Book Review | Shadows At Noon: Battle to reaffirm control over India’s national narrative

Joya Chatterji’s (JC) oversized tome, Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Penguin-Random House, 2023), is a weighty contribution to the intensifying battle to reaffirm control over India’s national narrative. JC’s book portends to become the standard reference work on India, included in its university history and humanities curricula and recommended as essential reading to IAS and IFS trainees. It ranges somewhat awesomely over a huge expanse of issues, from colonial history, politics and eating habits to religion, films, leisure and a great deal more. One cannot but admire the author’s daunting stamina and some of her book can be read profitably. However, assessing JC’s book conscientiously, one cannot but feel troubled by its orientation and perspectives on India, its people and civilisation. Joya Chatterji offers a fundamentally biased and distorted view of the history of the Indian subcontinent. Although my review essay scrutinizes her arguments in some detail, its focus is on contentions that especially dismay rather than being a survey of the narrative of the book in the sequence in which she marshals her material. With its studied propaganda about essential questions ‘Shadows at Noon’ has the imprimatur of Cambridge and Penguin to sway the ill-informed and inevitably mislead the naïve reader. It is quite ideologically sophisticated and almost as nuanced as the assiduously marketed book on India’s Islamic conquests by Richard M. Eaton’s ‘India in the Persianate Age 1000-1765’. Both books only need to be supplemented by Tirthankar Roy’s apologetics about the intervening historical period of colonial British servitude, from 1765 to 1900, in order to fully usurp India’s agonised thousand-year history by a self-congratulatory colonial narrative. The 780 pages of ‘Shadows at Noon’s’ rambling actual text are organised into seven chapters and an epilogue, which discusses overlapping issues and its historical chronology is not sequential. It quickly struck me how JC’s work vividly demonstrates, once again, how India remains, in many important respects, an occupied country, with much of its intellectual life and consciousness of its very selfhood still under foreign hegemony. JC’s book, aimed at an uninitiated popular audience is a reconfirmation of Indian intellectual vassalage. This predicament reminds me that India merely acquired Dominion status in 1947, its armed forces were commanded by Englishmen until the mid-1950s and its prime minister was the product of a British public school and Cambridge.It may be expedient to begin the review with Joya Chatterji’s concluding parts dealing with the most recent period, which will especially interest readers. Her assiduous concern for Pakistan is immediately revealed with her abbreviated discussion of the critical issue of the Durand Line. In reality, Pakistan only actually means the Punjabi military caste that controls its economy, society, and bureaucracy and has ruled it with the support of the Anglo-American masters of the universe. She fails to mention that the Durand line is not merely disputed, as she puts it genially, but is now the occasion for military clashes between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Ironically, Pakistan earlier regarded Afghanistan merely as a space for its make-believe strategic depth in defence rather than a fully sovereign nation. Joya Chatterji is apparently uneasy about the Indo-Bangladesh border being fenced, although an estimated thirty million Bangladeshis have already entered India illegally, along with terrorists and couriers of counterfeit currency. India is the only country in the world about which such mindless drivel is peddled on spurious humanitarian grounds. JC’s tortured unrealism about a shared subcontinental destiny unfolds unstoppably, heedless of the blind hatred even Pakistani schoolchildren express for India. In a forlorn effort to create national identity and unity, Pakistan cynically brainwashes its children with degraded religious instruction while Indian children animatedly talk science, but JC speaks of the fragile nationhood of both India and Pakistan. She rejects any presumption of distinctive Indian and Pakistani identities as ‘hyperbolic’ and the perception of a ‘glass half full’. JC’s maudlin sentimentality about subcontinental cultural commonality persists throughout and she describes its severing by partition as an example of Deborah Levy’s pedestrian idea that ‘sorrow does not have a century’. Other examples of even greater tragedy have occurred around the world during the twentieth century, even in recent decades, not least in the Congo and Rwanda where the scale of fratricidal killings has been unprecedented. Pakistan, as a nation, has proven a demonstrably artificial geopolitical construct and is now on its knees while the people of the other country are rediscovering their ancient civilizational roots together to literally reach for the stars. At some point, JC proceeds to make a remarkably inappropriate remark about ‘war talk’ in relation to Bangladesh being liberated by India from intensifying genocide. Joya Chatterji’s account of the J&K dispute could have been the handiwork of a disingenuous lawyer on behalf of Rawalpindi and inaccurate to a fault, which is discussed further below in the review. More to the point, the matter is now closed and there is no purpose in revisiting the erroneous historical facts she cites. Nor does JC want to believe that Pakistan attempted to occupy Indian territory in Kargil in 1999 or that its army was bloodily ejected by India, despite public acknowledgement by retired Pakistani army officers (p. 739). There is no discussion of Pakistan’s terror attacks on India, continuing unremittingly from 1947 to this day. JC virtually dismisses the unprecedented terror attack against Mumbai in 2008 merely ‘as young men engaged in suicide killings’ and ignores the attempt by Pakistani terrorists to decapitate India’s entire political leadership in 2001. The Indus Water Treaty signed in 1960, JC mentions, between India and Pakistan was an act of generosity on India’s part. But the excess water flowing into Pakistan since, beyond levels agreed levels in the treaty, may now be in jeopardy because India is likely to reclaim it. However, India has a wider national interest in upholding the treaty faithfully and has signed another one with Bangladesh as well. The implementation of the important subsequent Teesta River Water Sharing agreement between them has been held up by the government of West Bengal. In this context, it needs to be recognised that a significant aspect of the J&K dispute involves access to water resources of great significance for Pakistan. This is why it will never agree to the creation of an independent state of J&K, so much for the mournful handwringing by motivated historians about the sanctity of sovereignty. Although India and Pakistan reached an agreement on many issues that arose out of partition through a Steering Committee they created, JC laments the absence of Indian eagerness to help Pakistan become stably established. This is hardly surprising after the cataclysmic partition and Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s nefarious role in it. The reasons for India’s hesitancy in handing over Pakistan’s share of undivided India’s foreign exchange reserves are elaborated below. JC refers to the callous outcomes imposed by unforgiving circumstances owing to partition, mass migrations, the abduction of women, the fate of religious places and evacuee property. She seems to applaud the disturbing bonhomie between senior Pakistani and Indian bureaucrats involved in the Steering Committee discussing these issues. They were apparently not unduly distressed by the horrors of partition, socialised no doubt by their antecedent Raj training to remain indifferent towards the suffering of ordinary people. The violence in the North was mutual while its brunt was borne by Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan. They were slaughtered in large numbers and lost property and investments and professional livelihoods. Left-liberal historians might view such violence against these Hindus as motivated by class antagonism towards wealth and privilege, much as they do in their portrayal of the Moplah genocide and sexual violence as a revolt against oppressive landlords. The artfully tendentious tone of JC’s book is unmistakable early, with a veiled reference to subcontinental minorities who could ‘never prove their allegiance to the nation, whatever they did’. This assertion has no basis in fact since Pakistan’s constitutional provisions specifically exclude Hindus from public life and they were also rapidly liquidated as a populace. By contrast, India’s Muslims only grew in number and Indians also reverentially embraced any Muslim showing the slightest signs of patriotism, whether the former Indian President A.P.J. Kalam, India’s missile man, or the courageous archaeologist, K. K. Mohammed. But historical writing about India is overwhelmingly dominated by a collaborationist Left-Liberal narrative of colonial inspiration. This kind of contrived historical depiction had deepened with malice and forethought by the third quarter of the nineteenth century to outwit a recalcitrant Hindu majority, especially in Bengal. This instrumental ideological intellectual tradition was espoused enthusiastically in 1941 by Indian communist pen pushers and writers and subsequently by India’s benighted Left-Liberal academic cohort everywhere, especially its historians. The Left still espouses a belief in the now discredited idea of universal history that is supposedly destined to transcend all ancient heritages though they have been careful not to probe its potential in Islamic societies. More mundane has been their shamefully longing gaze towards Oxbridge and the American Ivy League, hankering for even a seminar invitation. These hallowed portals abroad have since been stormed by a breed of alarmingly ideological nominally Hindu academic appointees, staunchly loath to bite the hand it feeds off. Three among them are women Cambridge historians, suffused with loathing towards India and its Hindu aspirations. There are also others of Oxbridge and Ivy League pedigree, with no empathy for Hindu yearnings, which they abhor. In the meantime, Joya Chatterji speaks breezily of the shared unity of languages of the peoples of South Asia without irony since the attempt to impose Urdu broke the camel’s back of supposed subcontinental Muslim unity. It precipitated the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 to the accompaniment of genocidal bloodletting and mass rape by the Punjabi Muslim army of Hindu girls and women and their Bangladeshi co-religionists as well. The Pakistani soldiery sought to impregnate the wombs of fellow Muslims with proper future adherents of the faith. Joya Chatterji who demonizes defenders of Hindu interests astounds by cavalierly sidestepping such major human rights violations against them. But she worries about the nationalist fervour in India during the war that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, but does not dwell on the killing of millions of Bengali civilians. JC only mentions the 350,000 or more women held in terrifying rape camps in passing, with some odious non sequitur artifice about ‘gendered representation’ of violence. Women’s clothing was also discovered inside roadside bunkers where Pakistani soldiers apparently pleasured themselves at leisure while awaiting the advancing Indian army. As a friend of the late Lt. General JFR Jacob, I had firsthand accounts of quite ghastly discoveries of the Indian army and this is the Pakistan depicted with empathy in Joya Chatterjee’s repugnant retelling of the creation of Bangladesh. These are apparently issues that do not unduly trouble Left-liberal humanitarian souls and have, on the contrary, been denied altogether by one Indian woman writer, a Subhas Bose family scion. She quickly found a desirable berth at Oxford University on penning her shocking apologia for Pakistan’s soldiery. This is what passes for path-breaking scholarship according to the likes of Harvard’s Rana Mitter, Robert Frykenberg of Wisconsin-Madison and of course the irrepressible advocate of Pakistan, William Dalrymple. The internal politics and loyalties of the global academic ecosystem of India-baiters endure heedless of the dignity of intellectual integrity. Yet, it is noteworthy that all Indian governments have deferred to this pernicious ecosystem, overawed by its international credentials and ostentatiously grand European ethnicity since their own knowledge of the grim history of these institutions and their cynical personnel is lacking. Joya Chatterji absurdly judges her experiences at Cambridge, supping with Pakistani counterparts who shared the same cuisine, and eating habits, using the same paring knives to cut onions and watching cricket together. She preposterously mentions their apparent shared admiration for the ‘doosra’ cricketing bowling technique. Yet, Joya Chatterji later dwells at great length on the defining role of highly complex dietary rules and eating habits creating profoundly differentiated Hindu-Muslim cultural identities and the Muslim resolve in resisting the Hindu Brahmin vegetarian diet. In JC’s account, Muslims apparently also always satisfied a craving for meat, however poor and disregard other Hindu injunctions related to satvik, rajsik and tamsik qualities of food. In addition, Muslims choose to adorn the distinguishing attire of the lungi to assert their distinctive identity (p.563–65). They also ignore the mandatory Hindu disavowal of any food polluted by another’s saliva, which therefore becomes ‘jhoota’ as a result. They partake from the same platter, forming a primordial sense of battleground communal bonding through the practice. JC deems such commensality as more democratic than alleged Brahmin modes of serving food sequentially, in accordance with alleged status hierarchies. Nevertheless, JC insinuates that despite such differences in food habits and social culture, inborn attachments and intimate interaction apparently once existed in the Indian subcontinent between Hindus and Muslims, the Moplah genocide, Noakhali massacres and Great Calcutta Killings notwithstanding. What is shocking is JC’s idea that the alleged phenomenon of such interactive neighbourliness suffices to create deep bonds of amity among people. Unfortunately for her puerile argument, it is the very Muslim neighbours that turned viciously against Hindus in Bengal and Punjab in 1947, Kashmir in 1991 and, more recently, the Yezidis of Iraq. This deeply unhistorical contention would also suggest that Jews had nothing in common with their fellow Germans and Eastern Europeans. Many of them were enthusiastic slaughterers of their Jewish neighbours in Poland, the Ukraine and Lithuania. Nor did the Croatian Ustasa, speaking the same language and eating the same food, have any compunction killing Serbs and Jews en masse during WWII, with a brutality that even shocked German Nazis. This is the parlous state of historical writing on the Indian subcontinent with the usual suspects praising JC’s recurrent juvenile contentions in breathless reviews. Other non-sequiturs of JC leave one gasping for breath: “An Englishwoman’s romantic liaison with an ‘untouchable’ sweeper questions the much-vaunted ‘super-racism’ of white women in India, while also shedding light on the lives and experiences of Dalits.” Is this being insinuated as the norm by which to judge the widely acknowledged racism of white English women of empire that thoroughly poisoned social relations in the Raj between Indians and their alien rulers? Notices used to be hung in a Bengaluru club entreating white British members not to beat native Indians, suggesting such appalling behaviour was not uncommon. JC persists with the totally fabricated idea that after 1947 India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh experienced similar sociopolitical trajectories of creating enforced identities when this is patently false. India’s Nehruvian elites bent over backwards, with a portfolio of legislation to appease and reassure India’s Muslims. Their population size has since grown inexorably, poised to become a majority in West Bengal and Assam through illegal migration. By contrast, Hindus and other minorities in India’s two theocratic neighbours were mostly extinguished and destined to be wiped out completely. Quite hilariously, one of her Oxford academic colleagues once demanded, in a BBC debate with me, that India should open its doors wide to ‘persecuted Muslims’ from Pakistan. This evidently unbalanced interlocutor also supported, in the bargain, the Shaheen Bagh protesters who thwarted the accord of citizenship to persecuted Sikhs and Hindus who had fled to India. Instead of imposing any sort of uniform citizenship India’s federal structure has sought, instead, to institutionalize parochial regional identities, with critical aspects of policy decisions, on subjects like education, devolved to individual state governments. India’s constitution also grants extensive privileges to Muslims and Christians to manage their own religious and pedagogic institutions, allowing discrimination against Hindus while enjoying generous state funding. Worse, JC’s self-willed ignorance or deliberate obscuring of reality fails to refer to the ample documentary evidence of Pakistan’s creation as a British geopolitical goal and its rule ever since by foreign-sponsored military dictators. Quite unbelievably, she describes Pakistan’s foreign policy as nonaligned and anti-imperialist, which is completely contrary to the facts. Pakistan was to become an Anglo-American vassal officially from the outset, with its membership of Seato and Cento in the 1950s. Pakistan has now effectively surrendered its sovereignty to China although their dalliance also dates back to the 1950s when China told Pakistan that its membership of the two US-sponsored alliances would not affect their relationship (p.741). Besides, its prime ministers, according to Pakistan scholar, Christine Fair, have been the equivalent of city mayors, irrelevant to the imperial powers which direct its fate. Joya Chatterji does reiterate the view of Indian nationalists about the hugely detrimental effect of colonial rule, from de-industrialization to famines. However, in the context of India’s independence struggle, she persists with the standard refrain about divisions between moderates and extremists within the Congress. This distinction is no longer credible and collaborators is a more accurate depiction of the so-called moderates. Such moderates, sensitive to the interests of the departing colonial power, have always enjoyed favourable portrayals by colonial historians. The conflation of Hinduism with upper caste that JC also insinuates has always been a colonial and evangelist slander to discredit the entire nationalist movement although she does acknowledge the racist vitriol of the white community fueling the revolutionary movement of Bengal. There was massive surveillance on virtually the entire Bengali middle class as well, impacting even the likes of Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore, which only spread deepening alienation further. Surprisingly, there is barely any analysis by Joya Chatterji of the revolutionary upsurge in Bengal after the early twentieth century that lasted into the late 1930s, with only a glancing reference to ‘revolutionary terrorist societies’ (p.54). According to the British authorities, it had spawned the ‘terrorist’ Subhas Bose, who was to become the principal raison d’etre of British withdrawal from India. JC’s distortions parallel the Cambridge School libel of her husband Anil Seal, et. al. He alleged the real motivation of the Congress Party was to gain privileges for India’s elites and amounted to little else besides. Both husband and wife subliminally articulate an Islamist view of the British colonial administration that had prompted it to calculatedly sponsor the creation of the Muslim League in 1906. This conspiracy was designed to counter an essentially Bengali Hindu revolutionary movement of the early twentieth century. According to JC, the Hindu cultural motifs of the independence struggle apparently account for Muslims mostly looking askance at Indian nationalism. Yet, she herself notes their deeply transnational Islamic political consciousness and loyalties, even as early as the nineteenth century. It was accompanied by dogged efforts to uphold obscurantist Islamic tradition and repudiation of English education. Even Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s modest attempts to expose his community to Western science and ideas were rejected. Paradoxically, the consequential obliviousness of Muslims to Western education later became the justification for the liquidation, en masse, of Hindu professionals in East Pakistan. They were accused of dominating the professions by virtue of their proficiency in English and Westernized educational qualifications. At the bottom, the Indian Muslim perceptual political universe therefore diverged radically from a specifically Indian nationalism. Indian nationalists were not contemplating the restoration of their erstwhile political primacy over the Indian subcontinent that Muslims sought. Joya Chatterji is loftily judgmental about the admittedly flawed subsequent Indian attempts at nation-building without some sympathy for the enormity of the task in a nation virtually destitute and reeling from the bloody chaos of partition. She is apprehensive about Indian nationalism as if it is a unique phenomenon in history rather than an unfortunate necessity in a world of predatory states, as Rabindranath Tagore had once astutely observed. Her jubilant denunciation of Indian nationalism as Hindu and upper caste begs the question on what other basis could Indians have challenged British rule if not by appeal to memories of their own historical and cultural roots and led by the educated? Joya Chatterji’s imperious observation that the demolition of the derelict Babri structure was a watershed moment in India and worse than 9/11, in which thousands of innocents died, seems to dismayingly endorse the view of diehard Islamic extremists. They too condemned the demolition of the turret and roof of the Babri structure as an unforgivable outrage. In their punitive outlook, the act merited the copious shedding of Hindu blood although it was merely a monument to Hindu degradation. Her odious contention could be mistaken for the implicit rationalization of countless acts of Islamic terrorism that followed in the wake of the demolition. These included the burning alive of pilgrims and their families on the Godhra train and the killing of worshippers at the Akshardham temple. JC later whitewashes the Moplah genocide as a rebellion against Hindu landlords despite a mountain of evidence underlining it was no such thing, but a typical Islamist outrage against the hated Kafir. In fact, her penchant for unashamed apologia for Islamism effectively constitutes a calculated obverse of the rejection of the entire legacy of Hindu civilisation and its modern protagonists, from Ram Mohan Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterji to Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda. It is worth recalling that it was the progenitor of the Bengali Hindu renaissance and India’s embarkation towards modernity, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who had knelt in prayer to thank the Almighty for the ending of Muslim rule in Bengal by Robert Clive. Significantly, JC celebrates India’s Muslim cultural and political legacy with some breathless adoration though disparaging the promotion of Hindi in independent India as ‘stuffed’ with Sanskrit. She even finds a moment to grieve the destruction of Shahajanabad and the Great Daryaganj Mosques in the aftermath of 1857, faded symbols of the grandeur of Mughal invaders who laid waste an entire civilisation. As a corollary, the Babri structure evidently ought to have been preserved unspoiled and the Ram Mandir must consequently be seen as an abomination. [caption id=“attachment_13282162” align=“alignnone” width=“515”] Joya Chatterji’s ‘Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century’ (penguin.co.in)[/caption] Equating India and Pakistan, engaging in apologia for Muslims Apart from gratuitously misrepresenting preeminent issues, Joya Chatterji puts forward serial colonial tropes about India without any authorial misgivings. The unhesitant legitimacy she accords to Dravidianism and the highly suspect EV Ramaswamy Naicker, the virulent slanderer of Hindus is straight out of the colonial playbook. Naicker did not want British rule to end and both Nehru and Ambedkar thought him fit for imprisonment. British policies created irresistible societal changes in Tamil status and identity and instituted deep societal fissures by forcing Brahmins into public service and the professions, in turn, prompting a backward caste backlash against their dominance in them. JC also repeats tired conventional certitudes about partition without recognising that although Muslims were indeed mobilised overwhelmingly in its favour by Jinnah and prominent clerics, the creation of Pakistan was ultimately a paramount British imperialist goal, pursued determinedly by the colonial office in London. A succession of Viceroys and British statesmen of all political hues used Mohammed Ali Jinnah to achieve British strategic aims in north-western India by establishing Pakistan. The Congress party, accused of being a Hindu movement, would not have facilitated these British aims in an undivided independent India. Much evidence of the cynical British conspiracy and an extremely bloody partition, highly convenient to the colonial administration, lies undisclosed at Southampton University. It holds the Mountbatten diaries for which the British government successfully fought an expensive High Court battle recently in London to deny access to the public. Lord Mountbatten had been warned repeatedly by his own senior official of the impending bloodletting on the eve of partition he but looked the other way. However, he and his wife Lady Edwina were to remain Jawaharlal Nehru’s valued friends and Lord Mountbatten was invited to remain as Governor General of India, adding insult to injury. This makes irrelevant JC’s unwavering contention about the failure of a compromise owing to an increasingly divided and secularised Congress, which had sought a sense of belonging to the nation to override communal identities. The alleged subversion of the possibility of a compromise between Hindus and Muslims by a supposed Hindu right wing, comprising Sardar Patel, Madan Mohan Malviya and Rajendra Prasad, has been demolished by historian Venkat Dhulipala in an amply footnoted published article. Her heartfelt sensitivity towards the irrefutably sectarian Mohammed Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whom Joya Chatterji admires to some excess for his alleged liberalism and pragmatism, is revealing. She misses no opportunity to show him in a luminous light, comparing him, in one stray comment, to the exceptional Hindu reformer, Mukund Ramrao Jayaker, the first VC of Pune University although Ishtiaq Ahmed has provided chapter and verse on Jinnah’s vindictive Jihadi instincts (p. 468). This kind of indefensible outlook is also proffered by Ayesha Jalal, another former supervisee of JC’s husband, Anil Seal, the disparager of India’s independence struggles. The global anti-Indian historian’s ecosystem embraced Ayesha Jalal’s appallingly parochial scholarship on India’s partition although it has now been debunked thoroughly by Ishtiaq Ahmed’s recent research and the path-breaking work of historian Venkat Dhulipala. But JC persists with equating India and Pakistan and the alleged similarity of the goals of Nehru and Jinnah, although one was the principal cause of the unprecedented bloodshed of partition. In stark contrast, Nehru had sought to submerge communal differences in a sense of common fate and shared goals to overcome India’s parlous economic predicament under exploitative colonial rule. JC has a bee in her proverbial bonnet about Nehru and Jinnah being liberals and alike in their politics and personalities. In 1946, the implacably Islamist Jinnah and his Muslim League had bloodcurdlingly threatened to unleash the horrors of Timur and Nadir Shah on Hindus if their demand for partition was not conceded. There is no record of such abominable sentiments of Nehru and only Jinnah and his successors sought to impose a single language on their people because the role of English has remained unchallenged in India. JC is outraged by the Evacuee Property Ordinance of 1949 and indignant that Jinnah’s Malabar Hill property was not restored to him, an indication of her intellectual migration to another planetary orbit and failure to grasp the enormity which had taken place in August 1947. Furthermore, Joya Chatterji’s endorsement of weighted communal electoral representation shows little cognition that such an alternative, in the context of India’s independence, would have entailed an abandonment of democratic constitutional governance. It would have sponsored instead a divisive confessionalism and an institutionalisation of communal loyalties that would eventually descend into civil war. The fruits of such willful political caprice are there to be seen in contemporary Lebanon. JC’s observations on the culpability for Calcutta’s communal violence during the 1940s, by eagerly naming Hindu leaders, is motivated by a desire to obscure the preeminent role of Muhammed Ali Jinnah and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the butcher of Bengal. This communal violence, initiated by Muslims, followed by Hindu retaliation, was intended to convince doubters in London that without partition, uncontrolled bloodshed would result. The researcher she cites on partition has provided a highly partisan account of events too, typical of the fraudulent Left-wing Bengali intelligentsia seeking greener pastures abroad, by peddling ideological stereotypes about India, required by Western chancelleries. Neither JC nor the researcher found it politic to mention that the bodies of naked Hindu women were hung from meat hooks in north Calcutta after the violence was openly facilitated by the Prime Minister of Bengal, Suhrawardy, with ample quantities of weapons and bombs supplied to the rioters after a massive public meeting. JC’s importunate hand-wringing on behalf of Muslims who fled India and are not being allowed to return is a truly jarring contrast to her apparent insouciance about what happened to the Hindus of East Pakistan. The worst sufferers of one-sided atrocities were Bengali Hindus, though major retaliation against Muslims occurred in Bihar. A million Bengali Hindus had been slaughtered in East Pakistan by 1950, in response to which Nehru cynically provided Pakistan political cover by signing the shameful Liaquat-Nehru pact. It prompted the resignation of his two Bengali Cabinet Ministers, Syama Prasad Mookerjee and K.C. Neogy. Mookerjee himself was cynically and calculatedly done to death by Sheikh Abdullah in 1953. Mookerjee’s mother, the widow of the renowned Calcutta University VC, Ashutosh Mukherjee, blamed his death on none other than Jawaharlal Nehru. So much for the liberal duo, Jinnah and Nehru, of JC’s ideological blinkers though Cambridge’s Left liberal Indologists possibly suffer dyscalculia, unable or unwilling to grasp the sheer scale of the horrors Hindus in East Pakistan suffered in the aftermath of partition. Their unending saga of death, destruction and, of course, the Muslim speciality of abducting Kafir womenfolk continues unabated. In one ghastly episode in October 1946, Gholam Sarwar’s Mayur Fauj presented the severed head of the President of the Noakhali Bar Association, Rajendra Lal Roy, to him. Roy’s two teenage daughters were taken as booty by the leaders of the assault in their home. Village after village was forcibly converted, Hindu men forced to wear skullcaps and grow beards, women stripped of their shankha and sindur, and forced to recite the Kalma. The most prominent Muslim leader of Noakhali had earlier made an incendiary speech in which he significantly singled out Hindu women by saying they were ‘light-skinned and pretty’ because they ate quality food produced by penurious Muslims, pointedly stipulating them as primacy targets. Ten months later, in the aftermath of partition, Hindu women in East Pakistan were being abducted for the night from their homes by Muslim gangs. Elsewhere, Hindu women in captivity fell on their knees, begging to be rescued if they had an opportunity to plead in private, with members of the official visiting committee. None of this is apparently worthy of the attention of perfumed High Table Cambridge School legatees, mute apologists for the horrors inflicted on hundreds of thousands of helpless Hindu Bengalis and their hapless womenfolk. JC’s unfathomable urge to engage in apologia for Muslims gets the better of her again and again and she shockingly describes the rape of women kidnapped during partition merely as ‘consummation’, consensual by implication (p. 401). This was the fate of Bengali Hindu women in East Pakistan repeatedly and in Bangladesh subsequently and persists to this day. It is worth reminding readers of the plaintive exclamation of a Bangladeshi Muslim woman who bewailed that the greatest curse for them was to be pretty. At the same time, JC remains insupportably forbearing of interfaith marriages, which largely means ‘liaisons’ between Hindu women and Muslim men. There is now a growing body of disquieting evidence and criminal prosecutions that Hindu women are frequently victims of instrumental capture, in what has come to be known as “love jihad”. Joya Chatterji also makes outlandish claims about measures allegedly demanded by the Hindus against Muslims remaining in India, in the aftermath of partition, ignoring the high emotions its carnage had provoked across the country. Most important of all, instead of any unjust punitive measures, everything was done to reassure Muslims. This is a process that continues to this day, with swingeing legislative favours for Muslims. They are also disproportionate beneficiaries of various government welfare schemes under the allegedly Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. By contrast, the Noakhali genocide and murder of a million Hindus in East Pakistan by 1950 is nowhere discussed, nor is the predicted extinction in Bangladesh of Hindu and other minority populations by 2050, although they were more than a third of the country in 1947. India’s Muslim population only grows and Hindus, Sikhs and Christians continue to flee Pakistan and Bangladesh. By contrast, India’s Muslims are not seeking refuge in the neighbouring Islamic Republics. JC also accuses Syama Prasad Mookerjee of proposing an invasion of Pakistan, which is an unabashed half-truth. In fact, both Mookerjee and Sardar Patel, a particular bête noire of Joya Chatterji, had demanded the establishment of safe areas for Hindus in East Pakistan and subsequently suggested military intervention to stop their mass murder in it. The events prompted the duplicitous Liaquat-Nehru Pact mentioned earlier. This is not an outrage that apparently agitates JC. She also describes the invasion of J&K by Pakistani tribesmen and army regulars as a ‘brief and contained’ war when its horrors, especially for abducted women, were to be burned into popular Kashmiri memory. These Kashmiri memories were the real reason why one Pakistani Prime Minister, Mohammed Ali, declined Nehru’s offer of a J&K plebiscite in 1954, fearing trouncing, even according to another apologist of Pakistan, historian Alistair Lamb. The assassination of MK Gandhi, who had become politically irrelevant by 1947, with hardly anyone paying attention to him, turned him into an eternal martyr. Gandhi’s funeral reinforced the legitimacy of the Congress party and endorsed Nehru’s hitherto less than unequivocal claim to primacy as the supreme political leader. The catalyst for Gandhi’s murder was his final act of blackmail against Hindus, threatening to fast unto death if India did not immediately hand over to Pakistan its share of India’s foreign exchange reserves. What Joya Chatterji avoids mentioning is that Nehru also opposed handing over the amounts due because he warned Pakistan would immediately use the foreign exchange to purchase arms for its ongoing invasion of J&K. That is indeed what duly happened. But the self-indulgent criminality of assassin Nathuram Godse ended the prospect of any onset of a genuine Hindu socio-cultural renaissance in India. Instead, it firmly embedded an inflammatory politics of Muslim appeasement in India’s political culture. This appeasement has included politicians hampering the investigation of impending acts of terrorism by security agencies and questioning their integrity. The President of Congress, Nehru’s Italian granddaughter-in-law, notoriously confessed to weeping when terrorists were killed in the Batla House police encounter, though not for the martyred police officer. Yet, JC continues to harp on threats posed to Indian Muslims by a mythical Hindu Right and airily derides Sardar Patel’s immense achievement of peacefully integrating India’s princely states into the Indian Union as signifying ‘browbeating and dragooning’. However, JC does get something right, perhaps inadvertently, which is to underline Nehru’s own chosen role, above all else, as the champion of India’s sectarian Islam. He had even threatened to abandon politics and commit himself to relief work in a Muslim refugee camp if Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Syama Prasad Mookerjee insisted on armed action to save Hindus in East Pakistan. A ridiculous anecdote about kindness to an ironing lady in the Kashmiri Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru household, who had burnt an expensive saree, is quoted as evidence of civility, with imputed Mughlai courtly echoes, of the highly cultured Sapru-Nehru clan (p.91). This indefinable civility possibly accounts for the revelation in his selected works that Prime Minister Nehru discussed Indian defence policy and strategy with his girlfriend, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, right up to her death. It is also in Bangladesh that pogroms against Hindus continue unabated to this day. JC equates reprisals against Razakaars for enthusiastic participation in horrendous crimes of 1971, as collaborators in the Pakistani army’s slaughter, with the murder of millions during the genocide itself. JC laments, at some length, the fate of Razakaar killers, who were subsequently held in camps around Dhaka after Pakistan refused to accept them. Instead, large numbers of them were subsequently allowed to enter West Bengal as a potential Islamo-communist vote bank. They were furnished illegal citizenship papers by India’s communists, the CPI(M), which then governed West Bengal, no doubt her ideological comrades. Equally outrageous is Joya Chatterji’s obnoxious lament at the removal of the Nizam of Hyderabad in Operation Polo and mourning for the murderous Hyderabadi Razakaars eliminated during it. This piece of malicious falsification is poised for shredding by a manifestly superior historian, who has sifted through a mountain of evidence regarding the evil ruler and the history of the statelet. The longstanding Anglo-American hope of installing some sort of vassal administration in New Delhi still views Indian Muslims as their essential key allies to achieve it, a ploy originally formulated in the nineteenth century, after the revolt of 1857, by the truculently sectarian Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. In addition, contemporary Anglo-American strategy incites assorted Indian criminalized caste political parties to inflame political divisions in India. Among the expedients deployed is unswerving patronage of academic research on caste issues to help sustain a broadened alliance, intellectually and politically, against Indian sovereignty. But at some point, JC does make a revealing comment about early twentieth-century colonial policies: “The ‘communities’ in twentieth-century India – not only ‘Muslims’ but others that have since emerged – are best understood as modern political coalitions created in this period” (p. 79). However, JC’s apparent casual commendation of the Pasmanda Mahaz Muslim demand for inclusion as caste reservation beneficiaries, along with Dalits, amounts to an ominous abetment of the final annihilation of Hindu society (p. 560). Such demands have long been the staple of sustained incitement, ultimately by Western intelligence agencies. They have sponsored political activism in its favour in India through their global evangelical assets and broader advocacy has been undertaken by conniving academics abroad (Cf. Phillip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, OUP, 2007). Today, Oxbridge remains the principal hub of anti-Indian politics in the United Kingdom, often supported by Indian largesse, both official and private. The Anglo-American conspiracy to perpetuate sectarian religious identities is designed to embed a compliant political constituency in India, as highlighted by the protests against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant by Christian front organisations on instructions, revealed by WikiLeaks, from the US consulate in Mumbai. The strategy is well thought out and has reached a crescendo in recent years in the Anglosphere. The politically motivated legal proscription of non-existent alleged caste discrimination abroad is the first step towards introducing comparable caste clauses in international organisations. They will then cite equality provisions in their charters to demand the extension of reservation quotas to all in India, i.e. non-Hindus. It will open the floodgates to religious conversion once the fear of losing reservation benefits, owing to abandoning Hinduism and its alleged discriminatory caste practices is eradicated in law, although that is happening covertly across India anyway. Britain had held down India by force of arms, especially after 1857, spending more than 40 per cent of Indian revenues collected to suppress the people from whom it was extracted. Taxation under the Raj remained unwieldy and inconsistent and the burden on the cultivator was unbearable. This was a critical reason for devastating famines, but that didn’t unduly perturb the Raj, which was only exercised if serious discontent was precipitated and revolt threatened. Another crime in the nineteenth century that permanently scarred India was the decimation of a huge swathe of its forests and the extermination of wildlife as vermin, which also ruined the lives of India’s sizeable community of forest dwellers. In the decades before its retreat, the malevolent colonial power also embarked on a devastating political and cultural scorched earth policy to divide and despoil India. Their perception of the situation on the ground had broadly paralleled that of India’s erstwhile Muslim rulers and the 1500 or so noble Muslim families that benefited from India’s prolonged military occupation. Yet, quite clearly, India had continued to revolt repeatedly, in some shape or form, against the prolonged foreign occupations. It was the British panic of succumbing to a fresh armed challenge in Bengal that eventually forced it to decamp in 1947. The British policy of implanting virulent caste and regional identities has haunted the Indian subcontinent since independence. They have subsequently been used with great zeal globally by adversarial foreign powers to denounce the alleged innate racism of Hindu Brahminical casteism. Nevertheless, JC tellingly avers “the deceptively simple process of asking Indians who they were” for the purpose of counting them (‘What is your religion? What is your caste? What is your language?’) transformed the ways in which religious, caste and regional identities emerged and came to express themselves, and became major forces shaping the politics of the twentieth century. The census rubbed away granularity and forced people into large communal categories that, a century ago, had little meaning. Likewise, the fact that most Indians were bilingual would have been lost in censuses that allowed one person only one language (p.288-9). In the words of India’s pioneering anthropologist, caste censuses gave it “a life it did not have”. India’s rule by mostly racist British ICS officers, who often hated being in India and Indians, only resulted in a futile attempt to supplant local custom and dispute resolution with an overarching framework of civil law and it all faltered miserably. It reduced Indians to deceitful and mistrusted supplicants and their frustrated British overlord became a superhuman, all-powerful overseer of hundreds of districts. But India provided them with the wealth they could not have dreamt of, in Britain, as the sons of modest clergy and even shopkeepers who had navigated the incomprehensibly misdirected exams to join the colonial ICS. To enable the British officer to exercise authority over the hapless Indian, “the late-colonial state developed an armoury of coercive techniques that went well beyond the rule of law, and indeed had little to do with it. Public flogging, collective fines upon villages, forced ‘flag marches’, crawling orders, firing on unarmed crowds and even aerial bombardment were illegal techniques by which the British ruled India” (p. 299). This is the past nostalgically recalled by some Indians and especially deracinated Bengalis, like Nirad Chaudhuri, despite their region suffering the most, directly and indirectly, in the hands of the British. India was ruled by befuddled conquerors (like Babur who hated India, enjoining he be buried in Afghanistan) with egregious cruelty. Its unmanageable corollary had been Hindu India’s descent into a chaotic atomized societal form once the integrity of its socioeconomic coherence and long-established cultural norms of village self-governance and wider political hierarchy had been devastated by conquerors. The reasons for the comprehensive annihilation of Indian civilisation are not far to seek. It was the consequence of the overriding interest of both the British and Muslim conquerors to extract the maximum taxes, which entailed maintaining their rule through tremendous brutality. JC portrays with some realism the daily experience of British rule and the role of Indian intermediaries, representing local British authority, and the complex sociocultural context of their relations with ordinary villagers. The distaste of the white British official for the ensuing administrative situation and its underpinning by harshness are underlined. Such was the callousness of British rule that the thirty million famine-recorded deaths in the 26 years before 1902 are only an estimate. As a result, the hunger suffered by many, especially Dalits at the bottom of the pile, even after forty years of Indian independence is heartrending. Yet, some situational context of the historical frequency of famines and the norm of hunger was necessary to avoid implying unjust condemnation of independent India and its efforts to tackle the evil of hunger (p.555). The inhumane reality had not been much better for indentured nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian labour abroad. Their experience was little short of modern slavery despite the deceitful British pretence of abolishing it. JC’s ample recognition of callous colonial realities is at odds with her persistent hostility towards the complex societal longings of independent India, its overwhelmingly Hindu culture and its practice of statehood in order to endure as a sovereign polity. An unsympathetic depiction of India The British Indian Army after 1857 had been recruited from India’s mountainous regions, Pathans, Punjabis and Nepalis who were to become the sword arm of Britain’s military power in India. The less substantive ties of these groups from remoter regions to the politics of the Indian heartland were intended to ensure they would be willing to chastise the wider population, uncontaminated by local resentments. In the context of inherited armed forces, Joya Chatterji outrageously draws a false equivalence on their domestic use by the subcontinent’s three national armed forces after independence. As someone who has counted some of India’s most senior generals as friends, I have usually been impressed by their professionalism and integrity and taken aback by their liberal worldview. But JC’s libelous equation of India’s military culture with Pakistan’s is understandable since she seems hell-bent on absolving the Punjabi Muslim Pakistani Army of mass murder and rape on an industrial scale in East Pakistan during 1971. It was Pakistani President Yahya Khan, the rampant sexual predator, who in conjunction with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had announced that killing three million Bangladeshis would make the others ‘eat out of your hand’. Joya Chatterji writes rather feelingly of India’s Islamic history and culture, without any allusion to the grim fate of Hindus under Islamic rule. The Mohammed Iqbal she admires was a bigot, consumed by jealousy at the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Rabindranath Tagore. Her contention that Jinnah was proficient in Urdu is an exaggeration because he needed a translator for his speeches in the Northwest frontier province. Her conviction that there were divisions within Islam between hardline Islamic ideologues, who were in fact influential generations before India’s partition, and an allegedly dominant relaxed local tradition of pirs, cannot withstand scrutiny either. The triumph of the former in Pakistan was entirely predictable and the nation’s search for religious purity impacted not just Hindus but non-Sunni Muslims and is entirely consistent with the basis for its creation. JC also tosses in the egregious falsity that the protection of Hindu minorities in Pakistan was an official government policy. It leaves one speechless at the shameless extent of her apologetics of serial kidnapping, rape of girls and the murder of Hindus in Pakistan (p. 151). In addition, the impulse to create a unitary nation by force and manipulation contradicted the claims of Islamic ideologues, like Jinnah, that Muslims were an inviolably idiosyncratic nation which had little in common with Hindus. It soon became clear that bonds of Islamic solidarity could not themselves hold Muslims of Pakistan together. In fact, Pakistan was synonymous with West Punjab, which dominated the Army, bureaucracy and politics, alienating every other regional ethnicity. Besides, JC has no understanding of geopolitics since the Western alliance calculatedly thwarted Pakistani democracy which might have hindered their control over the country. The descent into self-destructive Islamic radicalism, now devouring Pakistan, was the logical outcome of the rationale of its political and ideological foundations. It was the result of the heady admixture of the supremacy over it, of shockingly corrupt Anglo-American sponsored military dictatorships, most becoming dual nationals eventually, and the country’s creation on insanely sectarian religious mythologies. Pakistan is truly a case study of the inevitable corruption of unchecked absolute power and still unconsecrated religious identity. In an extended discussion of regionalism and linguistic politics in India, JC dismisses the Ramayana and Manusmriti as the Vedic texts merely prescribing ‘rules of caste order’. She denounces the policy of promoting Hindi spitefully, as ‘reeking’ of Sanskrit and Brahminism, implying an offensive aura. Although the attempt to promote Hindi indiscriminately was indeed misguided, her criticism is couched in idioms of revulsion for India’s past and its Brahmin custodians, which are routine colonial evangelical tropes. Later in her book, JC engages in an overlong discussion of Indian agricultural practices to produce food, its ritual preparation, alleged hierarchical culinary habits and their symbolic religious significance. She finds distasteful vegetarianism, eschewing meat, and casteism though not all Hindus do. However, vegetarianism is now coming to be regarded by many as sensible for personal health and compelling ecological reasons. There is also a deeper rationale for Hindu culinary culture, intended for the sustenance of body and mind, occupying a central place in Ayurveda, that deserves considered attention. Her anguished lengthy discourse on the class divisions underlying food production and consumption is not uniquely Indian and happens to be a universal global phenomenon. Yet, somewhat contradictorily, JC does recognise the fragile artificiality of caste identities, which were institutionalised by the instrumental politics of the British census. It has subsequently transformed into the bleak basis for dissipating any sense of a shared national destiny in post-independence India (p. 527). Not unexpectedly, Joya Chatterji does not really have empathy for the Hindu attribution of sacredness to the cow, a taboo that did originate gradually over time, though India continues to struggle with ensuring its benevolent treatment. Cow slaughter was banned during Emperor Humayun’s reign for pragmatic reasons and merited the death penalty in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom. Muslim conquerors also understood the religious significance of cows to Hindus and frequently desecrated Hindu temples and idols with cow carcasses and blood, including the Golden Temple on one occasion. Some Muslim religious writers even enjoined cow slaughter to demonstrate to Hindus their powerlessness and British colonisers took to consuming cow meat routinely. JC’s disquiet at India’s display of military prowess on Republic Day highlights her quaint ideological blinkers and ignorance of historical facts as well as distaste for India’s attempt to establish an identity. Joya Chatterji does not seem to understand the unavoidable imperative of spending on military preparedness, however ethically unwelcome, in a world of chronic state competition and violent conquest, which India was to encounter in 1962 and 1965. She seems blissfully unaware of the result of a lack of defence preparedness in 1962 for India and the urgency of the subsequent organisational reforms. They were ushered in by a great Bengali General, J. N. Chaudhuri, Chief of Staff, which saved Delhi in 1965. According to a General and friend of mine, who fought in 1965, the far-reaching reforms of India’s armed forces and their reequipping prevented the security of Delhi from being jeopardised by Pakistani marauders. This is the same plundering army which had earlier ravaged J&K in 1947-48, kidnapping innumerable women, later consigned to brothels in Pakistani cities like Peshawar. A penchant for murder and mass rape, the historical signature of Muslim armies everywhere in history, was to be repeated during 1971 in East Pakistan until India liberated the country. But this kind of harsh reality apparently militates against her condescending personal reveries about the nobility of the human condition, especially where Islam and Pakistanis are concerned. Independent India’s myriad societal divisions and policy missteps attempting to unite the nation, prompting public unrest though rectified in response, are retailed with an undertone of schadenfreude by Joya Chatterji. Her unease at the use of the school history curriculum to promote nation-building and her insistence on drawing parallels between India and Pakistan are misplaced on innumerable counts. Such attempts are hardly novel and were infinitely cruder elsewhere and in Britain too, as historian Linda Colley has demonstrated. JC’s naiveté confirms the point made to me by a distinguished Indian Cambridge archaeologist of the mediocrity of Indian studies in Britain. In addition, Pakistan had no history, though laughable claims are made by many Pakistani Muslims to a fictitious Turkic and Arab pedigree and descent directly from the Prophet himself or his companions. Besides, it is puzzling why JC does not approve of the blatant propaganda applauding India’s Islamic conquests that fill Indian history school textbooks to this day. In India, the revision of school history and humanities textbooks is the final frontier of longstanding grotesque calumny against all things Hindu by JC’s Indian Left-liberal associates, many of whom she lists in her acknowledgements. JC might have mentioned in passing something about taxation levels of the very same Mughals and exactly how it was collected since her nostalgia for the tyrants is an ineffable underlying theme in her musings. Elsewhere, she casually pronounces a gross falsehood that the postcolonial Indian state also has a propensity to violence towards women, Dalits, minorities or party opponents (p. 250). This is the kind of stupefying nonsense one reads in the New York Post, The Washington Post, the London Guardian and other media outlets of adversarial states, engaged in information warfare against India. It is also an indication of the scale of lies adversaries of all things Indian will routinely propagate while sitting in great comfort and with infinite privilege in its capital city and ready to squeal Hindutva harassment if any critic dares challenge. Joya Chatterji does not display any compassion for independent India’s forlorn stumbling quest to recreate its ancient past in national museums by assembling ancient artefacts. She also sporadically expresses unease over the largely abortive attempts to resurrect Sanskrit in contemporary India that Muslim ideologues also find reprehensible. But she finds nothing anomalous for Pakistan, created by rejecting Hindu civilisation wholesale, fighting to retain decidedly Hindu objects discovered at Mohenjodaro. She also waxes eloquent at considerable length about Islamic monuments scattered in Delhi, built by some of the worst tyrants in Indian history. It might explain her lament over the displacement of the Babri structure by a grand Ram Mandir, an issue over which JC doesn’t hesitate to repeat half-truths demolished by India’s courts. In this context, it is worth noting that JC’s implicit denigration is specially earmarked for Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. They are the icons of the Bharat now taking shape, appropriately spurned by an Anglo-Indian enthusiast of Pakistan, even as that country lingers between the gutter and sewer of the corporeal reality of historical verity. The long sections on Bangladesh and Pakistan lack critical elements that would have contextualized her rather shallow cogitations on them. She fails to mention Mujibur Rahman’s role in the Great Calcutta Killings as a key lieutenant of Chief Minister Huseyn Suhrawardy. JC seems unaware of the US complicity in murdering him and his entire family, persuasively argued by my friend, the Cambridge University graduate student, Lawrence Lifschultz. It is worth mentioning in passing that one of the accused conspirators in the killing of forty members of Mujib’s family, including a sixteen-year-old newly-wed bride, found employment as head of the BBC Bengali Service. It might be noted that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s politics and wish to engage with India after 1971, highlighted approvingly by JC, were not motivated by any fondness for it since he himself was the principal architect of Operation Gibraltar, the 1965 war against India. After a visit to India in the immediate aftermath of India’s defeat by China in 1962, owing to the serial catastrophic errors of Nehru and his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (she compared Mao to Gandhi) on his return home, Bhutto exultantly proclaimed to President Ayub Khan that India was on its knees and it was the right moment to strike. Apparently, President Ayub Khan himself had some reservations. Significantly, a senior Indian aide to Nehru, Y. D. Gundevia, ICS, who was accompanying Bhutto to the airport, had said to him: Settle while the old man is alive – meaning Nehru. After that you will get nothing and, Mr. Bhutto, don’t fight for it. Instead, Bhutto tried to persuade China to join Pakistan and launch another invasion of India simultaneously with the planned assault of Operation Gibraltar in 1965. It was much like an identical proposal to attack India subsequently made to thwart India in 1971 by Henry Kissinger to Huang Hua, China’s Ambassador to the UN. The Soviets mobilised forty divisions at the Sino-Russian border to convey a stark message to desist from any such attempt. Another Pakistani strong man, General Zia Ul Haq, whom JC dismisses as not very bright and who had cynical manipulator Bhutto hanged in a karmic denouement, was praised enthusiastically by the editor of the London Times, William Rees-Mogg, who compared him to Oliver Cromwell. This is what passes for profound insight into the upper reaches of British intellectual life and its benighted universities, ever ready to participate in some national conspiracy against coolie peoples. After pointing out that Pakistan had no identity, no history or institutions or even offices and typewriters at independence and the army claiming to be its sole custodian, Joya Chatterji is unable to resist equating it with India by unconvincingly proclaiming: “the two states, for all their bluster and claims to be so…. different from each other, were akin. After independence, both were in much the same boat, and that boat often looked as if it was about to capsize. Both were post-colonial ‘nation-states’, which prized loyalty to the nation above all else” (p. 315). A balanced appraisal is thrown out of the window to bring India down a peg or two, so redolent of the Anglo-American patrons of Pakistan unfailingly attempting to legitimate their faithful Cold War asset by slandering India. Some even deny India’s very antiquity (i.e. Hinduism itself is alleged to be a colonial construct by inventively adding the suffix neo to it). In this context, Joya Chatterji’s earlier work, blaming upper caste Hindus for Bengal’s partition in 1947, though a view excoriated by one of her own hard Left fellow travellers, makes perfect sense. It was Bengali Hindu leaders, like Syama Prasad Mukherjee and N.C. Chatterjee, who campaigned for Bengal’s partition, opposing Jinnah’s demand for Bengal in its entirety (Assam and India’s Northeast too). In fact, decades earlier, it was Muslims who had been unconcerned about the British attempt in 1905 to partition Bengal territorially. The ploy was intended to cut down to size radicalized Bhadrolok Bengali babus fighting British rule and they protested successfully to thwart the attempt. The Muslims had begun viewing themselves as Britain’s partners in the empire, as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had recommended. It was the cynical sectarian plotter, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, one of Joya Chatterji’s subcontinental heroes, who suggested to Winston Churchill: “Let’s cut out the Hindus and rule together!” In the case of Punjab, partition was ensured by three state assembly Christian votes, including that of the speaker, who complied with instructions from London. All of India’s Christian organisations had already turned their face against Nehru’s overtures to engage with the Congress party. In an arresting instance of karmic justice, all three Christian supporters of Punjab’s partition were promptly discarded by Jinnah after Pakistan’s creation. There is a methodological default setting in which JC mistakes of policy choices, dictated in the three countries of the subcontinent by situational ecological realities of development, with deliberate official policy convergence. JC argues that this arose because they all emerged from the same cradle of the Raj and its traditions. This is what buttresses the pipedream defining JC’s overall narrative impulse, which posits the idea of three nearly identical societies. By underrating situational imperatives, JC’s narrative also ascribes an unduly preponderant explanatory role to personalities and ideologies like nationalism and Hindutva though her intellectual grasp of these phenomena is manifestly weak. However, she does situate the Indian Emergency under a supposedly authoritarian Indira Gandhi on the dramatic economic crisis of 1974-75, which had precipitated a popular revolt against her government. Joya Chatterji would probably be stunned to know that during the entire period of economic crisis from 1974, leading up to the collapse of the Indian economy in 1991, it was Manmohan Singh who was responsible for it in one role or the other. He is usually given credit, along with Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, for the supposedly bold reforms of 1991 when, in reality, the economic policy reform menu was handed to them by the Directors of the IMF in return for a loan. She also subtly insinuates conflicts within India were mostly due to Brahminical and Hindutva prejudices. The depiction of India especially articulates a hostile neocolonial trope commonplace in the hallowed portals of major Western academia. It patronizingly satirizes the complex cleavages and chaos of Indian society and the weakness of its governance, accompanied by official insensitivity. JC perversely deprecates as patriarchal, the universal impulse to protect women and regard that duty as a primary attribute of a society’s integrity, whether among the nineteenth-century indentured labourer or the Mukti Bahini in 1971. There is little sense of context and a reprojection of glib contemporary feminist preconceptions to interpret the choices of the unfree (e.g. p. 364). JC evokes the ghastly fate of ordinary Indians, nineteenth-century indentured labourers and victims of modern human trafficking from the subcontinent, with sympathy, their mistreatment prompting fitting censure. Shorn of her resort to pointless Western feminist homilies about patriarchy, etc., it is absolutely essential to have highlighted the exceptional fate of powerless proletarian women who also gave painful and often life-threatening birth as child brides. Women’s lives, caught up in the chaotic and unforgiving vortex of daily life in society, without much succour, surely constitute one of the universal failures of mankind in history. From young to old age, the fate of girls and women has been pitiable, the opportunity for childhood play ended very early, followed by ceaseless days of drudgery. It usually meant demanding manual labour, at home, in the factory or a building site, while struggling to protect their children. The lives of men possessed more agency, but penury and backbreaking toil was their lot too. Uncertainty about where the next day’s food would come from haunted them all. Her account of the mass internal migration within India and the inhuman working conditions and lives of countless millions, uncared flotsam, struggling to keep body and soul together are immeasurably poignant. However, at the bottom, the cause is poverty, not culture and tradition whatever intervening role they played. JC’s belief that rural women, in particular, were married to grooms residing at a sufficient geographical distance by an inclination to prevent interference by her own family in the home of in-laws of possible ‘bigamy, cruelty or violence’, is somewhat simplistic. It was likely intended to ensure intergenerational exogamy which would otherwise be harder to track if couples lived in proximity to each other. Quite puzzlingly, JC asserts the ‘norms for the socialization of women’ across the subcontinent’s regions and the religious divide were ‘identical’. She recounts with evident relish the conversion of a Brahmin woman, Atreyee Devi, to Islam to escape an oppressive marriage during the fraught times of 1944. JC uses the infamous marital rape and killing in 1889 of the eleven-year-old Phulmonee by her much older and heartless Hindu husband to furtively imply it as a feature of Hindu married life. However, the unequivocal religious legitimacy for Muslims to engage in sexual intercourse with an even younger girl child and its routine prevalence in Muslim countries, regularly resulting in injury and fatalities, do not merit JC’s comment. There cannot but be respect and admiration for subcontinental women who faced huge challenges with courage, dignity, determination and sometimes agency. Nevertheless, Joya Chatterji’s unhistorical feminist ideological retrojections, depicting the fate of women, fail to recognize the exacting universal economic realities that institute conditions of the unforgiving upbringing and married lives of women (interpreted in Firstpost, Gautam Sen, June 2023). In this context, JC’s admiring elevation of the dacoit and parliamentarian Phoolan Devi to some sort of exemplar is misplaced since she was an anomaly, whatever the strength of her personality and her remarkable ability to overcome crippling social handicaps. It is necessary that this story be told but, in recent times, the Indian government has taken many steps, unprecedented in India’s history, to ease the lives of the poor and destitute and India’s economic prosperity continues to change lives for the better. Joya Chatterji repeats discredited party political JNU taunts, without empirical substance, about the impoverishment of India’s rural poor by marketization. There is now prodigious evidence that marketization while entailing some transitional distress, has lifted countless Indians out of poverty. It has been combined with bold and imaginative welfare measures, like free foodstuffs and the innovative policy of direct benefit transfer to personal bank accounts, which avoid leakages to intermediaries. Joya Chatterji’s praise for the Cambridge-educated Manmohan Singh, whose ideological predilections she seems to share, amounts to crass special pleading for a fellow alma mater. He left the Indian economy in tatters in the period before 1991, returning in 2004 as prime minister, for a whole decade. Manmohan Singh was to leave the Indian economy mired in ruinous corruption and heading towards a definitive implosion by 2014 once again. The Machiavellian master of guile was criminally culpable for grave damage to India and its economy over decades. JC cannot be faulted for pointing to the unfeeling heartlessness of officialdom and the tragicomic pathos of encounters with it of aam aadmi, whether it is India’s courts and police or its bureaucracy. But despite the sensitivity of JC’s accounts of the dismal experiences of the hapless mass of humanity in the colonial period and subsequent decades of Indian independence, although moving, cannot be allowed to seduce. Her orientation still lacks overall context and empathy for independent India, overwhelmed by the magnitude and complexity of the burdens it was encountering and besieged by a paucity of resources and yet also achieving significant victories over cruel circumstances. India did overcome the routine famines that had haunted it historically by making colossal efforts and has subsequently mitigated malnutrition in contemporary India. However, in the end, JC’s predisposition towards an unsympathetic depiction of India is a vivid example of the kind of assassination Western social science and a systematically skewed historical analysis constantly engage in against a reviled prey. Resolutely showing Hindus and India in a poor light On the issue of refugees fleeing religious persecution in the Indian subcontinent, Joya Chatterji misrepresents blithely by making it apparently a phenomenon that overwhelmingly affects Muslims: “Until the end of the century, Muslims continued to leave India in waves, after riots and calamities such as the violent incorporation of Hyderabad in 1948 (in which between 25,000 and 40,000 Muslims died); the Hazrat Bal incident in Kashmir in 1964 and the violence of that time; the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992; and the Gujarat riots of 2002” (p. 403). Only adding, in passing, that Hindus had also left Pakistan and Bangladesh, though evidently they’re not commensurate victims. Joya Chatterji draws a bizarrely improbable parallel between India’s liberation of Hyderabad’s Hindus being terrorised by Razakaars, under the cruelly licentious Nizam, with Baluchistan’s accession to Pakistan under duress, when Jinnah’s army marched in to occupy the Baluch coastal towns of Pasni and Jiwani. JC obsesses about any Muslim refugee camp she can unearth and the lives of Urdu speakers caught up in the cruel maelstrom of newly independent Bangladesh. Her fixation with their miseries, whether in the Town Hall Camp of Dacca, where Razakaar collaborators had been confined by Bangladesh’s new government in 1971, or the Muslim slum of an earlier era in Patwarbagan in Calcutta, is an exaggeration of actuality in the scheme of things. JC’s sustained portrayal of them is effectively the self-conscious obverse of repudiating the fate of Hindus as a result of Muslim violence and depredations and their infinitely greater scale and frequency. But this parallels JC’s frequent adverse comparisons of Hindu social life and its alleged basis in extant law and custom with the supposedly humane practices of Islamic tradition and law, especially in relation to women’s property rights and divorce (e.g. p. 469-72). JC approvingly quotes hardline Muslim cleric, Maulana Thanawi, on the superior property rights of Muslim women (p.425-30). Her contorted apologetics shroud the gruellingly repressive upbringing so many Muslim women narrate compared with that of a Hindu. She implausibly avers that the notion of romantic love before marriage is apparently condemned and equated with lust by Dharmic precepts. One supposed authority she cites in this regard is Arundhati Roy, who makes a living slandering India. The circumstances of the degeneration of aspects of Hindu society during a millennia of ruthless barbaric subjugations, when its holistic structures of an interdependent totality of social practice, legitimate political authority and overarching Dharmic injunctions ceased to exist, do not elicit any sense of empathy. She manages to deride Karva Chauth as an upper-caste penance when its pragmatic impact in strengthening mutual bonds of commitment happens to be its obvious social and human rationale. The decimation of India’s Brahmins, increasingly cast to the winds, was a genocide initiated by Muslim conquerors, who viewed them as their principal opponents. Christian evangelists subsequently regarded them as the main barrier to mass religious conversion and instituted hatreds against them that thrive to this day in independent India, especially in southern India. The evangelist conspiracy succeeded, with the number of Brahmins in India, once the repositories of Hindu intellectual knowledge capital, barely double its 2% Sikh population (p. 545). JC continues to pile additional calumny on Indian social norms by failing to highlight that modern Indian law on homosexuality was a Victorian inheritance and its judicial prohibitions and sanctions absent in historical Indian custom and its practice accommodated in its ancient narratives. Chatterji’s frequent references to the detrimental effects of Brahmanism and Sanskritisation are belied by the diversity she herself describes in ‘Miracle Play and Drama: Danger and Leisure’, in which the ancient history of local diversity in religion is evident. There was of course a high culture of philosophical ideas about ultimate truths, too demanding for even the most educated to grasp, but there has always been alongside it a wide variety of forms of worship. They derive from local reveries of what might constitute the divine, reachable through myriad forms of Bhakti. JC herself designates them as “transcendence, of mystery, of profound authority” (p. 625). These social practices could be susceptible to degeneration and what others might view as superstition, but the quintessential issue is the absence in Hinduism of scriptural diktat, enforced by the threat of sanctions. On the degeneration of Hindu social practices, intellectual apologists of Islamic rule over India studiously avoid identifying their origins in the subordinate place of women in the culture of Islamic invaders. Two memorable instances are worth retelling, one of the disgust of a Muslim chronicler at Hindu husbands consulting wives and, second, their proclivity to wrap themselves around the husband’s body during intimacy. The individual local Hindu imagination was not forced into predetermined rigid straightjackets, deriving from some allegedly incontrovertible and unalterable divine text. The free play, discovery and imagined caprices of interaction with a cherished natural world created a genuine basis for personal experience of life and divinity in Hindu society. This is surely the great, liberating strength of Hinduism, far removed from instrumental political control, which Semitic invaders found so alien and intolerable. The supposed spread of the high culture of so-called Hindu Sanskritisation, only touching a few, was a relatively benign process of acculturation. By comparison, rural Europe remained barely Christian in its practices after fifteen hundred years of largely military triumphs to foist it on pagans. In the end, Christian orthodoxy still had to be imposed sternly to stamp out heresy. It was accompanied everywhere Christianity was triumphant by torture, authorised by an early Pope, human immolations and orgies of iconoclasm, destroying magnificent art objects. It might also be noted that Joya Chatterji’s account of the Ramayana story is self-consciously secular in tone, intentionally robbing it of its sacredness by insinuating violations of contingent petty modern fixations on caste, class and feminism by Lord Ram. Chatterji’s discussion of ‘prostitution’ in India, enforced or otherwise, would have been more realistic had she contextualised it with the conquest of India by invaders. The seizure by Muslim conquerors of Hindu women, girls and boys as sexual slaves was the norm after any military engagement and kidnapping them when the fancy took any notable or local satrap. Upper caste women used to take shelter in Kolkata’s Fort William to evade abduction by roaming agents of the debauched eighteenth-century ruler of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daullah. The fate of Hindu women under Muslim rule was not vastly different from enforced ‘prostitution’ and one local Muslim Nawab had 16,000 women and girls locked up in his private ‘brothel’, provoking the jealousy of the emperor himself. Another woman apologist of Islamic sexual slavery, Harvard faculty no less, once suggested enslaved harem ‘prostitutes’ could leave their slippers outside the door to indicate unavailability. It is not obvious if one should laugh or cry at this willful naiveté because the slippers obviously indicated menstruation because Ottoman rulers had uncooperative women sealed in bags and thrown alive into the Bosporus. The British too were not so very far behind in sexual frolicking in the empire and Ronald Hyam describes the empire as an occasion for sexual opportunity in his study (Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience – Studies in Imperialism; Manchester University Press, 1991). Yet, JC castigates the social practices of Hindu society at every opportunity although its practices had lost much of their traditional moorings and integrity under cataclysmic foreign conquests. The kindest explanation of JC’s one-sided perspectives could be that she too is the quarry of an overpowering white metropolitan imperialist ideology. It seems to ultimately dictate what societal dynamics constitute normalcy, which curbs one’s ability to conjure an alternative vision. This is a phenomenon easy to recognize because it has taken me many painful decades of self-denial and unsparing self-criticism to overcome to a tolerable degree. But there are indications that Chatterji’s instinctively hostile narratives about India, its ancient culture, institutions and somewhat dysfunctional state apparatus might have also been swayed by the agenda and politics of the CPI(M) (hinted at in p. 422). Its adoption of a destructive imbecilic worldview derives from the same Western ideological stable and its grotesque Sinic perversions. They have exercised an effective monopoly over key Indian university social science faculties in the decades after Indian independence. This usurpation of India’s intellectual space, in conjunction with highly suspect and hostile foreign academic institutions and faculty, intensified owing to Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s dependence on the political goodwill of communists (p. 480). Mrs Gandhi ended up ceding control of humanities higher education to an essentially depraved communist political dispensation, thoroughly engulfed by radical Islam as well since its very foundation in India. It has managed to forestall opportunities for exposure of its untold misdeeds by misusing wily intellectual sophistry, organizational control and street muscle. These dreadful intellectual hoodlums, often of Oxbridge Ivy League provenance, easily outclassed the hoi polloi of India’s Sangh Parivar in the joust over narratives. One is left wondering if the reason why some of the worst criminal acts of the CPIM do not even get a passing mention in JC’s otherwise hugely detailed account that encompasses many obscure events is a relationship with these Leftist political elements. The most unforgettable of such incidents include the mass slaughter and gang rapes that occurred in Marichjhapi, virtually on the orders of West Bengal’s CPM Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, the cynical, soft-spoken politician with murder in his heart. It is also still astounding to recall the chief minister’s notoriously unmoved insouciance about the brutal gang rape in May 1990, by his party goons, of three young women health officers of his own West Bengal government and the UNICEF and the murder of one of them, Anita Dewan. Earlier, in 1970, at a place called Sainbari in West Bengal, thugs from the CPIM had forced the mother of two murdered sons active in the Congress Party to eat rice drenched in their blood. JC’s wide-ranging survey of Indian life across much of its geographical expanse clearly indicates she is not oblivious to the new government’s circumscribed institutional capacity and the formidable practical barriers to even engaging with the great mass of India’s people, beyond urban conurbations. The authority and physical access available to the Indian state was barely superior to the Mughal empire’s writ, limited to the highways and cities of conquered territory. But she records the malign Narmada Bachao Andolan’s activities to halt a major development project without further elucidation, although the dam at issue transformed much of Gujarat for the better (p.611). JC’s carping criticism of the low nutritional content of India’s important midday meal programme for schoolchildren fails to mention a growing recourse by state governments to its high-quality provision by the remarkable Akshay Patra. Some state governments elected by dominant Muslim constituencies and their Christian evangelist allies have been trying to derail food provision by Akshay Patra by citing bogus reasons. However, JC herself may find Akshay Patra’s refusal to use onion and garlic in their cooking a product of the usual Brahminical caste machination (p. 614). On JC’s scepticism about India’s valiant efforts to overcome food deprivation, JC was not to know, that one of its critics, the crusading journalist she approvingly quotes on the acknowledged problem of malnutrition, P Sainath, would turn out to be a paid Chinese stooge. Although he is surely one of her motivated choleric fellow travellers. The breathless awe in which many dupes have held China’s contrasting progress since 1978, including the omniscient Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity, JC’s alma mater and academic home, is remarkable. The monstrous socioeconomic experiments of Chinese communism are now coming to grief across multiple fronts, not least owing to its imperialist belligerence. A privileged background in urbane anglicised academic instruction, enjoyed by many of this urban Left-liberal academic cabal, is also reflected in the lyrical prose and alluring idiom with which Joya Chatterji depicts her extensive excursions into the traditions and social life of India. There is considerable evocative reflection by JC on Indian society. She explores everything, from street food and the railway breakfast, the experience of India’s overcrowded public transport to its varied regional social cultures and the captivating capers of India’s itinerant circuses, acrobats and magicians, its baazigars. There is an eccentrically thorough discussion of the significance of wrestling, kushti, in Indian society and the widespread existence of akharas and their association with nationalist sentiment. For some wrestlers, their sport was an obsession akin to Nabokov’s butterflies, rendering much else in life somewhat humdrum (p. 658). JC writes knowledgeably about Indian dance, folk, classical and Bollywood and how they came to be synthesized as well as their origins in earlier traditional forms in temples and courtly culture. It was apparently denounced unsparingly by Keshab Chandra Sen of the Brahmo Samaj as licentious beyond redemption. The discovery of an ancient Sanskrit text, Natyashastra, and its full publication in 1890 is an interesting episode on how a classical tradition was restored and Bhartnatyam rescued and revived by the remarkable, Rukmini Devi although Joya Chatterji believes the claim of association with ancient spiritual tradition contrived. A comparable role was played in the Kathak form, a debauched nautch dance routine earlier, by the formidable Kapila Vatsyayan, another successful promoter of ancient Indian high culture. However, Kathak retained its hyper-sexual hybridity in the murjaa through its renowned exponent, Birju Maharaj. JC’s exploration of the lives of various classes of Indians, the wealthy, the middle class and the poor, is also coherent and appealing. It poignantly captures the kaleidoscopic quilt that has comprised India, throughout the twentieth century and beyond (e.g. on the middle and business classes (e.g. p. 569–582). Despite the display of prodigious learning JC’s extended account is not particularly sympathetic towards its Indian subject, coloured, unsurprisingly, by an unspoken ideological aversion for the inevitably quirky though largely innocuous social practices that usually typify human relations. Chatterji inexplicably identifies the remarkable Mumbai dabbawallah phenomenon of delivering home-cooked food to office-goers as a means of preserving caste purity, which is the reason she oddly suggests for children carrying water bottles to school as well. JC also seems to have an incongruous antipathy towards vegetarianism, as a preference deriving from Brahmin avowal of caste status although the health and ecological drawbacks of consuming rice she stresses were indeed recognised more than a century ago (p. 590-8). However, on the wider issue of Indian identities, JC does recognise the farcical introduction in the nineteenth century of imported English legal dogmata to interpret Hindu family life, described memorably by a British judge as a ‘phantom of the brain, imagined by Sanskritists without law, and lawyers without Sanskrit’ (p.464-591). Chatterji devotes an overlong but perspicacious section to the Indian film industry, dominated by Bollywood, its precarious political economy, chaotic organizational dynamics and the role of great directorial innovators, actors and actresses. She also ends the book with an interesting discussion of individual Indian films, though her interpretation is often unconvincingly political. The salience of the cinema, like cricket, in Indian life cannot be denied, capturing the attention and emotions of a vast mass of humanity. Viewers indulge in a few hours of fanciful entertainment punctuated by stirring romance, the violent downfall of ‘baddies’ and nuanced subversion of tradition. It offers the luxury of escape from drab lives and often straitened circumstances. Despite JC’s liberal moralising disquiet about it, why the supposedly respectable woman avoided an acting career is understandable. The industry’s reputation for depravity and exploitation of women aspirants to an acting career is increasingly being laid bare by growing revelations, which leaves little to the imagination. Before the era of mass audiences, films usually had a storyline and themes were didactic, articulating social realism and nationalism. They were to be succeeded by entertainment for mass audiences without truly credible plots, but much action, dance and drama though social issues were also evident. As audiences enlarged and became more diverse, films with complex plots also emerged and a whole new genre, exhibiting higher cinematic standards and with serious aesthetic pretensions, have followed. The historic filmmaker Satyajit Ray was less an Indian director than a ‘European neorealist’ of remarkable sensitivity who addressed Indian themes. In fact, India’s pioneer filmmaker was an ancestor of mine, the brother of Dinesh Chandra Sen, not Dadasaheb Phalke. Unfortunately, all his film reels, bar one, were incinerated by his brother in a fit of rage. JC understandably ignores how India’s film industry acquired an Islamized ideological undercurrent disavowing India and its Hindu culture, eventually becoming a recurrent dominant theme, as studies have shown. In recent years, a veritable backlash has been occurring against the contemporary amoral, drug-fueled and reflexively crude anti-Hindu popular Bollywood film. Its underworld criminal and Pakistani connections, also mocking Indian institutions, like its armed forces, a reason for growing public anger. One gets the sneaking suspicion that JC’s extraordinarily adulatory view of Bollywood stems from her ineffable sympathy for all things Muslim since their dominance over the Bollywood industry is evident from her long discerning account of its history, in all its dimensions. Bollywood’s immense influence on Indian public consciousness increasingly became a harmful challenge to its sense of nationhood and cultural integrity. But that is now coming to a close in the new India that is Bharat, which JC characterises as ‘communal hatred for Muslims’ (p. 767). However, JC triumphantly contends the influence of Bollywood is a welcome subversion of traditional culture and an alleged articulation of what some describe as ‘composite culture’. Chatterji’s formidable and readable but deeply flawed account of 20th-century India is a salutary reminder of the external impact of Western intellectual life, books, universities, journals, think tanks and its media and newspaper editorial pages. Such endeavour is not engaged in autonomous activity with its own aesthetic integrity and inner intellectual logic. They are an aspect of the wider societal engagement of the West with the vanquished world of the Other. This wider interaction is not benign despite its innumerable nuanced manifestations that may mitigate and soften the perception of its real principal impact. Ultimately, this impact is political and defined by adversarial relations of conquest and subjugation of other nations and cultures. This is the preponderant expression of the totality of the Western intellectual world and regularly comes to life with unabashed shocking clarity. The most important aspect of the entirety of Western intellectual life and culture is its rootedness in a Christian past. It’s the ideological Christian past of advancing European military and political conquest of other societies and cultures that is the real historical parallel for the contemporary externalisation of the West’s intellectual life. The goal is to subvert the independent thinking of objects of domination by overwhelming them intellectually with the weight of a compelling and plausible account of the natural order of things. As an aside, it might be noted that almost all novels written by Indians for an English-speaking audience are unavoidably absorbed into the Western project to control the intellectual lives and thoughts of the Other, like Indians. Some Indian writers cater rather shamelessly to existing Western prejudices in order to vindicate them and find buyers for their creations. This is an intellectual genre to which Joya Chatterji’s historical oeuvre also belongs. Western academia and its exultantly malevolent media are crude arms-length instruments of foreign policy. They are mostly co-conspirators in the unrelenting psychological warfare against former European colonies and Russia too. This reality is resoundingly confirmed by their unwavering collective participation in the crude propaganda war over Ukraine. As a result, virtually everything also written by Indian social science and humanities mercenaries abroad, their loyal camp followers in Indian institutions and the Western media is ideologically inspired and strains to cast Pakistan in a favourable light. Of course, Pakistan has been a vital Western ally against Soviet communism and a calculated terrorist millstone around Indian necks. In addition, it has been the supplier of soldiery for mobilisation to subvert Arab struggles for freedom and unity. The inevitable corollary of this geopolitics needs to necessarily denounce post-1947 India and all its evil works and any civilizational claims it has the temerity to advance. Like so much writing on objects of colonial scorn and targets of despoliation, Joya Chatterji’s approach to India has an ontology, but eschews epistemological analytical rigour, but it does have a self-consciously ill-disposed methodology. The ontology is an unspoken apologia of disdain for India and Hindus and the intellectual integrity of scrupulous epistemological procedures, like logicality and empirical validation, are cast aside. The methodological equivalent of a metaphorical magnifying glass is applied to underscore every inescapable Indian shortcoming, not how a subject deserving compassion is scrutinised. A face examined with a magnifying glass will highlight every blemish and they can be represented as defining it instead of a more rounded benign picture of it, viewed from a distance. Sadly, the once great civilisation of the Hindus and the history of awe-inspiring intellectual sagacity are no longer equal to the task of disavowing the ongoing warfare of Western mind games. The colonial-origin vilifications are articulated by historians and scholars who question the very integrity of Hindu civilisation, echoing the imperial evangelist calumny of an earlier era. Thus, some contemporary Hindutva claim that the improbable status of Vishwa Guru is merely an embarrassment. Joya Chatterji has strained resolutely throughout to show Hindus and India in a poor light, unsympathetic as well to India’s impossibly difficult task of creating and building a nation after millennia of comprehensive demolition by cruel British and worse Islamic rule. By contrast, she is exceedingly parti pris in her depiction of subcontinental Islam and Pakistan in a positive light, ignoring the horrors suffered by Hindus in their hands. It might be suggested that since Chatterji is so infatuated with India’s film industry and Bollywood, she would have been well-advised to have restricted herself to writing its history. The India she has written of so tendentiously is now defined by Subhas Chandra Bose, Veer Savarkar, and Vallabhbhai Patel, the men she finds thoroughly unpalatable and it is timeout for colonial historical writing. The writer taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost_’s views._ Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .