Conscious forgetting of primordial animosities

M Rajivlochan

Historian

AMID the turmoil in Nuh and other parts of Mewat, one is reminded of former Punjab CM Partap Singh Kairon. In the 1950s, Kairon issued a stern warning to those who gave an indication that they would not let Muslim families coming from Pakistan settle back in Mewat. These families had migrated to Pakistan in the days following the Partition in 1947. By the mid-1950s, most of them returned to their villages. Kairon ensured that thousands of Mewati Muslim families got their properties back.

“Just forget the animosities of the past; do not dwell upon your sufferings,” he would say in speech after speech to large crowds of Hindus and Sikhs who had suffered during the Partition. Therein lies an important lesson for us today.

Nations are built on both forgetting and remembering. People who don’t remember the past become rootless. Even the people who were enslaved, when they look forward to forging a brighter future, seek out roots or create fictitious ones. At the same time, people who do not forget anything from the past — or insist upon raking up imagined wrongs — are likely to continue with the feuds that they inherited from previous generations.

The generations of the past had lived in social formations that were essentially small in scale, characterised by face-to-face interactions and based on mutual trust built through various primordial identities. Anyone outside that small circle of trust was distrusted and presumed to be dangerous. All that changed with the emergence of that amorphous entity called ‘modernity’.

The easiest bonding between people comes through face-to-face interactions. However, such bondings and the resultant social groups are inevitably small in size, with meagre abilities to influence anyone else. It was the emergence of the institutions of the nation-state, and corresponding dissolution of primordial bonds, that enabled the dramatic enlargement of the scale that set apart modern society from its predecessors.

The history of the modern world has been essentially about subordinating primordial identities and the rise of anonymous, faceless institutional structures, which enabled the individual to be free of primordial identities and ensured that primordial social groupings could not bully the individual into submission. These structures were anchored in the nation-state, with the individual who owed allegiance to the nation-state — rather than to a primordial grouping — as its constituent unit. This could not be achieved through coercing anyone.

People cannot be coerced to develop a sense of belonging. That is a feeling which has to come organically to every person. An interesting concomitant to the strengthening of the bond between the individual and the nation has been the fear that the former would become anonymised. This fear has pushed many liberals to fetishise primordial social structures even at the cost of the common good. It is almost as if they do not care about the outcome of empowering those who derive their power through primordial structures, religion being the most powerful one among them.

Religion as a system of thought that allows people to make sense of the world and gives them hope and meaning has been the greatest competitor for the loyalties of people vis-à-vis the nation-state. In India, this challenge to the nation-state has been connected to the rise of political Islam. So much so that in the early 20th century, pan-Islamists in India floated the idea that India, on attaining self-rule, needed to establish a United States of Religion, analogous to the United States of America. Maulana Mohammad Ali, who prided himself on not having read the Quran, advocated this idea in his newspaper The Comrade. Little did he know that it would spawn Muslim separatism to the extent of partitioning the country.

The fact is that the freedom to practise religion has never been an issue in India. Even in the aftermath of the Partition riots, when the matter of right to religion came up for discussion in the Constituent Assembly, everyone took it for granted that in India everyone would automatically have the right to practise his or her religion. On the matter of the right to propagate one’s religion, some members did express concern that Hinduism was not a proselytising religion. They argued that such a right would result in the annihilation of Hindus. Such members were assured by others that taking Pakistan into consideration, it was important to assure Muslims that they were welcome in India. They were told by members who were practising Hindus that if the misconceptions about India’s culture and heritage were to be removed, the right to profess and propagate religious faith must be conceded. And so it was.

That is how things stand currently. Except that often we have people who would rather excite feelings in the name of religion, or claim that one or the other religious group is being ill-treated in India. Previous efforts at hiding bad behaviour by one community or highlighting equally bad behaviour on the part of another has not helped matters. Rewriting textbooks of history to hide some wrongs or highlight others hasn’t helped. The simple fact is that once people have made up their mind, it is not possible to change it merely by hiding facts or telling lies this way or that way.

It is in this context that we in India would do well to draw lessons from the history of Europe. The fetishisation of the diversity of India can be the starting point for such an understanding. While obsessing about our diversity, we often forget that all nations and people, across the world and throughout history, have been diverse. Indians might find it incomprehensible, but for many centuries in Europe, the fights were around whether people should be free to read and understand the book of their religion themselves or should merely be satisfied with interpretations provided to them by religious experts. Yet, with the expansion of the economy and with the increase in the scale of society that accompanied it, the Europeans found ways, consciously, to move away from such conflicts.

So, what happened to the age-old animosities that had existed? What happened to the numerous historical wrongs that one group had done to other groups? They were simply ignored and forgotten with the founding of the modern nation. Without such conscious forgetting, there was no way in which anyone could move towards a mutually amicable living.

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