mQbns as Buddhism Jainism k BMW &rn e. Pakistan and Sri tanka, I& India, the exeattive bnmch of the hdian the rules fkarned by the kgislath.le aIms&rhvn.Nsorpeiss&aad Ia India today this is clearly the case. This book by M, L Aklm is a Collsdiaa d 15 jourdistic pieces, written for Ak&ds newspiper and magmine, 7?ae Zkgmph and Sunday aver the last .Because it is jownalism, the ixqmknt “burning” issues m cravtred such as the Y&nadaW massacre in BW, &e dhughter of the Uttar m d e s h Harijans in B81 and the ongoing Babri Majid contmversey. It i s j t m d i s m , but the writing is of high quality and m d v e : “It is e and a mist lies cm the river, mazMg &he p & w n haze more p r t of The Howrah Bridge looms througjh the gauze, like a picbm delibemtely created by a @hatographer in search of art. The fires are out.” @. €70) Akbar’s material is hard, brittle, compelling stuff. He writes with the passim of the c&& and his commitments are to secularism, to humanity, to the truth, as he sees it, on the g r o d . Here, a brief account of Dr. Aklmr’s cultural b&qpund seems appropriate: He was born in 1951 and has become the English-speaking mice of past-Midnight’s Childrea of India. The sign&annce,o€post 1947 independence as a dividing line is genedly not Mly appeciated. Missing is the literary, sentimental r o d i m of the earlier Wian g d o n of writers. Don Moraes and Ved Mehta -already appear as dated figures ,of the past. Their India is another country. In &bar% background there is m punting on E@sh rivers, laboring i oxford intonations, g a h g drunk aftex the O x f o r d - C d r d g e boat race nor kiiurely redmg df the Eqghh romantic poets on the banks of the Cam. AMxu lives in the arban aigbnare of Calcatta and in his noshits is the smell of burning flesh d ratting corpses. Missing, &mgh he is - of the loss, is the mmzwic vkim d k h r u rmd tape religious idealism of Gadhi. Akbar is an Indian writkg w& a w&-2#rt pen for Indians of today’s India. 286 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Wl. 5, No. 2, 1988 Over Indian Muslims hangs the uneasy honor of having ruled Delhi for most of the last loo0 years and the traumatic partitioning of India-“History, Pakistan: the myth that has ia the subconscious, the myth of the mod-wieldmg Mussulman, which at times even sends a quiver of doubt into the sanest non-Muslim and which prompts him to ask himself whether the Muslims are basically an unreliable, emotional, anti-national community?” @. 41). “Massacre in Moradabad” opens: “Then, suddenly, with the astonishing fury of a violent storm in a calm sky, came the morning of 13 August 1980. Men of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) opened fire on about 40,000 Muslims while they were at their Id prayers. No one knows exactly how many people died. What is known is that the incident at Moradabad w a s not a Hindu-Muslim riot but a calculated, cold-blooded massacre of Muslims by a rabidly communal police force which tried to cover up its genocide by making it out to be a Hindu-Muslim riot.” (p. 33) However, not only Muslims are involved in communal hate: “Less than 500 years ago, these tribals of Orissa and Bastar and Andhra ruled over a brilliant empire; today they have been turned into parodies of a cruel fiction. The tribal man is a mahua swigging drunk. The woman is an easy lay.” (p. 89) Akbar’s point is-important. In this climate of violence no one is immune. “The untouchable Jatav is touchable only when a pretty Jatav woman can be raped, or when a whimpering man has to be dragged to a field to do forced, whimsically paid labor.’’ (p. 49) This is stressed by Khushwant Singh in the introduction to Riot After Riot: “Our hopes have turned to ashes. Hindu- Muslim confrontations on religious festivals have begun to occur with sickening regularity in riot-prone parts of the country where the two communities co- exist. From being Hindu versus Muslim, they have become Hindu versus Christian, Hindu versus Sikh, upper-caste Hindu versus lower-caste Hindu, Christian versus Buddhist, hill tribal versus plains’ tribal. In the massacre at Nellie in Assam, it was just about everyone against his neighbor.” (p. 10) Akbar blames religious fanaticism, Hindu or Muslim. On the Hindu RSS (the Hindu militant fascist organization) he writes: “The RSS is not so much an organization (cultural or political, take your pick) as a state of mind. It is the physical form given to an attitude towards the minorities, particularly the Muslims. It represents Hindu revivalism of the worst s~rt; in its heart it is still taking revenge against Aurangzeb, the Mughal Emperor.” The nostalgia for the high hopes engendered by independence and into the Fifties is captured in an occasional reference. Those hopes were symbolized by the popular film stars Raj K a p r and Dev Anand and, above all, by the towering figure of Nehru. The conclusion is gloomy and quite untouched by the hopes of the Fifties: “There is evil abroad, and it seems we are just too embarrassed to recognize the one weapon which has been successful against (P. 2 5 ) The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 5, No. 2, 1988 287 it in our history: the philosophy of decency, of goodness, of strength in brotherhood and faith in interdependence." (p. 125) Akbar rejects religion seeing it as a symbol of hate. In communal tom India today, this is understandable. But the vacuum is easily filled by further hatred. Sham and bogus religious arguments whip up communal fury. Perhaps the Indian experience ought to point in the opposite direction. We need more not less religion. More Babas of Batala and more Mahatmas. More men of good will and visionaries preaching love and tolerance. "Only connect". That surely will remain its lasting contribution to human civilization. This is excellent primary source material for the scholar and politician; it should also be a warning and an edification to the latter. Urgent and compelling, the small book-175 pages-is essential reading for South Asians. Time is running out for them. Akbar S. Ahmed Selwyn College Cambridge, U.K.