1.Subhuman nature of black people and their natural savagery.

2. The superiority of the indo-germanic and indo-aryan stock. This is there in his letters and part of the collected works ie collected works of mahatma gandhi.

Gandhi was not fighting for equality for the Indians with white people but simply that Indians were better than black people.

You accuse me of a lack of historical perspective …how about you inform us of the context as Gandhi put it in. Gandhi extolled the virtues of indo-germanic race and of racial purity. To try and spin it as some sort of attempt to show Gandhi as merely using the white argument flies in the face of reality ie Gandhi used Hindu scriptures and his personal ideas to prove that he too believed in the same racial purity and superiority that was associated with the indo-germanic stock and that caste Hindus were like white europeans.”

For your information, I’ve read most of Gandhi’s collected works and I’ve seen these so-called pejorative statements you so gleefully mention.

I will say what I’ve said before and what is mentioned by almost all credible historians on the subject (and these people are not partisan to India, nor are they the writers of Freedom at Midnight):

1.) Gandhi was a man of his time, much like Jinnah was.
2.) Gandhi was a young man at the time he wrote or said those statements. Like many other Indians at the time, he utilized the then very common concept of the Aryan-European relationship to prove that since Indians were scientifically supposedly akin to Europeans, they should therefore have the same rights as said Europeans. Think about it logically. All of what he said regarding the white race, Indo-Germanic ties, etc, was directed in this fashion. This tendency that existed in Indians in those days was very common and has been documented by several anthropologists. Heck, forget Gandhi, this concept of an Indian-European kinship via Indo-Germanic brotherhood was invoked by the lawyers of Indian-American immigrant Bhagat Singh Think in his 1923 case for citizenship in the US. He claimed in court that since he was of Aryan stock and thus by anthropological grounds a “Caucasian”, he was entitled to citizenship rights granted to other “Caucasians” as per law at the time. Unfortunately, the judges were able to pull out another convoluted explanation to keep him from his prize.

All of what you accused Gandhi of writing was written regarding his South African experience, and at a time when he still believed that the Empire was essential. I don’t have any reason to spin or whitewash anything, any more than you do regarding Jinnah.

I hold nothing against Jinnah and I don’t consider Gandhi an angel, unlike most of my fellow Indians. In fact, I’ll tell you from my heart that I think Jinnah was a better leader than Gandhi’s second-hand man, Jawaharlal Nehru and that if anything, his thought complements rather than contradicts the thought of Gandhi. But I do believe in telling the truth, not creating fancy pseudo-nationalist hagiographies as people such as yourselves are interested in. Nor do I believe in grinding an axe in the name of a non-existent God.

Gandhi’s collected works spoke of

1.Subhuman nature of black people and their natural savagery.

2. The superiority of the indo-germanic and indo-aryan stock. This is there in his letters and part of the collected works ie collected works of mahatma gandhi.

Gandhi was not fighting for equality for the Indians with white people but simply that Indians were better than black people.

You accuse me of a lack of historical perspective …how about you inform us of the context as Gandhi put it in. Gandhi extolled the virtues of indo-germanic race and of racial purity. To try and spin it as some sort of attempt to show Gandhi as merely using the white argument flies in the face of reality ie Gandhi used Hindu scriptures and his personal ideas to prove that he too believed in the same racial purity and superiority that was associated with the indo-germanic stock and that caste Hindus were like white europeans.

I’ve seen your posts in several forums, including amazon, not to mention, that I’ve read your own articles, and I have to say you truly lack a valid and informed historical perspective on this material.

If this is not racist then even Adolf Hitler is not racist.

“I am glad you’ve recognized your mistake dear boy.”

Yes, I did, my dearest, fair lady.

“As for explanation about gandhi comments, try reading gandhi’s collected works or search gandhi racist on google.”

I have read Gandhi’s collected works, and your comments about him being a Hindu fascist and a racist are so off base. Gandhi did much was wreaked havoc, but your characterization of him is based on your own biased views (which, interestingly, you also have on Jinnah, ie absolutely no critical take on Jinnah) rather than anything grounded in research.

And googling Gandhi and racism…? You don’t rely on Googling for all of your research, do you? ;)

Sepoy might come to San Francisco to kill me for starting a blogwar on his blog, but if you are the same Yasser Latif Hamdani that wrote the post on Jinnah’s vision on All Things Pakistan,

http://pakistaniat.com/2007/08/11/quaid-azam-jinnah-pakistan-vision-august-speech-minorities-religion-riots/

I’d like to point out that you re-edited your post without so much as mentioning that you took out the following lines on Partition, which generated most of my comments, and caused you to call me all sorts of names:

“I know there are people who do not quite agree with the division of India and the partition of the Punjab and Bengal. Much has been said against it, but now that it has been accepted, …..”

These lines are now no longer in your post.

Whitewashing history, eh?

This is true, he was very dogmatic.

“As for Gandhi and Hindu nationalism. He was not just a Hindu nationalist but also a racist, a casteist and a hindu fascist in many ways in addition to his deified role as Mahatma gandhi.”

Ok, I am all down for criticizing Gandhi, but the above– explanation?

“Jinnah did not use religion as much as religious identity. He could not afford to use dogma because he had so many diverse sects to contend with.”

Yes, and Gandhi did not have to contend with one of the most disorganized religions out there, with all of those castes, sects, regional practices, etc.

Ayesha Jalal’s thesis is fascinating in so much as it distinguishes between the creation of Pakistan and the partition of India ..the former being the ideal and the latter the tragedy.

All this has nothing to do with the fact that Jinnah as the founding head of state wanted equal rights and equal opportunities for the members of his new state regardless of religion or caste or creed.

As for Gandhi and Hindu nationalism. He was not just a Hindu nationalist but also a racist, a casteist and a hindu fascist in many ways in addition to his deified role as Mahatma gandhi.

And yes the use of religion was very different. Gandhi used religion as a stick to keep people in line. Gandhi was dogmatic and medievalist in his religiousity.

Jinnah did not use religion as much as religious identity. He could not afford to use dogma because he had so many diverse sects to contend with. Hence religion was always somewhere in the background and real practical issues took precedence.

The future is not looking too bright either. Faisal Devji is working on a Jinnah book and from the two readings I attended, he is not out to break new grounds.

The problem, of course, is not that the state can never allow a narrative that is complex but that historians, who should know better, continuously fail to see the complexity in Jinnah.

With that in mind: Where is the mention of partition? I would love to “let Jinnah live his multiple lives” (or any historico-political figure for that matter), if it were not for the awesome responsibilities and consequences these figures deliberately take on and administer and invoke and evoke, in their work. No, I’m not blaming Jinnah for partition; I’m pointing out that we CANNOT let any of these historical figures live out their multiple lives without responsibility to the present. That goes for politicians on both sides of the border. Advani or Jinnah.
So historians *better* disfigure their subject. If they dont, history becomes a rambling description of disconnected moments (rather like, dare I say?, some recent subalternist historical prose) and thereby history loses its relevance to the politics of the present. (That itself is a political move, some argue. Like apathy, it is a move that allows present politics to merely leave behind those who dropped out, and move on with its business. And then these ‘resisters’ wonder why they have been so politically impotent.)
Perhaps in an ideal world there would be no politics of the present (an anarchist utopia?) and thus history-of-the-present wouldnt be needed at all. I’m not holding my breath though. Till then: We had better hold politicians to coherency and unified self-narratives (let alone unified historical narratives post-event). Unless you want to erase the fact of institutional heirarchies and their responsibilities to the the states and populations they work within. Like I said – that would sound like an anarchist utopia – or a free-traders’ utopia – or an evangelist’s utopia. No accountability, only persuasion. History as a discipline is in need of a makeover, to be sure, but I hope our imaginations are not so impoverished that we think it should become advertising. That would be no better than its claims to be Truth. In some ways, it would be worse.
So lets not let Jinnah – or anyone else – have his ‘resistive’ multiple selves. Not because they dont exist; but because by letting them have it we would relinquish holding them responsible to the present. Some of them develop ‘resistive’ multiple selves – precisely for that reason – to be unaccountable. (My take on Advani). Resistive multiple selves is also a weapon, lets not ‘naturalize’ it away. As much of a weapon as ‘apathy’. Remember non-dualism? Polytheism can perhaps still teach post-modernity a thing or two. There is no outside when it comes to meaning. Not even for postmodern ‘complexity’.
Besides – sometimes ‘complexity’ is merely ‘confusion’. Lets not reify those moments beyond what they can hold. Neither Jinnah nor Advani are so clueless that they dont realize the advantages of throwing their enemies off-guard.

Along with purobi, I am curious to hear more about how Jalal’s Jinnah infuriates (aside from the prose that renders him), but I suppose we can leave that conversation for another time.

jak: Thanks for the lengthy and engaged response, and I echo your concerns regarding the responsibility of historians to the politics of the present. I could not agree with you more that we need to be especially watchful of the ‘resistive multiple selves’ the sly Advani puts up for public consumption, and I would apply a similar logic to Jinnah (though we might have different takes on what I see as the complexity – and confusion – of the negotiations leading up to the Partition). My desire here was not to anoint Jinnah with a postmodern crown of complexity and ambivalence and minimize the enormous damage religious nationalism has done to contemporary South Asia, and I sincerely hope it did not come off that way. Jinnah certainly made extensive and deliberate use of the rhetoric of religious-as-political community to advance his agendas (and I am in agreement with Jalal here in that neither the transfer of power settlement nor what has become of Pakistan since correspond very closely to his vision), and we need to understand that for what it was then and what it has come to be now. Particularly striking to me about the incident and response is the fact that nearly everyone responded with renewed efforts to shove Jinnah right back into the intricate pigeonhole that had already been devised for him in various national narratives. As someone who is often called upon to teach this history and Jinnah’s role in it, my feeling is that these attempts to write Jinnah into particular visions of the politics of the present are extremely limited as historical narratives. To call him a secularist who was a victim of circumstance is about as useful as calling his a fervent Muslim nationalist. These are the Jinnahs that populate many of our history books, and public historical understandings as well apparently. To teach and understand this figure responsibly, and perhaps more importantly to understand what political possibilities can come out of these assessments, we need more – and hopefully some sort of narrative that captures elements of the man, such as those Manto dwelled upon, that are not ‘political’ merely in the conventional governments’n'elections sense.

In order to conceive of the kind of history of Jinnah one might write, I think a far better parallel to think of than Advani would be Mohandas Gandhi (contemporary too). There is a striking similarity as well between the extent to which the two leaders turned to the rhetoric of religious community as political unit to generate mass political movements (crafty lawyers, no?), and an awareness of this fact does not preclude recognizing the roles they played in advancing democratic and secular ideals in late colonial political discourse. Obviously they are very different figures – Gandhi was sidelined from politics when the cards were on the table so we can never know what direction he would have gone, and the whole non-violence/civil disobedience aspect of the Mahatma gives him a far broader international relevance, but the two are nearly inviolable figures when it comes to national politics in India or Pakistan, respectively (severe criticism of Gandhi in India is a one-way ticket to the political fringe).

Here in the present one is always going to disfigure any past (or present) subject that is represented, whether in an academic history or at a paan-stall palaver. This does not necessitate, however, taking all complexity as confusion-inducing smoke screen – Jinnah’s secularism is no more an isolated strategic ‘moment’ than Gandhi’s Hindu nationalism. A good history should be able to countenance all of these ’selves’and more without losing coherence (though that is probably a bit of a tall order for politicians).