Category Archives: nationalism

by | 19 January 2009 · 5:06 pm

Japan’s Women vs. Children Left Behind in China

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 91-92 (Japanese kanji added):

Today the Japanese state and media woman call [women abandoned in Manchuria at war’s end] chūgoku zanryū fujin [中国残留婦人](Japanese women left behind in China) and distinguish them from chūgoku zanryū koji [中国残留孤児] (Japanese orphans left behind in China) in terms of age and gender. The latter were born of Japanese parents, mostly agrarian colonists, in either Japan or Manchuria, and were younger than thirteen at the time of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. In the wake of Japan’s capitulation, their parents entrusted them to Chinese families, either because they were too sick to take care of their children or because the latter had little hope of survival. Children who were orphaned or accidentally separated from their families were also adopted by Chinese families. Today, owing to the tender age of these children at the time they were separated from their relatives, they are unsure of their mimoto, their “roots” [身元]. Since the mid-1970s, such children have been urged by the Japanese state to prove their identities as Japanese in the system of nation-states. Only those who have successfully proved their Japanese nationality have been officially allowed to return to Japan permanently.

In contrast, chūgoku zanryū fujin is a gendered category, referring to women who were over the age of thirteen when separated from their families. By 1945, most Japanese men older than thirteen had already been mobilized into the Youth Brigade or military. Hence, whether they were married or not, the women in this category had been left to take care of themselves and all the children. In the turmoil after Japan’s capitulation, some of these women chose to marry Chinese citizens for their own survival, and they stayed in China. These women are different from the children who were left behind in one important way: because they were older, they firmly remember their roots as well as the Japanese language. Precisely for this reason, the Japanese state deemed these women old enough to make choices when they were left on their own. Thus until 1993, the state did not permit them to return permanently to Japan; they were regarded as belonging to China as the spouses of Chinese citizens.

The set of terminology is confusing largely because the difference between the women and the children was artificially created by the Japanese state and media. In addition, the categories excluded Japanese men older than thirteen who left in China as of 1945. In 1994, the Japanese state admitted this confusion. Through the Repatriation Support Law (Kikoku shienhō [帰国支援法]), the state eliminated the differences between the two categories and combined them under the umbrella term of chūgoku zanryū hōjin [中国残留邦人] (Japanese left behind in China). Nevertheless, this term too has generated confusion; as a result, the state and media continue to use the two earlier terms today.

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Filed under China, Japan, language, migration, nationalism

by | 16 January 2009 · 4:18 pm

Manshū Jizō for Japanese Orphans & Their Chinese Parents

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 113-114 (inline reference citations omitted):

In 1998, I was introduced to Kōji, a repatriate from Manchuria and a volunteer who assists [Japanese] orphans [left behind in 1945] and their [Chinese] families [who adopted them]. When I visited him at his home in downtown Tokyo, he showed me some fifty tiny figurines of Jizō, placed neatly in a box. Jizō, one of the most important Buddhist deities in Japan, is believed to comfort the souls of dead children while simultaneously comforting their mourning parents. Jizō statues are found throughout Japan, and the deity is “perhaps the most ubiquitous, popular, and widely loved in Japanese religion.” Kōji makes these little figurines. He starts by collecting tiny stones on the beach or by the roadside. Using his artistic skills, he smoothes the surface of each stone, paints a child’s face on it, and transforms the stone into Jizō. Each Jizō represents an immigrant child who died in Manchuria, as well as the sorrow of the child’s parents. According to Kōji, however, each Jizō also represents an immigrant child who has survived in China, as well as the devotion of the child’s Chinese adoptive parents. While the postwar Japanese state regarded orphans as “the dead” for quite some time, Kōji resurrected them in tiny stones and made the compassion of their adoptive parents known to the Japanese public. Kōji also took me to a gallery near his home. Located in the posh Roppongi district of Tokyo, the small gallery attracted many young women and men. There he displayed his figurines—called Manshū Jizō (Manchurian Jizō)—and sold them to gallery visitors. The money he made from the sale of these statues, Kōji said, would go into a fund to support another project: a stone monument to be built in China to express gratitude to the Chinese adoptive parents of the Japanese orphans. Indeed, by the time I met Kōji, the project was already well under way; a well-known artist, himself a repatriate from Manchuria, was already building a monument of a Chinese couple and their adopted son, a child of the Japanese agrarian colonists.

In 1999, Kōji and his group finally completed this grand project. When I read the newspaper report of this event, it surprised me greatly that they had built the monument in Liutiaogou, the very site of the Japanese invasion into Manchuria on September 18, 1931. In addition, they held the ceremony celebrating the completion of this monument inside the September-Eighteenth Museum, which is known for its displays condemning Japan’s imperialism. The monument, then, embodies more than the suffering of the orphans. It embodies the pain of their adoptive parents and, by extension, the pain of the people in China who suffered not only from the departure of their adopted children to Japan but also from the Japanese invasion in the age of empire. Representing the orphans, Fumio spoke at the ceremony to an audience of about two hundred, including his eighty-four-year-old adoptive father. He is reported to have said the following: “After the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and China, my adoptive father saw me off to Japan while crying. … My adoptive parents made me eat steamed rice every other day while they ate corn and kaoliang.” Fumio now lives in Japan as a Japanese citizen and yet has never forgotten the adoptive parents he left behind in China.

Kōji and his friends, who erected the monument and organized the ceremony in Liutiaogou, represent the parental generation of Japanese colonists. I later learned that Kōji, along with Satoshi, was one of the key figures who helped the orphans stage their protest march in downtown Tokyo. These volunteers, who themselves experienced tremendous hardships during the journeys of repatriation, are now keenly aware that the suffering of the orphans belongs not only to the past but to the present and the future as well. They are also aware that to understand their concerns and worries, they must go back to the past, and that is why they traveled to Liutiaogou. By so doing, they went far beyond Japan’s national space to understand not only the fates of the orphans and their adoptive parents but also their own involvement in Japanese imperialism. Are the children of orphans, being Japanese-Chinese, no longer Japanese? Is it necessary for the Japanese public to distinguish orphans and their families from Chinese “economic refugees”? I will leave these questions unanswered for now, but note that the wisdom of people such as Kōji gives us the hope that people, regardless of nationality, can learn the value of humanism from a past that they once shared in some ways.

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by | 11 January 2009 · 4:58 pm

Reporting from a Land of Lecherous Clerics

From Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran, by Azadeh Moaveni (Public Affairs, 2005), pp. 100-101:

My father had taught me that clerics were lazy; more specifically, that they were unsuited to run a country because their work kept them in seminaries, sipping tea in robes, and that sort of languid profession did not lend itself to the more challenging task of administering a government. Convinced their worst sin was sloth, I had not assumed they were equally lecherous. One really could not have a proper conversation with a cleric. They were absurd. A one-hour interview with a mullah inevitably cycled like so:

First fifteen minutes: Gaze averted, stares at own feet, wall, space, anywhere but two-foot radius around opposing female.

Second fifteen minutes: Slowly casts glances in direction of head and talking voice.

Third fifteen minutes: Makes eye contact and conducts normal conversation.

Last fifteen minutes: Begins making googooly eyes, smiling in impious fashion, and requesting one’s mobile phone number.

I didn’t understand why they did this with me, since they are supposed to favor round women and fair women, and I was neither. Some actually complained about this, with mock concern for my health (“Miss Moaveni, have you been ill? You’ve lost so much weight. … Don’t you like Iranian food?”). How they could detect a body underneath the billowing tent I wore, let alone its fluctuations, was beyond me. I asked Khaleh Farzi, who explained that clerics had x-ray vision. That was why they didn’t mind keeping women veiled.

It was only over time, after repeated exposure to womanizing clerics, clerics who stole from the state and built financial empires, who ordered assassinations like gangsters, who gave Friday sermons attacking poodles, that I came to understand the virulence of my father and my uncle’s hate for the Iranian clergy. Perhaps their flaws were no greater than those of ordinary mortals, but ordinary mortals did not claim divine right to rule, ineptly, over seventy million people. As the gravity of the Islamic Republic’s hypocrisy revealed itself, I came to the slow, shocking realization that Iranian society was sick. Not in a facetious, sloganny way, exaggerating the extent of culture wars and social tensions, but truly sick. The Iran I had found was spiritually and psychologically wrecked, and it was appalling.

I doubt a thoroughly secular state would be much better if it suffered under the political hegemony of, say, its professors of literature or philosophy (or linguistics, to pick on my own field).

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by | 10 January 2009 · 8:29 am

Japan’s Genre of Uprooted Colonist Memoirs

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 53, 59-60 (inline reference citations omitted):

In Japanese, the verb “to repatriate” (hikiage-ru) has multiple meanings; among these are to pull up, raise, refloat, pullout (of a place), and (close a business and) return home. [‘Pull up stakes’ seems the best English equivalent to me—J.] As a noun, “repatriate/s” (hikiage-sha) becomes not only historically but also morally charged in postwar Japan. Repatriates are those who emigrated to Japan’s overseas territories in the age of empire but were forced to (close their businesses and) return home after Japan’s capitulation in the Asia-Pacific War. Once in Japan, however, they were often seen as social misfits, largely because the dominant perception of them dramatically changed over the divide of August 15, 1945. Before then, they were imin (emigrants) who were hailed as the vanguards of imperialism in official discourses. After Japan’s defeat, they were hikiage-sha, who were greeted with pity, suspicion, and callousness by their compatriots who had never left Japan proper. Here, the oral narrative of Aki … is helpful: “When we returned home [to Fujimi in 1946], our neighbors were very cold to us Manchurian daughters. I truly worried that I might become an old mistress.” An arranged marriage for Aki would fail largely because she was “a returnee from Manchuria” who might carry “foreign sexual diseases.” In the end, she married a “Manchurian boy” whom I could not meet since he died a few years before the beginning of my fieldwork. After all, kaitaku imin (agrarian emigrants) were not supposed to return, for they had left Japan to rehabilitate the rural economy at home. With Japan’s capitulation, they lost land and houses in Manchuria that the state had taken away from Chinese farmers. Hence they had no recourse but to return to Japan, the only country on earth that was obliged to take them. Yet in the immediate postwar period, when resources were so meager, the people of their mother villages, who had sent them off enthusiastically, were reluctant to welcome the repatriates back to their home….

Although the first memoir written by a returnee from Manchuria appeared as early as 1949 (and was reprinted in 1976), the upsurge in this genre came decades later, from the late 1960s to the 1990s, with several published in the early years of the twenty-first century. This means that the majority of authors waited for more than two decades before publishing their memoirs—in order, possibly, to keep a certain distance from the past. What characterizes the memoirs is that most authors rely only on their personal memories, as well as the memories of their fellow settlers that they (over)heard while fleeing from Manchuria. In addition, they cite each other’s memoirs, rather than primary or secondary sources on Japanese imperial history. After all, hikiage-mono are the authors’ eyewitness reports and they force the reader to believe in the authenticity of their personal memories.

For all these reasons, the genre is called hikiage-mono rather than hikiage-bungaku, “repatriate literature.” Though a generic term for “genre,” mono is primarily used for classifying popular cultural productions such as movies, comedy shows, and songs. In other words, the term indicates the genre’s lower position in the hierarchy of cultural production: it is neither “literature” (bungaku) nor “history.” Indeed, most repatriate memoirs have small readerships, as the authors, being amateurs, submitted their works to small, local publishing houses. Many of the works are not even for sale. Others are not books at all but short essays printed in magazines published by organizations of former colonists and soldiers, as well as alumni organizations of the Japanese schools built in Manchuria. In fact, I bought most of the works that I examined in secondhand bookstores in Japan since the collections at university libraries are rather limited. It is for this reason, I believe, that Japanese as well as Anglophone scholars have hardly paid attention to them.

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by | 17 December 2008 · 10:05 pm

Where Gandhi Learned His Methods

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 24-26:

ON 2 OCTOBER 1869, A SON WAS BORN INTO A MIDDLE-CLASS family in Gujarat, a collection of princely states under British authority on the western coast of India. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had an ordinary childhood, culminating, as ordinary childhoods often do, in a teenage rebellion. This revealed a boy whose desire to experiment was usually halted by an immobilizing timidity in the actual act of defiance. He tried smoking and stole gold from his family to finance it; but this upset him morally, and so he stopped. Though from a strictly vegetarian family, he tried eating meat; but this upset him physically, and then morally as well, and then he dreamed of a live goat trapped in his stomach, bleating, so he stopped that too. Once he was egged on to visit a prostitute, but stood in the brothel having a crisis of confidence until the woman shouted at him to go away. On another occasion, he and a cousin ventured into the jungle to kill themselves by overdosing on datura, the narcotic seeds of the thorn apple; but, once they found the plant, they lost their nerve.

This boy’s family was reasonably well-off and of a middling but respectable caste. Hindu society had been divided for over seventeen hundred years into four main castes, reflecting second-century social groups: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants) and Sudras (farmers). Within each of these were hundreds of minute subdivisions, and below them a mass of outcastes, or “Untouchables”—those unfortunates who, condemned by the bad karma of previous incarnations, were destined to spend their lives sweeping, begging, scrubbing latrines and cleaning up corpses. The Gandhi family were Vaishyas, and within that were of the Bania subdivision. Banias were notorious for being hard-bargaining salesmen, a trait which young Mohan evidently inherited and would one day apply to spiritual and political ends with unprecedented effect.

Mohan’s rebellion was perhaps more unusual because the supposed cure for youthful misbehavior had already been administered. Karamchand and Putliba Gandhi had already married their thirteen-year-old son to a girl from a staunchly religious family. The girl who had been chosen, Kasturbai Makanji (known according to local tradition as Kasturba later in life, when she became matriarch of the household), was also just thirteen.

During daylight hours, etiquette decreed that Mohan and Kasturbai should ignore each other completely. Even an affectionate word between husband and wife was considered taboo. As darkness fell, they were left to their own devices, though neither had much idea what those should be. Mohan went to the bazaar to buy pamphlets, hoping to learn about his conjugal rights and duties. He was taken with the concept of fidelity and decided it should be his task to extract this from Kasturbai. He told her that she could no longer leave the house without his consent.

But, despite her youth, Kasturbai had already mastered the most effective technique available to women who live in extremely restrictive societies: that of passive resistance. She was a devout Hindu from a very traditional background and would not openly disobey her husband. Instead, she found a loophole.

Mohan’s mother asked Kasturbai to accompany her to the temple every day. Because this request was made in the daytime, when the young spouses were not supposed to communicate, Kasturbai was unable to ask Mohan’s permission. To disobey the command of the matriarch, on the other hand, would have been a terrible sin. So Kasturbai went with Putliba to the temple and returned to have her first fight with her husband, which she won by the sheer power of logic. Mohan was forced to remove the restrictions he had placed on Kasturbai.

This small incident would hardly be worthy of note, except for the fact that it formed the basis for Gandhi’s entire political method. In later years, when he found that he was at a disadvantage being an Indian in a white world, he would remember and develop the tactic of a woman in a man’s world. All Gandhi’s most famous tactics—passive resistance, civil disobedience, logical argument, nonviolence in the face of violence, emotional blackmail—had come from Kasturbai’s influence. He freely admitted this: “I learned the lesson of nonviolence from my wife.”

This, I regret to say, is my last excerpt from one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while. Von Tunzelmann is both a wonderful storyteller and a diligent researcher. (In that she is the equal, in my estimation, of Barbara Tuchman, one of my all-time favorite narrators of history; and I hope she already has another manuscript in the works.) In my many excerpts, I have excised all the endnote references, leaving no indication that supporting notes, maps, and glossaries consume almost 20% of a book nearly 500 pages long.

My historian brother has done a lot of research on Gandhi and is very critical of him, as are many revisionist historians. Von Tunzelmann also dishes plenty of dirt on Gandhi (and the other principal actors), while crediting him with two outstanding achievements: launching an effective campaign of nonviolence with the Salt March in 1930 and dampening communal violence in Bengal during the partition in 1947, a partition that he fervently opposed but unwittingly abetted. Between those two events, many of his efforts were irrelevant, at best, and counterproductive, at worst.

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by | 13 December 2008 · 8:24 pm

“One Million Dead”: Just a Number

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 273-275:

“ONE MILLION DEAD”: This is the most convenient number to have come out of the wildly varying estimates of how many people may have been killed following partition. Mountbatten preferred the lowest available estimate, which was two hundred thousand, and has been widely condemned for it; the denial of holocausts is always a sticky business, and yet more so when one may be implicated personally. Indian estimates have ranged as high as two million. Many historians have settled for a figure of somewhere between half a million and a million. The figure of one million dead has now been repeated so often that it is accepted as historical fact. “What is the basis for this acceptance?” asked the historian Gyanendra Pandey. “That it appears like something of a median?” Unfortunately so, for the truth is that no one knows how many people were killed, nor how many were raped, mutilated or traumatized. The numbers anyone chooses say more about their political inclination than about the facts. Fewer than four hundred thousand suggests an apologia for British rule; four hundred thousand to one million moderation; a million or more usually indicates that the person intends to blame the deaths on a specific party, the most usual culprits being one or more of Mountbatten, Patel, Jinnah or the Sikhs.

Beyond the dead, there were more numbers, too, plucked from the extrapolations and imaginations of regional officials, army, police and historians. Refugees on the move by the beginning of September: five hundred thousand, or perhaps one million. Women abducted and raped: 75,000, or perhaps 125,000. Total who would migrate from one dominion to the other between 1947 and 1948: ten million, or perhaps twelve million, or perhaps fifteen million. The Indian National Archives contain sheaves of charts scribbled by British and Indian officials, recording eighty-seven killed in Bengal here, forty-three injured in Madras there. “The figures make no pretence to accuracy,” admitted the Home Department. The Punjab government reported that its casualty estimates were “increasing daily as investigation uncovers further tragedies”; the North-West Frontier Province government referred to “stray murders,” which were not counted! Usually it was impossible to count the number of victims amid the “confused heap of rubble & corpses” that was left behind after riots. Sir Francis Mudie, governor of the West Punjab, remembered, “[I had to] ignore any report of a riot unless it alleged that there were at least a thousand dead. If there were, I asked for a further report, but I cannot remember any case in which I was able to do anything.”

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history. today whether there were two hundred thousand deaths, or a million, or two million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at a million deaths than at two hundred thousand? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burned alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

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by | 11 December 2008 · 2:00 pm

British India’s Problem of 565 Princely States

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 221-225:

Each of the 565 princely states in India had a separate agreement with the government, ensuring the paramountcy of the British Crown over its affairs. It had taken centuries to bring the states under paramountcy, and many still operated through arcane systems of government and society. It was the boast of the empire’s supporters that the reassuring eminence of the Indian civil service, staffed almost entirely with public-school-educated British men, kept things on track. Some thought this the pinnacle of British achievement, allowing the states their freedom of cultural diversity while tempering the worst excesses of absolute rule. The idea was to leave rulers as independent as possible; in case of trouble, for the British to offer the ruler in question “private counsel”; and, should that not fix the trouble, to intervene. In the event of gross totalitarianism or outright rebellion, the British raj would remove the individual prince who had proved to be a bad egg, install a more responsible scion of his family and leave the dynasty intact.

Unfortunately, this appealing portrait of a smooth, tolerant and accountable system was a fiction. In reality, the British presence in India was relatively small and unable to keep watch over so many princes. The notion that the “British race” had a monopoly on freedom and democracy was unsupportable with regard to the lengthy traditions of public debate, heterogeneous government and freedom of conscience that had existed for centuries in the Indias of Asoka and Akbar. If anything, the presence of the British damaged these traditions and actually safeguarded the princes from any new incursion of democracy. The British army was always on hand to give succor to each imperiled tyrant and stamp out any attempts by the people to express their discontent. As one staunch imperialist boasted, the princes had been “mostly rescued from imminent destruction by British protection.” And so imperialists were able to perfect a classic piece of doublethink: railing against what they called “Oriental despotism” on one hand, while propping it up with the other.

Even the illiberal Lord Curzon had been appalled by the standard of princely behavior during his viceroyalty, half a century before. he had written to Queen Victoria: “For all these failures we are responsible. We have allowed the chiefs when young to fall into bad hands. We have condoned their extravagances, we have worked at their vices.” … “As Your Majesty knows,” he added, “the Maharaja Holkar is half mad and is addicted to horrible vices.” This last was a particularly pointed comment—Victoria liked Holkar, because he had once sent her a telegram on her birthday—though “half mad” underestimated his insanity by around 50 percent. He would stand at a high window overlooking his subjects and issue random edicts as they popped into his head, once ordering the abduction of every man wearing a black coat. Once, he harnessed the bankers of Indore to a state coach and whipped them soundly as he drove them around the city.

During his tour of India in 1921, the young Dickie Mountbatten had admired the princely states but was shocked by their inequality. In Udaipur, he wondered at the habit of feeding pigs when people were starving, an injustice that prompted him to note, “There are times when I do sympathize with the Bolsheviks.” Princely excesses were common in states where the vast majority of people were destitute. The Jam Sahib of Nawanagar had 157 cars and a wife with 1,700 saris. The Nawab of Junagadh spent twenty-one thousand pounds on a wedding for two of his dogs. The Maharaja of Patiala moved into London’s Savoy Hotel, occupying all thirty-five suites on the fifth floor, and ordered that three thousand fresh roses be brought to decorate his rooms every day. Visitors to the miserly Nizam of Hyderabad would have seen that he used what looked like a crumpled ball of old newspaper as a paperweight—little suspecting that wrapped in it was the 185-carat Jacob Diamond, twice the size of the Koh-i-Noor. The Gaekwar of Baroda’s second wife, Sita Devi, earned herself the nickname “India’s Wallis Simpson” when she plundered the state treasury to finance her jewelry habit. Sita Devi made away to Switzerland with untold riches, including the incomparable Baroda pearl carpet. This remarkable object measured six feet by seven and a half feet, and was made up of 1.4 million pearls, 2,520 rose-cut diamonds and hundreds of emeralds and rubies, embroidered onto deerskin and silk in delicate arabesques….

These are some of the grosser examples of princely behavior and should not be taken as a slander against every individual prince. Some among them were men and women of great intelligence, ability and compassion. A Gaekwar of Baroda introduced the first free, compulsory education in India in 1894. A Maharaja of Travancore introduced progressive land reforms in the early 1880s. One turn-of-the-century Maharaja of Cochin was greatly admired for his modernizing legal reforms—though he became so frustrated at the complacency of his British patrons that he abdicated in 1914. But the existence of a few commendable examples does not vindicate the system. The reason that the Indian princely states were uniquely badly ruled was the very fact of British protection. Aside from their consciences, the princes had no incentive to govern well. Foreign invaders would be dealt with, domestic challenges neutered and the ravening mob readily suppressed, all by the might of the British Indian army.

UPDATE: The blogger at Blood & Treasure comments that this sounds like “a sort of best case scenario for Afghanistan”!

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by | 4 December 2008 · 12:01 pm

British India’s Rising Religious Separatism

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 236-238:

Despite his preoccupation with trivialities, even Mountbatten could not ignore the fierce controversies thrown up by the two partitions of Bengal and the Punjab. For centuries, both regions had been melting pots of cultures, a jumbled variety of Muslims and Hindus living side by side, with Sikhs, Buddhists, Animists and Christians fitted in too. In times of peace, it had not mattered much to which of these religions a Punjabi or a Bengali adhered. As Jinnah himself had admitted, most people within the regions tended to consider their local identity before their religious affiliation. But the importance of religious identity had been growing in the twentieth century, notably in India and more slowly in the world beyond it.

The reason for this effect can in part be traced to the British policy of “divide and rule.” Undoubtedly, the raj did plenty to encourage identity politics. The British found it easier to understand their vast domain if they broke it down into manageable chunks, and by the 1930s they had become anxious to ensure that each chunk was given a full and fair hearing. But picking a few random unelected lobbyists, based on what the British thought was a cross-section of Indian varieties, was not a reliable way to represent 400 million people. India’s population could not be divided into neat boxes labeled by religion and cross- referenced with social position. India was an amorphous mass of different cultures, lifestyles, traditions and beliefs. After so many centuries of integration and exchange, these were not distinct, but rippled into each other, creating a web of cultural hybrids and compromises. A Sunni Muslim from the Punjab might have more in common with a Sikh than he did with a Shia Muslim from Bengal; a Shia might regard a Sufi Muslim as a heretic; a Sufi might get on better with a Brahmin Hindu than with a Wahhabi Muslim; a Brahmin might feel more at ease with a European than he would with another Hindu who was an outcaste. When the British started to define “communities” based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. At the same time, Indian politicians began to focus on religion as a central part of their policies—defining themselves by what they were, and even more by what they were not.

This phenomenon is shown at its clearest with Jinnah, who began his career as the leading light of Hindu-Muslim unity, and ended it by forcing the creation of a separate Islamic-majority state. But the arc of Jinnah’s career merely amplifies that of Indian politics as a whole. Congress was a largely secular and inclusive organization during Motilal Nehru‘s prime in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Though it was the opposite of his intention, the emergence of Gandhi gave confidence to religious chauvinists. While Gandhi himself welcomed those of all faiths, the very fact that he brought spiritual sensibilities to the center of politics stirred up extreme and divisive passions. Fundamentalist Hindus were rare presences on the political scene before Gandhi. In the wake of Gandhi, though, Hindu nationalists were able to move into the central ground of politics; while organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dedicated to the formation of a Hindu nation, swelled their ranks from the fringes. This was no slow, invisible political trend; it was happening visibly during the spring and summer of 1947, when holy sadhus clad in saffron robes marched around the streets of Delhi, bellowing forth political slogans. Rajendra Prasad, who was to become the president of the new Constituent Assembly, wrote to Nehru on 7 August telling him that since July he had received 164,000 letters and postcards demanding that cow slaughter be made illegal—a common concern of devout Hindus, but one which is often used and taken as an anti-Muslim strategy. It was the Muslims in India, and the Untouchables, who ran the lucrative leather and beef industries, mostly for export. The threat of a ban on cow slaughter naturally drove Muslims and Untouchables into the arms of more radical political organizations, which they felt would stick up for them. Whether the British caused division by carving up politics on the basis of religion, or whether they were simply responding to a trend in Indian society for Hindu nationalism and the beginnings of an Islamic resurgence, is an endlessly debatable question.

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by | 18 November 2008 · 6:58 am

‘Quit India’ vs. the Muslim League

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 127-128:

IN JUNE 1942, [American journalist] Louis Fischer spent a week at Gandhi’s ashram and observed the preparations for a new campaign under the slogan “Quit India.” The slogan was not only catchy but accurate: the British administration was to be harried, disobeyed and besieged until it simply upped and left, war or no war, economy or no economy, responsibility or no responsibility. The Quit India resolution, passed by Congress on 8 August 1942, announced that Congress would “no longer [be] justified in holding the nation back from endeavouring to assert its will” against the British administration, and sanctioned “a mass struggle on nonviolent lines under the inevitable leadership of Gandhiji.” The struggle would only begin at Gandhi’s word; but this was a call for treason as far as the British were concerned. The first arrests were made in the early hours of the morning of 9 August.

Over the following days, India exploded in violent uprisings, described by the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, as the “most serious since that of 1857.” There were Quit India hartals across the country, which turned into riots. The police and the army fought back, often brutally, leaving an official civilian death toll of 1,028; bazaar gossip put the total at 25,000. Effectively, Congress had given the raj an excuse to imprison hundreds of its leaders, including Gandhi himself and Nehru—who, according to his sister, was almost thankful for it, so uncomfortable had he felt opposing the war effort. The resolution could never have succeeded. Britain could not evacuate India in the middle of the Second World War, with Japan looming on its eastern front. But the empty space created in politics by the Congress leaders being in prison gave the Muslim League its chance to rush in.

According to Jinnah, it was not in the interest of the Muslims for the British to abandon them in a potentially hostile swamp of Hinduism. The logical position of the League was actually to keep the British in India—at least for as long as it took to convince them of the case for Pakistan, and perhaps indefinitely. The effect of Gandhi’s Quit India misstep, and the League’s hugely successful campaign during the 1940s, can be seen from the election statistics. In the general election of 1945–46, the Muslim League would win about 75 percent of all Muslim votes. In every previous election, its share of the Muslim vote had hovered around 4.6 percent. During the war years, Gandhi and Congress handed Jinnah a sixteenfold increase in his support. Quit India damaged the chances of a united India at least as much as any single act of the British administration ever had.

Linlithgow wrote to Churchill, admitting that he was concealing the severity and the extent of the violence from the world. But the Americans found out and sent their own mediators to Delhi. The Americans’ “zeal in teaching us our business is in inverse ratio to their understanding of even the most elementary of problems,” Linlithgow complained to the secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery. It would be bad if the Americans came, he averred; it would be worse still if they tried to talk to Gandhi or Nehru. He pleaded with Amery “to arrest at least for a time this flow of well meaning sentimentalists.” But the flow of Americans continued, and Indians delighted to see them spoiling official occasions for the British by wearing the wrong clothes, disregarding procedure and cheerfully ignoring distinctions of rank.

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by | 17 November 2008 · 9:00 pm

Mohammad Ali Jinnah: Too much a toff for Yorkshire

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 94-95:

Jinnah was a successful barrister, born in Karachi and called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. Tall and slender, he hardly ate, and smoked fifty Craven A cigarettes a day! He was often described as looking cadaverous, but this description does no justice to his dynamism. With his smooth coiffure and glittering stare he looked more like a cobra than a corpse. The photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White described at length “the Oxford-educated Jinnah” with his “razor-sharp mind and hypnotic, smoldering eyes.” Jinnah had not, in fact, been educated at Oxford; he had attended a madrassa in Karachi and a local mission school. But it was easy to believe that this urbane gentleman, described by the New York Times as “undoubtedly one of the best dressed men in the British Empire,” his public speaking rich with quotations from Shakespeare, was part of the British elite.

Jinnah had begun his political career in Congress. He made himself a figurehead for Hindu-Muslim unity and was acclaimed as such by Hindu Congress luminaries. He had joined the Muslim League in 1913, confident that he could act as abridge between the political parties. But it was the emergence of Gandhi as the spiritual leader of Congress in 1920 that began to push Jinnah out. “I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics,” Jinnah had said, rejecting the call for satyagraha. “I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman’s game.” But politics is rarely gentlemanly, and as if to prove it there was a profound and deadly clash of personality between Jinnah and the other English gentleman of Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru. Like his compatriot and friend, the poet Muhammad Iqbal, Jinnah disdained “the atheistic socialism of Jawaharlal.” “We do not want any flag excepting the League flag of the Crescent and Star,” he would declare. “Islam is our guide and the complete code of our life.”

Despite his position as one of the key figures in the rise of twentieth-century Islam, Jinnah was no fundamentalist. His Islam was liberal, moderate and tolerant. It was said that he could recite none of the Koran, rarely went to a mosque and spoke little Urdu. Much has been made of his reluctance to don Muslim outfits, his fondness for I whiskey and his rumored willingness to eat ham sandwiches. In fact, he never pretended to be anything other than a progressive Muslim, influenced by the intellectual and economic aspects of European culture as well as by the teachings of Muhammad. The game he played was carefully considered: here was a Muslim who understood the British sufficiently to parley on equal terms, but asserted his Islamic identity strongly enough that he could never be seen to grovel. His refusal of a knighthood was significant; so, too, was his demurral in the face of Muslim attempts to call him “Maulana” Jinnah, denoting a religious teacher. Some historians go so far as to describe him as a “bad” Muslim, revealing more about their own ideas of what a Muslim should be than about Jinnah’s faith. In any case, the Muslim League suffered from no shortage of good Muslims. What it had lacked was a good politician. And Jinnah was without question one of the most brilliant politicians of his day.

Jinnah had married Rattanbai “Ruttie” Petit, the daughter of a prominent Parsi banker, when he was forty-two and she just eighteen. Rebellious and beautiful, Ruttie had been a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister Nan Pandit; she was closer still, indeed almost passionately so, to Padmaja Naidu, who would later become Jawahar’s lover. The deeply personal and incestuous nature of Indian politics is plain from these relationships. Jinnah’s marriage was not an easy one. After the birth of their daughter, Dina, he and Ruttie separated. Ruttie died on her thirtieth birthday in 1929, following a long affliction with a digestive disorder. Jinnah was devastated at her death and moved to London with Dina. He took a large house in Hampstead, was chauffeured around in a Bentley, played billiards, lunched at Simpson’s and went to the theater. He considered standing for parliament in the Labour interest but was rejected by a Yorkshire constituency, allegedly with the verdict that it would not be represented by “a toff like that.” His sister Fatima gave up a career as a dentist to become, in effect, his hostess, though that title belies her full significance. Fatima Jinnah was a woman of intelligence and drive, and was influential in her brother’s move toward Islamic nationalism.

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