Excerpt: 'In Freedom’s Shade'
A heart-rendering excerpt from Anis Kidwai’s moving memoir about post-Partition India, In Freedom’s Shade, originally written in Urdu & translated in English by NIF Author, Professor Ayesha Kidwai
The New India Foundation
Debating Patriarchy: An excerpt
The decade of 1940s was a vital decade in Indian history. The nation was bestowed with the unprecedented opportunity to transform itself as a modern nation. To build a modern nation, a variety of economic, political, social and cultural factors had to come to terms with each other. The vision of planned economic development and self reliance within a curious mixture of socialism and capitalism led to the evolution of political structures within the ambit a democratic set up. As economic and political forces reconfigured themselves to contribute towards the emergence of the modern economy, the cultural milieu also experienced the need for alignment to the aspirations of an emerging nation. The protracted debate over the Hindu Code Bill with widespread participation across all regions and segments of the Indian society between 1941 and 1956, known as the Hindu Code Bill debate, epitomised the necessity of the society to strike an alliance with the forces of modernization. Customary Hindu laws, frozen in religious beliefs of centuries, came to be challenged by the egalitarian, secular structure envisioned by the leaders of the modern Indian nation. The extensive Hindu Code Bill debate, in both public and legislative spheres, was of momentous importance to the entire project of carving a new, secular India. It was the debate that contributed to the family law reforms that influenced, to a great extent, the distribution of power and resources within the society, particularly at a granular level, within the family and enabled Indian society to align with the planned economic progress and modernisation.
The New India Foundation
An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism: An Excerpt
The police had issued four sketches of suspects after the Delhi blasts. Four sketches for three men. One of them wore a skullcap, the others had trimmed beards. None of these sketches matched the portraits that the newspapers published of those killed in the encounter. In the coming days and weeks, sceptics pointed out that the dead men had all presented authentic documents for SIM-card verification. The police responded that they had been overconfident, implying that the Terrorists had disguised themselves as Normal Human Beings – as students, as working men. Normal Human Beings.
The New India Foundation
Citizenship in a Caste Polity
The celebration of World Konkani day on the 9th of April references the death of Vaman Varde Valaulikar who is hailed by Konkani literary activists by his pen name, Shenoi Goembab, and as the father of Konkani pride, and Konkani language activism. These celebrations of Valaulikar and the Konkani language mask the fact that while Valaulikar’s language activism was received, especially in latter times, by a secular audience – i.e. one constituted by multiple religious and caste groups – the original context of his activism was that of securing the interests of the newly formed caste group – the Gaud Saraswats – to which he belonged. Konkani was painstakingly marked out as a marker of their brahmin identity, and in the context of the early twentieth century, was also imagined as the basis for a homeland that the Konkani-speaking brahmins could lead. It is only through understanding Varde Valaulikar’s occluded caste history that one is able to appreciate the way in which Konkani linguistic politics play out, not just in Goa, which is the focus of Citizenship in a Caste Polity: Religion, Language and Belonging in Goa, but in other parts of the western coast of India, namely Kerala, and coastal Karnataka.
The New India Foundation
Standardised Foods and Compromised Consumers: The New Farm Laws and the Future of Indian Agriculture
Much has been written on the implications of the three new farm laws on the agricultural sector and the livelihoods of farmers, especially how they will facilitate the growth of large agribusinesses and lead to the slow demise of the mandi (Agricultural Produce Market Yards). What has been missed out, however, is the likely impact of these new laws on accelerating changes in our diets and the grave implications of this for our health.
The New India Foundation
Pit Stops in India's Digital Journey
The pandemic has brought millions of Indians face-to-face with digital technologies – remote working, teleconferencing, digital and touch-free payments, telemedicine, online education, e-commerce, paperless transactions, and so on. These technologies have been around for many years, but the pandemic fueled their widespread dissemination and acceptance. Billions of digital transactions, including micro-payments, take place every day. Millions of school children are hooked to online classes, teleconsultation with doctors has become a routine affair. All this is nothing short of a transformation for a country where new technologies were feared, vehemently opposed, and were unaffordable not so long ago.
The New India Foundation
Rethinking Revolutions: An excerpt
The deep black soil, the basalt rock underlying it, and the monsoons, have together, shaped water management practices and crop choices on the Malwa plateau. Soyabean came and changed all that. Water, which was considered scarce in this dryland region and was percolated in the fields during the rainy season, became excess when the fields were planted with soyabean. In conjunction with the advent of water-guzzling wheat, soyabean converted Malwa into a land of water scarcity. The government’s push for rural electrification and its intervention in agrarian markets by instituting minimum support prices (MSP) were the other factors which came together with these non-human forces. Farmers chose to use the remuneration from growing soyabean to invest in water-extraction technologies, which also became available at the same time, because growing wheat was becoming profitable. These forces, acting together, have created a crisis of enormous magnitude. There is barely any water for drinking in Malwa in the hot summer.
The New India Foundation
Gita Press and the Making of Hindu Nation: An excerpt
Jaydayal Goyandka was an itinerant Marwari businessman based in Bankura, Bengal. A trader in cotton, kerosene oil, textiles and utensils, his work took him to small towns like Chakradharpur (now in Jharkhand) and Sitamarhi in Bihar, and occasionally to Kharagpur and Calcutta. Goyandka had earned a reputation for honesty, offering ‘sahi bhav’ (right price) and ‘sahi taul’ (right weight). After business hours he exchanged his ledgers for the Gita, either reading or discussing the text. Over the long years of travel he had formed groups of friends in these towns, mostly other businessmen, who joined him in satsangs (religious congregations). With time these groups expanded; the biggest was in Calcutta where meetings were held at first in the houses of Goyandka’s friends and then in an open space behind the fort near Eden Gardens. Soon, even this became too small, so the group rented a place in Banstalla Street and named it Gobind Bhawan. The year was 1922. Gobind Bhawan became Goyandka’s new home in Calcutta. He was fast losing interest in business, keen instead on developing a network of Gita discussion groups, having transformed himself into some kind of an expert whose expositions were praised in Calcutta. What he and his fellow satsangis missed was an authentic translation of the Gita along with a faithful commentary. Gobind Bhawan bankrolled the publication of two editions of the Gita running into 11,000 copies from Vanik Press of Calcutta, but the outcome was considered unsatisfactory, in terms of scholarship as well as production values.
The New India Foundation
Tawaifnama: An Excerpt
An exclusive introduction to the excerpt from the critically-acclaimed book Tawaifnama, by Saba Dewan:
The New India Foundation
Growing the Tree of Science: An Excerpt
Sir Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, whose utopian vision for science this book invoked at the outset, played a significant role in the establishment of Bhabha’s institute. Bhabha’s friendship with Bhatnagar is less talked about than his friendship with Nehru, however, it was no less important. Their friendship dated back to the years Bhabha spent in Bangalore; in fact, both Bhatnagar and Bhabha were awarded the Fellowship of the Royal Society by Sir A.V. Hill during his visit to India in 1944. Bhatnagar’s presence in the council of the institute from April 1947 predated Indian independence. Soon after independence in August 1947, the affairs of Bhabha’s institute demonstrated a quick rise in tempo. The institute had had the support of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) from its inception but with Bhatnagar, the director-general of CSIR entering the council, government investment in the institute increased dramatically. This was an expected outcome. Welcoming Bhatnagar into the council, the chairman, Sir Sohrab, had anticipated benefiting from Bhatnagar’s ‘great experience in matters of administration and research problems’. Bhabha’s institute had started functioning with an annual budget of Rs 80,000 in 1945. Demonstrating the convergence of private and public funding, the CSIR had also offered the institute an annual block grant of Rs 75,000. By 1946–7, the CSIR offered an additional grant of Rs 32,400 for training a team of scientists in accelerators. The following year this had increased to Rs 50,840. Government funding to the institute increased at an accelerated pace from 1948 onwards. By then Bhatnagar and Bhabha had been friends for almost a decade. Bhabha’s friendship with Bhatnagar cannot be defined merely as instrumentalist. Bhatnagar, the older scientist, was respected within the colonial scientific establishment and he saw in Bhabha a worthy collaborator who was already groomed for leadership in science. Together they forged a relationship of admiration, trust, and a sense of participation in building science for a new nation. Having identified the younger scientist as a leader, Bhatnagar did his utmost to reserve for Bhabha’s institute the pre-eminent position of becoming the only institute for nuclear research. In a confidential letter written to Bhabha just before Indian independence, Bhatnagar informed him that the IISc, Bangalore, was about to start a branch of nuclear physics and create a chair for R.S. Krishnan, who headed the Department of Physics. This, Bhatnagar felt, would interfere with Bhabha’s plans for nuclear research. For one, their plans to recruit R.S. Krishnan would not materialize if the scientist already had a chair at IISc—a proposal backed by the Tatas and Meghnad Saha. Highlighting the single source of funding— the government—with which he was involved, Bhatnagar justified his apprehensions about competition between research institutions. This also really is in conflict with our programme of developing your Institute as the centre for nuclear research, While I am not against more chairs being created in universities, I am against the IISc, the CSIR and the TIFR competing amongst themselves in the progress of development of nuclear research as the funds come practically from one source.
The New India Foundation
The Web of Freedom: An Excerpt
The value of Kumarappa’s work lies in his ability to present an economic philosophy while working to improve village industries. Right at the inception of the All-India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) in 1934, Kumarappa was clear that while the industries that had long sustained millions’ were languishing, if India ‘was to progress economically and culturally it was imperative that the villages had to become centres of activity’. If the villager had to have social and economic autonomy, the villages had to be made ‘self-dependent, self-supporting and self respecting’. An important, and often forgotten, aspect of this understanding was the emphasis that both Gandhi and Kumarappa laid on adapting and modifying the village economy ‘to meet the present-day needs’. Kumarappa repeatedly emphasized that the entire effort of the AIVIA was ‘to bring science and progress into the stagnant pools that are called “villages” today’. The AIVIA intended to assemble and disseminate reliable and scientifically validated information on all aspects of village-based production as well as carry out research work on its own. But if science was to be brought to bear on the problems of the villages, the association needed trained workers. In a lament that is strikingly contemporary, Kumarappa pointed out that capable individuals ‘end up in town in search of secure employment’ and ‘the artistically inclined deserted the indigenous art’. The cumulative impact of this process for many decades has only ‘brought ruin and distress to our country-side’. Sapped of skill, energy and hope, the villagers had neither ‘the enterprise … nor the resources to carry out experiments’ towards improving their methods of production.
The New India Foundation
Not Just a Mannequin: An Excerpt
As glamour was being packaged and sold to Indian women by ingenious magazine editors and feminist groups were protesting the ‘integration of India into a highly exploitative international market’, something important was happening unnoticed. A new class of working women was being formed. Girls were coming from across social classes, plotting to be part of this new workforce that seemed to offer a shot at something big. They were scouring satellite TV, poring over glossies, to learn how to read the signposts to this highway of social mobility, sending off awkward photos of themselves in shiny jackets and pants in neighborhood photo studios to beauty pageant organizers. They were readying to plunge into this exciting new winning field where there seemed to be no English-speaking, passport-demanding guards at the gate preventing entry. And where women seemed to be on top. They were disappointed, of course. What seemed like a global, modern profession (which it was, in terms of the time period and context in which it came into prominence in the West) based on merit and impersonal, professional relationships turned out to be not free of conservatism. It was strongly influenced by existing Indian models of patronage and networks of personal alliances where transactions were made usually on the basis of friendships amongst class peers.
The New India Foundation
Rahul Pandita's Our Moon has Blood Clots: An Excerpt
January 19, 1990, was a very cold day despite the sun’s weak attempts to emerge from behind dark clouds. In the afternoon, I played cricket with some boys from my neighbourhood. All of us wore thick sweaters and pherans. I would always remove my pheran and place it on the fence in the kitchen garden. After playing, I would wear it before entering the house to escape my mother’s wrath. She worried that I would catch cold. ‘The neighbours will think that I am incapable of taking care of my children,’ she would say in exasperation. We had an early dinner that evening and, since there was no electricity, we couldn’t watch television. Father heard the evening news bulletin on the radio as usual, and just as we were going to sleep, the electricity returned.I am in a deep slumber. I can hear strange noises. Fear grips me. All is not well. Everything is going to change. I see shadows of men slithering along our compound wall. And then they jump inside. One by one. So many of them. I woke up startled. But the zero-watt bulb was not on. The hundred-watt bulb was. Father was waking me up. ‘Something is happening,’ he said. I could hear it—there were people out on the streets. They were talking loudly. Some major activity was underfoot. Were they setting our locality on fire? So, it wasn’t entirely a dream, after all? Will they jump inside now? Then a whistling sound could be heard. It was the sound of the mosque’s loudspeaker. We heard it every day in the wee hours of the morning just before the muezzin broke into the azaan. But normally the whistle was short-lived; that night, it refused to stop. That night, the muezzin didn’t call.That night, it felt like something sinister was going to happen. The noise outside our house had died down. But in the mosque, we could hear people’s voices. They were arguing about something. My uncle’s family came to our side of the house. ‘What is happening?’ Uncle asked. ‘Something is happening,’ Father said. ‘They are up to something.’It was then that a long drawl tore through the murmurs, and with the same force the loudspeaker began to hiss. ‘Naara-e-taqbeer, Allah ho Akbar!’ I looked at my father; his face was contorted. He knew only too well what the phrase meant. I had heard it as well, in a stirring drama telecast a few years ago on Doordarshan, an adaptation of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, a novel based on the events of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. It was the cry that a mob of Muslim rioters shouted as it descended upon Hindu settlements. It was a war cry. Within a few minutes, battle cries flew at us from every direction. They rushed towards us like poison darts.Hum kya chaaaahte: Azadiiii!Eiy zalimon, eiy kafiron, Kashmir humara chhod do.What do we want—Freedom!O tyrants, O infidels, leave our Kashmir.
The New India Foundation
Autonomy, Dignity, and the Transformative Constitution
In my book, 'The Transformative Constitution' (HarperCollins 2019), I argued that the Indian Constitution was transformative in two ways: first, it transformed the relationship between the individual and the State. Erstwhile subjects of the colonial regime became free citizens of a free country, with inalienable rights of their own. And secondly, it sought to transform the relationship between individuals and social power. The framers of the Indian Constitution understood that the State was not the only source of power and oppression in a person’s life, but the social groups and communities – whether religious, caste-based, or even the family – could post an equal threat to happiness, well-being, and dignity. Consequently, the Indian Constitution was democratic in its deepest sense: it aimed to democratize both the public sphere and the private sphere, and ensure that the constitutional values of liberty, equality, and fraternity would be equally applicable in both.
The New India Foundation
Are we still at the crossroads of conservation?
Exactly ten years ago when Conservation at the Crossroads was published, I had lamented the growing degradation and fragmentation of forests in India, to the extent that a large proportion now fall in the ranks of the ‘living dead’-forests that lack vital ecosystem elements such as dispersers and predators. In 2010, infrastructural projects, mining and industry were visibly endangering natural habitats all over the country, a sort of double whammy when over-exploitation for grazing and fuelwood was already a problem in many places.
The New India Foundation
In Freedom's Shade
When I wrote up a proposal to the New India Foundation for a fellowship to translate Anis Kidwai’s Azādi ki Chhaon Mein in English, I never expected to be even invited for an interview. I had never translated into English before, and my academic credentials were in a completely unrelated field—formal linguistics—not literature or history. What I did have was three chapters translated, and some inchoate thoughts about communal violence, the activism of ‘ordinary’ women in the face of Partition violence, and the intimacies and distances between two sister languages, Hindi and Urdu.
The New India Foundation