Invoking Memory: Razakar, a novel by Kishorilalvyas 'Neelakanth'

Invoking Memory: Razakar, a novel by Kishorilalvyas ‘Neelakanth’

4/5/2012 posted on Tracking Telangana Google Groups 

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!topic/tracking-telangana/MOTithbVYBg

The plot of this new ‘historical’ novel on the struggle for ‘liberation of Hyderabad’ involves the events that led up to the merger of Hyderabad state into the Indian union. Historical figures and ‘fictional’ characters appear: a good but weak Osman Ali Khan; the brave Dayananda Saraswati; heroic Brahmin Arya Samajists who take to arms to protect Hinduism under threat; the fanatical Rizvi; communist activists like Shankar who fight landlords; cruel Muslim police officers; razakars afflicted with religious fervour wreaking mayhem in rural and urban areas; brave Hindu women who fight the razakars and help their men in armed rebellion; subjugated Muslim women; good harijans who refuse to convert to Islam and lose their lives; bad harijans who succumb and join the maurading gangs of razakars; their deserted families that suffer. Shoebullah Khan, Narsinga Rao, Nehru, Munshi, Laik Ali - all have a role to play.

A weak Osman Ali Khan gives a free rein to Kasim Rizvi and sets off a vicious train of events. The young protagonists like Shankar who grow up ‘seeing’ the atrocities of the razakars turn into political activists of various hues – Arya Samajists, communists and congress activists. They organize and write peacefully and at times revolt against the regime. The Nizam’s police is deployed to kill the regime’s opponents but they also act out their own savagery on the peasants and harijans. In the end, the Indian army comes to rescue the Hindu populace under attack. The Sikhs in the Indian army, whose families suffered at the hands of Muslims during the Partition take out their vengeance on the Muslim soldiers and the police here. After the Nizam admits his defeat, the ‘inevitable’ Hindu ‘backlash’  begins. The novel ends with a Muslim jagirdar being forgiven and offered ‘protection’ by his Hindu neighbour.

The novel has many historical referents - people and events in popular memory. Events in the communist movement in various districts, their attempts at organizing the peasants, their battles with the razakars and the Nizam’s police are narrated forcefully. Mahbub Ali Khan’s ‘golden’ reign has a full chapter devoted to its description .  He is known to have mixed with his Hindu subjects and participated in their festivals. Shoebullah Khan’s murder, Bahadur Yar Jung’s unexpected death and Gandhi-Jinnah’s debate on the nation’s future – all figure here. The turmoil of that period is brought out effectively. However, the key issue that the novel tries to attribute this turmoil and the ‘decay’ in the Hyderabad state to Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen, its ideology of the Islamic/Muslim rule and their ‘religious bigotry’ (mata picchi, mata moudyam). Rizvi is linkened to Jinnah who is supposed to have ‘caused’ partition. The atrocities of the Majlis, it describes, have propelled different movements, ranging from peasant struggles to nationalist movement. Kasim Rizvi is portrayed as having acted as the Telangana Jinnah, spreading hatred all through the length and breadth of the state, by recruiting innocent harijans, to target Hindu properties and women.

While the novel draws on incidents that have been etched in popular memory through songs (maro prapancham vastondi, naizamu sarkaroda etc.), in communist historiography and now, in the Telangana movement, it is also not difficult to find gaping factual holes in this ‘historical novel’: one, that while the novel portrays the razakars as having been active for a long stretch of time, they were in fact active only for three years; that Arya Samaj, Congress and Communists who are portrayed as entering the scene in response to the razakars, in fact preceded them, some of them by decades; that in fact, as opposed to this fiction, the Nizam too was opposed to the way religion and politics were mixed in the political ideology of the Majlis; that in fact as opposed to this fiction, innocent Muslims who died in the so-called Hindu backlash, rather than the police officers etc.

But for the novelist, capturing the ‘feel’ of that time seems to require this misrepresentation. In this ‘feel-real’ narrative, we only have ‘Harijans’ (sometimes also called Dalits), Muslims, Reddys, Brahmins, while many others remain caste-less. Characters from all communities except Brahmins are swayed by greed for money, women, power and privilege. The Brahmin characters are uniformly good, honest, god-fearing and take up arms only for the ‘altruistic’ purpose of the protection of Hindu religion, and the struggle against the threat of Islam under the able guidance of Dayananda Saraswati (and a few local swamis). They think of themselves as its sole protectors and others actively look upon them for guidance. Naturally, there is no place for the Brahmin karanams, bureaucrats and other employees that partook in the power and prestige of the narrative! 

Instead, the novel is intent on producing a figure of common hatred – the ‘razakar’. It describes in graphic detail of their raids and attacks on villages, their terrible cruelty, lack of kindness, loyalty or any affection towards their own subordinates, rapes of women, womanizing and even forcing harijans to eat beef, once they convert to Islam! Even though it begins by distinguishing religious bigotry of razakars from benign Nizam or genuine Shoebullah Khan,  it slips , by the middle of the narrative, into referring to all non-Muslim characters as Hindus and to the rest as Muslims. As the novel progresses this slippage worsens. Any and all Muslim characters tend to get invested with religious bigotry, irrespective of their placement in the governance, social hierarchy and their participation in any political activity. The punishment meted out to even quiescent Muslim characters at the end is also talked about as ‘inevitable’. Through its creative realism the novel establishes that a razakar is inherent in all Muslims.     

Clearly, this narrative of Hyderabad’s liberation is most useful for Hindutva politics today, which explains why the RSS publishing house (Jateeya Literary Parishat) chose to publish it in Hindi (2005), Telugu and English (2007). The arrogant brahminical imagination that thinks that harijans lose their religion by eating beef also makes sense only in this version. The need to consistently portray Dalits as Hindus, corrupted by Muslim practices to increase their own numbers as well as Muslims being protected by the Hindus – fits into the imagination of the Hindutva nationalism.  Indeed the uncomfortable accommodation as dalits as Hindus is possible only by asserting that they began eating beef because they were forced by Muslims!  One wonders how such a theory will square with the celebrations of beef eating undertaken by dalit cultural politics today.  The ‘backlash’ theory, made popular by Narendra Modi in Gujarat is the new addition to the repertoire. Reports say that the RSS has made significant inroads into erstwhile bastions of left politics and this kind of text would ably serve the political agenda of the RSS and its political front – BJP. It would help in pitting Dalits against the Muslims and both against the backward castes.

The problem however, does not end with the logic of this novel. The copious ‘Freedom Struggle in Hyderabad state’ volumes published by Gandhi Bhavan read, unfortunately, like a more factual, elaborate and evidence-based version of the novel. There too, Ramananda Teertha, P.Sundariah, Dayananda Saraswati seamlessly flow in and out of the text interspersed with conversions, language activism, anti-landlord uprising or razakar atrocities. A five to ten year period in the history of this region (1940s) is made to stand in for the entire modern history of the Hyderabad state. How does one address this persistent recourse to patent falsehood in the history of Hyderabad?  New beginnings are being made. K.Srinivas’s unpublished Ph.D thesis (1999) on the ‘cultural renaissance in Telangana’ makes an attempt to disturb this ‘commonsense’ by questioning the progressive-nationalist rendering of Telangana as a domain of ‘darkness’ before ‘liberation’. He quotes historians of Hyderabad state such as Sarojine Regane and Ramakrishna Rao that it will take a very long time before a decent history of this state is written. Gogu Shyamala’s biography of T.N. Sadalakshmi also breaks with this kind of historiography by referring to the support that dalit activism received from Osman Ali Khan.

During the recent phase of the struggle for Telangana statehood, several Dalit and Muslim activist-intellectuals (J.Srinivas, Kaneez Fathima, S.Srinivas, to name a few) have raised questions about the politics of this historiography (especially around the legacy of Nizam). Political questions about the future Telangana (what will be the place of Muslims or Dalits) also articulate a desire not to inherit such ‘legacies’ but to base it on the constitutional vision or contemporary political demands (Kancha Iliah, Jamat-e-Islami). But, how far these attempts from the margins disturb the official history, leave alone the ‘common sense’ about the history of Hyderabad state remains a big question.

It is this ‘commonsense’ (popular ‘consciousness’/actively constructed ‘fictions’ posing as residual or distilled ‘memory’) wherein the figure of razakar lives on, as Moid, Mohammad and I discovered when we went to investigate the ‘communal tension’ in Siddipet last year. An illiterate vegetable vendor (backward caste), while describing how the Muslims attacked her shop, said, ‘my mother told me that this is how turkollu used to attack manollu…telugollani in the past’.  The comment can be dismissed as post fact reasoning or as a result of indoctrination by the BJP after the communal tension; we could say that she spoke as per a pre-given script to an outside fact-finding committee. But, inherent in her comment was the assumption that the fact-finding committee members were all ‘Hindus’ (manollu/telugollu) and we would also empathize with her. Two questions arise in this context. In case of her speaking (what she believed to be) the truth (of her being attacked as a Hindu by Muslims), one would ask, how the other elements of her (innate, everyday life, organic) subaltern consciousness could not counter this  (external) indoctrination. Why does not the reality of her life in a hierarchically ordered society result in an organic understanding of the ‘true’ state of affairs? And if it we think of it as a truth-effect – the question would be - what kind of power relations are enabling her to speak this ‘truth’ with such effect?

Further questions also arise - how is the commonsense about razakars coming into play in the context of the Telangana identity/history/movement that have emerged during the last decade or so? What is the caste-class configuration that it has empowered? Is it simply a reddy-velama configuration that has become more powerful? Or there are new configurations/alliances of other castes too that are becoming more ‘empowered’? Which of these would explain the vegetable vendor speaking the truth or Kishorilal writing this novel?

A.Suneetha

I thank Srivats for making this much better than its original version; especially for the discussion on commonsense. A.Srinivas provoked this review by procuring a copy of the novel.