Book review - Anil Nauriya: Some Issues In The Indian Freedom Movement And After
This month it is 100 years since the launch of the Non-Co-operation Movement. Even British civil service opinion admitted the Movement tore the 'mystic fabric' that enveloped the Raj after 1857. The movement had led also to a huge renaissance in art and literature. This Review Essay by Anil Nauriya touches on one of the three major issues the movement raised - viz. Khilafat, Punjab wrongs, Swaraj...
Mushirul Hasan has since the late 1970's been an articulate scholar especially of the Muslim-related aspects of India’s freedom movement. This volume brings together mainly some of his newspaper writings. There are more than 125 articles in the book, some of them on issues of more immediate contemporary relevance which he seeks to understand through the historical lens. The style of many of the articles is languorous, involved and often indirect and tangential. Though not perhaps classifiable as essays in history, they are interesting for the historical political imagery that is invoked and sought to be presented by an Indian academician writing at the turn of the century.
Making sense of History: society, culture and politics
By Mushirul Hasan; 2003; Reviewed by Anil Nauriya
The book concludes with some writings related to the
Gujarat killings of 2002. The killings which followed nearly a decade after the
demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya raise questions about the future of
Indian society and the nature of its polity. Hasan correctly observes that “a
secular polity is the sole guarantor of our survival as a community and the
nation” (p.478).
Hindutva and its ramifications are themes which run
through this collection of articles. Hasan points out that “for decades” the
Hindu nationalists “waited on the margins of political life to establish the
illegitimacy of the Congress-led movements against colonialism.” (pp 231-232).
Exactly so. This was and is the thrust of Hindutva’s historical technique and
propaganda along these lines is drummed in day in and day out by organisations
like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) into the minds of the Indian people.
In this seemingly obvious but little appreciated insight lurks some of the
value of Hasan’s book. It is for the same reason that the present reviewer has
often emphasised the need for current scholarship to be as fair to the
Congress-led movements as it may be to other movements. There has been a
tendency especially in the last thirty years or so to focus a critique on the
pre-independence Congress, to the neglect of other players. This tendency,
fueled largely by Anglocentricism*, has somewhat skewed Indian historiography….
