on hailing the mother, and other related stuff...

I was going to add to Songs of Hind, but being a simpleton technophobe, decided to make a separate post.

Right, the first point, who are these 70 million children? The novel whence the song is taken is set in Bangla circa 1770. Now Bangla then was much larger than today’s matriarchy and the Bharati state. It also included most of what is today Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa. This was the Mughal suba (province) of Bangla (or as the Mughals would have spelled it if they were using Roman alphabet – Bangalla) which became a de facto independent state under Murshid Kuli Khan soon after Aurangzeb’s death (in 1690). The 70 million children are inhabitants of this greater Bangla.

Now, were there Muslims among these 70 million? If so, then is the song, and the novel, against them?

The answer to the first question, yes, there were almost certainly a large number, perhaps as large as 30 million, of Muslims in Bangla. But we should note that the Muslim majority of eastern Bangla came as a great surprise to everyone when the first census was done in the 1870s. Prior to that, everyone, the Ashraf Muslims, Calcutta Babus, and their Firangi masters, thought that Muslims in Desh (outside Pathan lands) amounted to a handful of urban minorities. And the 1871-72 census result was rejected by many Calcutta Babus, including Mr Chaterjee himself. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that the Muslim majority nature of Bangla was fully accepted, and its ramifications are of course still playing out.

So one possible answer to the second question is that, well, there were Muslims, but Chaterjee wasn’t writing about those Muslims, who he didn’t really know existed.

Actually we can go a bit further. To Chaterjee, there were indigenous Muslims, Pathans-Afghans like Sher Shah Sur and Issa Khan, and foreign Muslims, like the Mughals. The former counted among the children of Deshmata, the latter were foreign colonisers like the Firangi. Incidentally, Bangla circa 1770 was in a political transition – the Mughal Nawabi collapsed after Plassey, but the Company rule hadn’t yet commenced. To Chaterjee of course it was on foreign rule replacing another.

Now I find it extremely odd to think of the Mughals as foreign to Desh. Sure Babur didn’t like Delhi and preferred Kabul. So what? Try to think of Bharat without Taj! I would understand if you told me that Mahmud of Ghazni was a foreign thug, but to say that Jahangir is more foreign than Tipu Sultan is just bizarre. But who am I to argue when Sir Vidya says Mughals were worse colonisers than Firangis?

Perhaps Chaterjee was being a Bangla nationalist when he was being anti-Mughal? In the official history of the matriarchic republic, Issa Khan is a hero who fought off Man Singh, the Rajput general of Emperor Akbar. Perhaps this is the case. Until the acceptance of the Muslim majority nature of Bangla, the nationalism of Calcutta Babus exhibited as strong a sense of Bangla parochialism as opposed to a pan-Desh identity. And if Ramachandra Guha is to be believed, in the western and southern parts of Desh, Bangla hatao preceded Firangi hatao.

Now, what about hailing the land as mother goddess? Surely this is contrary to secularism? And it must be offensive to Muslim sensitivities?

Start with secularism. Secularism in Desh has always been the opposite of sectarianism and communalism. This is definitely different from the Firangi concept of secularism, which is the opposite of spiritualism. In Desh, it seems to me to be more valid to have all that are divine happily coexisting than to deny the divinity at all. But even using the Desi concept, it seems to me that portraying Desh explicitly as Durga is problematic as far secularism goes.

But if you drop the Durga bit (which is hard when the song actually refers to Durga), a generic connection of Desh to Mother doesn’t seem to have anything wrong. After all, the national anthem of the decidedly Muslim Bangladesh (which is not a secular republic, but nor is it an Islamic one – this is another blog) is all about loving Mother Bangla.

Right, so referring to Durga, or Ram, or any other specific deity, without due space to the other (read Muslim) symbols, has problems as far as secularism goes. The ideal may be to not talk about any divinity at all, but if we must invoke Ram, then let’s balance it with Rahmanur Rahim.
Now while this may be fine for secularism, I suspect it will still offend some Muslims. Islam is a fiercely monotheistic religion. Any suggestion of sharing a space between Allah and anyone else is shirq, worse than outright infidelity. What to do with the sensitivities of those Muslims who are not willing to live and let live? How do we deal with those who view Desh as Dar-ul-Harb?