A delicate history of current indelicacies
http://203.197.197.71/presentation/left ... acies.aspxBy Farrukh Dhondy
Feb 28 : "I made love to remember,
She made love to forget…"
From The Regrets
of Bachchoo
A few years ago, on a trip to India, Vidia Naipaul asked me to postpone going to Mumbai from Delhi for a day so that I could accompany him to a meeting of the BJP cultural forum. I made some feeble joke about that being a rampant oxymoron and was, perhaps for that very reason, persuaded to stay.
I had to ask why he wanted me there.
"I want a neutral witness. I know what some of the Indian press is like and they’ll lie!"
I went to the meeting and took my place in the audience. Vidia said he hadn’t come to say anything but indeed to ask some questions about the cultural, economic and political policies which the party should be formulating as a blueprint for the progress of the country. A great deal of hot air rose into the unevenly plastered ceiling. There was no red-in-tooth-and-claw minority-baiting, no allusion to Hindutva, caste or any mention of the Bajrang Dal and associated organisations or indeed much discussion of "history". Vidia did ask one question about the revision of text books and why it was done and some writers and revisers of such texts gave some unmemorable innocuous reply about telling the truth. One academic historian said she had been villified and characterised as a bigot and a charlatan even though she could prove that her work was accurate but politically inconvenient. Vidia didn’t ask for details and was given none.
Then a member of the audience asked Vidia what he thought of the Babri Masjid episode and of the political controversy surrounding the march to it. Very many of the audience and the person chairing the meeting asked the questioner to shut up. Vidia said he’d say something. He said he didn’t have any opinion about the politics surrounding the demolition demand but added that he thought that if the Emperor Babur had demolished a temple and built a mosque on the site, it was an act of extreme hubris.
I don’t know if the main body of the BJP’s cultural wing understood the Greek tragedians’ concept of "hubris’" but that was all that may conceivably have been considered controversial in what Naipaul said that day.
Yet he has, through the lame meanderings of Indian "literary criticism" and lazy and illiterate and posturing journalism, acquired a reputation for being virulently anti-this-or-that and worse. When he emerged from the building, newspaper and TV reporters, who had been excluded from the gathering, were waiting in the compound. They thronged, crowded and shouted, as robust as a bear-baiting audience. "Did you support the murder of Muslims in Gujarat?" was the tenor of the questioning. Nadira Naipaul, who accompanied Vidia, became very angry, shouting back at them that she was a Muslim and that he had never ever said any such thing and had variously made very open statements condemning the killing of innocent people. The reporters asked why he didn’t attend a Congress party cultural occasion and Vidia replied that he would if he was invited.
The next days’ and weeks’ reports made it very plain that this controversy and the press attention wasn’t about who invites V.S. Naipaul to a tea and a discussion. It’s about a historical delicacy, a veil of silence and sycophancy covering our knowledge of and exposure to Indian history. Most newspapers concentrated on the fact that V.S. had accepted such an invitation. An English writer, writing in an Indian journal, gave the game away. He began by saying that "he had heard" that V.S. had attended a meeting at which he endorsed the programme of the Sangh Parivar. I know from asking that Vidia wouldn’t know a Sangh Parivar from a Sans Culotte.
The writer went on to say that poor ignorant V.S. Naipaul may write crisp and stylish prose, but didn’t know much about Indian history. The quotations and expose that followed seemed to say that the Muslim invasions of India had been of great benefit to the natives, even in their time, as these invasions had added to the gaiety of the nation by bringing to it forms of long-shirted dress and kebabs. The writer was serious.
Events this week in Argentina and Europe make one wonder about the great truths of history because one Bishop Richard Wiilliamson, an English convert to Catholicism has been widely pilloried in the press for "Holocaust denial". Williamson was thrown out last week of the radical order of Catholicism to which he belonged in Argentina and has come back to Britain. This order of St. Pius X of which he is a consecrated Bishop, was itself expelled from the Catholic Church by the last Pope John Paul II for denying a papal ordinance called Nostra Aetate, which says that the Christian accusation against Jews of "deicide" is lifted and must no longer be held as Christian belief.
Williamson was excommunicated from the Roman church when the St. Pius X sect appointed him a bishop. Last month, the present German Pope lifted the excommunication despite the fact that Bishop Williamson has been exposed since as a "Holocaust denier" who has publicly stated that his historical understanding indicates that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis — this is a Jewish lie and an exaggeration and that it was nearer a figure of 300,000 who were murdered in the camps.
When dealing with numbers above two digits, I don’t suppose the quantum of cruelty, barbarism or genocide is in question, but today Austria and Germany have laws prohibiting the public denial of the Holocaust and the six million-figure. Austria jails those, such as British "historian" David Irving, who persist in airing this denial.
Williamson landed this week in his native Britain and was taken under the wing of self-confessed anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers such as Michele Renouf a former beauty queen and now a society hostess who was appointed to an "international fact-finding committee" by the 2006 Iranian Holocaust Denial conference.
It is very rare in our modern democracies to have a historical denial characterised as a crime against the State. Heresy as a punishable crime is, for Christian and secular states, a matter of the past. There do exist regimes and countries in which one can’t voice particular religious or political beliefs without being locked up or beheaded. In India it is not the Holocaust deniers who are the victims of smart opinion.
Now if you came to Austria and said that the Nazis’ purpose in the Holocaust was to bring new cuisine to the concentration camps and introduce striped pyjamas to the Jews, you would be locked up and forced to reconsider. In India, of course, genocide-deniers are safe.
Just because Muhammad Habib was the father of Irfan Habib doesn't make him automatically a founder of the Thaparite School of Indian history.
because you yourself admit that "Indian shipping had fallen behind" but then you go on to ask why Indian powers couldn't dominate the sea-lanes?
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