A brief introduction to Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, published by Cambridge University Press, and a conversation with the author, Afsar Mohammed
In a world given to wars and fanning differences, an in-depth study of history only reflects how we can find it repeating itself. In Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, academic and writer, Afsar Mohammad, takes us back to the last century to help us fathom a part of history that has remained hoary to many of us.
On 15thAugust, 1947, when India and Pakistan ‘awoke’ to a freedom amidst the darkness of hatred and bloody trains and rivers, there was a part of the subcontinent which remained independent and continued under the rule of a Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII. This was Hyderabad. Later, in post-Jinnah times, when India decided to integrate the independent kingdom, which had even found a name for its independent existence — ‘Osmanistan’ — what broke out was an episode called Police Action, code name Operation Polo. Mohammad’s book is an exhaustive relook at the integration of a people into the mainstream nation of India, using the voices of common people.
There were strands of communists in the Telangana movement and the mercenaries we know of as Razakars. His own family was involved in the events, and he had an uncle arrested for the performance of Burra Katha, a form of theatre used by Left to educate the audience, somewhat like a musical street theatre. Mohammad has interviewed survivors extensively and knitted into his narrative findings which make us wonder if religion or nationalism were used as a subtext of power play and greed. For, we have the local cultural lore where the people despite differences in faith had a tehzeeb or a way of life, where Hindu writers wrote in Urdu for the love of it and Muslims used Telugu.
Hyderabad was perceived by some as a sanctuary, like writer Jaini Mallaya Gupta. He contends: “Like me, many leftist writers and activists had migrated to the city at that point and they became popular by using pseudonyms. Hyderabad was like a sanctuary as it could hide us in its remote neighborhoods where we were supported by local Muslim community too. But we all became really closer to each other and more connected to the Urdu literary culture that indeed provided a model for our activities.”
But did things stay that way post Operation Polo? Razia, a witness to the police action, states: “It was a phase of unfortunate turns—everything so unexpected! Not about the Razakars or the Nizam, but most of the ordinary Muslims (ām Musalmān) whom I know fully well since my childhood had a hard time. Particularly young Muslim men and women … all suddenly became suspects and many of them from their homes leaving everything. They just wanted to live somewhere rather than dying in the bloody hands of the Razakars and Hindu fundamentalists.”
That cultural hegemony has a tendency of typecasting languages based on political needs is shown as a myth by Mohammad as both Hindu and Muslims used Urdu and Telugu in Hyderabad. His book revives Hyderabadi tehzeeb as the ultimate glue for defining a Hyderabadi. This is somewhat similar to what Bengal faced which had been divided along religious lines in 1947. Professor Fakrul Alam, a well-known academic, essayist and translator, tells us in his essay on the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, “The key issue here was language and the catalyst was the insistence by the central government of Pakistan that Urdu should be the lingua franca of the country…” Bangladesh emerged as a protest against linguistic and cultural hegemony. Eminent writer, Aruna Chakravarti, goes further back in history in her historical novel, Daughters of Jorasanko (2016), and shows how Tagore was involved in preventing the division of Bengal proposed by Lord Curzon in 1905. However, despite these historic precedents, we are seeing the world suffer wars from such divides and common people continue to be affected by the violence and bloodshed, losing their homes, livelihoods and often, their lives. What happened in the last century continues to reiterate itself more virulently in the current world. In times such as these, Remaking History surfaces as a book that has much to offer, perhaps if humanity is willing to learn lessons from history.
Your book is focussed on a small group of people, the common people of Hyderabad who suffered during the integration into a nation. Why would this be important in a larger context? How would it assimilate into stories of the world? By stories, I would mean plight of Rohingyas, Muslims, Jews … more or less plight of minority groups of people. Do you see any emerging patterns in all these stories?
In this work, I’ve consistently used the category of ordinary people as related to Hyderabad and Deccan. I needed this term to speak about both Hindus and Muslims as I was constantly reminded of the divisive politics persistent in this region and throughout South Asia. Despite the focus on the Muslims of Hyderabad, this work emphasises the inseparability of Hindus and Muslims when it comes to the violence and trauma of the Police Action of 1948. According to many interlocutors, the violence had inflicted the entire community — mostly the ordinary people of the Deccan.
I started writing this book with a primary idea that this lens of ordinariness helps us to not just this 1948 violence in Deccan, but many other religious conflicts now rampant through the globe. The examples you just mentioned above are not an exception. Since we’re blind to an ordinary person’s approach or emotional life, we totally failed to capture many dimensions of these violent events. Most patterns, either subjective or objective, that emerge out of this violence and trauma have their origins in this search for ordinariness.
Along with a few interviews, you have brought up the issues through writings of great Telugu and Urdu writers of that time. Can you tell us if literature actually translates to real life situations?
To be honest, being a writer and poet by myself, I’ve always believed that literature is half-truth which is filtered by multi-dimensional subjectivity of a writer. Specifically, when there’s a political situation, literary writings also tend to project a partial reality. However, these gaps could be filled by empirical evidence that we gather from the stories of ordinary people who not only witnessed the violence, but also suffered many setbacks caused by such violence. Yet, we require a balanced perspective to level these oral narratives and written materials. In this way, rather than relying fully on a singular story, we can explore the possibilities of multiple stories of a singular event.
Your family and you profess Leftist leanings. And yet, you write of religious minorities. Historically, the Left professes to be above traditional religions, like Hinduism and Islam. How do you integrate religion into communist ideology? Would you agree with Harari that Left is a religion unto itself?
One of the major critiques in this work is to contest the left-centric approach to 1948 and even the Telangana armed rebellion of 1946-1951. As I argued in this book, leftist writers, poets and ideologues completely failed to capture the reality of the day. I’ve presented evidence for this argument from various writings and witness narratives too. Since their high emphasis on economic determinism, many key social and religious dimensions remained their blind spots. Various religious and caste developments during the periods of the 1930s and 40s were determining factors of modern Indian history. Yes, of course, I still believe in the Leftist ideology, but never worship it though! To put it simply, I’m a critical Leftist and critical Muslim!
‘Popular understanding is largely shaped by what exists in circulation. This is what we see in the form of how people understand the Police Action across India as well as folklore, including the reconstructed folk narratives such as Adluri Ayodhya Rama Kavi’s burra katha. Such popular representations further reinforce the larger narrative peddled by the state.’ What exactly is burra katha? And what was your family involvement in it?
Burra katha was a popular storytelling and music genre in Telugu utilised by the leftist organisations to circulate their idea of resistance against the status quo in Telangana and elsewhere. Shaik Nazar was an icon of this radical narrative tradition and he also trained hundreds of disciples in this genre. Most artists and writers from the leftist camp were busy producing stories based on the Telangana armed rebellion and other resistance movements to gather the people in the public meetings between 1946 and 1952. My family also had some role in the production and circulation of this genre. However, it’s a story beyond my family’s history and had numerous political and performative implications that I’ve discussed in my book. I already have a detailed narrative of these personal and professional connections in my book and I encourage my readers to access them directly from the book. Just a brief note, many performers were arrested and put in prisons for months and months during this armed rebellion and they also suffered heavily due to the oppression of the Nehru’s government.
Do you see a parallel between what was happening then to such performers and protest writers in more recent times? Do you find still that popular opinion is being shaped by stuff circulating in media?
I see many parallels between the past and the present conditions of performers and writers who speak out against the hierarchies and status quo. Recent times, we see more strategic ways of silencing such protest and performance genres. Various apparatuses of the state have become extremely powerful and most writers/performers are being cleverly trapped into a governmental system. Nevertheless, there’re always exceptions. This book captures such intense moments that stubbornly contested the government-led media or privileges. We need more such strong voices to change the current state of things.
Were Razakars the Nizam’s army? I had been under the impression that they were mercenaries — irrespective of religion. But you say they were volunteers. Can you explain who were the Razakars exactly?
During the earliest phase of the Razakar activism, this was not Nizam’s army. It was supposed to be a group of young Muslims who volunteered to initiate radical changes in the Hyderabadi-Deccan Muslim community. In that sense, Razakar was a “volunteer,” the actual literal meaning of the term. Later, when Kasim Razvi became the president of this group, it took on a totally different manifestation. Razvi promoted a version of the Razakar activism that eventually served the military needs of the Nizam. I actually tried to show these different faces/phases of Razakar activism by collecting evidence from various writings and oral histories.
Before the Indian government ‘integrated’ the state of Hyderabad, there seems to have been a simmering of resentment against the Nawabi lifestyle and the common people, irrespective of their religious beliefs as you have shown. Do you find in the world context such reactions against wars or cultural hegemony currently?
Before, during and after the integration of the state into the Indian national government, it was an extremely complicated situation which we could name it as a “transition” period. It was similar to many states in India, but Hyderabad state had a peculiar situation due to its local politics and Deccani identity. Of course, there was a resistance to the Nawabi lifestyle as the new generation Muslims were engaging with many facets of modernity and embracing a reformist version of Islam. Nevertheless, these changes were not merely the products of local Muslim life. As I argued in the book, local Islam and Muslim sense of belonging was in constant dialogue with the larger networks of Islam and Muslim politics. I see similar thread continuing in contemporary Muslim discourse since 1992 when Hindu nationalism became a defining factor for many identities.
Did and do common people resent the “integration” as they did the Nawab? What would be the cause of that? Was it religion or economic and social discontent that becomes the focal point of riots then and as of now?
Whereas the Nawab’s resistance had his own political and private reasons, as I noticed from the evidence, the resistance from ordinary people had more to do with the common good and also, there was a protest against the way the entire military invasion was initiated and promulgated. People were concerned about the atrocities of the military which were aimed at wiping out the leftist movement on the first hand. At the end of the day, the Nawab and the Nehru government remained safe and friendly, while thousands of people were killed for this power sharing. Despite several different viewpoints, most of the public opinion was against this military invasion and the killings.
Why is evolving a Muslim, or for that matter any religious identity, important in today’s world? Will these not lead to conflict as we are experiencing in the post-pandemic twenty first century?
It’s not about a specific religious identity: now it’s high time for any identity to be discussed and disseminated. I see this more as a conflict resolution so that we become aware of our differences and learn the limits of our discourses. We’ve bigger issues that the pandemic. We’ve caste, religion, gender and regional issues that we need to sort out gradually. Many conflicts around us are due to our failure to acknowledge these identities and their role in the making of our community.
“The nationalist/textbook version of history is determined by the nation-state as is seen in how a nascent India emphasized and celebrated the ‘integration’ with an utter disregard for native opinion or the costs people paid associated with the bloody event.” Is this true not just in the Indian context but in context of the battles we see happening in the world?
Yes! Absolutely! The desire for “integration” is a product of hegemonic politics and turning into global phenomenon and we’re all plagued by the idea of nationalism and we’re forced to declare a singular nation, culture and language in many instances. We’ve too many examples right now to prove this and I don’t have to rehearse everything here.
Can you suggest a solution to finding and enforcing, peace, love, kindness and forgiving?
At first, we need to realise our mutual desire for such love and compassion. Our sheer dependence on political parties and making their goals as our own goals is a self-defeat by all means. I see community as a larger concept and we need to acknowledge its real sources of being and belongingness.
Thanks for your time and the comprehensive book.
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