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V. S. Naipaul D.M 32 ,33

MOST ost Hindutva Admirers of NAIPAUL are Tacit And Puposely Silent on HIS MIS JUDGED miss LEARNT and MISS ASSERTED

VIZYA NAGRAM as crux of HINDU demise in SOUTH

---

Just to Quote OTHER hindyu themselves about VIZYANAGRAM implication to vilify MUSLIMS AND TRUP CHARGE as SHIV SENA HAVALDAR to Md Ali STret MUMBAI muslims


i``th the history of
Vijaynagar? I read `Area of Darkness` last year, partly because I`ve
seen so many criticisms of this particular book on desi mailing lists.
It was beautifully written, though I can well believe that he has his
history wrong -- he does not come across as an exhaustive researcher.
*****************************************************************
Your reaction to Naipaul reminds me a bit of my reaction to Kipling --
(appropriately :-)) loved him, discovered in my teens that the people
he so exoticized were us!, then couldn`t bear to read him for decades,
now can read him again, in pieces, occasionally.....``.....................................

V. S. Naipaul
#32
DM
I beg to disagree onground of more intimate knowledge of Region concerned.....



``though with significant exceptions; even in India, what is true of a Bihari convert is not necessarily true of a Bengali convert.``

baseles irrsponsible and ILLGETIMATE loose statement if by Naipaul
*********************************************************

``Hindu, Ram Das, in India, an overwhelming Hindu country, and decide to embrace Islam either because I like the message or because of an affair of the heart. I have been told that Islam is a simple religion which only requires one to say three times that there`s no god but God and Mohammad is his messenger. So, I naively say in the language that I know, ``Ishwar ek hai aur Mohammadji uske sandeshak hain.`` Would that be enough? Of course not - I have to say some strange words in a strange language to be accepted. This is my first intimation that God understands only Arabic and my conversion is ``qabool`` only if uttered in that language. After I have done that, I would be told that my name, the very symbol of my personal identity must change; so Ram Das must change into Ghulam Muhammad or something like that ``..........................




IT is MIsfortune just lke that of AFRO American past Slaves in INDIA forever ...

for BIHARIS ..............from Hindu LALOO to any Bihari Muslim convert or NOT


to be picked on relentlessly for as long as my childhood memory
*******************************************************

and accepted

preposterous discriminationon level TOWARDS BIHARIS of India be it of ANY religion (hindu Laloo or others)


It is NOT FAIR !
*******************

Bias Prejudical unsbstantiated by Naipaul

DESPITE ALL OF literary Genius[ but NON EXPERT NAIPAUL ]

who i Suspect iBIHARI himself ...near Nepal Bihar Border Region of Most MIgratory LABOURS who were ``KIDNAPPED ``by BRITISH for cheap labours MUSLIMS included!...........

V. S. Naipaul A Hindu Tamil BRAHMIN professed HINDUTVINI self confessed sayzADORINGLY of NAIPAUL lovable according to HER !



``I am not condoning the killings in Gujerat in any
shape or form. But it is not Naipaul`s book that
caused it and I think it would take much more than his
book to make it go away.

Ch**pa``

That would be me (in place of NAIPAUL) saying

``I am NOT condoning the killings of 9/11 in any shapee or form .BUT it is not ``ME``(Substitute NAIPAUL)THAT CAUSED THE 9/11 or terrorism period*

AND IT WILL TAKE MUCH MORE THAN MY SYMPATHY FOR THE EXPLOITED TO MAKE WAR against OPPRESSORS to GO AWAY .....

But just as Every views of Diverse Farazana is UNACCEPTABLE by MAJORITY vociferous out numbered HINDUTVA of BILLIONS ,I am not holding breath for APROVAL for DISMISABLE useless to me MAJORITY INDIANS country of mINE !!!!!!!!

Some Hardtalk for Indians
``but are excelling in quantity.
******************************************************


Who knows, how brilliant a sociologist a child could be, only if he/she were let to be in the first place !

* Myth-4: ENGINEERING MEANS CODING ``
****************************************************
SUCCINTLY

......................REEEEEEEEPPPPPPPRODDDDUUCTIOOOOONNSSSSSSSSSSSS...................

not INNOVATION or Renovations

thy name is MOTHER india!

Bhagat Ram #3..godots BAGHAT RAM article RESPONSES
Following is the link to their forthcoming issue for Summer:
http://www.parabola.org/magazine/nextissue.php4

More upcoming themes:
http://www.parabola.org/magazine/themes.php4

Rest later,



``Also in this issue:

Robert Rice explains how animals are ``fluent in living``
Selections from the never-before-translated writings of Bahauddin, father of Rumi
Tales from the Hawaiian, Athabaskan, Mayan, and Botswanan traditions
A selection from the Upanishads
And more``

I just know what KINdof a MAGAZINE this is even if imnevr saw it before u r URL for the first time

Apologist Rushdie to mANAJIS who bring there family trubles to `DISTURB`` US

V. S. Naipaul
#3 by warpster on March 22, 2004 7:06pm PT

You have picked various quotes from people and pasted it. Your own opinions (other than a general negative spin on Naipaul) are mostly missing.

AKa Moothuswamy ..Tamil Harimou ....Iyer Menn Pillais Ramans Vijaylalithaaaas anti DALITS

SUKRANT the Sulejkha hindutva HERO


Sir Vidia Gets It Badly Wrong`
William Dalrymple grants Naipaul his eminence, but challenges his jaundiced notions of Indian history

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE


There was some surprise when Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul turned up at the BJP office last week and gave what many in the press took to be a pre-election endorsement not just of the party but the entire Sangh parivar programme. India was indeed shining, the Nobel laureate was quoted as saying, and yes he was quite happy being ``appropriated`` by the BJP.

More striking was the quote attributed to Naipaul about the violent destruction of the Babri Masjid: ``Ayodhya is a sort of passion,`` he said. ``Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity.`` For a man whose work contains many eloquent warnings of the dangers of misplaced political passions—such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran—this might appear to be a surprising volte-face.


For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on India`s psyche. It`s a theme he first developed in `An Area of Darkness` and holds to date.


Indeed, it led one commentator in the Times to wonder if Sir Vidia was not being misquoted or at least misunderstood.

Yet the quotes, especially Sir Vidia`s remarks that Babar`s invasion of India ``left a deep wound``, are consistent with ideas Naipaul has been airing for many years now. In 1998, for example,

he told The Hindu: ``I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions.... The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.``

A few years earlier, following the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Naipaul told the Times of India: ``What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening.... Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society, such understanding had eluded Indians before....`` Such attitudes form a consistent line of thought in Naipaul`s writing about India from An Area of Darkness in 1964 through to the present.

Today few would dispute Sir Vidia`s status as probably the greatest living writer of Indian origin; indeed, many would go further and argue that he is the greatest living writer of English prose.
For good reason, his views are taken very seriously. He is a writer whose fiction and non-fiction written over half a century form a body of work of great brilliance, something the Nobel committee recognised when they awarded him literature`s highest honour.

His credentials as a historian


By 16 c, Hindu and Muslim states lived in creative harmony, Hindu kings wearing Islamic-inspired costumes, Bijapur`s Ibrahim Adil Shahi II in rudraksha rosary.



are, however, much less secure, and so when Sir Vidia gets something badly wrong, it is important that these errors are challenged.

There is a celebrated opening sequence to Sir Vidia`s masterpiece, India: A Wounded Civilisation. It is 1975—a full quarter century before he won the Nobel—and Naipaul is surveying the shattered ruins of Vijayanagara.

Naipaul leads the reader through the remains of the once mighty city, its 24 miles of walls winding through the ``brown plateau of rock and gigantic boulders``. These days, he explains, it is just ``a peasant wilderness``, but look carefully and you can see scattered everywhere the crumbling wreckage of former greatness: ``palaces and stables, a royal bath...the leaning granite pillars of what must have been a bridge across the river``. Over the bridge, there is yet more: ``a long and very wide avenue, with a great statue of the bull of Shiva at one end, and at the other end a miracle: a temple that for some reason was spared destruction, is still whole, and is still used for worship``.





            
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Naipaul goes on to lament the fall of this ``great centre of Hindu civilisation``, ``then one of the greatest (cities) in the world``. It was pillaged in 1565 ``by an alliance of Muslim principalities—and the work of destruction took five months; some people say a year``.It fell, according to Naipaul, because already the Hindu world it embodied had become backward-looking and stagnant: it had failed to develop, and in particular had failed to develop the military means to challenge the aggressive Muslim sultanates that surrounded it. Instead, Vijayanagara was ``committed from the start to the preservation of a Hinduism that had already been violated, and culturally and artistically it (only) preserved and repeated; it hardly innovated.



Desecration of Hindu temples did take place but it was paradoxically a continuation of the Indian tradition of sacking tutelary `state` deities.


... The Hinduism Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end``.

For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of India, part of a long series of failures that he believes still bruises the country`s self-confidence (or from which, according to some



of his more recent statements, the country is only just now beginning to recover). The wound was created by a fatal combination of Islamic aggression and Hindu weakness—the tendency to `retreat`, to withdraw in the face of defeat.

Naipaul first developed the theme in An Area of Darkness. The great Hindu ruins of the South, he writes there, represent ``the continuity and flow of Hindu India, ever shrinking``. But the ruins of the North—the monuments of the Great Mughals—``speak of waste and failure``. Even the Taj and the magnificent garden tombs of the Mughal emperors are to Naipaul symbols of oppression: ``Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of the country`s spirit; they express the refining of a nation`s sensibility``. In contrast, the monuments of the Mughals speak only of ``personal plunder, and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered``. Time has not mellowed these views: in an interview Naipaul gave to Outlook (``Christianity didn`t damage India like Islam``, Nov 15, 1999), Sir Vidia maintained that ``the Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people``.

Not many other observers have seen the Taj Mahal—usually perceived as the world`s greatest monument to love (``a tear on the face of eternity,`` according to Tagore, an earlier Indian Nobel laureate)—in quite such jaundiced terms; indeed it takes an unusual perversity to see one of the world`s most beautiful buildings merely as a piece of cultural vandalism. Nevertheless, Naipaul`s entirely negative understanding of India`s Islamic history has its roots firmly in the mainstream imperial historiography of Victorian Britain.

For the Muslim invasions of India tended to be seen by historians of the Raj as a long, brutal sequence of rapine and pillage, in stark contrast—so 19th century British historians liked to believe—to the law and order selflessly brought by their own `Civilising Mission`. In this context, the Fall of Vijayanagara was written up in elegiac terms by Robert Sewell, whose 1900 book Vijayanagar: A Forgotten Empire first characterised the kingdom as ``a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests``, a single brave but doomed attempt at resistance to Islamic aggression. This idea was eagerly elaborated by Hindu nationalists who wrote of Vijayanagara as a Hindu state dedicated to the preservation of the traditional, peaceful and `pure` Hindu culture of southern India.





            
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It is a simple and seductive vision, and one that at first sight looks plausible. The problem is that such ideas rest on a set of ignorant and Islamophobic assumptions which recent scholarship has done much to undermine.

A brilliant essay published in 1996 by the respected American Sanskrit scholar, Philip B. Wagoner, was an important landmark in this process*.The essay, titled `A Sultan Among Hindu Kings`—a reference to the title by which the Kings of Vijayanagara referred to themselves—pointed out the degree to which the elite culture of Vijayanagara was heavily Islamicised by the 16th century, its civilisation ``deeply transformed through nearly two centuries of intense and creative interaction with the Islamic world``.



The gentle cult of Sufism, vernacular Islamic literature find no mention in Naipaul, neither does the religious tolerance of Akbar or Dara Shikoh.




By this period, for example, the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara appeared in public audience, not bare-chested, as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but instead dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume—the Islamic-inspired kabayi, a long-sleeved tunic derived from the Arabic qaba, and

the kullayi, a conical cap derived from Perso-Turkic kulah—all part, according to Wagoner, of ``their symbolic participation in the more universal culture of Islam``.

Far from being the stagnant, backward-looking bastion of Hindu resistance imagined by Naipaul, Vijayanagara had in fact developed in all sorts of unexpected ways, taking on much of the administrative, tax collecting and military methods of the Muslim sultanates that surrounded it—notably stirrups, horseshoes, horse armour and a new type of saddle, all of which allowed Vijayanagara to put into the field an army of horse archers who could hold at bay the Delhi Sultanate, then the most powerful force in India.

A comprehensive survey of Vijayanagara`s monuments and archaeology conducted by George Michell over the last 20 years has come to the same conclusion as Wagoner. The survey has emphasised the degree to which the buildings of 16th century Vijayanagara were inspired by the architecture of the nearby Muslim sultanates, mixing the traditional trabeate architecture of the Hindu South with the arch and dome of the Islamicate North.


Moreover, this fruitful interaction between Hindu- and Muslim-ruled states was very much a two-way traffic. Just as Hindu Vijayanagara was absorbing Islamic influences, so a similar process of hybridity was transforming the nominally Islamic sultanate of Bijapur. The landmark


Not for Naipaul a Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra or Nurul Hasan. It`s the `Dark Ages` history of the new NCERT books that`s more to his taste.



study of this fascinating City State is Richard Eaton`s Sufis of Bijapur. The picture revealed by Eaton`s work is of a city dominated by an atmosphere of heterodox intellectual enquiry, with the libraries of Bijapur swelling with esoteric texts produced on the intellectual frontier between Islam and Hinduism. One Bijapuri production of the period, for example, was the Bangab Nama, or the Book of the Pot Smoker: written by Mahmud Bahri—a sort of medieval Indian Allen Ginsberg. The book is a long panegyric to the joys of cannabis:

``Smoke your pot and be happy—
Be a dervish and put your heart at peace.
Lose your life imbibing this exhilaration.``

In the course of this book, Bahri writes: ``God`s knowledge has no limit...and there is not just one path to him. Anyone from any community can find him.`` This certainly seems to have been the view of Bijapur`s ruler, Ibrahim Adil Shahi II. Early in his reign, Ibrahim gave up wearing jewels and adopted instead the rudraksha rosary of the sadhu. In his songs he used highly Sanskritised language to shower equal praise upon Saraswati, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Sufi saint Gesudaraz of Gulbarga.





            
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Perhaps the most surprising passage occurs in the 56th song where the Sultan more or less describes himself as a Hindu God: ``He is robed in saffron dress, his teeth are black, the nails are red...and he loves all. Ibrahim whose father is Ganesh, whose mother is Saraswati, has a rosary of crystal round his neck...and an elephant as his vehicle.`` According to the art historian Mark Zebrowski, ``It is hard to label Ibrahim either a Muslim or a Hindu; rather he had an aesthete`s admiration for the beauty of both cultures.`` The same spirit also animates Bijapuri art whose nominally Islamic miniature portraits show ``girls as voluptuous as the nudes of South Indian sculpture``.

This creative coexistence finally fell victim, not to a concerted communal campaign by Muslim states intent on eradicating Hinduism, but instead to the shifting alliances of Deccani diplomacy. In 1558, only seven years before the Deccani sultanates turned on Vijayanagara, the Empire had been a prominent part of an alliance of mainly Muslim armies that had sacked the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar. That year, Vijayanagara`s armies stabled their horses in the mosques of the plundered city, and the Emperor Rama Raya had demanded that the Sultan come to his headquarters and eat paan from his hand as the price for peace. Before this Rama Raya had allied with the same Ahmadnagar Sultan in two joint invasions of Bijapur, then with the new Sultan of Bijapur in two campaigns against Ahmadnagar. It was only in 1562, when Rama Raya plundered and seized not just districts belonging to Ahmadnagar and its ally Golconda, but also those belonging to his own ally Bijapur, that the different sultanates finally united against their unruly neighbour.

The Fall of Vijayanagara is a subject Naipaul keeps returning to: in an interview shortly after he had been awarded the Nobel prize, he talked about how the destruction of the city meant an end to its traditions: ``When Vijayanagar was laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current has been broken.`` Yet there is considerable documentary and artistic evidence that the very opposite was true, and that the city`s craftsmen merely transferred to the patronage of the Sultans of Bijapur where the result was a major artistic renaissance.

The remarkable fusion of styles that resulted from this rebirth can still be seen in the tomb of Ibrahim II, completed in 1626. From afar it looks uncompromisingly Islamic; yet for all its domes and arches, the closer you draw the more you realise that few Muslim buildings are so Hindu in their spirit. The usually austere walls of Islamic architecture in the Deccan here give way to a petrified scrollwork indistinguishable from Vijayanagaran decoration, the bleak black volcanic granite of Bijapur manipulated as if it were as soft as plaster, as delicate as a lace ruff. All around minars suddenly bud into bloom, walls dissolve into bundles of pillars; fantastically sculptural lotus-bud domes and cupola drums are almost suffocated by great starbursts of Indic decoration which curl down from the pendetives like pepper vines, winding their way up brackets and gripping around the cusps of archways.






            
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This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the rss-Naipaulian view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and `chutnified` (to use Salman Rushdie`s nice term); and an important book has recently been published which goes a long way to develop these ideas. Anyone wishing to understand the complexities and fecund fusions of medieval India would be well advised to go straight out and buy a copy of Beyond Turk and Hindu (edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, published in India by Bahri). The book shows, from a variety of different articles by all the leading international scholars of the period, the degree to which the extraordinary richness of medieval Indian civilisation was the direct result of its multi-ethnic, multi-religious character and the inspired interplay and cross-fertilisation of Hindu and Islamic civilisations that thereby took place.

The historians do not see the two religions as in any way irreconcilable; instead they tend to take the view that ``the actual history of religious exchange suggests that there have never been clearly fixed groups, one labelled `Hindu`—and the other both its opposite and rival—labelled `Muslim`.`` Indeed, as one author points out, there is not a single medieval Sanskrit inscription that identifies ``Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims``, but instead they refer more generally in terms of ``linguistic affiliation, most typically as Turk, `Turushka`.`` The import of this is clear: that the political groupings we today identify as `Muslim` were then ``construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others``.

Of course this sort of approach is not entirely new. From the early 1960s until only a few years ago, Indian history textbooks emphasised the creation in medieval India of what was referred to as the ``composite culture``. This cultural synthesis took many forms. In Urdu and Hindi were born languages of great beauty that to different extents mixed Persian and Arabic words with the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of northern India. Similarly, just as the cuisine of North India combined the vegetarian dal and rice of peninsular India with the kebab and roti of Central Asia, so in music the long-necked Persian lute was combined with the classical Indian veena to form the sitar, now the Indian instrument most widely known in the West. In architecture there was a similar process of hybridity as the great monumental buildings of the Mughals reconciled the styles of the Hindus with those of Islam, to produce a fusion more beautiful than either.

These Nehruvian-era textbooks were the work of Left-leaning but nonetheless internationally regarded scholars such as professors Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra and Nurul Hasan—none of whom Sir Vidia appears to think much of. In the same 1993 Times of India interview in which he defended the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Sir Vidia remarked that ``Romila Thapar`s book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating.`` The new NCERT history textbooks—such as that on Medieval India by an obscure college lecturer named Meenakshi Jain with its picture of the period as one long Muslim-led orgy of mass murder and temple destruction—are no doubt much more to Sir Vidia`s taste.





            
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Thanks partly to the influence of the earlier textbooks on generations of students, there is still a widespread awareness in India of the positive aspects of medieval Islam—aspects noticeable by their absence in Naipaul`s oeuvre. It is widely known, for example, that Islam in India was spread much less by the sword than by the Sufis. After all Sufism with its holy men, visions and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual`s search for union with god, has always borne remarkable similarities to the mystical side of Hinduism. Under Sufi influence it was particularly at the level of village folk worship that the two religions fused into one, with many ordinary Hindus visiting the graves of Sufi pirs—some of whom are still considered to be incarnations of Hindu deities—while Muslim villagers would leave offerings at temples to ensure the birth of children and good harvests. To this day, Sufi dargahs still attract as many Hindu, Sikh and Christian pilgrims as they do Muslims.

Yet Sufism, clearly central to any discussion of Medieval India, barely makes a single appearance in Naipaul`s work; indeed he appears to be entirely ignorant of the term: ``Islam is a religion of fixed laws,`` he told Outlook. ``There can be no reconciliation (with other religions).`` In Beyond Belief (1998) Naipaul writes of Indian Muslims as slaves to an imported religion, looking abroad to Arabia for the focus of their devotions, which they are forced to practice in a foreign language—Arabic—they rarely understand.He seems to be completely unaware of the existence of such hugely popular Indian pilgrimage shrines such as Nizamuddin or Ajmer Sharif, or the vast body of vernacular devotional literature in Indian Islam, much of it dedicated to the mystical cults of indigenous saints.

Also notably absent in Naipaul`s work is any mention of the religious tolerance of the Mughals: neither Akbar nor Dara Shikoh make any sort of appearance in Naipaul`s writing, and his readers will learn nothing of the former`s enthusiastic patronage of Hindu temples or the latter`s work translating the Gita into Persian, or writing The Mingling of Two Oceans, a study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasises the compatibility of the two faiths and speculates that the Upanishads were the source of all monotheism. Such views were far from exceptional and most of the great Mughal writers show similar syncretic tendencies: Ghalib, for example, wrote praising Benares as the Mecca of India, saying that he sometimes wished that he could ``renounce the faith, take the Hindu rosary in hand, and tie a sacred thread round my waist``.

Yet Naipaul, if he is aware of these shared beliefs and overlapping practices, chooses to ignore it, and continues to envisage medieval India solely in terms of Islamic vandalism: in the interview to Outlook, for example, Naipaul mentioned Akbar in passing, but only as the ``terrible`` conqueror of Orissa, omitting any reference to the subsequent lifetime of work he put into reconciling India`s different faiths. Likewise, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, he continues to talk of Mughal architecture as entirely ``foreign...a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan``, wilfully ignoring all the fused Hindu elements that do so much to define its profound Indianness: the jalis, chhajjas and chhattris, quite apart from all the fabulous Gujarati-Hindu decorative sculpture that is most spectacularly seen at Fatehpur Sikri. Yet while genuine architectural historians see a remarkable fusing of civilisations in Mughal buildings, Naipaul, hostile as ever, thinks ``only of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up``.





            
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That destruction of Hindu monuments did take place is undeniable; but in what circumstances it took place, and on what scale, is now a matter of intense scholarly debate. Perhaps the single most important essay in Beyond Turk and Hindu is Richard Eaton`s fascinating article on temple destruction. It is of course a central nostrum of the rss and the Sangh parivar, bolstered by intellectual fellow-travellers such as Naipaul, that between the 13th and 18th century Indo-Muslim states, driven by a combination of greed, intolerance and a fanatical iconoclasm, desecrated as many as 60,000 Hindu temples. This claim is examined in detail by Eaton who concludes that ``such a picture (simply) cannot be sustained by evidence from original sources``.

Rather than the 60,000 looted temples of rss myth, Eaton writes that he can find evidence for around 80 desecrations ``whose historicity appears reasonable certain``, and that these demolitions tended to take place in very particular circumstances: that is, in the context of outright military defeats of Hindu rulers by one of the Indian sultanates, or when ``Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed as protected state property, were left unmolested``.

Indeed Indo-Islamic states involved themselves directly in the running of their Hindu temples, so that for example ``between 1590 and 1735, Mughal officials oversaw the renewal of Orissa`s state cult, that of Jagannath in Puri. By sitting on a canopied chariot while accompanying the cult`s annual festival, Shah Jehan`s officials ritually demonstrated that it was the Mughal emperor who was the temple`s—and hence the God`s—ultimate protector.``

Eaton sees the attacks on temples not so much as the introduction to India of a new spirit of iconoclasm, so much as the continuation of the existing pre-Islamic practice of destroying or abducting the protecting state deity whose power was politically linked to the sovereignty of the defeated ruler: ``Early medieval Indian history (of the pre-Muslim period) abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred amidst interdynastic conflicts,`` he writes. ``In AD 642...the Pallava king, Narasimhavarman I, looted the image of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi. Fifty years later, armies from those same Chalukyas invaded North India and brought back to the Deccan...images of Ganga and Yamuna, looted from defeated powers there. In the eighth century, Bengali troops sought revenge on King Lalitaditya`s kingdom of Kashmir by destroying the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, the state deity.``

And so on. Paradoxically, by destroying royal temples intimately linked with the protection of Hindu kings, and by abducting the tutelary state deities, Muslim rulers were in fact acting in accordance with Indian tradition, just as they were when they claimed descent from the Pandava heroes of the Mahabharata—as did the Muslim ruler of Kashmir—or portrayed themselves as supporters of the Ramrajya, as was the claim of the Mughals.

None of this should be read in any way as challenging Naipaul`s literary brilliance, or as an attempt to diminish his importance as a writer: Sir Vidia`s non-fiction about India is arguably the most profound body of writing about the region in modern times, and it is precisely because of this that it is important to challenge his errors. In the current climate, after the pogroms of Gujarat and the continued malevolent and inaccurate rewriting of textbooks, Sir Vidia`s absurdly one-sided and misleading take on medieval Indian history simply must not be allowed to go uncorrected. To quote Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya of JNU, writing recently about the NCERT textbooks: ``When history is mobilised for specific political projects and sectarian conflicts; when political and community sentiments of the present begin to define how the past has to be represented; when history is fabricated to constitute a communal sensibility, and a politics of hatred and violence, then we (historians) need to sit up and protest. If we do not then the long night of Gujarat will never end. Its history will reappear again and again, not just as nightmare but as relived experience, re-enacted in endless cycles of retribution and revenge, in gory spectacles of blood and death.`` William Dalrymple`s White Mughals recently won Britain`s most prestigious academic history award, the Wolfson Prize for History.




             
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V. S. Naipaul
#3 by warpster on March 22, 2004 7:06pm PT

You have picked various quotes from people and pasted it. Your own opinions (other than a general negative spin on Naipaul) are mostly missing.

AKa Moothuswamy ..Tamil Harimou ....Iyer Menn Pillais Ramans Vijaylalithaaaas anti DALITS

SUKRANT the Sulejkha hindutva HERO


Sir Vidia Gets It Badly Wrong`
William Dalrymple grants Naipaul his eminence, but challenges his jaundiced notions of Indian history

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE


There was some surprise when Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul turned up at the BJP office last week and gave what many in the press took to be a pre-election endorsement not just of the party but the entire Sangh parivar programme. India was indeed shining, the Nobel laureate was quoted as saying, and yes he was quite happy being ``appropriated`` by the BJP.

More striking was the quote attributed to Naipaul about the violent destruction of the Babri Masjid: ``Ayodhya is a sort of passion,`` he said. ``Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity.`` For a man whose work contains many eloquent warnings of the dangers of misplaced political passions—such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran—this might appear to be a surprising volte-face.


For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on India`s psyche. It`s a theme he first developed in `An Area of Darkness` and holds to date.


Indeed, it led one commentator in the Times to wonder if Sir Vidia was not being misquoted or at least misunderstood.

Yet the quotes, especially Sir Vidia`s remarks that Babar`s invasion of India ``left a deep wound``, are consistent with ideas Naipaul has been airing for many years now. In 1998, for example,

he told The Hindu: ``I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions.... The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.``

A few years earlier, following the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Naipaul told the Times of India: ``What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening.... Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society, such understanding had eluded Indians before....`` Such attitudes form a consistent line of thought in Naipaul`s writing about India from An Area of Darkness in 1964 through to the present.

Today few would dispute Sir Vidia`s status as probably the greatest living writer of Indian origin; indeed, many would go further and argue that he is the greatest living writer of English prose.
For good reason, his views are taken very seriously. He is a writer whose fiction and non-fiction written over half a century form a body of work of great brilliance, something the Nobel committee recognised when they awarded him literature`s highest honour.

His credentials as a historian


By 16 c, Hindu and Muslim states lived in creative harmony, Hindu kings wearing Islamic-inspired costumes, Bijapur`s Ibrahim Adil Shahi II in rudraksha rosary.



are, however, much less secure, and so when Sir Vidia gets something badly wrong, it is important that these errors are challenged.

There is a celebrated opening sequence to Sir Vidia`s masterpiece, India: A Wounded Civilisation. It is 1975—a full quarter century before he won the Nobel—and Naipaul is surveying the shattered ruins of Vijayanagara.

Naipaul leads the reader through the remains of the once mighty city, its 24 miles of walls winding through the ``brown plateau of rock and gigantic boulders``. These days, he explains, it is just ``a peasant wilderness``, but look carefully and you can see scattered everywhere the crumbling wreckage of former greatness: ``palaces and stables, a royal bath...the leaning granite pillars of what must have been a bridge across the river``. Over the bridge, there is yet more: ``a long and very wide avenue, with a great statue of the bull of Shiva at one end, and at the other end a miracle: a temple that for some reason was spared destruction, is still whole, and is still used for worship``.





            
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Naipaul goes on to lament the fall of this ``great centre of Hindu civilisation``, ``then one of the greatest (cities) in the world``. It was pillaged in 1565 ``by an alliance of Muslim principalities—and the work of destruction took five months; some people say a year``.It fell, according to Naipaul, because already the Hindu world it embodied had become backward-looking and stagnant: it had failed to develop, and in particular had failed to develop the military means to challenge the aggressive Muslim sultanates that surrounded it. Instead, Vijayanagara was ``committed from the start to the preservation of a Hinduism that had already been violated, and culturally and artistically it (only) preserved and repeated; it hardly innovated.



Desecration of Hindu temples did take place but it was paradoxically a continuation of the Indian tradition of sacking tutelary `state` deities.


... The Hinduism Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end``.

For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of India, part of a long series of failures that he believes still bruises the country`s self-confidence (or from which, according to some



of his more recent statements, the country is only just now beginning to recover). The wound was created by a fatal combination of Islamic aggression and Hindu weakness—the tendency to `retreat`, to withdraw in the face of defeat.

Naipaul first developed the theme in An Area of Darkness. The great Hindu ruins of the South, he writes there, represent ``the continuity and flow of Hindu India, ever shrinking``. But the ruins of the North—the monuments of the Great Mughals—``speak of waste and failure``. Even the Taj and the magnificent garden tombs of the Mughal emperors are to Naipaul symbols of oppression: ``Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of the country`s spirit; they express the refining of a nation`s sensibility``. In contrast, the monuments of the Mughals speak only of ``personal plunder, and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered``. Time has not mellowed these views: in an interview Naipaul gave to Outlook (``Christianity didn`t damage India like Islam``, Nov 15, 1999), Sir Vidia maintained that ``the Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people``.

Not many other observers have seen the Taj Mahal—usually perceived as the world`s greatest monument to love (``a tear on the face of eternity,`` according to Tagore, an earlier Indian Nobel laureate)—in quite such jaundiced terms; indeed it takes an unusual perversity to see one of the world`s most beautiful buildings merely as a piece of cultural vandalism. Nevertheless, Naipaul`s entirely negative understanding of India`s Islamic history has its roots firmly in the mainstream imperial historiography of Victorian Britain.

For the Muslim invasions of India tended to be seen by historians of the Raj as a long, brutal sequence of rapine and pillage, in stark contrast—so 19th century British historians liked to believe—to the law and order selflessly brought by their own `Civilising Mission`. In this context, the Fall of Vijayanagara was written up in elegiac terms by Robert Sewell, whose 1900 book Vijayanagar: A Forgotten Empire first characterised the kingdom as ``a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests``, a single brave but doomed attempt at resistance to Islamic aggression. This idea was eagerly elaborated by Hindu nationalists who wrote of Vijayanagara as a Hindu state dedicated to the preservation of the traditional, peaceful and `pure` Hindu culture of southern India.





            
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It is a simple and seductive vision, and one that at first sight looks plausible. The problem is that such ideas rest on a set of ignorant and Islamophobic assumptions which recent scholarship has done much to undermine.

A brilliant essay published in 1996 by the respected American Sanskrit scholar, Philip B. Wagoner, was an important landmark in this process*.The essay, titled `A Sultan Among Hindu Kings`—a reference to the title by which the Kings of Vijayanagara referred to themselves—pointed out the degree to which the elite culture of Vijayanagara was heavily Islamicised by the 16th century, its civilisation ``deeply transformed through nearly two centuries of intense and creative interaction with the Islamic world``.



The gentle cult of Sufism, vernacular Islamic literature find no mention in Naipaul, neither does the religious tolerance of Akbar or Dara Shikoh.




By this period, for example, the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara appeared in public audience, not bare-chested, as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but instead dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume—the Islamic-inspired kabayi, a long-sleeved tunic derived from the Arabic qaba, and

the kullayi, a conical cap derived from Perso-Turkic kulah—all part, according to Wagoner, of ``their symbolic participation in the more universal culture of Islam``.

Far from being the stagnant, backward-looking bastion of Hindu resistance imagined by Naipaul, Vijayanagara had in fact developed in all sorts of unexpected ways, taking on much of the administrative, tax collecting and military methods of the Muslim sultanates that surrounded it—notably stirrups, horseshoes, horse armour and a new type of saddle, all of which allowed Vijayanagara to put into the field an army of horse archers who could hold at bay the Delhi Sultanate, then the most powerful force in India.

A comprehensive survey of Vijayanagara`s monuments and archaeology conducted by George Michell over the last 20 years has come to the same conclusion as Wagoner. The survey has emphasised the degree to which the buildings of 16th century Vijayanagara were inspired by the architecture of the nearby Muslim sultanates, mixing the traditional trabeate architecture of the Hindu South with the arch and dome of the Islamicate North.


Moreover, this fruitful interaction between Hindu- and Muslim-ruled states was very much a two-way traffic. Just as Hindu Vijayanagara was absorbing Islamic influences, so a similar process of hybridity was transforming the nominally Islamic sultanate of Bijapur. The landmark


Not for Naipaul a Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra or Nurul Hasan. It`s the `Dark Ages` history of the new NCERT books that`s more to his taste.



study of this fascinating City State is Richard Eaton`s Sufis of Bijapur. The picture revealed by Eaton`s work is of a city dominated by an atmosphere of heterodox intellectual enquiry, with the libraries of Bijapur swelling with esoteric texts produced on the intellectual frontier between Islam and Hinduism. One Bijapuri production of the period, for example, was the Bangab Nama, or the Book of the Pot Smoker: written by Mahmud Bahri—a sort of medieval Indian Allen Ginsberg. The book is a long panegyric to the joys of cannabis:

``Smoke your pot and be happy—
Be a dervish and put your heart at peace.
Lose your life imbibing this exhilaration.``

In the course of this book, Bahri writes: ``God`s knowledge has no limit...and there is not just one path to him. Anyone from any community can find him.`` This certainly seems to have been the view of Bijapur`s ruler, Ibrahim Adil Shahi II. Early in his reign, Ibrahim gave up wearing jewels and adopted instead the rudraksha rosary of the sadhu. In his songs he used highly Sanskritised language to shower equal praise upon Saraswati, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Sufi saint Gesudaraz of Gulbarga.





            
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Perhaps the most surprising passage occurs in the 56th song where the Sultan more or less describes himself as a Hindu God: ``He is robed in saffron dress, his teeth are black, the nails are red...and he loves all. Ibrahim whose father is Ganesh, whose mother is Saraswati, has a rosary of crystal round his neck...and an elephant as his vehicle.`` According to the art historian Mark Zebrowski, ``It is hard to label Ibrahim either a Muslim or a Hindu; rather he had an aesthete`s admiration for the beauty of both cultures.`` The same spirit also animates Bijapuri art whose nominally Islamic miniature portraits show ``girls as voluptuous as the nudes of South Indian sculpture``.

This creative coexistence finally fell victim, not to a concerted communal campaign by Muslim states intent on eradicating Hinduism, but instead to the shifting alliances of Deccani diplomacy. In 1558, only seven years before the Deccani sultanates turned on Vijayanagara, the Empire had been a prominent part of an alliance of mainly Muslim armies that had sacked the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar. That year, Vijayanagara`s armies stabled their horses in the mosques of the plundered city, and the Emperor Rama Raya had demanded that the Sultan come to his headquarters and eat paan from his hand as the price for peace. Before this Rama Raya had allied with the same Ahmadnagar Sultan in two joint invasions of Bijapur, then with the new Sultan of Bijapur in two campaigns against Ahmadnagar. It was only in 1562, when Rama Raya plundered and seized not just districts belonging to Ahmadnagar and its ally Golconda, but also those belonging to his own ally Bijapur, that the different sultanates finally united against their unruly neighbour.

The Fall of Vijayanagara is a subject Naipaul keeps returning to: in an interview shortly after he had been awarded the Nobel prize, he talked about how the destruction of the city meant an end to its traditions: ``When Vijayanagar was laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current has been broken.`` Yet there is considerable documentary and artistic evidence that the very opposite was true, and that the city`s craftsmen merely transferred to the patronage of the Sultans of Bijapur where the result was a major artistic renaissance.

The remarkable fusion of styles that resulted from this rebirth can still be seen in the tomb of Ibrahim II, completed in 1626. From afar it looks uncompromisingly Islamic; yet for all its domes and arches, the closer you draw the more you realise that few Muslim buildings are so Hindu in their spirit. The usually austere walls of Islamic architecture in the Deccan here give way to a petrified scrollwork indistinguishable from Vijayanagaran decoration, the bleak black volcanic granite of Bijapur manipulated as if it were as soft as plaster, as delicate as a lace ruff. All around minars suddenly bud into bloom, walls dissolve into bundles of pillars; fantastically sculptural lotus-bud domes and cupola drums are almost suffocated by great starbursts of Indic decoration which curl down from the pendetives like pepper vines, winding their way up brackets and gripping around the cusps of archways.






            
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This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the rss-Naipaulian view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and `chutnified` (to use Salman Rushdie`s nice term); and an important book has recently been published which goes a long way to develop these ideas. Anyone wishing to understand the complexities and fecund fusions of medieval India would be well advised to go straight out and buy a copy of Beyond Turk and Hindu (edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, published in India by Bahri). The book shows, from a variety of different articles by all the leading international scholars of the period, the degree to which the extraordinary richness of medieval Indian civilisation was the direct result of its multi-ethnic, multi-religious character and the inspired interplay and cross-fertilisation of Hindu and Islamic civilisations that thereby took place.

The historians do not see the two religions as in any way irreconcilable; instead they tend to take the view that ``the actual history of religious exchange suggests that there have never been clearly fixed groups, one labelled `Hindu`—and the other both its opposite and rival—labelled `Muslim`.`` Indeed, as one author points out, there is not a single medieval Sanskrit inscription that identifies ``Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims``, but instead they refer more generally in terms of ``linguistic affiliation, most typically as Turk, `Turushka`.`` The import of this is clear: that the political groupings we today identify as `Muslim` were then ``construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others``.

Of course this sort of approach is not entirely new. From the early 1960s until only a few years ago, Indian history textbooks emphasised the creation in medieval India of what was referred to as the ``composite culture``. This cultural synthesis took many forms. In Urdu and Hindi were born languages of great beauty that to different extents mixed Persian and Arabic words with the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of northern India. Similarly, just as the cuisine of North India combined the vegetarian dal and rice of peninsular India with the kebab and roti of Central Asia, so in music the long-necked Persian lute was combined with the classical Indian veena to form the sitar, now the Indian instrument most widely known in the West. In architecture there was a similar process of hybridity as the great monumental buildings of the Mughals reconciled the styles of the Hindus with those of Islam, to produce a fusion more beautiful than either.

These Nehruvian-era textbooks were the work of Left-leaning but nonetheless internationally regarded scholars such as professors Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra and Nurul Hasan—none of whom Sir Vidia appears to think much of. In the same 1993 Times of India interview in which he defended the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Sir Vidia remarked that ``Romila Thapar`s book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating.`` The new NCERT history textbooks—such as that on Medieval India by an obscure college lecturer named Meenakshi Jain with its picture of the period as one long Muslim-led orgy of mass murder and temple destruction—are no doubt much more to Sir Vidia`s taste.





            
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Thanks partly to the influence of the earlier textbooks on generations of students, there is still a widespread awareness in India of the positive aspects of medieval Islam—aspects noticeable by their absence in Naipaul`s oeuvre. It is widely known, for example, that Islam in India was spread much less by the sword than by the Sufis. After all Sufism with its holy men, visions and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual`s search for union with god, has always borne remarkable similarities to the mystical side of Hinduism. Under Sufi influence it was particularly at the level of village folk worship that the two religions fused into one, with many ordinary Hindus visiting the graves of Sufi pirs—some of whom are still considered to be incarnations of Hindu deities—while Muslim villagers would leave offerings at temples to ensure the birth of children and good harvests. To this day, Sufi dargahs still attract as many Hindu, Sikh and Christian pilgrims as they do Muslims.

Yet Sufism, clearly central to any discussion of Medieval India, barely makes a single appearance in Naipaul`s work; indeed he appears to be entirely ignorant of the term: ``Islam is a religion of fixed laws,`` he told Outlook. ``There can be no reconciliation (with other religions).`` In Beyond Belief (1998) Naipaul writes of Indian Muslims as slaves to an imported religion, looking abroad to Arabia for the focus of their devotions, which they are forced to practice in a foreign language—Arabic—they rarely understand.He seems to be completely unaware of the existence of such hugely popular Indian pilgrimage shrines such as Nizamuddin or Ajmer Sharif, or the vast body of vernacular devotional literature in Indian Islam, much of it dedicated to the mystical cults of indigenous saints.

Also notably absent in Naipaul`s work is any mention of the religious tolerance of the Mughals: neither Akbar nor Dara Shikoh make any sort of appearance in Naipaul`s writing, and his readers will learn nothing of the former`s enthusiastic patronage of Hindu temples or the latter`s work translating the Gita into Persian, or writing The Mingling of Two Oceans, a study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasises the compatibility of the two faiths and speculates that the Upanishads were the source of all monotheism. Such views were far from exceptional and most of the great Mughal writers show similar syncretic tendencies: Ghalib, for example, wrote praising Benares as the Mecca of India, saying that he sometimes wished that he could ``renounce the faith, take the Hindu rosary in hand, and tie a sacred thread round my waist``.

Yet Naipaul, if he is aware of these shared beliefs and overlapping practices, chooses to ignore it, and continues to envisage medieval India solely in terms of Islamic vandalism: in the interview to Outlook, for example, Naipaul mentioned Akbar in passing, but only as the ``terrible`` conqueror of Orissa, omitting any reference to the subsequent lifetime of work he put into reconciling India`s different faiths. Likewise, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, he continues to talk of Mughal architecture as entirely ``foreign...a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan``, wilfully ignoring all the fused Hindu elements that do so much to define its profound Indianness: the jalis, chhajjas and chhattris, quite apart from all the fabulous Gujarati-Hindu decorative sculpture that is most spectacularly seen at Fatehpur Sikri. Yet while genuine architectural historians see a remarkable fusing of civilisations in Mughal buildings, Naipaul, hostile as ever, thinks ``only of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up``.





            
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That destruction of Hindu monuments did take place is undeniable; but in what circumstances it took place, and on what scale, is now a matter of intense scholarly debate. Perhaps the single most important essay in Beyond Turk and Hindu is Richard Eaton`s fascinating article on temple destruction. It is of course a central nostrum of the rss and the Sangh parivar, bolstered by intellectual fellow-travellers such as Naipaul, that between the 13th and 18th century Indo-Muslim states, driven by a combination of greed, intolerance and a fanatical iconoclasm, desecrated as many as 60,000 Hindu temples. This claim is examined in detail by Eaton who concludes that ``such a picture (simply) cannot be sustained by evidence from original sources``.

Rather than the 60,000 looted temples of rss myth, Eaton writes that he can find evidence for around 80 desecrations ``whose historicity appears reasonable certain``, and that these demolitions tended to take place in very particular circumstances: that is, in the context of outright military defeats of Hindu rulers by one of the Indian sultanates, or when ``Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed as protected state property, were left unmolested``.

Indeed Indo-Islamic states involved themselves directly in the running of their Hindu temples, so that for example ``between 1590 and 1735, Mughal officials oversaw the renewal of Orissa`s state cult, that of Jagannath in Puri. By sitting on a canopied chariot while accompanying the cult`s annual festival, Shah Jehan`s officials ritually demonstrated that it was the Mughal emperor who was the temple`s—and hence the God`s—ultimate protector.``

Eaton sees the attacks on temples not so much as the introduction to India of a new spirit of iconoclasm, so much as the continuation of the existing pre-Islamic practice of destroying or abducting the protecting state deity whose power was politically linked to the sovereignty of the defeated ruler: ``Early medieval Indian history (of the pre-Muslim period) abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred amidst interdynastic conflicts,`` he writes. ``In AD 642...the Pallava king, Narasimhavarman I, looted the image of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi. Fifty years later, armies from those same Chalukyas invaded North India and brought back to the Deccan...images of Ganga and Yamuna, looted from defeated powers there. In the eighth century, Bengali troops sought revenge on King Lalitaditya`s kingdom of Kashmir by destroying the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, the state deity.``

And so on. Paradoxically, by destroying royal temples intimately linked with the protection of Hindu kings, and by abducting the tutelary state deities, Muslim rulers were in fact acting in accordance with Indian tradition, just as they were when they claimed descent from the Pandava heroes of the Mahabharata—as did the Muslim ruler of Kashmir—or portrayed themselves as supporters of the Ramrajya, as was the claim of the Mughals.

None of this should be read in any way as challenging Naipaul`s literary brilliance, or as an attempt to diminish his importance as a writer: Sir Vidia`s non-fiction about India is arguably the most profound body of writing about the region in modern times, and it is precisely because of this that it is important to challenge his errors. In the current climate, after the pogroms of Gujarat and the continued malevolent and inaccurate rewriting of textbooks, Sir Vidia`s absurdly one-sided and misleading take on medieval Indian history simply must not be allowed to go uncorrected. To quote Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya of JNU, writing recently about the NCERT textbooks: ``When history is mobilised for specific political projects and sectarian conflicts; when political and community sentiments of the present begin to define how the past has to be represented; when history is fabricated to constitute a communal sensibility, and a politics of hatred and violence, then we (historians) need to sit up and protest. If we do not then the long night of Gujarat will never end. Its history will reappear again and again, not just as nightmare but as relived experience, re-enacted in endless cycles of retribution and revenge, in gory spectacles of blood and death.`` William Dalrymple`s White Mughals recently won Britain`s most prestigious academic history award, the Wolfson Prize for History.




             
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Musharraf Will Die
TAMIL brahmin

ignoramus of REAL muslims as opposed to IYER wannabeeee KALAM ...

Have Cluless mind

Empty Head No Conceptual Understanding of there Nontheologicaly `Culture Religion` ...Blind can never SEE dspite Surgey b/c of CORTICAL challenged ABSENT occipital CorteX



slam in a Benign Light

http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf=02&filename=6866&filetype=html
Communal Rage in Secular India
by Rafiq Zakaria;
Popular Prakashan,
Mumbai, 2002;
pp 248, Rs 350;

Islam and Jihad
by A G Noorani;
Left Word,
New Delhi, 2002;
pp 115, Rs 75;

Rational Approach to Islam
by Asghar Ali Engineer;
Gyan Publishing House,
New Delhi; pp 300.



S H Deshpande

Each of the three books under review shows that Islam is not only a religion of peace but much more. They refute every conceivable charge against Islam, quoting chapter and verse. The impression one receives, especially from Engineer’s book, is that almost every modern value – be it secularism, pluralism, freedom of religion, democracy or socialism – is imbedded in Islam. Noorani quotes Maulana Azad as saying that “Islam constitutes a perfected system of freedom and democracy” (Noorani 95). He quotes Qamaruddin Khan who swears by the “driving democratic force of ancient Islam” (ibid 65). Noorani himself is of the opinion that “Islam has a vision of equality, social justice, individual freedom, liberation of the oppressed and equality of men and women” (ibid 94). “The concept of liberation from oppression is very sharply defined in Islam” (ibid 84). Zakaria feels that in its ‘true pristine colour’ Islam is a “dynamic progressive force which teaches its followers to move forward, never backward” (Zakaria 206). Referring to Sir Sayyid Ahmad and Allama Iqbal he says, “Both reformers believed that the Quran embodied an essentially dynamic outlook on life and encouraged each generation to chalk out its course of action, unhampered by the past” (ibid 209). I do not contest these views. I have nothing to say about the authors’ interpretation of Islam. I shall confine myself to their general approach to the subject and express my unease on a few points. In the first place, one notes that none of them is ready to depart from the Holy Texts.

Rafiq Zakaria wants Muslims to change, but within Quranic limits. “They must, without compromising the Quranic injunctions, agree to the introduction of certain much-needed, essential changes in their Personal Law …” (ibid 207) (emphasis added). “There is, in fact, enough scope under the Sharia to amend the laws relating to marriage, divorce” etc (ibid 708) (emphasis added). About singing Vande Mataram he reports Jinnah having said that the song violated a tenet of Islam, “as it calls upon people to prostrate before the mother (land)”. Zakaria’s comment is: “But it does not; the Sanskrit word means ‘bow’ and not ‘prostrate’”. In fact ‘vande’ is the verb form (first person, singular, present tense) of the root ‘rand’ which means ‘to salute’, ‘to greet respectfully’, etc, and not ‘to bow’ (ibid 211). Thus, the national song must be sanctioned by Islam! Even then he advises Muslims: ‘Those Muslims who do not want to sing it, may not but they must stand up when it is sung…” (ibid 211). Referring to Quranic laws regarding inheritance he says, “no substantial change is possible (because it is against the Quran?), nor is it necessary because the Muslim law of inheritance is quite progressive” (ibid 209, Query in bracket added.) Even if a reform in inheritance law is necessary it should not be undertaken if it goes against the Quran. The logic is interesting: “As I had explained to the late Indira Gandhi, why should anyone bother about inheritance when 95 per cent of the Muslims in India die as paupers. The remaining 5 per cent can do what they like with their inherited assets; why ask them to violate the Quranic injunction?” (ibid 209) (emphasis added).

A G Noorani approvingly quotes Islamic authorities who say, “…there must be a return to the text…” (Noorani 86); “…The original thrust of Islam – of the Quran and Muhammad…must be resurrected.” (ibid 93); there must be an attempt at “rediscovering the old Islam, not…inventing a new heresy” (ibid 93). Noorani himself also wants to “recapture the essence of Islam” (ibid 76). Now, any religious text, be it the Bible, the Manusmriti or the Quran cannot meet the requirements and values of modern life. Taking the opposite stand would be ahistorical and against common sense. Most of the values which we all, including the authors of these books, cherish are of a much later origin and they have slowly evolved over time. Religious texts necessarily reflect the local social and cultural environment in which they were composed. This is because they are human creations and human beings are, as everyone knows, liable to err. However, all these authors are believers in the sense that they look upon religious texts, not as composed by men but as ‘Revelations’ – ‘Words of God’ to wit. In this sense they are not different from orthodox Muslims. Only, the meanings they cull out of the Sacred Word are different.

However, all our authors, steeped in western liberal influences, also feel obliged to pay respect to ‘Reason’ and claim to have used it. So they invite comment. The authorities whom Noorani quotes emphasise reason and intelligence. They ask for ‘rereading with new intelligence’ (Noorani 86) and ‘modernisation of old Islamic learning’ (ibid 93). Among them is Shabbir Akhtar whose principal aim was “to counsel Muslims to be reflective, to be intellectually honest enough to face frankly and conscientiously the tribunal of secular reason…” And yet all these authorities want reason in the service of faith. Akhtar wants reason to act “within faithful parameters”. He describes his attempt as ‘reverent scepticism’ (ibid 93), whatever that may mean.

Engineer castigates orthodox Muslims who “look down upon critical reason” (Engineer 8). However, in his own case, reason is not his only guide; he also seeks the guidance of faith. An interesting chapter on ‘What I Believe’ describes Engineer’s spiritual Odyssey and says that it was, principally, Islamic studies which gave him “a new vision of life and its meaning” (ibid 252). Further it says, “I came to the conclusion that reason is very crucial for human intellectual development, but not sufficient. Revelation is also a very important source of guidance and inner development. Reason…has obvious limits and cannot answer the ultimate questions regarding the ultimate meaning and direction of life. …I also came to believe that revelation cannot be contradictory to reason as many would like to believe. Revelation can and does go beyond reason but does not contradict it” (ibid 252-53).

Revelation, thus, has to do with matters of what is called ‘spirit’. What is spirituality for Engineer? “I believe any act, which leads to the general good of the human beings is a spiritual act”. (ibid 255). This spirituality, born of Revelation, expressed in Islamic Scriptures, bred in him anti-sectarianism, anti-authoritarianism, compassion, a sense of social justice, non-violence, pluralism, an understanding of ‘essential unity of all religions’, a catholicity of outlook regarding religious diversity and so on, as he later tells us. And thus finally back to the Quran. The concluding sentences are, “The Quran has described Allah as sustainer of entire universe. …and hence, it is our duty to submit humbly to the will of Allah and be His humble servant in maintaining and sustaining integrity of His Creation” (ibid 259).

Let us give Engineer his due. The above will have made it clear that for Engineer spirituality means ‘moral development’ in the broadest sense. He is right in saying that this is an area beyond the reach of reason. However, two questions arise. Moral development can come about without faith in god or religion, as several examples show. This is not to deny that some people can derive moral nourishment from religion also and Engineer could be one of them. But that would be a purely personal experience lacking general validity.

The more important issue is the following. Every religion has many elements and the moral element is only one of them. Another and a substantial part of religion relates to life in this world and injunctions about how it should be led. Now it is quite legitimate for Engineer to consider the moral and spiritual part as sacred and god-given. But sacredness attaching to the spiritual part should not be allowed to attach to the mundane matters dealt with in a religious text. Engineer does not make this distinction and considers the whole of Quran as revelation. And so he willingly submits to the authority of the Quran. If Engineer wants to use reason he should at least apply it to that part of the Holy Book which concerns itself with the work-a-day world. But he does not. Thus he ends up abandoning reason altogether.

If he had used reason where he ought to, he would have discovered that every extant revelation contradicts reason and knowledge in many ways. Given the mindset of the authors, use of ‘reason’, one fears, can only amount to exercise of ‘ingenuity’ in extracting modernity from ancient texts.

These authors do not really engage opponents in debate. Ibn Warraq’s book (1995) Why I am Not a Muslim, appeared in 1995. Anwar Shaikh (1999) who interprets Islam differently, has been writing for many years. Our authors do not really meet such critics head-on. There is no tussle, no clash of opposing views, no thrust and party. This is a natural consequence of their position.

These authors leave two questions largely unanswered. Along with ‘motivated’ non-Muslims they hold even Muslims responsible for painting Islam black by smearing its fair name. Noorani says, “Among Muslims no less than the rest…Jihad is synonymous with warfare” (Noorani 35). Jihad is frequently misinterpreted “either by Muslims themselves or by non-Muslims” (ibid 36). “Chiragh Ali demonstrated how some Muslim commentaries…misled Muslims and non-Muslims alike” (ibid 45). Engineer repeats that Jihad is “grossly misunderstood by both Muslims and non-Muslim” (Engineer 211). Zakaria says, “As for the concept of Jihad…it has been deliberately misused by certain Muslim groups to fulfil their motivated objectives” (Zakaria 124). “For the spread of these misconceptions…I am afraid Muslims are no less responsible” (ibid 126). Some verses “have been twisted by fanatical Muslims on the one hand and inimical non-Muslims on the other…” (ibid 115). “…Yet some Muslim rulers defied these injunctions (about protecting non-Muslims) and perpetrated atrocities the Hindus…” (ibid 130). “These days Islam has been much distorted by Muslim themselves; its noble values are openly violated by its own votaries…” (ibid 205). None of the authors analyse this phenomenon.

An analogous question is about the conditions in Muslim countries. About ‘honour’ killings and marriages of daughters with the Holy Quran, Engineer says, “Such killings and such marriages have, of course, no justification in the Islamic law is (sic), yet, widely practised in several Islamic countries. And even when these practices are totally contrary to Islamic teachings the ulama either keep silent or lend their support to them in the name of ‘purity of morals’ and sanctity of family life” (Engineer 16). “Some Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia” believe that “secularism is haram and that all secular nations are enemies of Islam” (ibid 43). “Maulana Maududi, the founder-chief of Jamat-e-Islami, said “…that secularism is haram and all those who participated in secular politics in India would be rebels against Islam and enemies of the Messenger of Allah” (ibid 43). “It is unfortunate that the Islamic world is yet to cope up with the notion of civil society. Most of the Muslim countries do not have full-fledged democracy and there is no respect for human rights in these countries. In fact most of the rulers condemn human rights as a western notion and some, even ‘un-Islamic’ ” (ibid 147). It is unfortunate that most of the Muslim countries do not adhere to…spirit of pluralism and diversity in the Quran and Sunna (ibid 154). None of our authors satisfactorily, explain why in spite of the revolutionary message of Islam, such a sorry situation persists in Muslim countries.

References

Ghosh, A (1999): This is Jehad, Houston, USA.
Shaikh, Anwar (1995): Islam: The Arab National Movement, Principality Publishers, Cardiff, Great Britain.
Warraq, Ibn (1995): Why I am not a Muslim, Prometheus Books, New York.




 





 


 


 





 

 


 


 


 




 




 

Musharraf Will Die #61 by harimau on March 20, 2004 7:36pm PT
Ref ahmadzai #36
U r Thaught under PSEDO nym TAMIL brahmin...


India News at IndiaCause.com

NRI Information and Services




Slaves, Servants & Rulers


By: Moorthy Muthuswamy
moorthy@charter.net
October 16, 2003

Last 50 years have seen various nations emerging from occupation by foreign civilizations. Their social dynamics during the occupation reflected one of people who were either treated as slaves or servants by the occupying powers. The occupying powers, no longer colonizers, are still the leaders when it comes to many indicators of progress and achievement, while their former colonies, to the most part, continue to struggle.

Where is India placed in this evolving dynamics? For the discussion here, I am going to categorize people broadly in terms of belonging to Slaves, Servants and Ruler category. As we will see, this is a useful characterization.

The Fijian Experience

The British rulers brought along a large number of Indian plantation workers (in the Servant category) to the Fiji islands. Coming decades saw Indians move into commerce and get their children better educated. When the British left the islands eventually, Indians, constitution about 45% of the population (almost all of the rest were native Fijians), were dominating the bureaucracy, education, and commerce.

When the British were ruling Fiji they constituted no more than 5% of the population. But Indian population, constituting more than 40%, allowed the country to be ruled by the natives. Also, there was hardly any Indian representation in the Fijian military; it was in complete control of the natives.

The natives, slow to catch up with the ways of modernity were resentful of the Indian domination. When Indians formed a government, displacing a native led government for the first time, the natives fought back with the native controlled Fijian army taking over the reigns of power.

What had happened?

The Indian population in Fiji never had any ruling experience – it was in the process of trying to come out of the Servant category. If Indian population had the ruling experience it would have made sure that the natives wouldn’t dominate the Fijian military. Also, it would have built bridges with the native community.

Ruler Class

When can one assume a country to have a significant population belonging to the Ruler category?

In my opinion, a country is acknowledged to have such a class if it can market a consumer product at the international level that requires complex engineering. The idea is that by being able to do so, it has class of people that can dictate terms or “rule” so to speak.

It can be seen that only with the recent advent of being able to compete in the area of information technology, India has generated a class of population in this Ruler category. But the bad news is, this level of competence is yet to permeate among most other institutions, including its political and governing class, and its military.

The seeds of generating this Ruler category was formed in the 1950s when quality engineering institutions of higher learning were formed. This shows the importance of education in converting a nation from Slave/Servant category into a Ruler one.

Outside of India, Mauritius and Caribbean, with very substantial Indian populations have yet to form pockets of Ruler class. This is probably because they lack quality institutions of higher learning.

Thugs, not Rulers

Pakistan is a nation that continues to take “initiatives”, especially when it comes to terrorism. Where does it fall?

Lacking in an educated and skilled population, it clearly doesn’t fall into the Ruler category we just discussed. It in fact acts like a thug vis-à-vis India and takes on the role of servant when it comes to Western countries or even Saudi Arabia -- its terrorism benefactor.

Indian Diaspora in America

The Indian Diaspora in America started off in the professional category, owing to immigration requirements and now even has a substantial entrepreneurial component. Hence to the most part it is in the Ruler category.

This expatriate Ruler population has played a major role in the recent developing of Ruler class among the Indian software industry – by acting as a bridge between America and India.

Many of the NRI have come to understand the extraordinary challenge India faces in developing its economy in one hand and fight off the draining and expensive terrorist war waged by Islamic groups. In the coming years, I see more of them actively involved in trying to help their extended families, by helping India win this war. To let the Islamic fundamentalist thugs win would reflect badly on all of us, not speak of the human tragedy such a win will lead to.

From Servants to Rulers?

The Fijian experience should be an eye-opener, especially for Hindus. You are only as strong or as weak as your community. The massive ethnic cleansing of Hindus from every Muslim majority area of South Asia confirms this observation. For a weakly institutionalized religion such as Hinduism, its strength lies in transforming its population into a predominantly Ruler category.

The current generation of aging Indian leadership of Vajpayee-Advani team represents leftovers from the Servant age. Nothing indicates from their background that they have progressed into a Ruler category on their own. This team’s mode of operation has been tentative and apologetic – a hallmark of belonging to the Servant class.

Indian approach to the war on terror reflects the fact that the Servant class leads it. A leadership belonging to the Ruler class would show initiative, focus, and be strategic in his/her approach (New Ideas for a New War). After all, by definition, the Ruler class knows what it takes to compete. Only a Servant ruling class would overlook the significant military and economic advantage India has over Pakistan and allows itself to be dictated and terrorized.

Among the new generation politicians, Narendra Modi speaks and acts like a leader in the Ruler category. A man of vision, and a competent one at that. Jayalaitha Jayaram is one other individual who falls in this category. So is Praveen Togadia of VHP.

For India to sustain a strong economic growth -- a necessary requirement to convert most of its population into the Ruler category -- it has to be able to put a stop to Islamic terrorism. But to achieve that India needs a real leader.

Moorthy Muthuswamy

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Musharraf Will Die ``I want to dance with joy when this whore is given a dental and rectal exam on world TV. I would dance in the streets. This is the whore who single handedly ``
Amen
And there is NOTHING wrong inIRAQI shua Kurd or Suni to see SADAM humiliated b/c we Cannot do it ourself to thses MUTARRIDS ,Nimroods!!!

I Belong
#10 by mitra on March 18, 2004 12:02pm PT
this is simply beautiful, like all of your writings are. i can relate to some parts so well, especially the first two paragraphs. the last stanza just leaves me lost for words. this is truly so touching.


#9 by mitra on March 18, 2004 12:02pm PT
this is simply beautiful, like all of your writings are. i can relate to some parts so well, especially the first two paragraphs. the last stanza just leaves me lost for words. this is truly so touching.

#10 by mitra on March 18, 2004 12:02pm PT
this is simply beautiful, like all of your writings are.

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I apprecite your TASTE mitr

But Where does YOUR 3rd Eye sees ``your WRINGS ARE `...can anyone irect me o OTHER `YoUR WRINGS ` that Mitr is TALKING ABOUT ..

For the unfortunate dprived Ignorants .....US

Yom Kippur 5764/Flight 1 by maryam on February 21, 2004 8:37pm PT
If I could love every contour
of your body a thousand times
if I could swim or drown with you
if I could kiss you and one more time
bring this madness to fruition



OHmYGOD..I LOWE IT!

that`s how love should be..unquenchable, insatiable, rooted in space like eternity...
and then i wake up.

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Lucky Some

WOW .....some gals have all the luck to get whatevr they want even when 15% USURP the hapiness desire love major 90% of worklds while 85 % ``others`` cant even ASK for the remainig remnent 10 % for `Goodies`that you DEMAND as if ONLY U EXISIT!

Unbinding India http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s1039575.htm

There are POSITIVE persons fortunately Hundreds of them in this ERa Alone who are clear thinkers like Dale Carnegie ,Many credibly qualified and PSYCHOLOGISTS students credentialled and recognised who have many Good Help Boks to manage our daily lives to being citizens members of cities ans cOUNTRIES.....

PROBLEM is who receives imbibes and pledge and AFFIRM with them

Chances are everything Farzana wil like majority indians WILL REJECT


empahasis MAJORITY

few of her freinds end up branded as

P sec ?/

PAKI ?

Commi?


Leftists????


Socialist scum?????

ANTI-Hindu ?


Traitors?


terrorists??


Bangladeshi????


Invariably the Muslim apreciative HINDUS are FEW and fortunately MORE Universal Educated than average HINDUS ...say ??%

Talk to Your Wife Hey RAAMM ji

Bara Dukh Jhela tere JATAN maine

Ravan ko na CHAHA

Magar SHAK kiy TU ne

De Laxman ka PEHRA

Band under Rekha TERE


Hey RAAMMJII

bara Dukh jhela tereJatan maine .......

Talk to Your Wife Hey RAAMM ji

Bara Dukh Jhela tere JATAN maine

Ravan ko na CHAHA

Magar SHAK kiy TU ne

De Laxman ka PEHRA

Band under Rekha TERE


Hey RAAMMJII

bara Dukh jhela tereJatan maine .......

Universities As Brand Names Yes in America and `english` west BRAND name is `good thing` to have ..just like Bush Clinton Kerry and almost ALL `BIG` Americans

I got brand Name too and I got everything because of `IT `


Withone BIG DIFFERENCE


I DID NOY P A Y for `IT`


in remnescing i would have to go back Decade I WOULD DO COSTBENEFIT ANALYSIS rather than CHOSE brand

(WITHOUT factoring RISK like Patriot ACT ,profiling,9/11,American shifting allegience globally etc.etc.etc.)

as faithfully as Ijaz gul ,and 1% Elites of `A level Brits ATCHESON type snob schools in PAKISTAN......