The Library Bazar, Mussoorie. Probably from 1917. 10 cm x 15 cm, Chromolithograph (Courtesy Priya Paul Collection and Tasveer Ghar)

I’ve always wondered how it got its reputation. And a few months ago I got the chance to find out. I was asked by Tasveer Ghar, a digital network of popular culture, to write an essay based on materials donated by collector Priya Paul. The collection itself is an embarrassment of riches, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw picture postcards from Mussoorie and Dehradun. Yellow with age, almost a hundred years old, with images of places I have known since I first learned that places have names.

The results of my exploration are up at the Tasveer Ghar site.

The story of Noor Inayat Khan is a remarkable one. A descendant of Tipu Sultan, Noor’s father was a musician and a Sufi teacher. Her mother was an American from New Mexico, who defied her family to marry the much older Inayat Khan. Noor was the eldest child in this non-traditional household. The Khans lived in Paris, where Noor went to the local school, while her father and uncles ran the Sufi Order International and gave music performances.

Noor might have become a leading author and illustrator of children’s stories, when history intervened, and she became a radio operator working for the British secret service in World War II.

Shrabani Basu’s ‘Spy Princess’ is a meticulously researched biography of this World War II heroine. Basu takes care to not make any claims she can’t back up with documentary evidence. She is very careful to avoid exoticizing Noor as some sort of a Mata Hari figure of popular imagination. Using papers that were declassified in 2003 and Noor’s personal papers, Basu sticks to the facts. At times, this can make for some dry prose. However, Noor herself is a heroine to the writer, who sees her as a brave and gentle soul who followed the dictates of her conscience. This creates an interesting tension in the writing. On one hand it almost reads like the research notes of a diligent graduate student– quite often we find out the exact date and wording of a banal memo, coupled with hagiographic asides about Noor’s patriotic feelings. This has a curiously flattening effect, especially in the first part of the book which deals with Noor’s childhood and adolescence. We get the relevant facts about the Inayat Khans and Noor, but it doesn’t add up to a complete picture. One senses that the Inayat Khans are a brilliant family who have to deal with an uncertain financial situation, and depend on the goodwill of their followers to be able to live. Indeed, their home in Paris, Fazal Manzil was donated to them by a rich Dutch aristocratic follower of the Sufi order. This is not a typical bourgeousie family.

By all accounts, Noor’s family was an unusual one, probably more so by virtue of the era, when a mixed race family of musicians and Sufi teachers must have brought its own baggage of being held in high esteem in some quarters, and viewed with suspicion in others. But its hard to get a sense of what it was like to be such a family in that particular time. Perhaps, in the interest of keeping the book focussed on Noor, Basu does not provide the sort of context which would be required to get such an insight. She performs her role as a writer as one who reports back to us only what she could tangibly observe, rather than as a social scientist who can bring in other strands of knowledge to help us see things in a new way. Or a documentary writer who sticks to the “facts” but nevertheless understands the imperatives of narrative.

In all of this, Noor herself disappears. She emerges more or less a paragon of virtue. A dutiful daughter, loving to a fault; a diligent student with an artistic bent. We don’t really get a sense that she is a complicated person, with contradictions. To be fair, it is hard to get to know Noor, who doesn’t seem to have left too many clues about her internal life. And with so many people who were close to her now dead, it is difficult to actually fathom her motives and feelings. Especially glaring, is the opacity of one of the most important romantic attachments in Noor’s life, to a Romanian Jewish musician and fellow student. The only thing we learn about him is that he had the surname Goldman. Noor’s family disapproved of the relationship and apparently it was a source of great stress to her. Basu is very careful to not say anything that might be construed as being critical about the family, probably in deference to Noor’s brother and nephews who made their family papers available to her. So the tone of the writing may be very objective, but it ends up not being very revealing.

The book picks up during the war years. The writers fondness for bureaucratic minutae serve the book well when describing the working of the covert Special Operations Executive (SOE). They seem to have left enough of a paper trail to demonstrate their incompetence and amateurishness. If you are fond of reading memos and bureaucratic entries, this section is actually pretty exciting. Through cumulative detail, Basu manages to convey the danger and drudgery of covert operations during the war. She is able to throw into sharp relief Noor’s bravery and intelligence. It seems that though Noor was a talented and smart radio operator, she was not well suited to spy work. She could be careless of her personal safety, was liable to leave her code book lying around, and was hopeless at dealing with the simulated interrogation she was put through. Being a radio operator was one of the most dangerous jobs during the war, since the likelihood of detection was very high. Despite this, the shortage of radio operators in enemy territory prompted the SOE to send Noor to France, before she was quite ready.

Despite her unsuitability to be a spy, Noor performed her duties with success and dedication. In the end, she was betrayed to the Gestapo. Noor tried to escape on several occasions and was ultimately deported to Dachau. After suffering the horrors of solitary confinement, being chained, starved and beaten, Noor was executed in 1944.

Noor Inayat Khan is a difficult subject. She remains elusive, all we are left of her are a mosaic of details that hopefully focus into a gestalt.

The crisis was precipitated when East Pakistanis (who later became Bangladeshis) voted overwhelmingly in favour of autonomy and West Pakistan responded by sending in its army.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, including Hindus, political activists, intellectuals and students. The Pakistani army carried out “collective punishment” where they suspected villagers of helping the freedom fighters.

Thousands of women were raped, millions fled into India. Bangladeshis say the killings amounted to a genocide and that three million people died.

Sometimes one can pin-point the exact moment one’s sense of self and the world changes irrevocably. Reading about that war was a moment like that. I must have been about ten, and it dawned on me that the world could be an anonymously cruel place. I did not know what the words ‘rape’ or ‘massacre’ meant, but it didn’t matter. The horror of 1971 was hard-wired into my brain.

I had an occasion to recall that feeling on reading about an effort in Bangladesh to prosecute perpetrators of the atrocities for war-crimes. One of the main organizations behind this effort is the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee, which is pressuring the Government of Bangladesh to go over its documents, gathered over 19 years and prosecute those responsible. Interestingly, many of the people it wants to be brought to justice are those who collaborated with the Pakistani army in the massacres:

In one of the most notorious incidents of the war, more than 150 academics and journalists (including BBC reporter Nizamuddin Ahmed) were rounded up in Dhaka on the eve of Pakistan’s defeat and killed by members of a group call Al-Badr, which was allegedly made up of members of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a coalition partner in the present government, so this is a very large skeleton rattling in its cupboard. And true to form, as things go in these circumstances, Dr. Hassan, one of the organizers of the movement, has received death threats for his trouble.

To find out more about this particularly dark period in Bangladesh’s history look at the Bangladesh Genocide Archive. I didn’t quite have the stomach to go through it. Wikipedia has a good entry about the war and its political and cultural context.

The article is a butchered version of the original — all the significant details have been taken out. Read the original underneath:

At a Demos fringe event during the Lib Dem conference, a handful of us pondered the question of identity in multicultural Britain. Diverse panelists came to pleasing agreement that people had multiple identities. We rejected New Labour’s quasi-American model of Britishness, with its flags on the lawn, national days, and monolithic ‘British story’.

Luckily, this genial consensus soon came to an end. As we spoke of opening up cultural categories, a familiar canard soon made its inevitable appearance. Voiced in eminently reasonable tones, it goes like this: British liberals respect individual choice and Other Cultures. But what happens when these cultures reject the core Western liberal value, the Equality of Women? It’s a frequently asked ‘genuine question’. I heard it most recently from an American woman who deplored Bush but feared that Islam would end the wearing of bikinis (which apparently symbolizes the achievements of Western liberalism).

Now, a great many women (and men) from outside the enlightened Western world also believe passionately in the equality of women. No ‘moral relativists,’ we have successfully countered Hindu chauvinists, Islamists, Syrian Christian clerisy, Sikh zealots and Catholic fundamentalists, not to mention sundry secular manifestations of sexism. In India, the women’s movement has challenged innumerable practices that patriarchs deem essential to a particular ‘culture,’ including unfair divorce and inheritance laws, female foeticide, and sexual violence (including marital and sex worker rape). In Pakistan, women’s activists have fought discriminatory Hudood ordinances and in Egypt, campaigned for reproductive rights and against clitoridectomy. In practice, culture has always been a battleground between authoritarian and progressive forces, not a clearly defined static object, whatever patriarchs of various ideological hues would have us believe. There is no such thing as an entire culture that unanimously believes in inequality- just powerful forces within them that do.

The insistence that human rights, equality and freedom are Western concepts to be defended against the incursions of Others or somehow bestowed on them (as suggested, for instance, by the Euston manifesto) relies, apart from double standards on colonialism and occupation, on a continued and convenient deafness to resistant voices from outside Judaeo-Christian contexts. (Except when the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali concoct a suitable story of oppression and liberatory flight to the West). This, ironically, makes such self-proclaimed liberals useful collaborators for authoritarian chauvinists from outside the West. For they are all in curious agreement that women’s equality is a Western concept and call for it, accordingly, to be either enforced (that’s why we sent in the troops) or rejected (keep her secluded). They are ably assisted by a minority on the left who regard sexism and homophobia as markers of legitimate cultural difference.

That they are not. Women from non-Western cultures have long mounted their own challenges to patriarchal subjection, even before John Stuart Mill denounced the ‘legal subordination of one sex to the other’. In India, women learned self-assertion and the rejection of injustice not from him but from medieval female Hindu poets like Mirabai and Akkamahadevi, and fierce Tarabai Shinde who in 1882 wrote a stinging denunciation of male double standards. Early 20th century Muslim women like Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Ismat Chughtai and Rashid Jahan attacked a range of injustices including seclusion, disinheritance, lack of reproductive choice and illiteracy. They also taught Western feminism that women’s subjection could not be endorsed in convenient isolation from race, caste and class oppression. They wrote critically on matters such as the niqab, apparel that is far from widely embraced in all Muslim societies and one that has always been the subject of debate rather than a simple expression of ‘culture.’ Nowhere, even in these societies, has there been consensus that denying women access to education, work, health and dignity is an expression of ‘culture’.

The talismanic invocation of women’s equality as the key difference between Us and Them is worrying. Apart from the simple hypocrisy of people whose own societies have yet to fully address systemic gender, race and class inequalities, there is a long, dismal history of using the ‘subjection of women’ to justify cultural condescension and colonial occupation. ‘White men rescuing brown women from brown men’ is how scholar Gayatri Spivak describes the attendant fantasy. An anti-war British woman once told me that she was, nevertheless, glad that Iraqi women could now go to school!

Gender inequality no more inheres to non-Western cultures than to European cultures, notwithstanding scriptures and clerics. Like all cultural practices, it is an historical phenomenon subject to human intervention and transformation. Western cultures not have a monopoly on change. Suggesting that ‘other’ cultures are inherently and immutably sexist on the basis of select practices and ideologues is no different from claiming that Western culture or Christianity is inherently racist because of colonialism, apartheid, the British National Party, or indeed, images of foul darkness in the Bible or Shakespeare. Oddly, the same people who defensively insist that racism must be understood in its historical context cannot extend that analysis to gender inequality elsewhere.

Brutal patriarchal thugs and ideologues who seek to control women’s minds and bodies are just that, whoever and wherever they may be. They can and should be fought as such, like the doughty Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) did, at great risk, for many years before Bush played feminist. Claiming sole Western ownership of the concept of women’s equality robs such women of their struggles, their victories and, ultimately, their dignity.

Balthazar Napolean de Bourbon, a lawyer in Bhopal seems to be the next in line to inherit the throne of France. From the Guardian:

Prince Michael of Greece, the cousin of Prince Philip, this week published a historical novel called Le Rajah de Bourbon, which traces the swashbuckling story of Mr Bourbon’s first royal ancestor in India. Prince Michael believes Jean de Bourbon was a nephew of the first Bourbon French king, Henry IV. In the mid-16th century Jean embarked on an action-packed adventure across the world which saw him survive assassination attempts and kidnap by pirates to be sold at an Egyptian slave market and serve in the Ethiopian army.

In 1560, he turned up at the court of the Mogul emperor Akbar. It was the beginning of a long line of Bourbons in India, who centuries later would serve as the administrators of Bhopal and become the second most important family in the region.

These days the Bourbons live a respectable middle class life and the very down to earth Mr. Bourbon:

….is aware that his family’s fortunes waned in Bhopal long ago. He describes the Indian branch of the family as Bourbons on the rocks.

Dalit poet Parak sang a couplet to the portrait – a refashioned Statue of Liberty, wearing a hippie hat, holding a massive pink pen, standing on a computer, with a blazing map of India in the background – Oh, Devi Ma/ Please Let us Learn English/ Even the dogs understand English, to cheers and laughter, even as Lord Macaulay’s portrait, looking the perfect English buccaneer, gazed below.

Alas, I haven’t been able to find an image of the portrait. Prasad’s reveres Macauley because:

…his insistence to teach the “natives” English broke the stranglehold of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic teaching, a privilege of only the elite castes and, he argued,for the European kind of modern education, with focus on modern sciences. “Imagine, if we had only followed indigenous study,’’ said Bhan, “we would be like Afghanistan or Nepal today.’’……“Today, English-speaking Dalits and Adivasis are less disrespected, therefore, empowered by Goddess English, Dalits can take their place in the new globalised world.’’

An interesting contrast to the view of Hindu Nationalists, for whom “Macaulay’s Children” is a favored insult for members of the English speaking Indian intelligentsia:

They are not real people, but zombies programmed by Macaulay to act like the Caliban, the slave.

Much as I enjoy the irony of using Shakespeare to advance the Hindutva agenda, I am much more inclined to sympathize with Ashis Nandy who seems to have had a jolly time at the party:

“I certainly do not agree with some of Bhan’s thesis,’’ said an aghast Nandy, “but I certainly support every oppressed community or individual’s right to pick up any weapon, be it political, academic or intellectual incorrectness, to fight the establishment. It’s the sheer audacity of it that makes it so forceful.’’

Many historians who call themselves “postcolonial” have taken it for granted that colonial rule was always evil and colonialist motives always bad.

From this complaint he goes on to describe Jasnoff arguement as being:

Empires tend to be inclusive, especially as they expand; their borders are porous, above all the cultural ones…

In service of refuting a “fundamental” postcolonial belief that “people cannot cross borders: they are either the colonialists or the colonized, the oppressors or the victims.” The evidence that Jasnoff presents is an account of Europeans who collected Indian Art and “went native,” specifically in Lucknow. I am not an academic, so I think I can freely say, “What crap.” So a bunch of Europeans crossed boundaries and got themselves a couple of Indian wives and Persian names, could the same be said of Indians who might have gone to England? Even a simple reading of Kipling’s Kim makes it clear that Kim, insofar as his whiteness goes, can cross boundaries at will, but the same privilege is not accorded to Hurree Babu, who is a believer in the Imperial project, despite being a somewhat comical but courageous figure, whose greatest ambition is to be a member of the Royal Geographic Society. Or to take a current example, when I had to go to the UK for our research trip, I had to exhibit every little bit of my life to the authorities to assure them that I was going to be free of disease and financially solvent, and thus worthy of entering ye olde England. What is more, when I came back, they asked our friend who wrote me a letter of invitation whether I had actually visited her as planned. What sort of visa did they have when they appeared on India’s shore I’d like to know. Apparently crossing boundaries, including political ones is a different story for different people.

The review ends with:

Historians who are interested in the people who make history are usually better writers than those who prefer theories. And Jasnoff is certainly a fine writer. She delights in scenes form the past; she knows how to describe the sights and smells of an eighteenth century bazaar as well as the personalities of her art collectors. She can visualize and imagine history, as well as study it in the archives and the seminar room, and this makes her book a particularly valuable account of the realities of empire.

The man may as well use the “e” word. If I wanted smells from my history books, especially a particular kind of smell, I’d read M.M. Kaye, not history. And God forbid anybody actually thinking about what they are studying, it would just make them “too theoretical.” Like those, oh so awful, Postcolonial theorists who are destroying the fabric of good scholarship with their pig headed interventions. Gilmour and Jasnoff both insist that they are not suffering from Imperial nostalgia. I am not so sure that its not the case (The same issue of NYRB has a very favorable review of Niall Ferguson’s new book, which seems to be about how bad it is when Empires crumble, because lots of people get killed. Never mind the fact that lots of people get killed over a long period of time when an Empire is being built and maintained.)

In all fairness though, Jasnoff’s book could be interesting, including the second half that describes how the Anglo-French rivalries played out in the subcontinent and the role of the invasion of Egypt in 19th century history. So I hope if anybody reads the book they’ll write something about it. I’d be curious to know more. Even if from the review it looks like there is a willful ignorance of the complexity of what postcolonial scholars have written, or maybe they are just mad that Europeans are not at the center of every inquiry.

“Rickshaws are almost as common in India as they are in China. Some of the…troops are on their way to see `Tarzan’s New York Adventure’—in India…”

African American soldiers going to see a Tarzan film in Calcutta. What can you say about that? It was interesting to find this in conjunction with the rumbles about the new Clint Eastwood film about the battle for Iwo Jima, where the absence of Black soldiers has been noticed by those who took part in it, like Sgt. McPhatter:

…almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter…..”Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you never see a black face,” said Mr McPhatter. “This is the last straw. I feel like I’ve been denied, I’ve been insulted, I’ve been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism.”

And here is a tidbit about the newsreel footage from that time, from auhor Melton McLaurin:

“One of the marines I interviewed said that the people who were filming newsreel footage on Iwo Jima deliberately turned their cameras away when black folks came by….

In 2000, the UK Government announced a compensation of £10,000 to British civilians interred during the war, as a ‘debt of honor.’ However:

Several months after details of the scheme were published, the government decreed that claimants should show a ‘blood link’ with this country

Which disqualified the 83 year old Diana, because her parents are of Indian and Iraqi heritage and she was born in Hong Kong, . Apparently she was British enough to be interred, but not British enough to receive a ‘debt of honor.’ In 2005, she took her case to the Parliamentary Ombudsman and received her compensation. You can listen to Diana on BBC radio regarding the case.
Diana is now pursuing the case in court to get the Ministry of Defense to acknowledge that the blood-link rule is racist, and among other things apologize.

You can read parts of her witness statement here.

Babii Yar

No monument stands over Babii Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Now I seem to be
a Jew.
Here I plod through ancient Egypt.
Here I perish crucified, on the cross,
and to this day I bear the scars of nails.
I seem to be
Dreyfus.
The Philistine
is both informer and judge.
I am behind bars.
Beset on every side.
Hounded,
spat on,
slandered.
Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace
stick their parasols into my face.
I seem to be then
a young boy in Byelostok.
Blood runs, spilling over the floors.
The bar-room rabble-rousers
give off a stench of vodka and onion.
A boot kicks me aside, helpless.
In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.
While they jeer and shout,
“Beat the Yids. Save Russia!”
some grain-marketeer beats up my mother.
O my Russian people!
I know
you
are international to the core.
But those with unclean hands
have often made a jingle of your purest name.
I know the goodness of my land.
How vile these antisemites–
without a qualm
they pompously called themselves
“The Union of the Russian People”!
I seem to be
Anne Frank
transparent
as a branch in April.
And I love.
And have no need of phrases.
My need
is that we gaze into each other.
How little we can see
or smell!
We are denied the leaves,
we are denied the sky.
Yet we can do so much–
tenderly
embrace each other in a dark room.
They’re coming here?
Be not afraid. those are the booming
sounds of spring:
spring is coming here.
Come then to me.
Quick, give me your lips.
Are they smashing down the door?
No, it’s the ice breaking…
The wild grasses rustle over Babii Yar.
The trees look ominous,
like judges.
Here all things scream silently,
and, baring my head,
slowly I feel myself
turning gray.
And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The “Internationale”, let it
thunder
when the last antisemite on earth
is buried forever.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage, all antisemites
must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!

(Translated by George Reavey)

About 30,000 Jews were killed over a period of 48 hours in the ravine of Babii Yar, and later 60,000 Roma, Soviet POWs and other “undesirables” were slaughtered at the same spot.

I suppose the poem could work just as well for Delhi 1984 and Gujarat 2002.