Tuesday, August 01, 2017
Sunday, July 23, 2017
Video: This teacher in Kerala has to walk through a river to reach school everyday
Meet Abdul Mallik, a teacher who commutes to his government job at a
school by wading across a neck-deep river swirling with debris.
https://video.scroll.in/844517/video-this-teacher-in-kerala-has-to-walk-through-a-river-to-reach-school-everyday …
https://video.scroll.in/844517/video-this-teacher-in-kerala-has-to-walk-through-a-river-to-reach-school-everyday …
Saturday, July 01, 2017
Saturday, June 17, 2017
How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate
Tony Joseph
June 16, 2017 23:49 IST
Here’s what it says in one place: “The dates we report have significant implications for Indian history in the sense that they document a period of demographic and cultural change in which mixture between highly differentiated populations became pervasive before it eventually became uncommon. The period of around 1,900–4,200 years before present was a time of profound change in India, characterized by the de-urbanization of the Indus civilization, increasing population density in the central and downstream portions of the Gangetic system, shifts in burial practices, and the likely first appearance of Indo-European languages and Vedic religion in the subcontinent.”
Source: thehindu
New DNA
evidence is solving the most fought-over question in Indian history. And you
will be surprised at how sure-footed the answer is, writes Tony Joseph
The thorniest, most fought-over
question in Indian history is slowly but surely getting answered: did
Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into
India sometime around 2,000 BC – 1,500 BC when the Indus Valley civilisation
came to an end, bringing with them Sanskrit and a distinctive set of cultural
practices? Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making
scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.
This may come as a surprise to many
— and a shock to some — because the dominant narrative in recent years has been
that genetics research had thoroughly disproved the Aryan migration theory.
This interpretation was always a bit of a stretch as anyone who read the
nuanced scientific papers in the original knew. But now it has broken apart
altogether under a flood of new data on Y-chromosomes (or chromosomes that are
transmitted through the male parental line, from father to son).
Lines of descent
Until recently, only data on mtDNA
(or matrilineal DNA, transmitted only from mother to daughter) were available
and that seemed to suggest there was little external infusion into the Indian
gene pool over the last 12,500 years or so. New Y-DNA data has turned that
conclusion upside down, with strong evidence of external infusion of genes into
the Indian male lineage during the period in question.
The reason for the difference in
mtDNA and Y-DNA data is obvious in hindsight: there was strong sex bias in
Bronze Age migrations. In other words, those who migrated were predominantly
male and, therefore, those gene flows do not really show up in the mtDNA data. On
the other hand, they do show up in the Y-DNA data: specifically, about 17.5% of
Indian male lineage has been found to belong to haplogroup R1a (haplogroups
identify a single line of descent), which is today spread across Central Asia,
Europe and South Asia. Pontic-Caspian Steppe is seen as the region from where
R1a spread both west and east, splitting into different sub-branches along the
way.
The paper that put all of the
recent discoveries together into a tight and coherent history of migrations
into India was published just three months ago in a peer-reviewed journal
called ‘BMC Evolutionary Biology’. In that paper, titled “A Genetic Chronology
for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased Dispersals”, 16
scientists led by Prof. Martin P. Richards of the University of Huddersfield,
U.K., concluded: “Genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was
strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and
patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early
Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European
expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried
closely related Y-chromosome lineages… across a vast swathe of Eurasia between
5,000 and 3,500 years ago”.
In an email exchange, Prof.
Richards said the prevalence of R1a in India was “very powerful evidence for a
substantial Bronze Age migration from central Asia that most likely brought
Indo-European speakers to India.” The robust conclusions of Professor Richards
and his team rest on their own substantive research as well as a vast trove of
new data and findings that have become available in recent years, through the
work of genetic scientists around the world.
Peter Underhill, scientist at the
Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is one of
those at the centre of the action. Three years ago, a team of 32 scientists he
led published a massive study mapping the distribution and linkages of R1a. It
used a panel of 16,244 male subjects from 126 populations across Eurasia. Dr.
Underhill’s research found that R1a had two sub-haplogroups, one found
primarily in Europe and the other confined to Central and South Asia.
Ninety-six per cent of the R1a samples in Europe belonged to sub-haplogroup
Z282, while 98.4% of the Central and South Asian R1a lineages belonged to
sub-haplogroup Z93. The two groups diverged from each other only about 5,800 years
ago. Dr. Underhill’s research showed that within the Z93 that is predominant in
India, there is a further splintering into multiple branches. The paper found
this “star-like branching” indicative of rapid growth and dispersal. So if you
want to know the approximate period when Indo-European language speakers came
and rapidly spread across India, you need to discover the date when Z93
splintered into its own various subgroups or lineages. We will come back to
this later.
So in a nutshell: R1a is distributed
all over Europe, Central Asia and South Asia; its sub-group Z282 is distributed
only in Europe while another subgroup Z93 is distributed only in parts of
Central Asia and South Asia; and three major subgroups of Z93 are distributed
only in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Himalayas. This clear picture of
the distribution of R1a has finally put paid to an earlier hypothesis that this
haplogroup perhaps originated in India and then spread outwards. This
hypothesis was based on the erroneous assumption that R1a lineages in India had
huge diversity compared to other regions, which could be indicative of its
origin here. As Prof. Richards puts it, “the idea that R1a is very diverse in
India, which was largely based on fuzzy microsatellite data, has been laid to
rest” thanks to the arrival of large numbers of genomic Y-chromosome data.
Gene-dating the migration
Now that we know that there WAS
indeed a significant inflow of genes from Central Asia into India in the Bronze
Age, can we get a better fix on the timing, especially the splintering of Z93
into its own sub-lineages? Yes, we can; the research paper that answers this
question was published just last year, in April 2016, titled: “Punctuated
bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome
sequences.” This paper, which looked at major expansions of Y-DNA haplogroups
within five continental populations, was lead-authored by David Poznik of the
Stanford University, with Dr. Underhill as one of the 42 co-authors. The study
found “the most striking expansions within Z93 occurring approximately 4,000 to
4,500 years ago”. This is remarkable, because roughly 4,000 years ago is when
the Indus Valley civilization began falling apart. (There is no evidence so
far, archaeologically or otherwise, to suggest that one caused the other; it is
quite possible that the two events happened to coincide.)
The avalanche of new data has been
so overwhelming that many scientists who were either sceptical or neutral about
significant Bronze Age migrations into India have changed their opinions. Dr.
Underhill himself is one of them. In a 2010 paper, for example, he had written
that there was evidence “against substantial patrilineal gene flow from East
Europe to Asia, including to India” in the last five or six millennia. Today,
Dr. Underhill says there is no comparison between the kind of data available in
2010 and now. “Then, it was like looking into a darkened room from the outside
through a keyhole with a little torch in hand; you could see some corners but
not all, and not the whole picture. With whole genome sequencing, we can now
see nearly the entire room, in clearer light.”
Dr. Underhill is not the only one
whose older work has been used to argue against Bronze Age migrations by
Indo-European language speakers into India. David Reich, geneticist and
professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, is
another one, even though he was very cautious in his older papers. The best
example is a study lead-authored by Reich in 2009, titled “Reconstructing
Indian Population History” and published in Nature. This study used
the theoretical construct of “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and “Ancestral
South Indians” (ASI) to discover the genetic substructure of the Indian
population. The study proved that ANI are “genetically close to Middle
Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans”, while the ASI were unique to India.
The study also proved that most groups in India today can be approximated as a
mixture of these two populations, with the ANI ancestry higher in traditionally
upper caste and Indo-European speakers. By itself, the study didn’t disprove
the arrival of Indo-European language speakers; if anything, it suggested the
opposite, by pointing to the genetic linkage of ANI to Central Asians.
However, this theoretical structure
was stretched beyond reason and was used to argue that these two groups came to
India tens of thousands of years ago, long before the migration of
Indo-European language speakers that is supposed to have happened only about
4,000 to 3,500 years ago. In fact, the study had included a strong caveat that
suggested the opposite: “We caution that ‘models’ in population genetics should
be treated with caution. While they provide an important framework for testing
historical hypothesis, they are oversimplifications. For example, the true
ancestral populations were probably not homogenous as we assume in our model
but instead were likely to have been formed by clusters of related groups that
mixed at different times.” In other words, ANI is likely to have resulted from
multiple migrations, possibly including the migration of Indo-European language
speakers.
The spin and the facts
But how was this research covered
in the media? “Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study,” screamed a newspaper
headline on September 25, 2009. The article quoted Lalji Singh, a co-author of
the study and a former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular
Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, as saying: “This paper rewrites history… there is no
north-south divide”. The report also carried statements such as: “The initial
settlement took place 65,000 years ago in the Andamans and in ancient south
India around the same time, which led to population growth in this part. At a
later stage, 40,000 years ago, the ancient north Indians emerged which in turn
led to rise in numbers there. But at some point in time, the ancient north and
the ancient south mixed, giving birth to a different set of population. And
that is the population which exists now and there is a genetic relationship
between the population within India.” The study, however, makes no such
statements whatsoever — in fact, even the figures 65,000 and 40,000 do not
figure it in it!
This stark contrast between what
the study says and what the media reports said did not go unnoticed. In his
column for Discover magazine, geneticist Razib Khan said this about
the media coverage of the study: “But in the quotes in the media the other
authors (other than Reich that is - ed) seem to be leading you to totally different
conclusions from this. Instead of leaning toward ANI being proto-Indo-European,
they deny that it is.”
Let’s leave that there, and ask
what Reich says now, when so much new data have become available? In an
interview with Edge in February last year, while talking about the thesis that
Indo-European languages originated in the Steppes and then spread to both
Europe and South Asia, he said: “The genetics is tending to support the Steppe
hypothesis because in the last year, we have identified a very strong pattern
that this ancient North Eurasian ancestry that you see in Europe today, we now
know when it arrived in Europe. It arrived 4500 years ago from the East from
the Steppe...” About India, he said: “In India, you can see, for example, that
there is this profound population mixture event that happens between 2000 to
4000 years ago. It corresponds to the time of the composition of the Rigveda,
the oldest Hindu religious text, one of the oldest pieces of literature in the
world, which describes a mixed society...” In essence according to Reich, in
broadly the same time frame, we see Indo-European language speakers spreading
out both to Europe and to South Asia, causing major population upheavals.
The dating of the “profound
population mixture event” that Reich refers to was arrived at in a paper that
was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2013, and
was lead authored by Priya Moorjani of the Harvard Medical School, and
co-authored, among others, by Reich and Lalji Singh. This paper too has been
pushed into serving the case against migrations of Indo-European language
speakers into India, but the paper itself says no such thing, once again!
Here’s what it says in one place: “The dates we report have significant implications for Indian history in the sense that they document a period of demographic and cultural change in which mixture between highly differentiated populations became pervasive before it eventually became uncommon. The period of around 1,900–4,200 years before present was a time of profound change in India, characterized by the de-urbanization of the Indus civilization, increasing population density in the central and downstream portions of the Gangetic system, shifts in burial practices, and the likely first appearance of Indo-European languages and Vedic religion in the subcontinent.”
The study didn’t “prove” the
migration of Indo-European language speakers since its focus was different:
finding the dates for the population mixture. But it is clear that the authors
think its findings fit in well with the traditional reading of the dates for
this migration. In fact, the paper goes on to correlate the ending of
population mixing with the shifting attitudes towards mixing of the races in
ancient texts. It says: “The shift from widespread mixture to strict endogamy
that we document is mirrored in ancient Indian texts.”
So irrespective of the use to which
Priya Moorjani et al’s 2013 study is put, what is clear is that the authors
themselves admit their study is fully compatible with, and perhaps even
strongly suggests, Bronze Age migration of Indo-European language speakers. In
an email to this writer, Moorjani said as much. In answer to a question about
the conclusions of the recent paper of Prof. Richards et al that there were strong,
male-driven genetic inflows from Central Asia about 4,000 years ago, she said
she found their results “to be broadly consistent with our model”. She also
said the authors of the new study had access to ancient West Eurasian samples
“that were not available when we published in 2013”, and that these samples had
provided them additional information about the sources of ANI ancestry in South
Asia.
One by one, therefore, every single
one of the genetic arguments that were earlier put forward to make the case
against Bronze Age migrations of Indo-European language speakers have been
disproved. To recap:
1. The first argument was that
there were no major gene flows from outside to India in the last 12,500 years
or so because mtDNA data showed no signs of it. This argument was found faulty
when it was shown that Y-DNA did indeed show major gene flows from outside into
India within the last 4000 to 4,500 years or so, especially R1a which now forms
17.5% of the Indian male lineage. The reason why mtDNA data behaved differently
was that Bronze Age migrations were severely sex-biased.
2. The second argument put forward
was that R1a lineages exhibited much greater diversity in India than elsewhere
and, therefore, it must have originated in India and spread outward. This has
been proved false because a mammoth, global study of R1a haplogroup published
last year showed that R1a lineages in India mostly belong to just three
subclades of the R1a-Z93 and they are only about 4,000 to 4,500 years old.
3. The third argument was that
there were two ancient groups in India, ANI and ASI, both of which settled here
tens of thousands of years earlier, much before the supposed migration of
Indo-European languages speakers to India. This argument was false to begin
with because ANI — as the original paper that put forward this theoretical
construct itself had warned — is a mixture of multiple migrations, including
probably the migration of Indo-European language speakers.
Connecting the dots
Two additional things should be
kept in mind while looking at all this evidence. The first is how multiple
studies in different disciplines have arrived at one specific period as an
important marker in the history of India: around 2000 B.C. According to the
Priya Moorjani et al study, this is when population mixing began on a large
scale, leaving few population groups anywhere in the subcontinent untouched.
The Onge in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are the only ones we know to have
been completely unaffected by what must have been a tumultuous period. And
according to the David Poznik et al study of 2016 on the Y-chromosome, 2000
B.C. is around the time when the dominant R1a subclade in India, Z93, began
splintering in a “most striking” manner, suggesting “rapid growth and
expansion”. Lastly, from long-established archaeological studies, we also know
that 2000 BC was around the time when the Indus Valley civilization began to
decline. For anyone looking at all of these data objectively, it is difficult
to avoid the feeling that the missing pieces of India’s historical puzzle are
finally falling into place.
The second is that many studies
mentioned in this piece are global in scale, both in terms of the questions
they address and in terms of the sampling and research methodology. For
example, the Poznik study that arrived at 4,000-4,500 years ago as the dating
for the splintering of the R1a Z93 lineage, looked at major Y-DNA expansions
not just in India, but in four other continental populations. In the Americas,
the study proved the expansion of haplogrop Q1a-M3 around 15,000 years ago,
which fits in with the generally accepted time for the initial colonisation of
the continent. So the pieces that are falling in place are not merely in India,
but all across the globe. The more the global migration picture gets filled in,
the more difficult it will be to overturn the consensus that is forming on how
the world got populated.
Nobody explains what is happening
now better than Reich: “What’s happened very rapidly, dramatically, and
powerfully in the last few years has been the explosion of genome-wide studies
of human history based on modern and ancient DNA, and that’s been enabled by
the technology of genomics and the technology of ancient DNA. Basically, it’s a
gold rush right now; it’s a new technology and that technology is being applied
to everything we can apply it to, and there are many low-hanging fruits, many
gold nuggets strewn on the ground that are being picked up very rapidly.”
So far, we have only looked at the
migrations of Indo-European language speakers because that has been the most
debated and argued about historical event. But one must not lose the bigger
picture: R1a lineages form only about 17.5 % of Indian male lineage, and an
even smaller percentage of the female lineage. The vast majority of Indians owe
their ancestry mostly to people from other migrations, starting with the
original Out of Africa migrations of around 55,000 to 65,000 years ago, or the
farming-related migrations from West Asia that probably occurred in multiple
waves after 10,000 B.C., or the migrations of Austro-Asiatic speakers such as
the Munda from East Asia the dating of which is yet to determined, and the
migrations of Tibeto-Burman speakers such as the Garo again from east Asia, the
dating of which is also yet to be determined.
What is abundantly clear is that we
are a multi-source civilization, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural
impulses, its tradition and practices from a variety of lineages and migration
histories. The Out of Africa immigrants, the pioneering, fearless explorers who
discovered this land originally and settled in it and whose lineages still form
the bedrock of our population; those who arrived later with a package of
farming techniques and built the Indus Valley civilization whose cultural ideas
and practices perhaps enrich much of our traditions today; those who arrived
from East Asia, probably bringing with them the practice of rice cultivation
and all that goes with it; those who came later with a language called Sanskrit
and its associated beliefs and practices and reshaped our society in
fundamental ways; and those who came even later for trade or for conquest and
chose to stay, all have mingled and contributed to this civilization we call
Indian. We are all migrants.
Tony
Joseph is a writer and former editor of BusinessWorld. Twitter: @tjoseph0010
Source: thehindu
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
In Defense of Cultural Appropriation
The Opinion Pages
Kenan Malik
Source: nytimes
Kenan Malik
Credit Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
LONDON — It
is just as well that I’m a writer, not an editor. Were I editing a newspaper or
magazine, I might soon be out of a job. For this is an essay in defense of
cultural appropriation.
In Canada
last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense.
The
controversy began when Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write, the magazine of the
Canadian Writers’ Union, penned an editorial defending the right of white
authors to create characters from minority or indigenous backgrounds. Within
days, a social
media backlash forced him to resign. The Writers’ Union issued an apology
for an article that its Equity Task Force claimed “re-entrenches the deeply
racist assumptions” held about art.
Another
editor, Jonathan Kay, of The Walrus magazine, was also compelled
to step down after tweeting his support for Mr. Niedzviecki. Meanwhile, the
broadcaster CBC moved
Steve Ladurantaye, managing editor of its flagship news program The National,
to a different post, similarly for an “unacceptable tweet” about the
controversy.
It’s not just
editors who have to tread carefully. Last year, the novelist Lionel Shriver generated
a worldwide storm after defending cultural appropriation in an address to the
Brisbane Writers Festival. Earlier this year, controversy
erupted when New York’s Whitney Museum picked for its Biennial Exhibition
Dana Schutz’s painting of the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old
African-American murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. Many
objected to a white painter like Ms. Schutz depicting such a traumatic moment
in black history. The British artist Hannah Black organized
a petition to have the work destroyed.
Other works
of art have been destroyed. The sculptor Sam Durant’s piece “Scaffold,”
honoring 38 Native Americans executed in 1862 in Minneapolis, was recently
being assembled in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. But after protests from
indigenous activists that Mr. Durant was appropriating their history, the
artist dismantled his own work, and made
its wood available to be burned in a Dakota Sioux ceremony.
What is
cultural appropriation, and why is it so controversial? Susan Scafidi, a law
professor at Fordham University, defines
it as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural
expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This
can include the “unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music,
language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”
Appropriation
suggests theft, and a process analogous to the seizure of land or artifacts. In
the case of culture, however, what is called appropriation is not theft but
messy interaction. Writers and artists necessarily engage with the experiences
of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one, and in inhabiting
a culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.
Critics of
cultural appropriation insist that they are opposed not to cultural engagement,
but to racism. They want to protect marginalized cultures and ensure that such
cultures speak for themselves, not simply be seen through the eyes of more
privileged groups.
Certainly,
cultural engagement does not take place on a level playing field. Racism and
inequality shape the ways in which people imagine others. Yet it is difficult
to see how creating gated cultures helps promote social justice.
There are
few figures more important to the development of rock ’n’ roll than Chuck Berry
(who died in March). In the 1950s, white radio stations refused to play his
songs, categorizing them as “race music.” Then came Elvis Presley. A white boy
playing the same tunes was cool. Elvis was feted, Mr. Berry and other black
pioneers largely ignored. Racism defined who became the cultural icon.
But
imagine that Elvis had been prevented from appropriating so-called black music.
Would that have challenged racism, or eradicated Jim Crow laws? Clearly not. It
took a social struggle — the civil rights movement — to bring about change.
That struggle was built not on cultural separation, but on the demand for equal
rights and universal values.
Campaigns
against cultural appropriation reveal the changing meaning of what it is to
challenge racism. Once, it was a demand for equal treatment for all. Now it
calls for cultures to be walled off and boundaries to be policed.
But who
does the policing? Every society has its gatekeepers, whose role is to protect
certain institutions, maintain the privileges of particular groups and cordon
off some beliefs from challenge. Such gatekeepers protect not the marginalized
but the powerful. Racism itself is a form of gatekeeping, a means of denying
racialized groups equal rights, access and opportunities.
In
minority communities, the gatekeepers are usually self-appointed guardians
whose power rests on their ability to define what is acceptable and what is
beyond the bounds. They appropriate for themselves the authority to license
certain forms of cultural engagement, and in doing so, entrench their power.
The most
potent form of gatekeeping is religion. When certain beliefs are deemed sacred,
they are put beyond questioning. To challenge such beliefs is to commit
blasphemy.
The
accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of
blasphemy. It’s the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important
to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others. This is most
clearly seen in the debate about Ms. Schutz’s painting “Open Casket.”
In 1955,
Emmett Till’s mother urged
the publication of photographs of her son’s mutilated body as it lay in its
coffin. Till’s murder, and the photographs, played
a major role in shaping the civil rights movement and have acquired an
almost sacred quality. It was from those photos that Ms. Schutz began her
painting.
To
suggest that she, as a white painter, should not depict images of black
suffering is as troubling as the demand by some Muslims that Salman Rushdie’s
novel “The Satanic Verses” should be censored because of supposed blasphemies
in its depiction of Islam. In fact, it’s more troubling because, as the critic
Adam Shatz has observed, the campaign against Ms. Schutz’s work contains an
“implicit disavowal that acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative
identification, are possible across racial lines.”
Seventy
years ago, racist radio stations refused to play “race music” for a white
audience. Today, antiracist activists insist that white painters should not
portray black subjects. To appropriate a phrase from a culture not my own: Plus
ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Kenan
Malik (@kenanmalik) is the
author, most recently, of “The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of
Ethics” and a contributing opinion writer.
Monday, June 12, 2017
Does Gandhi have a caste?
He had the ability to be of all castes and no caste at all
Written by Ramachandra Guha | Published:June 13, 2017 12:47 am
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Express Photo)
In March 1922, Gandhi was arrested on charges of sedition. When he was produced in court, the magistrate, after the law then prevalent, asked the prisoner to identify himself by caste or profession. Gandhi answered that he was “a farmer and weaver”. The magistrate was startled; so, he asked the question again, to get the same answer.
We have recently been reminded that Gandhi was born in a bania household. But, back in 1922, few, if any, banias were farmers or weavers; few, if any, are even today. Yet Gandhi’s self-description was accurate; for in the Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi did not trade, but he did spin daily and experiment with crops and livestock rearing. That statement to an Ahmedabad court was a striking example of Gandhi’s lifelong commitment to making his caste origins irrelevant to his personal and public life.
This commitment was manifested early. In September 1888, Mohandas Gandhi, then just short of his 20th birthday, decided to sail to England to study law. This horrified his orthodox Modh Bania community, whose head warned Mohandas that he would be excommunicated if he travelled overseas. But the boy defied him and went anyway. In the days before his departure, recalled Gandhi in his autobiography, he was “hemmed in by all sides. I could not go out without being pointed and stared at by someone or other. At one time, while I was walking near the Town Hall, I was surrounded and hooted by them, and my poor brother had to look at the scene in silence”.
Banias were, and often still are, obsessed with social taboos. Yet, while in London, Gandhi made so bold as to share a home and break bread with a Christian named Josiah Oldfield. Later, in South Africa, he and his wife Kasturba shared a home and kitchen with Henry and Millie Polak, he a Jew, she a Christian, both white. Johannesburg was then the most racist city in the most racist country in the world. By their remarkable act, the Gandhis and the Polaks defied both the casteism of Indians and the racism of Europeans.
In the satyagrahas he led in South Africa, Gandhi’s closest associates were a Parsi named Rustomji, a Muslim named Kacchalia, and a Tamil named Naidoo. Watching him at work, transcending all social boundaries, was his Jewish friend and housemate Henry Polak. In a vivid (but sadly unpublished) account of the passive resistance movement in South Africa, Polak wrote of its leader that, while “a Vaishnava Bania by birth, he is by nature a Brahmin, the teacher of his fellow-men, not by the preaching of virtue, but by its practice; by impulse a Kshatriya, in his chivalrous defence of those who had placed their trust in him and look to him for protection; by choice a Sudra, servant of the humblest and most despised of his fellow-men. It is said of [the seer] Ramkrishna that he once swept out the foul hut of a pariah with his own hair, to prove his freedom from arrogance towards and contempt for the untouchable outcast. The twice-born Prime Minister’s son [Gandhi] has been seen with his own hands to purify the sanitary convenience of his own house and of the gaols in which he has been interned.”
Having spoken of Gandhi’s ability to be of all castes and of no caste at all, Polak then stressed his ecumenism of faith: “Religion implies, for him, a mighty and all-embracing tolerance. Hindu by birth, he regards all men — Mahomedans, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists, Confucians — as spiritual brothers.
He makes no differences amongst them, recognising that all faiths lead to salvation, that all are ways of viewing God, and that, in their relation to each other, men are fellow-human beings first, and followers of creeds afterwards. Hence it is that men of all faiths and even of none, are his devoted friends, admirers, and helpers, and that, diverse in belief as is the community of which he has been the foremost figure, he is recognised as one who, in the last resort, may be looked to, to render impartial justice between man and man.” In South Africa, Gandhi was alerted to the horrors of untouchability by his Tamil friends.
On returning to India in 1915, he established a “Satyagraha Ashram” in Ahmedabad. Early on, the Ashram took in a family from the Dhed caste of “untouchables”, consisting of Dudhabhai, his wife Danibehn, and their baby daughter Lakshmi. When they arrived, there was much grumbling, not least from Gandhi’s own family members. Kasturba herself was not happy with this decision to defy the orthodox. The Dhed family was prevented from drawing water from the common well, until Gandhi said, in that case, he would not avail himself of the well either.
Through the three decades of his work in India, Gandhi steadily and persistently attacked the practice of untouchability. To be sure, he moved in stages. While, in his own ashram, all members ate and mingled together regardless of caste, he did not at first advocate inter-dining or inter-mingling to society at large. However, as he grew more popular, and more sure of his public influence, he urged every Hindu not just to abolish untouchability from their minds and hearts, but to disregard matters of caste in where they lived, whom they ate with or befriended, and whom they married. (This evolution in his thinking is documented in a classic early essay by the Gandhi scholar Denis Dalton; it is also the subject of a forthcoming book by Nishikant Kolge, significantly entitled Gandhi Against Caste. Gandhi had four biological sons, all, like him, technically banias by birth. But of his two adopted daughters, one was born in an untouchable home (the aforementioned Lakshmi), while the other was an Englishwoman (Madeleine Slade, known as Mirabehn). In India, as in South Africa, Gandhi comprehensively disregarded caste and religious distinctions in his personal and political life. His closest friend was a Christian priest, C.F. Andrews; and he lived, and died, for harmony between India’s two largest religious communities, Hindus and Muslims.
Like most Indian political parties, the BJP cannot and does not transcend caste or religion in its own practice. Dividing Dalits into Jatavs and non-Jatavs, dividing OBCs into Yadavs and non-Yadavs, dividing Indians into Hindus and Muslims, is how it seeks to win elections and remain in power. The reduction by the BJP president of Gandhi to his caste origins is therefore entirely understandable. It is another matter that Amit Shah’s comment displays the wide, indeed unbridgeable, gulf between his moral universe and that of the man we call the Father of the Nation.
The writer is a Bangalore-based historian. His second volume of the biography of Gandhi will be published next year
Source: indianexpress
Written by Ramachandra Guha | Published:June 13, 2017 12:47 am
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Express Photo)
In March 1922, Gandhi was arrested on charges of sedition. When he was produced in court, the magistrate, after the law then prevalent, asked the prisoner to identify himself by caste or profession. Gandhi answered that he was “a farmer and weaver”. The magistrate was startled; so, he asked the question again, to get the same answer.
We have recently been reminded that Gandhi was born in a bania household. But, back in 1922, few, if any, banias were farmers or weavers; few, if any, are even today. Yet Gandhi’s self-description was accurate; for in the Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi did not trade, but he did spin daily and experiment with crops and livestock rearing. That statement to an Ahmedabad court was a striking example of Gandhi’s lifelong commitment to making his caste origins irrelevant to his personal and public life.
This commitment was manifested early. In September 1888, Mohandas Gandhi, then just short of his 20th birthday, decided to sail to England to study law. This horrified his orthodox Modh Bania community, whose head warned Mohandas that he would be excommunicated if he travelled overseas. But the boy defied him and went anyway. In the days before his departure, recalled Gandhi in his autobiography, he was “hemmed in by all sides. I could not go out without being pointed and stared at by someone or other. At one time, while I was walking near the Town Hall, I was surrounded and hooted by them, and my poor brother had to look at the scene in silence”.
Banias were, and often still are, obsessed with social taboos. Yet, while in London, Gandhi made so bold as to share a home and break bread with a Christian named Josiah Oldfield. Later, in South Africa, he and his wife Kasturba shared a home and kitchen with Henry and Millie Polak, he a Jew, she a Christian, both white. Johannesburg was then the most racist city in the most racist country in the world. By their remarkable act, the Gandhis and the Polaks defied both the casteism of Indians and the racism of Europeans.
In the satyagrahas he led in South Africa, Gandhi’s closest associates were a Parsi named Rustomji, a Muslim named Kacchalia, and a Tamil named Naidoo. Watching him at work, transcending all social boundaries, was his Jewish friend and housemate Henry Polak. In a vivid (but sadly unpublished) account of the passive resistance movement in South Africa, Polak wrote of its leader that, while “a Vaishnava Bania by birth, he is by nature a Brahmin, the teacher of his fellow-men, not by the preaching of virtue, but by its practice; by impulse a Kshatriya, in his chivalrous defence of those who had placed their trust in him and look to him for protection; by choice a Sudra, servant of the humblest and most despised of his fellow-men. It is said of [the seer] Ramkrishna that he once swept out the foul hut of a pariah with his own hair, to prove his freedom from arrogance towards and contempt for the untouchable outcast. The twice-born Prime Minister’s son [Gandhi] has been seen with his own hands to purify the sanitary convenience of his own house and of the gaols in which he has been interned.”
Having spoken of Gandhi’s ability to be of all castes and of no caste at all, Polak then stressed his ecumenism of faith: “Religion implies, for him, a mighty and all-embracing tolerance. Hindu by birth, he regards all men — Mahomedans, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists, Confucians — as spiritual brothers.
He makes no differences amongst them, recognising that all faiths lead to salvation, that all are ways of viewing God, and that, in their relation to each other, men are fellow-human beings first, and followers of creeds afterwards. Hence it is that men of all faiths and even of none, are his devoted friends, admirers, and helpers, and that, diverse in belief as is the community of which he has been the foremost figure, he is recognised as one who, in the last resort, may be looked to, to render impartial justice between man and man.” In South Africa, Gandhi was alerted to the horrors of untouchability by his Tamil friends.
On returning to India in 1915, he established a “Satyagraha Ashram” in Ahmedabad. Early on, the Ashram took in a family from the Dhed caste of “untouchables”, consisting of Dudhabhai, his wife Danibehn, and their baby daughter Lakshmi. When they arrived, there was much grumbling, not least from Gandhi’s own family members. Kasturba herself was not happy with this decision to defy the orthodox. The Dhed family was prevented from drawing water from the common well, until Gandhi said, in that case, he would not avail himself of the well either.
Through the three decades of his work in India, Gandhi steadily and persistently attacked the practice of untouchability. To be sure, he moved in stages. While, in his own ashram, all members ate and mingled together regardless of caste, he did not at first advocate inter-dining or inter-mingling to society at large. However, as he grew more popular, and more sure of his public influence, he urged every Hindu not just to abolish untouchability from their minds and hearts, but to disregard matters of caste in where they lived, whom they ate with or befriended, and whom they married. (This evolution in his thinking is documented in a classic early essay by the Gandhi scholar Denis Dalton; it is also the subject of a forthcoming book by Nishikant Kolge, significantly entitled Gandhi Against Caste. Gandhi had four biological sons, all, like him, technically banias by birth. But of his two adopted daughters, one was born in an untouchable home (the aforementioned Lakshmi), while the other was an Englishwoman (Madeleine Slade, known as Mirabehn). In India, as in South Africa, Gandhi comprehensively disregarded caste and religious distinctions in his personal and political life. His closest friend was a Christian priest, C.F. Andrews; and he lived, and died, for harmony between India’s two largest religious communities, Hindus and Muslims.
Like most Indian political parties, the BJP cannot and does not transcend caste or religion in its own practice. Dividing Dalits into Jatavs and non-Jatavs, dividing OBCs into Yadavs and non-Yadavs, dividing Indians into Hindus and Muslims, is how it seeks to win elections and remain in power. The reduction by the BJP president of Gandhi to his caste origins is therefore entirely understandable. It is another matter that Amit Shah’s comment displays the wide, indeed unbridgeable, gulf between his moral universe and that of the man we call the Father of the Nation.
The writer is a Bangalore-based historian. His second volume of the biography of Gandhi will be published next year
Source: indianexpress
Saturday, June 10, 2017
The battle for values
The elevation of Yogi Adityanath as the Chief
Minister of Uttar Pradesh is an instance of this challenge.
Written
by Arjun Dangle | Published:June
11, 2017 3:09 am
Twenty-five
years ago, I had edited an anthology of Dalit literature, Poisoned Bread:
Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature. In the introduction, I had
stated: “In the coming age, India will see religion and politics go
hand-in-hand. When that happens, the literati, intellectuals, and thinkers who
believe in secular and democratic values will have to be ready to face the
challenges that will arise.”
The
elevation of Yogi Adityanath as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh is an
instance of this challenge. This mixing of religion and politics results in
feudalism. In India, it may not lead to race-based fascism but it can result in
authoritarianism centred on religion. The first laboratory for the creation of
such a Hindu Nation (Hindu Rashtra) was instituted in Gujarat under the
leadership of Narendra Modi; the Sangh Parivar has now
initiated the second such laboratory in Uttar Pradesh.
The
concept of Hindu Rashtra is not only outdated but also impossible. The last
Hindu kingdom, Nepal, has itself done away with the anxieties of the Hindu
Rashtra and is now standing strong on the pillars of secularism and democracy.
Supporters
of the idea fail to define what a Hindu Rashtra is. Will it have a different
Constitution? Will it have a different national flag? Will the national anthem
be different?
Well, if
the Hindu religion and its followers are not honoured in a country, are unable
to celebrate their festivals, or have had their temples demolished, then the
idea of a Hindu Rashtra makes logical sense. However, the fact is in
post-Independence India, all the elected governments, at the Centre and in the
states, have been dominated by Hindus, irrespective of the party in office.
As the
notion of a Hindu Rashtra cannot take a tangible form, the Sangh Parivar has
been consistently running a hidden agenda, which has produced a strait-laced
and dogmatic ideology. As a result, a Hindu Rashtra is being sought to be
established by targeting Muslims, Dalits, Christians and other minorities and
by demolishing the principle of one man, one vote, one value bestowed by the Constitution.
The violent religious frenzy of the “gau rakshaks” is a realisation of the
Hindu Rashtra agenda.
Hindu
Rashtra and Hindutva, however, are not the same. Hindutva is related to Indian
culture, whereas Hindu Rashtra is rooted in caste hegemony. There is no reason
to oppose Hindutva because the Constitution provides each one the freedom to
practice the religion of his/her choice and follow the lifestyle it entails.
The majority of Hindus are not casteist or fanatical. But, knowingly or
unknowingly, leftists, progressives, seculars, and Ambedkarites have committed
the mistake of targeting the entire Hindu community, while intensely opposing
Hindutva. The Sangh Parivar has found an opportunity here to polarise the Hindu
community.
My
observation may seem similar to the “soft Hindutva” of the Congress. There is a
basic difference, however, in the organisational structure of the Congress and
the Sangh Parivar. Every party worker in the Sangh Parivar, from the top to
bottom, is orthodox and dogmatic. In the Congress and other secular
organisations, top officials may be secular and the workers are either
followers of Hinduism or Islam.
My
concerns are about values. It is the responsibility of the government to
protect and preserve values — one man, one value, tolerance, liberty, equality,
fraternity, and national integration — upheld by the Constitution. But when one
listens to historians, scientists, politicians, judges and saints close to the
Sangh Parivar, one is transported to the 18th century. The country is going
through a psychological and ideological dialectical phase.
Jawaharlal
Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee were not just elected prime
ministers of India, they were accepted as leaders by Indian society. Why is
Narendra Modi, who won a convincing mandate, not regarded as a leader by all
Indians? The Sangh Parivar needs to introspect. Why does the Sangh leadership
remain silent and provide moral support to the party workers, who make
incongruous comments that provoke separatism? It scares me when tolerance,
civility, and culture in the socio-political system seem to disappear.
It scares
me that the BJP and Sangh Parivar never use the names of their idols, Hedgewar
and Guru Golwalkar, in election campaigns.
Instead,
they have appropriated those who have worked hard to preserve the values of
liberty, unity, fraternity and national integration — like Shivaji Maharaj, Mahatma
Gandhi, Babasaheb Ambedkar, and Sardar Patel.
The
battle for values is inevitable regardless of the party in power. It is necessary
to fight the tendency that endangers liberty, equality, fraternity, tolerance
and national integration. It is the duty of writers, artists, intellectuals,
and journalists to uproot such a tendency. As a writer-activist, who believes
in democracy and who wishes to see the socialisation of democracy, I reiterate
what Babasaheb Ambedkar said on November 25, 1949, while presenting the
Constitution: “We are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics, we
will have equality and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. We
must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment. Else, those who
suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy.”
Dangle,
one of the founder members of the Dalit Panthers, is an acclaimed writer. The
article was translated from Marathi to English by Rushikesh Aravkar
Source: indianexpress
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