Communal Rage in Secular India


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With reference to Gujarat.




The Partitions of Memory


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Echoes of the traumatic events surrounding the Partition of India in 1947 can be heard to this day in the daily life of the subcontinent, each time India and Pakistan play a cricket match or when their political leaders speak of "unfinished business." Sikhs who lived through the pogrom following the assassination of Indira Gandhi recall Partition, as do, most recently, Muslim communities targeted by mobs in Gujarat. The eight essays in The Partitions of Memory suggest ways in which the tangled skein of Partition might be unraveled. The contributors range over issues as diverse as literary reactions to Partition; the relief and rehabilitation measures provided to refugees; children's understanding of Partition; the power of "national" monuments to evoke a historical past; the power of letters to evoke more immediately poignant pasts; and the Dalit claim, at the prospect of Partition, to a separate political identity. The book demonstrates how fundamental the material and symbolic histories of Partition are to much that has happened in South Asia since 1947. Contributors: Mukulika Banerjee, Urvashi Butalia, Joya Chatterji, Priyamvada Gopal, Suvir Kaul, Nita Kumar, Sunil Kumar, Richard Murphy, and Ramnarayan S. Rawat.




The Crisis of Secularism in India


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In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.




Malevolent Republic


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After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru's diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. India is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion, and anti-Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream, with religious minorities living in terror of a vengeful majority. Congress now mimics Modi; other parties pray for a miracle. In this blistering critique of India from Indira Gandhi to the present, Komireddi lays bare the cowardly concessions to the Hindu right, convenient distortions of India's past and demeaning bribes to minorities that led to Modi's decisive electoral victory. If secularists fail to reclaim the republic from Hindu nationalists, Komireddi argues, India will become Pakistan by another name.




Indian Muslims


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Good Muslim, Bad Muslim


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In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Muslims readily available to be split off from “bad” Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of “good” against “evil.” Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.





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The Truth of Babri Mosque


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The word Babri was literally used to define something abnormal, out of sense or mad. Three instances mentioned in Babar-Nama support this. Babar's journal is replete with precise detail with a telling image or idiom as "a bud resembling a sheep's heart", "fell like water on fire" which lingers in the reader's mind long after the event or anecdote has receded. Few of the phrases and words in the Babar Nama are now part of everyday language in India and Pakistan as "Namak Haram" means lack of trustworthiness, "hamesha" means always, "bakhshish" means gift, "maidan" means plain area, "julab" means laxative and the most important, which is of our use here, is "Babri/Baburi /Bavala" means related to unhealthy mental state or mad or abandoned or one who is abnormal. Babar writes about his infatuation, after his marriage in March AD 1500, for a boy as, "In those days I discovered myself a strange inclination - no, a mad infatuation-for a boy in the camp's bazaar, his name was Babri/Baburi being apposite. Until then I had no inclination of love and ... a couplet of Muhammad Salih came to my mind: When I see my friend I am abashed with shame; My companions look at me, I look away sans aim. This couplet suited my state of mind perfectly. In that maelstrom of desire and passion, and under the stress of youthful folly, I used to wander, bareheaded and barefoot, through streets and lanes, orchards and vineyards. I showed civility neither to friends nor to strangers, took no care of myself or others." Babar clearly stated that guy's name was Bavara as he was of raging and flickering nature and Babar himself became Bavara or crazy for him to attain his sexual proximity.... That is why the term "Babri Mosque" is specially used only for the construction that was done according to Mughal architecture at Ramjanmabhoomi because it was made for Hindus not for Muslims. Babri Mosque means Mosques of infidels-insane Hindus.




Red peacocks : commentaries on Burmese socialist nationalism


Book Description

Two contradictory terms—Preservation and Revolution—captured the mental state of Burmese leadership in the 20th century. The choice of which values and customs should be preserved and which discarded has had no clear consensus; yet this has been the heart of the ideological struggle among the leaders of Burma, now Myanmar. Providing deep insights into the Burmese socialist nationalist movement, this book explains the philosophy of political revolution sanctioned by Ne Win. It draws upon a body of treatises written by socialist revolutionaries that explain and justify rebellion and insurgencies against the government. Finally, it offers commentaries on Burmese political thought to demonstrate how contemporary Burmese political concepts are rooted in Pali antecedents from medieval dynasties.