'71 Part One. A Mindset of Mutual Exclusivity

In Bangladesh, events of 1971 have cast a very long shadow. A shadow that has lodged itself in the subsequent history of the nation. And even harangues the present.

Memories and rhetoric around '71 configures party politics. They shape foreign relations and populate imagination of artists, novelists and activists.

Two years ago, I spent a good deal of time in London. The University at which I did my MA, didn't have many Bengalis. Not being particularly ethnocentric, I didn't necessarily miss being around my Bong buddies. But eventually, I was broken into the community at Bricklane.

Many of my British Sylhetti friends were already suspicious of me because of they considered me Americanized. The idea of America didn't seem very popular among many British Bengalis, try as I might to explain my nationalist loyalties didn't necessarily lie there.

One of my friends asked me quite wittily, "So since you want to call French Fries Freedom Fries, why not call Pizzas Circles of Justice?"

At any rate, these Bengalis in London I was hanging out with were far from the religious types. Most of them were involved with various underground art and music worlds. And religion seemed as big an anathema to them as America.

At one point that evening, one of them asked me how I felt about 1971. It was a strange question. The answer seemed obvious to me.

So I asked him more specifically what he meant. My new friend went to ask if I picked the Bengali side or the Muslim side in that fight. Generally impatient to such crude, sophomoric taking of sides, I told him, "neither."



My friend didn't seem too happy with the answer. I tried explaining to him how at no point, did the freedom movement assume an anti-Islamic color. If anything, journalists like Lawrence Lifschultz who became famous for their valorous reportage of events of '71, went to great lengths to point out the piety of Bengali Muslims before, during and after '71.

Of course champagne socialists and fashionable Marxists were outspoken. But they were hardly representative of the larger fabric of Bengali Muslim society.

Bengali or Muslim? I can't help but sense what really lurked behind it was another question, "Awami League or BNP?"

Sure enough, it came.

"So are you Pro-Indian or Pro-Pakistani. "Neither," I told him. "I am pro-nothing. I like both India and Pakistan. Although I am not sure what you mean by 'Pro-India' and 'Pro-Pakistan.'

(To be continued)

1971 Series

Leading upto 21 Feb, Addafication will feature a series of posts on '71, Pakistan, and the creation of Bangladesh. As well as the Mujib and Military Periods. Stay tuned.

A great interview with Shabana Azmi

Ever heard of the Indian New Wave?

The Indian New Wave or "Parallel Cinema" was largely a movement to produce high-quality Indian films, rich in plot and texture, to counter the incessant saccharine feel-good and formulaic Bollywood productions.

A sitar of this movement was the distinguished Shabana Azmi. I remember Ms. Azmi from Masoom, a movie that left quite an impression on me as a child. The songs were great, as were the child characters. And D.K. Malhotra played by Nasiruddun Shah was memorable.

Recently interviewed by BBC's Mike Willaims, Azmi shoots from the hip. Very conscious of her femininity, she speaks of growing up in a famous family, marrying a famous Urdu poet, her multiple identities - resisting any neat categorization. Always displaying a characterstic confidence, she breaks down tough questions re: women's rights, marginal voices, her involvement with politics, and Islam.

Click here for the interview.

Of Ishqs and Salaams (okay maybe not)

Okay. So I really don't watch Bollywood. Unless they are the esoteric types. Like Maqbool or Omkara. But sometimes, just sometimes, I give in to the cheese. The masala, the drama and the funda. As I did last weekend when I went with a herd of brownness to watch Nikhil Advani's Salaam-e-Ishq.

Granted, my brain stopped working for about two-hundred minutes, have to admit I found it worth my time. Not for the complexity of characters or density of plot, but for various feel-good and amusing moments.

Salaam-e-Ishq boasts a star-studded cast. A cast to end all casts. Six couples. 6 failing relationships. Twelve beautiful people. One big fat Indian wedding.

First, there was the journalistic couple of John Abraham (who needs to keep his shirt on, and not run all the time like David Hasselhoff, remember him?) and Vidya Balan (of Parineeta fame) who have a picture-perfect marriage. Until Vidya injures herself in a train-crash and suffers from partial amnesia. Leaving a gaping, John-sized hole in her memory. Try as she might, she can't remember John.

Our hot yet sentimental hero cries incessantly in anguish, but he is convinced that Vidya and he can create memories anew. Of course, forgetful Vidya is won over by the end. Too many emotional crescendos in this relationship. Gratituously. Too many times, I felt, the combination of John's (scruffy) baby face in anguish, Vidya's captivating performance, and the score (otherwise, fabulous) were all trying too hard to force tears from me.

Then there was the Anil Kapoor-Juhi Chawla duo. Reminded me too much of the blinging couples in the Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara tri-state area, (esp. ones in which there is an element of ever-so-slight debauchery). This is a story of attractive people leading very boring lives. Anil goes to work, watches the clock of his life tick away and is in perpetual mid-life crisis mode.

Juhi is an amazing mother, wife and sister. But Anil wants more. He wants not completeness, but excitement and adventure. Which arrive in the form of Anjana, a 20-something dance instructor who throws herself at Anil repeatedly until he decides to find his escape in her.

Of course, Anil is soon caught Anjana-handed. Juhi tries to leave Anil. Anil chases her and finds her on a plane. After a tussle with flight-attendants (surprising they didn't shoot goatied Anil down in a post-9/11 world) Juhi forgives Anil and takes him back!

Man, Juhi, adultery is haraam! Why must we all get swept away by the fast normalizing, sweeping sexual individualism that is our society?

The most glamorous relationship by far was Salman Khan (who also needs to keep his shirt on)and Priyanka Chopra's. Priyanka Chopra is a small-town girl who starts as a dancer in shady hotels and wants to be the next Bollywood diva. She is manipulative, machiavellian, ambitious, and will do everything possible to get there.

Until she meets an equally manipulative, machiavellian, and ambitious Salman Khan, who tracks her down, blackmails her (in the process woos her, warning: this only works in bollywood) and change her mind about her acting career. My heart broke to see lovely Priyanka on a bended knee asking muscle-man (head?) Salman's hand in marriage. Salman eventually agrees.

Also have to say Vikram Phadnis did a mighty job of dressing up this couple (except for Salman's bizarre blazers, too Ahmadinejad for me).

The fourth and last substantial relationship was between Govinda and Shanon Something (the fact that I don't remember her last name has nothing to do with her being white). Shanon Something has come all the way to India to find her Indian boyfriend who left her for a Hindustani wife.

Shanon is naive. She underestimates the hangover of South Asian traditions. Govinda encourages her naivete. Fight for what's yours, Govinda says. He himself, is an affable, chubby, love-lorn cabby, who without understanding a word of English, manages to communicate much with Shanon. He drives her across India to search for the Indian boyfriend. Shanon finally meets him, gets spurned once again, as the guy declared, "I want an NDN woman, not a blond bimbo!" Poor Shanon runts to Govinda's pudgy arms.

The 5th and 6th couples are Ayesha Takia-Akshay Khanna and Sohail-Isha. Both provide much comic relief. Akshay gets cold feet before marrying his girlfriend Ayesha. Calls off the marriage, stresses for a while, until he comes to his senses (like all good guys eventually do), and gets Ayesha back. Methinks lovely Ayesha Takia needs to stop playing the victimized girl whom her guy takes for granted. Breaks my heart.

Finally, Sohail and Isha are a North Indian (Punjabi?) couple. Sohail is a ravenous man who fails to consumate his marriage with Isha as one awkward interruption after another conspires and keeps Swaag Raat at bay. Not much else here. The first 4 carry the movie.

Last but not the least, the theme song is fun. Check it out.

A Soapbox for All: British Muslims and the Fight for Young Muslims' Minds (Part I: Muslims in a Secular World)

As spotlight intensifies on Barak Obama and his possible Muslim past/Madrassa education, Bush announces a "surge" in Iraq, 20, 000 strong, Hamas celebrates a year in government, and the British Education Ministry declares a plan to school children in "British Citizenship." Meanwhile the international posterwoman for CNN, Christiane Amanpour, comes up with a riveting documentary on Islam in Britain, curiously entiteld, "The War Within."

Arguably the world's most famous female journalist, inveterately chic, Amanpour is interested in uncovering not just the radicalization among many of Britain's Muslims, but also the wedge between "Extremist" and "Moderate" Muslims (why the flipside of "Extremist" is not "Mainstream" but "Moderate" I'll never understand).






Amanpour reports feeling after 7/7, "shocked beyond words that young British Muslims, born and bred here (London), would go to that extreme."

Among reasons for extremism that Amanpour unearths, are the Iraq war, Anglo-American foreign policy, and American foreign forays which are increasingly seen by British Muslim youth as wars against Muslims and Islam. She also touches upon racism and/or Islamophobia, but not nearly as thoroughly as I would have liked. This is a topic for a lengthier discussion that Jajabor will revisit (stay tuned for Islam in a Secular World part II) . For now, one has to merely remind herself of the BBC TV documentary "The Secret Policeman" aired in October 2003 and the odious racist bile spewed by unsuspecting cops videotaped by an undercover journalist.

Of course, there is also the recent furor over lovely Shilpa Shetty being bullied on screen on Britain's favorite TV reality show "Big Brother." Jade Goody tells recommends to an already beleagured Shilpa, "you need a day in the slums...[where] people look up to you." Another participant points out, "she [Shilpa] can't even speak English properly" and wonders if "people in India eat with their hands." Empire hasn't struck back quite yet has it.

Another shortcoming of Amanpour's documentary is the absence of any discussion of the British Left. Afterall, a variety of British Muslim discouses borrow from and interact with Leftists discourses on international affairs, foreign policy, as well as public affairs such as social welfare. Leading public figures such as George Galloway and Tariq Ali are hero-worshipped by both communities (they overlap too!).

Although Amanpour interviews one Muslim woman of small comedy-club fame, who made a clear case for her distance from her extremist brethren, British Muslim women's voices were surprisngly lost in the documentary. Almost as if Amapour was operating within the discursive paradigm and boundaries as laid out by the extremist mullahs she derides.

While admittedly, a confident modern British Muslim woman who could have furthered the case for more likable British Islams, are unlikely to roam the streets of Bricklane, Southhall or Edgeware road, one just has to walk into the Queen Mary cafetaria or the charmingly decadent SOAS Bar to get a representative Muslim woman voice.

Despite all despites, Amanpour does a decent job. Kudos where kudos are due. She punctuates a wonderfully crafted narrative on the radicalization of British Muslim youth with extended dialog with the "Moderates." She interviews Hanif Qadir who runs a large youth center in London, the said female comedian, an musician who is interested crossing cultures, and a good imam who declares, "If you are evil, you can justify it with anything – Bible, Qur'an or Shakespeare."

Finally, the documentary is laudable for capturing certain priceless moments. There are great scenes of angry Muslim youth demonstrating outside a Catholic Church and locked in diatribe with irate Christian youth, in the wake of the Pope's now-infamous remarks.

Towards the end, there is another entertaining debate between a young "Moderate" Muslim man having a go at the more "Extremist"Uncles. All well and good, but in this scene and in a few others, I questioned the air of false credence to a notion that civilizational debates may at the end be timelessly generational.

A young "Moderate" Muslim man declares, to much applause from a British audience, "This [extemist Islam], ladies and gentlemen, is not an ideology, but a mental illness."

Present's Trespass on the Past

History or rather the space of history writing often becomes the battle-ground for competing visions of a nation. In the case of Indian history, many historians, many of whom work out of Delhi or American or British universities often find themselves in an inevitable dialog with present political concerns.





It is often the case that the most ancient of histories are ones with the greatest relevance to present political concerns. This can happen when nationalists start looking back to define a nation and explain roots of a people. For example, the questions of whether the Aryans (by extension, Hindus) were indigenous to India becomes important for Hindutva folks because much of their nationalist ideology rest on the assumption that Hinduism in native to South Asian soil while Islam is foreign. Some of this political rhetoric that drove people to destroy the Babri Masjid and dismember entire Indian Muslim populations, rests on the flimsiest archaeological and numismatic evidence. The other area of controversy in Indian history writing has to do with the period of Muslim rule in the subcontinent.


Debates rage over how benevolent and tolerant Muslim rulers were to the subcontinental population. On the one hand you have modern-day secularists propelled by the Nehruvian dream who highlight the tolerance of Emperor Akbar, his love for his Rajput wife, his concoction of a new religion despite protests from Muslim orthodoxy, the fusion of the "Indic" and the "Islamicate" in Indian cuisine, music and architecture and so on. On the other hand, you have badla-minded folks, with an axe to grind to undo what they see as historical wrongs, ranging from destruction of Hindu temples to Aurangzeb's persecution of certain prominent Hindus and Sikhs. Methinks Hollywood should make a movie on the Mughal Empire in all its splendor, diversity and tensions.




History-writing has also attracted controversy in Pakistan. After General Zia came to power, at a time when Islamism of a certain conservative kind was flourishing all over from Egypt to Iran to Afghanistan, new syllabi were devised to provide historical depth to Pakistan's Islamic nationalism. In Pakistani school textbooks, the 1965 war against India became absorbed into chapters on Islamic history and written alongside great battles in early Islam. Pakistani school children were goaded to understand their heritage as not one that was Indic, but one that was continuous with 10-11th century CE Turks in South Asia. Ridiculous but unsurprising then is President Pervez Musharraf's claim in his recently published, highly self-congratulatory autobiography, that both the Urdu language as well as Pakistani cuisine have evolved out of Turkish counterparts. Completely ignoring their more substantial similarties with languages and cuisines South Asian.

Historigraphy in Bangladesh has also drawn attention of late among secular circles, and rightly so. A certain politicization seems to be creeping in. After a conversation with Dr. Muntassir Mamoon, a popular Bangladeshi intellectual, greatly harangued by student wings of the ruling coalition - I confirmed that references to the word "Rajakar" are being dropped from secondary school history books ["Rajakar" ("Razakar" in Persian) was a term used for loyalists who were against the creation of the Bangladeshi state]. Moreoever, the chapter that describes atrocities committed during '71 on the Dhaka University campus, have dropped mention of Jagannath Hall. Curiously, Jagannath Hall was the site of the largest massacre of DU students, a largely Hindu dormitory. Furthermore, the new set of authors have dropped Sheikh Mujib's adornment of "Bongobondhu." And if one compares the older school history texts before and after the ruling Jama'at-BNP cartel - mention of Mujib has dropped noticeably.

Armies and Indoctrination

Armies have always fascinated me. The fascination began with G. I. Joe action figures and might culminate by figuring centrally in a doctoral dissertation. I remember a conversation in college pre-Abu Ghraib with a politically conservative friend who insisted that the US Army pumped out jawans who were critical and ethical and unlikely to abuse their power in post-conflict situations. Abu Ghraib surprised him greatly. But having been around military families in South Asia and interacted with various personnel, egregious conduct from soldiers, even in peacekeeping situations never surprise me. Afterall, isn't the whole idea of an army is to train obsequious combatants, who will suspend all ethic and critical judgment to obey orders? How can such a rigorous process of indoctrination in one nationalism or the other, or some other form of -ism, not produce many strangeos? They would be more than "exceptional" I would think. How can such an intense process of bodily and emotional disciplining not change one chemically, and often unpredictably?

1860s onwards, the British in India stopped recruiting from the South and the East (Madras and Bengal Presidencies) after a Mutiny and opted instead for jawans from the North-West. Their raison d'etre was two-fold: firstly, the jawans from the North-West (modern-day Punjab, Kashmir, NWFP, Rajasthan, etc) were more "martial" and secondly, more obedient. The ideological indoctrination in armies was so powerful that a wonderfully symbiotic alliance formed between Punjab and the colonial state. Consequently, the Independence movement against the British took a while to get off the ground in the Punjab (See Rajit Mazumdar on this). Another historian has also attempted to explain the war machine that was the Germany Army in the 20th century by drawing on colonial wars that the German Army fought in Africa in the 19th Century. She has argued that motivated by racism against Africans, the German Army adopted a tendency of "absolute destruction" which became internalized, the worst excesses of which came to pass in the World Wars.

What we see today seems no different. I was reading somewhere that over 200 UN “peacekeepers” have been sent back to their home countries or otherwise disciplined for sexual and other misbehavior. One wonders how a group of (usually) under-privileged teenagers conditioned and disciplined through one ideology or the other, dangerously real-politik, and in line with one nation’s and imagined community's exclusive gain over others’ – can ever be counted upon to act as a moral or social police.

UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Liberia, Congo, Sudan, and Somalia have been notorious. The Bangladeshi state, as much as it trumpets it prolific record in peacekeeping missions, have a lot to be mortified about. Bangladeshi peacekeepers have been notorious in southern Sudan. About 15 Bangladeshi peacekeepers have been disciplined for sexual offenses against Sudanese girls, many of them minors.

Last year, I ran into to a Indian Uncle who happened to be a retired Army officer, during a layover at the Kuwait Airport. He said he was trying his hand in journalism and wanted to write a piece he wanted to call "Ethics of Bombing." It appeared as if he had thought much about the needfulness of bombing enemy states into oblivion. Slightly intimidated by his hawkishness, I resisted the temptation to suggest how the said piece might be better entitled "Bombing of Ethics."