'The Indians: Histories of a Civilization' book review: Point of origin https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/books/2023/sep/03/the-indians-histories-ofa-civilization-book-review-point-of-origin-2610432.html 03rd September 2023
The detailed book, albeit a bit jargonised, counters the ongoing trend of rewriting India’s history.. through the centuries and across the country, looking at ancient languages and philosophies; the histories of the Deccan, Bengal, Odisha, Sikkim, Punjab, the Western Himalayas, and more. Colonialism, political and social movements, and India’s journey since Independence are also covered The Indians amply reflects the “cultural, linguistic, social and religious heterogeneity that has been the hallmark of the Indic world” that Vinay Lal writes of in the afterword. Its subject matter is varied, and insights, more often than not, refreshingly different. It brings, again and again, the subaltern into the limelight (or at least makes sure that it is mentioned). It shows that the homogenous India of the self-appointed WhatsApp ‘historians’ is a falsity.
extract from page 536 . the colonial ethnographers, such as
those responsible for drawing up the huge series of district and State
gazetteers, ‘went looking for difference’, intent on drawing up sharp
lines of demarcation and differentiating unequivocally between adherents
of different faiths, but everywhere — nowhere more so than in Gujarat,
though scarcely anyone could believe that today given the intense and even
brutal communalization of the state in our times — they stumbled upon
communities which described themselves as equally Hindu and Muslim
and whose religious practices filled the ethnographers with bewilderment
and sometimes abhorrence.” One such community that they encountered
in Gujarat, which must have seemed to the ethnographers as akin to such
Hindu deities as Shiva in his form of Ardhnarisvara (half female, half
male) or Vishnu in his form of Narasimha (man-lion), were the ‘Husaini
Brahmans’ who called themselves ‘followers of the Atharva Veda’ but took
their ‘title from Husain, the grandson of the Prophet’: “The men dress
like Musalmans the women like Hindus. The ethnographer continues:
‘Except that they wear the Hindu browmark tila [tilak], that they often
give their children Hindu names, that they do not circumcise, that a priest
of their own class marries them, and that their dead are buried sitting
their customs, even to observing the Ramazan fast, are Muhammadan.
I suspect that few orthodox Muslims would have construed the various ways
in which the Husaini Brahmins marked their distance from Islam perhaps
most prominently, their failure to practice circumsision — as marginal to
the faith, though the ethnographer’s almost nonchalant attitude, indicated
by the ease with which the divergences are merely signified through we
casual use of the word ‘except’, seems to suggest otherwise, It is perhaps
the ethnographer’s own unease with the phenomenon to which he
witness which makes him inclined to undermine the vitally importance