Region, Religion, and Violence in Postcolonial Gujarat Yogesh
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Legacies of Colonial History: Region, Religion, and Violence in Postcolonial Gujarat Yogesh Chandrani Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Yogesh Chandrani All rights reserved ABSTRACT Legacies of Colonial History: Region, Religion and Violence in Postcolonial Gujarat Yogesh Chandrani This dissertation takes the routine marginalization and erasure of Muslim presence in the contemporary social and political life of the western Indian state of Gujarat as an entry point into a genealogy of Gujarati regionalism. Through a historical anthropology of the reconfiguration of the modern idea of Gujarat, I argue that violence against religious minorities is an effect of both secular nation-building and of religious nationalist mobilization. Given this entanglement, I suggest that we rethink the oppositional relationship between religion and the secular in analyzing violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat. The modern idea of Gujarat, I further argue, cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how local conceptions of region and of religion were fundamentally altered by colonial power. In particular, I suggest that the construction of Islam as inessential and external to the idea of Gujarat is a legacy bequeathed by colonialism and its forms of knowledge. The transmutation of Gujarati Muslims into strangers, in other words, occurred simultaneously with the articulation of the modern idea of Gujarat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on the role of nineteenth-century regional history-writing, in which the foundational role of Islam was de-emphasized, in what I call the making of a regional tradition. By highlighting the colonial genealogy of contemporary discourses of Gujaratni asmita (pride in Gujarat), in which Hindu and Gujarati are posited as identical with each other, I argue that colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat. Another consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for Muslims to represent themselves or advocate for their rights as Muslim and as Gujarati. How the reconfiguration of a Gujarati regional identity is imbricated with transformations in conceptions of religion is part of what this dissertation seeks to think about. Furthermore, I argue that the marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on organized violence or on the Hindu nationalist movement. While recent studies on Gujarat have focused mainly on the pogrom of 2002 to think about the role of the Hindu nationalist movement in orchestrating mass violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat, I argue that the pogrom of 2002 is but one part of a broader spectrum of violence and exclusion that permeates the body of the state and society. In addition, I suggest that one of the conditions of possibility for such violence is the sedimentation of a conception of Gujaratiness as identical with Hinduness that cuts across the religious/secular divide. Instead of focusing exclusively on the violence of the Hindu nationalist movement, I explore this process of sedimentation as it manifests itself in the intersecting logics of urban planning, heritage preservation, and neoliberal development in contemporary Gujarat. Through an analysis of the contemporary reorganization and partitioning of the city of Ahmedabad along religious lines, I show how it is continuous with colonial and nationalist urban planning practices of the early twentieth century. Using ethnographic examples, I also argue that the contemporary secular nationalist discourse of heritage preservation is both complicit in the marginalization of Muslims and continuous with practices of urban planning and preservation that were articulated in the late colonial period. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates the enabling nature of neoliberal logics in the organization of violence against Muslims in Gujarat and argues that anti- Muslim violence and prejudice are enabled by and intertwined with narratives about the promises of capital and progress. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this dissertation seeks to contribute to an anthropology of colonialism, nationalism, religion, secularism and violence in South Asia that is attentive to the continuities and discontinuities that are constitutive of the postcolonial present we inhabit. By historicizing contemporary debates and assumptions about Muslims in Gujarat and describing some of the genealogies that have contributed to their sedimentation, I hope to have argued that colonial legacies have enduring effects in the present and that the question posed by colonial forms of knowledge and representation is not merely epistemological or historiographical but also a political one. Written as a history of the present, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to imagine a future in which Hindu/Gujarati and Muslim are no longer conceptualized as oppositional categories; in which Gujarati Muslims are able to represent themselves as Muslims and in their own (varied) terms; and where Hindus are no longer invited and incited to inhabit a subjectivity that depends on making Muslims strangers to Gujarat. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ………………………………………………….. iv DEDICATION ………………………………………………………….. ix INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………. 1 CHAPTER ONE FOR THE LOVE OF RAM: TRADITION AND TOLERATION IN THE MAKING OF HINDU NATIONALISM IN GUJARAT Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 23 The Ramcaritmanas Tradition in Contemporary Gujarat……………………….. 38 Liberal Toleration and the Reconfiguration of Tradition……………………….. 56 Two Contrasting Ideas of Toleration …………………………………………… 73 For the Love of Rama …………………………………………………………… 79 CHAPTER TWO IN THE ASYLUM OF TRUTH: PLANNING, HERITAGE AND VIOLENCE IN AHMEDABAD Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 91 Space and Power in Medieval Ahmedabad ………………………………….. 101 Modernizing Ahmedabad………………………………………………………. 118 Heritage in the Age of Hindu Nationalism……………………………………… 149 At the Queen’s Mosque…………………………………………………………. 154 In the Asylum of Truth………………………………………………………….. 158 Conclusion: Sidi Said’s Mosque………………………………………………… 162 CHAPTER THREE “IS IT NATURAL TO HATE MUSLIMS IN GUJARAT?” Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 171 Gujaratni Asmita and Hindu Nationalism……………………………………… 176 The Violence of “Vibrant Gujarat”…………………………………………….. 185 Can a Gujarati be a Muslim? …………………………………………………… 193 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………… 201 i CHAPTER FOUR REVISITING THE IDEA OF GUJARAT Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 206 The Gujarat Vernacular Society and the Making of a Regional Political Tradition ……………………………………….. 222 K.M. Munshi and Gujaratni Asmita……………………………………………. 239 Conclusion 245 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….. 248 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………….. 263 ii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure I.1: The Dargah of Hajji Pir in Kutch ………………………………………………… 88 Figure I.2: Morari Bapu’s Ramcaritmanas Katha at Hajji Pir………………………………… 89 Firgure I.3: After the cloudburst, the damaged tent at Hajji Pir ……………………………… 90 Figure II.1 Ahmedabad in 1917 ……………………………………………………………. 102 Figure II.2 Ahmedabad within the Fort Walls, 1941………………………………………… 103 Figure II.3 Example of a pol layout......................................................................................... 166 Figure II.4 Rani Sabrai’s Mosque……………………………………………………………. 167 Figure II.5 Rani Sabrai’s Mosque…………………………………………………………… 168 Figure II. 6 Demolished homes across from Rani Sabrai’s Mosque……………………….. 169 Figure II.7 Sidi Said’s Mosque ………………………………………………………………. 170 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Doing field research and writing a dissertation are collaborative exercises during which one accumulates many debts and receives numerous gifts along the way. Over the years, I have benefitted tremendously from the support of many institutions, teachers, friends and family members in the United States, India and Morocco. First and foremost among these is my teacher, mentor and friend the late Eqbal Ahmad, who introduced me to the study of colonial history and postcolonial theory when I was an undergraduate student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. In many ways, the kernel for this dissertation was sown by him during our many walks in Amherst, when we discussed Gandhi, the Partition of 1947 and his own memories of childhood in rural India. At Columbia University, I was fortunate to have access to a group of teachers and advisors who pushed me to pursue more rigorously my interests in colonialism and empire and their complex and contradictory legacies in the present. I am especially grateful to Nicholas Dirks, my teacher and advisor, for introducing me to historical anthropology and to the importance of thinking historically about the present. I thank him for the many stimulating conversations about this project and about the varied and complex legacies of colonialism and empire in South Asia and beyond. As a teacher, advisor and mentor, I could not have asked for more; he was critical and at the same time patient and unstinting in his support and faith in my ability to see this project through. Mahmood Mamdani patiently read early and inchoate drafts of chapters, offered