Where history stops

I ordered a couple of books titled 'Modern Indian History' a few weeks ago: I was looking to read about recent developments in India. So, I was surprised and disappointed when I found out that the books dealt with events starting with late Mughal period, the most recent event discussed being the Indian Independence. I went back online, and after some searching, found a book titled 'India After Gandhi': so figuring that I could not go wrong here, given its title, ordered it. Interestingly, the prologue of the book reflects on this very same problem: the seeming end of Indian history with Independence. The author quotes Krishna Kumar who wrote that 'for Indian children history itself comes to an end with Partition and Independence. As a constituent of social studies, and later on as a subject in its own right, history runs right out of content in 1947... All that has happened during the last 55 years may filter through the measly civics syllabus, popular cinema and television; history as formally constituted knowledge of the past does not cover it.'

Yes, our history books in school dealt with the struggle for Independence at great length, but that was where it ended. I find myself lacking anything more than a vague idea of most events after Independence (those that I didn't live through myself, that is), even major ones. Only recently did I look into and find out, say, as to how Goa or Nagaland came to be a part of India or why Indira Gandhi was assassinated. And I find that very odd, primarily when contrasted with the economics or civics syllabus, which deal with events after Independence. The civics texts talk about Indian involvement with the UN and its international policy, and the economics texts talk about India's five year plans and the opening up of its markets in the 90s. So, does the school board think that these nuggets of information gleaned from disparate sources make up for a holistic view of recent Indian history?

But of course, Guha (the author) argues that the problem is not the school boards as such, that in fact there is very little work being done on recent Indian history, and that most of the texts published pertain to India before Independence. Compare this to the US or Europe where new books come out after every major event. Incredibly, most Indian states, some larger than any European country, haven't even had their histories written. 

So, does this have to do with Indians being stuck with the idea of the day of independence as the start of the present? Or maybe it has to do with Indians being bad historians in general: we do have a rather notorious reputation for not writing things down, and being lazy about facts - given that Indians have such a long history, we only find accounts of ancient India in foreign texts (of course, we do find accounts in mythological poetry and prose, but that is not exactly factual history, is it?)

Aihole and Pattadakal

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The structures at Aihole and Pattadakal give us the opportunity to see almost a millennium of evolution of Indian temple architecture all at one place. We have rock cut temples giving way to free standing temples, which further evolve along the two separate styles of the northern Nagara style, and the southern Dravida style, all right next to each other.

Voting to kill democracy

"So, this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause."  - Senator Amidala, Star Wars II

Who has the final say in a constitutional democracy? The people or the constitution? India's Constitution, for example, was drafted and ratified by an indirectly elected Constituent Assembly. However indirectly they elected it, the people of India were the source of legitimacy of the Assembly. But, conversely, India did not become a republic, a democracy, and her people didn't have any of their fundamental rights (including their universal suffrage) until the Constitution was officially ratified. So, without a Constitution conferring voting rights on the people, where from did they derive their power to ratify the Constitution?

This might seem like a useless circular argument, but it serves to make my point that people exercised their right to vote even before the Constitution came into existence. The Constitution serves merely as a written record of what was agreed upon as the core of the law of the land, it need not be enshrined, and it should be remembered that it is not from the Constitution that we derive our power, but ourselves. But, that is not how the Constitution is seen today, it is seen as the immutable foundation for all that we build on.

Attempts to amend what is seen as the 'basic structure' of the Indian Constitution are resisted by the Indian Supreme Court. Some of the amendments that the Congress Government under Indira Gandhi, with its two-thirds majority, tried to push through during the Emergency were invalidated by the Supreme Court subsequently as subversive to the basic structure of the Constitution. So, if a Government with two-thirds majority cannot amend the basic structure of the constitution, then who can? There is no provision for referendum (though referendums have been conducted at a local level on a voluntary basis by the Government) in the Indian Constitution, so does that mean that the 'basic structure' of the Constitution is unalterable? Of course, I am not saying that I agree with the amendments that the Indira Gandhi Government passed: I am merely pointing out that it is odd that there is no apparent way to fundamentally change the Indian Constitution if we want to. 

Contrarily, people (or their representatives, as the case maybe) under extreme circumstances - as is shown beautifully in Star Wars - can be persuaded to voluntarily vote off their fundamental rights. The state of emergency that existed in India from 1975-77 or the one that has existed in Egypt for most of the past fifty years are cases in point. More recently, international observers of Turkey were worried that the AK Party under Mr. Erdogan would unilaterally create a new, more authoritarian constitution (a 2010 referendum voted for creating a new constitution) if they gained the required two-third vote in the 2011 elections, and were relieved when they didn't. 

So, maybe the Indian Supreme Court does have a legitimate reason for its attempts to protect the Indian Constitution from the vagaries of the Indian voters and their representatives. Perhaps new amendments could be made to the Constitution to make it more difficult to amend it (does anyone not see the irony of it?), by putting in more safeguards. But, when that is done, the Court must acknowledge that this is a democracy, and the people, through whatever means, must have a possible way to to amend their Constitution, even fundamentally if they want to. Again, it is possible that they might vote to change the Constitution in a manner that is detrimental to themselves, but that is their choice.

Hampi

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Alien within

I watched Cheeni Kum yesterday, and while I enjoyed it, I could not suppress my thoughts on the irony of the whole situation. We are a country with a history of young girls (still children sometimes) being married off to older men for a bride price - something that, even after being outlawed, happens with disturbing regularity in rural India - and here we have an entire film dedicated to the romance between a young woman and a much older man, and the difficulties they face on their way to getting married, with the theme being labelled as 'bold' in the Indian media. 

I am not questioning the relevance of the film, rather who it is relevant to. Given the manner in which the subject was dealt with, and the location where it is set, it is a reasonable assumption to make that it was made with India's diaspora and its urban elite in mind. And they did their job well, the denizens of India's rural landscape would find alien the film's language, moral qualms, the problems of its characters and its so called 'boldness'.

The changes that happened over the last twenty years in India's urban centres happened too fast, and increasingly, the gap between the urban elite and rural population looks too wide for any significant sympathetic understanding and exchange of each other's perspectives to take place. The urban elite constantly live with one foot outside India, and the rural population (I am including recent migrants to cities here), even with the attempts made to increase access to internet, still live in the same small world that they lived in twenty years ago (a few years ago, I was talking to a few of my father's subordinates at their dam site. I told them that I lived in England, two hours from London, so one of them asks me, so you live in Paris then?). The rural population, for the most part, only has access to myths of urban life and the foreign lands that city dwellers concern themselves with. 

The urban elite is properly outraged by the farmers' suicides, child marriages, honour killings...that happen in the villages, but this outrage is the same as the one reserved for the civil war in Libya or state suppression in China: it is news yes, but it is not felt as something immediate, not felt as something happening in 'our' society. A migrant worker once told me how he had saved up for a year working in the city, took a sizeable loan, and with a sense of achievement had a bore-well dug on his land back home (he hit water after three attempts). But, a more influential neighbour, now knowing where the water was, dug a deeper bore-well not five feet from his, stealing all his water. Crying, he told me how he had contemplated suicide. I listened, and I sympathised with him, but the problem itself was totally alien to me. 

I am not saying that the urban elite do not encounter poverty and misery - there is plenty of both to go around in Indian cities - but they relate to it as a purely urban problem, they don't associate it with rural poverty. They live in the city, with an eye on the outside world, and rural India is some place else.

I am sure a decade or two from now the situation will be different. Access to information, becoming easier everyday, hopefully, will help bridging the gap between the two. But until then, they will have to live with not really understanding each other. 

Ellora, 2007

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Ajanta, 2007

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