The fantastic India-Pakistan battle

Futures

Volumn 29, Issue 10, 1997, Pages 909-918

  Nandy, Ashis ^a,b  

^a DevelopmentStudies   (India)

^b UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0010858161     PISSN: 00163287     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/s0016-3287(97)00073-6     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Keynote Address at the Symposium on Rethinking South Asia, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 9-10 April 1996. A section of the paper borrows from an article published in The Times of India in January 1996.
2. Keynote Address at the Symposium on Rethinking South Asia, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 9-10 April 1996. A section of the paper borrows from an article published in The Times of India in January 1996.
3. The figures on defence expenditures are official figures and taken from The Times of India, 31 March 1995. Unofficial figures are naturally higher. According to the UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia, Pakistan and India have spent 25.1% and 14.4% respectively of their annual budgets on defence during 1995-6.
4. Ayesha Jala, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985; Seervai, H. M., Partition of India, 2nd edn, N. M. Tripathi, Bombay, 1994.
5. Ayesha Jala, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985; Seervai, H. M., Partition of India, 2nd edn, N. M. Tripathi, Bombay, 1994.
6. These questions have as their underside others: Does an analogous process work in the case of Islamic civilization and Pakistani state? Is statist nationalism itself and attempt to reduce complex, rich cultural and religious experiences to manageable political realities within the standardized format of the contemporary global nation-state system? Is this attempt a product of the increasing incomprehensibility and fear of these experiences to the politically powerful modernized, massified sectors of South Asian societies? These questions may not have priority in the research agenda of the South Asian diaspora, both outside and within South Asia, but they cannot but haunt the intellectuals who live with and in South Asian realities. They know that the answers will have to be simultaneously cultural-psychological and political.
7. Gunnar Myrdal, The Asian Drama: Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, Penguin, London, 1968.
8. According to one estimate, actually only 16% of the sub-continental Muslims voted for Pakistan. Mani Shankar Aiyer, Pakistan Papers, UBS Publishers, New Delhi, 1994, pp. 91-8. However, a majority of the subcontinent's westernized Muslim elite certainly sympathized with the idea.
9. My favourite quote is from Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), by common consent the father of modern India, '...I have observed with respect to distant cousins, sprung from the same family, and living in the same district, when one branch of the family had been converted to Mussulmanism, that those of the Muhammadan branch living in a freer manner, were distinguished by greater bodily activity and capacity for exertion, than those of the other branch which had adhered to the Hindoo mode of life.' Rammohun Roy, 'Additional Queries Respecting the Condition of India'. The English Works, Sadharon Brahmo Samaj, Calcutta, 1947, part 3, pp. 63-68; see p. 63. For this 'deformity' Roy held Hindu vegetarianism culpable, which in turn he traced to 'religious prejudices' and 'want of bodily exertion and industry' brought about by a hot climate and a fertile land (ibid). A major cultural paradox of contemporary India is how Hindu nationalism, often considered an illegitimate child of the nineteenth-century religious reform movements, has turned against Islam, not as an alien other but as disowned part of one's own self.
10. The ordinary Indians seem to do better in this respect. According to the only survey in India available on the subject in The Times of India, in January 1996, after years of effort by the Hindu nationalist parties to blur the line between the Pakistani regime and the sub-continental Muslim communities, a majority of the respondents clearly distinguished between the Pakistani citizens and the Pakistani state.
11. Many years ago, while studying the assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, I found to my utter astonishment that Hindu nationalist literature was the harshest not on Islam and the Muslims, but on the Hindus. Swami Vivekananda (1866-1902) who pleaded for a Vedantic brain and Islamic body as the stuff of his vision of the future India was only slightly less explicit.
12. This has its obverse in the innocence attributed to the ordinary, 'lion-hearted but dumb' Muslim masses whom Pakistan is supposed to have been brought into being to protect. More about that later.
13. At the moment, Pakistan is unwilling to accept even non-Bengali Muslims, ideologically fully committed to Pakistan, who have been left behind in Bangladesh.
14. Ziauddin Sardar says, '[In South Asia] All Muslims were, somewhere in the past, actually Hindus, or, at best, hybrid Hindus having one parent who was Hindu. The Muslim hatred of Hindus is actually the hatred of what they have rejected in their genealogical history. The Hindu hatred of Muslims is a direct result of this betrayal - a betrayal reinforced by the partition of India and creation of Pakistan.' Ziauddin Sardar, 'On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian Imagination', Futures, November 1992, 24(10). 942-949; see p.946.
15. It is an indicator of the remarkable hold of the Indian caste system in the subcontinent that instead of owning up the Hindu origins of a majority of the Muslims of the subcontinent and thus emphasising the emancipatory role of Islam, most Islamicist movements in the region have emphasized their exogenous origins and further underlined a social hierarchy within Islam which corresponds to the hierarchy within Hinduism.
16. Sardar, 'On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian Imagination', p.944.