Between mourning and melancholia: Religion and politics in modern India

Abstract

In reviewing this autobiographical book by Saeed Naqvi, an internationally known Indian journalist, this essay first discusses the relationship amongst journalism, autobiography and anthropology, the discipline this reviewer broadly works in. Arguing for a crossover amongst them, it documents the evolving relationships Naqvi describes between religion and politics in modern India, including the moment of India’s Partition in 1947. It discusses such figures as Azad, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rao, Vajpayee and issues such as ethnic/communal violence, the role of the state in genocide, demolition of Babri Masjid, the US-led “Global War On Terror (GWOT)” and more. This essay notes the salience of Naqvi’s thesis that the much-valorized Indian secularism was and is at best a mask for majoritarian religious impulse. However, it critiques Naqvi’s solution as a return to India’s founding fathers and the imagined era of so-called composite culture. Central to this critique is the point that Naqvi’s own personal and professional account of colonial and postcolonial India defies his proposed solution. This paradox appears precisely because Naqvi, this essay suggests, mourns a past which he is unable to identify, let alone enunciate. His account thus approximates, following Freud, melancholia more than mourning.

Keywords: :

• Anthropology
• Hindus
• India
• journalism
• Muslims
• Partition

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to four non-anonymous readers of this essay for their critical comments –editorial, stylistic, structural and substantive. I have incorporated most of their suggestions. “Thank you” Sean Durbin (New Zealand), Pralay Kanungo (Leiden University), Nicholas Morieson (Institute for Religion, Politics, & Society, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne) and Banu Senay (Macquarie University)!

Notes

1. Evidently, I don’t draw a sharp line between sociology and anthropology – a practice pronounced, among others, in Indian sociology/anthropology.

2. Until early 1990s, there was no anthropology of mass media (Spitulnik 1993). It is only very recently that anthropology has begun to pay adequate attention to media, especially news media. Important works in the new and growing area of anthropology of journalism include Bird (2010a), Brauchler and Postill (2010), Peterson (2010) and Rao (2010).

3. “If Myth is ideology in narrative form”, writes Lincoln (1999: 209), “then scholarship is myth with footnotes”. I thank Sean Durbin for drawing my attention to this quote.

4. On the relations as well as difference between autobiography and memoir, see Rak (2004).

5. All page numbers without an author’s name are from Naqvi’s book. I have used the digital copy of the book provided by the weekly magazine Indian Today which invited me to review it (see Ahmad 2016b).

6. For a detailed account of politics behind the destruction of Babri Masjid, see Gopal (1993).

7. Naqvi is not alone to say this. Recently, a prominent Congress leader, Mani Shankar Aiyar (2016) wrote that the former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao belonging to the same party as Aiyar’s told him that “India is a Hindu nation”.

8. For more on this, see Matthew (1982).

9. For a crisp account of Gulwalkar’s ideology and activism, see Kanungo (2002: 50–59).

10. In a study that examines four cases of collective communal violence (one against Sikhs and three against Muslims) – Nellie (1983), Delhi (1984), Bhagalpur (1989) and Gujarat (2002) – Chopra and Jha (2014) note that the biased role of the authorities and the denial of justice are not episodic but systemic.

11. On the processes of identification as terrorists and dis-identification as citizens after 9/11, see Ahmad (2016a) and Volpp (2002).