indian modernity and its ‘Shining Indians’ on screen (Rao 2007: 13). In these places, audiences can actually enjoy another kind of films, different from the upmarket Yash Raj and Dharma productions, made in regional languages and focusing on a different, and often more realistic, picture of migration. These films, not strictly Bollywood, are predominantly made in Bhojpuri and Punjabi. 28 In addition, fewer films in the past few years have continued this trend of showing NRI heroes as champions of ethnic nationalism and unabashed liberalism. This change reflects the evolution of the entertainment market and of the political discourse, mostly after the Congress party’s return to power in New Delhi in 2004. Ethnic nationalism has lost currency, and speeches about ‘inclusive growth’ have replaced those about ‘India shining’. Moreover, the cinema industry is becoming more regional thanks to new corporate investments in a previously untapped market while the audience is increasingly segmented into niches, and the ‘aspirational middle class’ genre of the 1990s ‘targeting metro and NRI audiences’ has given way to other more diverse and, to borrow the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s terminology, ‘Indianized’ contents (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry; KPMG: 32, 34, 170, 171). However, some films like Hum Tum (Kunal Kohli 2004), Salaam Namaste (Siddharth Anand 2005), Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Karan Johar 2006), and Love Aaj Kal (Imtiaz Ali 2009) still revolve around NRIs, but they do not directly address the issue of migration, which merely provides the excuse for exotic foreign locations. The NRI, not so much of a role model anymore, has become one of the normalized figures of Indian society on the big screen, not as much because of the world economic crisis or because of return migrations as because he has been fully integrated into the mainstream imagination of Indianness. At the same time, while films can show NRI characters without emphasizing their status or migration, NRI actors known for their weak Hindi, like Katrina Kaif, have become over the past few years new role models and trigger the desire for a reconciled modernity that could transcend territorial and linguistic barriers. 29 Nevertheless, a few films do deal directly with the issue of migration. Ramji Londonwale (Sanjay Dayma 2005) depicts the adventures of a young Bihari forced to emigrate to the United Kingdom. In this Hindi version of a film originally made in Tamil, emigration is shown in the most negative light where the immigrant is seen as a victim of racism, economic exploitation and a legal system beyond his comprehension. He ends up by opting to return to India even though the British government offers him a residential permit.9 In Singh is Kiingh (Anees Bazmee 2008), the village council views migration as a way to get rid of an unruly boy. Some of these films go even further and revert to the old approach of the NRI as a perverted Indian whose redemption can only happen at the cost of relocation into the homeland. Swades: We the People (Ashutosh Gowariker 2004), for instance, departs from the ethnic nationalism of the earlier films and resorts to a more classical nationalist treatment centred on the national territory, as indicated by the title and focuses on the accomplishments of a rich young NRI working for NASA

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upon his return to his village. In Virrudh… Family Comes First (Mahesh Manjrekar 2005), the main female character, Jenny, a young Indian girl in the United Kingdom, sometimes gets drunk, wears mini-skirts and sports blond streaks in her black hair. She is the modern version of Preeti in Purab Aur Paschim and, like her, she becomes Indian again and returns to her country to marry an Indian, wears a shalwar qamiz and makes an effort to speak Hindi. At the end of the film, when she is shown as a mother and a widow, she has become an integral part of her husband’s family and behaves like an ideal daughter-in-law. On a similar line, Namastey London, a film that tries to show the conflicts between the generation of NRIs born in India and their British-born and raised children, offers redemption to Jasmeet (who, like Preeti and Jenny, wears mini-skirts and gets drunk in London while going by the nickname of Jazz and is introduced on the film poster as a ‘British brat’) through her forced marriage to and gradual acceptance of Arjun Singh, a village boy from Punjab (a ‘funjabi boy’ as per the poster).10 The last scene shows the two of them, dressed in ethnic clothes, Jasmeet sitting on Arjun’s bike- frame in the middle of Punjabi mustard fields… 30 These few examples reveal that, since the mid-2000s, while NRIs continue to bring in money at the box-office and therefore to assert their presence—albeit often negative— on the big screen, they are not necessarily objects of envy or role models anymore. Exemplarity and the imposition of strict behavioural and aspirational patterns are indeed dependent on the political and economic context and, like them, extremely volatile.

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Martin, Denis-Constant (ed.) (2002b) Sur la piste des OPNI (Objets Politiques Non Identifiés), Paris: Karthala.

Martin, Denis-Constant (2002a) ‘Introduction: Les OPNI, l’essence du pouvoir et le pouvoir des sens’, in Denis-Constant Martin (ed.), Sur la piste des OPNI (Objets Politiques Non Identifiés), Paris: Editions Karthala, pp. 11-45.

Martin, Denis-Constant (2000) ‘Cherchez le peuple… Culture, populaire et politique’, Critique internationale, 7, April, pp. 169-83.

Mehta, Rini Bhattacharya; Pandharipande, Rajeshwari (eds.) (2010) Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, New Delhi: Anthem Press.

Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (2010) ‘‘My Name is Khan’ Creates History’, Pravasi Bharatiya, March.

Moti Gokulsing, K.; Dissanayake, Wimal (1998) Indian Popular Cinema – A Narrative of Cultural Change, Hyderabad: Orient Longman.

Nandy, Ashis (ed.) (1998) The Secret Politics of Our Desires. Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, New Delhi, Oxford University Press.

Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logic of Transnationality, Durham: Duke University Press.

Power, Carla; Mazumdar, Sudip (2000) ‘Bollywood Goes Global’, Newsweek, 28 February.

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Prasad, Kiran (ed.) (2003) Political Communication: The Indian Experience, Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation.

Prasad, M. Madhava (1990) Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Prasad, M. Madhava (2003) ‘This Thing Called Bollywood’, Seminar, 525, May, URL: http:// www.india-seminar.com/2003/525/525%20madhava%20prasad.htm

Punathambekar, Aswin (2005) ‘Bollywood in the Indian-American diaspora: Mediating a Transitive Logic of Cultural Citizenship’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8 (2), pp. 151-73.

Pulkit, Datta (2008) Bollywoodizing Diasporas: Reconnecting to the NRI through Popular Hindi Cinema, B. A. Dissertation, Oxford, Ohia: Miami University.

Ramdya, Kavita (2009) Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement and Marriage in Hindu America, Lanham: Lexington Books.

Rao, Shakuntala (2007) ‘The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India’, The Communication Review, 10, pp. 57-76.

Ravindran, Visa (2003) ‘Values in Transition: Media, Technology and Communication’, in Kiran Prasad (ed.), Political Communication: The Indian Experience, Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, pp. 149-65.

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Sircar, Ajanta (1995) ‘Of ‘Metaphorical’ Politics: Bombay Films and Indian Society’, Modern Asian Studies, 29 (2), May, pp. 325-35.

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Thomas, Rosie (1996) ‘Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream Hindi Film’, in Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 157-82.

Thoraval, Yves (1996) ‘Le cinéma indien: entre évasion et réalités’, Historiens et géographes, (356), pp. 281-90.

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Vasudevan, Ravi (2010), The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Permanent Black.

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NOTES

1. Bollywood is a problematic word, which some involved in the Bombay film industry refuse because it is modelled on an American production model while others still use for its easily identifiable quality. We have chosen to use it for the same reason. For more discussion on this term, see Prasad (2003) and Vasudevan (2010: 346-361). 2. The acronym NRI, Non Resident Indians, only designates Indian citizens residing abroad. PIOs, foreign citizens of Indian origins, actually dramatically outnumber NRIs amongst the 25 million members of the Indian diaspora. However, since this distinction does not impact the representations of the diaspora on screen, the distribution of films or even the choice of themes, this paper shall use NRI indiscriminately as is currently done in India. 3. This figure was reached through an appraisal of the data base available on the site http:// www.IndoFilms.com 4. In Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Singh prefers Indian pigeons but Rahul explains to him that even in England he can find pigeons from his country which will recognise him and understand him. Identity, in this case, is determined less by the country of residence and more by the country of origin. 5. International Business Overview Standard, available on: http://www.ibosnetwork.com/ bopaper.asp Although, according to the last FRAMES report, the overseas territory accounts for about 7% and the domestic territories more than 70% of the total theatrical revenues. 6. I am grateful to Mohan Agashe, actor and former Director of the Film & Television Institute of India, for this information. 7. Vineet Lal, ‘Screen Magic: The romance of Bollywood and Britain’, available on http:// campaigns.visitbritain.com/moviemap/bollywood/home_text.asp 8. According to Thomas Blom Hansen (2005: 239-60), the film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai owes its success in Durban less to the choice of the diaspora as its theme than to the projection of India’s modernity which enables Indians in South Africa to put behind them the opposition between European modernity and Eastern backwardness. 9. Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999) is another of the rare recent instances where migration to a Western country, in this case the USA, is seen as a difficult and sometimes disappointing process. 10. Interestingly this film was seen by many critics and commentators as a new version of Purab Aur Paschim. The character of Arjun even alludes to Manoj Kumar’s classic when he lectures a racist Britisher on the merits of India and finishes his monologue by saying: ‘Agar Bharat ke bare mein jyada janna ho to main Manoj Kumar ki film Purab Aur Paschim ka DVD bhej dunga’ [if he wants to know more about India, I’ll send him the DVD of Manoj Kumar’s Purab aur Paschim].

ABSTRACTS

Commercial Hindi cinema plays a central role in the negotiation of national identity. For decades, the expatriate Indian served as a counter-example for acceptable behaviour, a living testimony of inappropriateness. In the mid-1990s, following the liberalization of the Indian economy, the rise of Hindu nationalism and the advent of a multiplex-going urban middle-class, the stereotype was turned around. The Non Resident Indian (NRI) became the epitome of Indianness and embodied at once capitalist and consumerist modernity and patriarchal, Northern and Hindu traditionalism. This change was meant to cater to a lucrative niche market and reflected an

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uneasy transition period. In addition, the on screen NRI role models were seen as an instrument of Western modernity in India and of India’s recognition as an international power in the West.

INDEX

Keywords: diaspora, cinema, role models, achievers, exemplarity, Bollywood, films, NRI, capitalism

AUTHOR

INGRID THERWATH

Senior Research fellow, Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi

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Heroes in the Bedroom? Iconoclash and the Search for Exemplarity in India

Malvika Maheshwari

1 The increasing influence of religion in politics and the socio-political strengthening of religious nationalism since the 1990s in India have, among other things, impacted art practice in unprecedented ways. Artists and works of art were dragged into controversies and suffered violent attacks targeting the religious identity of the artists, their depiction of gods and goddesses or their representation of women; in some cases, these attacks addressed more political concerns, and were conceived as an embarrassment to the ruling government. Among the participants in these attacks on the nation’s visual and artistic fabric were secularists, Hindu nationalists, more marginally Muslim fundamentalists and Christian revivalists, each trying to infuse their peculiar characteristic acrimony into the narrative. Such interventions have had momentous violent consequences, each faction aiming at nothing short of capturing the nation’s political pedestal and a cultural revamp with the chance of shaping India’s identity and destiny in the coming decades.

2 The straining of relations between religious communities concomitant with the decline of secularism as a practice, if not as a norm, since the 1990s, provides the background to position the attacks on artists. However, understanding the attacks solely based on these inferences, though demonstrable, may not be adequate, for it overlooks the most important agent in these episodes of iconoclasm: the individuals who lead the attacks and indulge in violence. Furthermore, by incriminating politico-religious entrepreneurs only, one fails to acknowledge the prerequisite of an audience or viewership in such acts of violence.1 ‘Iconoclash’ itself is a staged spectacle, which, paradoxically, gives greater visibility to the images under attack, while transforming the attackers into performers. Through media attention to such acts of vandalism, attackers gain social acknowledgment or face opposition, which perhaps they otherwise would not have, at least not in such proportions (Rajagopal 2001). Critical factors in the escalation and social representations of these attacks can be found in the

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behavior of the attackers themselves, and more tentatively in the ‘motivations’ of these attackers, or at least in the justifications they give for such actions. As we will see, these justifications are complex and often contradictory. As such, they introduce an element of uncertainty in these episodes of ‘iconoclash’. Following Bruno Latour, I distinguish ‘iconoclash’ from ‘iconoclasm’: Iconoclasm is when we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations for what appears as a clear project of destruction are; iconoclash, on the other hand, is when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive (Latour 2002: 14). 3 In this article, I turn attention to these enthusiasts of violence, and address two primary questions: (i) what justifications are put forward by the men (so far, women have rarely been involved in such episodes of ‘iconoclash’) who terrorize artists and destroy works of art, beyond delineations of unofficial party mandates and politics of right-wing organizations? (ii) how do they negotiate the extreme social reactions towards themselves, which range from considering them intolerant fanatics to martyrs and models? Looking at violence through the eyes of the attackers, I argue that a common theme which defines the microsociological make-up of this violence is the search for glory, understood as the individual take on an epic collective imagination, or to put it more simply, as the internalization and creative appropriation of a cult of the hero. The rage that outlines this heroism is sought, among other things, through the deep rooted and problematic realms of gender, sexuality and politics. For instance, by claiming to defend women’s ‘honor’ as they discredit works of art, these men act out their vindications and fantasies, at the same time symbolically reassert their domestic identities and expectations tied to work and family—‘heroes in the bedroom’, to paraphrase the old Sanskrit expressions referring to ‘house heroes’.2 Regrettably, due to constraints of space, this study holds back from approaching a very pertinent issue from the other side, i.e. the contradiction that women in general may not perceive these actors as their heroes despite the latter’s claim to be the protectors of their ‘honor’.

4 Public and macro dimensions of attacks have been expressed in debates in the media and in the Parliament within the limits of democratic governance, electoral politics, freedom of expression and religious sentiments.3 In contrast, the attackers’ life worlds remain less accessible but equally potent, offering powerful referents for defacing imagery and emerging a victor. Escalation of attacks throughout the country points to the localized fabric of role models and heroes such as a Niraj Jain in Gujarat (although inspired by Diwakar Rawate in Maharashtra), Afsar Khan in Hyderabad, and so on. Despite widespread condemnation, these individuals often enjoy a degree of respect at the local or regional level. 5 This article stands at the contested intersection between heroes and role models, where a hero is understood as a man, real or fictional, of exceptional courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and regarded by others as an ideal. Role models are non- fictional characters whose behavior and success set an example to be emulated by others. Virtue is not a necessary qualification of the former: a hero may not be a role model, he may not be a ‘good man’, he only needs to be extra-ordinary. It is in the essence of heroes to be unique, therefore inimitable. The article is rooted in this ambivalence, based on the fantasies and justifications of attackers. Questions related to modern day heroes, haters and attackers, as achievers and role models, would not be so

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engaging, emotionally disturbing or politically challenging were it not so potent for the changing contours of free speech in India.

Outline of the assault: playing the protagonist

6 As a form of violence, attacks on art in India are a unique and relatively new form, differing from communal riots, political demonstrations, student agitations or labor union unrest.4 They involve a blend of religious, political, symbolic, economic and personal aims. Less planned and smaller than a riot yet more organized than a street side assault, the phenomenon of violence on art lies somewhere in between. Stoking claims of religious sentiments being hurt, these attacks are both inter religious and intra religious. Thus, a Hindu mob is as likely to attack the work of art by a ‘deviant’ Hindu artist as that of a Muslim artist allegedly disrespecting narrowly construed Hindu religiosity. The build-up and preparation of these attacks happen when a ‘source’ informs the group of the ‘event’, or it learns of the occasion through the media, leading to a collective distortion and interpretation of the works, based on the reductive denominator of religious affiliation, independent of the artist’s intentions. Thus begins an agitation around perceived disrespect, humiliation and threat. The characteristic form of public manifestation of violence involves a daylight agitation by five to twenty men, belonging mostly to the age group of 40-60 years, generally but not always armed with lathis (sticks). The violence goes beyond inflicting wounds with physical force, and includes physical and/or verbal abuse: tearing a painting, assaulting actors, ripping film posters, inflicting property damage in cinema halls, burning books, shouting abuses and religious slogans. In the main, this form of violence on artists by religious nationalists is to be regarded as a process: a spill-over of larger ideologies while also, at the same time, creating spillovers of its own, cumulative, boundless and often internalized violence (Lawrence & Karim 2007: 13-17). The source of legitimacy, heroism and glory of this violence originates from the point of view of the instigator or what Samuel Klausner has called ‘victim-defined spheres of violence’ (Eliade 1987: 268-271). For the attacker and the perpetrator, this is glorified in the name of protection of faith and the divine, a crusade. Also, control and representation of women has been mobilized as a significant justification for attacking art, and stands at the intersection of religious, national and domestic narratives of heroism.

7 One feature that sets violence on art apart from other forms of communal agitations, like riots, is that physical violence here remains solely one-sided and imbalanced, i.e. artists have rarely reacted in a similar manner by using physical force. The ultimate aim of such vandalism does not necessarily lay in the destruction of the creator but the creation, to ‘scare the artist away’, instill terror, ‘police’ the boundaries of visual productions and viewership in the society, and thereafter emerge as the savior, the hero. The role of the police in most instances has remained peripheral due to corruption and speculated reasons of influential position of the political parties and groups the attackers belong to. It is this deficiency of state support and guarantee of impunity that makes the artist susceptible to such attacks. What is more important, the police may play along in hailing the attackers as heroes. The present article focuses on the men behind the three most well known cases of attacks in India in recent years: the incident at the MS University in Baroda in May 2007, attacks on painter M.F. Husain since 1998 and the Hyderabad attack on writer Taslima Nasreen in August 2007. These

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attacks provide three instances that can help us understand the development of a pattern of attacks on art. Earlier attacks included the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) assault on SAHMAT’s Hum Sab Ayodhya cultural sit-ins in 1993 at the height of the Ramjanmabhoomi/Babri Masjid agitations, violence against Deepa Mehta’s film Fire and the disruption of the shooting of her film Water, among various other instances. 8 Besides, ‘hurting religious sentiments’, celebrated and hailed as the ultimate cause, I argue that these occurrences are neatly tied to the narcissism of men who indulge in the same. Heightened and varied media attention and perception confuses the hero and the villain. Whatever the jury and the judgment, it is the attackers instead of the artist or the critic who emerge as the lead characters in any consequent description of the broken, damaged, defaced, repaired, remade, re-described piece of art.

Fame and the female: the heroism of doing ‘God’s work’

9 Even six months after May 2007, the name Niraj Jain evoked strong responses in the Fine Arts Department of MS University in Baroda (MSU), and proud support from his defenders in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Jain, from a small time lawyer gained notoriety as Gujarat’s ex-President of the Bajrang Dal, Joint Secretary VHP and Secretary BJP (Jain 2008).5 Transformed into a militant defender of Hinduism, Jain was one of the accused in the violence that followed the Godhra carnage in 2002 (Concerned Citizens Tribunal 2002). As a ‘preserver of pure Hinduism’, he was in the news for having brandished a revolver and thrown eggs at the state Education Minister for including them in school mid-day meals (Dharkar 2007). But it was the MSU art case that ‘finally’ brought him to spotlight, and ‘people recognized [him] as a hero’. Jain barged into the University campus along with the state police, where he abused and threatened both the faculty and students, and ordered three paintings to be removed from the ongoing student exhibition. Even amongst party and organizational cadres, Jain had acquired a reputation of a fierce, violent, intolerant defender of Hinduism.

10 A big, red tika (holy mark) covered his forehead, a cluster of red holy Hindu threads tied on the wrist, Niraj Jain, by then famous in Baroda, was a Hindutva supporter recognizable from afar. A man in his forties, he had the gait of a confident, vain warrior. In plain white pants and shirt, he gave the impression of a man who dressed up for his role. Jain was not yet a star in Gujarat, like Babu Bajrangi6 or Narendra Modi. Nonetheless he was an assured, unabashed version of someone who wore his dreams on his sleeve, hoping to be a star but undecided about what kind. He was convinced that responsibilities of governance and legalities did not amalgamate well with the individualism of a hero, justifying violence to be outside the norms of a democratic polity while still working around to profit from the nation’s legal apparatus. Jain claimed, ‘All this [party positions] is OK but I need no political platform to do my task. If I see a painting like this anywhere, even if I’m not part of any party, I would put an end to such things. Because I know it is God’s work. I am a person well versed in law. I know very well how to use law’. 11 Seemingly animated by a desire to be a hero for Hindus, he claimed to be prepared to sacrifice and stand alone even for temporal and idiosyncratic motives such as transient fame or a party ticket. Most striking was that a large part of his own construction of

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heroism was sought through and over the female presence, body and sexuality. It is this aspect that also in part explains his discomfort over particular works of art. 12 I think I took him by surprise when I approached him introducing myself as the ‘researcher from Paris’ he was scheduled to meet. ‘But you are an Indian woman, also young (…), what are you doing here?’ His initial surprise and relief was soon replaced with suspicion. He asked the first questions to fathom if he was being tricked ‘by the Tehelka people’ like some of his ‘friends’.7 After three ID cards and a few minutes spent on my family history, he braved the recorder, and settled down to ‘ask whatever you want, I have no fear’. Jain introduced himself, balancing his pride, confidence and calm. The first words he chose to describe himself were a reaction against the English media’s portrayal of him: ‘I am basically an open-minded person’. Jain described his role in society primarily in relation to a ‘higher reality’, his work for Hinduism as ‘God’s work’. The higher reality that is not accessible to ordinary mortals was thus to be undertaken by the ‘chosen few’, a belief that emanates from tales of heroes whereby the latter may sacrifice themselves so that others may live or so that they themselves may live in other’s memories. Jain was unwilling to delve much into the subject of his profession as a lawyer, which he deemed secondary but still considered as ‘God’s work’. 13 Jain was savvy and instantly eloquent about Vivekananda and the Bhagavad Gita. These were sources of his Hindu pride and a substantial justification that God was watching him at all times, and thus ‘I am likely to never do anything wrong and God in turn helps me’. Jain was convinced of Hinduism’s superior position in the hierarchy of religions, its defining feature being tolerance. ‘[Tolerance] comes in Hinduism, this does not come in Muslims. Islam says that if someone slaps you, their hands must be cut. In Christianity as well, they don’t forgive anybody. Hinduism is open-minded, everyone has a right to speak and talk. This is why Hindu is suppressed everywhere’. Jain’s personal relationship with violence offers a more sharpened understanding of his actions at MSU, which comes from both a family history of penance and a self- inscription in the Hindu caste order that bypasses the ahimsa (non-violence) preached in Jainism. For Jain, ‘being a kshatriya (warrior by caste) was in [his] blood’, while ‘Jainism was only adopted by [his ancestors] for what had happened. In any case it was part of Hinduism’. 8 14 Like most members of the Hindutva network, for Jain too this perception of his own tolerance was simultaneously shrouded with doubts of it being a sign of weakness towards the Other, an example of virtue becoming a disability. Instead of justifying the violence meted out by Hindus in the name of tolerance, Jain focused on the suffering which tolerance brought upon Hindus, for this talk of shared sufferance would bring the Hindus closer together. For him, a cornerstone of Hindu society’s sufferance was the angst about sexual concerns, control, its representation and all its associated conservative moralities. ‘The biggest problem of our tolerance is that anyone can portray our gods naked. They can abuse any Hindu woman or sister, and abduct them’. The responsibility of doing God’s work, belief in being the hero chosen to ‘save society and women from moral degradation’ and its associated anxiety prompted his ‘intolerant’ reaction to the paintings. ‘It is not my responsibility alone; it is the responsibility of the entire society to uphold respect of our mothers and sisters. I defend Hinduism because others are scared to do so. The person who suffers injustice is worse than the person who commits it. So here I am’.

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15 ‘Art is something which gives me pleasure. When I feel something in my heart, those are called paintings. What was depicted in those things that they called art were not gods. A man and a woman were shown having an intercourse’. His aesthetic understanding was limited to very literal, figurative aspects of the works. Repeatedly describing them, he conveyed the extent of his disgust, reasons for the attack, his discomfort with sexuality, the extent of his concern with women’s shame and the need to define boundaries of public and private. ‘In the linga [a phallic symbol of Shiva], he (the artist) kept his own photograph suggesting that he is having an intercourse with Parvati. Now would any person do this to his mother or show his wife like this? You are a lady. What do you feel if someone were to show you like this?’ Swiftly positioning his audience as a victim, Jain saw himself as the ‘savior and friend of the voiceless’, the ‘protector of the oppressed’. He continued with authority, ‘I believe till the time a woman is covered in clothes she is beautiful. After she has taken off her clothes, she is beautiful and desirable for her man only. Her beauty belongs to her man. Her beauty is not for the society’. The hero’s view degraded the unclothed, nude woman and, in doing so, aggrandized him in his own eyes. Ideas of public and private spheres, broadly believed to be a distinction between domestic and non-domestic life (Mahajan & Helmut 2003: 205-28), laid central to Jain’s thought and actions. Both implicitly and explicitly, the conviction was perpetuated that these spheres were sufficiently separate, that the public and the political could be discussed in estrangement and with entitlement, i.e. through disassociating the two along with making rightful claims on what constituted political and public. ‘I say that if you want to enjoy nakedness, limit it to your bedroom. That is where a woman’s beauty lies’. Jain granted agency to the woman —after all, it is she who takes off the clothes—but at the same time he suggested that the boundaries of her action were to be governed and controlled. 16 Jain saw himself as a protector of Hindus, but also the guardian of women’s role, respect and social uplifting. His retaliation was against a painting of a goddess where, for Jain, godliness was superseded by femininity. It was the woman who needed to be saved and not the reverence towards a goddess who saved humanity. ‘Painting mother Durga naked, showing a child coming out of her vagina whom she is killing with a trishul—isn’t this a kind of fetus killing? Can any mother kill her own child?’ India’s art history did little to deter his understanding of aesthetics, Hinduism, women or violence: When Khajuraho9 was made, teaching was done only through sculptures. I have seen them. Did you ever feel irritated when you saw them? At any time, did you feel like having sex when you were around those sculptures? Did you feel it was disgusting? In Ajanta-Ellora [caves], can you see nakedness anywhere? If you want to see art then come with me to Pavagadh. I am a trustee there. 17 Jain conveyed his power and legitimacy as an art lover and the degree of his importance in the life of the community in which he lived. The hero’s authority was so grand for himself that he was lost in admiration, but he referred only to the beauty of all that was erotic in art and in the temples: Nothing else is visible in it [the art works he attacked] except sex. In Lord Vishnu’s painting, he has shown Vishnu holding a penis in one hand and surrounded by many other penises. Is this called a painting? Has our art fallen to such levels? After Darwin’s study of evolution, we became a species that started wearing clothes. Will we still go around showing our penises?

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18 The more he claimed his disgust against the ‘sexually immoral art and the need to protect Hindu women from such degradation’, the more he spent time speaking about them. Words associated with intimate desire and excitement, generally considered culturally inappropriate for a ‘public’ discussion, dominated the monologue. Jain was much more comfortable talking about the perceived bawdy sufferance than about religion per se or violence. He focused more on the associations made due to the discomfort of lascivious works than on the divisions of religious or ethnic disorder. Jain was convinced that losing one’s respect by seeing one’s body and biology belittled in the name of art and the hurt sentiments of worshippers of that iconography was a shared experience of Hindu men and women alike. In turn, this conditioned the maneuvers in his speech, by being aware that ultimately, he was talking to a Hindu woman. Talk of disrespect and shame due to these visual depictions would earn him another follower, seeker and supporter, whereas detailed illustrations of his own acts of violence could risk a division or retaliation from his audience. He interpreted art and spoke in a representational manner, but not for the nation, strictly for the ‘entire Baroda society’. Language played an integral role in defining territories of influence in the construction of his heroism through these attacks on art. Jain was conscious of addressing the Gujarati speaking and Gujarati educated audience. For it was he who could understand their pain, and take their voices and distress ‘to the highest level, and seek justice’.

19 As a mark of service to society and of the extent he would go to save this ‘degeneration’, Jain elaborated on the professionalism of his cause: ‘I wrote to the Pope asking him to give me his observation on these paintings. After he received my email, from the next day the media of the entire country stopped writing on the issue. Sonia [Gandhi] also shut her mouth. Why? Because the Pope asked them to stop, agreeing with me that it was disrespectful to Lord Vishnu’. He returned to the issue of carnal discomfort that women would face, if they encountered the art pieces. For his own, he suffered to save the society. Jain believed that heroes were rebels, hard to accommodate in a well-ordered state, not the ones who gave in to what the world might know, believed or stood by. Jain had his own version of the MSU exhibition, contesting that it was an exhibit for sale and not for examination evaluation as ‘alleged by the Dean’. This way, though the justifications of his acts remained unchanged, he believed that he also could not be made accountable for the disruption, for his justification of the university ‘event’ did not correspond with those against whom he reacted. 20 Beyond seeing the attack as his achievement, Jain was less concerned about the impact of actions on the students, disruption of the university system and the works of art, which were ‘now sealed in a room’. In highlighting his own importance, Jain never restricted himself to one-line statements. For example, he did not limit the response to ‘They (the university) were not troubled at all’. Rather he added how and why the impact was really not much. For both of these, Jain sought reassurance in women’s voices, and was comforted by his newfound supporters from ‘around the world’: An Australian sister had come to write an article about me. I told that woman that I will show you the photographs of the paintings. After seeing them, tell me if I am wrong. After she saw them, she told me, ‘Mr. Jain you are a coward, you should have slapped that man—why didn’t you slap him?’ I told her I only created a little noise and so much hangama [noisy chaos] happened. If I would have slapped him God knows what would have happened? Now you tell me, am I right or wrong?

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21 Men and co-workers played no part in Jain’s narration of his heroism. He did not need them, did not need to protect or control them. ‘The day the women of our society are neglected, the day their perversion happens, it’s the end of Hindu society. I have to save them from this. Hamara kya hai (what is it to us [men]?) A real man is one who can save his woman from the society’s gaze’.

22 Any deliberation on the cult of the hero anticipates ways of thinking about mortality where the hero, in his pursuit of immortality, is willing to expose himself to mortal dangers to the extent of social unacceptability, disregard and public contempt. ‘I am famous now. People know me and have written about me in newspapers all over the world. I know that the English media will write only against me, they all are against Hinduism’. On the contrary, sections of the Gujarati media hailed and praised Jain’s selfless act against the ‘immoralities of youth and selfish professors’. Jain took solace in this acceptance, and found a rationale for believing in his guardianship of Hindus in this moment of glory. Arab Times, Dawn of Pakistan and others in their editorials have abused Hinduism. They want a chance to abuse Hinduism. Arab Times wrote against me that I have raped the artist. Yes, Niraj Jain is an art rapist. What did I do? In Calcutta they put hoardings against me. They made my cartoon saying ‘art rapist’ [...] They have even fired at me. I feel very happy reading all this because through this, people who do wrong at least come out in the open. [...] I believe that the work I’m doing is not wrong. Whomever I’ll speak to I will look into their eyes and speak. If these things continue, who will protect the coming generations? Somebody will have to uphold the ideal and tell them that this is what we were ... if there was a Ravana then only people realized that Rama is like that. It is because of Kansa that Krishna was nice. Somewhere someone has to sacrifice. This is why I’ve taken birth […], after this I could face my own women.

Playing the tiger’s tail: subjection as a route to self- aggrandizement

23 Unlike Niraj Jain, Diwakar Narayan Rawate believed that he was a true role model, not a hero who was unique or extraordinary.10 He was a Maharashtrian but, more significantly, he was a trained, proud, loyal follower of Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena,11 ‘right from the day the Sena was born in 1966’. His pro-Maratha stance translated into a socio-political discourse that preached ‘Maratha equality’ rather than ‘caste-equality’. In 2008, he even supported reservations in the State Assembly for Marathas on grounds of economic rather than caste status, a demand informed by his own position in a higher caste but a lower economic status. Now in his fifties, Rawate was highly experienced and tactful in dealing with (un)constitutional mechanisms and backyard party politics. Since 1966, he had slowly and steadily climbed the party ranks: from being ‘one of the Sena boys’, he presently served as a senior leader and MLA, although he was still some notches below being called a political star, the kind whose phone would be answered by someone else or followed by chamchas (sycophants). For the liberals and the educated English language press of Mumbai, he was notorious as a riotous, violent bigot while the Shiv Sainiks (Shiv Sena activists, literally soldiers) and sympathizers of Maratha pride hailed him, and took inspiration from his dedication to their cause. Juniors in the party aspired to his role in the organization of the party’s violence, and also hold in high regard his loyal service to the party chief Bal Thackeray.

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Like Jain, Rawate compensated his lack of economic power with the local glories accompanying his cause and the ensuing violence. Rawate’s construction and consciousness of his self-image, as a local role model for the ‘Sena boys’, drew from the narcissism of the leader-follower relationship. The power and omnipresence of Thackeray in Mumbai particularly appealed to Rawate, although he did not qualify himself to fill Thackeray’s shoes, but rather was consumed by his vision and stature to heal the wounds of Maharashtrians, the characteristic rhetoric of polarization, uniting followers against the outside enemy. Despite a strong sense of self-esteem, if not egotism, Rawate acknowledged himself as a model of obedience: follower, son, devotee. Subjection to the leader was here the pre-requisite, or the condition of possibility of self-affirmation. Ironically, for a rabidly anti-Muslim party such as the Shiv Sena, this empowering subjection was reminiscent of constructions of the Self in Islamic socio- religious movements (Audrain 2004, Mahmood 2005).

24 The core of the Shiv Sena’s ideology was his most passionate cause, the ‘issue that Bala Sahibji raised’.12 He explained his politics: Maharashtra was developed; states were divided linguistically according to the Constitution of India. So, naturally, the right of ‘sons of the soil’ is clearly mentioned in the Constitution. Though our Constitution says that everyone in the country can settle anywhere, they do not have the right to deprive the sons of the soil people. After the state was created, everyone started coming to the city, occupying jobs thereby depriving Marathis of their rights. I was part of the first Sena rally [...] Bala Sahibji received tremendous response. 25 The story of his own aggrandizement was intimately tied to the growth of the party and, unlike Jain, Rawate devotedly used ‘we’ in his narration rather than ‘I’. He devoted himself zealously to the service of the Maharashtrian community by working for blood camps, hygiene and health facilities, or by playing judge to local family quarrels, etc. He believed that this personal relation with the Marathis explained the rise of the Shiv Sena. However, not one to believe in peaceful political advancement, Rawate was a firm advocate of using physical force to get things done: militant morchas (demonstrations), bandhs (strikes), use of dadas (dons) and pehalwans (wrestlers, and more recently body- builders).13 We are militant. We call ourselves sainiks so we obey our chief. Whatever he decides, we are ready to sacrifice our lives for the cause. He was the first one in India to do politics like this, without caring for consequences, and brought justice to the people of Mumbai. The strength of Bala Sahibji is such that he can paralyze anything in the city. The moment he puts his finger down and gives a go, everything can be started again. 26 Rawate was ecstatic, for the city worked around the whims of his hero. Admission of his own pride thereupon lied in the Shiv Sena’s threat of alternative governance, of which he was an important part. Rawate summarized that his religion was Maharashtra and his God Thackeray. He shared Jain’s hatred for the Muslims, echoing similar sentiments: Muslims were outsiders, violent and fanatic, and Hindus suffered due to their own tolerance.

27 Unlike Jain, however, Rawate made no claim for his love of art or freedom of expression to justify the attacks: Art and all these small matters don’t bother me too much [because] artists and singers don’t encroach upon our working space. The only time we take action is when they do other than just sing, paint, act or anything else. When they give their views not required by the society and those we disapprove of, then we retaliate.

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These days, artists, filmwallahs, think they have become very important. We just do things to keep them in check. 28 Following the Shiv Sena working style of threats and physical coercion, proving allegiance to his hero by seeking issues that matter to the master, Rawate had spearheaded various violent demonstrations. These were ‘nothing new’ to him. ‘The man sitting in front of you broke the first billboard on the road in Mumbai twenty years ago’. Shiv Sena seniors and supporters, from whom Rawate got the large part of his self-esteem, rewarded him by promoting and positioning him at various press conferences and public platforms. ‘Every time I indulge in these acts I feel I am doing a service, setting an example, my blood boils and I feel powerful, that I can make a difference’.

29 While violence is an integral part of the Shiv Sena’s political culture (Hansen 2001), Rawate’s self-representation as an ‘ideal’ and a ‘role model’ could be ascertained through his description of how artists had hurt him. Like Jain, Rawate’s sentiments revolved around a gendered explanation, but his female figure was not his companion or an object of sexual desire. She was the revered mother and the vulnerable daughter. Justifying his repulsions, he delved on the duties of an ideal, exemplary son to his ‘mother’ land, ‘mother’ tongue and ‘mother’ goddess and how his example would ‘inspire the young generation to show respect’. Artist M. F. Husain’s representations of unclothed Hindu goddesses have, since 1998, invited sever ire of the sainiks. Violence against Husain’s work and property and even threats of killing did not invoke any moral anxiety on Rawate’s part. To the contrary, assault in such a circumstance was every ‘sainik’s moral duty to save the ‘mother goddesses’ from ‘such Muslims’: ‘We will not leave him if he dares to step in our country. If he comes in front of me I will shoot him. It is simple. My religion is my mother; my faith. Who has given him the right to draw my14 mother naked? It is because of Muslims who buy his paintings for millions of dollars that he paints such things, just to tease us’. 30 Religion was overshadowed in Rawate’s narration of the various attacks on Husain’s representations of Hindu goddesses Saraswati, Durga and Sita by the over emphasis of a relation he sought with the opposite sex and the discourse of preserving women’s virtue that also provided the justification for violence. My Hinduism is if I see my daughter in you (...) you should know that we are your saviors. Not again will a Muslim be able to treat my daughter in an unfair manner. In Islam a seventy-year-old man can marry an eighteen-year-old girl. We don’t do that. 31 Rawate was also involved in the obstruction of Pakistani singer Ghulam Ali’s concert in 1998. His elaborations focused on the assumption of the hate shared by ‘all’ Indians against Pakistanis, as well as on the universal feeling of ‘motherly concern’, thus bringing people to realize that he was speaking their language, reflecting their hurt. ‘Insult of my mother is not described anywhere in the books of law. Is there any court in the world that would allow one’s mother to be treated like this?’

32 Serving the cause of a modern nation state, Rawate’s attacks on artists is irreducible to symbolic nationalism or a whim to get famous. While these attacks were intended to scare the artists away, they also served to assert the integrity of his value and ideology. Jain was content in the flowering of his fame after the attack and cared less about the broken image: his own or the works of art. But Rawate, a trained follower, seemed less concerned about his own fame. He invoked his own unique form of justice,

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notwithstanding the orders of the State High Court supporting the artist’s right to free expression. ‘If I believe my religion is my mother so this should be respected. That is why court is blind. It has no feelings. The only justice is that Husain should paint his mother, sister and wife like this. Then only I will consider [his paintings] as art’. The issues revolve back to the protection of the private sphere, the sphere symbolically inhabited by women: ‘The paintings are a problem because your bedroom should not be open to anybody. If you don’t agree with me then what is the message you want to give out to people?’ 33 Protected by his conviction to work towards the common good, Rawate claimed to be immune to criticism: ‘English media has attacked Sena since the time it was born, they attack today and I am sure they will do so tomorrow. But they are not our concern anyway’. If he could claim that, it was because ‘Bala Sahibji’ had inspired him to work against all odds: criticism, the Constitution and the law. His commitment was his achievement, the only way he believed that he could inspire the ‘next generations to save their women’.

Between opportunism and self-sacrifice: the muscle- man as ‘Islamic’ hero

34 ‘Muqtada’ Afsar Khan was a 58-year-old locally well-known MLA of the All India Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (All India Conference for Muslim Unity, AIMIM), a Hyderabad- based Muslim political party.15 In many ways, he is the Muslim equivalent of Rawate although he did not share Rawate’s accessibility for interaction. He belonged to the community of pehalwans, economically sustained through what is euphemistically called ‘land or real estate business’, but allegedly involving land grabbing activities. Along with his brother, famous in Hyderabad as ‘Meraj Pehalwan’, Afsar Khan shot to the limelight following the ‘boom’ of their ‘land business’. Hyderabad provided the context of Khan’s growth and his importance within the local Muslim community. In a city with a history of communal violence, keeping up religious pride has become a major issue. Since Khan was ‘always more interested in Muslim issues like water, schools, colleges, etc.’, he decided to join the AIMIM thirty years ago, ‘because I was also politically inclined’. The AIMIM, one of the oldest surviving Muslim parties in India, defines itself as the ‘voice of Indian Muslims’. Today the old city of Hyderabad is the party’s stronghold. Khan, like most party members, owed allegiance to the party’s towering leadership: Sultan Owaisi and his sons, Asaduddin and Akbaruddin.16

35 Well-built and heavy voiced, like many pehalwans within or outside the AIMIM, Khan was reputed as violent, and was often in the forefront of agitations in the city. In his capacity as an elected MLA from Karwan, Khan had been involved in notable cases of violence and had his name booked under various police charges including attempts of murder. However, his position as an MLA gave him an advantage in and out of violence since he is part of the ‘system’. In July 2008, he was arrested for firing from his licensed revolver protesting against the demolition of an illegal structure by the city’s Municipal Corporation; he allegedly roughed up doctors at a city hospital in December 2007 for not providing ‘proper’ treatment to a child. In March 2007, the editor of the Urdu newspaper Siyasat was harassed after his newspaper spoke about Khan’s ‘land grabbing activities’. Despite these, Khan was confident that ‘people like my style of politics otherwise I wouldn’t be here serving my third term’. Rehearsed words of a

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politician followed: ‘Their love is important. I guard it and work for them’. Violence as an instrument of politics was what he and ‘his people’ agreed upon ‘since I don’t care for police, court cases or the law’. He proudly took the discussion to the core theme of this article: ‘But of all these incidents the most famous one, the one that you must have heard of is Taslima Nasreen’s. That was an important opportunity for me and probably such a big chance17 will never come again in my life’. What is truly remarkable here is how genuinely Khan acknowledged his personal motives in targeting Taslima Nasreen, although this self-proclaimed opportunism confining to cynicism did not preclude other motives of a more moral or ideological nature. And again, as with Jain and Rawate, women were integral to Khan’s self-representation and projection as an exemplary personality. Except that this time, women no longer appeared as weak creatures in need of protection; they were constructed as potential threats to the ‘natural’ order of things, which had to be contained by any means. 36 Exiled and famed Bangladeshi writer Nasreen was in Hyderabad on 9th August 2007 for the release of the Telugu translation of her book Shodh. ‘I got a call from our Salar-e- Millat (commander of the community), Sultan Owaisi, that you go and protest because Nasreen is in Hyderabad. So I went and protested. The entire party was called to protest against this, but I was the first to reach’. It was only much later in the interview that Khan invoked a personal reason for leading the attack: ‘I had problems with her writings on issues of my mother, my sarkar (boss) Prophet Muhammad and especially what she had to say about my Muslim culture, that it is not necessary for women to wear a burqa. For things like these it was necessary for us to protest in Hyderabad. I protested on behalf of my congregation’. 37 After the attack, the AIMIM filed a police case against the writer, however, not on grounds of ‘hurting religious sentiments’ but on the technicality of her visa restrictions and travel. A case was booked against Khan as well, ‘because I hit her and I give no importance to this court case’. Khan proudly explained how he picked up chairs, tables, flowerpots and ‘anything that I could get my hands on’, along with ‘some very bad abuses’ that he threw at Nasreen during her press conference in the city. 38 In defense of his faith, Khan’s associations with his religious group revolved around stereotypical categories like ‘good Muslims’ and ‘bad Muslims’, overshadowing individual identity traits. For Khan, Nasreen was no more than an ‘unworthy Muslim’ and violence was the ‘only way the infidels can be taught a lesson’. In any case, ‘[I]t was very little that was done to that woman, if I had got a chance I would have done a lot more… I could have gone till any extent. I don’t care who the offender is, a woman, a man whoever does misdeeds against Allah I am not going to spare that person’. 39 Starting with an almost cynical discourse, Khan gradually drifted towards a completely opposite form of self-presentation, which emphasized his readiness to self-sacrifice, and freely drew its inspiration from Islamic idioms of heroism and martyrdom. Despite their extreme disregard for Muslims, Jain and Rawate professed a similar conception of heroism as a form of self-sacrifice to the Creator, as their claim to be committed to ‘save the mother goddess’ suggested. For Khan, this spirit of self-sacrifice would be ‘natural’ among Muslims: ‘inspiration to fight for Islam is in the blood. I am a Muslim and this inspiration to fight for the religion is in the body, this is in my iman [faith]’. 40 While religion provided the most important parameter of identification for men indulging in attacks, the boundaries of what they defined as ‘community’ were fluid. For example, Khan began with an all-encompassing ‘Muslim community’ including

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faithfulness to universal Islamic brotherhood: ‘The Muslim community cannot say anything negative or against what I did to Taslima. A message was sent to the world that even in Hyderabad there are people who love Allah, and cannot tolerate any misdeeds against Prophet Muhammad’. This translated to the city he belonged to. Thus, his service to the ‘Muslim community’ remained tightly bound to the geographical limits of Hyderabad: ‘I will not go to another city for defending Islam like this. They have other people there to save Islam’. Following which his praise, allegiance, importance was highlighted through the political party he was associated with: ‘I will follow the instructions of what my Majlis asks me to do. I have a life associated with a political party. I am tied to my work’. Finally, like Jain and Rawate, Khan saw women’s respect, adoration and obedience as the ultimate mark in self-realization as a hero: ‘ Many of the women in the society where I live are thankful and happy with what I did. And if the whole world, the Muslim community, liked what I did then it is natural that my wife liked what I did. I feel proud of what I did and so does she. That is important for me’. He proudly stated that his organization was working on women’s issues like, ‘we save them, we see to it that they have a good environment to live in’. 41 A characteristic trait of ‘attackers as achievers’ that emerges is the complete denial of any extra or negative impact of their action other than the kind desired by them. Khan was convinced that ‘Taslima will never come again to Hyderabad or even write such a thing again’. Bound with the idea of sin and complete assurance of power over women, he was nonchalant about the extent of his violence: ‘Many people told me that I shouldn’t have raised my hands on a woman. Even though we have made progress in education of our women, all the other women have come to know now that if they make a mistake as far as our boss (Allah) is concerned this will be their fate. What I did was absolutely just’. Like a professional pehalwan who wrestles for the public or the politician performing for his people, Khan spoke as an entertainer who could not let down those who expected a show. This partially explains the justification offered by Khan for his own violence: ‘I am here to serve the people’. He said, ‘The juniors in my party like me a lot, public also wants this, this is the mood. The public wants that I keep playing this role, so if the public wants me to do something then I must be able to fulfill their expectations’. In cases of art attacks, self-constructions of heroism do not stem from a narration of the incident as a tactful display of violence, but rather provide ways of thinking about (im)mortality and the possibility to transcend one’s life, to become somebody: ‘After the Nasreen attack, the public appreciated me a lot, many people came to congratulate me, I got calls from all over India, I even got calls from out of India, wherever people watched me on the television they congratulated me. Many TV channels came to speak to me like NDTV, Aajtak, Star TV-everybody contacted me’. Khan emphasized the importance of his deeds and portrayed himself as an asli sher (real lion), who inspired more attacks like these: ‘After what I did in Hyderabad only then in entire India was there a voice against Taslima like in Bengal, Bangalore, so the retaliations picked up’.

Conclusion: the transient glory of modern-day iconoclasts

42 Attackers of art and artists consider themselves as exceptional, and yet exemplary, by virtue of their commitment to suppress opponents, to ‘save’ their religion and their

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women, or to resist an unjust political system. While violence is not new among Indian politico-religious activists, the introduction of art, camera, media and the pretext of women’s honor have been providing convenient arguments for heroism and achievements. In all three accounts, the attention generated by the mass media played an important role in publicizing and consolidating the attackers’ self-representation as emerging heroes. It was not so much the content or the criticisms that affected these men, but the very fact that their name appeared in the media. Their names have been tied to every subsequent narration of the attacked piece of art or artist, strengthening the belief that just as they knew about the ‘heroism’ of ‘people’ who burnt Rushdie’s books or protested against the Prophet’s cartoons in the Danish Jyllands-Posten, likewise their acts would be ‘known to the world’. For Hindu attackers, ‘the Muslims should know that even we can defend our faith’ (Jain’s interview) and for Muslim attackers, ‘the world should know that even in India there are those who fight the infidels’ (Khan’s interview). However, strategies of violence assume dramatic, unpredictable consequences.

43 In attacking art, where risks of punishment or physical harm to attackers themselves are low, attackers may find a shortcut to fame. Individual gains of such activities outweigh the risks of punishment posed by the state, law or society at large. State authorities in India, including the judiciary, have notoriously overlooked the nature of such violence, favoring electoral appeasement over justice. The National Academies of Art, on the other hand, have referred the matter ‘out of their purview’,18 leading to an increasing vulnerability of the media to public expression and its acceptance of violence. However, even though attackers’ narratives told a tale of heroism and exemplarity, these men were in fact hero worshippers, considering themselves local embodiments of national figures. Their heroism or construction of exemplarity was limited to linguistic boundaries for they were aware of their own limitations. These men were not national, immortal figures; they knew that they shall never be. Although they saw attacks on art as modern day achievements, they rarely invoked the idea of a nation. The nation emerges, nevertheless, through the gendered metaphor of ‘Mother India’ (Ramaswamy 2003). 44 The place of art in society now increasingly resembles dramatic market practices of consumption, ownership and entitlement whereby showcasing rejection has also been intensified. Furthermore, though the attackers consider violence on art as part of the ‘public sphere’, they aim to make women aware and proud of this violence—what we could call the ‘this-time-we-are-doing-it-for-you syndrome’. While the ‘liberal, secular’ world mocks them, they find solace in the bargain that they could foresee and defeat danger, punish the guilty and honor faith and women. These iconoclasts are simultaneously admired and marginalized, being more often characters of momentary veneration than holders of real power. 45 The rhetoric of these self-professed role models and heroes is adjusted to cater to the moral values, emotional needs and religious aversions of their audience. That violence on art is unconstitutional is a banality, but being enthralled by men who see it as the source of their heroism is intriguing. Bertolt Brecht wrote that it is an unhappy land that looks for heroes (Halpin 2006). In the midst of the crisis of communal politics and religious fundamentalism the process assumes a dramatic, complex resonance. Perhaps it is only in times of quandary that heroes and role models prosper. In any case, the mass media is as instrumental in nurturing the transient glories of modern day

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achievers as it is to send them back to oblivion—or to the bedroom—, where so many of them belong.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Audrain, Xavier (2004) ‘Devenir ‘baay-fall’ pour être soi: le religieux comme vecteur d’émancipation individuelle au Sénégal’, Politique Africaine, 94, pp. 149-165.

Austin, William; Worchel, Stephen (1979) The Social Psychology of Inter Group Relations, Monterey: Brooks-Cole.

Blom Hansen, Thomas (2001) Violence in Urban India. Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’ and the Postcolonial City, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bunsha, Dionne (2006) ‘A Serial Kidnapper and His ‘Mission’’, Frontline, 23 (25).

Concerned Citizens Tribunal (2002) Crime Against Humanity: An Inquiry into the Carnage in Gujarat: Findings and Recommendations, Vol. 2, Mumbai: Sabrang Communications.

Dharkar, Anil (2007) ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Times of India, 17 May.

Eliade, Mircea (ed.) (1987) The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 15, New York: Collier Macmillan.

Guha-Thakurta, Tapati (2004) Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post Colonial India, Cultures of History 2, New York: Columbia University Press.

Gupta, Dipankar (1980) ‘The Shiv Sena Movement: Its Organization and Operation, Part One and Two’, Social Scientist, 8 (10), pp. 22-37.

Halpin, David (2006) ‘Why a Romantic Conception of Education Matters’, Oxford Review of Education, 32 (3), pp. 325-45.

Hoskote, Ranjit (2004) ‘The Mob as Censor’, The Hindu, 11 February.

Jaffrelot, Christophe (1996) The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, New York: Columbia University Press.

Kapur, Ratna (1999) ‘Cultural Politics of Fire’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34 (21), pp. 1297-9.

Latour, Bruno (2002) ‘What is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars’, in Peter Weibel & Bruno Latour (eds.) Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp.14-37.

Lawrence, Bruce B.; Karim, Aisha (eds.) (2007) Violence: A Reader, Durham: Duke University Press.

Mahajan, Gurpreet; Reifeld, Helmut (eds.) (2003) The Public and the Private: Issues of Democratic Citizenship, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rajagopal, Arvind (2001) Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ramaswamy, Sumanthi (ed.) (2003) Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Sen, Attreyee (2007) Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

NOTES

1. In many instances of attacks on artists, the attackers came prepared with video cameras and even ‘warned’ news channels in advance. Most of the attacks occurred during working days, in public places and in the presence of onlookers and spectators. 2. On Sanskrit expressions related to ‘house heroes’, see the introduction to this issue. 3. See for example Hoskote (2004) and Kapur (1999). 4. The following observations are based on my field research for an ongoing doctoral thesis on ‘The rise of religious nationalism and freedom of expression of artists in India’. The fieldwork was carried out at various times between 2008 and 2010 primarily in New Delhi, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Jaipur, studying over 40 cases of violence against artists. The interviews of Niraj Jain, Afsar Khan and Diwakar Rawate were conducted, for most part, in Hindi. However, to lay emphasis on certain ideas Jain and Rawate used (often grammatically incorrect) English sentences and words, especially those related to women and sex. Despite their usage of certain English phrases, both Diwakar and Jain were adamant that I pose the questions in Hindi. Khan, on the other hand, did not use English at all. 5. All quoted sequences in this section, unless otherwise mentioned, are from the author’s interview with Niraj Jain in Baroda (Gujarat) on 17 February 2008. 6. An ex-member of the VHP, a pro-Hindutva organization, Babu Bajrangi is one of the main accused of the 2002 Gujarat pogroms, involved in the killings of more than a hundred Muslims. He is presently on bail and runs an NGO, Navchetan Trust. Among its many activities, is ‘rescuing’, or forcibly separating, inter-caste couples, especially Hindu women married to Muslim men. See also Bunsha (2006). 7. Babu Bajrangi’s involvement in the post-Godhra violence against Muslims was ‘proven’ and publicized through a ‘sting operation’ carried out by the news journal Tehelka in September 2007. 8. Jain narrated his family history and its conversion to Jainism, ‘My father’s grandfather was a diwan of a very big estate in Bharatpur. We are kshatriyas. Whatever happened in 1857 (…) the war of 1857 is mentioned in the history of that estate. A lot of things happened through his hands. Being the diwan he was fighting the war. So he was very worried and sad that he killed so many people. So a Jain sadhu (holy man) was passing by (…) but I believe Hinduism is our way of living life’. 9. Known for its erotic sculptures, Khajuraho here refers to a group of medieval Hindu and Jain temples built in the town of Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh. For an understanding of the ‘new obsessive preoccupation with the site of Khajuraho’ and its referrals to nudity in art, see Guha- Thakurta (2004). 10. Diwakar Narayan Rawate, interview by author, Mumbai, 26 August 2008. 11. Founded by Bal Thackeray on June 19th 1966, the Shiv Sena is a regional, extremist political party from Maharashtra. Militant in its approach, the name translates as ‘army of Maratha ruler Shivaji’. The tiger is its symbol. The early guiding motto of the movement was to favor rights of ‘original’ Marathis in the state over those of ‘outsiders’ who had settled in Mumbai for reasons of work, etc. From 1970 onwards, the party placed considerable importance on the Hindutva ideology, while continuing to canvass for its original cause in favor of Marathis. The Shiv Sena has since been at the helm of politics and social life, especially in Mumbai.

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12. Throughout the interview Rawate respectfully addressed Thackeray as ‘Bala Sahibji’. 13. For an in-depth study of Shiv Sena’s organizational structure, working and violence, see Gupta (1980), Blom Hansen (2001) and Sen (2007). 14. Emphasis in the interview. 15. Based on the interview with the author, Hyderabad, 5 January 2010. 16. However, he showed an immediate generosity in his interaction after I told him that I was interested to know about ‘his work’. 17. Emphasis mine. 18. Interviewed by the author, New Delhi, July 2010.

ABSTRACTS

This article addresses the issue of violent, controversial attacks on artists and works of art in India, which have been increasing with the rise of religious nationalism since the 1990s. It argues that understanding the attacks solely on the basis of religious and political ideologies, though demonstrable, may not be adequate, for it overlooks the most important agent of action: the individuals who lead the attacks and indulge in violence. I argue that a common theme that defines the microsociological make-up of this violence is the choice for glory through a collective imagination, a personal take on the cult of the hero.

INDEX

Keywords: art, heroes, iconoclash, India, individual activism, religious nationalism, violence, women

AUTHOR

MALVIKA MAHESHWARI

Doctoral candidate, CERI-Sciences Po, Paris

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