A Place Within (25 page)

One thing they disagree on is the reservation system for so-called scheduled castes and backward tribes, India’s affirmative action, a hotly debated topic among the middle classes during my time in Shimla. “Some form of reservation is necessary,” he affirms one afternoon, true to his natural sympathies, and she clams up, picks up a book. A subject that has come up many times before, apparently.

There is bitter anger among the upper classes with regard to reservations of government jobs and university positions for the lower and “backward” classes. The resentment, liberal middle-class
Indians take pains to point out, is against the cynical politics behind the ways in which the reservations are implemented.

In 1979, the Indian government set up the Mandal Commission to “identify the socially or educationally backward” classes among the population and consider the question of reservations, or quotas, for them in the educational and government sectors. The commission took into consideration social, economic, and educational criteria to determine “backwardness,” and in its report, released in 1980, recommended an increase in the number of reservations that were already in place for these classes, which included the lowest castes among Hindus, the “tribals,” and others. The report was implemented in 1990 amidst great controversy and led to the fall of the government. The percentage of reservations for the backward classes was increased, and the upper castes found the number of university places and government jobs for their children drastically reduced. In some areas, protesting students went so far as to commit suicide by setting themselves on fire. The Supreme Court of India, in its ruling on the issue, while admitting that the number of reservations allocated to the backward castes was large, put a ceiling of 50 per cent on them. For the court to allow even this number of reservations in a bid to right past wrongs was a strong admission that Indian society had a long way to go to be rid of systemic inequalities. For it even to consider the question is a triumph of India’s democracy, whatever its practical and historical problems.

At public functions that I have attended, in the representations of India at home and abroad through books and columns, and in Bollywood films, which project images of India all across the globe, the almost complete predominance of upper-caste Hindus is truly remarkable. India’s story, it would seem, is their story. Of course, this lower-caste submergence has to do with their traditional occupations and poverty. The lowest castes traditionally did the lowliest jobs, associated with dirt and pollution, such as sweeping streets,
cleaning toilets, and tending to corpses, and in the past they could not even approach the upper castes. In my own childhood, not as much exposed to the caste system, the derogatory epithets “chudo,” “neech,” and “bhang,” all indicating the lowest castes, were common, though I was not aware of their meaning. They were even used for the Africans, who did most of these jobs, but we had our shoemakers and potmakers who were visibly of the lower castes.

And yet, here in India, even among the most liberal, especially those with children, resentment of the reservations is common. The policy rewards mediocrity in the name of equality, runs the familiar argument. Or, economic status should be the criterion, not caste. It is pointed out that a beneficiary of the present system can rise up to wealth and privilege yet continue to receive further benefits for his children, depriving others less privileged. And the so-called backward classes constitute well over half the population in many areas. The system can be further abused in almost comical ways: castes competing as to which is the more backward.

There is a deep yearning among some intellectuals for an essential Indian-ness, to do away with these ancient divisions, the messiness of India. The nostalgic Oxonian at the Institute blithely speaks of the Hindu mind, comparing it with the Jewish mind. This is silly, if not dangerous, for it only enhances exclusivity and division. What of the Christians, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Jains, all as ethnically Indian? Is a Tamil “mind” the same as a Bengali “mind”? A visiting professor says, of the nationalist policies of the BJP, the right-wing political party that recently fomented the communal tension in the country, “Even if it’s Hindu nationalism, it’s nationalism. Is it my fault that I was born a Brahmin?” One might ask, Would you have liked to be born an Untouchable, one whose ancestors dared not raise their heads to exchange a look with a high-caste person?

One of the ironies of the upsurge of middle-class Hindu nationalism is that this same class of privileged Indians is instrumental in
shaping the new concepts of citizenship in Canada, Britain, and the United States, by their immigration to these countries and their largely successful struggles for equal rights even as small cultural, racial, and religious minorities. Their Western host countries, of course, no longer see themselves in racial or nationalist terms—which is not to say that such consciousness, especially in discussions of culture, do not exist. But it is always contested, and not the least by people of Indian origin. Affirmative action continues to be used successfully to redress a racist past, and systemic non-representation. In a reverse irony, many of the Indian middle classes, assured of their rights in their new, multicultural homes, turn around to support financially and promote militant nationalism in the native country. Many of them would wish for a Hindu India but not a Christian or Euro America or Canada.

Shimla, this peaceful little town where the only threat appears to be the rumour of a cheetah and perhaps a monkey-thief on the road, is intimately connected with the last days of the Raj and the partition of India. This is well known, but walking along an isolated path in the woods, or in the paradisaical garden of the Institute, the reminder nevertheless manages to hit one with a jolt.

In June 1945, the viceroy, Lord Wavell, invited Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Mahatma Gandhi, Tara Singh, and other Indian leaders to the so-called Simla Conference to decide on the future of India; specifically, what form self-government should take with respect to the representation of India’s minorities. Nehru, of the Indian National Congress, arrived straight from jail, where he had done time for civil disobedience. Jinnah, formerly of Congress, now represented the Muslim League, which was at loggerheads with Congress regarding the representation of Muslims in independent India. An astute lawyer, he was not
very much liked by the British; the viceroy’s ADC, Peter Coats, privately called him “the Muslim in the woodpile.” The conference was a failure, for the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress could not agree.

Wrote the
Atlantic Monthly
a few months later,

The most powerful figure in Indian politics today is not the Viceroy, nor Mahatma Gandhi, nor Jawaharlal Nehru. It is a lean, gray-haired, impeccably dressed Karachi lawyer, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Moslem League. Upon his attitude depends the success or failure of the present attempt to solve the Indian problem.

An arguable assessment, conforming to the portrayal of Jinnah in Richard Attenborough’s film
Gandhi
, which in its turn outraged the Pakistanis, who revere Jinnah as much as Indians do Gandhi, perhaps more. (A 1998 film on Jinnah’s life, with Christopher Lee playing the lead role, could not obtain distribution and came out as a DVD.) The partition of India, which had to be agreed upon after Simla, is debated to this date, the subject fraught with accusations and regrets. It was him; it was them; if only. History and historical interpretation, too, suffered division, and belong to two separate worlds.

Not all Indian Muslims followed Jinnah; one of the delegates representing Congress at the Simla Conference had been Maulana Azad, who spoke Persian to Freya Stark, the well-known advisor to the British Empire. The irony was that it was Azad who was the practising Muslim, and not the “snappy dresser” Jinnah, who got his clothes from London’s Savile Row, did not speak Urdu, let alone Persian, and reportedly drank wine. There is a belief, therefore, corroborated by some of Jinnah’s later speeches, that it was a secular state for a Muslim majority that he had in mind, not anything like the current Islamic state with a gun-toting Taliban on the rampage. Perhaps he did not know his constituency well enough.
Ayesha Jalal, a well-known Pakistani scholar in the United States, has even put forward the argument that Jinnah did not want a separate Muslim homeland at all, but merely used the threat as a bargaining chip to win safeguards for India’s Muslim minority.

In 1947 arrived the last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, to oversee the division and independence of India. A Boundary Commission was established, which put up in Shimla at the Cecil Hotel in Chaura Maidan, to draw the boundary between independent India and the new state of Pakistan. The boundary was drawn, and the transfer of populations, which took place in the northwest and the northeast, was accompanied by scenes of gruesome violence in which half a million lives were lost. The figure is quite readily trotted out, as I have just done; but when one pauses to think about it, it is, quite literally, stunning.

In what remained of India, in Gujarat, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, for example, substantial Muslim populations continued to live alongside a Hindu majority. But the acrimony and suspicion of Partition would remain, the Muslims of India for long left to wonder if they had made the right decision to stay, always wary, especially during the wars between the two countries, of being seen as a fifth column or rooting for the enemy. Taunts would be suffered, and Muslim areas of India dubbed “Pakistan” to this day. Countless bloody riots would take place. Today there are roughly one hundred and fifty million Muslims in India. The problem of Kashmir remains unsolved. The two countries face each other with nuclear weapons. And today’s Pakistan would surely be Jinnah’s nightmare.

Raja Bhasin, the Shimla historian, wonders if the bloodbath of Partition could have been averted had there been no summer capital and had the government thus been more in contact with the people. He quotes Gandhi: “I can no more effectively deliver my message to millions by travelling first class than the Viceroy can rule over the hearts of India’s millions from his unapproachable Simla heights.”

After Partition, most Muslims of Shimla left; Mahbub Ali’s Pathan ilk disappeared.

It is fitting, then, that in this palace which hosted the Simla Conference to decide the fate of independent India, where Nehru and Gandhi and Jinnah and others came to wrangle, and ultimately where the line was drawn to divide the country, there takes place a seminar to commemorate the author Manto, whose stories are the most savage indictment of the insanity that prevailed at Partition.

Saadat Hasan Manto is one of the greatest story writers the country (if one forgets for a while the political boundary that so incensed him) has produced. While Tagore has the lofty grace, the wisdom, the aesthetic quality, the diversity, Manto is the story writer, pure and raw, and his narratives about Partition are like a kick in the gut; they will never become simply quaint, simply great, simply admired; they will continue to shock and probe and haunt each generation as it grapples with the incomprehensible violence that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent and continues periodically to erupt.