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Living Together Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics edited by Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy; Oxford University Press, New Delhi; pages 427.
THE coming together of the followers of different religions and the practitioners of cultural traits and their peaceful coexistence and mutual influence, despite differences, has been the hallmark of Indian civilisation. The cultural plurality that ensued led to the development of a syncretic tradition and, as some would argue, composite culture, not without the inevitable tensions inherent in the very process of living together.
The living together, however, did not lead to cultural homogenisation, but to multiculturalism, not purely tolerating each other, but respecting each other's religious faith and cultural practices. As a result the coming together has been considerably creative in many a field, particularly in language and literature, religious philosophy, architecture and above all, in daily life practices.
The essays collected together in this volume, originally presented at a seminar at the Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi, have helped to forefront the dynamics of the syncretic processes as manifested among Muslims. Grouped together in three sections - Perspectives, Processes and Actors - they make a strong case for a re-look at the cultural plurality and multiculturalism in Indian society, as evolved through a long process of cultural interaction and assimilation.
For a long time historians have chronicled the distinctiveness of the assimilative and inclusive traits of Indian culture. The earliest and foremost among them has been Tarachand whose seminal work entitled Influence of Islam on Indian Culture, written in 1922 but published only in 1964, brought out the impact of Islam on Indian religious and cultural life. In its preface he stated: "The history of India which furnishes a striking illustration of the impact of many divergent cultures which were gradually transformed by a process of mutual adjustment, surely needs the attention of a student of sociology and history who endeavours to understand the interaction of human mind and the effects of cultural contacts as presented in the customs, religion, literature and art of a people." Choosing religion, architecture and painting to analyse this impact, he demonstrated how the transformation it had wrought had led to a cultural and intellectual situation, which was essentially syncretic in character. Although a complete blending of cultures was nobody's case, that Indian society over a period of time developed a composite culture had several advocates. Two powerful articulations of this idea are Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India and Humayun Kabir's The Indian Heritage.
The notion of religious and cultural interaction leading to cultural plurality had "the salience of an unquestionable historical verity" for a fairly long time. However, both colonialists and fundamentalists challenged this understanding, in the process sharing a common view about the inter-religious relationship in Indian past. The first to question its veracity were the Orientalists who "helped to construct and perpetuate exclusive and competing, if not conflicting, models of religious-cultural traditions in the region". The knowledge about the past retrieved by the Orientalists was invoked by the fundamentalists, among both Muslims and Hindus, to establish their exclusive cultural traditions. While I.H. Qureshi, a historian of Pakistan, "stressed the exclusive nature of the Islamic and Hindu cultures and their separate destinies", R.C. Majumdar, whose writings have considerably furbished the revivalist ethos, reciprocated the view that Hindus and Muslims were irreconcilable and it was unlikely that the "twain shall ever meet".
Such views tend to ignore the historical reality of creative interplay of two cultures in a variety of fields. More important the influence they exerted in the daily cultural practices of people based on mutual accommodation and acceptance is overlooked.
The People of India, a publication of the Anthropological Survey of India, shows that there are more than 4,000 communities in India whose "cultural profile is rooted and primarily shaped by their relationship with their environment, their occupational status, their language and so on, and that religion comes way down in the construction of their identities. The Hindus and Muslims share more than 95 per cent characteristics of various kinds in common and that it is shared lives that have given shape to the diverse cultural expressions". The cultural processes that led to such a situation are yet to be fully unravelled through historical investigation and interpretation. In the context of the challenge posed by the proponents of Hindu nationalism with its "ahistorical, monolithic, cultural, and political credo of Hindutva", a serious inquiry into this significant aspect has become not only academically imperative but politically compelling.
As Asim Roy observes in his introduction, "the secularist ideology has been carefully ensconced within a perception of tolerant pluralistic tradition", the challenge to secularism is therefore "no less a challenge to India's pluralistic culture".
The papers presented in a seminar in which scholars of diverse disciplinary interest participate are difficult to bring within a single framework or focus. In this volume, which has arisen out of a multi-disciplinary seminar, the essays are quite diverse, ranging from colonial language classification to the life of Dyce Sombre of Saldhana. Nevertheless, they are all informed by their common interest in mapping the make-up of multiculturalism in Indian society.
The opening section on perspectives is mainly conceptual and theoretical in nature. They broadly cover history, culture and politics. In a perceptive essay on popular Islam in South Asia, Asim Roy traces the "linkage between the syncretic tradition and the process of Islamisation". Drawing upon his research on Islam in undivided Bengal, he reflects upon the cultural consequences of the interaction between the "great" and "little" traditions. Contemporary observers during the medieval times, such as Ibn Battuta, had noticed the distinctive features of Indian Islam which were evidently a result of the assimilation of cultural traits from the local milieu. A survey of popular Muslim beliefs and practices in the former East Bengal region has pointed out that "there are some rites observed by the Muslims... which have no doubt been originated from the Islamic sources. But even in such cases, sometimes, Hindu beliefs and rituals are mixed up with the Islamic rites. On the other hand, a purely Hindu ritual at times would bear an Islamic façade". However, there are scholars who believe that "popular Islam and syncretic values had been undergoing steady erosion in many parts of South Asia". Such a tendency, which manifested itself in the revivalist and purificatory movements in the 19th century, has gained further ground in recent times with the increasing influence of revivalist and fundamentalist forces.
Peter Vander Veer's brief essay is an attempt to examine the character of tradition, conversion and sycreticism in India, mainly based on fairly well-known published literature. This opinion, which he had earlier stated elsewhere, is, however, quite contentious. He holds that "democratisation in India implies a growing participation of larger sections of the population both in the political process and in communal violence. To expect that the liberal tradition will give answers that religious traditions will not provide seems to be a fallacy of the secular mind". The participation in communal violence as an index of democratisation in India, which even diehard communalists would be hesitant to assert, tends to sanitise communal violence and to devalue democratisation.
The other two essays in the section, the first by Annie Montaut on "Colonial Language Classification, Post-colonial Language Movements, and the Grassroot Multilingualism Ethos in India" and the second by Gurpreet Mahajan on "Reinventing Democratic Citizenship in a Plural Society", are excellent. The dialectics of national integration and diversity, which reached a particularly acute polarisation in the language question, is the main concern of Annie Montaut's essay. Since language is "not merely a tool for communication or a way of enacting one's social roles" but is also a means for asserting one's cultural or religious identity, the politicisation of the language `problem' is a distinct possibility. Such a situation, it is contended, was absent in pre-colonial India, but gradually developed with the British efforts to map and survey the languages of the colony, providing a radically new representation of the relation of the speaker to his speech. The language therefore became more a separative force, the reason for which is not linguistic diversity, but rather the consciousness of language as a monolithic entity and as a direct expression of community identity. Montaut recognises that societies able to deal with pluralism are the best resisting forces to liberal neo-capitalist globalisation.
But cultural plurality in itself is not a sufficient guarantee as the uniformed mass of capitalist system brings "people to a culture of oneness and unity of thought and eradicates from deep down the real differences". Such a situation demands a serious consideration of the relationship between democracy, multiculturalism and group rights, which Gurpreet Mahajan attempts in her well-crafted essay. Underlying her analysis is the difference between cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. She holds that "multi-cultural accommodation entails something more than peaceful coexistence of different cultures and communities. In violence and strife-ridden situations, peaceful existence is no doubt important, but for peace to last in a democracy what is perhaps even more important is that diverse populations learn to live as equals". It cannot be said that these three essays form a well-conceived conceptual and theoretical framework for the volume, as perhaps suggested by the title of the section. Nevertheless, they do raise issues of analytical importance, some of which find their echo in the essays that follow.
The essays in the following two sections of the book entitled, Processes and Actors are empirically rich and are attempts, even if unsuccessful in some cases, to address the issue of cultural plurality in operation, highlighting both its complimentarity and tension.
The essays "A `Holi Riot' of 1714: Versions from Ahmadabad and Delhi" by Najaf Haider, "Living Together: Ajmer as a Paradigm for the (South) Asian City" by Shail Mayaram and "From Beehive to Civil Space: A History of Indian Matrimony" by Nupur Chowdhry and Rajat Kant Ray not only contain hitherto unknown information but also provide new insights into social and cultural relations. Karrin Grafin Schwerin's study of the cult of Salar Masud, "the cow saving Muslim saint", dwell on the popular cultural practices that grew around traditions of the peer, which according to the author "are the creation of the silent masses". The majority of visitors to the grave of Salar Masud are Hindus as well as converted Muslims of peasant castes. The songs of praise of the peer are modelled on oral folk epics of lower Rajput-Afghan culture, dating back to the 13th century. They demonstrate without doubt that Hindu influence on Indian Islam and vice versa is not merely "a popular academic sport", as stigmatised by Francis Robinson who has contributed a scholarly article in the volume on the Ulema of Farangi Mahal.
Michael Fisher's biographical account of Dyce Sombre, son of the legendary Begum Samru, though it has less to do with the central theme of the volume, is delightful reading. The bibliographical essay prepared by Adnan Farooqui and Vasundhara Sirnate is quite comprehensive and useful. The remaining essays, though not referred to here, do contribute to the central theme of the volume.
This collection, as the sub-title suggests, is primarily an inquiry into the consequences of cultural plurality brought about by the togetherness and social accommodation of people belonging to different religious denominations. The syncretic cultural tradition, it is arguable, finds articulation most splendidly in the daily cultural practices of common people, which has not received attention except in passing. Perhaps that demands another seminar and another volume. But this collection in itself is a substantial contribution and hopefully would stimulate further research.
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