“The curious fact is that as we move into the 21st century, historians have become central to politics. We historians are the monopoly suppliers of the past. The only way to modify the past that does not sooner or later go through historians is by destroying the past. Mythology is taking over from knowledge.”

—Eric Hobsbawm in ‘Politics, Memory and the Revisions of History in the Twenty-first Century’, lecture delivered at Columbia University, 2003

IF HISTORY REPRESENTS collective memory, and if it is to be objective and not written by victors, it becomes important to guard its sanctity. After artists like Maqbul Fida Husain, the Hindu nationalists’ prime target is Indian history. In late February 2008, a group of Hindus stormed into the history department of the University of Delhi, breaking windows and causing general mayhem. They belonged to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All India Students’ Council), the student wing of the BJP. They were angry because the professors had directed students to read an essay on the Ramayana that they considered ‘blasphemous.’

The essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” by the distinguished poet A. K. Ramanujan, a Macarthur Genius Fellow who died in 1993 in the US where he taught at the University of Chicago, marvels at the sheer diversity and range of the epic Ramayana, and recounts many of the unusual and alternate renderings of the myth, pointing out the vibrant plurality in religion and literature. The head of the history department, a quiet academic called Saiyid Zaheer Hussain Jafri, is, as his name suggests, a Muslim. The professor who reportedly assigned the essay is Upinder Singh, who happens to be Sikh and the daughter of India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This particular combination gave the nationalists further ammunition.

The conventional Ramayana narrative is complicated enough. Most interpretations tell a story with which many Indians, Hindu or not, are familiar. But as you travel through the length and breadth of the vast Indian nation, the stories change, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite drastically, and no one singular view prevails. Ramanujan’s essay irritated Hindu activists precisely because it showed that there is no one, unique rendering or interpretation of the Ramayana. Not surprisingly, the student activists called it “malicious, capricious, fallacious, and offensive to the beliefs of millions of Hindus.”

But to silence a voice that says that there are many versions of Ramayana is not only an act of crude censorship and an attack on Hindu intellect, it also goes against the central tenet of Hinduism. The doyen of Indian history, Romila Thapar, herself a target of vicious attacks by Hindu nationalists, has shown how the Ramayana’s many versions embed stories reflecting social aspirations and ideological concerns of each group that propounded a different version. The Hindu nationalists’ challenge to the diversity of voices is more a political proposition than a religious assertion.

And how diverse those narratives are—not only across India, but as far away as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos where they vary even more widely than in India. These multiple narratives interfere with the master version of a strong, virile, masculine and martial lord/warrior-king—like the image now reinforced by Virgin Comics in India which casts him as a muscular, Superman-like hero in Ramayana 3392 AD—that the BJP wants to project in India.

There is political purpose behind depicting Rama as a soldier, and not as maryada purushottam (the ideal man who knows his own and society’s limits, and who will sacrifice his interests for others). And that is to inject militancy into the Hindus, who, the BJP believes, have been made to feel like second-class citizens in their own country.

Feminist scholars are indeed appalled by the Ramayana’s overt masculinity. But they have also found in Sita a cliché-ridden representation of femininity, a docile woman willing to be led wherever her husband takes her and unquestioningly accepting her fate, including cruel punishments and chastity tests. Gauri Parimoo Krishnan notes: “Valmiki’s Ramayana has been wrongly ascribed canonical status, giving rise to a sort of patriarchal, literate, pan-Indian elitism which in recent times has been scorned.” In the Indian feminist magazine, Manushi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Madhu Kishwar have written powerful critiques of the masculine interpretation of the Ramayana.

A survey of Hindu epics may suggest that Hindu gods don’t claim to be morally perfect; they do practise subterfuge and trickery. In an uncertain universe, we often have to act in ways that seem morally impure in order to achieve a higher end. That, indeed, is the message of the Mahabharata. On the other hand, the Ramayana aims to show how it is possible to lead a morally pure life. Rama’s heroism is not simply based on his battlefield skills but also on his ability to place the interests of others—and his own sense of obligation—above his own.

Such sacrificial acts are passé; the BJP wants to project Rama as a superman. However, elevating him over other gods makes Hinduism seem monotheistic, a bit less like itself and a bit more like Islam or Christianity. The late Morarji Desai, a former prime minister, astutely noted this point in a conversation with me in the late-1980s, when the BJP was still only beginning to embark on what then seemed like a quixotic campaign—to reclaim the site of the Babri Masjid. “They are playing a dangerous game,” he told me. “They want to create a cult of Rama. They are converting Hinduism into Islam—they are making Hinduism a religion with one book (Ramayana), one place of worship (Ayodhya) and one God (Rama). That is not Hinduism. Hinduism is about plurality.”

Edited extract reproduced with permission from Seagull Books. Offence: The Hindu Case will be available in bookstores from August, 2009. It is published by Seagull Books (Calcutta/London/New York) and distributed worldwide by the University of Chicago Press. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon in the UK and US.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. He has written frequently for a range of publications, including Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Guardian, Index on Censorship, Washington Post and Salon. He is also a columnist for Mint and a writer-at-large for Tehelka. Salil serves on the board of English PEN, and has been a senior visiting fellow at the Kennedy School, Harvard University.

Email Salil at salil61@hotmail.com and visit his blog at http://saliltripathi.wordpress.com/

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Greg Mitchell lays bare the psychology of the ongoing self-censorship in the American media. There was not so much a conspiracy of silence about the war as an ideological refusal by the media to listen, see, and ask, writes Rohit Chopra.

GREG MITCHELL’S So Wrong for So Long is an immensely significant work, for reasons beyond the apparent. The book is a record of the life of the Iraq war in the American media from the time it was a neocon idea gathering force in January 2003 to the imbroglio of the second half of 2007. It is a compendium of the complicities of the mainstream American media in creating a narrative about the inexorable need for going to war. It is an examination of the appropriate relationship between the media and the state and a provocative questioning of the meaning of journalistic autonomy during the exceptional conditions of war. Each of these aspects of the work in itself justifies the value of the book. Cumulatively, they amount to a powerful statement and inquiry about the very meaning of freedom and voice in a democracy.

So Wrong for So Long consists of more than 75 columns written for Editor & Publisher — which Mitchell edits — from January 2003 through October 2007, adapted for the book. Each chapter brings together one more columns from a particular month during this time period. These columns are prefaced by Mitchell’s reflections on the main war-related events of that month in Iraq and / or in the US and the actions, decisions, and products of American media organizations about these events. The structure of the book compellingly juxtaposes past and present. Mitchell has framed these columns with the lightest and surest of editorial touches, providing an apposite amount of contextual information and letting the columns speak for themselves.

As the title of the book suggests, Mitchell addresses the role of various actors, including the media, experts, political authorities, and the American people, in contributing to the American failure to establish a viable Iraqi state after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. However, the main focus of the book is on the many ways in which the mainstream media fell short of its obligations before and through the war.

Patterns clearly emerge from the story that Mitchell tells us about the media coverage of the war. He highlights the incredible consensus among the media that Colin Powell’s speech at the UN on February 5, 2003 had incontrovertibly secured the case for war, and shows the eagerness with which the media accepted the claim of ‘mission accomplished.’ With due acknowledgment of the fact that certain restrictions may apply to covering a war situation, Mitchell draws attention to the politics of embeddedness, and the problematic implications of the conventions by which the media have covered the dead and wounded, military and civilian, coalition force or Iraqi.

Mitchell notes the double standards applied by the media in evaluating the claims of pro-war and anti-war sources. He comments on the gentle self-recriminations of the New York Times and the Washington Post for their earlier failings in reporting the war, which, Mitchell argues, did not go far enough. He chronicles the stubborness of prominent media columnists in refusing to budge from the essential premise that the war was justified. The book addresses the anxieties about appearing non-patriotic and the fear of a backlash from the public that have haunted media coverage of the war from its inception.

But we also find that it is not the case that there were no skeptical voices in the media and the political arena. Mitchell provides us several examples of these voices. Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the Pentagon papers, is one such figure who was unconvinced by the administration’s case for invading Iraq. Described by Mitchell as “one of the most important figures in the history of American journalism,” even though not a journalist, Ellsberg was also critical of the media for failing to do their job. Bill Moyers of PBS emerges as another dissenting voice, interviewing Mitchell for his PBS program NOW in April 2003. Four years later, in April 2007, Moyers also presented a 90-minute PBS broadcast “Buying the War” that offered a blunt, hard look at the responsibility of the media in contributing to the climate that made the war possible. In Moyers’ own words, quoted in an April 21, 2007 E & P column reproduced in the book, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses” (p. 237). Mitchell’s book chronicles how, as the war has progressed, more columnists, conservatives and liberals alike, have advocated a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Politicians such as Representative John Murtha and Senator Chuck Hagel have also recommended a withdrawal in light of the situation in Iraq.

And yet, as Mitchell notes, the editorial columns of major newspapers have continued to stay mum or have equivocated on a host of glaring issues related to the war. We read through E & P columns in chronological order, accompanied by a constant sense of déjà vu, knowing more or less what is to follow.

The book thus hints at an intriguing phenomenon, one that deserves close attention from journalists, mediapersons, and scholars alike. It demonstrates that that there was not so much a conspiracy of silence as an ideological refusal by the media and others to listen, ask, see, and believe. It shows us the pyschology of self-censorship in operation and the ongoing construction of a self-willed amnesia on the part of the American media in its coverage of the Iraq war. What we see is memory — or rather a particular memory and narrative of a war, a society, a time — in the making. Where and why, one might, inquire, do these imperatives come from? What are their historical and sociological roots?

The book also causes us to look at the politics of differential access to information. It is one of the cliches of our times that in our information age and networked society, flows of information can cross national boundaries in the twinkling of an eye, across national boundaries and beyond the grasp of national governments. Global media and communication technologies such as the internet, with the forms of hyper-literacy and global discourse communities that they have engendered, are often adduced as proof of this new informational economy. But Mitchell’s book is a sobering reminder that such flows of information cannot be understand independently of the structures of political power, the stark inequalities that characterize international relations, the calculations of corporate organizations, and the pressures that all of these factors bring to bear on individual voices, journalistic or otherwise.

Mitchell begins the Introduction to the book with the words, “If only this were merely a book of history. Sadly, the war in Iraq is still very much with us, which makes this a current affairs volume as well. More than anything, however, I hope it serves as a warning for the future” (1). One may disagree respectfully with his distinction between history and current affairs. Current affairs are, after all, predicated on history or histories. The value of the book too, one may observe, is as much as documentary record, a four year history of how the media in the world’s only superpower covered that superpower’s decision to go to war and its aftermath, as political commentary about the present or political critique. And, in the words of NBC reporter Kevin Sites who is quoted in the book, it is an urgent and poignant reminder that the “burdens of war…are unforgiving for all of us” (p. 107).

Rohit Chopra is Editor, Interjunction and Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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