The Battle of Belonging
Shashi Tharoor
Aleph, Rs 799
At the risk of generalising his otherwise vast corpus of academic work, anybody reading Shashi Tharoor would say that he invariably makes a wonderful edifice of arguments to begin with, but often ends up destroying the superstructure of ideas when the politician in him takes precedence over the intellectual he has always been. This explains why he could so diligently enumerate the paradoxes in Narendra Modi in his book, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, but wouldn’t go far enough to say that these very paradoxes could be seen in much bigger and dangerous proportions among some of the most exalted leaders of his own party. Tharoor did the same with his book, Why I am a Hindu, wherein he explained the nuances of Hinduism so beautifully but faltered the moment he entered the domain of politics while explaining Hindutva. He conceded the same to this reviewer at the time of the release of his next book, The Hindu Way, when he said: “This one is meant for those who wrote after my previous book on Hinduism that I should have written on the faith without getting into politics. I have tried to do that with this book.”
The current book, The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism and What It Means To Be Indian, unfortunately, suffers from this malaise again. One perfunctory example can be that this 448-page book on nationalism and patriotism makes a reference to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee just once, and that too in a passing manner, to just let the reader know that he was the author of Anandamath! In contrast, Winston Churchill is mentioned three times—the same as Sri Aurobindo—in this book on Indian nationalism and patriotism. Incidentally, the author doesn’t shy away from showing his admiration for Rabindranath Tagore who saw nationalism as “essentially immoral”. “I am not against this nation or that nation, but against the idea of the nation itself,” Tagore would say bluntly. Ironically, this ardent critic of nationalism ended up being the author of the national anthems of two nation-states—India and Bangladesh—and was in some way the inspiration behind a third one in Sri Lanka!
Apart from his political compulsions, a part of the problem is the book’s overreliance on the Western framework of nationalism. It needs to be understood that unlike in the West, nationalism—just like religion—is a unifying force in India. The problem began when a concerted attempt was put soon after Independence to institutionalise a perverted form of secularism which had nothing but distrust for Hinduism and the Hindu way of life. Nationalism, as per this skewed ideological vision, was Hindu in nature as the imagery of Bharat Mata would suggest.
While reading the book, one gets the feeling that the author takes a certain posturing despite knowing both sides of the story. For instance, Tharoor mentions Tipu Sultan’s “depredations against the Nairs” of Kerala by bringing out quite lucidly his own family story where the paternal side of the family was believed to be involved in inviting the tyrant of Mysore while the maternal side suffered immensely at the Sultan’s army. “It is entirely possible that I am descended from two Palakkad families, one of whom invited Tipu Sultan to attack Palakkad and the other who lost their fortune out of fear of his attack,” Tharoor writes. So what’s his remedy? Forget the past atrocities! And to bolster his claim, he reminds how France “could never have become a united nation if people had not been willing to forget historical atrocities like the massacres of the Midi”.
Forgiveness is the way out, not forgetfulness. No sane person will vouch for vengeance but that doesn’t give a person the right to deny the very fact of being persecuted in the past. Tharoor seems to push for amnesia, and that too selective. He won’t mind the Maratha atrocities in Bengal and Rajasthan to be uncensored or, for that matter, the so-called Hindu persecution of Buddhists in ancient times, but has a problem with Muslim atrocities in medieval times and, to counter them, dig out selective, often half-baked, cases of Muslim benevolence. The issue that Tharoor and his ilk forget is it backfires both ways: it gives wings to the “Hindus under threat” argument, as it happened in the 1980s, to Rajiv Gandhi’s discomfort, when Indians, to use Sir Vidia Naipaul’s words, were “becoming alive to their history”. This “new historical awakening”, which coincided with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, was a reaction to the Congress’ lopsided secularism, which, according to sociologist T.N. Madan, “is the dream of a minority which wants to shape the majority in its own image” and which “stigmatises the majority as primordially oriented”. And second, it does a disservice to the minuscule but genuinely secular section in the minority community by leaving them unprotected when there should have been a concerted attempt to promote such progressive elements.
No sane person can support the destruction of a historical/religious place to avenge the past. For, an eye for an eye, as Mahatma Gandhi would say, would make the world blind. But that doesn’t mean one should turn a blind eye to what happened in the past. After all, the acceptance of violence, persecution is the first genuine step towards reconciliation.
Tharoor often quotes George Orwell to say that “every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered”. It’s truly an Orwellian world we live in. Here Mohammed Ali Jinnah is defended. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar is abhorred. And Babasaheb Ambedkar is worshipped. The three political leaders believed in the two-nation theory. Yet, they get different treatment despite holding a similar view on Islam and the idea of Pakistan.
But, on a more serious note, what is history if it’s not “what the historian makes”, as Edward Hallett Carr writes in his epochal book, What is History? In fact, history is what an eminent historian famously wrote: “The past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present.” So, to blame a particular dispensation for “rewriting the past in the service of nationalism” is flawed and unhistorical. Tharoor can refer to the book, Political Violence in Ancient India, by Upinder Singh, by no means a Hindutva historian, to know how the Nehruvian dispensation tried creating an aura around Asoka to forward the nationalist cause!
The Battle of Belonging, like all other books by the author, despite a series of failings, remains a must-read for the sheer brilliance of Tharoor as a writer and also because of the personal stories and anecdotes he has up his sleeve. Whether it’s his own story of how he was eligible for a British passport but not entry permit into the UK and how he refused to let go of his Indian passport, to the saga of former UN colleague Ansar Hussain Khan, author of the polemical The Rediscovery of India, who gave up his Pakistani citizenship to be an Indian but died quite tragically soon after he pulled out a gun and shot his wife dead. His family account—whether of the past when the tyrant Tipu attacked Kerala or in the present vis-à-vis his sons, Kanishk and Ishaan—in the book shows how much Tharoor has to offer. Alas, as in the past, Tharoor the politician invariably trips Tharoor the intellectual.
