1. Art of Loving - Erich Fromm
2. Sane Society - Erich Fromm
3. Escape from Freedom- Erich Fromm
4. Indian Philosophy - JJ Mohanty
5. Communist Manifesto - Marx & Engels
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Dancing in a Cultural Vacuum
“The human soul needs a fuller and a more richer culture than the one offered by Hollywood and Rock Music” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian Writer
Prelude: It was a sultry day in Silvassa[1], April, 2008. I and a few of my fellow students had come there for a research project and were staying in a hotel. After dinner, we noticed that the hotel had a built-in discotheque and that some youth were dancing there. We cautiously approached the security guard there and asked whether we can enter the dance areana. He said yes and so we entered. I could not resist my desire to join in the dancing. By the way, coming from ultra-conservative Tamil Nadu where only cinema actors are allowed to dance, I had developed a love for dancing (A friend of mine used to say that Iam the most aweful dancer she has ever seen but I don’t let these trivial things deter me from dancing in public whenever I get an opportunity totally insensitive to whatever spectacle that I might be subjecting the onlookers to). I realized to my pleasant surprise, that the dancing in the discotheque is not very different from the “grinds” that happens in IRMA. As my fellow students were not willing to shake a leg, I went to a corner of the dance floor and started dancing alone. A group of three guys dancing a small distance away, on seeing my lonely dance, out of spontaneous friendliness, pulled me into their dancing ring. We four guys happily danced till the discotheque wound up for the night. We went out and mutually introduced ourselves. They said they were all undergraduate students from a college in Mumbai. We said bye and I came to my hotel room wondering at this beautiful cultural medium of dance which enables complete strangers to engage with each other with a feeling of spontaneous love and joy. I came back to my hotel room with my faith in humanity fully reinforced. But somewhere deep within myself I felt that some pertinent questions related to this experience needs to be answered.
A simple definition of “Culture” can be taken as those set of values that in sum constitutes the guidelines for human existence and that which enables us to exist at a higher and a more subliminal level than that of animals. The French Structuralist Levi Strauss says that the birth of the incest taboo demarcates the state of animals from the cultured state of human beings. Culture need not connote only good things. For that matter, Sigmund Freud claims that the first man threw an insult instead of a stone at his opponent started the human civilization. Culture denotes the sum total of all human values and not only the refined formal expression of these values through the arts like music, dance, cinema, drama etc. Finally, culture is the medium through which people find a meaning for their lives.
But what exactly seems to be the state of culture in the last few decades all across the globe? Two broad cultural trends seem to be in a dialectical interchange. One is the traditional culture across all societies and the other is the west-inspired modernist culture which forms the cultural component of the globalization process. This cultural clash should not be understood as the interplay between traditional and modern cultures which has been the hallmark of all ages but as something which is qualitatively different from other ages because of the radical nature of the globalization process which has been happening for the last 30 years.
We’ll now examine both these trends one by one. The first trend represented by traditional culture has ceased to satisfy the cultural urges of the human population as a whole in this era because it is not in sync with the changed and changing nature of the “mode of production”. Here by the phrase “mode of production” is taken from the Marxist epistemological understanding and it means the ever-evolving force of technology and the way in which economic production is organized around it. The second modernist trend is one which is in sync with the changed mode of production and is best described by the Hollywood culture and its numerous clones around the world. We can see that a considerable number of Bollywood movies are inspired by the problems of the NRIs and the wannabe NRIs. If one only sees only this genre of bollywood movies, he cannot be faulted for coming to the comfortable conclusion that the whole of India is driven by only one aim - To go abroad for a better life. Another closely related genre of Indian films like Dil Chatta Hai' and ' Devdas' have another related problem. In these films, ostentation has become an end in itself and opulence exists in celebration of itself. The old kind of stories where a 'poor girl falls in love with a rich boy' kind of movies are passe. By and large, the poor are out of the world view of these films. These new breed of movies deal exclusively with the concerns of the ' Beautiful people ' - the noveau rich , the rich and the bored super rich.
There are two problems with this cultural clash between the traditional and modern western culture. One is that it can adopt certain uncomfortable and violent overtones. The beating up of young couples on Valentine’s Day by right wing groups is an example of this. This is being done by a feeling of aggrievement caused by the globalization process which has left the majority of the population outside its cultural calculus. The cultural capital of modernization defines what is being “Civilized” in the current era. Deprived of that cultural capital, in the search for self-esteem and dignity, the dispossessed sections direct their anger against what they wrongly perceive as the symbols which caused their deprived undignified state. For this purpose, they take on the cultural weapons offered by the revivalist, revanchist ideologies of the right-wing religious groups who base their worldview on the real or imaginary state of cultural wellbeing that existed like say the “Ram Rajya” in India etc. The second problem is that even the groups who may mange to get this cultural capital through their education, jobs etc may suffer from an “Identity Crisis” because in their attempt to straddle two cultures, their cultural moorings gets properly shaken. For example, I knew one upper middle class Mumbaikar youth who used to believe in both traditional Hindu values as well as pre-marital relationships and doesn’t seem to detect the faintest sign of dissonance between the two. And ultimately this leaves them searching for a meaning for their lives.
Ok, assuming that a section of society manages to smoothly effect the cultural leap from the traditional to the modern, then is the problem solved for them? Definitely not. Because the problem is much deeper and is to do with the very nature of capitalism. In capitalism characterized by commodity production for the market, a person is estranged and alienated from his true essence. Marx termed this phenomenon as alienation. Because of alienation, a person tries to find solace only in things which are external to him like a revivalist God, a new car, fancy house etc. Moreover, in capitalism, a thing becomes valuable only by virtue of its unavailability. Once it becomes available, it will become not-so-worthy and the individual will start yearning for something which is not available. The system consciously cultivates mythical images through the media like the “Contented Consumer”, the “Obedient worker”, the “Brilliant Investment Banker”, the “Happy Married Couple” etc while superbly hiding the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal relations that underlie each of these constructs.
Additional complications are being created which are leading to a lot of cultural confusion. I knew some cultural activists in Tamil Nadu who used to profess a militant fringe left political ideology. I had read in a newspaper that a couple of their women activists had barged into a cinema theatre showing pornography and had torn the screen because of their belief that pornography insults women. There were all a band of dedicated, selfless and idealistic set of people. Well, one day I had the opportunity to talk with a male activist of theirs, a poor chap who was doing the profession of an auto driver for a living. He was saying that they had no money even to print their political posters and so were writing them by hand day and night. Even if uneducated, he was inspiring. But when I asked him about the content of those posters it was disappointing. It was about North Indian Marwadis “exploiting” Tamil Nadu. If tiny underdeveloped Manipur talks of development neglect and hence exploitation by the Indian state, that has more than an element of truth. But I simply could not get how Tamil Nadu which by any standards will be one of the most developed states in India can be “exploited” by north Indians. The only plausible explanation for their stance is that, after the collapse of the USSR, their earlier noble and inclusivistic communist ideology has now degenerated into a parochial cultural Tamil nationalism and it is not derived from the material facts of inter-regional development and exploitation. This is the trend internationally also. In Sri Lanka, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) inspired by the great internationalist Che Guevara waged a militant struggle for a communist Srilanka in the 1980s. 40,000 of their selfless Sinhalese cadres gave their lives for the cause of an egalitarian Sri Lanka comprised of both Sinhalese and Tamils cohabiting with equal rights. But now the very same JVP has transmorphed into a mainstream political party with a virulent ultra-nationalist ideology rooted in Sinhala majoritarianism and its attendant anti-Tamil minority connotations.
So, to put it in a nutshell, the whole of humanity seems to be dancing in a cultural vacuum. Caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea, humanity is left desperately searching for a meaning for life worth living. But nature abhors a vacuum and it will be surely filled. So, what exactly is the solution? This is easier asked than answered. A new culture needs to be evolved.
Firstly, a progressive culture cannot leave out the aspirations of the majority and so the elite-mass cultural gap has to be bridged. At a personal level, people should understand that being 'cultured ' does not mean acting 'sophisticated' and imagining themselves to be the snobbish member of an elitist stratum. Being cultured means being broad and inclusivist in mind, spirit and action. This will enable the elites to connect with the masses. As Gandhi says, even self-suffering can have a culturo-spiritual value. The elites should realize that to share in the sum-total of human suffering is also an act of personal spiritual and cultural upliftment. Hence the popular culture needs to be dovetailed with the subaltern culture.
Secondly the reality-fantasy cultural gap has to bridged. In an abstract sense, being cultured means having the aesthetic capability to appreciate beauty. But what is beauty? Beauty is truth even if it contains certain ugly aspects of reality. A culture which provides a beautiful make-believe fantasy world into which people can escape, be “Happy” and forget these aspects is neither progressive for society and will only create mindless zombies out of these individuals.
Thirdly, in a society that is mutually constituted by an exploitative set of relations, there cannot be a passive culture which is not related to these relationships. A progressive culture has to combat these exploitative relationships. A kind of culture is needed that helps mass movements of the dispossesed millions connect to the mainstream middle class and get the legitimacy that they richly deserve. These movements can assume a plethora of cultural forms like street theatre, community media etc and can be creatively derived from a mix of traditional and modern cultural forms and they can use the latest in Information and Communication Technologies.
Finally, the cultural problems have to be linked with the other systemic problems to do with the political economy and the efforts has to be a joint and sustained one. In this essay certain terms used have been used more to prove the analytical points raised than to stand the test of rigid academic scrutiny from the sociological or the anthropological point of view. Moreover a broad sweep of issues have been covered at the expense of some coherence. But the objective was more to provide some useful insights and ask some pertinent questions.
[1] The Capital of the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border
Prelude: It was a sultry day in Silvassa[1], April, 2008. I and a few of my fellow students had come there for a research project and were staying in a hotel. After dinner, we noticed that the hotel had a built-in discotheque and that some youth were dancing there. We cautiously approached the security guard there and asked whether we can enter the dance areana. He said yes and so we entered. I could not resist my desire to join in the dancing. By the way, coming from ultra-conservative Tamil Nadu where only cinema actors are allowed to dance, I had developed a love for dancing (A friend of mine used to say that Iam the most aweful dancer she has ever seen but I don’t let these trivial things deter me from dancing in public whenever I get an opportunity totally insensitive to whatever spectacle that I might be subjecting the onlookers to). I realized to my pleasant surprise, that the dancing in the discotheque is not very different from the “grinds” that happens in IRMA. As my fellow students were not willing to shake a leg, I went to a corner of the dance floor and started dancing alone. A group of three guys dancing a small distance away, on seeing my lonely dance, out of spontaneous friendliness, pulled me into their dancing ring. We four guys happily danced till the discotheque wound up for the night. We went out and mutually introduced ourselves. They said they were all undergraduate students from a college in Mumbai. We said bye and I came to my hotel room wondering at this beautiful cultural medium of dance which enables complete strangers to engage with each other with a feeling of spontaneous love and joy. I came back to my hotel room with my faith in humanity fully reinforced. But somewhere deep within myself I felt that some pertinent questions related to this experience needs to be answered.
A simple definition of “Culture” can be taken as those set of values that in sum constitutes the guidelines for human existence and that which enables us to exist at a higher and a more subliminal level than that of animals. The French Structuralist Levi Strauss says that the birth of the incest taboo demarcates the state of animals from the cultured state of human beings. Culture need not connote only good things. For that matter, Sigmund Freud claims that the first man threw an insult instead of a stone at his opponent started the human civilization. Culture denotes the sum total of all human values and not only the refined formal expression of these values through the arts like music, dance, cinema, drama etc. Finally, culture is the medium through which people find a meaning for their lives.
But what exactly seems to be the state of culture in the last few decades all across the globe? Two broad cultural trends seem to be in a dialectical interchange. One is the traditional culture across all societies and the other is the west-inspired modernist culture which forms the cultural component of the globalization process. This cultural clash should not be understood as the interplay between traditional and modern cultures which has been the hallmark of all ages but as something which is qualitatively different from other ages because of the radical nature of the globalization process which has been happening for the last 30 years.
We’ll now examine both these trends one by one. The first trend represented by traditional culture has ceased to satisfy the cultural urges of the human population as a whole in this era because it is not in sync with the changed and changing nature of the “mode of production”. Here by the phrase “mode of production” is taken from the Marxist epistemological understanding and it means the ever-evolving force of technology and the way in which economic production is organized around it. The second modernist trend is one which is in sync with the changed mode of production and is best described by the Hollywood culture and its numerous clones around the world. We can see that a considerable number of Bollywood movies are inspired by the problems of the NRIs and the wannabe NRIs. If one only sees only this genre of bollywood movies, he cannot be faulted for coming to the comfortable conclusion that the whole of India is driven by only one aim - To go abroad for a better life. Another closely related genre of Indian films like Dil Chatta Hai' and ' Devdas' have another related problem. In these films, ostentation has become an end in itself and opulence exists in celebration of itself. The old kind of stories where a 'poor girl falls in love with a rich boy' kind of movies are passe. By and large, the poor are out of the world view of these films. These new breed of movies deal exclusively with the concerns of the ' Beautiful people ' - the noveau rich , the rich and the bored super rich.
There are two problems with this cultural clash between the traditional and modern western culture. One is that it can adopt certain uncomfortable and violent overtones. The beating up of young couples on Valentine’s Day by right wing groups is an example of this. This is being done by a feeling of aggrievement caused by the globalization process which has left the majority of the population outside its cultural calculus. The cultural capital of modernization defines what is being “Civilized” in the current era. Deprived of that cultural capital, in the search for self-esteem and dignity, the dispossessed sections direct their anger against what they wrongly perceive as the symbols which caused their deprived undignified state. For this purpose, they take on the cultural weapons offered by the revivalist, revanchist ideologies of the right-wing religious groups who base their worldview on the real or imaginary state of cultural wellbeing that existed like say the “Ram Rajya” in India etc. The second problem is that even the groups who may mange to get this cultural capital through their education, jobs etc may suffer from an “Identity Crisis” because in their attempt to straddle two cultures, their cultural moorings gets properly shaken. For example, I knew one upper middle class Mumbaikar youth who used to believe in both traditional Hindu values as well as pre-marital relationships and doesn’t seem to detect the faintest sign of dissonance between the two. And ultimately this leaves them searching for a meaning for their lives.
Ok, assuming that a section of society manages to smoothly effect the cultural leap from the traditional to the modern, then is the problem solved for them? Definitely not. Because the problem is much deeper and is to do with the very nature of capitalism. In capitalism characterized by commodity production for the market, a person is estranged and alienated from his true essence. Marx termed this phenomenon as alienation. Because of alienation, a person tries to find solace only in things which are external to him like a revivalist God, a new car, fancy house etc. Moreover, in capitalism, a thing becomes valuable only by virtue of its unavailability. Once it becomes available, it will become not-so-worthy and the individual will start yearning for something which is not available. The system consciously cultivates mythical images through the media like the “Contented Consumer”, the “Obedient worker”, the “Brilliant Investment Banker”, the “Happy Married Couple” etc while superbly hiding the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal relations that underlie each of these constructs.
Additional complications are being created which are leading to a lot of cultural confusion. I knew some cultural activists in Tamil Nadu who used to profess a militant fringe left political ideology. I had read in a newspaper that a couple of their women activists had barged into a cinema theatre showing pornography and had torn the screen because of their belief that pornography insults women. There were all a band of dedicated, selfless and idealistic set of people. Well, one day I had the opportunity to talk with a male activist of theirs, a poor chap who was doing the profession of an auto driver for a living. He was saying that they had no money even to print their political posters and so were writing them by hand day and night. Even if uneducated, he was inspiring. But when I asked him about the content of those posters it was disappointing. It was about North Indian Marwadis “exploiting” Tamil Nadu. If tiny underdeveloped Manipur talks of development neglect and hence exploitation by the Indian state, that has more than an element of truth. But I simply could not get how Tamil Nadu which by any standards will be one of the most developed states in India can be “exploited” by north Indians. The only plausible explanation for their stance is that, after the collapse of the USSR, their earlier noble and inclusivistic communist ideology has now degenerated into a parochial cultural Tamil nationalism and it is not derived from the material facts of inter-regional development and exploitation. This is the trend internationally also. In Sri Lanka, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) inspired by the great internationalist Che Guevara waged a militant struggle for a communist Srilanka in the 1980s. 40,000 of their selfless Sinhalese cadres gave their lives for the cause of an egalitarian Sri Lanka comprised of both Sinhalese and Tamils cohabiting with equal rights. But now the very same JVP has transmorphed into a mainstream political party with a virulent ultra-nationalist ideology rooted in Sinhala majoritarianism and its attendant anti-Tamil minority connotations.
So, to put it in a nutshell, the whole of humanity seems to be dancing in a cultural vacuum. Caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea, humanity is left desperately searching for a meaning for life worth living. But nature abhors a vacuum and it will be surely filled. So, what exactly is the solution? This is easier asked than answered. A new culture needs to be evolved.
Firstly, a progressive culture cannot leave out the aspirations of the majority and so the elite-mass cultural gap has to be bridged. At a personal level, people should understand that being 'cultured ' does not mean acting 'sophisticated' and imagining themselves to be the snobbish member of an elitist stratum. Being cultured means being broad and inclusivist in mind, spirit and action. This will enable the elites to connect with the masses. As Gandhi says, even self-suffering can have a culturo-spiritual value. The elites should realize that to share in the sum-total of human suffering is also an act of personal spiritual and cultural upliftment. Hence the popular culture needs to be dovetailed with the subaltern culture.
Secondly the reality-fantasy cultural gap has to bridged. In an abstract sense, being cultured means having the aesthetic capability to appreciate beauty. But what is beauty? Beauty is truth even if it contains certain ugly aspects of reality. A culture which provides a beautiful make-believe fantasy world into which people can escape, be “Happy” and forget these aspects is neither progressive for society and will only create mindless zombies out of these individuals.
Thirdly, in a society that is mutually constituted by an exploitative set of relations, there cannot be a passive culture which is not related to these relationships. A progressive culture has to combat these exploitative relationships. A kind of culture is needed that helps mass movements of the dispossesed millions connect to the mainstream middle class and get the legitimacy that they richly deserve. These movements can assume a plethora of cultural forms like street theatre, community media etc and can be creatively derived from a mix of traditional and modern cultural forms and they can use the latest in Information and Communication Technologies.
Finally, the cultural problems have to be linked with the other systemic problems to do with the political economy and the efforts has to be a joint and sustained one. In this essay certain terms used have been used more to prove the analytical points raised than to stand the test of rigid academic scrutiny from the sociological or the anthropological point of view. Moreover a broad sweep of issues have been covered at the expense of some coherence. But the objective was more to provide some useful insights and ask some pertinent questions.
[1] The Capital of the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Towards a New Feminist Identity
(Partly adapted from a poem in the “Analytical MONTHLY REVIEW’ titled “The Secret Of Being A Woman”)
Everybody realizes that ‘sex’ is a biological identity…
We only have to attend a biology class,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is a social identity…
We only have to see the page 3 columns in fashionable magazines,
That are exclusively for “Him” or “Her”,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is an economic identity…
We only have to see the commodification of women,
In the oldest profession in the world – prostitution,
And the sexual division of labour,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
The problem starts,
When gender is realized,
As a Political identity…
When a woman starts realizing that,
She being a woman,
Has got nothing to due with Biology,
But rather,
Is something to due with Sociology,
Because she is not born as a woman,
But through countless taboos and sanctions,
She is made into a woman…..
When a woman starts realizing that,
The ethereal orange flavoured perfume,
That so very nicely adorns her skin,
May be made by the same corporation,
That manufactures chemical weapons…
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her worth is not something,
That is decided by her beauty…..
And more so,
Her conception of her own beauty,
Is not a simple manifestation of her sense of aesthetics,
But is something that is increasingly decided,
By an alien and commercial cosmetics industry….
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her own sexuality,
Can also be made by a patriarchal society,
Into an instrument,
For her own oppression…
When a woman starts realizing that,
All through history and up till today,
That the feudal institution of the “Family”,
Represents the most structured origin and basis,
For her continual sub-ordination.….
When a woman starts realizing that,
That she cannot hope to realize her Identity
By winning Beauty pageants,
And by strutting in Fashion parades,
And by stressing the finer aspects of her ‘Feminity’,
But only by,
Affirming the deeper aspects of her innate Humanity…
When she realizes all these things,
She will cease to be a woman in herself,
And will truly become,
A real woman for herself
And will realize her identity…
Everybody realizes that ‘sex’ is a biological identity…
We only have to attend a biology class,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is a social identity…
We only have to see the page 3 columns in fashionable magazines,
That are exclusively for “Him” or “Her”,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
Everybody realizes that gender is an economic identity…
We only have to see the commodification of women,
In the oldest profession in the world – prostitution,
And the sexual division of labour,
To realize the truth of the above statement…
The problem starts,
When gender is realized,
As a Political identity…
When a woman starts realizing that,
She being a woman,
Has got nothing to due with Biology,
But rather,
Is something to due with Sociology,
Because she is not born as a woman,
But through countless taboos and sanctions,
She is made into a woman…..
When a woman starts realizing that,
The ethereal orange flavoured perfume,
That so very nicely adorns her skin,
May be made by the same corporation,
That manufactures chemical weapons…
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her worth is not something,
That is decided by her beauty…..
And more so,
Her conception of her own beauty,
Is not a simple manifestation of her sense of aesthetics,
But is something that is increasingly decided,
By an alien and commercial cosmetics industry….
When a woman starts realizing that,
Her own sexuality,
Can also be made by a patriarchal society,
Into an instrument,
For her own oppression…
When a woman starts realizing that,
All through history and up till today,
That the feudal institution of the “Family”,
Represents the most structured origin and basis,
For her continual sub-ordination.….
When a woman starts realizing that,
That she cannot hope to realize her Identity
By winning Beauty pageants,
And by strutting in Fashion parades,
And by stressing the finer aspects of her ‘Feminity’,
But only by,
Affirming the deeper aspects of her innate Humanity…
When she realizes all these things,
She will cease to be a woman in herself,
And will truly become,
A real woman for herself
And will realize her identity…
A Voice Against Hindu-Muslim Communalism
Communalism is an ideology which survives on certain myths and false notions. Since it is an ideology, it has to be fought on an ideological plane because no force can crush an ideology. Communalism is not only a feeling which is possessed by certain misguided elements but it thrives on certain attitudes and prejudices which is present in most ordinary people like us. We'll start by analyzing certain myths. Myth No: 1 : Hindus are the natives of India while Muslims are foreigners.
This is false because the majority of the ancestors of Indian Muslims were living in India before the advent of Islam. Most of them were converted to Islam by Sufi Saints by peaceful means. Even the minority of Muslims who came from Central Asia are not 'foreigners' because if they are foreigners , are not the Aryans who came from Central Asia, the Huns from Central Asia who constitute the ethnic ancestors of most of the current Gujaratis and Rajputs and the Dravidians who came from the Mediterranean region foreigners? Man evolved from ape in Central Africa and then migrated to all parts of the world. So going by that, apart from the inhabitants of central Africa, all of us are 'foreigners'. Why can't we accept a people who have been living here for a minimum of 1000 years as natives of India? Myth No: 2 : Islam is a regressive religion compared with Hinduism In the 7th century AD, when we Hindus in India were burning our young widows in the name of 'Sati', Mohammed the Prophet himself married a widow. According to the Manu Smriti, there is no provision for divorce open to a woman. She has to live (and possibly die) with her husband. But this provision is there in Islam for a Muslim women. Moreover, theoretically Islam recognizes only one god ‘Allah’ before whom all are equal. But in Hinduism we have different gods for different castes, the status of the god increasing with the status of the caste. In Kerala, until recent times a man belonging to the 'Pulayan' caste had to maintain a distance of 64 feet from a 'Nambhoodri Brahmin' else he ' pollutes' him. These sort of obnoxious practices of untouchability were sustained on the basis of 'Varnashrama Vyavastha' or the doctrine of Theological Determinism. The caste system is definitely a blot on Hinduism, the remnants of which are still lingering well into in the 21st century. Seeing all this, how can we claim that we are following a more progressive religion than Islam? If the Taliban type of Islam is taken to represent the essence of Islam, then the Hinduism advocated by the killers of Graham Staines can be taken to be the essence of Hinduism. Both are virulent forms of Islam and Hinduism respectively and don’t represent the ‘Ideal type’ of either religion.Myth No: 3 : Muslims and other minorities enjoy some ‘privileges’ which the majority Hindu community does not enjoy. The percentage of Hindus in India who are below the poverty line is around 26%. This figure for Muslims is around 46 %. Muslims form 12% of India's population. But in no sphere of economic, social or political importance like say the number of MPs in Parliament, the number of IAS officers, the number of millionaires etc is the Muslim representation equal to this 12%. It is always less. If Muslims are enjoying special privileges, how come this is possible? The differential laws which Muslims have are related to the issue of marriage, divorce etc. Let us take the famous issue of the ‘Triple Talaq’ system of divorce allowed for Muslims. Because of this law, Muslim men are able to exploit Muslim women more than the extent to which Hindu men are able to exploit Hindu women. But if we come to a conclusion that due to this law, Muslims are dominating Hindus, then we are taking a tragically erroneous leap of logic and morality. These issues have to be debated and solved from other angles like Gender relations etc and not from the communalistic angle. The point to be noted here is that the average Muslim of India is worse off economically, socially and politically than the average Hindu of India. Myth No : 4 : Muslims were ‘foreign invaders’ of the Indian nation Now we have to define the term 'foreign invader'. We can have a concept of a 'foreign invader’ only when we have a concept of what is the ‘native country’.We were not a single nation when Muslims invaded India. We were divided into numerous countries each fighting with each other. And even if we assume that India was invaded by Muslim conquerors 1000 Years ago, how can we forget the fact that India was also ‘invaded’ by the ‘foreign’ Hindu Aryans 3500 years ago? So nobody is a ‘foreign invader’. Myth No: 5: Muslims are basically of a violent mindset and are more prone to acts of ‘Terrorism’. Presently we read about ' Islamic terrorists '. But before September 11 WTC attacks the terrorist group which was first in the list of terrorist groups (if the word ‘terrorist’ can be used here) drawn up by the US State department was the LTTE. The LTTE conducts pujas in temples on its leader's B'day. So it is as Hindu as any Hindu organisation can be. No only the LTTE, the ULFA, Bodo militant groups of Assam are Hindus, the Naga militants are christians. In Southern Sudan we have Christian fundamentalist militants or terrorists. One may ask that on an international level, it is Islamic terrorism which is in the news and not Hindu or any other religion’s terrorism. This is because Muslims form a considerable proportion of the population in 90 countries of the world stretching right from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific whereas Hindus are found only within the Indian sub-continent. So Hindu fundamentalism is localized and contained while Islamic fundamentalism is internationalized. So we cannot associate terrorism with any single religion. And even if a particular religious group turns violent, the root causes of terrorism have to be located in socio-economic factors rather than in religion per se. So the average Muslim is as violent / non-violent as the average Hindu or The average Christian. Myth No: 6 : About Muslims invaders destroying Hindu temples This is a fact in the sense that Muslim invaders did destroy Hindu temples. But any invader in those crude historical times would definitely have attacked Hindu temples because those temples were like treasuries which housed all kinds of precious items. Any invading army whether it is the army of Ghazni Muhammed attacking Somnath or the army of Hindu King Krishna Deva Raya attacking the neighbouring Muslim Bahmani Kingdom would ransack the host country. For this we cannot blame the Muslim invaders alone. The sad fact is that a considerable section of India seems to believe that most of India's problems is because somebody destroyed a temple 500 years ago. Myth No : 7 : India was ruled by Muslims This is the greatest myth. India was never ruled by Muslims but only by Muslim rulers. What is the difference? A world of difference is there. When we say that Muslims ruled India for 750 years, we mean that during those 750 years, Muslims as a whole were ruling and dominating over Hindus, Sikhs, Jains etc of India. That was not at all the case. It was only a tiny fraction of the Muslim community called the Ashraf Muslims which constituted the Muslim ruling class. The point is even when the Muslim rulers were ruling India, the average Muslim was worse off in the socio-economic sense than the average Hindu. So, inspite of India being ruled by Muslim rulers for nearly 750 years, the Muslim rulers, were not able to convert their political dominance into social and economic dominance for all Muslims and perpetuate it. So, the average Muslim continues to be in a marginalized state even now.
Myth No: 8: Muslims are getting the advantage of “Minority appeasement” which is against the interests of the majority community
For this first we have to define what we define as a “Minority”. A South Indian who does not know Hindi properly will be part of a miniscule minority in North India. A lower caste boy in most elite educational institutions of India dominated by upper castes will be part of a minority. A professionally successful woman will be part of a minority in most professions which are male-dominated. A poor chap who enters a mall meant for the rich poor chap will be a minority in that space. So, judging by these standards the vast majority of Indians will be a part of some minority or the other. So, how a nation and society views and treats its different minorities reflects the progressive and liberal character. Hence a pro-muslim perspective and policy will only strengthen the moral character of the majority community as well as liberal ethos of the Indian state.
It might seem that here an anti-Hindu, pro-Muslim stance has been taken. But that was not the objective. We are now living in a country in which majoritarian fundamentalism parades under the name of ‘Nationalism’ while minoritarian fundamentalism is always condemned as ‘Terrorism’. So it is necessary to know the other side of the story to get the complete picture of the truth. Islamic fundamentalism is not an answer to Hindu fundamentalism neither is Hindu fundamentalism an answer to Islamic fundamentalism. The answer for irrational communalism is rational humanism. We are humans prior to being the adherents of specific religious denominations. So it behooves that we shouldn’t lose our humanistic and rational faculties in a communalistic stupor.
This is false because the majority of the ancestors of Indian Muslims were living in India before the advent of Islam. Most of them were converted to Islam by Sufi Saints by peaceful means. Even the minority of Muslims who came from Central Asia are not 'foreigners' because if they are foreigners , are not the Aryans who came from Central Asia, the Huns from Central Asia who constitute the ethnic ancestors of most of the current Gujaratis and Rajputs and the Dravidians who came from the Mediterranean region foreigners? Man evolved from ape in Central Africa and then migrated to all parts of the world. So going by that, apart from the inhabitants of central Africa, all of us are 'foreigners'. Why can't we accept a people who have been living here for a minimum of 1000 years as natives of India? Myth No: 2 : Islam is a regressive religion compared with Hinduism In the 7th century AD, when we Hindus in India were burning our young widows in the name of 'Sati', Mohammed the Prophet himself married a widow. According to the Manu Smriti, there is no provision for divorce open to a woman. She has to live (and possibly die) with her husband. But this provision is there in Islam for a Muslim women. Moreover, theoretically Islam recognizes only one god ‘Allah’ before whom all are equal. But in Hinduism we have different gods for different castes, the status of the god increasing with the status of the caste. In Kerala, until recent times a man belonging to the 'Pulayan' caste had to maintain a distance of 64 feet from a 'Nambhoodri Brahmin' else he ' pollutes' him. These sort of obnoxious practices of untouchability were sustained on the basis of 'Varnashrama Vyavastha' or the doctrine of Theological Determinism. The caste system is definitely a blot on Hinduism, the remnants of which are still lingering well into in the 21st century. Seeing all this, how can we claim that we are following a more progressive religion than Islam? If the Taliban type of Islam is taken to represent the essence of Islam, then the Hinduism advocated by the killers of Graham Staines can be taken to be the essence of Hinduism. Both are virulent forms of Islam and Hinduism respectively and don’t represent the ‘Ideal type’ of either religion.Myth No: 3 : Muslims and other minorities enjoy some ‘privileges’ which the majority Hindu community does not enjoy. The percentage of Hindus in India who are below the poverty line is around 26%. This figure for Muslims is around 46 %. Muslims form 12% of India's population. But in no sphere of economic, social or political importance like say the number of MPs in Parliament, the number of IAS officers, the number of millionaires etc is the Muslim representation equal to this 12%. It is always less. If Muslims are enjoying special privileges, how come this is possible? The differential laws which Muslims have are related to the issue of marriage, divorce etc. Let us take the famous issue of the ‘Triple Talaq’ system of divorce allowed for Muslims. Because of this law, Muslim men are able to exploit Muslim women more than the extent to which Hindu men are able to exploit Hindu women. But if we come to a conclusion that due to this law, Muslims are dominating Hindus, then we are taking a tragically erroneous leap of logic and morality. These issues have to be debated and solved from other angles like Gender relations etc and not from the communalistic angle. The point to be noted here is that the average Muslim of India is worse off economically, socially and politically than the average Hindu of India. Myth No : 4 : Muslims were ‘foreign invaders’ of the Indian nation Now we have to define the term 'foreign invader'. We can have a concept of a 'foreign invader’ only when we have a concept of what is the ‘native country’.We were not a single nation when Muslims invaded India. We were divided into numerous countries each fighting with each other. And even if we assume that India was invaded by Muslim conquerors 1000 Years ago, how can we forget the fact that India was also ‘invaded’ by the ‘foreign’ Hindu Aryans 3500 years ago? So nobody is a ‘foreign invader’. Myth No: 5: Muslims are basically of a violent mindset and are more prone to acts of ‘Terrorism’. Presently we read about ' Islamic terrorists '. But before September 11 WTC attacks the terrorist group which was first in the list of terrorist groups (if the word ‘terrorist’ can be used here) drawn up by the US State department was the LTTE. The LTTE conducts pujas in temples on its leader's B'day. So it is as Hindu as any Hindu organisation can be. No only the LTTE, the ULFA, Bodo militant groups of Assam are Hindus, the Naga militants are christians. In Southern Sudan we have Christian fundamentalist militants or terrorists. One may ask that on an international level, it is Islamic terrorism which is in the news and not Hindu or any other religion’s terrorism. This is because Muslims form a considerable proportion of the population in 90 countries of the world stretching right from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific whereas Hindus are found only within the Indian sub-continent. So Hindu fundamentalism is localized and contained while Islamic fundamentalism is internationalized. So we cannot associate terrorism with any single religion. And even if a particular religious group turns violent, the root causes of terrorism have to be located in socio-economic factors rather than in religion per se. So the average Muslim is as violent / non-violent as the average Hindu or The average Christian. Myth No: 6 : About Muslims invaders destroying Hindu temples This is a fact in the sense that Muslim invaders did destroy Hindu temples. But any invader in those crude historical times would definitely have attacked Hindu temples because those temples were like treasuries which housed all kinds of precious items. Any invading army whether it is the army of Ghazni Muhammed attacking Somnath or the army of Hindu King Krishna Deva Raya attacking the neighbouring Muslim Bahmani Kingdom would ransack the host country. For this we cannot blame the Muslim invaders alone. The sad fact is that a considerable section of India seems to believe that most of India's problems is because somebody destroyed a temple 500 years ago. Myth No : 7 : India was ruled by Muslims This is the greatest myth. India was never ruled by Muslims but only by Muslim rulers. What is the difference? A world of difference is there. When we say that Muslims ruled India for 750 years, we mean that during those 750 years, Muslims as a whole were ruling and dominating over Hindus, Sikhs, Jains etc of India. That was not at all the case. It was only a tiny fraction of the Muslim community called the Ashraf Muslims which constituted the Muslim ruling class. The point is even when the Muslim rulers were ruling India, the average Muslim was worse off in the socio-economic sense than the average Hindu. So, inspite of India being ruled by Muslim rulers for nearly 750 years, the Muslim rulers, were not able to convert their political dominance into social and economic dominance for all Muslims and perpetuate it. So, the average Muslim continues to be in a marginalized state even now.
Myth No: 8: Muslims are getting the advantage of “Minority appeasement” which is against the interests of the majority community
For this first we have to define what we define as a “Minority”. A South Indian who does not know Hindi properly will be part of a miniscule minority in North India. A lower caste boy in most elite educational institutions of India dominated by upper castes will be part of a minority. A professionally successful woman will be part of a minority in most professions which are male-dominated. A poor chap who enters a mall meant for the rich poor chap will be a minority in that space. So, judging by these standards the vast majority of Indians will be a part of some minority or the other. So, how a nation and society views and treats its different minorities reflects the progressive and liberal character. Hence a pro-muslim perspective and policy will only strengthen the moral character of the majority community as well as liberal ethos of the Indian state.
It might seem that here an anti-Hindu, pro-Muslim stance has been taken. But that was not the objective. We are now living in a country in which majoritarian fundamentalism parades under the name of ‘Nationalism’ while minoritarian fundamentalism is always condemned as ‘Terrorism’. So it is necessary to know the other side of the story to get the complete picture of the truth. Islamic fundamentalism is not an answer to Hindu fundamentalism neither is Hindu fundamentalism an answer to Islamic fundamentalism. The answer for irrational communalism is rational humanism. We are humans prior to being the adherents of specific religious denominations. So it behooves that we shouldn’t lose our humanistic and rational faculties in a communalistic stupor.
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