In 'Religion, Community and Nation', KL Tuteja enlightens us on Lala Lajpat Rai's life and struggles

Dipankar Gupta

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THIS book is about a lot of things. It is first and foremost about Lala Lajpat Rai, a fact the title does not reveal. This is also a work that was waiting to be accomplished as his life and works have not received the attention they supremely deserve. But this book is more than that. It also tells us how Lala Lajpat Rai, through word and deed, informs us, even corrects us, on matters central to contemporary social theory. As in most conceptual lessons, a lot comes to the surface when we consider facts in extremis. Lala Lajpat Rai is able to enlighten us on a number of issues precisely because he was an honest man in a hard place. As he found himself positioned delicately on the edge of received wisdom, his life is a testimony to bold forward thinking.

Prof Kundan Lal Tuteja does an excellent job of concealing himself and letting Lajpat Rai speak in action and words. Tuteja does not ostensibly interfere and yet subtly italicises appropriate aspects of the history of Punjab in the early decades of the 20th century. This allows him to foreground Lala Lajpat Rai’s contribution not just to the freedom struggle, but to Independent India as well. Lajpat Rai emerges as a profound thinker and not just as the brave activist we all know him to be. None of this revelation would have happened if Lajpat Rai were not self-critical and true to himself. His complex nature is made all the more fascinating by his abiding honesty and willingness to learn.

Lajpat Rai was a fervent Arya Samaji, so one is obviously not surprised that he was a staunch Hindu and believed in protecting Hindu identity. Thus far it is simple. Now come the complications. While being a proponent of what he considered were just Hindu community demands, he was, at the same time, a committed secularist and a follower of the National Movement. The Nehrus, both Motilal and Jawaharlal, were his friends as well as critics and that is how he saw them too. He was with Gandhi during the Khilafat Movement and found great virtues in it. This, however, did not prevent him from noticing the sectarianism that this agitation had unfortunately aroused among the two major communities.

On a similar note of complexity, Lajpat Rai was a lover of the Hindi language. Yet, he urged that Hindustani be the language of communication. He agreed with the Hindu Mahasabha that yielding to Muslim sectarian demands was wrong. At the same time, he also wrote in Urdu, could recite the namaaz, believed that Hindu and Muslim blood together would make India strong and condemned the Hindu nation theory protagonists. He thought that they were not just wrong-headed and foolish, but “mischievous” too. No wonder he was greeted in Jallianwala Bagh in 1923 with cries of ‘Vande Mataram’, ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Sat Sri Akal’, all together.

Yes, indeed, he felt for the Hindu community when it was exercised over the 1900 Land Alienation Act, for it purportedly prevented Hindu traders from investing in agriculture. On the other hand, he did not agree at all with the Arya Samajist political programme and distanced himself from it. Here he was with the nationalists and a full-blooded secularist too. Among other things, he also encouraged Hindus and Muslims to dine together. All of this might surprise many because Lajpat Rai has often been cast as a Hindu communalist simply because he was a practising Hindu and wanted to strengthen Hindu community ties. Yet, like Mahatma Gandhi, he too believed that if Hindus and Muslims were true to their faiths and injected some rationality into their beliefs, all Indians would prosper.

The other reason to project Lajpat Rai as communal was because he was not willing to stand by when Hindu interests were openly being undermined by Jinnah. In particular, Lajpat opposed the demand that electoral reservations be granted to Muslims even in those areas of Punjab where they were in a clear majority. Fortunately, with the intervention of Jawaharlal, the Swarajists desisted from enforcing this line of action, initially favoured by Motilal, for the sake of communal peace. Also, Bhagat Singh is reputed to have made an oblique, derogatory remark against Lajpat Rai but that is not the full story. It should be noted that it was the same infuriated Bhagat Singh who shot a British officer because Lajpat Rai died facing blows from the police in the anti-Simon Commission agitation.

Lala Lajpat Rai’s life and struggles also reveal a vivacious, complex and rich exposition of the difference between communitarianism and communalism. It is so easy to conflate the two and see them as one, as many enthusiastic commentators have done rather self-righteously. Lala Lajpat Rai was, as Tuteja repeatedly clarifies, a Hindu communitarian but not a communalist. A communitarian does not need enemies, which is why the Muslims were never Lajpat Rai’s foes. A communitarian believes in the textured and imbricated layers of a belief system and is content in observing these without harming others. A communitarian’s belief system is complex, untidy, unwieldy, and attractive precisely for these reasons.

A communal ideology, on the contrary, needs a focused enemy. Its ideology is sparse, angular and sharply pointed at its “other”, and there is always a definite “other”. The richness of a community identity is not of much consequence for communalists as they are only interested in those shrapnel edges that hurt. Without an object of hate, communalism withers, for its source of symbolic energy is just that, it lies in anger. Mahatma Gandhi had once said that religions have so much in common, yet communal propaganda only highlights the differences between them. Lala Lajpat Rai felt the same way, which is why he was far away from being a communalist and Motilal Nehru was wrong when he derisively coined the phrase “Malviya-Lala gang”.

Also, Lajpat Rai brought sophistication to political theory when he distinguished between national/community identities and states. This is much like what Jayprakash Narayan did a few decades later. Lajpat Rai found nothing objectionable in the fact that Hindus and Muslims were two distinct communities, but so what? Europe, he pointed out, had several examples of diverse religions coming together as one nation-state. Religion can exist in its place and it is not as if communities should be erased to form nation-states. Such a view would be historically incorrect and politically unsound. Many decades later, Benedict Anderson would put this aspect in lucid prose by reminding us that nations imagine themselves a state and it is not as if a state must have just one religion, even one language. Once again, Lajpat Rai was able to show this aspect in word and deed simply because he sat in a very hard place without the cushion of double-speak and prejudice.

Prof Tuteja deftly, from the wings, shines a light on two other important background aspects of communalism, namely urbanisation and a uniform, universal judicial process. These features are often overlooked in studies of communal identity and mobilisation. He draws our attention to the increasing frequency of communal riots in urban settings. The anti-cow slaughter agitations and the incidence of playing music in front of mosques increased with urbanisation as all of this began in the closing decades of the 19th century. Further, in pre-colonial times, there was no question of cow slaughter in a Hindu fiefdom, nor any chance of playing music in front of mosques in a Muslim zamindari. However, with the establishment of a judicial service in 1866, there was now a court at the apex level where Hindus and Muslims could equally petition for favour. So much of contemporary sectarianism, as well as community angst, can be explained if we see them in this light.

This book is a treasure trove of information, historical detail and conceptual interventions and Prof Tuteja must be congratulated for this stupendous effort. While presenting us with a rich history of early 20th-century Punjab, he also opens several conceptual windows through which we get a full view of Lala Lajpat Rai’s march through time.