Books

Let Us Talk About Your Book:
Arvind Pal Singh - "Religion & The Specter of The West"
Part IV

Q & A with Author by SIKHCHIC.COM

Continued from last week …



PART IV

Q   You mention this “nexus between State, Media and Academia” at key places in the book. What do you mean by this? Can you perhaps give some examples that demonstrate such a nexus?

A    Actually let me start by referring you to something that is blowing up right now, and which shows that my analysis in Religion and the Specter of the West has turned out to be spot on.

I’m referring to the release of government papers which clearly show the complicity of the British state in the months leading up to Operation Blue Star in June 1984. The release of some of these papers, 30 years later (which according to British law is the length of time that secret government documents cannot be released to the public) reveals what many of us had suspected at that time – that people like the British prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had very clearly aided Indira Gandhi’s Congress government in framing the Sikhs as a rogue community in the international media, and had lent British state resources (primarily in the form of military intelligence) to help plan the Indian army’s attack on the holiest Sikh shrine.

When I first read the article by Phil Miller on the website Stop Deportations, it was somewhat cathartic. It was like a secret being released. A secret that many Sikhs carried for 30 years and were prevented from sharing with the general public because the contents of the secret were not deemed legitimate.

As Miller states, quoting a top secret UK file which was released from the National Archives after the New Year:

Thatcher sent the SAS to advise Indira Gandhi on Indian army plans “for the removal of dissident Sikhs from the Golden Temple” months before the disastrous raid on Amritsar …

When Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the army to storm the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984, it was a decision that would lead to her assassination. The assault on the Sikh holy site to evict separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, involving tanks and helicopters, incurred heavy civilian casualties.

Outraged Sikhs in Britain responded with a huge demonstration in Hyde Park, and thousands more sought refuge in the UK as the violence in Delhi and the Punjab escalated, in what some call India’s Sikh genocide.

Now, what I argue in my book is that the collusion between the Indians and the British government extended to other aspects of the public sphere, especially the media. The British and Indian media at the time steadily built a picture of the Sikhs as a troublesome community of fanatics that posed a clear and present danger to the Indian state.

And this media imagery, which was prevalent many months before Operation Blue Star, was legitimized by well placed scholars and academics who basically took an uncritical stance towards the state.

That is what I mean by the nexus of State, Media and Academia.

It refers to a kind of hegemony exerted by the state which extends to the sphere of academic scholarship and media, with the danger that these two sectors can easily become functionaries of state policy even in supposedly stable liberal democracies.

In Religion and the Specter of the West, I showed that when this nexus works in this way, it repeats “past imperialisms”. That’s why it is so important to understand that colonial infrastructures did not simply become extinct after Independence, but continue to affect us today.

Colonialism is not something that happened a hundred years ago, but will continue to happen if we stop being vigilant about its often invisible workings.

Its also why I think that Sikhs need to scrutinize more carefully the nature of their agency and how that agency can so easily be co-opted by vastly more powerful forces such as the nation-state.

Q   I’m not quite sure what you mean by the term ‘agency’ in this context. Can you please explain your usage of the term?

A   By ‘agency’ I mean how Sikhs act, what motivates them to act in a particular way.

Q  Some examples?

A  A good example of this might be the somewhat over-enthusiastic involvement of younger Sikhs in the First World War Centenary celebrations by depicting Sikhs as loyal servants of the British state.

At one level, it is entirely right for Sikhs to be involved in such celebrations. After all, over 80,000 Sikhs died in the service of the British Empire.

But the Empire did nothing for Sikhs at the time of Indian independence. It simply fed them to the wolves, despite the Sikhs showing much loyalty right until the eleventh hour. Nor did the British state remember Sikh sacrifices in the months leading up to Operation Bluestar.

Again, Margaret Thatcher (who was truly nostalgic about the ‘good old days’ of the British Empire) cynically used the SAS against Sikhs in Punjab who were trying to give voice to very genuine grievances .

Q   What course of action do you advocate then for Sikhs today? For Sikh-Britons, for example? Or Sikh-Indians, for that matter.

A   My point is that Sikhs today should not become the toadies of any state.

What the book shows is how this can happen so easily, how Sikh agency can be co-opted by state forces, despite our very best efforts.

My argument in the book is that this co-option continues to happen long after colonialism is thought to be over. It happens through the mechanism of language – the very element that we share with the rest of the world.

To understand how language does this … well, you’ll have to read the book. In the book itself I don’t cite the example of Margaret Thatcher (although I allude to it). This is something that came up in the last few days and it just brought back a rush of memories. No, in the book I show how the effects of past imperialisms also operated in the post-9/11 scenario when Sikhs were (and still are) caught up in the American-led backlash against Muslims and non-white ‘others’ who were racially and religiously profiled by State, Media and Academic forces all acting together.

But again, you’ll have to read the book to see how that all works.

Q  Can you then explain how the structure of the book vis-à-vis parts 1, 2 and 3 lend itself to an analysis of State, Media and Academia?

A  Before I talk about the structure of the book in more detail, its worth noting that this could easily have been three different books of about 150 pages each (which is the size of a medium sized book) instead of one tome of more than 500 pages.

For example a theoretical volume that looked at the Comparative Imaginary of the West (Part 1 in the current book); a more historically and textually orientated second book that focused on archival material and exegesis, with a view to examining the phenomenon of ‘reform’ in the 19th century (and the continuity of ‘reform’ today as a metaphor for socio-political movement or the Panth) which is Part 2 in the current book; and a third book focusing on Sikh philosophy in a new vein (which I never got round to doing but which you can glimpse in the current book) which is part 3 in the current book.

Q   So, why not three books then?

A   In the end I decided that three separate books wouldn’t have served the purpose I had in mind, which was to find spatial and temporal continuities between past and present with a view to determining a alternative future.

Spatial continuities refers to the intimate connections between the structures of State, Media and Academia as they affect Sikhs in the current context.

Temporal continuities refers to continuities between Sikh past and present, but at the same time keep an eye on the future with the desire to break with worn out reactionary politics and instead release the creative potential inherent within the teaching of the Sikh Gurus.

What brings both kinds of continuities together (spatial and temporal) is the notion of ‘reform’. That’s why at the heart of this book is a critical analysis of the project of reform enacted by Singh Sabha elites as both response to, and entry into, the dominant symbolic order of European imperialism and the parallel emergence of political Hinduism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Q   Why is the concept of ‘reform’ so important here?

A   Well, the project of ‘reform’ entailed much more than the idea of Sikh elites making organizational changes to Sikh society – that’s the conventional way of understanding it.

Rather, ‘reform’ is something that was imposed on indigenous peoples by the colonial machine. It is something that Sikh elites acceded to, something that they were forced to accept and eventually internalized into their modes of existence.

Unfortunately many Sikh scholars, even today, continue to equate the project of ‘reform’ with a lehar or movement that is intrinsic to Sikh Gurus’ teachings and the way of life they brought into being.

This is not true. You cannot simply equate ‘reform’ with the lehar of the Sikh Gurus. Yes, it might have borne a resemblance but it is not the same. The concept of ‘reform’ as it comes out of the Anglo-Euro-phone consciousness is derived form the historical reform of Catholic Christianity into its Protestant version.

Over a period of time, as Protestantism became more established, this concept of reform was credited with being the motivational force for the rise of the modern secular state. Western narratives for this suggest that Christianity had to undergo an internal ‘reform’ (an internal transformation) in order to give rise to the modern state, and therefore to modern liberal democracy.

So basically, they claim that only Christianity could give rise to secularism because it had managed to ‘reform’ itself. The problem is that by the 19th century European powers were exporting this notion of ‘reform’ to Asia and Africa via the imperial project.

Again, their narrative went something like this: “if you want to revive your nations then you have to emulate European society and politics, and to do that you have to ‘reform’ your religions which basically become degraded and fallen from their original states”.

So by accepting the narrative of ‘reform’ you accept that your culture is ‘fallen’ or that it lacks something which it must retrieve. Its this narrative that Sikh elites, like other indigenous elites in Asia, Africa and elsewhere, inadvertently imported into their political projects.

The narrative of ‘reform’ is already a narrative of ‘lack’. Basically they were importing an inferiority complex through the back door. The mechanism of this negative inferiority complex is something called ‘dialectic’ which I mentioned in my response to the first question you asked.

Continued next week …

February 8, 2014

read other articles in Books