New Perspectives on India and Turkey: Connections and Debates 9781138689329, 9781315537757

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of contributors
Foreword
Introduction
Part I History and memory
1 India and Turkey: interplay of shadows and trajectories in the longue durée
2 Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities: reflections on love and violence in Islamic thought and politics
3 Echoes in the shrine: remembering and forgetting in two contexts
Part II Nationhood and leadership
4 Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters: Kemal Pasha in southern India
5 Halide Edib and Gandhi: literary modernity in India and Turkey
Part III Secularism
6 Temple and dam, fez and hat: the secular roots of religious politics in India and Turkey
7 Nehru against Nehruvians: On religion and secularism
8 Redefining the minority: Alevis in Turkey
Part IV Development debates
9 Locating agency in global connections: the case of India and Turkey as ‘rising powers’
10 Diaspora engagement in the United States: the case of India and Turkey
11 Perspectives on development incentives: 18th-century philosophers, India and Turkey
12 Waterproof development? Impact of advocacy networks on anti-dam movements in India and Turkey
Part V Claiming the city
13 Notes on informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta
14 The endangered pleasures of Indian cities: notes from the good life in Istanbul
15 A political analysis of middle-class-based social movements: India and Turkey compared
Index

Citation preview

New Perspectives on India and Turkey

India and Turkey, Asia Minor and the subcontinent of Hindustan, and the Ottomans and Mughals have had shared histories of contact, engagement, and dialogue over the centuries. Much of northern India was under the control of rulers from Central Asia since at least the thirteenth century. Startling glimpses of the presence of Turkic-speaking peoples from Central Asia are still visible, for example, in north Indian material cultures – languages, cuisine, religion, architecture, and medicine. This book places the Indian subcontinent side by side with the Turkic-speaking world, both past and present, in order to understand one geographical context in relation to the other. The juxtaposition of the two countries throws up some startling commonalities as well as considerable differences, and it is the variations as well as the similarities that allow for comparability. By exploring historical connections and providing a comparative perspective in terms of spirituality and religion, social movements, political economy, and foreign policy, the book initiates productive cross-cultural conversations, allowing concerns from one location to illuminate the other. The book is split into five parts: History and Memory, Nationhood and Leadership, Secularism, Debating Development, and Claiming the City. The first comparison of the subcontinent and present-day Turkey, the book emphasizes the importance of cross-regional comparative analysis in order to overcome some of the pitfalls of area-focused analysis. Filling a gap in the existing literature, it will be of interest to scholars in various disciplines, including politics, religion, history, urbanization, and development in the Middle East and Asia. Smita Tewari Jassal is Professor of Sociology at Ambedkar University, Kashmere Gate, Delhi, India at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. Halil Turan is Professor and Chairperson, Department of Philosophy, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

Routledge Contemporary South Asia

Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers (Un) Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles in a Post-Colonial Society Sandya Hewamanne Migration of Labour in India The squatter settlements of Delhi Himmat Singh Ratnoo Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India Globalizing Muscular Nationalism Sikata Banerjee Media as Politics in South Asia Edited by Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell Death and Dying in India Ageing and end-of-life care of the elderly Suhita Chopra Chatterjee and Jaydeep Sengupta Documentary Film in India An Anthropological History Giulia Battaglia The Rule of Law in Developing Countries The Case of Bangladesh Chowdhury Ishrak Ahmed Siddiky New Perspectives on India and Turkey Connections and Debates Edited by Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

New Perspectives on India and Turkey Connections and Debates

Edited by Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-68932-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-53775-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of H.E. Raminder Singh Jassal

Contents

ContentsContents

List of contributorsx Forewordxiii MELIHA BENLI ALTUNIŞIK

Introduction

1

SMITA TEWARI JASSAL AND HALIL TURAN

PART I

History and memory

15

  1 India and Turkey: interplay of shadows and trajectories in the longue durée

17

EYÜP ÖZVEREN

  2 Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities: reflections on love and violence in Islamic thought and politics

32

SHAIL MAYARAM

  3 Echoes in the shrine: remembering and forgetting in two contexts

47

SMITA TEWARI JASSAL

PART II

Nationhood and leadership

63

  4 Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters: Kemal Pasha in southern India

65

V. GEETHA

viii  Contents   5 Halide Edib and Gandhi: literary modernity in India and Turkey

76

EMRAH EFE KHAYYAT

PART III

Secularism89   6 Temple and dam, fez and hat: the secular roots of religious politics in India and Turkey

91

SRIRUPA ROY

  7 Nehru against Nehruvians: On religion and secularism

113

RAJEEV BHARGAVA

  8 Redefining the minority: Alevis in Turkey

127

MUSTAFA ŞEN

PART IV

Development debates

139

  9 Locating agency in global connections: the case of India and Turkey as ‘rising powers’

141

DERYA GÖÇER AKDER AND MELIHA BENLI ALTUNIŞIK

10 Diaspora engagement in the United States: the case of India and Turkey

155

ŞEBNEM KÖŞER AKÇAPAR

11 Perspectives on development incentives: 18th-century philosophers, India and Turkey

168

HALIL TURAN

12 Waterproof development? Impact of advocacy networks on anti-dam movements in India and Turkey

182

ZEYNEP KADIRBEYOĞLU

PART V

Claiming the city

195

13 Notes on informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta

197

DURBA CHATTARAJ

Contents ix 14 The endangered pleasures of Indian cities: notes from the good life in Istanbul

209

KUSHANAVA CHOUDHURY

15 A political analysis of middle-class-based social movements: India and Turkey compared

219

CEREN ERGENÇ

Index

235

Contributors

ContributorsContributors

Şebnem Köşer Akçapar is Associate Professor in Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul, where she is also Senior Research Fellow, Migration Research Center, and Founding Director of Center for Asian Studies (KUASIA). She taught Diaspora and Transnationalism at South Asian University, New Delhi. She edited Turkish Immigrants in Western Europe and North America: Immigration and Political Mobilization (2012). Derya Göçer Akder is Assistant Professor in the program of Area Studies at Middle East Technical University. She teaches and writes on revolutions, social movements and international politics of the Middle East, as well as theoretical intersections between area studies and international relations. Meliha Benli Altunışık is Professor of International Relations at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Her recent essay “Turkey’s Soft Power in a Comparative Context: The South Caucasus and the Middle East” appeared in Mehran Kamrava (ed.) The Great Game in West Asia: Iran, Turkey, and the South Caucasus (2017). Rajeev Bhargava is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and was Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru and Delhi University. He was a Fellow at Harvard University; University of Bristol; Institute of Advanced Studies, Jerusalem; Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin; Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna; Distinguished Resident Scholar at Columbia University; and Asia Chair in Paris. His publications include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What Is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010), Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010), Secularism and Its Critics (1998) and Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (2008). Durba Chattaraj is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Ashoka University, Delhi, where she was also the Director of Writing. She works on space, informality and globalization in South Asia. She is interested in developing genres of anthropological writing aimed at wide audiences, and is working on a book based on her ethnography of National Highway 117 in West Bengal. Kushanava Choudhury is author of The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta. He received his PhD in Political Theory from Yale University and

Contributors xi has taught at the University of Pennsylvania; Bogazici University, Istanbul; and the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Ceren Ergenç is Assistant Professor in International Relations and Asian Studies at Middle East Technical University. Her publications include Political Efficacy through Deliberative Participation in Urban China: A Case Study on Public Hearings, Journal of Chinese Political Science, Vol 19 Issue 2 (2014); Can Two Ends of Asia Meet?: An Overview of Contemporary Turkey-China Relations, East Asia (2015). V. Geetha is Editorial Director, Tara Books, Chennai. A feminist historian by vocation, her interests include caste, gender, labour and education. She has authored Undoing Impunity: Speech after Sexual Violence (2016), and coauthored Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (1998). Smita Tewari Jassal is Professor of Sociology, School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has taught Social Anthropology at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and at Columbia and Brandeis Universities. She has authored Unearthing Gender (2012), Daughters of the Earth (2001) and co-authored The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts (2006). Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu is Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at Bogazici University, Istanbul. She received her doctorate in Political Science from McGill University and her MPhil in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include democratization, migration and citizenship. She has published in Public Administration and Development, Environmental Politics, and in edited volumes. Emrah Efe Khayyat is Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. He received his PhD from Columbia University. Before Rutgers he taught philosophy of literature and religion in Frankfurt, Istanbul, Paris and New York. He works in Turkish (Ottoman and modern), Ladino (Judeo-Espagnol) and Italian, French and German. He has published essays and edited volumes in Europe and the United States. Shail Mayaram, Professor at CSDS, was Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University; L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales; Aligarh Muslim University; and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. She was a member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective. Her books include Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (1997), Against History, Against State: Counter-perspectives from the Margins (2003), and Philosophy as Saṃvāda and Svarāj: Dialogical Meditations on Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi (2014). Eyüp Özveren is Professor of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He publishes on Mediterranean and Black Sea Studies and on political economy. He is co-editor of Transnational Social Spaces: Agents, Networks and Institutions (2004) and author of “Bazaars of the Thousand and

xii  Contributors One Nights,” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 14 (2007). Srirupa Roy is Professor and Chair of State and Democracy at the University of Göttingen’s Centre for Modern Indian Studies. Her research and teaching interestsinclude nationalism, state formation, democratic transformation, media, and visual politics in India and the wider comparative context of “InterAsia.” Mustafa Şen is Associate Professor of Sociology, Middle East Technical University. He earned his PhD in Sociology and wrote his dissertation on “Turkish Entrepreneurs in Central Asia: The Case of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan” (2001). Among his English publications are: “A Background for Understanding Gülen Community” (2007) and “Transformation of Turkish-Islamism and the Rise of the Justice and Development Party” (2010). Halil Turan is Professor of Philosophy at Middle East Technical University. He has published articles and chapters in books on history of modern philosophy, phenomenology, ethics and political philosophy in English and Turkish. He is co-author of The Dictionary of Logic (2003) in Turkish. His current research interests are philosophy in the Enlightenment and cross-cultural studies.

Foreword

ForewordForeword

The idea of this book may go back to Professor Smita Tewari Jassal’s coming to Ankara as the wife of India’s ambassador to Turkey, H. E. Raminder Jassal in 2008. Professor Smita Tewari Jassal soon started teaching at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara through a joint appointment in the Sociology Department and the Asian Studies Program. She remained in Turkey after her husband passed away in 2011, until 2016. Her seven years of teaching and researching at METU were not only an occasion for fostering new friendships and academic exchanges but also, for her and some of her colleagues at METU, a cause for increasing interest in researching and understanding connections as well as similarities and differences between India and Turkey. It is out of this curiosity that Professor Smita Tewari Jassal and Professor Halil Turan from the Philosophy Department at METU decided to bring scholars from India and Turkey together to write a book about exploring connections between the two countries. An important milestone in this journey was a symposium at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi, India, on 12–13 February 2015. In addition to the contributions to the volume, the group benefited from the insights and comments of H. E. Burak Akçapar, Shahid Amin, Aditya Nigam, Ayşe Saktanber, and Prasad Shetty – scholars and experts who took part in the workshop but did not in the end contribute to the book. This book is a first in terms of engaging an academic dialogue about India and Turkey by Indian and Turkish scholars. It explores historical connections and provides a comparative perspective in terms of spirituality and religion, social movements, political economy, and foreign policy. Such cross-regional comparative analysis is important to overcome some of the pitfalls of area-focused analysis. The book is also significant in the context of re-thinking Asia, as it brings together two Asian countries that are generally analyzed as individually, mostly as “unique” cases or in their immediate neighbourhood. As such it contributes transregional understanding that has become increasingly important in Social Science research. More significantly though unlike most of such studies that only focus on historical comparisons, this book focuses also on contemporary issues thus expands the empirical base of trans-regional studies. Another characteristic of this book is its multi-disciplinarity. The contributors come from different disciplines, including Economics, Philosophy, Anthropology,

xiv  Foreword Sociology, Political Science and International Relations. This allows for a rich analysis of India and Turkey by providing possibilities for cross-disciplinary conversations. The book is a first attempt at a comparative analysis of India and Turkey. The hope is that it will inspire others to continue this conversation by deepening and expanding it. It is also hoped that identifying the origins and trajectories of pathways across these two comparable contexts the analysis in the book will be useful in probing novel hypothesis about the issues that are discussed. Meliha Benli Altunışık Ankara, Turkey

Introduction

Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil TuranIntroduction

Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan

This book, which includes chapters from a wide variety of perspectives, is an exercise in synthesizing intellectual and scholarly issues to investigate and highlight aspects and features that facilitate comparability between and across distinct cultures. We hope that it will stimulate reflection in promising directions. The viewpoints of writers arise from varied social and cultural positionings and define a new object of study, one which has not been identified before, except in occasional undertakings. Turkey and India have not been compared specifically as in this collection of essays. These contributions by our authors prove that findings from one location can illuminate the other and hence there are good reasons to believe that the comparative approach here is fruitful and could pave the way for similar studies. While the examples are likely to be country- and context-specific, the point of the study is precisely to investigate and highlight aspects and features that facilitate comparability between and across cultural divides. The starting point of our research was an effort to investigate the sources of economic and intellectual dynamism in two non-Western societies that are registering significant growth rates, albeit still struggling with social problems concerning inequality, education, health care, corruption, equity, gender, ecology, and the like. Our subsequent research questions were informed by an overarching theme: what might be the philosophical and anthropological/sociological explanations for the economic and cultural drive that we are witnessing in these societies? Philosophically, while the desire to enjoy the good life and even to “shine” is a basic impulse that drives all human societies, and the release of the new investment climate after the 90s has been explained through political economy arguments and changes in the economic sphere, one could well go beyond the obvious economic explanations to look for the “hidden” answers within these new social imaginaries. In other words, it is the supplementary philosophical, religious, cultural, and social explanations that must be foregrounded in future studies on development. Apart from the economic dynamism in both countries, there are several other reasons to use examples from one country to illuminate the other. The large Muslim population that makes India the second largest Muslim country in the world is another reason. Besides, both countries are multi-ethnic and socially diverse, with considerable minority populations.

2  Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan Chapters of this book are designed to investigate and identify trends that might be valid across distinct socio-cultural and political locations. The juxtaposition of the two countries throws up some startling commonalities as well as considerable differences. It is the variations as well as the similarities that allow for comparability. For example, while both are secular and democratic states, they are still quite different in terms of what is understood by “secularism” (even if what is understood by “secular” is also constantly being negotiated) – in brief, the state’s equidistance from all religions in the Indian case, as opposed to the relegation of religion to the realm of the private, in the Turkish one. India and Turkey, Asia Minor and the Indian subcontinent, and even the Ottomans and Mughals, share histories of contact and dialogue over the centuries. Hindustan had long been a frontier for the rest of the Islamic world, with soldiers and merchants arriving from Khorasan in Iran: Central Asia; Arabia; and Abyssinia. They came in the wake of religious scholars and mystics, as well as to escape the Mongol invasions of Iran and Transoxania. Much of northern India had been under rulers from Afghanistan and Central Asia since at least the 13th century. Ibn Batuta’s visit to Hindustan in the 14th century was prompted by rumors of the liberality of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq (Kozlowski 1995: 361). In spite of deep geographical, historical, and cultural connections, India and Turkey have become increasingly distanced with their understandings about each other filtered through stereotypically Orientalist categories. Indeed, it was not always this way. The ubiquity of thousands of words common to both cultures exemplifies the deep historical connections developed through centuries of movement, trade, and commerce. Hence, in response to the dissatisfaction with the existing state of academic engagement between India and Turkey, this book is an attempt to initiate cross-cultural conversations within a multidisciplinary framework. Going beyond social and economic explanations relevant to today’s developing economies, our contributors concentrate on specific issues relating to the historical connections and imaginations of their futures. Philosophical, religious, cultural, and social explanations, and associated re-evaluations of the past often sidelined in economic understanding, are foregrounded. Against a potentially fruitful but relatively under-researched and under-theorized backdrop, the book seeks to place the Indian subcontinent side by side with the Turkic-speaking world, both past and present, in order to understand one geographical context – history, culture, and social processes – in relation to the other. It builds on the premise that the ensuing conversations enable concerns from one location to illuminate the other. Through a focus on themes that facilitate comparability, we argue that such an exercise opens the space for further cross-cultural conversations between these different social universes. Since our aim was to encourage cross-cultural as well as inter-disciplinary conversations, we invited scholars to discuss themes they find relevant from their own perspectives. The outcome is a collection of enquiries to stimulate scholarly engagement. Grouped into separate thematic clusters anchored in ongoing academic debates, the essays underline the necessity of investigating links between economy, culture, religion, and polity. For example, problematizing and

Introduction  3 historicizing the term “Turk” enables us to apprehend the vast swathe of geography that the word encompasses. The term has undergone change with time and place because identities were in flux, making it hard to imagine such fluidity in the age of nation-states (Kafadar 1995: 28). As the volume builds on historical connectivity between geographies, the term includes much more than an aspect of contemporary Turkey as nation-state. In its historical sense, it subsumes a host of Central Asian peoples, recognized by ethnicity and shared linguistic commonalities, from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. In popular usage within the subcontinent, “Turk” includes the many displaced nomadic Turkic tribes, as well as dispersed elites who, as we shall see, made their way to India via Iran, Baghdad, and Afghanistan, at different historical junctures.1 As descendants of Timur, the Mughals were Turkic speaking, and while the Emperor Shahjahan wrote evocatively of longing for his ancestral home in the Ferghana valley, Persian was always the official language of the Mughal imperial court. As the lingua franca of the pre-colonial Islamic world, Persian appears to have been the language linking states and dynasties of Central Asia, Iran, and India. The Mughals merely built upon the ideals of Persian statecraft put in place over the three centuries of rule by the sultans preceding them. Principles of governance introduced by the 11th-century Delhi Sultanate of Turkic origins were replicated in other parts of north India. Mughal attempts to construct a polity combining their Timurid heritage with the traditions of Perso-Islamic statecraft were complicated by the challenges of ruling over a predominantly Hindu and Jain population. A cursory acquaintance with India’s material culture would be sufficient to convince the sceptic of the urgency of the cross-cultural exercise attempted here. Architecture, gardens, cuisine, languages, literature, religiosity, and even medicine bear the impact of extraordinary cross-cultural fertilization. The Mughals, who referred to themselves as the House of Timur, are only one among a series of pre-colonial visitors/conquerors – rather, one wave of people who made India their home, rarely returning to their homelands to tell of the encounter. Their political achievements were also more enduring than were the preceding Turkic, Tajik, and Afghan dynasties (Kozlowski 1995: 366). Not surprisingly, the impact appears one-sided, despite the rich though rare accounts of travellers such as Ibn Batuta and Francois Bernier from the 14th century. From the innumerable ghazi shrines or tombs dotting the north Indian landscape, it is clear that ghazis or warrior saints played a role in the subcontinent. Linda Darling explains, “Sponsorship of ghaza into India by the Turkish Gaznavids of Afghanistan (999–1161) attracted many ghazis.” (Darling 2000: 145) Mahmud of Ghazni made 17 raids into India between 1000 and 1027 C.E. His conquest is widely understood in mainstream history-writing as the dreaded but classic Sword of Islam, marking the beginning of rule by Muslim kings of different slave dynasties in the Sultanate of Delhi starting around 1200 (Amin 2005). In some chronicles, the term ghaza came to refer to warfare against the Mongols, in which Hindus and Muslims both participated (Darling 2000: 148). We next turn to evidence about Turks who preceded the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent.

4  Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan

Turks and the Delhi Sultanate A recent reappraisal of the Delhi Sultanate’s complex and conflicted trans-regional linkages with people of the Central Asian steppes reveals a rich lexicon of governance from the 12th to the 14th centuries, as well as Turkish and Mongol influences on polity, statecraft, and society (Kumar 2017: 161–90). Following the Mongol incursions, while the Delhi Sultanate became the nearest sanctuary for Muslim migrants, the social and cultural proximity of sultanate elites with the political and administrative practices of Turko-Mongols left its own imprint on sultanate customs and practices (ibid.). With the Mongols under Genghis Khan threatening to devastate Transoxiana, Iran, and Afghanistan, large numbers of Turkish military slaves entered the subcontinent in consequence of special favors bestowed on them by the Delhi sultan, Shams al-Din Iltutmish (1236). Public office and the regime’s privileged posts were invariably assigned to elite military slaves, also called Shamsi slaves or bandagan-i-khass. Invariably of Turkish origin and purchased rather than acquired as war booty, they represented a variety of Turkish tribes, such as the Qipchaqs (ibid.: 165). Inherited elite status may have enhanced their leadership skills, but their ability to adapt to the new environment and offer utmost loyalty to the sultan were other prized qualities. These factors reinforced the schooling in Persianate urbane traditions which they had received at the hands of slave merchants and their subsequent grooming in the Delhi court before being eased into positions as governors and commanders (ibid.: 166). From the ethnicity of his reliable cadres who formed a significant component of Sultan Iltutmish’s evolving polity, Kumar deduces that the consolidation of the early Delhi Sultanate was carried out by the Turks (ibid.: 168). But even after the death of Iltutmish, as political competition provided the regime’s diverse personnel with greater opportunities for upward mobility, frontier commanders continued to be recruited by succeeding Delhi sultans – the Khaljis (1290–1320) and later the Tughluqs (1320–1414). Both Jalal al-Din Khalji and Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq brought with them the social and cultural milieu of the Eurasian frontier. For instance, Tughluq’s commanders were drawn from such diverse ethnicities as “Ghuzz, Turk, Mongols of Rum and Rus and some Khurasian Persian (Tazsik)” (ibid.: 178), people who had fought alongside him on the Mongol frontier. The traveler Ibn Batuta notes that Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq was a Qara’una Turk whose military activities on the frontier increased his fortunes until the second decade of the 14th century (ibid.). In fact, it was Sultan Giyath al-Din Tughluq’s defense of Delhi from a Mongol raid which demonstrated his right to rule (Darling 2000: 148). It is no surprise that Turkish cultural traditions continued to be imported into Hindustan as it was possible for ambitious commanders in transition from the frontier to seize power and eventually emerge as sultans (ibid.: 163). Delhi sultans were known to have “borrowed, adapted and immediately cobbled together forms of administration and governance from a wide variety of regimes” (ibid.: 178). Persian accounts, however, have tended to erase the professional and ethnic

Introduction  5 diversity that the Delhi Sultanate received and absorbed, thus homogenizing the diverse body of immigrants into a composite Muslim community (ibid.: 184). Also effaced is the jostling for power and eminence by both new and old immigrants to the subcontinent (ibid.: 186). Further, while conventional historiography has argued that the Turkish experience ended with the establishment of the Khalji dynasty of 1290, recent scholarship interrogates the very notion of a monolithic social and political world of the Delhi sultans (Kumar 2017). In these accounts, the entry and role of Turks is a recurring and intriguing central motif. How, then, may we imagine the cross-cultural conversations that would have ensued from this encounter of Turks with Hindustan?

Cross-cultural conversations in the past An example that uniquely illustrates one type of cross-cultural conversation is of particular interest for the lessons it offers. It also exemplifies our method of enquiry, illustrating how insights from one location may illuminate the other. Since oral narratives offer a way of knowing the past, besides offering a commentary on it, let us then turn to the popular shrine of Ghazi Miyan, frequented even today by both Hindus and Muslims, which has drawn devotees since as early as the 14th century, when the Moroccan traveller Ibn Batuta visited it in 1341 (Amin 2005: 6). Darling writes that a certain Salar Masud, a Turkish Ghaznavid martyr, was portrayed as an ascetic and his tomb became a shrine in Bahraich, in eastern Uttar Pradesh (Darling 2000: 145). The shrine commemorates a martyr saint who was supposedly the nephew of that dreaded iconoclast Mahmud of Ghazni. An annual fair has been celebrated at this site since the 14th century. Amin describes a famous ballad of the region associated with the shrine in which the young Ghazi Miyan, being readied for marriage, leaves his wedding canopy in response to the cry of “Save the cows!” and ends up being martyred. Amin observes: Every year the unfulfilled desire to get Ghazi Miyan – Bale Dulha, the young bridegroom married is pushed to the first Sunday of the month of Jeth in the next agricultural year, “when the first mangoes expectedly ripen and drop from the tree.” And so it has gone on at least since the great Moroccan traveler Ibn Batuta visited the shrine in 1341 C.E. and found it too crowded for comfort. (Amin 2005: 21) Noteworthy about these folk retellings is that while the conquest of north India by Turkic-speaking central Asian Ghaznavids is evoked, there is also a reworking of the mainstream narrative to subvert the dominant thrust of difference and conquest (Amin 2005: 29). Rather, what the folk narrative emphasizes is hospitality toward the outsider, describing strategies of folk wisdom whereby the alien and “threatening” other must be domesticated, welcomed, and integrated. If this example of hospitality to the stranger hints at amity as the central motif in the

6  Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan ensuing cross-cultural conversation, what if the stranger were an entire world of ideas? For an inspiring historical precedent to the method of drawing upon another intellectual culture in the interpretation of one’s own, let us turn briefly toward innovative and vibrant conversations of the 16th and 17th centuries, associated with the period of early Indian modernity. Associated with the Navya Nyaya (“new reason”) thinkers and their emphasis on reason and critical, evidence-based enquiry (Ganeri 2011: 3, 6, 38), this distinctive way of looking at the past is an attitude of “religious cosmopolitanism” that characterizes the period. In 1656, this approach inspired Dara Shikoh, the Mughal philosopher crown prince, to get 52 Upanishads translated from Sanskrit into Persian. For Navya Nyaya thinkers, such an approach was an intellectual prerequisite for anyone interested in engaging in public reason. Dara undertook the project of translation, not because, as a practicing Sufi, he was hoping to learn anything new, but because of the compelling idea “that the stranger, if welcomed and understood, would turn out to be no stranger at all” (ibid.). It is worth underlining that the translations do not reflect a “syncretic” or “pluralist” mission, because such an approach would have meant acknowledging “difference” in the first place (ibid.: 25). Rather, the norm of hospitality to ideas, when extended to the Upanishads – the “intellectual stranger” – now offered the means by which the Sufi seeker could find answers to his “own” questions (ibid.: 30). Here, then, we find the principle of using another tradition to shed light on one’s own – the method of seeking insights into one’s own culture through the lens of another. Hence, in facilitating the migration of these ancient Sanskrit texts into the Persian intellectual tradition, Dara Shikoh enabled his own tradition of Mughal courtly Islamic learning to see itself more clearly. As European scholars of the time knew Persian but not Sanskrit, the translation project’s historical importance can be traced to Anquetil Duperron’s translation of the Persian into Latin, thus going on to influence Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, William Blake, and Schelling (ibid.: 22). Ganeri speculates that it was precisely Indian norms of “engaging the new in a dialogue with the old, of the outsider with the insider, that enabled India to emerge from British colonialism uncrushed” (ibid.: 153). In the following sections, we reflect on ways in which essays in this book might take forward the mode of engaging with another culture to understand one’s own.

The past in the present The first set of four essays on historical linkages offers the opportunity to continue the conversation between history and memory illustrated by the folk memory about Ghazi Miyan. Collective memory in Turkey is familiar with the late prime minister Bülent Ecevit’s interest in India and its culture. Eyüp Özveren’s chapter draws on his visit to India in 2000. Turks who have witnessed Ecevit’s long career as a politician and his role in Turkish history would surely have noted Ecevit’s poetic affection for India. Özveren’s opening essay charts the reconstitution of the geographical terrain with the movement of Alexander the Great from

Introduction 7 west to east, with references to medieval tales such as The Thousand and One Nights and travelogues of Ibn Batuta and Marco Polo. Discussions of the Indian Ocean world economy through European expansion until the 19th century and the opening of the Suez Canal are woven together with family history, memory, arts, and literature. In the next essay Shail Mayaram provides a historical and political perspective on Sufis in the cities that were located within the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. She argues that the Sufi emphasis on love is seen as a challenge to Salafis, who are explicitly oriented to a self/other binary view of the world. Mayaram’s essay explores the relation between the ethical and the political, analyzing discourses on nonviolence in Islamic thought. Clearly, the metaphysics and practices of Salafis and Sufis have profound implications for democracy and secularism. A Turkish traveller in India would be impressed by the exceptionally positive attitude of Indians toward those whom they recognize as Turks. Most probably, the reason for this is the historical relation of Indians with people they are accustomed to call Turks, with whom they lived for centuries. It is not surprising that the conflation of Turk with Muslim in the folklore of north India hints at the multiple and now almost forgotten ways in which the two cultures were connected in the past. In the oral tradition of eastern Uttar Pradesh, for example, “Turk” continues to denote people of Central Asian origin who practice Islam.2 Turks from the westernmost part of the continent, namely Anatolia, are less known. As Smita Tewari Jassal’s chapter in this book witnesses, numerous usages in healing shrines in North India are identical with those in the modern Turkish juridical terminology (muakkil, bayan), as well as in its colloquial language (insaf, haziri, kalaam, ilm, etc.). The essay compares on-going practices at specific healing shrines in north India with similar practices of ziyaret in Turkey. How people engage with, imagine, and reconstruct their historical past informs the essay, along with a reflection on how the past is made meaningful and brought into conversation with the present.

Turkey and India in the 20th century An episode in the shared histories of India and Turkey that perhaps greatly intensified connections between them in the early 20th century is the Indian Khilafat movement, in support of the caliphate in Turkey. When the Ottoman emperor Abdul Hamid II launched his pan-Islamic program to protect his empire from division by the West, it evoked immense religious sympathy and support among Indian Muslims. As the Turkish War of Independence began, the Indian Khilafat Committee of prominent Muslims was formed to forge political unity to protect the caliphate. In 1920 Indian Khilafat leaders allied with Gandhi’s Indian National Congress to fight for the aims of Swaraj (independence) as well as the cause of Khilafat. The wave of sympathy for Turkey’s War of Independence under Gandhi’s leadership led to the raising of substantial sums in support of the caliphate, which would later form the core endowment for Turkey’s Is Bank. The alliance furthered the cause of Hindu–Muslim unity but with the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Atatürk, the Khilafat leadership fragmented. This

8  Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan mobilization was subsequently channeled into the Pakistan Movement. How this energy then fed into the partition of India is a story that waits to be told. As an exit strategy of the departing colonial power, India was partitioned – to create a separate homeland for Muslims, thus, ironically, undoing centuries of amity and co-existence – a mere glimpse of which we have tried to offer above. Yet more Muslims stayed behind in India than moved to Pakistan, thereby negating (and also questioning) the very logic upon which the partition of the subcontinent was premised. Paradoxically, despite partition and the formation of Pakistan, India continues to be the home of one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, second only to Indonesia. Even after the abolition of the caliphate, conversations that had begun in the early 1920s continued after the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic. Reform movements in religion, law, and women’s rights attracted the attention of intellectuals in Madras and other regions of India. Atatürk’s reforms continued to inspire Indian nationalists and thinkers struggling for freedom from colonial rule. V. Geetha examines the attractions of early republican Turkey for the Tamil “self-respecters,” a subaltern group of Tamil social reformers and iconoclasts in the 1920s. While it is common to conceive of modernization in terms of Turkey’s relationship to Europe and critique the model adopted by Atatürk, Geetha’s essay foregrounds the shared internationalist discourse aimed at wresting the content of the “modern” from its imperial and Western context and – paradoxically – relocating it within the local. Geetha argues that such a reconstituted “modern” enables us to think beyond older modernization theses. Emrah Efe Khayyat’s is the last essay in this section. Ottoman-Turkish feminist, humanist, novelist, and critic Halide Edib’s (1884–1964) single cause was aesthetic education to “awaken the spirit and the struggle for its evolution” of Muslim masses caught between dormant traditions and great powers fighting for world dominion. Her relentless search for the “ideal neo-Moslem” to meet the challenges of the modern world ended in India in her meeting with Gandhi. Invited in 1935 to teach at Delhi’s newly instituted Jamia Millia Islamia, a university founded by enthusiastic Khilafatists, this “modern” Muslim woman, now veiled, mocked Islamists of the late Ottoman Empire for policing women’s dress, while declaring Mahatma Gandhi the ideal neo-Muslim. Edib embodies the conflicts and allegiances that marked the period. Many key issues of contemporary literary and cultural criticism were reframed, including the relationship between visibility and faith, politics of the veil, and the ideals of free speech.

Secularism and nationhood Hitherto, comparisons about India and Turkey have surfaced in discussions about specific understandings of secularism or the approaches of Kemal Atatürk and Jawaharlal Nehru to modernity, development, and nation building. References to India’s Muslim population by virtue of being the second largest Muslim country are ubiquitous and recurring. Perhaps one of the most productive and on-going conversations has been on the subject of secularism, especially the ways in which

Introduction 9 relations between secularism, religion, and nationalism are understood and experienced in the distinct historical and cultural contexts of India and Turkey. A gradual shift may be discerned from abstract conceptualizations of secularism to its practice and institutionalization in daily life. Instead of religion being confined to the private sphere, Indian scholarship has endorsed the public face of religion, especially for the marginalized and lower castes. In place of equal citizenship, the Constitution itself has emphasized the need for special benefits to these groups to strengthen the principles of secularism in India’s pluralistic context (Geetha and Rajan 2011: 26). If secularism is not about separation of religion from the public sphere but rather its regulation and systematic and controlled inclusion in public life (Roy and Cinar 2012), these two national contexts offer the potential for a comparative anthropology of secularism. Since it clearly shapes public discourses and practices, the particularities and specificities of India and Turkey offer at least two distinct contextual frameworks to nuance the universalistic terms within which secularism has been hitherto understood. The essay by Srirupa Roy does just this. Her nuanced reading of secularism in the two contexts argues that the ideology and practices of secularism in both India and Turkey secured rather than erased the political salience of religion. In India it contributed to an understanding of the political arena in terms of permanent majorities and permanent minorities constituted along the axis of religious identity. Turkish secularism contributed to the hegemony of Sunni Hanafite Islam through its efforts to establish the state’s ability to control religious practice in the public sphere. Moreover, the secularist ideology entrenched an oppositional dichotomy of “secularism versus religion” as the dominant framework of Turkish politics, which inscribed religion as the prime motivator of all political activity. In conclusion Roy suggests that we locate secularism historically, so as to engage with the politics and ideology of the “secular” instead of conceiving it in abstract procedural terms. Thus, an overall reevaluation of the relationship between religion and politics that does not presume a false choice between secular nationalism and religious nationalism is the way out, she argues. Recognizing that political secularism is in crisis, Rajeev Bhargava also argues that it needs to be re-conceptualized. To do this he revisits secularism as imagined by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, arguing that Nehru’s views on religion and secularism were unusually subtle, even complex, and remain acutely relevant. Far from secularism being about the defence of minority rights alone, Nehru’s multi-faceted understanding includes countering inter-religious domination. The function of a secular state, in Nehru’s view, was therefore to encourage freedom and equality, and promote justice-centred reforms – even if this meant efforts to liberate ordinary people from religious extremisms within their own religious spheres. In his essay on the contemporary struggles faced by the Alevi community in Turkey, Mustafa Şen addresses the question of why Alevis resist being seen as minorities. He argues that, compared to Indian Muslims who embrace their minority status to preserve their rights in an increasingly Hinduised social order, Alevis

10  Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan reject the minority label out of fear that it will further marginalise them and erode their capacity to play a meaningful role in Turkey’s political life. Thus, the innumerable attempts by Alevis to maintain political dialogue with the Sunni mainstream in Turkey reflect a desire to remain politically relevant and preserve the existing political space. In shifting the terms of the minority discourse away from that of religious difference and numerical disadvantage to that of equal citizenship, Alevis in Turkey are then engaged in investigating the very nature of the minority. Meliha Altunışık and Derya Göker Akder explore Turkey’s way of connecting with the world and its claims to be a “world power” from the late 1980s until the rise of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) government in 2002. The end of bipolarity and Turkey’s economic successes have combined to facilitate the recasting of Turkey as global representative of a monolithic “Islamic civilization.” In addition, Turkey’s commitment to reclaiming its Ottoman past is another policy thrust, known as neo-Ottomanism. A comparison with India enables Altunışık and Akder to identify the ways each nation defines its role in a changing world. Şebnem Köşer Akçapar argues that transnational political and economic activities of diaspora communities usually take place within the framework of the triadic relationship involving diaspora communities, their organizations, homelands, and countries of settlement. Her focus on diaspora engagement of India and Turkey in the United States seeks to argue that lack of historical/colonial connections, high concentration of skilled migrants, strategic partnership models, and geographical distance are factors that have shaped engagement with diasporas in the US differently from those in Europe. However, diaspora institutions and migrant organizations also seek to effect economic and political changes back home. As Turkish and Indian diaspora communities in the US are not monolithic, Akçapar argues that there is a need to recognize the existence of multiple diasporas and develop strategies and policies accordingly to address the specific needs of diaspora members.

Development debates While one of the book’s attempts is to shed light on what was often obscured when seeking to understand today’s possibilities with reference to the past, a second academic goal is to develop comparative approaches that could be applicable elsewhere. From the Turkish point of view, India offers a model of scientific and technological development and its achievements in IT, the space program, and medicine seem spectacular to the Turkish observer. Its intelligentsia and scholars, both in India and abroad, are perceived as enormous assets. Yet, to many Indians the nature of this success seems an “uncertain glory,” as suggested by the title of a 2013 book by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. Authors like Amartya Sen, Jean Drèze, Dipankar Gupta, and Anirudh Krishna are sceptical about the claim that a widening middle class in India has the potential to foster consumerism, which will in turn lead to economic growth. For Gupta, an Indian middle class is a “myth.” He argues that a prosperous middle class – that is, one whose members earn and consume at a level similar to the Western middle class – is “an optical

Introduction 11 illusion” created by a few visible and rich employees in high-tech firms (Gupta 2009: 68–83). Drèze and Sen complain about the media’s exaggerated optimism concerning India’s high growth rates of GDP, ignoring “the fact that the growth process is so biased, making the country look more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa” (Drèze and Sen: ix).3 There are serious impediments to an equitable competition, as many researchers suggest. For example, the growing IT sector in India – and elsewhere – requires a select workforce, whose education is encumbered by the existing inequalities in schooling in developing countries. Anirudh Krishna and his colleagues’ surveys on higher education in India displaying the rural-urban divide and the inequalities concerning family background are alarming (see e.g.  Krishna 2013; 2014; Krishna and Brihmadesam 2006). Although “social mobility” can be shown to be a fact both in India and Turkey, it must also be noted that for both countries “stability” is a more concrete one (see e.g. Kumar et al. 2002; Boratav 2004). Our authors seek to explore dimensions of the new social imaginary with special reference to three recent trends that have been identified in the literature as specific to globalization processes worldwide: namely, increasing social inequalities rather than a narrowing of income disparities, with wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few; a growing informal sector with increasing insecurity of labour as a result; the alleged widening of the middle class or of an expanding “consuming” class. The essays in this section on development touch on some of the social costs of globalization and developmental strategies adopted by Turkey and India. The three essays on changing economies and forms of development by Turan, Kadirbeyoğlu, and Chattaraj examine different aspects of the economy and examples of development. India’s development project over the past 60 years has been described as a virtual laboratory of “planned development.” Existing scholarship has examined development paradigms that empowered and legitimized the state and negotiated a consensual program for planned development (Deshpande 1997). In addition, specific policy issues critical to development, among them land reform, environment, ecology, displacement, and resettlement, are significant thematic issues with their own emerging bodies of literature. Drawing on comparisons, this cluster of essays also seeks to understand how individual conceptions of life, evaluations and aspirations of individuals living in urban environments of the 21st century may be understood in universal terms. Halil Turan re-visits the philosophical debates on relations between emulation and wealth, virtue and happiness. Bernard Mandeville argued in The Fable of the Bees that virtue and prosperity are antagonistic, perceiving pride or vanity as the spur for industry and wealth accumulation. David Hume and Adam Smith, Mandeville’s critical readers, however, were reluctant to identify “vice” as a chief incentive. Nevertheless, they conceded that “passion” played the major role in economic development. Turan reviews the potential for economic growth of India and Turkey with reference to the arguments of these thinkers as well as those of Amartya Sen. He asks if freedom and capability are primary indicators and constitutive of development.

12  Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan A political economy that conceives of the human being as guided by self-interest in all of his/her practices presupposes an ethics that takes egoism as a power which needs to be tempered to benefit society by contributing to its welfare: this explains why “industriousness,” “frugality,” “perseverance,” and “dexterity” were brought to the fore as “virtues” by philosophers who thought that people are motivated to work and strive to be enterprising owing to their will to be appreciated for their power to purchase (the labour of others), or at least for fear of being looked down upon if they lack such power. Hence, “pride” or “vanity” was seen as the basic egoistic motive that could (and, apparently, ought to) be employed for the good of society, in that it led to an increase in the quantity and improvement in the quality of labour in production and services. In this sense, do contemporary market economies in states of growth therefore bear some resemblance to 18th-century Britain at least in the psychology of human beings participating in economic relations as workers or entrepreneurs? It is generally argued that individuals are becoming more and more egoistic, that the opening of borders to foreign capital makes the economy grow but degrades human values such as friendship and solidarity in creating an environment of relentless competition. Hence, “one-upmanship,” a conception brought to the fore by the late Zygmunt Bauman, can be seen as marking the spirit of all societies affected by “globalization” (Bauman 2013). Developmentalism was the leading ideology for both India and Turkey from the early years of their modern histories. Environmental issues, in the meantime, fell into oblivion until populations began to be affected by mega projects necessitated by industrialization. In the 90s, the intensification of people’s movements and struggles culminated in the articulation of influential World Bank policies on the “rehabilitation” of the project-affected and marginalized groups as a consequence of developmental projects. It has been argued that owing to civil society initiatives in India and a vibrant tradition of social critique, intellectual discourses emerging from the Indian subcontinent in response to issues of development have the potential to transform social science (Cernea 1999). Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu makes a comparison of dam building in India and Turkey. Contextualizing her arguments within debates on the construction of large dams, she examines two dam projects – Sardar Sarovar project of India and Ilısu of Turkey. Since both projects were severely challenged by national and international civil society movements, Kadirbeyoğlu compares these experiences under the following heads: democracy and its context, independent media, access to transnational networks, and the availability of state resources, irrespective of international funding. The fast-growing economies of India and Turkey, with large and expanding informal sectors, prompt Durba Chattaraj to explore the implications of casual vending on the streets of Calcutta and Istanbul. Part of the informal or unregulated economy, such trading often violates state regulations. Chattaraj develops a normative argument for the ethics of informal vending. She argues that despite illegality, the process benefits the poor as well as consumers  – the public. The ubiquity of street vendors as an inescapable part of public space contributes to distinct imaginaries of these cities.

Introduction  13

The city Migrants and workers are often bearers of vibrant counter-imaginaries of the city, citizenship, and democracy. The final two essays seek to understand how people claim the space of the city as well as reimagine cityscapes. They touch on several interlinked themes about city planning, people’s participation, civil society, and examples of self-governance, in addition to alternative social imaginaries that have inspired people’s movements. The world learned of Istanbul’s unique urban culture through confrontations at Gezi Park when thousands rose up to fight against the planned construction of a shopping mall. Kushanava Choudhury suggests that discourses about making Delhi “a world-class city” and Mumbai “like Shanghai” spur fantasies of highways and shopping malls. Such imaginaries are divested of the pleasures arising from the diversity that produces urban idioms and new forms of comportment and mentality. He draws on Istanbul to imagine an alternate urban future, evoking Socrates’ (and Plato’s) understanding of the link between the polis, politics, and the good life. Since Istanbul’s citizens articulate a way of being attuned to the pleasures of being in public, and of being a public, he argues that this is worth fighting for. In the light of Choudhury’s timely paean to Istanbul, the last essay, by Ceren Ergenç, contributes to the literature on new activism of middle classes. The year that the AAP in India (the Common Man’s Party) entered electoral politics, urban middle classes in Turkey occupied the streets, demanding public control over neoliberal urban regeneration policies. Turkey’s Gezi movement gave rise to neighbourhood forums but did not evolve into a political party. To explain these divergent outcomes, Ergenç examines the socioeconomic, institutional, and ideological background of the middle classes, demonstrating how the decentralized Indian state’s policies facilitate political activism, while Turkey’s middle classes remain organizationally dispersed. *** We, as the editors of this volume, are astonished to find that scholarly relations between India and Turkey in social sciences and philosophy are only occasional and not commonplace. The present volume intends to bridge this gap and be the first in its genre to bring together researchers from both countries to initiate ­comparative social and cultural analyses. We believe that the outcome is a rich collection of essays discovering substantial topics of comparison. There is ample evidence that the research and assessments of the authors will be fruitful for future cooperation of social scientists and philosophers from both countries. We would like to express our gratitude to the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, for funding a research project on India and Turkey, and to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (CSDS), for hosting the symposium “Past Connections, Contemporary Debates: India and Turkey” in 2015. We thank ambassadors Mr Rahul Kulshreshth and Mr Burak Akçapar for their invaluable support and encouragement.

14  Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan

Notes 1 For three centuries before Babar from Uzbekistan founded the Mughal Empire in 1520, large parts of peninsular India were ruled by different slave dynasties (Amin 2005). 2 “Muslim” is a later category that emerged with colonialism as a consequence of the colonial state’s taxonomic concerns, which in turn led to the fixing of the fluid and flexible identities into those of Muslim and Hindu. 3 Emphases added.

References Amin, Shahid (2005) “Un saint guerrier: Sur la conquête de l’Inde du Nord par les Turcs au XIe siècle,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, (60e année): 265–92. Bauman, Zygmunt (2013) Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?, Cambridge: Polity Press. Boratav, Korkut (2004) Istanbul ve Anadolu’dan Sinif Profilleri [Class Profiles from Istanbul and Anatolia], Ankara: Imge Kitabevi. Cernea, Michael (1999) “Why Economic Analysis Is Essential to Resettlement,” Economic and Political Weekly, 31 July–6 August. Darling, Linda T. (2000) “Contested Territory: Ottoman Holy War in Comparative Context,” Studia Islamica, 91: 133–63. Deshpande, Satish (1997) “From Development to Adjustment: Economic Ideologies, the Middle Class and 50 Years of Independence,” Review of Development and Change, 11/2, July–December: 294–318. Drèze, Jean and Sen, Amartya (2013) An Uncertain Glory, India and Its Contradictions, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Ganeri, Jonardon (2011) The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450– 1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geetha, V. and Nalini, R. (2011) Religious Faith, Ideology, Citizenship: The View from Below, New Delhi: Routledge. Gupta, Dipankar (2009) The Caged Phoenix, Can India Fly? New Delhi: Viking by Penguin Books India. Kafadar, Cemal (1995) Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kozlowski, Gregory C. (1995) “Imperial Authority, Benefactions and Endowments (Awqāf ) in Mughal India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 38(3): 355–70. Krishna, Anirudh (2013) “Making It in India, Examining Social Mobility in Three Walks of Life,” Economic and Political Weekly, 48(49), 7 December: 38–49. ———– (2014) “Examining the Structure of Opportunity and Social Mobility in India: Who Becomes an Engineer?” Development and Change, 45(1): 1–28. Krishna, Anirudh and Brihmadesam, Vijay (2006) “What Does It Take to Become a Software Professional?” Economic and Political Weekly, July 29: 3307–14. Kumar, Sanjay, Heath, Anthony and Heath, Oliver (2002) “Determinants of Social Mobility in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 20 July: 2983–7. Kumar, Sunil (2017) “Trans-Regional Contacts and Relationships: Turks, Mongols and the Delhi Sultanate in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Ismail K. Poonawala (ed.) Turks in the Indian Subcontinent, Central and West Asia: The Turkish Presence in the Islamic World, New Delhi: OUP. Roy, Srirupa and Cinar, Alev (eds.) (2012) Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and India, Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Part I

History and memory

1 India and Turkey

Eyüp ÖzverenIndia and Turkey

Interplay of shadows and trajectories in the longue durée Eyüp Özveren

Introduction This chapter starts with an anecdotal close-up on cultural politics via the Europeanmediated influence of Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, on Bülent Ecevit, the Turkish politician. Then, the deeper forces at work that connect the two countries are explored by taking a large-scale, long-term historical approach in contradistinction to separate treatment in this vein (Wallerstein et al. 1987; Wallerstein and Palat 1999). This chapter thus places the two countries in a broader map as a singular subject matter of inquiry. By delving into the layers of collective memory, we get hold of traces and remnants of such real links that integrate the human geography in question. The Indian impressions of Falih Rıfkı Atay, the leading Turkish journalist of the interwar period – who quoted in his preface Mevlana Zafer Ali’s speech in Lahore that emphasized the continuing Indian support for Turkish independence as cutting across the Indian religions (Atay 1943: 6), and the letters from India (1958–9) of the prominent social scientist Niyazi Berkes – who received a warm welcome as a ‘relative’ when he declared his nationality (Berkes 2016: 154) – are exploited to this effect. Because the author of this chapter believes that the combined effect of personal (allegedly subjective and unimportant) and collective (traditionally taken to be more objective and important from the viewpoint of writing history) memories is to cultivate historical consciousness, he sees no harm in incorporating glimpses of his family history and intellectual biography into this narrative even if they may seem trivial. The reader is begged to interpret these inclusions as indicators of the strength and depth of the ties between India and Turkey that penetrated into human lives.

How India and Turkey have been related The three themes that have attracted scholarly interest are (1) national liberation struggles, (2) concomitant foreign policy choices and (3) the political role of secularism. Whereas national awakening was invited by the discriminatory and exploitative nineteenth-century international order in general and British imperialism in the case of India in particular, the Ottoman Empire was spared from British

18  Eyüp Özveren colonialism by the rise of Germany amidst an international balance-of-power game. India was unfortunate enough to become ‘the jewel in the crown’ at a time when the Ottoman Empire, modest in wealth and resources, was considered important because of its geostrategic placement on the route to Britain’s most prized possession, India. The peoples of the two countries were encouraged by the Japanese victory against the Russian Empire (Atay 1943: 59). National awakening was speeded up in Turkey because of the occupation and partition of the country among the winners of the First World War. Turkish independence was won in the battlefield and formally recognized at the Conference of Lausanne (1923) where the Republic of Turkey emerged. Indian independence benefited from the moral raising effect of the Kemalist victory (Atay 1943: 59). It was the crowning achievement in 1947 of the prolonged struggle of a predominantly but not exclusively peaceful movement (Gordon 1990; Fay 1995). Wholehearted Indian support for the Turkish struggle for independence had its roots in earlier support during the Libyan and Balkan Wars and the First World War. It had been strong because of the anti-imperialistic nature of Turkish struggle in the eyes of Indian people in general, and allegedly due to its Islamic attribute, from the viewpoint of Indian Muslims – who were disappointed with the abolishment of the sultanate and kalifate1 – in particular (Berkes 2016: 17, 100, 113, 127, 130–31, 135). We observe here the fruits of consciousness-raising in response to imperialism that contrasted sharply with the Ottoman indifference to the demand for military assistance raised in Basra on behalf of the legendary Tipu Sultan (Atay 1943: 244) while he resisted the British takeover of his country during the last decade of the eighteenth century (Berkes 2016: 156). Turkish foreign policy was built upon the nineteenth-century Ottoman experience of playing one great power against another. Whereas this was primarily ‘Byzantine’, the Turkish Republic’s foreign policy was principled. The Soviet Union provided Turkey with an opportunity in this respect. It was unfortunate that Turkey’s experiences with its neutrality policy (Wesiband 1973; Deringil 1989) took place at a time when the Third World had not yet been born. Turkey thus anticipated India in the domain of international politics. The independent India became a major leader of the nonalignment movement. India thus became the true heir to the Turkish foreign policy of the interwar period and upgraded its scale and scope. There must have been a direct influence at work, as Atay observed many Indians approaching him during his visit to praise Turkish neutrality during the Second World War as an example of ‘good government’ (Atay 1943: 149). Both Turkish (Berkes 1964) and Indian secularism were rooted in nineteenthcentury modernization of the one-size-fits-all type. Turkey shifted to a secularism modelled after the France of the Third Republic. The prime objective was to sever religion’s access to the state and to re-define civil society and the public sphere. The Turkish state was faced with a primarily Muslim population once the nation had been homogenized greatly by the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire in a war context. This meant an outright struggle for limiting the power of the dominant religion. India was helped by its multi-religious population, which provided

India and Turkey 19 the state with relative autonomy. As secularism has come under attack in both countries, major political landslides have been observed. Taking the risk of counterfactual history, it can be suggested that had the Second World War not taken place, the trajectories of Turkey and India might have converged.

A crossroads of modern politics and poetry Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006) was five-time prime minister from 1974 to 2002. He was one of the most important political figures in Turkey. No other politician affected the language of politics as much as he did. His oratorical skills were powerful, and he introduced numerous concepts to Turkey, including ‘democratic left’, ‘self-management’ and ‘village-city’. He combined modesty and humility with an extreme politeness and a unique dressing style. His greatest political asset was the public perception of his incorruptibility (Tachau 2002: 114). Much of this would have seemed familiar within the Indian political environment, but it was quite novel in Turkey. Ecevit pursued an equally innovative political agenda. As of the 1960s he helped transform the Republican People’s Party (hereafter RPP), the Turkish equivalent of the Congress Party in India), from being the party of a one-party regime into a democratic leftist party of a multi-party regime. When he saw that the party he led failed to thoroughly transform itself in line with his aspirations, he resigned from leadership and started his political struggle anew with the Democratic Leftist Party (1983). This party carried him to government by popular vote as prime minister for the last time in 1999. Important in his regaining popular support was his redefinition of secularism by reconciling respect for religion – as an individual and cultural right – with politics, without jeopardizing the nonreligious nature of the state. Despite the short time he spent in office as prime minister, Ecevit gained a statesman’s standing even in the eyes of his long-term political foes. This had to do not only with his highly personal and principled political style but also with his strong identification with the national foreign policy stance. Ecevit was the politician who resurrected Turkish foreign policy of the interwar period and adapted it to requirements of the last quarter of the twentieth century. In spite of his phoenix-like resurrection from the ashes, Ecevit was in fact a reluctant politician. He had hesitated before entering politics just as he did in seeking leadership. Every time he lost an election, he either resigned from office and/or offered to resign from the leadership of his party, as was the case in 1979 and 1987. (Arcayürek 2006) Given his persistence in politics for about half a century, this offers a curious paradox. It seemed his heart and mind were elsewhere. His father, a member of parliament during the single-party regime, was an academic and his mother a painter. Ecevit graduated from American Robert College in İstanbul in 1944. This school was known for its liberal arts education. As a student, Ecevit had developed a deep interest in literature, especially Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Anglo-Saxon poetry left a deep impression on him at a time when French influence reigned strong over Turkish poetry (Süreya 2006: 173). Shortly

20  Eyüp Özveren after his graduation, he started as a translator in civil service. Between 1944 and 1950, he worked at the Turkish Embassy in London. Upon his return to Turkey, he became first a journalist and then a member of parliament from RPP as well as minister of work (1961–65) who introduced modern labor legislation to Turkey. In spite of the political progress he had achieved by then, he hesitated to challenge İsmet İnönü, the ‘Second Man’ of Turkish independence and the republic, who had inherited the political mantle of Kemal Atatürk and who had supported Ecevit all along. Ultimately he decided to stand up and challenge, making up his mind by recourse to an Indian classic, Bhagavad Gita, which he had read time and again. He realized he was suffering in a state of confusion not too different from that of Arjuna, who had to contest his cousins, and that he had to win the war first in his own mind. The rest would follow naturally, as in the epic. Well versed in turnof-the-twentieth-century modern literature, Ecevit had always had an interest in Indian classics, not unlike Pound and Eliot, whom he admired. Ecevit had translated the very section of Bhagavad Gita that helped him make up his mind into Turkish. He was fifteen when he saw his father read Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener in Turkish translation. Ecevit translated, when he was sixteen, Tagore’s Gitanjali, first published in Bengali in 1910. Many years later, during the peak of the first phase of his political career, he published a volume of his own poetry along with his poetry translations. He included some poems from Gitanjali. In the preface, Ecevit noted how the (Western) world came to know Tagore through Ecevit’s translation of Gitanjali into English in 1912. Ecevit thought the choice of prose in these translations together with the alteration of the order of poems (along with omissions of some poems and additions of others from his other books) had produced an altogether different book. In 1976 he wrote of his regret that “all that remained in his hand from his Bengali were these translations” (Ecevit 1976: 109). Ecevit’s preoccupation with Tagore and translation had continued throughout his youth as he took Sanskrit and Bengali courses in the School of Oriental and African Studies. Ecevit was first attracted to Tagore because in his works he identified resonances with Ottoman-Turkish mystiques. Throughout his life, he always wished to go to India and visit the school set up by Tagore at Santiniketan, which in 2000 would confer upon Ecevit an honorary doctorate.2 This was during an official visit with great importance attached because it was to liberate Turkish-Indian foreign relations from the Pakistani yoke. For Ecevit this was also a personal visit to India, the homeland of his inspirations, poetic as well as political.3 He paid a final tribute to Tagore as well as to his own youth by visiting places with which Tagore’s name had been inextricably linked. Ecevit saw poetry as a tool for resolving his political dilemmas, but also as ‘a clothing of thought that waited to be stripped off’ (Süreya 2006: 176). In short, Ecevit wished to be a poet but became a politician with poetic credentials. By contrast, Tagore was first and foremost a poet. In 1926, the year Ecevit was only one year old, Tagore, Nobel laureate in literature (1913), had a brief stopover in Istanbul. He was on his way from Italy to India, via Egypt (Tamer 2000: 24). Born in Calcutta in 1861, he had gone to London to study law but then changed

India and Turkey 21 his mind – just as Ecevit would do in his studies – and returned home to give himself to literature. He published his first book as early as 1878 and wrote prolifically until his death in 1941. He was well received by William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, the two leading modern poets of English language. For Tagore poetry always came first and although at its height he had endorsed the Indian struggle for national liberation, he withdrew to his own corner to pursue his literary and artistic interests as soon as he could with an easy conscience (Tamer 2000: 9–10). On 23 November 1926, a Tuesday, Cumhuriyet, a daily newspaper identified with the Turkish national liberation struggle and the subsequent republican reforms, reported: The great Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore who bears a worldwide reputation came to our city yesterday. The poet, whose works have been translated into all the languages of the civilized nations on earth, will not stay long in Istanbul. He does not even disembark. Today at 14.00 pm he will depart for Egypt with the very same boat he has arrived yesterday at 14.00 pm. (Cumhuriyet 23 November 1926: 1) Two points deserve emphasis: first, that Tagore was viewed as first a philosopher and then a poet; and, second, that this newspaper uncritically entertained the idea of a category of ‘civilized nations’ which nevertheless, to the dismay of the inventors of this terminology, unquestionably included both Turkey and India. The perception of Tagore as a philosopher first was an import to Turkey via the West, where he was praised as an Eastern mystical philosopher. In fact, he had a strong record as a philosopher committed to the principle of non-violence. Moreover, given his strong commitment to direct intercultural interaction among the people, it was but natural that he saw imperialism as well as nationalism as potential obstructions on the way. Whether Tagore was first and foremost a philosopher or a poet is beside the point, as he was also a lyricist and a painter as of the age of sixty-eight (Bhattacharya 2012). Tagore had arrived on a Romanian boat. Symbolically, when the boat set anchor in the harbor, his cabin faced the Asian rather than the European side of Bosphorus. He was in poor health, he said, because of the successive conferences he had been giving, and this was why he abstained from yet another one in Istanbul. Nevertheless, he agreed to talk to the press in his cabin. The great poet is reported to have said that, to his discontent, he did not see any major change in postwar Europe, and even after such a disastrous war, lessons had not been learned. When the interviewer asked how he saw the future, Tagore responded that only when humans learned to treat one another as equals could we foresee a common bright future. Tagore’s opinion about Turkey was also solicited. He underlined the important philosophical and social progress achieved. Until recently, Eastern nations had suffered from religious bigotry. He said, ‘The President of Turkey showed us the way to civilization instead, which Western nations had also followed’. Tagore anticipated that the reforms Turkey had undertaken would, not only for Turkey but also for all the Eastern nations, yield pleasantly positive results (Cumhuriyet

22  Eyüp Özveren 23 November 1926: 1). Upon his return, Tagore wrote to Atatürk requesting books on Turkey and Turkish literature for the library he set up at Viswa Bharati University. Atatürk sent forty-one books that remain ‘the prized possessions of the University’ as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee noted some eighty years later during his official visit to Turkey (The Hindu 19 September 2003). Thanks to Berkes, we know that Tagore had a poetry reading in the then prestigious Majik (Magic) Cinema Hall in the cosmopolitan Pera district of Istanbul. Berkes recounted his saintly posture on stage years later when he attended a traditional Indian marriage with a performance which reminded him of Asaf Hâlet Çelebi (1907–1958), a Turkish modernist poet with one foot in Eastern civilization (Berkes 2016: 75). We do not know if Çelebi, who used motifs as manifest in the title of his volume of poetry Om Mani Padme Hum, including the poems ‘Nirvana’, and ‘Sidharta’, (Çelebi 1983: 48–9) also attended this poetry reading where he might have been inspired as a very young man who had been experimenting until then with the traditional forms of ghazal and rubaiyat. But we know that he was a regular at the café-chantant across the street (İnal 2012: 184). After 1937 he developed his own poetics while seeking to build up an abstract poetry, with a strong sense of sound, out of traditional ‘concrete’ material. In any case, we know that the mature Çelebi wrote a number of articles on Indian literature (Necatigil 1978: 92–3). Tagore’s visit came only four years after the Turkish military victory on the battlefield in 1922 that was celebrated, not only by Muhammad Iqbal, who wrote a poem about the occasion (Duman 2014: 393), but also by Mahatma Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru (in jail). The first thoughts of his Glimpses of World History (1934) must have then been taking shape in Nehru’s mind. This was a book that left a strong mark on Ecevit. He once stated that if he were to be confined to a remote island and was allowed to take only one book with him, this would be it. In fact, on one occasion, after the military coup of 1980 when he was sentenced to prison, he went to prison with this book, and just like Nehru in jail, he wrote continuously, with his customary typewriter (Dündar 2006: 5).

Lessons of the longue durée So far we have been concerned with discerning the Turkey–India connections, among other things, in the midst of political decorum, that amount to dust in the end, as Fernand Braudel, the eminent historian of the longue durée, once put it. In Braudel’s view, deeper structures associated with the very long term should be the preoccupation of the genuine historian – and, we might add, the social scientist. We use connections of the above kind as a springboard here to the further study of the processes that have linked the fortunes of India and Turkey since time immemorial. Before going any further, we should underline that the connections we have so far observed were mostly indirect and of a mediated kind; that is, they worked through the West as was true of either the convergence of Turkish and Indian trajectories of struggles against European imperialism, or the role of Anglo-American ‘switchboard operators’ of modern poetry and oriental studies

India and Turkey  23 through whom Ecevit came to know more of Tagore. We now venture into the exploration of deeper and direct links. In his sweeping treatment of early modern world history (15th to 18th century), Braudel approached the Ottoman Empire and India separately, nevertheless classifying India under ‘The Far East – Greatest of All the World-Economies’. The Ottoman Empire, with Istanbul in the commanding heights, was home to a vast surplus that attracted long-distance trade routes (Braudel 1984: 467–9). In Braudel’s account, we are faced with a well-developed ‘bazaar economy’ accompanied by archaic instruments of money and credit, which he viewed as the markers of capitalism (Braudel 1984: 472–3). In contrast, India was not only home to a high level of trade but also had strong maritime and industrial credentials. He identified ‘long-distance trade [. . .] at the heart of [this] most advanced capitalism in the Far East’ (Braudel 1982: 125). This could not have been possible without a sophisticated monetary economy with its corresponding instruments of credit, thereby fostering an indigenous capitalism that was certainly at risk, but far from being ‘impotent’ (Braudel 1984: 520). Braudel’s above conclusion seems plausible in light of further evidence. What is less plausible, unless the specific circumstances of the time period in question are taken into account, is the way he treats the Ottoman Empire and Mughal India as worlds apart. This was more the exception than the rule, and the exception is traceable to the specific circumstances. Braudel gives us a hint of the normal state of things: [The Ottoman Empire] had strengthened her hold on [‘the Red Sea, a “second Mediterranean” almost completely encircled by the Turkish Empire’] in 1538–46 when she consolidated her position in Aden. Even earlier than this, realizing the commercial, strategic, political and religious importance of the Red Sea, [the Ottoman Empire] had captured Mecca and the holy places of Islam. As a sea sacred to Muslims, and forbidden to Christians, the Red Sea would long remain, under Islamic control, the essential route for the ships carrying pepper and spices to Cairo, Alexandria and the Mediterranean. . . . . . . Even in the 1770s, the Red Sea trade, now mostly in Indian hands, was still bringing considerable supplies of gold and silver to Surat. . . . As a historian of the Mediterranean, I was astonished to find that at the end of the eighteenth century the position was still the same as it had been in the sixteenth: gold and silver coins – the most favored merchandise – were continuing to reach the Indian Ocean by the shortest (and surest?) route. (Braudel 1984: 478–9) This connection was of vital importance for the two geographical entities we treat as a single human geography here. Braudel thought this connection had become less important in the eighteenth century when India was further attracted to the orbit of the greater Asian world economy at the expense of the Levant. In contrast, during the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had turned its attention to the Indian Ocean in order to confront the most western European continental

24  Eyüp Özveren power, Portuguese, for the exclusive control of the riches of the East. The Ottomans had ventured into this maritime struggle of worldwide significance with their oar-ship navy, built according to Mediterranean warfare requirements because of the notoriously unpredictable winds of the inner sea, which was ill-suited to the Indian Ocean. They lost once and for good. Be that as it may, remnants of Mughal architecture attest to the intensity of connections at the height of the power of two empires. Archival evidence has been produced of the presence of twenty-eight architects and master craftsmen who left the Ottoman Empire in order to take part in the construction of the Taj Mahal (Atay 1943: 131). Long before that, the Delhi and Deccan sultanates had hosted Ottoman architectural influences as well as occasional noble refugees (Michell and Zebrowski 1999). Mughal emperors, while allegedly seeing themselves as superior to Ottomans because of their ancestry, nevertheless adopted and revived these traditions of the previous sultanates and thus became heirs to Ottoman influences (Koch 2002: 20 and 29).

Traffic and the trivia of family history Modern history, a latecomer fine-tuned with local coloring to this human geography, found its symbolic expression in the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). With the realization of this grandiose project designed to achieve ‘the union of East and West’, the Indian Ocean was connected to the Mediterranean Sea (Farnie 1969: 3). This direct route facilitated connections and increased traffic enormously. It is no coincidence that the highly esteemed Ottoman poet Abdülhak Hâmit Tarhan (1852–1937) was appointed as consul to Bombay in 1883. He travelled there with his wife, and while returning to Istanbul by sea, she became ill and died in Beirut in 1885 (Necatigil 1978: 298). Years later, when Berkes visited the Darul ‘Uloom Seminary in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, he was shown some of the most precious objects in their library, a Koran and its interpretation, donations of Sultan Abdul Hamid II that were delivered by Tarhan, who had written a few lines for the occasion and signed it in his eloquent handwriting. Until Berkes informed his hosts, they were unaware that the former Ottoman consul was the most respected poet of his day in his country (Berkes 2016: 98–9). Personal biographies are no less penetrable to historic events and themes than celebrity lives. The author of this chapter was once a young graduate student at the Fernand Braudel Center working on Beirut and its Mediterranean connections, together with an Indian colleague working on Bombay and the Indian Ocean. These two scholars pooled their findings for a conference paper on the comparative study of the nineteenth-century port city networks of the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. They conceived the subject matter of their work not as mere comparison only, but also as connected horizontally. Whereas the port city network in the eastern Mediterranean (overlapping more or less with the Ottoman Empire) was essentially multipolar with more or less equal port city nodes, its counterpart in the Indian Ocean was essentially a unipolar system where Bombay far eclipsed any rival because of its vast hinterland. Their second conclusion was that the effect of the Suez Canal was to magnify everything spectacularly, so

India and Turkey  25 much so that the Mediterranean, with its port cities dwarfed by Bombay, seemed as a mere tributary of the Indian Ocean. The attractions of India when seen from the above perspective cannot but be overestimated. A great-uncle of the name Esat on my grandmother’s side once left for India as a solitary adventurer. His father was appointed to Aleppo as a civil servant after the attempted assassination of Abdul Hamid II in Istanbul in 1905. Esat was educated in the medical school in Istanbul as a practitioner with an additional degree in pharmacy and graduated probably before the sultan was deposed by the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. He joined his father, who had settled in Aleppo, before traveling further, through Bagdad and Basra to India, as had been the case since time immemorial. It was through his parents that my mother’s father came to hear about this relative’s whereabouts. When my mother’s father met him in Basra, he confirmed that, as well as practising his profession, he had made considerable money in India trade. My mother’s father graduated from the military school sometime between1908 and 1911 and sought an appointment in the Arab provinces, thereby ending up in Yemen. Before the Ottoman entry into the First World War in 1915, he must have traveled back to Istanbul at least once on leave, when he met and invited Great-uncle Esat to his family home (Esat had by that time returned for good to Istanbul). Nevertheless, his supposed fortune had evaporated on his way from Basra in the hands of a swindler. The further details of his travels and adventures remain unknown to us. We have good reason to date his travels between 1906 and 1914. The later it might have been, the more likely that Esat was at an arm’s length from the Indian mission of doctors sent to the Ottoman Empire to treat wounded soldiers during the Balkan Wars (1912–3), although their roads did not actually cross one another (Akçapar 2014).4 The traffic between the two countries had drastically increased in the early twentieth century. During his visit to the historical port of Calicut, Berkes was told of an unforgettable Turk who had lived there adventurously for many years. He was a former Turkish military officer married to a German. He spoke many languages and was good at shooting and riding. Locals wondered how he had ended up here. There were rumors that he was a spy (Berkes 2016: 125). Berkes (2016: 16) also noted that he had met a fellow in Karachi who had worked to raise support for the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars and heard of Ahmed Medenî. Medenî wished to take up arms against the British imperialists in Turkey during the First World War, but when he spoke of his true intentions in Mecca, Arabs caught him and turned him in to the British. He was sent to prison in Malta, where he met members of the Ottoman Party of Union and Progress, who were detained as prisoners of war (Kutay 2014). He had written his reminiscences in Urdu, a copy of which was given to Berkes as a gift (Berkes 2016: 101). Let us emphasize that Esat Bey made his trip, like many of his contemporaries, not through the Suez Canal, but via the traditional land route until sailing off from Basra. There is nothing exceptional about this family history when we remind ourselves of the numerous similar cases encountered in real life as well as in The Thousand and One Nights. As late as the Second World War, the journalist Atay went by train from Ankara to Bagdad, then to Basra by plane, and then by plane

26  Eyüp Özveren again with a stopover in Bahrain to Karachi. He wrote that the usual gateway to India in peacetime was Bombay, compared with which Karachi was a mediocre port city (Atay 1943: 85–6, 103).

Ancient and medieval origins of a common human geography The campaigns of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) helped mark out the geography of the Hellenistic Empire. In less than a decade, Alexander had transformed the ancient world, which had until then been centred on the eastern Mediterranean and oriented towards the West for expansion. Alexander was attracted by the legendary scope and riches of the East and pursued his campaigns in this direction. Starting from Macedonia, he asserted his sovereignty over Greece and then set off to vanquish the rival Persian Empire. He conquered Anatolia, Syria and Egypt, defeated the Persians in 331 BC, and advanced to the Indian Punjab. Alexander set up a singularly vast imperial economic space within which goods circulated, and the Greek language and culture became common among the elite, while common folks were allowed to preserve their ethnic and religious identities. Alexander adopted foreign customs to appease his subjects and died in ancient Babylon. Among the numerous cities his name was given, Alexandria, at the crossroads of East and West, survived as the center from which the Hellenistic civilization radiated outwards. His very aspiration for such a grand synthesis was testimony to the importance of the East in general and India in particular as the one pole of attraction in the ancient world. The legacy of this common geography survived through the medieval and early modern times. What was the Dark Ages in European history was not so for the Mediterranean world and the East, which were well connected (Amin 1989). Marco Polo (1254–1324), the merchant adventurer, who travelled to China in 1271, boasted at the end of his travelogue: [T]here was never man yet, Christian or Saracen, Tartar or Pagan, who explored so much of the world as Messer Marco, son of Messer Niccolò Polo, great and noble citizen of the city of Venice. (Polo 1978: 344–5) Second only to his Venetian citizenship, Polo considered himself a denizen of this greater geography. The West was no better off, as he forewarned his readers while writing about Motupalli, north of Malabar, in India: You must know that in all the world diamonds are found nowhere else except in this kingdom alone. But they are both abundant and of good quality. You must not suppose that diamonds of the first water come to our countries of Christendom. Actually they are exported to the Great Khan and to the kings and noblemen of these various regions and realms. For it is they who have the wealth to buy all the costliest stones. (Polo 1978: 273; emphasis added)

India and Turkey 27 He had further important observations that inform us about the role of Aden as a crossroads in the picture the Suez Canal modified: Aden itself is the port to which all the ships from India come with their merchandise. It is a great resort of merchants. In this port they transfer their goods to other small ships, which sail for seven days along a river. At the end of this time they unload the goods and pack them on camels and carry them thus for about thirty days, after which they reach the river of Alexandria; and down this river they are easily transported to Alexandria itself. This is the route from Aden by which the Saracens of Alexandria receive pepper and spices and precious wares; and there is no other route as easy and as short as this. Aden is also the starting point for many merchant ships sailing to the Indies. From it they export to India many fine Arab chargers, on which they make a handsome profit. For I would have you know that they sell a good horse in India for 100 marks of silver or more. (Polo 1978: 307–8) About two generations later, Ibn Batuta (1304–1368), an Arab denizen of the same ‘universe’, born in Tangier (Morocco), set out in 1325 to trace the same human geography and left an equally impressive travelogue behind. Batuta observed that Alexandria had a very busy, immense port, second only to Calicut in India (Batuta 1963: 46), which is one of the chief ports in Mulaybar and one of the largest harbors in the world. It is visited by men from China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen and Fars, and its merchants from all quarters. . . . In this town [Calicut] too lives the famous shipowner Mithqal, who possesses vast wealth and many ships for his trade with India, China, Yemen, and Fars. . . . We stopped in the port of Calicut, in which there were at the time thirteen Chinese vessels . . . and we stayed there three months . . . awaiting the season of the voyage to China. (Batuta 1963: 234–5; emphasis added) This is where, in 1959, Atay saw Arab sailors sitting and smoking their waterpipes along the waterfront, while sailboats waited off the coast, and he felt he was in the times of Vasco de Gama (Berkes 2016: 125).

The Thousand and One Nights persists The evidence we find for this human geography is no different in The Thousand and One Nights than in the narratives of Polo and Batuta. The frame-story involves two brother sovereigns, one ruling over India and Indochina and the other over Samarkand. After hundreds of years of oral tradition and handwritten manuscripts, the first edition of these stories originated in Calcutta in 1814 and 1818. The event itself was ‘transnational’, as an instructor of Arabic by the

28  Eyüp Özveren name Shaikh Ahmad ibn-Mahmud Shirawani at the British Fort Williams College edited these stories from an Ottoman Syrian manuscript (Haddawy 1990: xvii). In one story, the protagonist introduces himself: My father was a great and powerful king, and when he died, I inherited the kingdom. My name is ‘Ajib ibn-Khasib, and my city stood on the shore of the vast sea that contained many islands. My fleet numbered fifty merchantmen, fifty small pleasure boats, and one hundred and fifty ships fitted for battle and holy war. (Haddawy 1990: 138) It is beyond reasonable doubt that this story takes place in the geographical proximity of the Indian Ocean, and the size of possessions is comparable to those of the above mentioned ship owner. There exist numerous examples like this, demonstrating the inherent realism of these tales as a collectively produced description of a world our ancestors shared. Berkes, reacting to the beauty and historical treasures of Mysore, reemphasized the sharp contrast he observed between the misery and poverty on the one side and the wealth and magnificence on the other, and linked the latter with the fact that this was the homeland of The Thousand and One Nights (Berkes 2016: 143). It seems that the aura of The Thousand and One Nights has survived up to our time, as testified by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), the Italian poet, critic, essayist, and film director, who went to India in 1957 (Pasolini 1984: 73). He observed more than once the surviving spirit of The Thousand and One Nights in ports, bazaars, performance arts, customs and traditions (Pasolini 1984: 23). With a few strokes, he described Cochin as an international port, evoking the spirit of stories quoted above: Every day, two or three boats arrive and sailors from every nation disembark. Here is all the toughness and corruption of a great international port. . . . I had to take [a rickshaw] at Cochin in the middle of the night to return to the hotel, the Malabar, which is situated on an island in the middle of the port, in a wasteland of docks and deposits the length of eight miles. However I didn’t have the courage to let myself be carried: so I went the whole eight miles on foot, chattering with Josef the rickshaw man, amidst the fearsome night of this deserted port. Josef had been a sailor and had travelled the whole world. He knew Genova and Naples, but the city he preferred was New York. (Pasolini 1984: 39; emphasis added) He was most interested in how the memories of a legendary past coexisted with the savage realities of contemporary world. The first direct association of India with The Thousand and One Nights occurs as Pasolini described how he was taken to a theater by a native in Gwalior: We walked for a long time in between clusters of atrocious huts, little walls on fearsome meadows, and we arrived at a kind of fair: as usual, in the darkness

India and Turkey 29 and with the lights lit, everything appeared artificial, fantastic, worthy of Thousand and One Nights. (Pasolini 1984: 55) In nighttime Chattarpur, he likewise noted: It is already dark. By the side of the big bungalow there are some hovels on the street made of beaten earth: there shine the light of a Thousand and One Nights, but miserably, modestly, rustically. (Pasolini 1984: 89) It should come as no surprise that Pasolini returned to India in the 1970s in order to shoot parts of his film A Thousand and One Nights (1974). Only few years before, he had been to Turkey to film Euripides’ ancient tragedy Medea (1969) in Cappadocia. The concern with ritual was hence a constant for Pasolini, whereas the association with The Thousand and One Nights was conspicuously absent in the case of Turkey. He did not keep a diary, but wrote poetry (Pasolini 1994) instead. His Indian diary was also extremely poetic, yet without a single verse, and this was because he was also, above all, a poet, like Tagore, to commemorate whom he went to India in the first place.

A window of opportunity Two books by K. N. Chaudhuri (1985, 1990) opened new vistas in Indian Ocean studies by transposing Braudel’s approach. Whereas until then, Europe had come first in the making of modern history, after Chaudhuri (1985) and Janet Abu-­ Lughod (1989), a growing awareness of European history as a subset of Asiancentered world history emerged.5 This anti-Eurocentric renewal (Frank 1998) drew strength from the concomitant Rise of Asia (Arrighi 2007). The likely continuation of this momentum will affect India and Turkey. As Ecevit anticipated during his historic visit, there may be a major role for India and Turkey in this ‘Eurasia formation’. India has a greater chance than Turkey to make this shift smoothly and capture a more privileged partnership, as was the case before the European interregnum in the nineteenth century that altered the picture to India’s disadvantage. Turkey will remain a beneficiary of its strategic location en route to Europe as this connection will remain of vital importance for any foreseeable world order. What remains to be seen is whether this will be a peaceful move that brings along with it cooperation rather than animosity, prosperity rather than poverty, equality rather than discrimination, and fairness rather than injustice, as has been the case with the era that is now coming to a close.

Notes 1 Some Indian Muslims, such as Kıdwai, who visited Ottoman Istanbul twice, in 1906 and 1910 – that is, before and after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 – felt disillusioned

30  Eyüp Özveren because they saw themselves as the last friends of the Ottomans holding the califate at a time when they were betrayed by the Arabs (Kıdwai 2015: 327–30). They withdrew their support from the regime but maintained ties with the clandestine religious opposition, so much so as to exchange students and visits within the context of an informal ‘Islamist International’ (Berkes 2016: 89–90). Atay and Berkes met members of the Ottoman dynasty in exile, including the daughter of the last khalif in Hyderabad, and observed an aura of Ottoman nobility culture well and alive (Atay 1943: 261; Berkes 2016: 145– 152). The British authorities deliberately cultivated a wrong impression among Indian Muslims of the new Turkish regime. Atay noted that Hindus held a more positive image of Turkish reforms than the Indian Muslims (Atay, 1943: 193). Some of this propaganda was offset by the visits and conferences of critics of the new regime such as Rauf Orbay and Halide Edip Adıvar, who had once been supporters of Mustafa Kemal. These opponents defended the new regime against extremist criticisms in India (Duman 2014: 395–6; Adak 2016: 115–7; Berkes 2016: 135). In 1920 Halide Edip had corresponded with Kıdwai to raise financial aid for Turkish independence (Kıdwai 2015: 362–3). 2 The Viswa Baharati University. Berkes (2016: 166) recounted how he had first come to hear and never forgot about this establishment through a favourable article praising it as a very original educational institution, which he had read in his youth in Resimli Ay (1924–1931). Ecevit must have read the same article. 3 Ecevit believed strongly that the intellectuals and middle class were alienated from the people. Moreover he advocated that development should start from the countryside with villages assembled in village-city units where mutual cooperation and state support would develop peasant capabilities. He put this policy into effect during his last tenure. These ideas are also traceable to Tagore’s ‘rural reconstruction of nation-building’ (Bhattacharya 2012). 4 Rauf Orbay visited Bombay in 1934 to meet his doctor friends who had extended help during the Balkan Wars (Duman 2014: 395). 5 A recent study of the Red Sea inspired by Braudel (Wick 2016: 5–8) further supports this view.

References Abu-Lughod, Janet (1989) Before European Hegemony, New York: OUP. Adak, Hülya (2016) Halide Edib ve Siyasal Şiddet, Istanbul: Bilgi. Akçapar, Burak (2014) People’s Mission to the Ottoman Empire, New Delhi: OUP. Amin, Samir (1989) Eurocentrism, New York: Monthly Review. Arcayürek, Cüneyt (2006) Bir Özgürlük Tutkunu: Bülent Ecevit, Istanbul: Detay. Arrighi, Giovanni (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing, London: Verso. Atay, Falih Rıfkı (1943) Hind, Istanbul: Semih Lütfü. Batúta, Ibn (1963[1356]) Travels in Asia and Africa: 1325–1354, London: RKP. Berkes, Niyazi (1964) The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal: McGill. ——— (2016) Asya Mektupları, Istanbul: YKY. Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi (2012) Rabindranath Tagore, New Delhi: Penguin India. Braudel, Fernand (1982) The Wheels of Commerce, New York: Harper & Row. ——— (1984) The Perspective of the World, New York: Harper & Row. Çelebi, Asaf Hâlet (1983[1953]) Om Mani Padme Hum, Istanbul: Adam. Chaudhuri, K. N. (1985) Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, Cambridge: CUP. ——— (1990) Asia Before Europe, Cambridge: CUP. Deringil, Selim (1989) Turkish Foreign Policy During the Second World War, Cambridge: CUP. Duman, Selçuk (2014) “Atatürk Dönemi Türkiye-Hindistan İlişkileri,” Turkish Studies, 9(4): 389–99.

India and Turkey  31 Dündar, Can (2006) “Can Dündar’ın Arşivinden Ecevit.” Available at: www.haberturk. com)gundem/haber/4886-can-dundarin-arsivinden-ecevit Farnie, D. A. (1969) East and West of Suez, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fay, Peter (1995) The Forgotten Army, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Frank, André Gunder (1998) ReOrient, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gordon, Leonard (1990) Brothers Against the Raj, New York: Columbia University Press. Haddawy, Husain (ed. and trans.) (1990) The Arabian Nights, New York: Norton. İnal, Onur (2012) Pera’dan Beyoğlu’na, Istanbul: e yayınları. Kıdwai, Müşür Hüseyin (2015) Osmanlı’nın Son Dostları, Istanbul: DBY. Koch, Ebba (2002) “The Intellectual and Artistic Climate at Akbar’s Court,” in John Seyller (ed.) The Adventures of Hamza, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 18–31. Kutay, Cemal (2014) Osmanlı Sürgünlerinin Öyküsü (1918–1921), Istanbul: ABM. Michell, Gerorge and Zebrowski, Mark (1999) Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates, Cambridge: CUP. Necatigil, Behçet (1978) Edebiyatımızda İsimler Sözlüğü, Istanbul: Varlık. Nehru, Jawaharlal (2004 [1934]) Glimpses of World History, London: Penguin. Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1984) The Scent of India, London: Olive Press. ——— (1994) Kapadokya’dan Şiirler, Ankara: İtalyan Kültür Merkezi. Polo, Marco (1978 [c.1300]) The Travels, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Süreya, Cemal (2006) “Düşüncenin Giysisi,” in his Şapkam Dolu Çiçekle, Istanbul: YKY, 171–6. Tachau, Frank (2002) “Bülent Ecevit: From Idealist to Pragmatist,” in Metin Heper and Sabri Sayarı (eds.) Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 107–25. Tamer, Ülkü (2000) Tagore: Profil, İstanbul: Yapı ve Kredi Yayınları. Wallerstein, Immanuel, Decdeli, Hale and Kasaba, Reşat (1987) “The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World-Economy,” in Huri Islamoğlu-İnan (ed.) The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy, Cambridge: CUP, 88–97. Wallerstein, Immanuel and Palat, Ravi Arvind (1999) “Of What World-System Was Pre1500 ‘India’ a Part?,” in Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau (eds.) Merchants, Companies and Trade, Cambridge: CUP, 21–41. Wesiband, Edward (1973) Turkish Foreign Policy: 1943–1945, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wick, Alexis (2016) The Red Sea, Oakland: University of California Press.

2 Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities Shail MayaramSufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities

Reflections on love and violence in Islamic thought and politics Shail Mayaram For many the global war on terror is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fault lines, however, are not between Latin Christendom and Islam but instead between many others that are intra-religious, including within Islam.1 While there is a polarisation between the Shia and Sunni, deriving from the Sunnification of Islam since the early twentieth century, I argue that the emergent civil war within Islam is between Sufis and Salafis. The systematic attack on Sufi shrines began with the nineteenth-century Wahhabi attacks on the tombs of the companions of the Prophet. The earlier attacks against Sufis had largely been against individuals and orders accused of heresy, hence the dismemberment of the body of Al Hallaj, who was accused of denying the idea of pilgrimage (Nusseibeh 2017: 132). It has intensified in the past two decades with the multiplication of groups that claim to be Salafi, or “early Muslims” who profess an Islamic creed that is pure and uncontaminated by accretions. In the past decade, several Sufi shrines that fall roughly in the territories of the former Ottoman and Mughal Empires have been targeted, either bombed or burnt down. This is the case with Sufi sites in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Clearly the metaphysical implications of Sufi and Salafi thought have profound implications for democracy and secularism even as both are complex and heterogenous philosophical positions. The Sufi emphasis on love is seen as a challenge to Salafis, who are explicitly oriented to a self/other binary and reformist perspective on Muslim lifeworlds. This chapter provides a historical and political perspective on Sufis in certain cities, which were once located in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. It also explores the relation between the ethical and the political, analysing discourses of (non)violence in Islamic thought.

The Salafis The first question we must address is what Salafism is. Individual Salafi philosophical positions are varied and heterogenous. Nonetheless, Salafism can be broadly described as a reform movement that laid emphasis on the scriptural understanding of Islam (methodological literalism) and aimed at countering the divisiveness of the four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, or Fiqh – Hanafi,

Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities  33 Maliki, Sha’fi and Hanbali. The major component of the Salafi reform agenda as articulated by scholars like Jalaluddin al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh was to inculcate a culture of contextualist interpretations (ijtihad) of canonical texts, without a rigid adherence to what they saw as the rote learning process of the Fiqhi schools (taqlid). The early Salafis sought to unite Muslim regimes, specifically the Ottoman Empire and Persia, with the sultan as caliph of all Muslims and the shah as the sovereign of all Shi’is. They were called salafi as they claimed to be inspired by “as salaf as salehin” (the pious ancestors), or the first three successors of the Prophet. Being leaders of a rationalist movement, they sought to replace the four schools of Fiqh with a single Fiqh and even to rationalise and reinterpret the Qur’an, if required. These early Salafis influenced the Aligarh school of Sir Syed in India and the Muhammadiya movement in Indonesia, although this nahda, or renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was seen as an attempt to secularise Islam and was largely rejected. The more recent resurgence of self-proclaimed Salafis has made the question of who is a Salafi particularly vexed. There are, for instance, divergent positions within different organisations. Sheikh Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher and imam (1906–1949) who founded the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in March 1928, articulated a da’wa (literally, “invitation to Islam”) that was communal and educational involving communication. This was distinct from the position of the Radical Salafists, such as Sayyid Qutb, for whom da’wa was to be accompanied with jihad. There are, however, several fine distinctions between Salafis. Shavit points out the indistinguishability between Salafis and the Wasatis (Shavit 2015). If you ask a Wasati adherent where the nearest Salafi mosque is, he will gesture to the Wahhabi. The Wasati follow Yusuf Qaradawi, who is an Azharite, while the Wahhabis follow Saudi jurisprudence. The Indian subcontinent has not been a significant base for the Salafis, until they became active in Pakistan. Nonetheless, Salafis include groups such as the Kerala Nadvathul Mujahideen, which is an organisation dedicated to Salafi Manhaj, established as in 1924 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_Nadvathul_ Mujahideen, accessed 2 May 2016). The Jamiat Ahl-i Hadis Hind (JAHH) in India identifies itself as Salafi rather than Wahhabi, as Wahhabi is seen as a derogatory term. The JAHH may, however, be identified as an Indian Wahhabi organisation with a distinctive history: its founder, Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (1786–1831), was considerably influenced by Sufi ideas and even initiated his followers first into Sufi orders (Chishtiyya, Qadiriyya, Naqshbandiyya and Mujaddidiyya) and then into the Muhammadi order, which he claimed to have developed (Mayaram 2015). The most extreme version of the Salafist position is currently held by Daesh (DAIISH) referring to ISIS (as it is called by The New York Times, the Guardian, etc.) and ISIL – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – as it was called by the Obama administration. It was founded in 1999 as the Jamaat al-Tawhid wa-ljihad, until its founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi pledged an oath to al-Qaeda and it

34  Shail Mayaram came to be called al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). After its conquest of considerable territory in northern Iraq, it declared itself the Islamic State in northern Iraq. In 2013 it called itself the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). DAIISH is the Arabic acronym for al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Daesh militias have attacked pagan sites, taken over churches and converted them into mosques, and enforced their authority in every territory that they have occupied through brutal killings such as that of Karla Mueller. Syria’s armed forces are currently battling ISIL’s attempt to gain control over cities such as Mosul; Russian bombing has reduced Aleppo to rubble. The question is whether ISIS is an ideological or a political movement, as it has no coherent ideology. Nonetheless, whatever the ideological fuzziness of Salafi and Wahhabi polemics, both have positioned themselves against Sufis in the modern era. Michael Barak cites Muhammad Aman al-Jami as asserting that the Sufis are the worst enemy of da’wa; he has described them as dogs and as qabariyya, or worshippers of graves, hence the Wahhabi-Salafi attempt to weaken Sufi orders (Barak 2015). Jews and the Christian West are also described in similar terms. The Sufi orders along with the Ahmadiyya are regarded as being among the most successful Islamic organisations with respect to da’wa (inviting adherents to the faith) and are held responsible for contaminating the ummah (Islamic community) by heresy. Tarbiya (cultivation of beliefs and action based on pure knowledge), da’wa and jihad that follow the model of the Prophet leave no room for the cultural other, Jamal Malik asserts (2015).2 To begin with, the upsurge of ISIS seemed unstoppable. Nonetheless, it is also the case that resistance to the global configuration of Islamist discourses is coming from several sources, including Sufic theologies.

The Sufis Let us visualise another map of our parts of the world, of another time some four to eight centuries ago. Imagine a world in which Sufis instead of Salafis reigned in the cities of Maghrib and Misr and Shams and Fars (Persia) that were later part of territories under the Ottoman and Mughal Empires (for a description of the cosmopolitanism of this world, see (Mayaram 2009). A philosophical turning point came with the Persian scholar Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), who came to be celebrated as the mujadid, or renewer of faith and the most important Muslim after the Prophet. His work Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm ad-dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences) brought Sufism to the centre of mainstream Islam, undermining the rationalist influence of Greek philosophy. The author of 400 books, al-Ghazali was a Shafi and Asharifite who defended Sunni theology against Shi’i and Ismaili versions. His major work, Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (Incoherence of Philosophy) criticised ‘Ibn Sina and al Farabi who emphasised the role of reason. Al-Ghazali rejected some principles of Aristotelian philosophy, but significantly advanced and applied others. Abu Nasr alFarabi (878–970), who was of Persian descent but belonged to Damascus, had

Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities  35 been regarded as the greatest philosopher after Aristotle. He viewed philosophy as having declined in other parts of the world but saw it as having a new life in Islam. For him the rule of the philosopher was akin to the rule of God over the universe. ‘Ibn Sina (980–1037), who was born near Bukhara and traveled through Persia, likewise belonged to the tradition of falsafa and qalam (Islamic practice through debate, argument and falsification). Al-Ghazali was countered by ‘Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), the jurist and commentator on Aristotle whose famous Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), defended reason and the metaphysicians against the theologians. ‘Ibn Rushd was born in Cordoba, Spain, and died in Marrakech, capital of the Almohad empire.3 Sufis had been flourishing since the eighth century, initially as independent practitioners and then as orders committed to lineages and a theology of love. From the city of Khurasan where al-Ghazali was born, also came the Sufi and ‘alim, or scholar, al-Qushayri (b. 986). Khurasan was a region of agricultural abundance in Persia and is regarded as a zone of heresies. Al-Qushayri descended from Arabs who had come with conquering armies but had obtained land, suggesting an Arabic–Persian interface. He lived in Nishapur, which was a major intellectual centre till the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century. Al-Qushayri’s Al-Risala al-qushayriyya (Epistle on Sufism) was one of most popular Sufi manuals and gives us a deep insight into Sufi theology (2007). According to Alexander D. Knysh, the English translator, the text maintains a balance between the shari’a and haqiqa, i.e., the exoteric and esoteric aspects. He portrays Sufism as a science in accord with the shari’a, attempting to cleanse it of its “unbecoming” beliefs and practices. Al-Qushayri regards the term “Sufi” as deriving from safa’, or purity, and the sufi as the man of purity denying the common view of it coming from suf, or wool, from which tasawwuf is said to be derived, i.e., “to wear wool.” He emphasises shuhud, or the witnessing of the murid, the seeker who seeks waqt, the mystical moment. The text refers to jihad as both external and internal, involving the rescue of the soul from Satan and passions. Spiritual development is seen as the move of the intellect to the heart (al-qalb) and then to the spirit (al-ruh), then to innermost secret (al-sirr) and then to the secret of secrets (sirr al-sirr). Clearly Sufism was already an established tradition, as Al-Qushayri describes 83 biographies of Sufi masters from the eighth century onwards. He sees them as the rightful heirs of the Prophet and his Companions because of their exemplary piety, but also remarks on their declining influence. Let us move from Fars to the Maghrib (later under Ottoman rule), which witnessed the birth of the new Sufi order called the Shadhili that was theologically close to the Qadiri. It derived its name from Shadhila, the Tunisian cave retreat of its founder Hazrat Abu’l Hasan (1179–1256) to which he had come at the persuasion of his teacher, Shaykh Abrumu Madyan. In this journey from his home in Morocco, he was accompanied by his first companion, Hazrat Abu Yahya Abdellah ibn Samala al-Habibi. After intense spiritual exercises in the Jabal Zaghwan region, he was ordered in a vision to teach Sufism. He set up a zawiyah (hospice)

36  Shail Mayaram in Tunis in the year 625/1228 where Hazrat Abu’l Hasan taught 40 students who came to be known as the 40 friends (al-awliya al-arba’un). His new tariqah (Sufi order) was a great success, drawing masses of people from all walks of life, including the sultan’s family. He later went to Egypt and established himself in Alexandria. Al-Shadhili, as Abu’l Hasan came to be called, was both a learned Sunni Sufi who was orthodox by theology, opposed Mu’tazilism and lent an esoteric interpretation to the Qur’an that gave precedence to intuitional knowledge over the intellectual. His teachings were compiled in the Durrat al-Asrār wa Tuhfat al-Abrār, written six decades after al-Shadhili’s death, using information given by disciples, companions and friends in Tunisia and Egypt. The author borrowed from Lata’if al-minan (The Subtle Blessings) of Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah al-Iskandarani, a disciple of al-Mursi. A third important figure was Abd el Qadir Jilani of Baghdad (1145–1234), the author of ‘Awārif-Ul-Ma’ārif who defines 69 key terms used in sufism, including ma’arifat (deep knowledge), nafs (essence), fakr (poverty) and muhabbat (love). The last section of this text is devoted to the dance of sama’. In some depth, Jilani discusses sama’, which he points out is denied by the ulama since it did not exist in the time of Muhammad and the sahaba and is an innovation. The benefits of sama’, he points out, are to the soul as it counters weariness, sadness and despair, and the increase of halāt, or ecstasy, and enables the move from a lover (of God) to a beloved (of God) and opens the ear of the soul to eternal joy. A moment of sama’ enables travel, contrasted with those without sama’, who cannot travel in years. Jilani was the preceptor from whom came the Naqshbandi, Qadiri, Chishti and Suhrawardi Sufi orders of South Asia.

Sufis in Turkey and India Within the Ottoman Empire the two Sufi orders that thrived were the Maulviya (Mevleviyya) and the Naqshbandiyya. The Mevleviyya were organised around the lineage descended from Maulana Rum, who became dominant in Turkey and Central Asia. The Naqshbandiyya were a particularly powerful brotherhood that claimed to be the most learned tradition of all Sufi orders and were also concerned with demonstrating their conformity to the shari’a (Islamic law). During the earliest phase of the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Central Asia, the Mughals’ ancestor Amir Timur had been close to Amir Kulal, the pir of Shaikh Baha al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389) after whom the order was named (Algar 1990). The next great figure of the Sufi silsila (lineage) was the Bukharan Sufi Khwaja Nasir ad-Din Ubaydullah Ahrar (d. 1490), who established the Naqshbandiyya as the dominant Sufi order in all regions of inner Asia and sent disciples to Iran, Hijaz and Anatolia (Algar 1985). Khwaja Ahrar was the biggest single landowner in central Asia and played both an economic and political role (Alam 2009). His murid (disciple) Molla Abdullah Ilahi moved to Istanbul and established the first Naqshabandi hospice in Istanbul, where sermons (including at Ayasofya) were attended by scholars and even by Sultan Mehmed Fatih. Ilahi’s own murid,

Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities  37 Shaykh Ahmad Bukhari, was from Bukhara, and he built a series of hospice patronised by Sultan Bayezid II. Apart from Central Asia and Ottoman Turkey, the Naqshbandi order spread to South Asia. The Naqshbandis were dominant during the time of Babur and Humayun. Babur attributed his conquest of Samarqand in 1501 to a vision of the saint. Nonetheless, Babur also visited the tombs of Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki and Nizam al-Din Auliya, reputed Chishti saints in Delhi and that of Shaikh Sharf al-Din Yahya Maneri. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, however, was a Naqshbandi. Aurangzeb had deputed Qamruddin to the Deccan, but he declared his independence, proclaiming himself a Nizam who wore a crown in the colour yellow, the colour of the Naqshbandi. There were many khanaqahs (Sufi hospices) in Hyderabad, as in India in general. Incidentally, the well-known Owaisi politicians of Hyderabad belong to the Owaisi khanaqah and are Chishtis. The Mujaddidi and Khalidi branches of the order derived from India. Babur’s memoirs mention the complementarity between two families, one exercising political kingship, the other a spiritual monarchy. Weismann refers to two later phases of the Naqshbandiyya (Weismann 2007). The second phase of Naqshbandiyya was dominated by Mujaddidiyya and its missionaries. Established by Ahmad Sirhindi in India, it thrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sirhindi rejected the subordination of the tariqa to the shari’a and also syncretism, both popular and (Mughal) courtly. The context was one of the challenge of a militant Safavid state and contest over Transoxiana, hence the polemics against Shiìsm. The Mujaddidiya travelled to Bukhara, Tashkent and Yarkand. The third phase came about with the establishment of Khalidiyya in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, leading to many religious movements in Turkey and the Middle East. Khalid-i-Baghdadi, founder of the Khalidiyya order, a branch of the Naqshbandi, was particularly influenced by the ideas of Ahmed Sirhindi. Traditionally Turks have leaned towards Hanafi jurisprudence that emphasises interpretation, while Arab and Kurdish Islam are more oriented to Hanabali and Shafi’i schools based on the Ashari tradition that give less scope for interpretation. The contemporary spread of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order in Turkey has fostered an understanding of Islam influenced by Arab and Kurdish traditions. This ideology established a break with more liberal Ottoman traditions and also reversed the secularisation of the early republic. Turkish political Islam has also been influenced by the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen and by Abu Ala al-Mawdudi, founder of the JII.4 The Naqshbandi–Khalidi group has come to constitute the core of Turkish political Islam. Interestingly, Fethullah Gulen, who heads the Gulen movement, is also a major Naqshbandi leader. The Turkish state sees him as responsible for the coup of July 16, even though he is said to have supported Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 2002 elections. The ­de-criminalization of shari’a teaching led to the spread of sohbet, or Nurcu study circles, after 1965. The Gulen movement emphasised educational institutions that thrived in Turkic-speaking Central Asian states.

38  Shail Mayaram

Ethical implications of three journeys Let me break this historical and philosophical account to weave in stories about three journeys relating to the Chishtis, a Sufi order whose influence in southern Asia extended from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. The order was established by Sheikh Harul Chisht, and the Chishti still has a presence in Afghanistan, its home, despite the influence of the Taliban (as in Yemen). The first journey is that of Mu’in-ud-Din Chishti to India. He came from Chishti, in Sijistan, the frontier region between eastern Persia and central Afghanistan, hence he was Sijzi. He went to Balkh and Samarqand for his education, then came to India in the twelfth century. Opinion is divided on when he settled in India, but he had established himself in Ajmer in the first decade of the thirteenth century. Currie maintains that Mu’in-ud-Din Chishti’s main teachings involved obedience of the murid to the murshid (master). The order was known for a strenuous personal routine of prayers, devotions and service to others in the form of teaching and guidance (Currie 1989). Moini, who is both a khadim (a lineage of “servants of the shrine”) and a medieval historian, critiques Currie’s usage of the term “cult” rather than tasawwuf (Moini 1989; Moini 2004). The Perso-Arabic term taṣawwuf is an umbrella term for all forms of philosophical, empirical and practical knowledge associated with sufis and broadly speaking can be characterised as metaphysics. The Chishti became known for the sama’ (literally “to hear”; involving groups that performed theology musically in the quest for halāt or ecstasy). Islamic orthodoxy does not accept the goal of union with God, and maintains that these assemblies of devotional singing for male devotees obliterate the distinction between God and man. Hence they are critical of sama’ (Sanyal 2007: 187). The second journey is that of Banda Nawaz that takes the Chishti Sufi order to the Deccan. In 1356 Banda Nawaz became successor of the great Chishti Sufi, Nasiruddin Chiragh Dehelvi, literally the lamp of Delhi. Among the many wellknown stories of Banda Nawaz is one about how he came to be called Gesudaraz, “the long-haired one.” His long hair had on one occasion been caught while he was carrying his pir in a palanquin, but he refused to cry out despite the pain. And so Sadruddin Abdul Fath Syed Mohammed came to be popularly called Gesudaraz, symbolising the idea of love and sacrifice that permeates his philosophy. In 1398 at the age of 77 he left Dehli (Delhi) for the Dakkin (Deccan) and reached Gulbarga, having been invited by the sultan of the Bahamani kingdom. He was already recognised as a master, having authored 110 books, only 40 of which are said to be extant – in Arabic and Persian. The Bahamani sultan became his follower, inaugurating a very different relation between Sultan and Sufi in the Dakkin as compared to the Dehli Sultanate, where a particularly tense relation between Sultans and Sufis had prevailed. Shaikh Nizamuddin had, for instance, refused to meet Sultan Alauddin Khilji, and when the capital was shifted by Sultan Mohammad Tughlaq from Delhi to

Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities  39 Daulatabad, all the Sufis were thrown out of Delhi. This is why Banda Nawaz was born in Daulatabad and only returned to Delhi much later. From Gulbarga the Bahamani Sultan shifted his capital to Bidar, a medieval city that had become an important hub of the seaborne trade between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Bidar has one of the largest forts in India and was a kingdom renowned for its patronage of scholars and knowledge institutions. At Bidar’s mausoleum of the sultan, I was told a story about the kingdom being wracked by drought when the sultan opened his grain stores to both Hindus and Muslims and asked leaders of all faiths to congregate and pray for rain. To commemorate this multi-faith event whenever the Urs, or annual death anniversary, is held at the sultan’s tomb at Ashtur, the chief priest of the Lingayat sect performs the major rites. The Lingayat are a major Hindu order dominant among lower castes. To begin with, they were a dissenting sect from Brahmandominated Hinduism and rejected both its caste and gender hierarchy. Chishti Sufism in the Deccan then augurs a conversation with bhakti devotionalism within Hinduism. The third journey is that of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who walked 250 kilometres from Agra to Ajmer in 1567 after defeating the Mewar kingdom, a victory that had been attributed to the saint Mu’in ud-Din. There Akbar accomplished two great alliances, one with the Rajputs that became the foundation of empire and the second with the Chishtis that enabled an intimate dialogue with this Sufi order. Both alliances reinforced the legitimacy of the Mughals and led to the dominance of the Chishtis in the subcontinent, which had been enabled by a series of brilliant Sufi sheikhs following the establishment of the silsila in India (Nizami 1948–50; Nizami 1991; Nizami 2002; Dehlvi 2007; Dehlvi 2009). As Alam points out, from the mid-1570s Akbar moved away from the Islamic rulership of the Timurids (that had been shared with the Naqshbandis) to a conception of a kind of universal kingship, emphasising the “undisputed and allencompassing power for the ruler.” His new capital at Fatehpur Sikri was the site of a living Chishti saint, Salim Chishti, to whom was attributed the birth of his son Salim (who would become the Emperor Jahangir). He also ordered the building of the Akbari Mosque in Ajmer and gifted the two large cauldrons (deg) used to feed pilgrims. Akbar made several pilgrimages to Ajmer and also visited the tomb of Nizam al-Din Auliya in 1564, distancing himself from the Naqshbandis (Alam 2009). The Chishtis were not as wealthy, and their tasawwuf was based on wahdat alwujud that had “hitherto facilitated the process of religious synthesis and cultural amalgam.” Shah Jahan gave land grants to the Dargah Diwan and his helpers (khuddam), and his daughter, Jahanara, who was a devotee, described herself as a faqira and wrote a biography of him (Ernst 2002: 87–89). Dara Shukoh, the eldest son of the Emperor Shah Jahan (1627–1658), was also initiated into the Qadiri Sufi order. The dera of Dhianpur was originally founded by Baba Lal Dayal, popularly known as Baba Lal Ji, of the Ramanandi sect.

40  Shail Mayaram Dara Shukoh is said to have had frequent religious discussions with the saint Lal Ji, including on monotheism, which was the favourite topic of their discussions. Dara Shukoh is said to have adopted his opponent’s views to the extent that he was regarded as a heretic by Muslim orthodoxy. In the main building of the Dhianpur dera, the paintings on the wall depict Lal Ji and Dara Shikoh in conversation. A land grant of about 500 acres of land was attached to the dera for its maintenance. Dara’s secretary, Chandra Bhan, recorded their conversations in Mukālima-i Dārā Shikūh wa Bābā Lāl, 1653. Dara had been initiated into the Qadiri order by Mullah Shah in 1639 AD. His visit to Mullah Shah is captured by a Mughal miniature (Bakhta and Chokha, see Mylovich, collection of Jagdish Mittal, 74.108, M4). Another Mughal miniature captures contemporary religiosities in its depiction of a lady before a Sufi (ibid. 76.568, DR.3). By 1656 Dara undertook the most ambitious and innovative exploration of the Indo-Muslim intellectual encounter in his work, Majma’-ul-Bahrain or the mingling of the two oceans. Dara Shukoh, according to the Sanskrit text Samudrasangama, a translation of Dara’s Majma-ul-bahrain (1982, 1929), was interested in the common ground between mazhab-i sufiyā and Sanskrit ekātmavād (non-dual theology). In his discussion of Ruyat, or vision of God, Dara refers to every tradition having apauresheya (authorless, i.e. revealed) scripture. He addresses a major Islamic theological debate on the question of whether one can behold God. Dara’s response is to use a modified version of the Upanisadic insight into states of self to argue that one may behold God in a dream, in wakefulness, in sleep-­ wakefulness, in a higher state and in complete realisation. In the final section of Majma’-ul-Bahrain, Dara goes even further to introduce into Islam the idea of infinite cycles of life, which he identifies with the Prophet Muhammad’s night of Ascent (mi’raj). Little wonder that this most creative philosopher-prince was beheaded for apostasy to Islam.

Violence against Sufi shrines In the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, Sufi shrines have been targeted by Salafis. In Libya there have been attacks on the tombs of Sufi scholars and mystics. At Al Masry, or Sidi Almasry, in Tripoli, a photograph of the emptied grave on Photobucket has since been removed. In January 2012 Sidi Ubaid Benghazi was destroyed and 31 corpses removed. An attack on August 24, 2012, targeted the site of Sheikh Abd As-Salam Al-Asmar (1455–1575), who was popularly called al-Asmar because he would spend the entire night praying and who was reputed to be a zahid (ascetic) and mujahid (holy warrior) who defended his city, destroyed by Salafis. Attacks via arson have also been made against ancient libraries of books and manuscripts. In Tunis the mausoleums of Sidi Bou Said and Sidi Manouba have been attacked. The architecturally spectacular blue-and-white neighbourhood of the Sidi Bou Said adjacent to Tunis-Carthage has been subject to arson. When my

Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities 41 young friend Ovais Sultan Khan and I visited it in May 2015 we found a small shrine tucked away but over which – most unusually – a woman mujawir, or ritual specialist cum caretaker, presided. Another woman showed us the small mosque across from the mausoleum. On my last day in Tunis I was finally able to perform my ziyarat, or pilgrimage, to the mausoleum complex of the great Sufi Abu’l-Hasan ash-Shadhili, known as Imam ash-Shadhili or by the more popular name of Sidi Belhassan. It was an extraordinary experience of an all-woman zikr, which was in progress when I entered the hall, packed with women of different ages. The men had been relegated to an outer room and the inner hall reverberated with women’s voices singing a song about the saint. Zikr (dhikr) has many meanings, ranging from prayer to recitation to repetition of an expression of praise. Here it culminated in a trance-generating incantation of Allahu Akbar with the repetitive “Akbar, Akbar, Akbar” rendered akin to an aum or a Buddhist chant inviting one to the mystic experience of love for the divine. I had come to Tunis in 2015 to participate in a panel at the World Social Forum (WSF) that was part of an initiative of the South Asian Dialogues on Ecological Democracy (SADED) to engage with a larger global debate on Islam and democracy. At our session my co-panelists Irfan Engineer, Rakesh Bhatt, Ovais Sultan Khan and Arif Mohammad Khan held forth authoritatively with Qur’anic exegesis. My presentation focused on the philosophical contribution of Sufi brotherhoods such as Chishtis, Qadiris and Madaris and also of independent qalandars in the Indian subcontinent (Khan 1997). The Chishtis and Qadiris are close cousins, theologically speaking, of the Shadhili (Shazili) brotherhood, which was important in Egypt and Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. I visited Egypt at the turn of 2014. I had come to Egypt after many years. The last time I visited there had been bomb blasts in Luxor targeting tourists that were attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood. In December  2012 some 24 Salafis had attacked the grave of Sidi Abdel Rahman. Sufis continue to thrive in Egypt despite the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qena (near Luxor) is a bridge city on the route to the Red Sea. The two tombs at Qena are for Abdul Rahim and Al Shakiri. Abdul Rahim (d. 1195) is said to have lived only for God. In Luxor a Sufi who had come from Morocco was called Il Arif, meaning “a person who knows about the religion of Allah,” which is how Sufis were addressed. He established a small qutab (maktab), a hospice where poor persons could find food and shelter and where people came to study. He taught Egyptian children the Qur’an, which he was known to read through the entire night. He became the leader of all the Sufis in Egypt. Once he was asked who provided the food, and he replied, “God.” After his death people continued to pray to him at the same place, and his burial chamber was eventually covered with a mosque. The saint’s body was preserved and people smelled a perfume. The Sufi shrine is embedded in the ruins of Luxor amidst sites depicting facets of ancient Egyptian religion. Major critics of Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarianism, its ritual specialists were supporters

42  Shail Mayaram of the Arab Spring protests, but also describe the Muslim Brotherhood as ignorant of the foundations of Islam. Pakistan has suffered repeated Salafi attacks. In 2010 a suicide bombing at the mausoleum of Hazrat Data Ganj Baksh Ali Hujweri in Lahore killed 42 persons (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPCLhV1adSA, accessed 23 October  2017). The talk back on YouTube recounts the theological dispute: Ahmed Khan:

Allah kay siwa koi data nahi jo bhi jakar mangta hai data ganj say wo kuch nahi daiskta or jo mangta hai wo mushirk hai yai azaab hai allah ka Farooq Javed: lanat teri soch par hi ahmed khan

On 26 October 2010 there had been an attack on the shrine of Baba Farid Ganjshakar at Pak Patan. When I visited the Data Sahab shrine at Lahore, there was heavy security and pilgrims waited in long lines even though the women’s lane had been separated. At Pak Patan there was similar barbed wire and barricading around the mausoleum of Baba Farid, one of the most famous Chishti Sufis, celebrated for his verse in Hindavi and Punjabi. On 12 November 2016 a bomb explosion during a dhamal ritual performance at the shrine of Hazrat Shah Bilawal Noorani in Khuzdar, Balochistan (some 100 kilometres north of Karachi), killed 52 and injured 100. Pilgrims had gathered here to commemorate the saint’s 500th death anniversary. ISIL claimed responsibility. The Lahootis spend two weeks on this pilgrimage, covering treacherous terrain barefoot beginning at the shrine of that great Qalandar Lal Shahbaz in Sehwan and halting at the shrine of Sain Ali Raza Shah in Jhangra before proceeding to their final destination: the shrine of Muhabbat faqir (www.dawn.com/news/1296027, accessed 14 November 2016; www.youtube.com/watch?v=KctjNvII01s, accessed 23 October 2017). Hazrat Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, is said to have passed through the area, and the great Sindhi mystic-poet Shah Abdul Latif built a mosque here. Historian Ghanshyam Devra pointed out to me that from the nineteenth century in old Khurasan and Sind-Baluchistan, stories of Hazrat Ali became popular. Even as I put some details of this attack on my Facebook page it generated interesting comment: Mohammad Arif: Well try legitimizing satan worship by associating Ali (RA) to it. The real dhamal was done by Tauhid lovers (believers in the oneness of God). The comment suggests debates within Islam.

Sufi theologies of love The previous comment signals why the antipathy between Sufis and Salafis is becoming an emergent civil war in Islam. The war itself is fairly one-sided as the

Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities  43 other side are really only victims of the attack and have no strategy for a concerted counter-attack. There is one exception to this war, which is the Naqshbandis in Turkey, who are exempt. Quite clearly, without romanticising Sufism – any ism is problematic – or the “good Muslim,” one has only to do a perusal of early Sufi medieval texts to see how Sufi philosophies provide major sources of resistance to recent versions of Salafist and other exclusionary ideologies. As philosophies they go back to a period when religion and philosophy were not yet divorced as they would become with European modernity. They also suggest Islam’s civilisational dialogue with Greek and Hindu-Buddhist philosophies. What cannot be destroyed by arson or attacks, however, are the powerful ideas of some of these Sufi masters that contest certain annihilationist Salafist ideologies. We have raised the question of the coexistence of democracy and Islam. There is also the issue of the coexistence between the religious and the secular, which is not about the shallow secular but the deep secular and its correlation with the cosmopolitan in the sense of living together with difference and in conviviality. So what does a fifteenth-century Sufi – namely Banda Nawaz – and his writing have to tell us? In the following discussion are extracts from two texts, recently translated from the original Persian into Urdu. Both Fatimāh Sharīf and Salā Risā Kusheriyā spell out the conceptual world that Banda Nawaz inhabited, with all its complex metaphysical, philosophical and ethical implications. Here is no surface conception of peace as the absence of war, conflict and violence (via suleh) but a demand for a deep, inner peace manifest in the Sufic distinction between the zahir (exoteric) and batin (esoteric). It is only from this that outer peace can come. Needless to say, many Sufis departed from the path of tasawwuf and played power politics, and contemporary historiography has spelt this out. Most recently, Shahid Amin has described for us the virgin and warrior saint Ghazi miyan, a mythic figure who is rendered into a historical person by fourteenthcentury hagiographies that describe him as the nephew of Mahmud Ghaznavi, indeed, his conqueror general representing the Sword of Islam in the tenth century that brooked no opposition but conquered the enemy and converted him to Islam. Other historians of medieval India, most notably Simon Digby, Richard Eaton and Raziuddin Aquil, unravel for us the path of the worldly and warrior Sufis (Digby 1986; Aquil 2003; Aquil 2005). Eaton associates them with the expansion of Islam into the Bengal Frontier and highlights their collaboration with conquests of Muslim kingdoms of the Deccan (Eaton 1978). Digby and Aquil have similarly excavated the role of Sufis in the Turko-Afghan conquest of India, their collaboration with the Sultanate and their tensions with numerous Hindu Jogis. Let us turn, then, to Banda Nawaz, who establishes himself in Gulbarga, located between Hyderabad and Bangalore. His theology of love has many components, which one may list as follows, based on his advice to his murid, or followers, in Fātimāh sharīf (2014).

44  Shail Mayaram The cultivation of the self that Banda Nawaz elaborates upon includes the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Asceticism involves slowly minimising food intake and hunger and abandoning the desires of the body Abandoning narcissism Aloneness as it is only in this state (tanhāī) that one can meditate Devotion to the Pir rendered in the idea of tasawwur, the relation between the Pir and his follower being that of māshūk and āshiq (Beloved and the Lover) True Worship that requires marāqaba – whether it is namaz or wuzu or the everyday worldly activity of eating, walking, discussing The importance of wujūd or being is stressed – even in sleep, the Sufi should be aware of his wujūd (Mayaram 2015).

Banda Nawaz sharply rebukes ritualistic action, pointing out that Shabe kadr (a special time that Muslims seek) is not only in the special days of Ramzan (21, 23, 27, 29) but present in each day and night. The importance of silence is emphasised; zikr-i khafī, for instance, should be performed soundlessly and from the heart – a criticism of those who show off in the way of practice. The ethical derives from the metaphysical. Alam cites a Chishti text: The whole world is a manifestation of love (‘ishq) and we see everything as perfect. . . . As you begin iradat (become a murid and join the order) you stop quarrelling over kufr and iman. There is no precedence of one religion over the other. . . . After you experience the limitlessness of unbounded Beauty you can see His Grace present both in a kafir and a Muslim. (Bilgarami, Sab ‘ Sanabil, Urdu trans. from Persian, 1562. Published in 1981, cited in Alam 2009, 162) As I read certain Chishti texts at a repository for manuscripts of Arabic and Persian, in Tonk (an erstwhile Muslim-ruled kingdom in Rajasthan, India), Salahuddin Qamar cited an extraordinary Farsi verse: When a thorn hurts another, let me be the one to tremble, Amir Let the suffering of the world, be felt in my being This couplet that seeks to embody the pain of others is attributed to Amir Ahmad Meenai (1828–1900), an Urdu poet who was born in Lucknow but relocated to Hyderabad for his Urdu dictionary project, Amīr-ul-Lught (I owe this information to Pranav Prakash, personal communication, 18 October 2017). It intimates sources of cosmopolitan selfhood that constituted cities and the important role played by writers, poets and intellectuals in the history of ideas.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this paper titled “Sufis and Salafis in former Ottoman and Mughal cities: some reflections on Luxor, Akko and Jerusalem and Delhi, Ajmer and

Sufis and Salafis in Ottoman and Mughal cities  45 Gulbarga,” was presented at an international workshop on India and Turkey, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, 10–11 April  2015. A  revised version was presented to the International Workshop on New Perspectives on the comparative study of South Asia and the Middle East, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, 29 January 2016. The most recent incarnations have been presented to the Stream on Violence, Trauma and Peace, Sydney School for Critical Social Thought, 16–27 May 2016, and at the CSDS Faculty Seminar, 23–26 December 2016. Funding from IDRC and CSDS have enabled a good deal of the research. Many thanks to the participants of these workshops for their comments and feedback and to Smita Jassal Tewari and E. Efe for organising these workshops on comparative studies in an age when so much of our research continues to be defined by the boundaries of the nation-state. 2 https://tasfiyatarbiya.wordpress.com/about/, accessed May 2, 2016. 3 www.britannica.com/biography/Averroes, accessed 4 www.hudson.org/research/11601-the-naqshbandi-khalidi-order-and-political-islam-inturkey, accessed 21 November 2016.

References Alam, M. (2009) “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation,” Modern Asian Studies, 43(1): 135–74. Algar, H. (1985) “A Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order,” in M. Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone (eds.) Naqshbandis: Historical Developments and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order, Istanbul-Paris: l’Ínstitut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 3–44. ——— (1990) “A Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order,” in M. Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone (eds.) Naqshbandis: Historical Developments and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order, Istanbul-Paris, Institut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 3–44. Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism, Abu’l-Qasim al-Qushayri Al-Risala al-qushayriyya fi’ilm, al-tasawwuf. (2007) The Center for Muslim Contribution to Civilization. Aquil, R. (2003) From dar-ul-harb to dar-ul-Islam: Chichi Accounts of Early History of Islam in Hindustan. Paper presented to Conference on Assertive Religious Identities: India and Europe, New Delhi: Jamia. ——— (2005) “Chishti Sufi Order in the Indian Subcontinent and Beyond,” Studies in History, 21: 91–111. Barak, M. (2015) Strategies of Salafi and Wahhabi Polemics Against Sufism in the Modern Era, Paper presented to Conference on Dawa, Preaching Islam, Jewish-Arab Center, Haifa University. Currie, M. (1989) The Shrine and Cult of Mu’in al-din Chishti of Ajmer, New Delhi, Oxford University Press. Dehlvi, S. (2007) “Hazrat-e-Dilli: The threshold of the Sufis,” Hindustan Times. ——— (2009) Sufism: The Heart of Islam, New Delhi: HarperCollins. Digby, S. (1986) “The Sufi Shaikh as a Source of Authority in Medieval India,” Purusartha, Islam et society en Asie du Sud, 9: 57–77. Eaton, R. M. (1978) Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ernst, C. W. and Lawrence, B. W. (2002) Sufi Martyrs of Love. The Chishti Sufi Order in South Asia and Beyond, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Khan, D.-S. (1997) Conversions and Shifting Identities: Ramdev Pir and the Ismailis in Rajasthan, New Delhi: Manohar.

46  Shail Mayaram Majma’-ul-Bahrain or the Mingling of the Two Oceans by Prince Muhammad Dara Shikuh. (1982 [1929]) Calcutta: The Asiatic Society. Mayaram, S. (2009) “Introduction,” in S. Mayaram (ed.) The Other Global City, LondonNew York: Routledge, 1–32. ——— (2015) Da’wa Debates and the Question of Indian Islam. ——— (forthcoming) “Conceptualising South Asia as a World Region,” in Dev Pathak (ed.) Another South Asia, Delhi: Primas. Moini, S. L. H. (1989) “Rituals and Customary Practices at the Dargah of Ajmer,” in C. Troll (ed.) Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 60–75. ——— (2004) The Chishti Shrine of Ajmer: Pirs, Pilgrims, Practices, Jaipur: Publication Scheme. Nizami, K. A. (1948–50). “Early Indo-Muslim Mystics and Their Attitude Towards the State,” Islamic Culture, 22, 23, 24. ——— (1991) The Life and Times of Shaikh Nasir-u’d-din Chiragh-i-Delhi, New Delhi: Idarah-i Adabyat-i Delhi. ——— (2002) Religion and Politics in India During the Thirteenth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nusseibeh, S. (2017) The Story of Reason in Islam, Stanford: California University Press. Sanyal, U. (2007) “Tourists, Pilgrims and Saints: The Shrine of Mu’in al-Din Chishti of Ajmer,” in C. E. Henderson and M. Weisgrau (ed.) Raj Rhapsodies: Tourism, Heritage and the Seduction of History, Williston, VT: Ashgate, 183–202. Shavit, U. (2015) Da’wa and Facilitation: Revolutionising Religious Law for Muslims in the West. Paper presented to Conference on Dawa, Preaching Islam, Jewish-Arab Center, Haifa University. Syed Shah Khusro Husaini Chishti (ed.) (2014) Fātimāh sharīf by Gesu Daraz Banda Nawaz. Gulbarga: Dargah Khwaja Gesu Daraz. Weismann, I. (2007) The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activisim in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition, London: Routledge.

3 Echoes in the shrine

Smita Tewari JassalEchoes in the shrine

Remembering and forgetting in two contexts Smita Tewari Jassal

Love is the cure for everything The lighthouse is always here Come! Come to the shrine To ignite again the fire that went out (Field notes, Ankara, 16 September 2010)

Introduction In a trance like state, this is what Naime, a resident of Ankara, has recorded in one of her 15 notebooks. Since Naime “hears” these sayings, she is convinced that her ancestors have chosen her as their medium and faithful record-keeper. A frequent visitor to the shrine of Haci Bayram in Ankara, Naime claims to be the 41st descendent of the saint Abdul Kader Geylani (Gilani). Far away on another continent stands the shrine of Naime’s saintly ancestor, popularly known as Ghaus e Azam or Bade Pir Saheb. Especially known for healing, the shrine is located on the outskirts of Jaunpur in north India. In the 13th century, a brick from the saint’s actual resting place in Baghdad was first installed here to form the potent threshold and locus of miraculous healing. Oral narratives and hagiographies remember the journey of the ardent disciples who, centuries ago, carried the brick from Baghdad on their chests in accordance with the saint’s instructions communicated in a dream. When the brick inadvertently slipped off, the “saint impresarios”1 instantly recognized the sanctity of the spot, now known as Ghaus Pir, and the saint’s own endorsement of the site (Field notes, Jaunpur, August  2013). The narratives memorialize the successful transference of the bereket or barkat (blessedness), divine favor, or specific spiritual quality that survives in the form of blessings, even after the saint’s passing. Connecting sacred geographies and continents, these narratives about remembering and forgetting at shrines traverse the two locations I wish to connect in this essay, to understand people’s relationship to the “Friends of God.” In this essay, I am interested in the space of the shrine and on-going practices and forms of knowledge associated with the shrine universe. I ask about the historical imagination that shrines activate, and practices sanctioned through the authority of

48  Smita Tewari Jassal the past. Since visitors are from diverse classes and religious denominations, I further ask about the nature of interpersonal interactions facilitated here. Moreover, as the blurring of distinctions termed as “religious” is characteristic of diverse geographies, what exactly is “shared” in the sharing of shrine spaces? Lastly, I reflect on the implications of the fluidity of religious identities for the phenomenon of shrine sharing. I enquire if, through identities evoking connections across vast geographies, limitations of locality and nationhood might be transcended. I seek answers to my questions through the comparative exercise of placing side by side the two distinct socio-historical contexts of India and Turkey, to see if one context might illuminate the other. Listening to the articulations to grasp the wider discursive contexts in which they are made, I scrutinize the language and actions of my interlocutors as well as the underlying structures of meaning. Could comparative perspectives offer deeper and more layered insights than simply examining these contexts in isolation from one another? Ziyaret or the ritual of visiting shrines of Muslim saints is common in the Middle East, as well as across the Indian subcontinent. These historical structures as monuments to the past remind devotees of glorious saintly deeds and the bereket2 of the saint. Thus, even when almost everything else associated with a saint’s era might be forgotten, memories of saints linger in the conscience collective (Green 2004: 442–3). Scholars such as Hayden have attributed the religious coexistence exemplified by saint shrines to pragmatic calculations, suggesting that at shrines the inherent competition and conflict between groups is both defused and contained (Hayden 2002: 206–17). On the other hand, Bellamy (2011: 14–19) asks why notions about the “other” hold such potential for healing at shrines such as Husain Tekri. Understood by both Hindus and Muslims as the “court of saints” and as an emphatically “other” space, Husain Tekri’s “transgressive, polluting, and dangerous” aspects enhance its appeal, especially for its non-Muslim clientele (ibid.: 15–19). Taking forward Bellamy’s argument to focus on what transpires in the space of the shrine in the two geographies, this ethnography asks about the significance of the active embrace of the “other” which the space of the shrine provides. Drawing on comparisons and contrasts, the analytical exercise asks how issues from one context might illuminate the other. The challenge is to apprehend the commonalties on the one hand while resisting the impulse to remain fixated on differences on the other. People in both fieldwork contexts engaged me in discussions about the significance of shrine visiting, although their experiences were by no means all the same. In the following sections I move between these geographical levels. First, I briefly describe the main features of these sacred spaces in my two fieldwork locations. Second, I reflect on the kinds of remembrance induced by the space of the shrine. In the third section I explore the importance of dreams. In the fourth I scrutinize concepts of sanctuary, healing, and understandings about saints as “Friends of God.” In the fifth I consider themes that might be forgotten, so that forms of remembering specific to shrines are possible. In the sixth I argue that shrines offer a space for remembering and connecting with the past. At the same

Echoes in the shrine 49 time, as shared spaces, they blur rigidities in religious affiliation and nationality, encouraging fluid, inclusive identities. In interrogating the advantages of a comparative perspective, I reflect in the conclusion on the play of remembering and forgetting that constitutes the central appeal of the shrine universe.

Fieldwork Jaunpur in north India is well known for its rich pre-Mughal-sultanate past and its centrality as a locus of Sufi thought and sainthood, as well as a contemporary thriving shrine culture. Dargahs of Jaunpur continue to attract ever-increasing numbers of the afflicted. Fieldwork was conducted at saint sites famous for healing, particularly Ghaus Pir. The city boasts several enormous shrines that attract pilgrims for the purpose of healing, which raises tantalizing questions about their contemporary appeal, as well as the needs of the surrounding population that they clearly address. The shrines are far from declining in importance: one finds instead their popularity increasing. Since perceptions about the sharing of shrine spaces are built upon notions of a common past, we find a continuation of practices already in place. By no means passively transmitted, these ideas are actively reinforced through narratives and ritual practice, as well as economic and other ongoing exchanges. Moreover, more Hindus than Muslims visit saint shrines, especially for healing. In many such shrines, concepts of justice are invoked and a distinctive juridical terminology and protocols induce participation in their social world. In voluntarily submitting to these, people gradually acquire levels of comprehension about a range of tragic and traumatic occurrences that may otherwise remain incomprehensible. Significantly, creative “remembering” is a critical element in the healing. It is worth underlining that this universe appears to have evolved over time through people’s own practices, indicating how ideas about multiculturalism are performed, as well as grounded, in the space of the shrine. The varying views I encountered in the course of fieldwork in Jaunpur regarding the miraculous powers of the saints entombed in the shrines ranged from “scientific” and “logical” explanations about an extraordinary magnetic field that triggers healing, to the many miracles narrators had experienced, witnessed, or heard. Sidestepping them, it is sufficient to note that shrines here attract clientele from eastern Uttar Pradesh’s vast rural belt and mofussil towns stretching into Bihar. The shrine complexes seem to be continually expanding to accommodate the thousands who turn up. On Thursday mornings pilgrims brave the crush of crowds, scorching sun, and the sensation of heated marble under bare feet. At Ghaus Pir particularly, loudspeakers keep up an incessant cacophonous barrage of every single offering made, however meager. In sum, while the saint’s miraculous powers may trigger devotees’ initial visits, the specific atmosphere, sociality, and opportunity to interact with a diverse following are equally significant. The diverse multi-vocality offers people the chance to perform their open and inclusive identities. Shrine visits for mental healing appear to be undertaken as a last resort, when other avenues and medical cures are perceived to have failed.

50  Smita Tewari Jassal In addition to several shrines I visited in Ankara, my main fieldwork location was the shrine of Haci Bayram, flanked by the ruins of a Roman Augustus temple and a Selcuk-era mosque. The focus, a covered grave of the 13th-century mystic and leader of the Bayramiyya order Hacı Bayram Veli, offers the possibility of seeing how eras and histories collapse and converge. In Turkey, while the republican state had sought to disengage from the “disorder” of the world of the dargah and its association with superstition, anti-modernity, even backwardness, antipathy to shrines was reinforced through mainstream Nakshebandi orthodoxy that continuously seeks to cleanse Islam of “impure” accretions. In 1923 the set of reforms to modernize the young nation-state banned the Sufi orders and instated the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) to oversee the promotion of a “correct” form of Islam. A  speech by Atatürk in 1925 articulates a divide between the acceptable “official” pragmatic, legalistic, and “civilized” Islam and its less scientific, unenlightened, “folk” or mystical counterpart. To expect help from the dead is a disgrace for a civilized society. . . . Gentlemen and fellow countrymen, know that the Turkish Republic cannot be a nation of sheikhs, dervishes and mystics. The truest path is the path of civilization. (Quoted in Sakallioglu 1996: 236)3 A feature of all shrines in Turkey today is the prominently placed plaques instructing visitors about appropriate behavior on the premises.4 In listing certain local practices as “superstitions,” the plaques underline a dichotomy between an urban, official Islam and its rural, popular version associated with saint veneration. Prohibitions include animal sacrifice, lighting candles, insertion of stones and coins, tying pieces of cloth in the complex, monetary or food offerings, touching the tomb and covers, petitioning saints, circumambulation, expectation of miraculous cures, and sleeping or praying (namaz) on the premises.5 Paradoxically, it is through the prohibitions that we may infer not only that such practices were once permissible but also that they were widespread. In this sense, the pre-republican shrine culture of Turkey appears to have shared features with Muslim saint shrines in other parts of the globe, including India. Despite the list of do’s and don’ts, the fluidity of interactions, especially on Fridays, is striking. My field visits offered the opportunity to meet women from both Alevi and Sunni backgrounds and people from the elite and middle classes, as well as rural migrants to Ankara from the Anatolian heartland (Shankland 1999: 138). I next take up the question of what is remembered at shrines.

A space to remember Shrines are spaces where cultural knowledge is transmitted and preserved, the circulating oral narratives forming a sort of “self-history” of communities attached to them (Green 2004: 442–3). Visitors’ expectations are heightened through narratives about miracles against which one’s own life events may be evaluated. An

Echoes in the shrine  51 incentive for the visits is the belief that saints are intermediaries capable of interceding with the divine for the welfare of believers. Emphasizing that an intermediary between the divine and the self is not contrary to Islamic teachings as propagated by orthodoxy, a visitor at Haci Bayram argued, “I have found Allah, I have found Prophet here. I am not putting any intermediary between me and Allah.” Likewise, Turkan disapproves of narrow interpretations that may frown on the intermediary role of shrines: Muslims make pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and ziyaret comes from this age-old tradition and pilgrimage. If pilgrimage is one of the pillars of Islam, visiting shrines cannot be against Islam. If you visit with faith, it is in line with Muslim traditions. (Field notes, Ankara, 10 August 2010) Zeynep added, “In Islam such an intermediary role is often played by Imams and what they say is accepted as a rule by the community. People put an intermediary between themselves and God in a mosque as well” (Field notes, Ankara, 10 August 2010). Celebi Akkus explained, “When you light a candle, saints become witnesses to your wish and help your wish to be granted through Allah. Candles are like the saint’s torchlight” (Field notes at Zohre Ana, 25 July 2010). Thus, an incentive for the visits appears to be recognition of ziyaret as an ancient practice associated with a remembered and often revered past. As a form of piety to be carried forward by successive generations, ziyaret provides its own convincing rationale. That shrines allowed the “God of Islam” to be accessed through interactions with physical spaces and not solely through written scripture facilitated the spread of Islam even to those without literacy (Green 2012: 102). It is therefore easy to see that in both geographies, women are drawn to shrines rather than to mosques, perceived as quintessentially male spaces. In India, conflation of the term dargah with the Mughal-era darbar, associated with day-to-day governance, is significant. For instance, in the darbar of the Mughal emperor Akbar, regular attendance or haziri (presence) of all officers was required. The daily imperial court in the capital as well as on tour facilitated efficient conduct of state business (Blake 1979: 94). Officers were required to present themselves6 in these courts while the emperor listened to complaints, received petitions, and dispensed justice. Until today, the court-like atmosphere in dargahs mirrored this structure. In subsuming the glory of former darbars of kings, dargahs seem to affirm that rather than the politically powerful, “God’s friends, the Sufi saints govern the world” (Green 2004: 425–6). Moreover, owing to the notion of haziri, people experience the dargah not merely as belonging to a history that is past, but rather as “presence” where attendance must be marked in the here and now. Another evocative concept associated with shrines is the notion of sanctuary. From the 15th century, at least in the Indian context, shrines had begun

52  Smita Tewari Jassal emerging as spaces for adjudication, reflected in the right of influential saintly families to grant sanctuary to criminals and rebels (Green 2006: 350). Increasingly, then, the saint’s shrine was being understood as an inviolable physical space, a powerful locus of influence underwritten by notions of sanctity. Hence, the shrine could also mediate between groups, and in this sense saints played a significant social role (ibid.: 345–51) As Sufi idioms penetrated rural society, religious ideas as well as mechanisms of arbitration and control were spread. By the 15th century, “whether in admonishing lawbreakers, settling disputes or teaching seemly behavior, the Sufis had become important pillars of the rural social order” (ibid). Ajay Singh, my interlocutor in Jaunpur, sums up with the following memorable remark in the early days of my fieldwork: The saints were always on the side of the downtrodden against tyrannical kings and hence the people never forget them. They continue to be remembered with gratitude so many centuries later. In Jaunpur, it was customary to take one’s shoes off when entering the city so as not to tread on the gravestones of the hundreds of saints lying just below the surface. (Fieldwork interview with Ajay Singh, Jaunpur, 13 April 2013) In addition to removing shoes, covering the head, and kissing the threshold, more localized gestures of humility and submission may also be found, such as the prescriptive norm in India for women to figuratively “sweep” the floor with their tresses. Before turning to what is remembered, it is worth asking how remembering occurs. In the next section I examine the recurrent motif of dreams, which appear to prompt people’s initial visits. In both geographical contexts, as dreams serve to provide the initial inspiration, I evaluate the relevance of this common phenomenon in elucidating our theme.

Dreams and summons “The meaning of such a site has to be analyzed in terms not of the place itself, but in terms of the social practices of the communities which revere it and the identities generated by those activities” (Bowman 1993: 432). Just as a dream is said to have prompted the transfer of bereket of Abdul Kadir Gilani from Baghdad to the new geography in 13th-century India, dreams continue to be significant in bringing about the initial “awakening” through which people understand individual spiritual journeys. During fieldwork, I encountered innumerable cases of women who had first “seen” the shrine in a dream. For many of my interlocutors in both contexts, acting on a summons or invitation from the saint was a first step in an elaborate spiritual journey. For example, a Sunni visitor at Haci Bayram, Gul, stated rather matter-of-factly: “I learned about Haci Bayram’s life. But what is more important is that he called me here. Every time I come, his soul greets me at the entrance of the shrine” (Field notes, Ankara, 16 July 2010). Asuman, a nurse in Ankara, added a deeper layer:

Echoes in the shrine  53 The saints visit me in dreams and I visit their shrines in return. When I dream of these holy places, I search to see where they are located. Of course, I feel uneasy when the saints “appear,” but I am also overjoyed. (Field notes, Ankara, 23 July 2010) In such self-representations, my interlocutors talked about symbols they learnt to decipher. Some interpreted the dreams as evidence of the saints’ bereket. Their “tellings” were public declarations of commitment to the saint or affirmations of belief. In India the legitimizing power of dreams is evident in the saint hagiographies that invariably start with a dream. Visits to the shrine to cure infertility were commonplace in Jaunpur, and births after such visits were seen as the gift of the saint. Rekha, who had visited the shrine and made an offering of a tomb cover (chadar), also took to sleeping on it, after which she claimed to have been blessed with a daughter. The recurrence of such miracles and evidence of several new mothers and babies powerfully reinforce people’s belief in the saint. Here is how Ruya, 43, in Ankara began ziyaret: During my pregnancy I dreamt of a shrine. The tomb opened and I heard the saint’s voice promising protection. As I had never been to that shrine before, when I later did, I realized it was exactly the same as in the dream. I have been a frequent visitor since. (Field notes, Ankara, 23 July 2010) Another interlocutor from Ankara, Asuman, felt that dreams offer a glimpse of one’s inner life. Her account indicates the extent to which her persuasive, affirming, and vivid dreams demand both commitment and action: Years ago in a dream I was given a seal by the saint Geylani with my name on it. I was asked to visit a far-away land but when I declined a white-robed man took me there on his shoulder. Addressing me as daughter and giving me the seal, he opened the tomb of Geylani to offer a whiff of heaven. I remember the fragrance. Later, through the Internet, I was surprised [to find] that Geylani had said that he would carry his followers on his back! (Field notes, Ankara, 23 July 2010) In Turkey, Naime, who traces descent from saints and whose brief verse opens this essay, shared her own experience of continued conversations with saints: I am like a channel between this world and the other one. My elders want me to write, and that too with a pencil! It started 10 years ago. When they send me the power, I feel a burning sensation in my palms, a tingling in my fingers. Only when it is over, I see the rhymes and comprehend the meaning. In the beginning, they sent prose of simple sentences but now they send verses. When I am almost done, they send me a signal, like a repetitive word. Then I understand that it is the title of my notebook. (Field notes, Ankara, 16 September 2010)

54  Smita Tewari Jassal What are we to make of this layered meditation on the power of dreams by Asuman and Naime, the nurse and the Turkish teacher of English in Ankara? So steeped is the latter in the world of shrines that she also engages with saints in intense conversation. By no means exclusive to Turkey, such conversations were echoed by my interlocutors in Jaunpur. Khatim Ali’s conversation with a saint at the shrine of Maula Ali in Jaunpur is instructive. He recalls a revelation in a dream in which the saint showed him the scene of a large-scale scam suffered by Khatim Ali’s ancestors. The saint advised him, “Meri adalat mein application lagao, karyavai honi chahiye” (“Apply for redressal in my court. A proper judicial process is required.”). In response, Khatim Ali says that no sooner had he tied the green thread to the shrine trellis, that his “case began in the saint’s court,” and continued over the next four years (Field notes, Shrine of Maula Ali, Jaunpur, 14 May 2013). Thus, an additional layer in Jaunpur was the pervasive discourse of justice. If my interlocutors in Ankara remembered the past through miracles of saints and as proof of the exalted stature of shrines, or through connections as in the case of Naime, Khatim Ali’s dream went a step farther to facilitate the immediate intervention necessary to make changes in his existential condition. We have here a collapse of distinctions of time and space, with dreams offering the possibility of guidance – which in turn reinforces further remembering. In listening carefully to dreams in both geographical contexts, common patterns and embedded motifs may be discerned, typical of Islamic traditions where dreams and visions have served as proofs of friendship with God (Green 2012: 76). As a recognized means of acquiring knowledge and authority complementing the mastery of textual sources, dreams provided “a cultural technology enabling Sufis to transcend the barriers of time and evade the ambiguities of scripture” (ibid.: 5). Thus, in addition to discursive ways of knowing, both written and oral, the realms of experience, imagination, and dreams were understood as meaningfully valid forms of knowledge, especially in the works of the medieval philosopher Ibn’Arabi (Chittick 1994). In the next section I examine the implications of remembering the shrine as sanctuary – a space where people may recover or simply experience refuge, safety, protection, and, therefore, also healing.

Friends of Allah, healing, sanctuary Green writes of saints as living interfaces between human and divine worlds, “serving as intermediaries between the ordinary believer and the celestial hierarchy of saints, prophets and God” (Green 2012: 9). A comment I heard in Turkey was, “Suppose you are an ordinary citizen and you want to see the Prime Minister. No one will take you seriously. How are you going to see him? But if you know someone who is close to the PM, then they accept you. Saints are like that. In order to reach Allah, you visit saints” (Field notes, Ankara, Haci Bayram, 16 August 2010). Similarly, in Jaunpur one of my informants said that if we wanted to meet a senior bureaucrat, would we not have to make an appointment through his secretary? It was striking to see how people understood the universe through their own experience of and familiarity with

Echoes in the shrine  55 the bureaucracy. My fieldwork in Jaunpur was specifically at healing shrines, but before that I encountered several patients suffering from life-threatening diseases in the shrines in Turkey. In Jaunpur, discourses at shrines emphasized the sanctity of tradition and the salience of practices because they were backed by continuity with the past. Expectations about saints as intermediaries and healers were proportional in intensity. It is because of the “remembered” justice of the courts (darbars) of just kings that in entering into the court of saints, the afflicted perceive themselves as “summoned” to present their bayan (evidence) or witness statement to the saint and arzi (petition) through haziri (presence) in the saint’s adalat (court). Especially for those seeking relief from possessing spirits, haziri underlines the expectation that the possessing spirit may manifest itself so that further steps can be taken regarding the direction of the cure or exorcism, besides clarifying the causes and circumstances of the possession. Following this, the bayan, (evidence or witness statement), an elaborate outlining of the case, is seen to be effective precisely because the saint is listening. In Jaunpur’s healing shrines it was common to find visitors who treated the shrine as a space of refuge. Many of the afflicted made arrangements to live for a week or longer in the waiting rooms available on the shrine premises. A thriving pilgrimage tourism has emerged to cater to those seeking extended healing at the shrine. In most cases, the seriously afflicted refer to an “order” they received from the saint in a state of trance or dream not to leave the premises for a period of time. The shrine protocols thus activate a collective memory of Sufi shrines as places of refuge – a precondition for the healing which is to follow. In the process, what must be remembered is not merely the benevolence and healing touch of the saint, but most of all, his capacity to provide a space where protection may be guaranteed, as in past eras. Surprisingly, a nurse in Ankara, Asuman, used exactly the same terms of refuge to describe her experience of Ankara’s Taceddin Sultan shrine. For her, shrines are first and foremost places to seek shelter and respite from worldly oppressions and distress of all kinds. Yes, this place is sacred to me, as saints are Friends of Allah. I like this environment, as it is a sanctuary in the heart of the city, surrounded by a nice garden. Moreover, I know the history of the saint, a Sufi master with many followers, including the national hero, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, the composer of the Turkish national anthem. I feel that I am in audience with the saint. Shrines are places where people tell their troubles. This is to be expected, as shrines are therapy centers. (Field notes, Ankara, 23 July 2010) In the above meditation, we see the unfolding of a conceptual vocabulary that matches the one encountered in the Indian universe. Parallels are striking in terms of what the shrines “mean” to people and what they accomplish in terms of providing solace and sanctuary. In the next section, I turn to themes that might be

56  Smita Tewari Jassal muted or completely forgotten in each of the geographies. Just as shrines activate a specific memory, I  ask if there might be memories that are consciously and deliberately forgotten.

Forgetting Although Meral, an interlocutor at Haci Bayram, had enthusiastically explained how dreams prompted her visits, she appeared to contradict herself in her very next sentence, thereby revealing the ambivalence of Turkish visitors. This is after all, only a cemetery. So, do not expect anything from a dead person, instead pray to Allah. We have to learn what these saints did when they were alive, and whether they had any miraculous powers. It is not enough to come and pray. (Field notes, Ankara, 23 July 2010) Since the plaques remind visitors of the disorder and chaos before the formation of the republic, the memory of saintly deeds is replaced by a skepticism underlined by Asuman: These guidelines in shrines are for people who do not know much about their own religion. They are there to preserve the order. There should be guidelines about visitation. Ataturk kissed the hands of real saints, certain restrictions had to be put into place because otherwise there would be abuse of religion. Ataturk was a real believer himself. (Field notes, Ankara, 23 July 2010) The presence of visitors at shrines eloquently testifies to their belief that the “holy person entombed in the shrine is a living presence and active agent in the world, existing between God and his believers and as a go-between” (Gilesnan 2000: 605). Despite the pervasive skepticism, our interlocutors in Turkey revealed a multiplicity of understandings. While visitors from both contexts subscribed to the common belief that the “holy person entombed in the shrine is a living presence and active agent in the world, existing between God and his believers and as a go-between” (ibid.), in Turkey, my interlocutors revealed an anxiety about ziyaret as not being Islamic enough. Their responses tended to be ambivalent with reference to belief in the saint’s miraculous abilities. Hence, while in Turkey, saints’ powers are remembered, there is also a conscious forgetting. The prohibitions on practices mute expectations and serve to inhibit the active seeking of saintly intervention, even if saints are seen as intermediaries between the supplicant and the divine. Thus, remembering the saint does not invariably translate into attitudes of submission to seek the required mediation. When conviction is missing, there is also a conscious forgetting of saintly miracles. Moreover, since the Diyanet in Turkey was designed for the interpretation and execution of an “enlightened” or high

Echoes in the shrine  57 version of Islam, to be enforced by its civil-service personnel, it is this “statesponsored Islam” that is remembered, while practices associated with folk Islam were eclipsed, if not forgotten. If in Jaunpur remembering of a glorious past with the saint in the center was activated through the rituals, practices, and protocols, in Ankara memories of this kind tend to be muted. Rather, the plaques served as a cautious reminder of past concerns that had led to the banning of the Sufi orders. In Ankara, Naime remembered that women who sought the intervention of sheikhs and saints for healing, family concerns, fertility, and so forth were actually opening up “forbidden” subjects which should in fact be shielded from public view. She was alluding to the potent sense of expectancy that prevailed at shrines in the past, arguing that since women’s “hands were held” this made it possible for “Sheikhs [to] cross over into what is properly set off from other men save the husband. They enter that dangerous territory that is the space of women’s shame and men’s honour” (Gilesnan 2000: 610). Here Naime is endorsing Gilesnan’s observation that sheikhs (seyhs) were able to obtain access to women’s intimate secrets (Field notes, Ankara, 16 September 2010). Naime appears to be suggesting that when male power superior to the husband or the state is so trusted, a dangerous possibility for subversion opens up. Speculating on the possible reasons for the abolition of the Sufi orders by the republican state, she further offers this rationale for the closure of tarikats: As husbands did not talk to their wives, rarely praising them, women searched out sheikhs. Husbands did not talk to their wives but sheikhs did. When with sheikhs, women were transformed. Many women went to shrines to engage in communication. They talked about their problems. Women’s spiritual investment at shrines was often beneficial to the caretakers of shrines who got money and presents from them – the sweaters they knitted, the cookies they baked. The tarikats needed membership and once women were at the shrine, they could frankly share their problems with other women who would in turn suggest experts for specific difficulties. (Field notes, Ankara, 16 September 2010) We have here a layered discourse, a novel argument that “neglected women” who visited dargahs were ripe for being “seduced” into the tarikats, the Sufi orders. Here we see a rationalization for the closure of tarikats and justification for a conscious forgetting – a desirable aim, even if people continue to visit dargahs as monuments to the past. Hindu women’s experience of relief in the shrine as the place of the “other” is about these safe havens, away from the judgmental gaze of family, caste, and extended networks within which they are embedded. It was the critical gaze of family and community that could be escaped in the space of the shrine. Estranged from families, communities, or selves, as they sought healing in these spaces, the anonymity possible in the “other” Muslim space constituted a large part of the appeal for them. Moreover, since estrangement is experienced precisely

58  Smita Tewari Jassal from those most proximate to the Self, this realization must necessarily induce a rethinking and reconsideration of notions of the Other. Because shrines are shared spaces, a major form of forgetting also pertains to the downplaying of difference at shrines. Bellamy has argued that the “ambiguity” inherent in shrine culture, and the possibility of its being deployed by pilgrims for self-presentation and interaction, is central to the experience of healing (Bellamy 2011: 19). Since shrines afford the space to “encounter others in ways that are dangerous and transgressive on the one hand, and built around shared expressions of submission, devotion and remembrance (italics mine) on the other,” their potentiality for healing is thereby enhanced. Thus, there is a conscious forgetting of the “otherness” encountered at the shrine. This makes shrines potent with the possibilities for healing as well as pre-empting calamities. Highlighting her faith in the saint at Ghaus Pir, a lower-caste Hindu believer said, “Whatever the impending calamity, the saint forestalls it” (Field notes, Jaunpur, 4 May 2013). Another interlocutor, in an effort to convince me of the potency of the shrine, compared the saint’s prompt intervention in her afflictions with the frustrating lack of response she had encountered in previous supplications to numerous Hindu devtas (deities). Her observation echoed many others’ at this shrine: “the saint never turns us away empty-handed,” or “ I vowed not to leave this place until I am cured. There are different sets of rules here. The more I experience this world, the more my faith increases. . . . This place changes one’s fortunes” (Ghaus Pir, 4 May 2013). Moreover, in the witness narratives referred to as bayan, the separation between Hindu and Muslim is completely “forgotten.” It was striking to find that discourses of goddesses, for instance, or Hindu female spirits termed as Mohini, or devatoan ki sawari (possession by benevolent, godly entities) seamlessly integrated into an Islamic vocabulary of arbitration. In this way, shrine visitors deliberately reject or consciously “forget” sectarian divisions. Also forgotten in the Indian context are mainstream historical narratives of violence and conquest that had accompanied the spread of Islam in the subcontinent. India’s composite culture then rests precisely on the refashioning of such narratives rooted in the ongoing cultural give-and-take across religious divisions. I argue that the forms of popular remembrance at dargahs described above, combined with specific kinds of forgetting, serve to reinforce and cement other widespread cultural and literary interventions that have, over the centuries, built consensus and bridged difference (Amin 2015: 8). It is equally striking that while sultans and kings may be forgotten or remembered only in name, it is the saint that is remembered. Continuity with the past is then established and maintained precisely through these practices of communities that coalesce around memories of saints. The healing potency of the shrine lies moreover in the possibility it offers of bringing Hindus face to face with an Islamic universe and to fully embrace it in order to experience wholeness. It is this possibility, I suggest, that constitutes the unique and increasing attraction of the shrine universe. In connecting with and embracing a multicultural past, and, in the process, deliberately “forgetting” the difference of religious boundaries, one not only encounters the “other” but is

Echoes in the shrine  59 simultaneously reminded of a “wholeness” and a less divided past. It matters little that the past itself is as “imagined” as the “justice” of former sultans. In this context it is important to draw attention to people’s practices as facilitating an “idealized” and “remembered” past in order first to draw attention to the injustices of the present, evoking a “moral vision of the pre-modern past against the violence of the modern [state]” (Taneja 2012: 557). Secondly, through such remembering, attention is focused on the very injustices of the present that need to be dealt with, to be fixed. If shrines activate those memories about the past that are of profound relevance to the immediate present, they also encourage thoughts about more encompassing and inclusive geographies, provoking reflection on wider spatial interconnections. Just as Ghaus Pir pilgrims connect with the glory of a saint from Baghdad, other shrines enable people to imagine an interconnected universe traversing vast geographies. Narrow limitations of nationalism can be transcended to forge more inclusive and transnational identities and affinities with pilgrims, believers, and followers of the saint across the globe. Reverence for the saint thus also opens up the imagination to more universal, transnational linkages.

Conclusion In this essay I have attempted to analyze the play of remembering and forgetting that characterizes the shrine universe. In both geographies we saw that for specific forms of remembering to occur, some forms of forgetting are also necessary. Distinct kinds of remembering and forgetting are mobilized, specific to the two geographies rooted in their distinct cultures and histories. Despite such differences, for both our contexts, the space of the shrine offers an alternative sacred space. For Turkish women who experience exclusion by virtue of their sex in the mainstream Sunni context, the shrine exercises a distinct appeal. As mosques are largely frequented by men, it is at shrines, sheltered from the male gaze, that women from both Alevi and Sunni backgrounds experience greater freedom to carry out prayer and contemplation. In India, the space of the shrine offers a different kind of alternative to those seeking an experience other than that provided by the more predictable or restrictive orthodoxies of caste, family, and locality. Through the practices described above at healing shrines in India, it could be argued that the interred saint is better understood as an “active” agent in the here and now to whom one’s pain can be explained, with the conviction that justice will be carried out. Pilgrims experience the saint as present, as palpably intimate and immediate, rather than a remote historical figure belonging firmly in the past. Because the saint is active in the here and now, he is also always ready and listening in order to intervene in the wellbeing of his devotees. It is perhaps this explicit sense of engagement with the saints that is gradually being lost in the Turkish universe, although the monuments still evoke nostalgia for the past and are visited in large numbers by both Alevis and Sunnis. I have argued that in India the chance to encounter the other, and through this proximity, the chance for the Self to experience “wholeness” or “completeness,”

60  Smita Tewari Jassal constitutes a large part of the appeal of the shrine universe. Moreover, the discourse of justice, perhaps because it evokes a just past, is another important element. Here, Green’s understanding of Sufism as a “cultural technology of interregional connection and exchange in the early modern period” I see as especially relevant. He argues that Sufism’s global expansion from a specific temporal and spatial context was transformative in that it facilitated the adaptation of Sufi ideas in new environments. This, perhaps, best accounts for the commonalities as well as the differences I have outlined in this essay. I suggest that the contrasts and similarities are thrown into sharper relief particularly when considered side by side within the historical and socio-economic contexts which lend them specificity.

Notes 1 “Saint entrepreneurs” or “impresarios” are terms used by Eyal Ben Ari and Yoram Bilu for the innovative Moroccan migrants who initiated the process of transferring saint shrines of Morocco to a new geography – the industrial towns of Israel. 2 Bereket is the quality of blessedness or blessings of the deceased saint that linger on, and may even multiply after the saint has died. A transcendent spiritual quality invested with miraculous powers, it manifests itself in divine favour and has been likened to “spiritual electricity” (Sanitotis 2008: 19). 3 Ataturk’un Soylev ve Demecleri II [Ataturk’s Speeches and Statements] (Ankara: Ataturk Kultur, Dil ve Tarih Yuksek Kurumu, Ataturk Arastirma Merkezi, 1989), p. 225; quoted in Sakallioglu (1996: 226). 4 This list of do’s and don’ts at the shrines in Turkey reminds one of the pilgrim guides or the etiquette of ziyaret, which was an important genre of literature in the medieval Middle East comprising hagiographical information as well as ritual instructions appropriate to certain shrines. See Renard (2008: 178–80). Also see, Akcapar, Sebnem Koser and Jassal, Smita Tewari (2014) “Sites of Power and Resistance or Melting Pots? A Gendered Understanding of Islam through Sufi Shrines in Turkey,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 1, 95. 5 It should be noted that even in the 14th century, prominent jurists like Ibn Taymiyya, an influential figure on the early modern Wahhabi movement, made a distinction between lawful/proper and forbidden shrine visits and considered ziyaret as idolatry. For a detailed discussion, see Taylor (1998: 168–218). 6 In addition to “officers, soldiers, clerks, artists, musicians, craftsmen, and merchants of the palace, the records of the Imperial record office, the money and jewels of the Imperial treasuries, and the men and equipment of the mint could all be found at the Imperial camp” (Blake 1979: 92).

References Akçapar, Şebnem Köşer and Jassal, Smita Tewari (2014) “Sites of Power and Resistance or Melting Pots? A Gendered Understanding of Islam through Sufi Shrines in Turkey,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 1, 95. Amin, Shahid (2015) Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of a Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Bellamy, Carla (2011) The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blake, Stephen P. (1979) “The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 39(1): 77–94.

Echoes in the shrine  61 Bowman, Glenn (1993) “Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred-Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories,” in Michael Breger, Yitzhak Reiter and Leonard Hammer (eds.) Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine, London: Routledge, 195–227. Chittick, William C. (1994) Imaginal Worlds: Ibn’ al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity, Albany: State University of New York Press. Gilesnan, Michael (2000) “Signs of Truth: Enchantment, Modernity and the Dreams of Peasant Women,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4): 597–615. Green, Nile (2004) “Stories of Saints and Sultans: Re-Membering History at the Sufi Shrines of Aurangabad,” Modern Asian Studies, 38(2): 419–46. ——— (2006) “Blessed Men and Tribal Politics: Notes on Political Culture in the IndoAfghan World,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 49(3): 344–60. ——— (2012) Sufism: A Global History, Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Hayden, Robert M. (2002) “Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religions Sites in South Asia and Balkans,” Current Anthropology, 43(2): 205–31. Renard, John (2008) Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sakallioglu, Umit C. (1996) “Parameters and Strategies of Islam-State Interaction in Republican Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 28(2): 231–51. Sanitotis, Arthur (2008) “Enchanted Landscapes: Sensuous Awareness as Mystical practice Among Sufis in North India,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 19(1): 17–26. Shankland, David (1999) “Gellner and the Study of Anatolia,” Middle Eastern Studies, 35(2): 138. Taneja, Anand V. (2012) “Saintly Visions: Other Histories and History’s Others in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi,” IESHR, 49(4): 557–90. Taylor, Christopher (1998) In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Saints in Late Medieval Egypt, Leiden: Brill.

Part II

Nationhood and leadership

4 Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters V. GeethaRepublican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters

Kemal Pasha in southern India V. Geetha

Daud Sha (1885–1969), editor of a Tamil Muslim magazine called Dar-ul-Islam, was a prominent Muslim publicist active in the colonial public sphere of the erstwhile Madras presidency, the southernmost province of British India. Among other things, he championed the cause of education, especially in religious matters, and was committed to translating the Quran into Tamil. Disagreeing that the holy text ought to be read only in the language that it was revealed in, he argued that there were no strictures as such against translation in the holy book itself, and that the Prophet’s words were constitutively free and available to whoever wished to hear them. Daud Sha was convinced that a self-proclaimed religious elite was to blame for disallowing translation efforts and directed his ire at this group, which he claimed stood between the believer and his God in a manner that was inimical to the spirit of Islam. In an essay that he contributed to a volume released to mark the convening of a social equality conference in Chinglepet (in what was then called the Madras presidency) in 1929, he argued that Islam did not recognize or grant authority to a mediating priestly class that claimed to explain the word of God to lay people (Daud Sha, ‘Suyamariyathai Vaazhvae Suyaraajiya Vaazhvu’ [A Life of Selfrespect Is the Life of Self-Rule], in Kannappar and Gurusami 2007: 36–47). Sha noted that prophets from Moosa onwards through Ibrahim and Esau had set themselves against the priesthood, and that the Prophet Muhammad had set a seal on the latter’s malevolent influence. His reign at Medina had witnessed thirty years of exemplary democracy, after which, tragically, a conspiring priesthood had managed to subvert that rule and hold believers in thrall. This, insisted Sha, was responsible for Islam not being renowned as a faith of peace, which indeed it was, and for its being understood instead as a destructive creed. Its constitutive liberalism was thus marred. And so several hundred years passed. In the end, around twenty years ago, there emerged a group called the ‘Young Turks’ in Turkey that came forward to free Turkey and Islam from the grip of an accursed priesthood. They had understood that it was the latter that was responsible for Turkey’s weak position in the world and Islam’s low status. Anvar Pasha knew that it was the priestly class that was chiefly responsible for Turkey being considered the

66  V. Geetha ‘sick man of Europe’. As a result, Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan was unseated from his throne. For he held the priesthood close to him and so proved a stumbling block for Turkey’s progress. . . . At that time no one in Turkey read or understood the Holy Quran in their own native language, for it was the version offered by the mullahs – the Muslim priests – that was considered the core of the holy book, though, in reality their interpretation was completely contrary to the spirit of Islam. But if anyone dared find fault with the priests’ version, they were exiled or beheaded. The first victory of the Young Turks was achieved when they freed themselves from this satanic class. But the conspiracy of the priests did not end with the exit of Abdul Hamid Khan. The Tripoli and Balkan wars and finally the European Great War came to Turkey. Later, with the victory at Smyrna Haji Mustafa Kemal emerged on the scene. And then was declared the death-knell for the priesthood. Today we might wonder who Kemal is, but those who write of him in the years to come are bound to consider him as having done the greatest service to Islam . . . and in Turkey today, the rule of the priests is completely ended. (Ibid.: 42–43) Turkey, Sha argued had set the tone for developments in the region, and it was only a matter of time before the hold of the priesthood in Islamic societies disappeared completely. The rule of Reza Shah in Persia, the changes afoot in Egypt, particularly the renaissance currently underway at the Al-Azhar university in Cairo, he suggested, pointed to the eventual triumph of peace and rationality in the Muslim world. Afghanistan, which showed great promise given the reformist zeal of Amir Amanullah, had suffered a setback because the populace was largely ignorant and cut off from the outside world, which allowed the priests free rein. But once ignorance was rooted out, change was inevitable (ibid.: 43). The history of progress that Sha sketched in his essay, and in which Turkey was offered an important place and role, was meant to draw Tamil Muslims into a new moment in time – when the faithful did away with the priesthood and its machinations in India as well. The non-Brahmin movement – against the domination of upper-caste Brahmins in social and political life – had shown the way for Hindus to free themselves, but Muslims continued to be in thrall to their mullahs. It was important that they trusted their power of reason, drew on that faculty that had been given them by God, and seek to discern right from wrong, without looking up to priestly interlocutors. If they did not do this, if they did not seek to establish their right to self-respect and freedom of thought, they would not be in a position to administer the much desired swaraj (ibid.: 45–7). Daud Sha’s anti-clericalism, and his reformist attitude, particularly with respect to disseminating the Tamil Quran amongst his fellow believers, were somewhat singular. There were others who were committed to the translation project as he was, but they did not rail against the clergy, such as it was. Nor did they protest local customs as he did. Unsurprisingly, Sha earned the wrath of his fellow Muslims – he was accused of being influenced by the Ahmadiyas, a charge that was not wholly misplaced. In the early years of the 20th century he had spent time in

Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters  67 London, propagating the Ahmadiya cause, and even written for their journal (Vadlamudi 2010: 19–20; 23–4). But he had since broken away from his associates, and on his return to India, he evolved an understanding of Islam in the modern world, which drew from eclectic sources, including science on the one hand and the Ahmadiya notion of Islam being a ‘natural’ religion on the other. Further, he endorsed Syed Ahmad Khan’s support of modern education and advocated that women too be educated. (Interestingly, he held contrary views on purdah, insisting that women must be freed from seclusion to go to school, but thereafter be made to consider purdah as befitting their status as decent educated women (ibid.: 39–40).) Given Sha’s views, it is not surprising that he was drawn to the young Turks and held both Anvar Pasha and Mustafa Kemal in esteem. His understanding owed a great deal to popular representations of Turkish events in the journalism of the day. Turkey was a staple subject in anti-colonial journalism from the early years of the 20th century. In the Tamil context, the nationalist press followed developments in the Ottoman Empire carefully, and at least one well-known figure  from the Tamil context was excited by the Turkish question. This was Subramania Bharati (1882–1921), a poet and journalist, who tended to support extremist nationalism, which at times appeared atavistic and violent, in political matters. However, socially and culturally, he was open and willing to be inspired by diverse histories and viewpoints. He was fascinated by the pan-Asianism of his time, the crisscrossing conversations that took place between artists, writers, travelers, and political activists in locations that spanned a wide arc: Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, India, Japan, China, Mexico, South Africa, the Irish Republic, and Bolshevik Russia. The Khedive rebellion, the exploits of the Young Turks, industrial education in Japan, the fate of the Russian revolution after 1905  – India, the Tamil weekly (1907–1910) edited by Bharati, featured news on these subjects regularly. Anti-colonial nationalism typically sought international affiliates, and for many in India, developments in Turkey and Russia on the one hand and Japan and China on the other seemed to hold important lessons. As militant nationalism gave way to Gandhi and his politics of truth, nonviolence, and civil disobedience, the nation-to-be emerged as an ideal category, almost as if it were an organic entity, drawing from the wellsprings of civilizational memory – and the relationship between the national and the international contexts of anti-colonial protest was recast. Thus, when Gandhi looked to Turkey, he did not ‘see’ a nation struggling to become a republic; rather he identified a historical context that would allow him and others to think about faith and tradition as they ought to exist in the present. More specifically, he was committed to forging a national sensibility that brought together Muslims and Hindus – a unity that he witnessed and helped nurture in the course of struggles for civil rights in British South Africa. In the Indian context, concerned as he was with various lines of difference, whether of caste or faith, he desired such unity. The abolition of untouchability and the ‘unity of hearts’ between Hindus and Muslims were two causes that Gandhi held dear during this period (the early 1920s). As far as the latter was concerned, he joined with those who lamented the

68  V. Geetha dissolution of the Khilafat, or caliphate, and launched a movement of civil disobedience – the non-cooperation movement – against the British in India. The idea was to cease cooperation with the British in the fields of commerce, education, and administration until they righted the Khilafat wrongs. While the cause proved highly emotive for Muslims who followed events in West Asia keenly and who subscribed to various versions of pan-Islamism, non-cooperation proved attractive to all others who had reason to be unhappy with British policy and rule for one reason or another. In the post-war years, there was plenty to feel angry about, and to boycott British schools and goods, to surrender titles, to stay away from law courts and colonial offices, appeared just actions against a patently unjust government. Muslims in the Madras presidency also joined the Khilafat movement. Initially, Urdu-speaking elites (who held themselves to be different from and socially superior to their Tamil-speaking peers) were the most active; significantly, many of them were opposed to the reformism of men like the Tamil-speaking Daud Sha. Gradually, though, students and sections of Tamil-speaking Muslims, too, thronged the Khilafat meetings. Tamil Muslims, it has been said, were provoked to support the Khilafat as much on account of local crises, to do with trade and commerce, as for reasons of sentiment. However this may be, the Khilafat rendered the Turkish question an important aspect of Indian national politics in this southern corner of the sub-continent (Palammal 2010: 99–100). For Tamil-speaking Muslims, who constituted over 90 percent of the faithful in Madras, this affiliation with events in West Asia was new. Historically, they were linked to other spaces: their cultural and social networks followed migratory and trade pathways across the Indian Ocean and made them part of a shared universe of faith, language, values, and material culture (e.g. clothes, places of worship) which stretched from the Coromandel Coast to Indonesia, taking in its sweep the Islamic communities of Indo-China and Ceylon, as those regions were referred to during that time. In this sense, Turkey and other modernizing Islamic societies were unexplored geographies, which now stood to be claimed as inspiring fraternal societies. While the Khilafat represented one sort of fraternity, republican Turkey in the 1920s proved inspiring for other reasons, not only for reformist Muslims, but for non-Muslims as well. Daud Sha’s was thus not a lone voice, and in fact was part of an emergent discourse about modernization, faith, justice, rationality, and progress that cut across religious lines. The reasons for this interest in Turkey and other Islamic societies were many. The dilemmas posed by modernization were reason enough, but local political and social circumstances played a role in Tamil Muslims and non-Muslims in the Tamil context looking to developments in that part of the world. And here I must take a detour through the world of nationalist politics as it unfolded in India in the 1920s. *** The 1920s were witness to events that showed the maturing of Gandhi as the undisputed leader of the Indian National Congress, the premier nationalist party

Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters  69 in the sub-continent. His particular mode of struggle that called on ordinary people rather than their elite leaders to act defiantly drew a large and new constituency of ordinary actors into the nationalist movement. His sensitivity to social inequity caused by the unequal caste order, particularly the existence of untouchability and by widespread poverty, earned him status as a leader who was concerned with the poorest of Britain’s subjects. His insistence on peaceful protest and ‘soul force’ rather than militant action brought women into the forefront of his campaigns. However, the consensus he sought to create for his particular mode of doing politics was not always stable and often proved contentious. Eventually, his adroit leadership won the day, but meanwhile, his very victory created an oppositional movement, centred on issues he held dear, including the question of faith in modern times, social inequity, and composite (that is, Hindu– Muslim) nationalism. Nationalist politics was pushed to re-examine itself in the mid- and late 1920s. To start with, when Gandhi recalled his non-cooperation movement (1922) due to an instance of violence, a faction of nationalists moved away from him and formed a sub-party of their own. The nationalists decided that, rather than protest and contend with British rule, they would strive to get elected to the colonial legislature and fight the enemy from within. The Swarajists, as these men were called, returned to the Congress in the late 1920s on the eve of an election, and insisted, as before, that rather than undertake mass action, they would contest elections. This proved an embarrassment for many Congress workers who had decided they would not cooperate with the British ever. Eventually, the Swarajists’ presence in Congress led to a fracturing of its ranks, especially in the Tamil region. The 1920s were also marked by workers’ unrest in Bombay and Calcutta in key industries, the great railway strike and rural discontent in several parts of the sub-continent. Further, this period saw the determined assertion of a radical anti-untouchability politics in the Bombay province under the leadership of Dr Ambedkar, which directly challenged the Gandhian approach to reform and threatened to steal nationalism’s moral aura from it. Around the same time, in the Tamil-speaking south, a new and radical social movement based on self-respect took shape, which challenged the verities of faith, preached atheism and the liberation of women, and challenged the authority of the upper castes in Hindu society. Eventually, this movement came to articulate a decidedly anti-caste politics. Congress nationalists had to also contend with youthful militancy in the east and north-west, in Bengal and Punjab. The Young Bengal group and Bhagat Singh’s socialist Hindustan Republican Army (HRA) in the Punjab offered political alternatives that diminished the appeal – at least to the young – of habitual nationalist rhetoric that now appeared wan and discordant. These disparate historical events constellated into a restless and trying historical conjuncture, whose significance was not lost on the nationalist Congress. There were rumblings in its own ranks, expressed best in Jawaharlal Nehru’s call for going beyond a politics of seeking autonomy, home rule, or dominion status: in the Madras conference of the Indian National Congress, Nehru insisted that nationalists demand ‘purna (complete) Swaraj’.

70  V. Geetha There was another sort of discontent. This was articulated by self-professed ‘Hindu’ congressmen who were none too happy with attempts to engage the Muslim League’s (founded in 1907 to represent Muslim political interests, including representation in government) fears and concerns in the drawing up of a future constitutional scheme for Indian governance. The Muslim League and the Congress had been locked in a relationship of uneasy accommodation for nearly a decade, and on the eve of British constitutional reforms in 1928, the terms of this accommodation had to be revisited, which produced considerable mistrust and tension. High idealism, a barely concealed Hindu nationalism, and an articulated desire for political office: to address these disparate interests, Congress had to design a solution that was both ethically credible as well as politically astute. Gandhi turned out to be the man of the hour. He succeeded in both recognizing and restraining Jawaharlal Nehru’s political ardor; he endorsed the Congressappointed Motilal Nehru Committee’s proposals for constitutional reform, even though they did not offer nearly enough to the Muslim League, and outlined the conditions by which Swarajists could remain opposed to colonial authority, even while being part of the legislature. Gandhi also made it clear that the Swarajists need not abide by his Gandhian program of social reform in all instances. The Calcutta Congress session of 1928 was the battleground on which this Gandhian consensus was forged: a lofty nationalism was proclaimed, which conceded nothing to the political radicalism of either Young Bengal (on the nationalist fringe) or the socialist Hindustan Republican Army, and which chose to ignore the anticaste protests in the Madras and Bombay presidencies. Hindu–Muslim unity was loudly and endlessly affirmed, even though Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a prominent Muslim Leaguer, denounced Congress’s political reform proposals immediately thereafter; importantly, congressmen were offered honorable ways of being legislators and opponents of government at the same time. Gandhi’s moral rhetoric and political acumen won the day for Congress but diminished the nature of his appeal (V. Geetha and Rajadurai n.d.: 10–12). This is where the Tamil story becomes important. *** In the 1920s, in Tamil country, the ethical claims of nationalism were self-evident because they appeared embodied in Mahatma Gandhi and his political practice. Many were drawn to his advocacy of simplicity, the tenets of Hindu-Muslim unity he outlined in his defense of the Khilafat, his suggestion that nationalists take up hand-spinning to produce cloth that could be then sold in the market as an alternative to English manufactured textiles, and to his proclaiming a relentless campaign against untouchability. His views held appeal across a wide spectrum, and, interestingly, were interpreted in tellingly complex ways. For instance, Saiful Islam, a Tamil Muslim weekly, took up the cause of hand-spinning and counseled Muslim women to take up the practice, arguing that the Prophet had held it in high esteem. Further, Fatima herself was given to spinning. The newspaper also noted that Amir Amanullah of Afghanistan had listed it as important since it encouraged self-sufficiency (Kudiaracu [Republic], 27 February1927).

Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters 71 However, the consensus Gandhi wrought in the late 1920s, with respect to Muslim representation in future schemes of governance in the sub-continent and his supporting those Swarajists who wished to enter the legislature, was not well received. For one, Tamil nationalists who had been active in non-cooperation felt ‘betrayed’ by the latter. Secondly, the Muslim representation question appeared ill-resolved to some. In the Tamil context, there had long existed a plea for proportional representation of all communities, in education, administration, and the legislature. This plea had been made forcefully from as early as 1917 by those who felt Indian nationalism did not seek to do away with caste and other social inequities, and was only opposed to British rule. These men objected to Brahmin domination in all aspects of political and social life, and argued that unless this was critically addressed by the nationalists, their claims to representing all of India could not be taken seriously. Those who argued thus had emerged as a political force in their own right – the South Indian Liberal Federation, or the Justice Party, as it was called (V. Geetha and Rajadurai 2008: 121–268). Significantly, their views were repeated in the late 1920s by the Khilafat leader Maulana Mohammed Ali, who drew on their arguments to bolster the case for separate electorates for Muslims: he pointed out that Hindu nationalists in Congress discriminated against the Muslims, just as Brahmin nationalists did against all those who were non-Brahmins (Kudiaracu [Republic], 31 January 1926). Amongst Tamil nationalist dissenters was a radical rump, represented by E. V. Ramasamy Periyar, an ardent Gandhian. He was one of the Mahatma’s most vocal and passionate supporters, and Kudiaracu, the weekly that he started in 1925, bore an image on its masthead of Gandhi spinning. By the mid-1920s, he was disenchanted with nationalism: the emergence of the Swarajists from within Congress’s ranks, the nationalist indifference to questions of caste-based discrimination, their parrying of the question of proportional representation for all communities, including Muslims, and the fact that Brahmin nationalists were unregenerate with respect to their exclusive status and dominance made him critical of the Congress. Initially, this critique was directed at the Swarajists, but as the terms of the Gandhian consensus became clear, and the Mahatma’s pronouncements on caste and untouchability appeared equivocal, Periyar turned his ire against Gandhi and announced that henceforth he and his supporters would have nothing to do with Congress and Gandhi; instead they would seek to build their incipient self-respect movement into a mass campaign against social inequity, the authority of Brahmins, untouchability, and religious superstition (V. Geetha and Rajadurai 2008: 269–88). In the Tamil context, the caste question was closely linked to the question of the Brahmins’ role in social and cultural matters. Practicing a culture of exclusivity, disdaining to consider others their social or cultural equals, and capable only of an enormous condescension, when challenged, Brahmins as a group elicited derision, anger, and critique from their critics. These critics objected to the Brahmins’ arrogation of priestly authority to themselves on the basis of their birth and their over-representation in administration and in the legislature. The self-respect movement set itself against Brahminical power and authority through its advocacy

72  V. Geetha of atheism, self-respect, comradeship across castes, and the dissolution of caste boundaries through social interaction and marriages across caste differences. This last was important since caste identity was maintained through endogamous marriages (ibid.: 365–9). The anti-clericalism of men like Daud Sha was honed in the context of these debates, and while he developed his views in the context of his own reflections on what he considered ‘true’ Islam, he was undoubtedly emboldened to voice his opinions on account of the self-respect movement’s iconoclasm on the one hand, and endorsement of the spirit of free enquiry on the other. Interestingly, the more conservative Saiful Islam too found it worthwhile to debate the issues thrown up by the self-respect movement, but their concerns were different. They were not interested in denouncing faith or the priesthood; rather, they shared the selfrespect movement’s interest in and commitment to proportional representation (Kudiaracu, 4 July 1926). The self-respecters in turn endorsed their demand for separate electorates for Muslims and re-featured articles that originally appeared in Saiful Islam – on this matter – in Kudiaracu. In the late 1920s, when the self-respecters set about to articulate a world-view to challenge the nationalist vision of the good society, they insisted that political reform was meaningless without social reform and argued that the former achieved its aims through actively retarding the progress of the latter. They also proposed their own agenda for social change and progress, which was discussed and resolved at the First Self-respect Conference held in Chinglepet in 1929 – which is where Daud Sha voiced his views on the need for Muslims to examine their conscience and free themselves from the hold of maulvis and mullahs, in the manner of the Turks. The self-respect program for social change and justice comprised several interlinked elements, of which the right to criticize and recast the worlds of faith and custom were granted centrality. The modernizing state was viewed as an apt vehicle for reform, but at the same time the program set great store by what it called social persuasion – tireless labor undertaken in the realm of the family and civil society to persuade individuals and social groups to act on the basis of reason and with the greater common good and justice in mind. The self-respect movement comprised a substantial number of atheists and freethinkers. They subjected religious dogma, the power of priests, and the prevalence of obscurantist customs in the practice of all faiths to a penetrative social and political critique. Their atheism possessed an energetic and satiric charge, trained as it was against faith that appeared a travesty of reason as well as of human decency. Thus, the self-respecters objected as much to the use of religion to retain and legitimize hierarchies of caste, class, and privilege as they did to its irrationality. Atheist arguments were utilized in several contexts: to advance a critique of Congress nationalism that appeared in concord with unbending orthodoxy; to argue for and re-define the right of the so-called untouchables to temple entry as an essentially public and civil right; to mount an unrelenting critique of those who set themselves up as opponents of marriage reform and women’s

Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters  73 equality; and finally to interrogate the truth claims of all religions in the Indian context (ibid.: 289–33). The self-respect movement’s atheism was characteristically homegrown: it took its cues from worldwide debates in radical rationalism and free thought but adapted them brilliantly to explain and illumine conditions on the Indian subcontinent. In fact, they held themselves to be in the vanguard of a sub-continental movement against priestcraft, superstition, and social inequality, nurtured by religious texts and leaders. Thus, Revolt, an English weekly that the movement ran from 1928 to 1930 noted that the self-respecters were encouraged by the fact that rationalists elsewhere were looking to Indian radicals to do their best by a society that was described as a ‘slumbering giant’, which had to be woken up to the day of reason. Revolt’s writers (and readers) were inspired by worldwide debates on science, faith, and rationality and the weekly re-published articles from a number of freethought journals, including The Rationalist, The Truthseeker, and the tracts of the London-based Rationalist Press Association. Significantly, atheism was understood not in the limiting sense of a negative doctrine but as an idea whose time had come. For the readers and editors of Revolt, Ataturk’s Turkey, Amanullah’s Afghanistan, and the self-declared atheistic Soviet Union appeared to be important historical examples in this regard (V. Geetha and Rajadurai n.d.: 582–601). The late 1920s seemed particularly apposite to the self-respecters’ atheism, for these were the years that saw Turkey write its Constitution and carry out farreaching reforms with respect to civil law. The introduction of a new civil code, the dissolution of the Ministry for Islamic Law, the introduction of a modern dress code for women, the introduction of modern education – the self-respect movement saw in Turkey’s emergent republicanism a vindication of its own position and worldview. Likewise, Amanullah’s boldness intrigued and excited them, as did the Bolsheviks’ opposition to religion and their practical iconoclasm. An editorial dated 27 March 1929 that appeared in Revolt had this to say of Kemal Pasha and his republic: Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha is the soul and brain of the New Turkey of today. Under his guidance and command Turks are organizing their entire scheme of existence anew. The part that the Koran and Shariat is to play in their lives is being settled by the Ghazi and his enthusiastic band of reformers. No more of authority but ethics, no more of gospel but truth, no more of faith but science and technology, shall guide the life of young Turkey. The Ghazi has spoken and all Turks are straining themselves to the limit to realize his ideals. (Ibid.: 594–5) For the self-respecters, what was particularly attractive was the republican vision of womanhood. Today, we are rightly suspicious of the republican ‘resolution’ of the woman’s question in Turkey, but in the 1920s, it appeared startlingly new and bold. For self-respecters, the Turkish reforms with respect to women’s

74  V. Geetha status and lives could not have come at a more apposite moment in time. The midand late 1920s in India witnessed debates around three important legal measures to do with women’s rights that were on the anvil and waiting to be passed. One was a local Madras bill (1928), which had its origins in the efforts of a woman legislator, Dr Muthulakshmi. It sought to abolish the practice of dedicating young girls to temples. This ‘dedication’, whatever its significance in the pre-colonial period, was understood as a euphemism for ‘sanctified debauchery’, as the selfrespecters defined it. “Dedicated” girls had to seek the support of wealthy male patrons, including the priests of temples they were attached to, and often ended up as sex workers. The proposed bill therefore sought to ban the practice. During the same period, two male reformers, H. S. Gour and Har Bilas Sarda, undertook legislative efforts to raise the age of consent for conjugal as well as extra-marital sexual intercourse and to restrain child marriage. These bills – which were national and not merely local instances of reform – spawned debates on a range of issues, including the appropriateness of legislation to do with matters on which there was no social consensus: the questions of female sexuality, permissible sexual liaisons and illegitimate relationships, and the institution of marriage and the right age for it. In addition, there was widespread discussion on the need for female education, rights to marriage, and sexual autonomy (ibid.: 406–407). The self-respect movement adopted radical positions on all these matters: it advocated women’s right to choose their partners; argued that ‘chastity’ was a moral imposition on women, which impeded their mobility, freedom and bound them to unhappy marriages; insisted that women do all that men do, by way of education and employment; called on them to participate in public life; and, most important, noted that the subjection of women was the basis on which an entire system of social inequality was sustained in the Indian context. Given the self-respecters’ concerns, the Turkish republic’s purported reforms appeared inspiring. As Revolt observed: The most important feature of the change in Turkey is the emancipation of women. They are today taking an active share of work of nation building, especially in public health work. They are also mixing freely with men in tea parties and dances, but health, hygiene, education and the arts are drawing more of their energy and attention. Then there is the question of dress. In this, of course, the whole of Turkey has gone to Europe. (ibid.: 595) Another Revolt article, from August 1929, noted how, in Turkey, “women are encouraged to move about freely without the unwholesome veil. They may enter any of the professions, and may work in shops and offices. Instead of being mere playthings for men, they are becoming real companions. It may be added that the subjection of women in Turkey was owing to the influence of religion. Opposition to the reforms has invariably been fomented by the priests and their supporters” (ibid.: 597). The self-respect movement’s eulogizing of Turkish reforms was not restricted to their English and Tamil weeklies; their publicists drew attention to Turkey in their public addresses as well. In the early 1930s, the Soviet Union replaced

Republican Turkey and Tamil self-respecters  75 Turkey as a favored nation-state in the lexicon of the self-respect movement, as it came under the spell of communism. But in both instances, the self-respecters looked for ways and means to hone their particular project of social radicalism. While nationalists looked to fraternal states that would aid their anti-colonial struggle, the self-respecters looked for support and inspiration for their social justice projects. Interestingly, they were drawn to the modernization project but did not link the latter to a putative nationalism, as the Turkish Republic had. Rather, they advocated secular and republican virtues in the context of their struggle for social equality and justice. This is perhaps also why the Soviet Union, which was not ostensibly ‘national’, became a model that replaced Turkey. *** Daud Sha did not have an easy relationship with the self-respect movement. While he endorsed its social justice claims, particularly the call to grant proportional representation to all communities in the legislature, administration, and education, and shared its anti-clericalism, the movement’s atheism irked him, its radical position on women was clearly not acceptable, and besides, the self-respecters’ iconoclastic disregard for the claims of tradition and culture annoyed him. Eventually, he moved away from the movement. But in the period that we are concerned with, the 1920s, the Turkish instance provided a point of intersection for several interests and ideologies in the Indian – Tamil – context to constellate into a rare moment of dialogue and conversation.

References Abdul Khader Fakhri, S. M. (2008) Dravidian Sahibs and Brahmin Maulanas: The Politics of the Muslims of Tamil Nadu, 1930–1967, New Delhi: Manohar. Geetha, V. and Rajadurai, S. V. (2008) Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar, Kolkata: Samya. ——— (eds.) (n.d.) Revolt: A Radical Weekly in Colonial Madras, Chennai: Periyar Dravidar Kazhagam. Kannappar, J. S. and Gurusami, Kuthoosi (2007) Tamil Provinces Suya Mariyathai Maanaadu, Dravidan Malar, 1929, 17, Sunday [The Tamil Province Self-Respect Conference Volume, Dravidan Collection, 1929, 17, Sunday], Melur: Kuthoosi Gurusamy Padipagam. More, J. B. P. (1997) Political Evolution of Tamil Muslims in Tamil Nadu and Madras, 1930–47, Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Palammal, B. (2010) Women Freedom Fighters in Tamil Nadu, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Manonmanium Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, India. Available at: http:// shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/14211/10/10_chapter%203.pdf. [Accessed 14 December 2014]. Vadlamudi, Sreenivasa Sundara R. (2010) Daud Shah and Socio-Religious Reform Among Muslims in the Madras Presidency, M.A. Thesis. Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin. Available at: https://repositories.lib. utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/ETD-UT-2010-05-249/VADLAMUDI-THESIS. pdf?sequence=1 [Accessed 14 December 2014].

5 Halide Edib and Gandhi

Emrah Efe KhayyatHalide Edib and Gandhi

Literary modernity in India and Turkey Emrah Efe Khayyat

Halide Edib (Adıvar)1 (1884–1964) was “a great world figure . . . whether you look on her as a Turkish feminist leader, as a world-renowned authority on education or as a great writer” (Letter from Ansari to Seth Jamal Mohamed, 20 October 1934, Ansari Papers, Jamia Millia Islamia)2 writes Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari (1880–1936), an Edinburgh-educated doctor who, as the leader of the Indian medical mission,3 met Edib in her native Istanbul in 1913. In 1935 Ansari was Edib’s host when she delivered a series of lectures across India (Hasan 2010). The comments below on Gandhi, part of them delivered with Gandhi by her side on the stage, are from Edib’s lectures in 1935 at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi: The twentieth century is blessed in having in Mahatma Gandhi, the New Teacher, the needed servant of humanity (Edib 1935a: 33).  .  .  . All Hindu Indians should support him and serve him in this work, for he is the only person capable of using the best in Hinduism and of sorting out the superstitious, the degenerative elements which have crept into it. All Moslem Indians should also support him and further his cause, for his synthesis is dominated in its fundamentals by the everlasting principles of Islam. He seems to me, if I may be permitted to say so, an ideal neo-Moslem, with his cleanliness of body and mind, his self-restraint, his readiness to co-operate and love, his respect for bodily labour, education, truth and peace. (247) This was in January, months before the Government of India Act of 1935, which would later become the basis for both India’s and Pakistan’s constitutions, and a little more than a decade after the abolition of the caliphate in modern Turkey. By then the Khilafat movement in India, which had emerged with Gandhi’s backing and out of fears for the future of the world-wide (Ottoman-) Muslim leadership in the age of world wars, had perished along with the caliphate, Ottoman pan-Islamism and the Ottoman Empire itself, which was replaced by the modern Turkish republic. The Khilafat’s leadership had fragmented with some of its leaders – including the Ali brothers – joining the Muslim League, which opposed Gandhi, but Ansari, Edib’s host, still supported Gandhi.4 Edib observes that the Khilafat movement produced “two curiously contradictory results in India: that of

Halide Edib and Gandhi 77 uniting the Muslems and Hindus around a common activity; and that of dividing them. Dr. Ansari’s work belongs to the first. Hence he is a third bridge – that is, one between Muslems and Hindus” (Edib 2002: 17–8). Ansari is the host, then, and Edib rubs shoulders with Gandhi and other Indian leaders at these lectures. Among Edib’s extraordinary interlocutors, we also have a reluctant Mohammad Iqbal,5 the poet-prophet of yet-to-come Pakistan. Edib here too stands as a “bridge between Muslems and Hindus,” and bridges Turkey and India. The rationale behind hosting Edib in India is given by Gandhi himself in his response to one of Edib’s lectures: There is an indissoluble tie that binds India to Turkey, not because we have suffered alike, but because Turkey has a Muslim population which has so much in common with India because of her millions of Muslims, who are flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood and bone of our bone. May Begum Saheba’s coming in our midst result in binding Hindus and Muslims in an indissoluble bond. (Gandhi 1974: vol. LX, 93–4) A year later, in a letter from Paris, Edib writes that she hopes one day “to be able to deal with [. . . the] statement in regard to Gandhiji being a neo-Moslem” (Enginün 2000: 558–9).6 She never explained the statement. This chapter seeks to provide an explanation. The first section introduces Edib’s life and work and expounds upon how and why Edib’s is the politics of literature par excellence. The second section looks at Edib’s literary politics from a rather more critical perspective.

I Edib was the first Muslim graduate of the American College for Girls (in 1901) in Istanbul, where she would later found the Society for the Elevation of Women (Teali-i Nisan Cemiyeti).7 She was a major figure of resistance against late Ottoman monarchy – against the “bloody tyrant” Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). As a popular nationalist intellectual, she allied with Turkish revolutionaries,8 first against pious Abdülhamid9 and then, during World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, against the Entente and the European invasion of Turkey. After the Young Turk revolution of 1908, which practically dethroned Abdülhamid, she wrote extensively on the education of women in the Istanbul-based Tanin. She was targeted during the “royalist”-Islamist (Khilafatist) rebellion of 1909 (known as the 31 March Incident) as a result of her efforts, and fled, first to Egypt and then to London. During World War I, back in Turkey, she fought on the side of Ottoman-Turkish revolutionaries as an activist, the sole woman on horseback, a great orator in black hijab riding from one square to the other to mobilize the masses against European colonialism.10 She was among the founders of the Anadolu News Agency, the press bureau and sole voice of the Turkish nationalist struggle, of whose necessity she seems to have convinced Mustafa Kemal, and

78  Emrah Efe Khayyat where she worked tirelessly.11 At one point during the independence war, along with some prominent Turkish intellectuals, she supported an American mandate in Turkey, convinced of its viability over the dreams of an independent Turkish nation. Eventually she challenged Turkish revolutionaries too and also the founder of the modern Turkish republic Mustafa Kemal, for what she considered their authoritarianism. After this last confrontation she chose self-exile, for the most part in Europe,12 lecturing in the US and India, and critiquing modern Turkey’s “cutting its people off from their past” (Edib 1930: 258). She published some of her major works originally in English.13 During her self-exile, in Turkey, her earlier support of an American mandate, which many thought was the best way of challenging the Entente, was used against her. Mustafa Kemal, in his national address Nutuk, or oration, read a letter by Edib supporting this view as evidence of her treachery (Kemal 1984).14 After Mustafa Kemal’s death, and not long after her Indian trip, Edib returned to Turkey to work for the humanist reform project of modern Turkey,15 working for the reorganization of a traditional, somewhat Islamic educational institution, İstanbul Darülfünûnu, into Istanbul University. She founded the Department of English Philology at Istanbul University. *** Halide Edib’s novels engage impasses of Ottoman and Turkish “Westernization,”16 condemning mimicry and arguing for an alternative modernity. Raik’in Annesi [Raik’s Mother] by juxtaposing a number of female characters and their ways of relating to men and the world around them, searches for an identity and morality divorced from both the past and the West yet national and modern. Seviyye Talip focuses on the education of the modern Turkish-Muslim mother who would be best equipped to bring up the ideal modern Ottoman citizen. Yeni Turan [New Turan] depicts a utopic future of union and equality for women and men of Asia Minor, harmonizing rising Turkish nationalist sentiments with an ideal of a homeland, based neither on shared history nor blood, but on an ecumenical idea of the Turan.17 What Edib admits about Yeni Turan could easily apply to all of her novels: “The book, which has the usual love-story, has not much pretension to art, but its practically worked out ideals will, I firmly believe, be at least partly realized” (Edib 1926: 332). And yet she never takes “love stories” lightly. Under her pen every love story turns into a revolutionary statement on the future of the Middle East and gender equality, The Clown and His Daughter being her crowning achievement in this regard. Its heroine Rabia is the pious (she is a hafez, i.e. performs Quran recitations) and highly cultured daughter of a grocer-turned-actor who enjoys playing female roles (Edib 1935b). Rabia falls in love with Peregrini, an Italian monkturned-music-master based in Istanbul, eventually marrying and converting Peregrini to Islam. The late Ottoman man of letters constantly “brought non-Muslim women together with Muslim men in his novels, but Halide Edib found an irreproachably authentic way to do the opposite,” comments Carter Vaughn Findley

Halide Edib and Gandhi 79 insightfully (Findley 2010: 239). Yet most of Edib’s “minor” Jewish, Greek and Armenian women characters are either prostitutes or figures of impropriety at the very least (Millas 2005; 1996).18 Her fiction appears didactic, but only retrospectively, and only if one ignores the generic shift that her writings perform, and her irreverence and indifference in context. In fact she could as well be taken to be among the first truly modern literary figures of Turkey, in that her writing, always keen on describing life from within, seeks to go deeper in depicting the social fabric to hint at the social truth that lies beneath, “tunneling into the depths and formulating the unconscious social text that is to be deciphered there” (Rancière 2011: 22–3). Hers was no simple populism. The statement about Yeni Turan could be interpreted as proof of her ability and readiness to mix genres without any concern for the high and low, traditional or modern, while many of her contemporaries either struggled to bring back ancient Muslim genres or to produce properly literary works worthy of European eyes. Her irreverent gaze, challenging both traditional and modern discourses on art and politics,19 indifferently travelled all the way to the interiors of households, to the private chambers and thoughts of her heroines and heroes. Hers was not some political literature, but literature as politics, or the politics of literature. After reading Handan (1912) whose heroine, oppressed by her husband’s infidelity, falls in love with her niece’s husband, young critic Yakub Kadri, who would later become one of the greatest novelists of Turkey, could not but admit that the novel appeared to him “autobiographical.” But Yakub Kadri knew nothing about Halide Edib or her life (Karaosmanoğlu 1990: 240–7). The best case in point is Edib’s response to Mustafa Kemal’s historic “oration” (Nutuk) that narrates the history of the Turkish struggle for independence. In response to this great man’s big words on how he led his great nation’s history-making achievements, Edib publishes her memoirs accounting for more or less the same events but with a degree of lyricism, or simply with an aesthetic terbiye (terbiye: manners, morality, but also discipline or learning, education or training; verb form is terbiye etmek, i.e. to educate or to train), taking us inside the Turkish independence movement, to the private chambers of her family and personal lives of her compatriots (Adak 2003; 2004; 2014). Her Inside India was written for an English-speaking audience with more or less the same premises. On the one hand, this is a book on India from within, or seen “through the Salam House” and “on highways and byways,” as opposed to some Orientalist, bookish view of India from a distance. Edib is interested in private chambers here, because “the houses where I have stayed seemed to me like so many clues to Indian character: that is why I describe them at some length for my readers” (Edib 2002: 101). On the other hand, Inside India is still autobiographical: “What I say about India need not be the truth as Indians themselves see it, but it is the truth I see and believe” (ibid.: 3). If her political fiction has no option but to withdraw to the private chambers and thoughts of her heroines and heroes, her “history” takes the form of the memoir, withdrawing to her self in autobiography. We can confidently say that Edib had a single cause behind her work, whether as a translator, novelist, or author of political treatises, and wherever she wrote

80  Emrah Efe Khayyat and taught. This cause was the aesthetic education (terbiye) of the masses. For her the “true meaning of education,” – basic liberal arts or “aesthetic” education – could achieve the grand task of “awakening of the spirit” for “the struggle for its evolution” (Edib 1327 [1909]: 25–7). 20 In the final age of colonialism and world wars, aesthetic education was of particular significance to the Muslim masses who, for Edib, were caught between dormant traditions and great powers fighting for world dominion. At the same time, then, hers was a relentless search for a very particular model, for what she would call the “ideal neo-Moslem” who would be fit for the challenges of the modern world (1935a: 247). She wanted a model who could expand horizons, one whom everyone could follow to see the depths she effortlessly described in her writings. She seems to have found this model in India, and this is one possible explanation of her statement.

II Halide Edib was also systematically “accused” of having Jewish heritage in Turkey as she became more and more prominent in the Turkish revolutionary movement as the sole imposing female figure on the battlefield.21 Despite lack of evidence of Jewish ancestry and her outright denials,22 it was none other than one of her most prominent brothers-in-arms, namely Mustafa Kemal, who came up with the same “accusation” not long before Edib’s Indian trip. Edib’s Jewishness, along with her treacherous support of an American mandate, was how Mustafa Kemal explained Edib’s veering off the Turkish cause as he would have it, which is also to say Edib’s exclusion from the Turkish nationalist movement or her “exile.”23 Yet Edib herself, her writings and her politics, played a very important role in the same movement’s development and in empowering Mustafa Kemal. To this day Halide Edib remains a minor figure in the history of Turkish independence. Perhaps there are indeed two Edibs, unless there are two sides to Edib’s humanism, her literature and politics. At the very least we have a fictitious crypto-Jew of sorts traveling to India to describe Gandhi as a crypto-Muslim of sorts – an “ideal neo-Moslem,” no less. The encounter of the fictitious Jew with the fictitious Muslim may help explain Edib’s statement better. Edib’s ambivalence concerning the veil provides a key. To this day, Edib’s sartorial choices have always been a subject of furious debate in Turkey. There was once even an “Edib model” for tackling the issue of the secular Turkish ban on Muslim sartorial habits in public, fiercely debated as well. What she makes of her veil and what it veil stands for gives us a number of clues about her understanding of politics and religion, inside and outside, “spirituality” and “materiality,” the esoteric and the exoteric, the East as opposed to the West. Edib appears sometimes veiled and sometimes not, sometimes with the hijab and sometimes with the headscarf in her images that reach us. In her public anti-colonial addresses, which she always delivered veiled, at the front of her audiences were always veiled women, and at times women wearing the black hijab, even when the black hijab was not exactly common in Istanbul (Aksoy 2005: 91). But her entire educational ideal, including her project regarding

Halide Edib and Gandhi 81 the education of Muslim women, and for instance her utopia as it took shape in Yeni Turan, depicts the veil in such a way that despite remaining crucial to the Muslim identity, the veil transforms radically. It is far from appearing “conservative” to begin with, and is certainly a huge leap from the generic “black hijab.” In Yeni Turan the veil is described as having become much “plainer,” still far from being “fashionable,” yet innovative and “aesthetic” (Edib 1330 [1912]: 1–14). It is aestheticized to such an extent that it becomes the signature of Muslim yet national, Western yet traditional identity. Edib never wore the veil in Paris, London or New York.24 But she appears in black hijab in India, and after her return to Turkey, where the ban on Muslim sartorial habits in public had already taken effect, her veil and conservative habits shocked her comrades (Çalışlar 2010: 462–73; Taner 1983: 91). I would argue that this ambivalence is not limited to her sartorial habits. In fact I am interested in Edib’s sartorial habits and what she has to say about Muslim sartorial habits in general, in so far as the issue has implications for understanding the ways in which Edib embodies her ideals, and in the final analysis, for making better sense of her statement regarding Ghandiji being an ideal neo-Muslim.25 I will say a few words concerning Edib’s ambivalence concerning veiling, then, but this will also require rethinking the veil – unfolding it, as it were. Edib will be veiling and unveiling herself, but also veiling and unveiling Shakespeare, for instance  – veiling and unveiling Armenians, and finally, veiling and unveiling Gandhi himself in the telegraphic comments below. The veil, in the final analysis, is the problematic issue here that helps us to catch a glimpse of her figure as a branch sprouting forth global letters, as an instance of the global dissemination of literary modernity and literariness. Let me start with Shakespeare. *** Right after World War I and in the midst of the Turkish resistance to occupation, Edib made time to work on a translation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Edib’s partial translation, published in 1918 in the progressive literary journal Temaşa of Istanbul, is not the first Turkish translation of the play, but as the editorial introduction explains, the first translation that was done “professionally” [vakıfane] and was meant to be as faithful as possible, “appropriate to [the classic’s] sublimity.”26 In fact The Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare play to be translated into Ottoman Turkish in its entirety some decades before Edib’s partial translation (Enginün 1979). Hasan Sırrı’s translation of 1884 was still popular among the Istanbul literati in 1918 (Shakespeare 1301 [1884]). But Sırrı’s translation displays a peculiar sensitivity concerning what he takes to be the play’s violence and pejorative language toward Jews. Sırrı skips long passages that he considers too violent or biased, as he explains in his Preface, and censors expressions such as “the dog Jew” in order not to offend Ottoman Jewry (Enginün 1979: 34). Edib, on the other hand, restores the skipped passages and censored language in her translation of the selections from the play. She seems to have selected the acts to make it clear that her intention was to undo the censoring.

82  Emrah Efe Khayyat This intervention by Edib enables us to analyze – microscopically, as it were – the bigger conflict that appears to be central to Edib’s life and work. One might argue that this conflict is very much alive in our day and age, and central to contemporary literary and cultural criticism too, as the scholarly responses to the infamous “cartoon crisis” and similar tensions of the past decade attest.27 The conflict is between different ways of engaging letters and words and the task of the translator, but also of engaging publicity and free speech. It is a conflict between different forms of practicing freedom, and ultimately between different ways of being and saying. For Hasan Sırrı the naked, insane materiality, the pictorial reality of the printed word  – or words such as “the dog Jew” in this case  – determines the political decision of what to say and not to say, what to veil or unveil in translation. Edib’s intervention involves, obviously not blatant “anti-Semitism,” but what one could identify as the philological passion for the “truth about the surface.” But this philological passion also calls for “tunneling into the depths and formulating the unconscious social text that is to be deciphered there,” (Rancière 2011: 22–3) thereby producing an alternative space, an interiority for the text. While Sırrı’s translation suggests cautious restriction, Edib’s suggests cautious release. If Sırrı takes the liberty to veil that which is at the surface, attending above all to the letters printed on paper, Edib takes the liberty to unveil and expose “as is,” begging the question of the text’s invisible depths. That which travels, here from English to Turkish, through Edib’s translation is not only Shakespeare and his words but also a new way of seeing and saying – a new, hidden truth behind that which is visible. This is not to say that Edib was the first Ottoman intellectual to perform literary translation. But her Shakespeare translation is certainly a moment in the global dissemination of literary ways of seeing and saying, reading and writing. Her struggle in Lebanon during World War I and her appearance in Delhi may as well be interpreted as stop-overs in the worldwide travels of the hidden truths in question and of the space of literature where one observes their manifestation. Let me continue with Edib and her Armenians. *** From 1908 Edib published articles on Muslim women and education in other journals in Istanbul, mainly Tanin. Eventually, her articles that emphasized the significance of literary and humanistic training of the masses got her a job as an educational reformer. She worked as an overseer of girls’ schools for the Ministry of Education of the revolutionary Ittihat ve Terakki (Union and Progress) government, the first and last ruling Ottoman political party. Her thoughts regarding an educational reform project, which aimed at the creation of the new Ottoman citizen, were highly appealing to Turkish revolutionaries who, after dethroning Abdulhamid II, had found themselves in the midst of a colonial war and in urgent need of mobilizing the masses. But the revolutionaries had other troubles too. One of the three leaders of the Ittihat ve Terakki, Djemal Pasha, also known as the “Butcher of Syria,” invited Edib to Lebanon right after the Armenian Genocide (1915–17) to put her educational ideals and skills to use in greater Syria.

Halide Edib and Gandhi  83 Edib was charged with making fully fledged Ottoman citizens out of the orphans of the war, and, in Lebanon, mostly out of Armenian children whose parents had been massacred. She took charge of a number of schools for this purpose, among them an orphanage in Aintura. It was in Aintura and under Edib’s guidance that Armenian orphans were given Muslim names and a properly modern OttomanTurkish education – without which, allegedly, they had no chance of survival. Turkish identity, according to Edib, would serve as a veil to protect these children (Edib 1926: 467). One particular orphan “by the name of Jale,” whose story Edib narrates in her memoirs and whom Edib had taken back to Istanbul planning to adopt her, summarizes the success of the college with the following protest at being pronounced Armenian by origin: “Ask Mother Halide . . . she will tell you I’m not an Armenian” (ibid.). Incidents such as these are the reason why for some people among the many “demonic crimes” of World War I on the Turkish front, “the case of Halide Edib Hanum is a loathsome one” (Andonian 1920: iv). Yet for Edib, hers was a struggle to make modern citizens, fully fledged agents out of the humble and powerless. She also narrates her time in Lebanon in such a way that her reader is introduced to an utterly cosmopolitan environment in Beirut, where Edib the humanist, orator, and teacher speaks to those around her in English, French, Kurdish, Greek, Turkish and Arabic. Edib the revolutionary teacher contributes to the cultural life of the city by writing a libretto titled Shepherds of Canaan, (1334 [1916]) based on the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, and staging an opera with the same name, with her students from Aintura as performers, in collaboration with an Ottoman nationalist, the Armenian composer Vedi Sabra. One could also argue that her endeavours in greater Syria were still but a search for the “ideal neo-Moslem.” In her memoirs, addressing an English-speaking audience, she describes the situation in Syria in what appears to be a realist tone. Despite explaining how her host, Djemal Pasha, fed the Armenian orphans by taking food from Muslim children, Edib does not seem to think that there was anything ideal about this Young Turk leader.28 She appears sometimes veiled and sometimes without the veil in her photographs from this period in Lebanon. It is this setting and this self-characterization, though, that together with Edib’s later public presence in Paris and New York without the veil, produces an uncanny contrast with her arrival in Delhi some years later, where she was greeted by a huge crowd wearing Gandhi caps and chanting “Allahu Akbar” (Çalışlar 2010: 383; Yorulmaz 1988). Seven years before, in New York, Edib’s unveiled picture was published in The New York Times as the “new face of the Near East.” Now the crowd in the Indian station was celebrating the alliance with this great champion of Islam – this proud Muslim woman who, once again in black hijab, was traveling by herself after having fled the oppressively nationalist, secularist government of modern Turkey. Gandhi by her side, there Edib tells the story of Turkish-Muslim independence as an exemplary Muslim, yet national, struggle against colonialism. Allying with Gandhi and in opposition to Muslim separatists of India, she calls on all the Muslims of India to embrace the true Islam to be found not in the mosque but elsewhere, in some other space. It may as well be for this reason that she says of Gandhi that he is

84  Emrah Efe Khayyat “an ideal neo-Moslem, with his cleanliness of body and mind, his self-restraint, his readiness to co-operate and love, his respect for bodily labour, education, truth and peace” (1935a: 247). We also know now that this was when Edib herself was being described as an exemplary “secret Jew” of sorts – Muslim on the outside, Jew on the inside. It is of course difficult to take Gandhi to be literally or faithfully Muslim, let alone an “ideal” Muslim, whatever this latter may mean. It makes no sense whatsoever to speak of Edib’s “Jewishness” in the Turkish context either, whatever that may mean. It is also difficult to decide whether Edib is veiling or unveiling something about Gandhi, Islam, or India in these lines, or whether Mustafa Kemal veils or unveils anything about Edib or Judaism when he addresses Edib’s alleged Jewishness. But right on the surface of things, it is clear that in Edib’s statement regarding Gandhiji being a neo-Muslim we once again find ourselves facing the contrast between cautious restriction, this time the cautious Muslim resistance to Indianness, and Edib’s call to freedom of thought and action, and perhaps even to conversion; but also to expanding horizons, to take liberties with imagination; to rethink and appropriate the Muslim, Gandhi and the Indian. In this sense, then, veiled or unveiled, veiling and unveiling, Edib never gives up on political interventionism, her literary-political interventionism, already visible, for better or worse, in her work with the Armenian orphans in Aintura and in her Shakespeare translation.

Notes 1 Modern spelling of the name is Halide Edip, and Adıvar is the surname she received after marriage (and after the introduction of surnames to Turkey during the republican era). I prefer Halide Edib for consistency. 2 See also Mushirul Hasan’s Introduction to Halide Edib’s Inside India (2002). Hasan’s introduction to this new edition of Edib’s Inside India (originally published in 1937), which contains “minutiae of India’s political history in the 1930s” (xiii) as the background to Edib’s Indian trip, along with Hasan’s Between Modernity and Nationalism: Halide Edip’s Encounter with Gandhi’s India, were models for this essay in many ways. I would like to think that the essay responds to Hasan’s writing from the “Turkish side,” as it were. 3 India sent the medical mission to Turkey to support the Turkish cause during the Balkan Wars. For a historical account of the mission, see Akçapar (2015). 4 For an introduction to the end of the caliphate in Turkey, see Berkes (1964), and for the Khilafat movement and its history, see Minault (1982) and Qureshi (2009). 5 Letter from Mohammed Iqbal to Ansari, 1 January 1935 (Ansari Papers, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi). Iqbal first declines to chair a lecture. 6 The letter was reproduced in Enginün (2000: 558–9), with a small error in transcription that renders Gandhiji “Sandligi.” 7 For her description of the foundation of the society, see (Edib 1926: 334–5). 8 Again, in Ansari’s words: “She has also been a rebel against customs and traditions that fetter life; she has fearlessly denounced men and policies in the name of brotherhood, justice and truth” (Edib 1935a: iii). 9 For Abdulhamid’s “conservatism,” see Deringil (1998). Deringil’s judgment on this “conservatism” is summarized in this quote: “The Islamism of the Hamidian period . . .

Halide Edib and Gandhi  85 was entirely a reaction against classical Ottoman Islam. As such, essentially it was a modernist movement. Despite all its anti-Western posturing, because it favoured modernization, it must be considered together with other modernist movements in Turkish history” (67). This would apply equally to the Khilafat movement in India and the “political idea of Pakistan” in Faisal Devji’s account. 10 For how this echoed in the international media at the time, see, for instance, Zekeriya (1922). 11 In fact she named the agency herself, it appears. See Nadi (1997: 84–6). 12 Edib never liked to think of herself an exile, though. In India, upon being introduced as such, she feels it necessary to enlighten the Indian public, and gives an interview to say that “she was no exile from Turkey as was the impression in India. She could go back to Turkey at any moment she desired. ‘The reasons which make me live outside my country at the moment are not of a nature to interest the public. I have not been official advisor to any Ministry. I beg my Indian sisters and brothers to consider me as nothing but a writer of fiction and a private individual, who is living the happiest moments of her life because of the affection and hospitality of India and Indians.’ ” Hindustan Times, 11 January 1935: 6. 13 In addition to The Conflict and its American version Turkey Faces West, Edib’s two volumes of memoirs, The Turkish Ordeal and The Clown and His Daughter, among others, were published originally in English. 14 Gazi Mustafa Kemal, Nutuk-Söylev, 2 vol. (Ankara: TTK, 1984). 15 A series of educational reform projects were undertaken by the Turkish state in the 1930s and 40s to create a Turkish brand of humanism, a movement that the legendary minister of culture Hasan Ali Yücel himself called “the humanist culture reforms,” and which mainly involved translation and publication of European classics as cheap paperbacks, sometimes distributed for free, and the establishment of the academic humanities in Turkey (with the help of German Jewish émigrés, among them Erich Auerbach, of course). For an interesting juxtaposition of Auerbachian “exilic” humanism and the humanism of the Turkish ministry of culture in this context, see Konuk (2010). 16 For an analysis of Edib’s oeuvre from this perspective, see Enginün (1978). 17 For Turanism in Turkey generally speaking, see, for instance, Arnakis (1960). 18 Millas (2005) observes that “the only positive character encountered in [Edib’s] literary texts is a Greek post official who favoured a multi-national Ottoman state.” See also Millas (1996). 19 Mixing of genres with indifference and irreverence to generic determinations, and for instance the testing of scholarly “knowledge” in real-life situations, are ideals that no doubt inspired a great many modern men and women of letters. Obviously I have Erich Auerbach in mind in saying this, as in (2003). For “indifference” and Auerbach in this context: Rancière (2011; 2004). 20 This book is a rather liberal translation of Herman H. Horne’s (1906) The Psychological Principles of Education: A Study in the Science of Education. Turkish version opens with a letter from “Halide” to Horne. Edib translated only selections and added her commentary here and there. The quoted material is her own words. 21 Even scholarly works mention wide-spread “rumours” to address Edib’s presumed Jewishness. See, for instance, Enginün (1978: 20–1). But from 1924 on, the rumor took the shape of outright “accusation” and became “public knowledge” too. See for instance, Çalışlar (2010), particularly pages 359–66. Even this recent biography states, quite incomprehensibly too, that Halide Edib’s father was of the Sephardim (ibid.: 10–1). 22 Enginün already brought in all the records and documentation (birth certificates, places of burial, etc.) for all interested parties (1978: 20–1). 23 In 1927, complaining about Edib’s residence in London to a British dignitary, Mustafa Kemal brings up the “Jewish question,” suggesting that Edib was the embodiment of the Jewish question in Turkey, her scheme to establish American mandate in Turkey being the proof of this. His complaint was reported to Austen Chamberlain. See

86  Emrah Efe Khayyat Çalışlar (2010: 344–51) and Şimşir (2005: 144–5). Responding to different accounts of the tension between himself and Edib, Mustafa Kemal felt it necessary to explain in 1932 that he “never liked Halide Hanoum, the daughter of a Jewish father.” See Borak (1997: 61). 24 As example of how Edib was represented outside Turkey, see, for instance, Price (1928), which has a picture of Edib. 25 Yet it is true that her position regarding the veil allows us to rethink from a variety of angles “the politics of the veil” as it relates to the modern public, but this is beyond the scope of this essay. 26 “[U]lviyetiyle mütenasib veya o nisbette mütekarrib olarak . . .” (Fuad 1918: 7). 27 For a recent discussion see Asad, Talal, W. Brown, J. Butler and S. Mahmood (2009). Edib’s life and work give us the context to historicize such crises. 28 In fact according to Edib, this is what the Pasha himself tells her: “ ‘You are an idealist,’ he answered gravely, ‘and like all idealists lack a sense of reality’ ” (Edib 1926: 428–30).

References Adak, Hülya (2003) “National Myths and Self-Na(rra)tions: Mustafa Kemal’s Nutuk and Halide Edib’s Memoirs and The Turkish Ordeal,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 102(2–3): 509–27. ———– (2004) “Otobiyografik Benliğin Çok-karakterliliği: Halide Edib’in İlk Romanlarında Toplumsal Cinsiyet,” in S. Irzık and J. Parla (eds.) Kadınlar Dile Düşünce: Edebiyat ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Istanbul: İletişim. ——— (2014) “Swaraj/siyasi Direnişin Biyografik Sözlüğü: Halide Edib ve Inside India,” Duvar Edebiyat Dergisi, 14: 58–63. Akçapar, Burak (2015) People’s Mission to the Ottoman Empire: M.A. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission, 1912–13, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Aksoy, Murat (2005) Başörtüsü-türban: Batılılaşma-Modernleşme, Laiklik ve Örtünme, Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi. Andonian, Aram (1920) The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Ansari Papers, New Delhi: Jamia Millia Islamia. Arnakis, George G. (1960) “Turanism: An Aspect of Turkish Nationalism,” Balkan Studies, 1: 19–32. Asad, Talal, Brown, W., Butler, J. and Mahmood, S. (2009) Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Auerbach, Eric (2003) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, W. R. Trask (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Berkes, Niyazi (1964) The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal: McGill University Press. Borak, Sadi (ed.) (1997) Atatürk’ün Armstrong’a Cevabı, Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları. Çalışlar, Ipek (2010) Halide Edib, Istanbul: Everest. Deringil, Selim (1998) The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909, London: I. B. Tauris. Edib, Halide (1327 [1909]) Usûl-i Tâlim ve Terbiye, Istanbul: Tanin Matbaası. ——— (1330 [1912]) Yeni Turan, Istanbul: Tanin. ——— (1334 [1916]) Kenan Çobanları, Istanbul: Orhaniye Matbaası. ——— (1926) The Memoirs of Halide Edib, New York-London: The Century. ——— (1928) The Turkish Ordeal, New York-London: The Century.

Halide Edib and Gandhi 87 ——— (1930) Turkey Faces West, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ——— (1935a) The Conflict of East and West in Turkey, New Delhi: Maktaba Millia Islamia. ——— (1935b) The Clown and His Daughter, London: Allen & Unwin. ——— (2002 [1937]) Inside India, London: Oxford University Press. Enginün, İnci (1978) Halide Edip Adıvar’ın Eserlerinde Doğu ve Batı Meselesi, Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Matbaası. ——— (1979) Tanzimat Döneminde Shakespeare, Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi. ——— (2000) Araştırmalar ve Belgeler, Istanbul: Dergah. Findley, Carter Vaughn (2010) Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fuad, Salih (1918) “Shakespeare Hakkında,” Temaşa, (8), 13 September. Gandhi, M. K. (1974) The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Education and Broadcasting, Government of India, vol. LX. Hasan, Mushirul (2010) Between Modernity and Nationalism: Halide Edip’s Encounter With Gandhi’s India, London: Oxford University Press. Horne, H. (1906) The Psychological Principles of Education: A Study in the Science of Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Iqbal, Mohammed (1935) “Letter to Ansari,” in Ansari Papers, 1 January, New Delhi: Jamia Millia Islamia. Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri (1990) Gençlik ve Edebiyat Hatıraları, Istanbul: Iletişim. Kemal, Gazi Mustafa (1984) Nutuk-Söylev, 2 vols. Ankara: TTK. Konuk, Kader (2010) East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Millas, Herkül (1996) “The Image of Greeks in Turkish Literature: Fiction and Memoirs,” in Oil on Fire? Hanover: Verlag Hansche Buchhandlung. ——— (2005) Türk ve Yunan Romanlarında “Öteki” ve Kimlik, Istanbul: İletişim. Minault, Gail (1982) The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, New York: Columbia University Press. Nadi, Yunus (1997) Türkiye’yi Sokakta Bulmadık, Istanbul: Cumhuriyet Kitapları. Price, Clair (1928) “A Woman Speaks for the New Turkey: Halide Edib Hanum Comes to America as the Striking Symbol of the Changed Life of the Near East,” New York Times, 29 June. Qureshi, Naeem M. (2009) Pan-Islamism in British India: The Politics of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924, Karachi: Oxford University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2004) The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——— (2011) The Politics of Literature, J. Rose (trans.), Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Shakespeare, William (1301 [1884]) Venedik Taciri, Hasan Sırrı (trans.), Istanbul: Matbaa-i Ebüzziya. Şimşir, Bilal (ed.) (2005) İngiliz Belgelerinde Atatürk, 1919–1938, Ankara: TTK. Taner, Haldun (1983) Ölürse Ten Ölür Canlar Ölesi Değil, Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi. Yorulmaz, Bülent (1988) Halide Edib Adıvar’ın Hindistan Hayatı, Unpublished MA thesis, Marmara University, Istanbul. Zekeriya, M. (1922) “Turkey’s Fiery ‘Joan of Arc’: Her Double Role as Leader,” The New York Times, 26 November.

Part III

Secularism

6 Temple and dam, fez and hat

Srirupa RoyTemple and dam, fez and hat

The secular roots of religious politics in India and Turkey1 Srirupa Roy

Dams are the temples of modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, Nangal Canal Inauguration, 1954

Gentlemen, it was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilisation. [It was necessary] to accept in its place the hat, the headgear used by the whole civilised world. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Nutuk, 1927

How and why has religion come to be the currency of politics in so many secular nation-states at the present moment? Most attempts to answer this question have focused on the agency of contemporary religious political movements, examining either the political entrepreneurs who introduce religious vocabularies and practices into the political arena or the motivations of those who join such movements. In both sets of explanations, the terms of enquiry remain confined to a relatively narrow time period that coincides with the emergence of these religious political movements. The implicit presumption appears to be that of a dichotomous, mutually exclusive relationship between ‘secular’ and ‘religious-political’ eras and arenas. Thus, the strength of secularism in previous historical periods is correlated with the absence of religious politics, while the contemporary ascendancy of religious politics is linked to secular collapse or breakdown. In the cases of India and Turkey, two paradigmatic examples of secular polities that have countenanced the rise of religious politics in recent years, this assumption is empirically unviable: as this essay argues, the emergence of religious politics in both cases is related not to the weakness but to the strength of secularism. This positive relationship comes to light only if we shift focus from the present to an earlier historical period and from the actions and decisions of religious political actors to the larger institutional–ideological context within which they operate. Undertaking such a task, this essay offers a comparative examination of the historical processes through which secularism was adopted and consolidated in India and Turkey. It examines the historical choice and the ideological practices

92  Srirupa Roy that worked to establish secularism as an essential component of national identity in each country at its time of founding (Turkey in 1923 and India in 1947) and shows how this reinforced rather than defused the political salience of religion in both cases. The rise of religious political movements in later years is related to the presence and persistence of these pre-existing secular repertoires. As I argue below, in India and Turkey the ascendancy of religious politics is built on secular foundations.

Explaining religious politics in India and Turkey Hindu nationalism in India and political Islam in Turkey are contemporaneous phenomena with several striking similarities. The ideology of Hindu nationalism established itself as a significant presence in the Indian political arena through the growing electoral popularity of its chief political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or the Indian People’s Party, in the 1980s. The Hindu nationalists argue that India is a Hindu nation, since the majority of its population is Hindu. They criticise the Nehruvian understanding of secularism that has dominated the Indian political landscape ever since India gained independence in 1947 and call for a rejection of what they consider to be ‘minority appeasement’, or the constitutional and legal provisions that allow other religions in India to have their own personal law, and to establish and administer their own educational institutions that are eligible for state aid. A broad spectrum of organisations that comprise the Sangh Parivar, or the ‘Hindu nationalist family’, work together to achieve the goal of awakening Hindu pride and of replacing the existing configurations of state–society relations and national identity with a Hindu majoritarian alternative. Starting in the late 1980s, successive parliamentary elections saw the BJP and its Hindu nationalist or Hindutva vision register a steady increase in vote share. Although the BJP has never enjoyed the status of a majority party at the national level, it was in power as the dominant member of India’s ruling coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, from 1998 until 2004, and also formed the government in several states of the Indian federation over the same period. In Turkey the political Islamist Refah Party also became a significant political– electoral force in the same time period, the 1980s to the present. Islamist political parties had existed since the 1970s, when the National Order Party was formed by Necmettin Erbakan, and had even enjoyed brief stints in power as members of a coalition government following the 1973 elections. However, it was not until the 1980s that they entrenched themselves as a definitive and permanent part of the Turkish political landscape.2 While electoral laws banning religious parties, constitutional safeguards, and the ever-present spectre of military intervention checked and countered the growth of political Islam in the national arena, requiring the Islamists to continually disband and reconstitute their political parties, they were nevertheless able to establish themselves in local government, winning the prestigious municipal elections of the city of Istanbul in 1996. In the two most recent elections, Islamist parties have also fared well at the national level, after having worked out a series of compromises (including disbanding the Fazilet, or

Temple and dam, fez and hat  93 Virtue, Party, successor to the Refah Party, and forming the Justice and Development Party (the AKP) that enabled them to contest the elections in conformance with the existing provisions of electoral and constitutional law. Existing explanations for the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and of political Islam in Turkey include ‘supply-side’ as well as ‘demand-side’ accounts. Thus, some scholars focus on the supply of religious politics or the innovative mobilisation and persuasive strategies of Hindu nationalists and political Islamists that introduce a distinctive set of ideologies and practices into the existing political arena (Basuet al., 1993; Gopal 1993; Sarkar and Butalia 1995). Others engage instead with the question of the demand for religious politics, investigating how political, economic, and cultural changes generate varied expressions of social need that turn individuals towards the comforts and promises of political religion (Vanaik 1997; Landau 1997; Zubaida 2000; Rashid 2001; Ali 2002; Breman 2002; White 2002). Despite the difference in emphasis, both supply-side and demand-side accounts argue that a vacuum has been created by the decline, the failure, or the manifest inadequacies of secularism, the dominant institutional-normative framework that has shaped the political arena in both India and Turkey ever since their formation as sovereign nation-states, in 1947 and 1923, respectively. It is this vacuum that religious politics is seen to fill  – whether we emphasise how the filling takes place (the supply-side account) or that such filling is needed or required (the demand-side account). In other words, the relationship between secularism and religious politics is conceived as an oppositional dichotomy, with the rise of religious politics inversely correlated with the strength of secularism. The converse is claimed as well, with the negligible influence of religious politics in earlier years linked to the strength of Nehruvian and Kemalist secularism during that time (Khilnani 1997; Mardin 2002). Explanations for religious politics are also tied to the agency of political religious movements, as noted earlier. In other words, it is the manoeuvres of Hindu nationalists and political Islamists (or, if we adopt a demand-side explanation, the distinctive social needs that generate popular support for such formations) that lead to the intermingling of religion and politics (and the attendant erasure of the ‘separation principle’ that is the mainstay of secular polities). The role of secularist structures and practices is seldom a topic of discussion, except in terms of secular failure or secular inadequacy to keep religion and politics apart. The working assumption here is that ‘true secularism’ separates rather than intermingles these two domains and that if religious politics emerges in a secular polity, then it is incompletely or imperfectly secular. How valid is this claim in empirical terms? What does the historical record tell us about how secular formations have actually engaged with the relationship between religion and politics? Does the ‘separation principle’ find empirical validation? For the most part, such questions go unanswered. This tendency to de-emphasise the agency of secularism in the rise of religious politics points to a larger theoretical and empirical gap, which is the paucity of information on secularism as a positive ideological project in its own right. For the most part, secularism is treated in terms of its institutional and procedural

94  Srirupa Roy attributes rather than as an ideology or an identity (for exceptions, see Hansen 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Asad 2003; Cinar 2005; Tambar 2009). Thus, while we have rich descriptions of how the ‘battle to win religious minds’ (Ajami 2001) is waged by Hindu nationalists and political Islamists, we lack equivalent information on the battle to win secular minds or the practices of identity formation that accompanied the establishment of secularism in each country. Simply put, the existing research on religious politics has little to say about the deliberate or conscious formation of secularism as a particular kind of identity or subjectivity. For the most part, secular subjectivity has been understood either as a negative category (the opposite of ‘being religious’) or as an inevitable by-product of macro-social and economic processes of modernisation. The secular is thus evacuated of a positive content, and the array of practices and representations that work to constitute the ‘imagined community’ of secularism or the normative secular subject are consequently overlooked in favour of documenting the equivalent attempts launched by the various religious–political oppositional organisations. In what follows, I develop an alternative account for the rise of religious politics in India and Turkey. Through an examination of the historical choice and the ideological practices that worked to establish secularism as an essential component of national identity in each country, I suggest that it was secularism that consolidated the political salience of religion in Turkish and Indian public arenas in the founding period of both nation-states. The later maneouvres of Hindu nationalists in India and political Islamists in Turkey have undoubtedly taken forward the politics of religion in new directions. However, as I show below, they build upon pre-existing vocabularies and practices that were in fact laid down by the ‘other’ of religious politics, secularism itself.

Secularism and nation formation in India The end of a 200-year period of colonial rule in India, and the corresponding establishment of a sovereign nation-state in 1947, may be seen as an instance of a successful ‘pacted transition’ (Karl and Schmitter 1991). The substantial transformation in regime type and the introduction of new and distinctive rules of the political game were achieved, not through the sudden violence of revolutionary upheavals and the resulting collapse of the existing edifice, but instead through a protracted and largely constitutional process of strategic bargaining between differently located political elites. The outcome was the establishment of two sovereign nation-states, India and Pakistan, on 14 and 15 August 1947, through the partition of imperial territory along religious lines. This particular mode of negotiated transition raised several political dilemmas in its immediate aftermath. In examining the debates of the Indian constituent assembly and the legislative proceedings of the interim government, which was a governing body constituted under the provisions of the colonial Government of India Act of 1935 that remained in existence until the first general elections were held in 1951 and 1952, two such dilemmas or concerns are readily observable.

Temple and dam, fez and hat  95 The first was the question of how to define the relationship between the present and future of independent India and its colonial past: should continuity or rupture be emphasised? The second was the question of how to secure a distinctive Indian modernity: how could India’s uniqueness but also its parity or similarity with the modern nations of the world be established? The resolution in both cases entailed the adoption of secularism as the defining feature of the Indian state. In the debates of the Indian constituent assembly, as in the legislative debates both during and after the founding period of 1947–50, the arguments used to justify the secular constitution of the Indian state were almost invariably about secularism as evidence of a representative state and secularism as evidence of a distinctive modernity (Nigam 2006). According to this constitutional and legislative logic (Chiriyankandath 1999; Austin 2000; Tejani 2008), through its existence as a secular state that provided equal treatment and protection to all religions, particularly to minorities, the Indian state could foreground its representative character and could consequently assert its difference from its (non-­representative) colonial predecessor. Similarly, through its existence as a secular state that undertook the task of reforming and rationalising the majority religion of Hinduism, the Indian state could establish its dual commitment to the universal goal of modernity and the particularist goal of preserving indigenous tradition. And as we shall see, both these promises of the secular state – secularism as a sign of the state’s commitment to the principles of representation and of modernity – would draw upon and reproduce an understanding of religion as an essential, inalienable, and visible component of Indian identity. The definition of the Indian state as secular would proceed in and through the definition of religion as the Indian way of life, that which suffused all aspects of being Indian, public or private, political or cultural. Let me now explore in further detail each of these post-colonial dilemmas and their resolution through secularism, beginning with the question of how the new state sought to establish its relation with the old.

Secularism as representation For the newly independent Indian state, a major task at hand was the assertion of difference from the colonial structures and presumptions of government even as the basic institutional pillars of governance such as the army, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary continued to function uninterrupted. In this regard, the specificities of Indian decolonisation presented a unique dilemma of how to handle the ambiguities of a transition from colonial rule that was at once gradual, abrupt, and profound, and for which there were no readily available modular templates and historical lessons. Further, while the task of institutionalising a social movement and moving from a mobilisation-directed politics to a stability-directed politics had indeed been accomplished in other countries, the liberal-democratic imperative exerted a unique pressure in the Indian context. The task at hand was to build not simply a strong and durable state but one firmly anchored in a democratic mandate, simultaneously able to command and to be commanded by society.

96  Srirupa Roy Before 1947, the anti-colonial movement had mobilised people on the basis of calls to actively reject and disobey the existing state and its law enforcement agencies. After August 1947, however, precisely the opposite stance vis-à-vis the state was called for. The norms of ideal national behaviour previously upheld – the definition of the ideal Indian as one who participated in strikes, boycotts, protests, and other forms of overt refusal of the state’s authority and legitimacy – now served as negative exemplars of resolutely un-Indian behaviour. This shift from ‘civil disobedience’ to ‘civil obedience’ was further complicated by the fact that the object of disobedience/obedience – the state – remained unchanged in terms of structure, power, and location. As constitutional delegates and legislative representatives repeatedly asserted, the most pressing need in the days and months following India’s independence on 15 August 1947 was the ability of the state to secure law and order in the face of unprecedented waves of human migration and an enormous loss of life. The mass exodus of Hindus from Pakistan and Muslims from India in the wake of the imperial partition of the Indian subcontinent and the extreme violence that erupted in its wake left between 500,000 and 3 million people dead and countless others homeless (Butalia 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1998). The services of the state most called upon during this period were that of the army, the police, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary, all essential components of the ‘steel frame’ of colonial government. Was there a way to assert difference in the face of this manifest continuity in structures and modes of governance? As the constitutional and legislative debates indicate, one way out of this impasse was to emphasise the representative nature of the post-1947 state, with representation framed in ‘actional’ rather than descriptive or mirroring terms (Pitkin 1967), or an emphasis on the beneficial actions that the state would undertake on behalf of its citizens, and therefore establish its difference from its colonial predecessor. The post-colonial state’s commitment to national development (the promise to secure rapid growth and also equity) was upheld as one such activity of representation, contrasted with the de-industrialisation, stagnation, mass poverty, and widespread inequality that had resulted from the exploitative economic relations of the colonial period. The laws, policies, and official nationalist discourses and practices of Nehruvian India (1947–1964) all foregrounded the indispensability of the state for national economic growth and progress. The second way in which the state’s representative nature (and therefore its difference from its colonial predecessor) was secured related to the ‘minority question’ or the status of religious minorities in the country. As numerous historians of the anti-colonial movement have documented, the two major charges levelled against colonialism by nationalist organisations were the colonial state’s economic neglect or underdevelopment of India and the spread of ‘communalism’, or inter-religious discord and violence by the ‘divide and rule’ policies of the colonial administration (Brass 1974; Pandey 1992). According to Indian nationalists, the colonial ‘construction of communalism’ (Pandey 1992) reflected the colonial state’s inability to establish an appropriate relationship between religion and the

Temple and dam, fez and hat 97 state. Thus, the colonial state was accused by nationalists in Congress of cynically using religion as an instrument in the service of state power. It was held that this instrumentalist logic had led to the partition of British India along religious lines, by creating the conditions under which Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League articulated its ‘Two Nation theory’ of Hindu–Muslim incompatibility and then went on to demand an independent homeland for Muslims. The promise of decolonisation was accordingly phrased in terms of bringing forth a new and better relationship between the state and religion. The colonial state and the Muslim League also made much political capital of the relationship between religion and the state. Both these adversaries of Congress argued that religious minorities were at significant risk in an independent Indian state, since it would reflect the culture and aspirations of the Hindu majority. This argument about the Congress’ inability to ensure adequate representation informed the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state of Pakistan, where they held that Muslims would no longer have to exist as minorities subject to the whims of Hindu majoritarianism (Bose and Jalal 1998). The resulting challenge that confronted the Indian founding elites after 1947 was to prove their opponents wrong by configuring India as a nation in which ‘minorities could feel at home’ (a saying popularly attributed to Nehru) and where the promise of equal representation to all religions would be fulfilled through making secularism a foundational pillar of the sovereign nation-state. Indian secularism thus bore the burden of national sovereignty, with the very existence of India as an independent nation-state tied to the viability and durability of secularism. To this end, constituent assembly delegates drafted and adopted a comprehensive array of group rights for religious groups, equally privileging the principles of ‘universalism’ and ‘pluralism’ or individual-centred and groupcentred understandings of rights and freedoms (Rudolph and Rudolph 2000). Articles 25–28 of the constitution formulated secularism as equal respect for all religions, granting groups and individuals the right to freely profess, practice, and propagate religion. Additionally, religious denominations were guaranteed the right to establish and administer religious and educational institutions and to seek state aid. Finally, religious minorities were given autonomy in the domain of personal law, with the commitment to a universal civil code enshrined in the nonjusticiable Directive Principles section of the Indian constitution as a long-term goal rather than an immediately actionable provision. Three conclusions about the nature of Indian secularism and its relation to the question of religious politics may be derived from the preceding discussion. First, the strength of Indian secularism was tied to the strength of religious identity. Secularism could be claimed as a fulfilment of the state’s commitment to the representative principle only if there was a manifest need or demand for religious representation, and to the extent that religion grew less salient in the constitution of identity and interests, so too did secularism. Second, this secular insistence on religious needs was differentially constructed, with certain kinds of Indians seen to ‘need religion’ more than others. While much has been made of Indian secularism’s unique understanding of state neutrality not as separation between religion

98  Srirupa Roy and the state but instead as a function of the state’s equal involvement with all religions (Smith 1963), less attention has been directed to the ‘minoritising’ bent of secularism in India or the ways in which the success of secularism was tied to the existence of religious minorities as minorities (Bajpai 2000). Differently put, the continued public visibility of religious minorities secured the dominant status of secularism – thus Muslims qua Muslims had to ‘feel at home’. Emphasising the permanent difference of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsis became integral to secular discourse and practice. This is most obvious in public discussions about the difference between India and Pakistan, the twin heirs of the British Empire. Ever since the founding years of the Indian republic, official discourse as well as popular cultural and media representations of the Indian–Pakistani relationship has invariably emphasised India’s superior treatment of minorities as its mark of national distinction. Finally, the secular insistence on minority difference worked to constitute Hindu identity as the unmarked centre of Indianness against which the difference of other religions could be contrasted, as the permanent majority that was already, and safely, ‘at home’ (Devji 1992; Upadhyaya 1992). In an ironic and unforeseen twist, the roots of Hindu majoritarianism in India, an ideology that differentiates between resident hosts and newly arrived guests, may thus be traced to the ‘minoritising’ impulses of Indian secularism. In sum, although applied towards very different ends, both Hindu nationalists and Indian secularists may be seen to share a common understanding of how religion is a primary and natural determinant of political identities and interests and of how religious difference constitutes monolithically understood groups as permanent majorities and minorities in the public political arena.

Secularism as modernity Along with the project of building and showcasing the representative activities of the state, the resolution of the post-colonial dilemma by India’s founding elites also entailed efforts to develop an indigenous modernity. How could the nationbuilding project respond at once to the imperatives of universalism and particularism, and establish India’s parity with, as well as distinction from, the rest of the world? This predicament was certainly not unique to India. The contradictory requirement of claiming a nation’s difference with and identity from other nations has preoccupied a diverse range of nationalists in other countries. However, in the Indian context, this long-standing nationalist dilemma of how to be ‘just like and also different from the rest’ was inflected with a historically specific concern about modernity or how to achieve the standards set by the already modernised nations of the West in a recognisably distinct ‘Indian’ way. As Partha Chatterjee has noted, the post-colonial question of how to form the ‘Indian modern’ had also preoccupied the anti-colonial nationalist movement. The resolution settled upon by Indian nationalists in the colonial period was to delineate two different zones of operation for nationalist activity. In the ‘outer domain’ of politics and economics, Indians were urged to emulate and adopt Western practices

Temple and dam, fez and hat 99 and otherwise work to achieve identity with their colonial rulers, whether through participating in politics, attending colonial schools, or joining the administration. In contrast to this realm in which mimetic behaviour was sanctioned and encouraged was the ‘inner domain’ of culture and spirituality, where the distinctiveness of Indian tradition was asserted, and all efforts were directed towards social and cultural conservation rather than change (Chatterjee 1993). This strategy of asserting and maintaining a separation between the pristine inner domain of culture and the strategic-instrumental outer domain of politics and economics carried over into the postcolonial period as well. For Nehru and other state officials, the project of forming a suitably Indian modernity entailed showcasing the state’s efforts to preserve key aspects of Indian tradition and heritage even as it facilitated the rapid social, economic, political, and social modernisation of the nation. Thus, while the five-year plans held out the promise of industrial and technological modernity, unfolding before the nation grand visions of agricultural productivity, scientific achievements, and rapid industrial growth, they equally stressed the state’s efforts at ‘cultural conservation’ and the ways in which official cultural policy enabled the ‘best aspects’ of ‘timeless’ Indian art, literature, and performance traditions to flourish. Similarly, the pageantry of the annual Republic Day parades in the capital city of New Delhi and the documentary films produced by the state-owned Films Division of India juxtaposed depictions of dramatic industrial and scientific change with visions of the ‘unchanging’ folk traditions of the country, presenting both as equally constitutive of Indian reality (Roy 2007). However, the mandate of popular legitimacy and national sovereignty that the state could claim after 1947 provided a post-colonial twist to this otherwise familiar tale of the separation between the cultural and political-economic zones of activity. More specifically, the charge of political interference in matters of culture and tradition that had been levelled against the ‘foreign’ and non- representative colonial state by Indian nationalists was now replaced by an understanding of the necessity of such practices of state intervention, since the interventionist state was now an indigenous one. The post-colonial state entrusted itself with the task of cultural sorting, or the sifting out of ‘good’ and authentic Indian tradition that was worthy of preservation from the ‘bad’ or the inauthentic. This entailed, not necessarily the privileging of ‘high culture’, (Gellner 1983) but the articulation of understandings about what constituted the true and authentic ‘folk’ traditions of the nation. A similar calculus informed the state’s engagement with religion, which was seen to belong to the inner domain of culture and tradition. While the requirement of maintaining religion as pristine and unchanging remained a consideration, so too was the imperative of selection, or the state’s determination of the aspects of religion that merited preservation and the ones that could be discarded. Thus, a series of landmark judgements delivered by the Indian Supreme Court distinguished between the essential and the non-essential aspects of Hindu belief and practice, holding that the practice of discriminating against untouchable castes and denying them entry to a temple was a corruption of the truth of Hinduism

100  Srirupa Roy (Smith 1963; Galanter 1965). In another instance, the judiciary determined the issues of sectarian autonomy, holding that the Swaminarayan sect was a part of the Hindu religion and therefore could not separately seek state aid for its institutions (Smith 1963; Galanter 1965). As Marc Galanter and more recently Gary Jacobsohn have observed, the Indian state’s commitment to modernisation and the achievement of political, economic, and social equality frequently came in conflict with its other stated goal of respecting religious tradition. In most instances, such clashes were resolved through state determinations (through the judiciary or through the legislature) of superfluous versus core aspects of religion, with the former then treated as legitimate objects of reform and transformation (Galanter 1965; Jacobsohn 2003). The most direct effect of such practices of state selection was the placement of religion in the outer political domain, with debates about the meaning of religion conducted in the secular public spaces of courts and legislatures. However, the placement of the core or the essence of religion in the inner domain had significant constitutive effects as well, serving to reproduce the notion of religion as the bedrock of Indian culture and tradition. In this regard, the post-colonial state appears to generate its own self-orientalising logic. It upholds and reproduces the dichotomy between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism through its construction of how religion, in both its good and bad or essential and non-­essential forms, is central to Indian life. To reiterate this point, the project of secular reform did not discount or deny religion per se, but only those inauthentic and false aspects of religion that stood in the way of progress and development. The remnants, conceived as ‘spirituality’ and ‘faith’, were firmly ensconced within the nationalist imaginary as necessary components of Indian identity, and ‘India’s essential religiosity’ served to differentiate it from the godless and disenchanted nations of the West. The Nehruvian project of secularism thus must be investigated in terms of both its modernising and its traditionalising implications for religion. In the first instance, secularism was part and parcel of a modernity project or the attempt to transform and replace those aspects of religious thought and practice that were seen to impede the national goal of progress and development. In terms of transformation, the secular state took upon itself the task of reforming and streamlining religion, whether through successful interventions such as the Temple Entry Bill outlawing caste-based discrimination in Hindu temples or through those less successful, such as the Hindu Code Bill that codified and reformed Hindu personal law on inheritance rights, marriage, divorce, and adoption. The replacement imperative of secular modernity informed attempts to develop an alternative and superior determinant of identity and interest. The strong proscience bias in higher education and the massive amounts of state funding provided to scientific research institutes and educational training establishments such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Vigyan Mandir (‘Temple of Science’) scheme of setting up science museums in Indian villages, the unparalleled status and privileged access accorded to scientists such as the nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha by the state establishment, and the official nationalist worship of

Temple and dam, fez and hat 101 scientific–technological artefacts that was most famously encapsulated in Nehru’s declaration that ‘dams are the temples of modern India’, all worked to replace the unreason of ‘religious passions’ with the rationality of a ‘scientific temper’ (Abraham 1998; Visvanathan 1997; Roy 2007). However, these attempts had the unintended consequence of ‘traditionalising’ or essentialising that which they sought to transform and replace. As we have already seen, secular efforts of transformation worked not to efface religion but instead to constitute it as a primary determinant of Indian identity, the tradition that would anchor the state’s modernisation attempts and enable a distinctively Indian modernity – one which was respectful of religion in its quest for progress and reform – to flourish. Similarly, the efforts to develop scientific-secular norms, interests, and identities did not challenge or question the legitimacy of religious belief but instead put in place a parallel sphere that was paradoxically legitimised in terms of religion. Nehru’s call to worship dams because they are just like temples cited in the epigraph of this essay is only one such example of this practice of reproducing the moral authority and valence of religion. Similarly, while the vision of the new and secular India was characterised in terms of the absence of communalism and the peaceful coexistence of diverse groups, the Nehruvian state did not, as is commonly assumed, urge its citizens to reach this utopia by leaving religion behind. Instead, the argument went, it was by mining and working through the resources of religion, by believing in the ultimate religious truth of communal harmony, that a conflict-free India would emerge. To summarise, the above discussion of secularism as modernity has drawn attention to its unintended effect of primordialising religion and of emphasising rather than de-emphasising the importance of religion in India. The secular state’s imagination of religious identity in self-enclosed, finite, and unchanging terms is not very far from that promoted by religious entrepreneurs themselves in their quest to objectify religion as the prime mover of human existence. Like the preceding investigation of secularism as representation, the exploration of the ­secular-modern project in India thus highlights the proximity rather than the distance between secular and religious politics, with both ‘inventing tradition’ in different but related ways. There are other family resemblances as well between the ideology and practices of secularism and those of religious political groups such as the Hindu nationalists – points of convergence that have troubling ­political-ethical implications in light of the constitutive inequality between different categories of Indian citizens that they presume and reproduce. For instance, the impulse of secular modernity, like that of secular representation, may be seen to contribute to the differential value placed on Indian religions or the implicit understanding of some religious groups as more able and capable of modernising than other backward ones. The state’s modernisation campaigns have repeatedly maintained a careful distance from minority religions, avoiding possible charges of interference in minority affairs that would negate the ‘minorities feeling at home’ promise that is at the heart of the Indian social contract. To this end, the enactment of a uniform civil code for all Indians has continued as a noble promise in the Indian constitution for

102  Srirupa Roy more than 50 years. Efforts to initiate a wide-ranging discussion on this issue have been checked by arguments about how such legislation offends ‘Muslim sensibilities’ about the sanctity of their personal law. This implicitly differentiates between the capacities of Hindus and others in terms of their ability to countenance and be ready for the challenges of modernisation. Moreover, it reifies a monolithic understanding of minority identity and refuses the plurality of voices and interests that are all equally qualified to represent Muslims as Muslim (or Christian or Sikh). For whom is personal law the core constituent of Muslim identity? How are determinations of ‘minority sensibilities’ made – on what basis and on whose word do we know that all Muslims are averse to the project of personal law reform? Such questions are disallowed by the prevailing secular paradigm, whose communitarian logic cannot engage with the presence of intra-community fissures and heterogeneity. The dominant paradigm of actional representation or the equating of representation with actions taken by the state on behalf of its people – thus the state ‘knows’ that Muslims do not want alterations in their personal law – has a negative effect on the realisation of substantive democracy, denying as it does the possibility of internal dissension, deliberation, and other practices of democratisation within religious communities. In conclusion, the preceding discussion of Indian secularism has located its emergence within the historical project of post-colonial state formation and shown that secularism was associated with the attempt to build and consolidate a representative state and a distinctive form of modernity. In both these cases, the formation of the secular entailed an active engagement with rather than a negation of the field of religion, with secularism understood as an intermingling of religion and state, instead of as separation. Moreover, both ‘secularism as representation’ and ‘secularism as modernity’ have worked to consolidate the salience of religion in Indian public life, and in this regard, the distance between the religious nationalisms of the present and the Nehruvian secularist nationalisms of the past may be shorter than we would expect. Through its primordialising or essentialising effect, secularist ideology and practice has contributed to an understanding of how religion is the mainstay or the sine qua non of Indian culture and tradition. The conception of religion as the primary determinant of political identity and interests – the primary need of Indian citizens – can also be traced to secularist ideology. Finally, secularism and religious politics are seen to draw upon and reproduce a common set of assumptions about the essential and permanent difference of religious minorities in India. These assumptions serve to increase rather than decrease the salience of religion in political life, privileging as they do the axis of religious identity in determinations of how majorities and minorities are constituted. To what extent is this intimacy between secularism and religious politics peculiar to the specific variant of secularism in India? The next section addresses this question by examining the case of secularism in Turkey, a country that has institutionalised secularism very differently, that engages with a different majority religion (Islam), and whose historical experience of nation-state formation evolved along a different route. To understand whether a different relationship between

Temple and dam, fez and hat  103 secularism and religious politics is produced as a result of these divergent histories and practices is the purpose of the following discussion.

Secularism and nation-formation in Turkey The republican birth of Turkey in 1923 was far more dramatic and revolutionary in form and content than the founding of the Indian republic two decades later. The Turkish republic was proclaimed against a backdrop of imperial collapse rather than imperial withdrawal, and battlefield victories rather than deliberative negotiations were the primary determinants of Turkish national sovereignty. The project of nation-state formation that followed was similarly dramatic and profound in its scope and content, with the Turkish state undertaking a mammoth programme of social engineering from the moment of republican founding in 1923 until the death of its founding father, Kemal Ataturk, in 1938. The Kemalist project of bringing into existence a Yeni Turan (‘New Society’) touched upon all aspects of life, with the state legislating on a comprehensive range of issues ranging from the names, dress, leisure-time activities, and public comportment of individuals to those concerning the macro-structures of social, economic, and political organisation, such as the nature of law, the role of religion, the content of education, the choice of national language, and the relationship between the state and the economy. The question of the status and role of religion in the Yeni Turan was a foundational concern for the new Turkish state. Accordingly, the eventual choice of secularism settled upon by state elites as an appropriate response or solution was, in Turkey as in India, a historically overdetermined one. Secularism in Turkey, as in India, bore the burden of national identity and state viability. The existence of Turkey as a sovereign nation-state of a particular kind was tied to the ideology and practice of secularism. Moreover, from the very outset Turkish secularism, like Indian secularism, did not have a ‘thin’ or procedural existence. It was instead thickly imbued with ideological and identitarian dimensions: secularism constituted the very stuff of being Turkish. As the Turkish Constitutional Court observed in its ‘thick’ definition of secularism: ‘[secularism is] a civilized form of life which provides the basis for an understanding of freedom and democracy, independence and national sovereignty, and constitutes the humanistic ideal which has developed with the defeat of medieval dogmatism in favor of the primacy of reason and an enlightened men- tality’ (Oehring 2002: 5). The existing scholarship on Turkish state formation has accorded secularism its due place, elaborating on the various ways in which secularism was enshrined at the heart of definitions of Turkishness (Kadioglu 1996; Zurcher 1998; Bozdogan 2000; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Cinar 2005; Ozyurek 2006). In most cases, this has been presented in terms of a decisive break between the Ottoman approach towards the religion (and towards Islam in particular) and that adopted by republic state elites. The late Ottoman Empire had both implicitly and explicitly privileged Islam as the religion of state. In contrast, the Turkish republic after 1923 was concerned with precisely the opposite, working to reduce the political importance

104  Srirupa Roy of Islam through securing its negation or banishment from public and political realms. Measures included the abolition of the caliphate; the closing down of religious terikats (lodges), medersas (religious schools), and religious tombs; the order for the daily namaz, or Muslim call for prayer, to be issued in Turkish rather than in the original Koranic language of Arabic; the replacement of the Hijri Muslim calendar with the Gregorian calendar and the declaration of Sunday rather than Friday as the weekly day of rest; the requirement for all Turkish citizens to adopt surnames and discard existing Islamic naming practices; the mandated wearing of a top hat instead of the religiously symbolic fez for public officials (and for women, the banning of the headscarf in public places); and the ‘Turkification’ language reforms mandating the use of the Roman script in place of the Arabic script. Indeed, Kemalism, at least in its undiluted expression during the initial years of the Turkish republic, has frequently been upheld as the most fully blown expression of the separation of church and state axiom that existed in the contemporary world. Not only were such efforts absent in other non-Western locations, but the Turkish state’s efforts to privatise and delegitimise religion as a source of public authority also surpassed the secularist projects of western states, including that of Turkey’s named model France, in terms of the zeal and the single-minded determination with which it was pursued. This phenomenon of ‘high secularism’ has been explained by the dominant impulse of Westernisation or Europeanisation that prevailed in the circles of state elites at the founding moment of the Turkish republic. As Bozdogan (2000) and Cinar (2005) have argued, the Turkish elites’ preoccupation with ‘Western acceptance’ – the emulative or derivative desire to be recognised as a European nation – generated a project of nation-state formation that endeavoured to shape the new Turkey in the mold of an imagined Europe, of a space specifically imagined to be ‘religion free’. In sum, the Western-oriented nature of the Turkish nation-building project led to the privileging of modernity as the primary goal of nation formation and to the subsequent embrace of secularism, which was upheld as the source and also the sign of Western modernity. The requirement of building a strong state and the requirement of elaborating a distinctive Turkish modernity had unintended consequences. While the separation of religion and politics was a primary task undertaken by the state in the founding year of the republic, the actual policy measures undertaken towards this end effectively reproduced the continued political salience of religion and of one religion in particular: Sunni Hanafite Islam. In this sense, the strength of the Kemalist project may actually be correlated with the consolidation of Sunni Islamic hegemony in Turkey. Moreover, as Cinar (2005) and Poulton (1997) among others have suggested, the Kemalist project is better viewed not as a project of negating religion but instead as one of controlling religion. Ever since its inception in the 1920s, official secularism in Turkey has endeavoured to establish the state’s ability to control religion. This paradoxically entails the continued presence of religion in public life and the continued demonstration of all the ways in which religion is a creature of the state. In other words, securing the presence of controlled religion rather than the absence of religion per se is the primary task to which Turkish

Temple and dam, fez and hat  105 secularism directs itself: the inclusion rather than exclusion of (a particular form of ) religion is its chief impulse. The following sections elaborate on these claims.

Secularism as state strength With the pronouncement of Turkey’s independent existence as a sovereign national republic on 29 October 1923, Ataturk and his cohort faced several daunting challenges. Among these was the urgent need to define a sense of Turkishness in the absence of a pre-existing and consistent repertoire of presumptive understandings of nationhood that could be drawn upon by republican nationalists. Ataturk’s nation-building efforts thus had more of an ex novo quality to them than comparative efforts undertaken elsewhere – the invention of a national identity for Turkey was as much of a priority in 1923 as was the attempt to form and consolidate the institutional authority of a new state. If the national question was unsettled in 1923, the question of state authority was similarly fraught. While republican victory had been proclaimed by a military-bureaucratic coalition gathered under the leadership of Ataturk, and as such no significant leadership challenge confronted the new Turkish state (as, for instance, was encountered in the post-revolutionary period in Russia), significant pockets of resistance still remained, whether from those bureaucratic elites who opposed any plans to abolish the caliphate or from military officers who expressed dissatisfaction with the territorial status quo effected by the ‘National Pact’ and the Treaty of Lausanne. Moreover, the widespread popular mandate that the Indian state elites claimed, courtesy of the long experience of nationalist mobilisation that had preceded the foundation of the Indian republic, was absent in the Turkish case. Of the various threats, both real and imagined, that existed at the time of Turkish founding, the Ataturkists were most cognisant of the counter-hegemonic potential of Islam. This stemmed from material-historical as well as theological calculations about the nature and status of Islam. The authoritative status that the religion had enjoyed under Ottoman imperialism was seen as problematic, as was the fact that Islamic theology denied the legitimacy of any form of temporal or non-spiritual authority. Checking and countering the strength of Islam as the most formidable contemporary challenger of republican authority thus became crucial to the project of building and securing the strength of the Turkish state. The statebuilders directed themselves towards the task of taming Islam, and the elaboration of Turkish secularism played a key role in this endeavour. The complexities of ‘self-decolonisation’ presented yet another set of hurdles. Unlike other instances of post-imperial state formation, the Ottoman Empire could not be ‘sent away’ from Turkey. It called for manoeuvres of conceptual rather than physical distancing: the production of the past as another country altogether. However, if historical estrangement required emphasis, so too did precisely the opposite, or the need to historically embed the present materiality of Turkey. The significant role played by external actors and circumstances  – specifically, the First World War – in bringing about Ottoman imperial collapse and determining

106  Srirupa Roy the boundaries of the Turkish nation-state placed a large burden on the territorial nationalist imaginary. Prior to the settlement of 1923, the territorial extent of Turkey was unknown, and no equivalent of the ‘Kashmir to Kanyakumari’ (India) or ‘Land’s End to John O’Groats’ (Britain) cartographic expression of nationhood existed. From 1923 onwards, however, Turkey existed as a territorial fait ­accompli  – a given landmass, an identifiable and fixed space on a world map. Nationalists were now confronted with the task of claiming historical continuity for this landed nation even as the dominant requirement of self-decolonisation was to deny or disavow historical antecedents completely. One substantive effect of the ‘found’ rather than ‘made’ nature of Turkish territoriality was to heighten the sense of ‘cartographic anxiety’ in official Turkish nationalism (Krishna 1996), or the state’s need to protect and defend its existing borders at all costs, despite – and one might even say because – they are manifestly artificial rather than historically determined. In the Turkish case, this was manifested in the strong centralising and homogenising thrust of the nationbuilding project, and the efforts of state elites to vigorously counter any attempts to question the existing territorial contours of the nation-state. Nation-state formation in Turkey thus privileged the attribute of state strength – the existence of a unitary, centralised state – rather than attributes of representativeness, as was the case in India. In both instances, the specific historical circumstances in which the projects were undertaken shaped this choice of strength versus representativeness. The particular experiences of the founding elites of the two nations (Ataturk was a member of the Ottoman bureaucracy at a time when centralising imperial reforms were being enacted), and the existence of certain kinds of international norms and modular templates of nationhood (after the First World War, organicist, ethnoracialist, and centralising nationalisms were gaining dominance), all played a part in determining why centralisation rather than devolution and étatisme rather than representativeness came to dominate the Turkish national project. It is in this context of the project to secure the singular authority and unchallenged strength of the central state that we can locate the ideologies and practices of Turkish secularism. As a foundational ‘arrow’ of Kemalism, secularism in Turkey, like the other five arrows,3 prioritised the quest for state strength, participating in the project of constituting a centralised state as the sole unquestioned authority in Turkish politics. To this end, its chief interlocutor was one religion, Islam, which had enjoyed considerable state sanction and official prestige during the Ottoman Empire, and consequently existed as a potential rival in the republican period. In the service of state strength, Turkish secularism directed itself towards taming and checking the power of Islam, and republican policies worked to constitute a ‘safe’ or state-approved version of Islam for the new Turkey, one that would no longer exist as a challenge to state authority. In the first decade of Turkey’s sovereign existence, the state enacted a wide variety of laws that dramatically transformed the existing organisational structures and ritual practices of Islam and determined the parameters within which a state-approved and monitored religion could flourish. The motivating impulse

Temple and dam, fez and hat 107 was, not privatisation or the reproduction of religion as a matter of private faith rather than public ideology and practice, but monopolisation, or the demonstrated ability of the state to command and control religion. To this end, Turkish secularism worked to secure the public visibility of religion of a particular kind, and it is consequently erroneous to conceptualise the Kemalist period as one in which the public presence of a religion was effaced. The religious legislations of the secular Turkish state should be seen as positive or productive attempts to generate a statesupporting religion instead of in prohibitory or negative terms. The aim was not to make public unbelievers out of Turkish citizens but to ensure that they prayed in Turkish, that their clerics were trained and paid by the state, that the designs for their mosques originated in state-made blueprints, and that they discarded the ‘bad’ aspects of their religion (such as polygamy) and continued to embrace the ‘good’ (Ramadan observance and Eid celebrations). That Kemalist ‘high secularism’ had a positive or productive effect on religion is perhaps best appreciated from the perspective of non-Sunni Hanafites, whether Muslim or non-Muslim. For many of these groups, the secular state’s efforts to constitute a state-sanctioned Islam amounts to preferential treatment, since it secures the hegemony of one particular variant of Islam. From this perspective, Turkish secularism is not neutral or equally prohibitory towards all religions but is instead majoritarian in impulse, providing support and recognition to some but not all religions. Thus, it is possible to see state efforts to invent appropriate Sunni Islamic practices and structures (matters concerning dress, the language of prayer, social relations, education of clerics, and organisational structures) as a negation of religious freedom and autonomy. However, it is equally possible to view these attempts to produce and disseminate state-approved religion as the ‘Sunnification’ of Turkey and the corresponding marginalisation of other versions of Islam, such as those practiced by Alevis, Shias, or Sunnis following the Shafi rather than the Hanafi school of Islamic law. In other words, similar to the assumptive practices of Indian secularism, Turkish secularism draws upon and reproduces a monolithic understanding of religion, with the official religious landscape structured around the presence of Sunni Islam. The resulting ‘lumping effect’ or the tendency to treat all Muslims as if they were identical has significant political and practical implications, since the distribution of resources and the exercise of group rights are tied to this basic issue of recognition as a distinct religious identity. Thus, Sunni Hanafite clerics are salaried state officials and schools have existed for their religious training since 1951 (the Imam Hatips, which started providing general education in 1973). Alevis, Shias, Yazidis (not recognised by either Shias or Sunnis), and other Muslim groups do not enjoy comparable privileges. If Turkish secularism glosses over the sectarian differences within Islam, it also has exclusionary effects on other, non-Islamic religions. Ever since the minority protection clauses of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, to which the Turkish republic was a signatory, named four distinct groups – Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Greeks – as those entitled to religious protection and freedoms, the state has consistently maintained that that no other minorities count; in fact, no other minorities

108  Srirupa Roy exist. This framework of ‘four original minorities’ effectively denies the heterogeneous composition of these named groups in yet another manifestation of the lumping effect, and moreover fails to provide minority religions with the same array of rights and privileges as it does in the case of Sunni Islam.4 Further, it denies recognition to the religious groups who have arrived and settled in Turkey in the nearly 100 years since Lausanne. Most notably, however, it is invoked in support of the official position on the Kurdish question. According to the state, Kurds are not minorities, since they are not mentioned in the original – and only – codification of minority identity in Turkey. The denial of recognition to Kurdish identity merits further investigation, in terms of the justificatory logic used by the secular state to refuse such demands. A detailed exploration is outside the scope of this essay, since it entails an examination of the entire corpus of Turkish official nationalism and not just of secularist ideology. Let me simply note here the interesting and counter-intuitive observation of how implicit understandings of Turkishness as Muslimness may pave the way for such denials of Kurdish distinctiveness. While the dominant definition of Turkish national identity deploys ethno-racial, secular-modern, and territorial understandings of Turkishness – Turks as those with a visible secular and modern behaviour and lifestyle, those living in a particular geographic area, and those who can trace their descent from a particular ethno-racial group according to the terms of the Turkish History Thesis of 1931 – these all tap into implicit presumptions about a common religious identity as constitutive of Turkishness. This comes to the surface in discussions of the minority question in Turkey. The Turkish state’s refusal to accept that there can be any non-Turkish Muslims (such as Kurds) is an effective admission of the religious determination of national identity, with the commonality of religion trumping assertions of ethnic, racial, or tribal difference. “Kurds are Muslims and therefore not separate from Turks” is the implicit reasoning behind the Turkish state’s position on the Kurdish autonomy question – a position that reads Turkishness as synonymous with Muslimness. In sum, through its location within the ideological field of official nationalism, Turkish secularism contributes to the salience of religion in public political arenas.

Conclusion Through a comparative discussion of the historical processes through which secularism was adopted and consolidated in India and Turkey, I have argued that the ideology and practices of secularism in both cases secured rather than erased the political salience of religion. As the title of this essay suggests, the distance between the iconic oppositions of secularism and religion – ‘temple’ and ‘dam’ in Nehruvian India and ‘fez’ and ‘hat’ in Kemalist Turkey – is much shorter than we have been given to understand. As an integral component of the nation-state formation process in India, secularism was associated with the project of building a state that was representative of all religions and where minorities in particular enjoyed rights, freedoms, and

Temple and dam, fez and hat 109 security; and one that preserved Indian tradition even as it actively engaged in the project of modernisation. The effect of this was to make religion primordial or assert its constitutive role as an essential component of Indian life or as synonymous with Indian tradition; to contribute to an understanding of the political arena in terms of permanent majorities and permanent minorities constituted along the axis of religious identity; and to draw upon and reproduce a monolithic and objectified understanding of religious identity that did not take into account the heterogeneous constitution of group identity. In Turkey, the ideological formation of ‘high secularism’ was likewise the product of a historical choice made by state elites at the founding moment of the Turkish republic. Through its efforts to temper and check the authority of Islam and to replace ‘backward’ religious practices with ‘civilised’ ones, secularist ideology lent critical support to the project of building and consolidating a strong and centralised state and a modern society. Despite this explicit posture of antagonism towards religion, however, secularism in Turkey served to consolidate its public and political salience. Turkish secularism contributed to the hegemony of Sunni Hanafite Islam through its efforts to establish the state’s ability to control and monopolise religious practices in the public sphere. Moreover, secularist ideology elaborated an oppositional dichotomy of ‘secularism versus religion’ that was entrenched as the dominant framework of Turkish politics, with its simplistic binary logic inscribing religion as the prime motivator of all political activity. Religious political movements and actors in present-day India and Turkey draw upon these existing presumptions and ideological formations that secularism has put in place, not politicising religion ex novo, but instead taking forward an already well-entrenched process. Thus, Hindu nationalists in India and Islamists in Turkey draw upon and reproduce existing understandings of religious identity as primordial or essential, as objectified and monolithic, and as the primary determinant of social and political behaviour. Moreover, the majoritarian assumptions of religious political movements or the understanding that majorities and minorities are permanently constituted groups that reflect the fixed nature of religious identity are present in the secular imaginary as well, despite (and in fact because of ) the various minority-protection commitments that are integral to secularism. In sum, the relationship between official secularism and religious political movements should not be conceived in zero-sum terms of rise and fall or strength and weakness. It requires instead a dialectical understanding of how secularism constitutes its feared and reviled other, and how even the prohibitory impulses of secularism vis-à-vis religion have positive or productive effects. The religious politics of the present may thus be seen to have secular historical roots. This finding has several practical and also theoretical implications. First, it suggests that efforts to strengthen secularism may not provide an appropriate solution to the problem of religious politics, since secularism is also responsible for the mixing of the two supposedly separate domains of public politics and private religion. For the most part, the irruption of religious passions in modern political life is considered to have a negative impact on democracy, tolerance, the sanctity of human rights, and international peace and security. At the same time, however, the

110  Srirupa Roy attempt to defuse the dangers of religious politics by attempting to ban or delimit religious political formations and to deny recognition to expressions of religious identity has its own and equivalent share of problems. The principle of secularism appears to offer a sure route out of this impasse by granting a wide array of religious rights, freedoms, and recognition even as it channels expressions of religious identity along system-supporting rather than system-destabilising lines. However, as we have seen, the reality of secularism is considerably more ambivalent than its fiction. The relationship between secularism and religious politics can well be a positive or reinforcing one. Second, and related, the observation about secularism’s complicity in the rise of religious politics calls for a critical evaluation of the secular package deal or the assertion of the normative worth of secularism. As the cases of India and Turkey show, the ideology and practice of secularism can be associated with implicit or explicit majoritarianism and the arrogation of power to a centralised state at the expense of denying social and cultural heterogeneity. Secular formations must be subjected to the same kinds of critical questions about inclusivity, freedom, justice, and equity that we ask of religious political formations. The democratic potential of secularism should be an empirically validated hypothesis rather than an unproblematised assumption. Who participates in the framing of secular laws and policies, the determination of religious needs, and the appropriate modes of needs fulfilment? What are the constitutive inclusions and exclusions that underwrite the emergence of secularism in different nation-states? Does the secular choice reflect statist or societal imperatives? To engage with such questions is to locate secularism historically and to engage with the politics and ideology of the secular instead of conceiving it in abstract procedural terms. This essay has taken an initial step towards answering such questions by exploring the historical formation of secularism in India and Turkey, where it was an elite-driven project marked by the absence of any participation on the part of religious minorities. Moreover, in both India and Turkey, secularism carried the burden of national identity, with official nationalism emphasising the secular identity of the two nations as their most distinctive feature. This national weight of secularism frequently deters attempts to critically interrogate secularism in both countries, since this amounts to questioning the very meaning of nationhood and sovereignty. Could the denationalisation of secularism or efforts to reduce its normative-ideological potency clear the ground for a reevaluation of the relationship between religion and politics, one that does not have to participate in the false choice of either secular nationalism or religious nationalism? A comprehensive answer to this question awaits further comparative research on the secular histories and choices of other countries.

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter has been facilitated by an International Collaborative Research Grant from the Social Science Research Council’s Middle East

Temple and dam, fez and hat 111 and North Africa Program, and a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published as an article: Srirupa Roy (2010) Temple and dam, fez and hat: the secular roots of religious politics in India and Turkey, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 48:2, 148–172, reprinted by permission of the publisher. 2 By then the original Islamist formation of the National Order Party had been reconstituted several times, first as the National Salvation Party and then as the Refah Party (Welfare Party), which went on to win 25  per cent of the vote share in the National Assembly elections of 1996. 3 The six ‘arrows’, or the foundational pillars, of Kemalism were republicanism, populism, secularism, reformism/revolutionism, nationalism, and étatism. 4 Thus, Christian, Jewish, Armenian, and Greek religious groups do not enjoy de jure legal recognition of the separate institutional status of their respective patriarchates; the state can and does intervene in the election of the patriarch or the rabbi; they are not allowed to independently establish and administer religious training institutions; and they are denied the right to acquire property.

References Abraham, I. (1998) The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Ajami, F. (2001) “What the Muslim World Is Watching,” New York Times Magazine, 18 September. Reprinted in the Transnational Broadcasting Studies Archive, 8 (Spring/ Summer 2002). Available at: www.tbsjournal.com/Archives/Spring02/ajami.html [Accessed 3 March 2010]. Ali, T. (2002) The Clash of Fundamentalisms, London-New York: Verso. Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Austin, G. (2000) Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bajpai, R. (2000) “Constituent Assembly Debates and Minority Rights,” Economic and Political Weekly, 25(21–22), 1837–44. Basu, T. et al. (1993) Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, New Delhi: Tracts for the Times. Bose, S. and Jalal, A. (1998) Modern South Asia, London-New York: Routledge. Bozdogan, S. (2000) Modernism and Nation-Building, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Brass, P. (1974) Language, Religion, and Politics in North India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breman, J. (2002) “Communal Upheaval as the Resurgence of Social Darwinism,” Economic and Political Weekly, 20 April. Butalia, U. (1998) The Other Side of Silence, Durham: Duke University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chiriyankandath, J. (1999) “Constitutional Predilections,” Seminar, 484, 50–5. Cinar, A. (2005) Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Devji, F. F. (1992) “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,” Public Culture, 5(1), 1–18. Galanter, M. (1965) “Secularism East and West,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 7(2), 133–159. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

112  Srirupa Roy Gopal, S. (ed.) (1993) Anatomy of a Confrontation, London-NewYork: Zed Books. Hansen, T. (1999) The Saffron Wave, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jacobsohn, G. (2003) The Wheel of Law, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kadioglu, A. (1996) “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity,” Middle Eastern Studies, 32(2), 177–94. Karl, T. L. and Schmitter, P. (1991) “Modes of Transition in Southern and Eastern Europe, Southern and Central America,” International Social Science Journal, 128, 269–84. Khilnani, S. (1997) The Idea of India, London: Hamish Hamilton. Krishna, S. (1996) “Cartographic Anxieties,” in M. Shapiro and H. Alker (eds.) Challenging Boundaries, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 193–16. Landau, J. (1997) Turkey Between Secularism and Islamism, Jerusalem Letter/ Viewpoints, 352. Available at: www.jcpa.org/jl/vp352.htm [Accessed 3 March 2010]. Mardin, S. (2002) Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Menon, R. and Bhasin, K. (1998) Borders and Boundaries, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2002) Faces of the State, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nigam, A. (2006) The Insurrection of Little Selves, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Oehring, O. (2002) “Human Rights in Turkey,” Missio (Human Rights), 5. Available at: www.missio-aachen.de/images/mr%20tu ̈ rkei%20englisch_tem14–11238.pdf [Accessed 3 March 2010]. Ozyurek, E. (2006) Nostalgia for the Modern, Durham: Duke University Press. Pandey, G. (1992) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pitkin, H. (1967) The Concept of Representation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Poulton, H. (1997) Top Hat, Grey Wolf, and Crescent, New York: New York University Press. Rashid, A. (2001) Taliban, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Roy, S. (2007) Beyond Belief, Durham: Duke University Press. Rudolph, L. and Rudolph, S. (2000) “Living With Difference in India: Legal Pluralism and Legal Universalism in Historical Context,” Political Quarterly, 71(1), 20–38. Sarkar, T. and Butalia, U. (eds.) (1995) Women and the Hindu Right, Delhi: Kali for Women. Smith, D. (1963) India as a Secular State, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tambar, K. (2009) “Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey,” Public Culture, 21(3), 517–37. Tejani, S. (2008) Indian Secularism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Upadhyaya, P. (1992) “The Politics of Indian Secularism,” Modern Asian Studies, 26(4), 815–54. Vanaik, A. (1997) The Furies of Indian Communalism, London-New York: Verso. Visvanathan, S. (1997) A Carnival for Science, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. White, J. (2002) Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Zubaida, S. (2000) “Trajectories of Political Islam: Egypt, Iran, and Turkey,” Political Quarterly, 71(3), 60–79. Zurcher, E. J. (1998) Turkey: A Modern History, London: I. B Tauris.

7 Nehru against Nehruvians

Rajeev BhargavaNehru against Nehruvians

On religion and secularism Rajeev Bhargava

Jawaharlal Nehru, a central figure  in the anti-colonial movement against the British and the first prime minister of independent India, is widely accepted as a Westernized intellectual influenced by mainstream views of the Enlightenment on religion as a storehouse of falsehoods and superstition. Nehru, an atheist, felt that although religion was supposed to raise questions about human existence, at best it answered them wrongly and dogmatically.1 It petrified old beliefs and customs and encouraged attitudes against social reform and revolution. Science and philosophy, on the other hand, encouraged critical reasoning and intellectual self-reliance, and forged detached viewpoints, while orienting minds towards progressive change. Thus, Nehru positioned scientific reason against religious faith. It is no wonder that he also espoused a secular state – one that separated itself from religion and was indifferent, if not hostile to it. Some have found striking similarities between him and Ataturk, except that, because of the constraints of democracy and diversity, he failed where Ataturk succeeded (at least in his own time). In this essay, I argue that Nehru’s views on religion and secularism were unusually subtle and considerably complex, remaining acutely relevant today. To be sure, some Nehruvians in the late 1960s and 70s, encouraged by some of Nehru’s own remarks, have presented his views as overly simplistic, which is precisely my point. Nehru’s own views on religion and secularism, indeed even his political practice, were very different from Nehruvian secularism that emerged after his death – a handiwork of intellectuals close to his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Here I argue that Nehruvian views on secularism must give way to Nehru’s own views, for they have an even greater relevance today than during his lifetime.

On religion To begin with, Nehru was uncomfortable with the terms “religion” and “secular.” As he writes in his autobiography, “The word ‘religion’ has lost all precise significance (if it ever had it!) and only causes confusion and gives rise to interminable debate and argument. It would be far better if it was dropped from use altogether” (Nehru 2003a: 135).

114  Rajeev Bhargava To understand this idea, allow me to draw you into a thought experiment – a short, eight-step, longue durée, speculative history of human beings. Let us assume that at some point in the very distant past, we began to develop a capacity for transcendence, that is, to step back and look beyond life, to holistically examine our existence in the world, to dispassionately see its limitations and aspire to overcome them. Step 1: A gap emerges between what we currently are and what we could be. We then strive to overcome this gap, searching for a vision, both personal and collective, in terms of which we can chart a journey of self-fulfilment, self-cultivation, self-development, and self-perfection. If the issue of death worries us, we seek an answer to the question of how to be saved in the face of death (salvation). In short, we search for a vision that helps to clarify and sharpen our questions and provide answers to what our ideals should be, and how our lives and selves might be shaped by practices informed by such ideals. An important condition toward this path is receiving guidance, most likely from a teacher (dead or alive) with the requisite brilliance and wisdom to shape our character, practice, and perspective on life and the world – a teacher who helps us aim higher and dig deeper, one we look up to. To pursue our thought experiment, let’s imagine that in Step 2, people begin following the wisdoms of such a teacher. They become followers of a path towards self-realization outlined by him or her – a “Way” (marga, dao). In Step 3, over time, a loose sense of community amongst the followers emerges – important for self-cultivation, mutual learning, and reinforcement. Thus, self-development is a guided, social activity. Teachers and other learners are crucial to it. This lightly organized human endeavour – the gamut of practices, dispositions, and character – Nehru was prepared to accept as religion in one important sense. Let us call it “religion A.” Here, religion “consists of the inner development of the individual, the evolution of his consciousness in a certain direction which is considered good. What that direction is, will again be a matter of debate. But as far as I understand it, religion lays stress on this inner development and considers outward change as the projection of this inward development” (Nehru 1989: 379). No man can live without religion A, Nehru agrees with Gandhi, who is using the term in a broadly ethical and moral sense. He then goes on to quote John Dewey: [R]eligion is “whatever introduces genuine perspective into the piecemeal and shifting episodes of existence”; or again “any activity pursued on behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss, because of conviction of its general and enduring value, is religious in quality.” (Nehru 2003a: 136) If this is religion, one cannot have the slightest objection to it (ibid.). Now these conceptions of higher good and path toward self-realization may be dependent on gods and goddesses (as in ancient India, Greece, and Rome), or be God-dependent (as in predominantly monotheistic societies such as Jewish, Christian, Islamic), or be independent of God – faith in the rightness of human

Nehru against Nehruvians  115 action and human rationality – (as in visions of atheist/secular societies). Such God-independent standards evolved in ancient Greece (Plato) and India (Buddha, Jaina, Mimamsa). From very ancient times, India was home to many “religions A,” even though it had neither a word for religion nor distinguished between religion and philosophy. Some people lived their lives presupposing gods and goddesses, others presupposing one God, and some that no God exists at all. Nehru understood and experienced this religious diversity and its acceptance, for Asian faiths displayed characteristic features associated with “polytheistic” societies.2 In virtually all cultures of classical antiquity, each god performed a function based on his cosmic competence. Thus, there are gods or goddesses of love, wealth, war, knowledge, crafts. Likewise, each god embodied an entity of potentially cosmic significance. Hence, there are gods of fire, rain, earth, time, sun, moon, and sea, or primal gods who create, destroy, preserve, and so on. The god of love in one culture could then also acquire the name of the god of love from another culture. This way, differences continue to be viewed as irreducible, yet translatable. This feature of translatability might be understood as a theology of recognition. The gods of each culture are recognized within the background of a common semantic universe. Certainly, this implicit theology of polytheism and inclusive monotheism permits easy movement across religions. If different names refer to the same god or the same god has different cultural backgrounds, then why create a fuss about leaving one and embracing another? Indeed, why not embrace both?3 Eventually, this theological mode of coping with diversity could be enlarged to include perspectives or soteriologies that do not depend on gods. One can deploy the more general term “ethic of self-realization” that includes God-dependent, gods- and goddesses-dependent, and god-free ethics pertaining to humans and even non-human selves. Each of these ethics can be treated as a way of being or relating to the ultimate, in any way the latter is defined or understood. Nehru learnt from his own experience and under the influence of Gandhi that this deep diversity constitutes a major feature of the Indian religious landscape and is part of India’s rich heritage. Nehru himself embraced a “religion A” – faith in modern humanism and rationality. He held it and its values as the highest normative ideals, also realizing that religion A was one among others. He accepted that while each of these is sufficient, none is necessary for self-realization. He says, “It is the quality of thought and not its object which determines its sources and allows us to decide whether or not it emanates from religion. If it turns fearlessly towards the search for truth at all costs with single minded sincerity for any sacrifice, I should call it religious; for it presupposes faith in an end to human effort higher than the life of existing society and even higher than the life of humanity as a whole [this is what I refer to above as the capacity for transcendence]. In this sense, skepticism can also join the march of the Grand Army of the religious soul.” If so, Nehru concludes, “I  am prepared to be a humble campfollower of the Grand Army” (2003a: 137).4 Having demonstrated the importance of religion A in Nehru’s personal life and for human life more generally, and the profound inescapability of the plurality, allow me to take my thought experiment to the next step. Imagine that, over

116  Rajeev Bhargava time, the community of religion A develops an institutional structure involving hierarchies of power and status (Step 4). Some of these grow because a section of the community has taken the responsibility to systematize teachings and then give coherence to them. These teachings are now turned into intellectual doctrines (Step 5). What was once a loose community now has a highly doctrine-oriented, bureaucratized structure. Pursuit of religion A is dependent upon one’s belonging to this tightly institutionalized community. Religiousness (as Nehru defines it) as a quality of human beings is reified and becomes external to persons.5 We have already posited the plurality of “religions A.” If most of these were to take Steps 4 and 5, there would be many such socio-intellectual systems. Given the importance of doctrines, some within the bureaucratic structures become gatekeepers who maintain strict rules of entry and exit (Step 6). Perhaps some of these are proselytizers who view each other as rivals fighting for individual allegiances and slowly define themselves in opposition to each other (Step 7). Differences of doctrine or practice may even bring them to blows and in confrontation with those who differ in doctrines as they define them (Step 8). Let us say that “religions A” that have taken Steps 4–8 have become religions in another, second sense – let us call them “religions B.” Because “religion” had come to refer to both religion A  (teachings of selfdevelopment) and religion B (institutionalized, power-laden, status-ridden, and doctrinaire), Nehru developed a deep ambivalence to it. He revered religion A and found religion B repugnant. Wishing to disentangle the two but finding they had become virtually inseparable, he preferred to drop the term but could not, owing to its currency. He concluded that “the use of the same word with different meanings makes mutual comprehension still more difficult” (2003a: 136). To illustrate, Nehru engaged with Gandhi again. “No man could live without religion,” Gandhiji had written. “There are some who in the egotism of their reason declare that they have nothing to do with religion. But that is like a man saying that he breathes, but that he has no nose.” Again, Nehru quoting Gandhi, “My devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.” Perhaps, Nehru adds, it would have been more correct if Gandhiji had said that those wishing to exclude religion from politics mean by the word “religion” something very different from what he means. Nehru clearly implies that by religion, Gandhi, like himself, means religion A. Like Gandhi, Nehru could not see how politics could be conducted without religion A, and like Gandhi, he would not mix politics with religion B. But, as we will see below, both also understood religion A as true religion or religion in the best sense, and religion B as communal.

On secular states and secularism Nehru says, “The word ‘secular’ is perhaps not a happy one. And yet for want of a better term, we use it and call our state a secular state” (2003a: 192). Here, too, since the term “secular” had come to mean different things in different societies, what was his conception of the secular state?

Nehru against Nehruvians 117 For a start, no matter how great one religion might be in the first sense (A), the state cannot identify with it or with any other. It cannot attach itself to any one religion and declare it a state religion. The state may be nourished by all or by none. Even if the majority in a country owes allegiance to one religion, so that (as in the case of India) the general climate is coloured with the Hindu ethos, the state should not be Hindu (2003a: 194–5). Particularly critical of the “Hindu Rashtra” or Hindu nation-state, Nehru argued: It may sound very nice to some people that we will create a Hindu Rashtra but I cannot understand what it means. Hindus are in the majority in this country and whatever they wish will be done. But the moment you talk of a Hindu Rashtra, you speak in a language which no other country except one can comprehend and that country is Pakistan, because it is familiar with this concept. It can immediately justify the creation of an Islamic nation by pointing out that we are doing something similar.6 . . . Hindu rashtra can only reduce the status of those who are not Hindus. . . . You may say patronizingly that you will look after the Muslims or Christians or others . . . but do you think any race or individual will accept for long the claim that they are looked after while we sit high above them? (2003a: 186) Not only does it reduce the status of others, it inferiorizes and marginalizes them. Thus, since all states in the modern era are nation-states, Nehru opposed narrow nationalisms, including religious ones. In religiously diverse societies, all religious nationalisms are exclusionary. He may have underestimated the power of such nationalisms when he said that they were “relics of the past and backward.” The nationalism that needs to be built in India, he argued, must have its doors and windows open to internationalism. For this to happen, the state must not identify with one set of ends, and certainly not of any one religion A. The ends promoted by any religion A, no matter how valuable, cannot be the ends of a secular state. Second, in Nehru’s view, a secular state cannot be anti-religious (2003a: 194). It is not a state where religion as such is discouraged or pushed into oblivion (ibid.: 195) How could he indiscriminately oppose religion or espouse its absence, given his acknowledgement of the indispensability and value of religion A? Since many faiths express themselves publicly, a secular state must accept the public presence of religions A. There should, he insisted, be “free play for all religions” (ibid.: 192). A secular state must protect places of worship and guarantee religious practices. It must protect freedom of religion and conscience, including freedom for those who have no religion (atheists, agnostics, sceptics). Indeed, going a step further, Nehru argues that religion A must honor all faiths equally and give them equal opportunity (ibid.). But what should a secular state do in relation to religion B or to B aspects of a religion, with regard to status and power hierarchies, doctrinal matters, interreligious rivalry, hate speech, and inter-religious violence? Here, all secular states must satisfy at least two requirements: they must (a) disconnect with particular

118  Rajeev Bhargava religions A ends specified by any doctrines of religion B, and (b) religious personnel such as church officials or theologians must not become state officials and not be guaranteed a place within state structures based on their religious status (a common feature in theocracies and states with religious establishments).7 In India, this second disconnection was not seriously considered, because imperial practice was shaped largely by secular considerations of power and wealth accumulation and also because democratic ideas in the anti-colonial struggle did not entertain any substantive, automatic connection between religious and political personnel. Nehru could easily argue that a secular state must disconnect from religion B at both levels of doctrines, institutions and personnel. However, it is claimed sometimes that a secular state must meet third condition: that it disconnect at the level of law and public policy. Nehru might have been tempted to take this view, given that he opposed state hostility to religion, as occurred in different phases in France, Turkey, and communist regimes. If states do not indiscriminately intervene in religions, should they not show respect by altogether disconnecting from them even in policy and law? He must be aware that this is how the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (sometimes referred to as “American secularism”) is frequently interpreted. A  wall between church and state means that church and state must not interfere with one another, that they have their own well-demarcated areas of jurisdiction, that the religious domain cannot be the object of state policy and law. In at least one major interpretation, the U.S. Congress is not supposed to legislate on any matter pertaining to the church. However, given Nehru’s views on religion B, this option was not available to him. So, what was his stance on religion B? For a start, he had to acknowledge that India’s religious landscape had changed considerably. Religion A had begun to more closely resemble religion B, with the result that religious coexistence in India could now no longer be taken for granted. Religion in this new avatar had morphed into something worse and was entirely responsible for what I have elsewhere referred to as the majority-minority syndrome.8 Religion had become a diseased network of neurotic relations, so completely poisoned and accompanied by a such a vertiginous assortment of negative emotions (envy, malice, jealousy, spite, and hatred) that it spawned collective delirium and cold-blooded acts of revenge, mindlessly, alternately, cyclically sending groups down a path of deeper estrangement. This was reminiscent of Europe in the 16th century, when the “other” was viewed as an existential threat and doctrinal differences were experienced not merely as intellectual disagreements but cast in ways that undermined basic trust. The “other” could not be lived with and so had to be expelled or exterminated. A feature of this syndrome is that groups make demands on each other that can rarely be fulfilled. Conjuring up imaginary grievances, they insist precisely on that which hurts the other most, occasionally obsessively desiring the same thing the other wants, at other times the exact opposite – always with the sole intent of negating the claims of the other. Thus, animosity between groups circulates freely, adding layer upon layer of grievances. Antagonistic games are played without end, except the defeat and humiliation of the other. Nehru’s contemporary the

Nehru against Nehruvians 119 great leader of Dalits, Ambedkar, provides several examples: “Hindus and Muslims make preparations against each other,” he tells us, without abatement, reminding one of a race in armaments between two hostile nations. If the Hindus have the Banaras University, the Muslims must have the Aligarh University. If the Hindu starts Shuddhi movement, the Muslims must launch the Tablig movement. If the Hindus start Sangathan, the Muslims must have the Tanjim. If the Hindus have the R.S.S., the Muslims must reply by organising the Khaksars. (Seymour 2004: 349) A group of Muslims had psyched themselves into a state of paranoia that was only partly grounded in fears of inter-religious domination which got exacerbated and became a very real prospect after the formation of Pakistan. An important task of the secular state, then, given that severe doubts about coexistence had forced themselves upon the public arena, was to ensure that all religious communities be at peace with one another, that there be, to use Gandhi’s term, “communal harmony.” To generalize further, secularism came to be used in some important circles for a certain comportment of the state, whereby it distances itself from all religions B to perform its primary function of ensuring trust and confidence between religious communities. A secular state must promote sociability and foster cooperation as a certain quality of relations among religious communities.9 To foster cooperation between different religious communities is, for Nehru, a constitutive objective of a secular state. Furthermore, the prospect of this inter-religious domination – when members of one religious community, with or without the help of state power, discriminate against, marginalize, exclude, oppress, degrade or humiliate members of other religious communities – was significant in Nehru’s conception of secularism. The duty of the secular state is to protect religious diversity and to undermine interreligious domination. Much of the motivation for this domination comes, as we learned above, not from religion A, but from religion B. The state, then, cannot simply separate itself from religion B. If it is necessary for the state to intervene in religion B by law and public policy, it must do so. For Nehru, communalism meant the domination by one religious community of other religious communities (Nehru 2003a: 173). Thus, a secular state must oppose communalism regardless of whether it stems from the minority or the majority (ibid.: 192–3; 173). “If that community is in a minority, it goes against the grain of all ideas of democracy. But if that community is in a majority,” Nehru continues, “its dominance over other communities is undemocratic.” To protect minorities from majoritarian domination, it is crucial that these communities be given community-specific minority rights so that they are able to procure all those benefits that come routinely to the majority community. In a religiously diverse society, where prospects of interreligious domination loom large, a secular state’s respect for all religions manifests itself as commitment to minority rights (ibid.: 174). A state then may have to

120  Rajeev Bhargava intervene in the majoritarian acts of a religious community, which it cannot do if the separation between the two is strict or “perfect.” Nehru’s conception of secularism was broader still, for religion B was also ridden with intra-religious domination – a condition wherein members of a religious community oppress, exclude, discriminate against, humiliate, and degrade other members of their own community – which occurs because of hierarchies of status and power embedded in religion B. He provides three stark instances of such domination. The first is religiously justified inter-caste domination, the ugliest example of which is the practice of untouchability – the exclusion and stigmatization of a group made to do work that none other is prepared to and which is systematically treated as sub-human, offending any sense of dignity and equality. Nehru says that “the word secular conveys something much more to him, although that might not be its dictionary meaning – the idea of social and political equality.” A state that encourages or tolerates such deeply inegalitarian, casteist practices is not secular (ibid.: 192). Finding casteism as dangerous as communalism, since both are impediments to democracy and equality, Nehru’s secularism is pitted against religiously grounded casteism. Second, although he does not use the term “patriarchy,” secularism is also pitted against this form of intra-religious domination. As early as 1934, addressing Prayag Vidya Peeth, he said, “Our civilization, our customs, our laws have all been made by man and he has taken good care to keep himself in a superior position and to treat the woman as chattel and a plaything to be exploited for his own advantage and amusement. Under this continuous pressure the woman has been unable to grow and develop her capacities to her fullest and then man has blamed her for her backwardness” (Nehru 2003b: 21). He continues, “For all of us, therefore, the first problem that presents itself is how to free India and remove the many burdens of the Indian masses. But the women of India have an additional task which is to free themselves from the tyranny of man-made customs and laws. They will have to carry on this second struggle by themselves for man is not likely to help them” (ibid.). Providing many examples of this particular form of intra-religious domination while addressing girls of the Vidyapeeth, he implores, “The purdah, that evil relic of the barbarous age, which imprisons the body and mind of so many of our ­sisters – will you not tear it to bits and burn the fragments? . . . Our marriage laws and many of our out-of-date customs which hold us back and especially crush our womenfolk, will you not combat them and bring them in line with modern conditions?” (ibid.: 22). A third instance of intra-religious domination that he drew attention to was the domination of ordinary persons by religious clerics, bigots who perpetuated women’s oppression – for which the orthodox among Hindus and Muslims frequently come together. “Brahmins are prepared to march shoulder to shoulder with the Maulvies, the priests from the Ghats fraternize with the mullahs from the mosques against any freedom and equality-oriented internal reform” (Gupta: Ch. 5). Given this oppressive and politically meddlesome stance of religious elites, Nehru argued

Nehru against Nehruvians 121 that “the high priests of religion cannot take decisions on social and political questions.” A stance in favor of freedom in the social sphere against all those religious organizations that work against individual freedom must be strengthened in order to regulate their power. Religion B is the “fountainhead of authoritarianism and meek submission,” he claimed. Thus, a secular state must regulate the continuing attempt by religious clerics to impose their orthodox or bigoted views and norms on ordinary men and women (ibid.: 141). To sum up, Nehru’s views on secularism were subtle, complex, and distinctive. Unlike the model that often operated in modern France and Turkey and was approved by some post-Nehru Nehruvians, it was not anti-religious. In this model (let us just call it the idealized French model, or model 1): (a) religion is not officially recognized, (b) it becomes a target of active disrespect by a state that excludes religion from its affairs but retains the power to intervene in religion, (c) it is removed from the public domain, i.e. privatized, and (d) qualification of citizenship, both membership in the state and all rights, are made wholly independent of religious affiliation. To be sure, aspects of model 1 were attractive, such as non-identification with religion and the independence of citizenship from membership in religious communities, but disrespect of religion and privatization is not. It is equally unlike model 2, the one seen in the United States. Let us for the sake of simplicity call it the idealized American model, in which: (a) The non-identification with religion is accompanied by a different understanding of what “separation” means. Here, religion and state are mutually excluded from each other; neither has the right to intervene in the affairs of the other. (b) Thus the state has no power to intervene in religious affairs. (c) There is no active disrespect, but rather an unqualified passive respect for religion. (d) Qualification of citizenship, both membership in the state and all corresponding rights, are made independent of religious affiliation. Again, Nehru would find some aspects of this model attractive, but not its complete withdrawal from religion, for religion B has so many infirmities, so much accumulated dirt, that change from within may not be entirely possible. Nehru’s views on secularism are also different from the model (3) that operates in western European states – call it the idealized European model – wherein many states remain weakly but constitutively linked to one dominant religion. While individual rights are independent of religious affiliation, the state, in all kinds of ways, favours one dominant religion. How can this model do justice to the inequality and dominance built into the structures of societies with deep religious diversity?

122  Rajeev Bhargava Thus for Nehru, India needed another model in which: (a) The state does not belong to a particular religious community. (b) Given the new reality of the interlocking of religions A and B, and the potential of conflict between different religions B, the state must be vigilant to remove conflict and foster cooperation. (c) A distinction is made between being anti-religion and being against institutionalized religious domination. A secular state respects religion A and the diversity within it, including the diversity of atheisms. It can even officially recognize religion and fund the educational institutions of all religions, and, furthermore, grant limited but important cultural and educational rights to minority religious communities (against inter-religious domination); but under some conditions, it can attack the vicious power and status hierarchies within religion B as well as their potential to unleash a host of “un-freedoms.” (d) Furthermore, since religion is understood to be complex and morally ambiguous, some aspects may require negative state intervention – a ban on untouchability, an order that all temples be opened to all sections of Hindus, a law that seeks to keep religious restrictions away from the exercise of basic individual rights of women (state against intra-religious domination). Other aspects would require positive intervention, which could include exemption to Sikhs from wearing standard headgear in the army or police. Still other aspects may require the state to keep entirely away from religion. Hence a space must exist where religious individuals and communities are entirely free to do as they believe, as required by their religion. So, unlike models 1 and 2, the state is not strictly separated from religion. Instead, it maintains what elsewhere I have called a policy of “principled distance” from all religions (see Bhargava 2008). (e) There is no blanket disrespect towards religions nor an unqualified respect for them, but rather an attitude of critical respect. (f ) The qualification for citizenship qua membership in the state is made wholly independent of religious affiliation, and although most rights are independent of religion, some are dependent on membership in religious communities. Regrettably, most Nehruvian secularists have frequently defended not this sophisticated, subtle conception of Nehru’s secularism (also found in the Indian Constitution) but a partial version of it, or worse, one or the Western variants. By turns they have defended a secularism that is anti-religious – alienating the religious by failing to treat them as citizens worthy of equal respect – and sometimes put their force behind a religious secularism, failing to understand that no modern state can keep itself aloof from religion, especially in places like India where religion is not easily separated from the social and the cultural; and sometimes chosen to support a multi-religious (multi-communal) secularism that has a propensity to tolerate indefensible socio-religious practices, that cries foul every time

Nehru against Nehruvians  123 the state intervenes in religion, and that, in the name of coexistence, might even tolerate all kinds of inter-religious and communal rivalry. This has placed defenders of secularism at a loss. They have intervened in religion when they should not have, when restraint was desperately needed, and frequently continued to respect aspects of religion not worthy of respect, or disrespected those aspects that deserved respect. An acute understanding of the complex and variegated ways in which inter- and intra-religious domination persists in the interstices of Indian society has been elusive and thus has been challenged only half-heartedly.

Lessons from Nehru’s secularism Many lessons can be drawn from this account, of which three are worthy of focus. A manifestation of a one-sided understanding of Nehru’s secularism is the complete and exhaustive identification of secularism with a defense of minority rights, as if the only purpose of secularism is to equally respect all religions. In this view, fighting inter-religious domination seems to be secularism’s only raison d’être. Forgotten is the equally important goal of Indian secularism and, indeed, the primary purpose of all Western secularisms: countering intra-religious domination. This function of a secular state – to encourage freedom, equality, and justicecentred reforms within all religions, to protect individuals from oppression by their own fellow co-religionists – indeed, to rescue ordinary Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs from their own religious extremists, to liberate religion from bigotry and fanaticism, tends to slip off this secularism’s radar. Marginalization of socio-religious reform within the agenda of Indian secularism and an exclusive focus on minority rights lends credence to the unjust charge of “minorityism.” When secularism is perceived as concerned solely with the defense of minority rights to protect the interests of Muslims and Christians, it appears to have little to do with Hindus. It can then be twisted to appear as pro-Muslim and anti-Hindu. Yet secularism is needed as much to protect Hindus from their own extremists and homogenizers and the exclusionary instincts of its traditional power-wielders, who cared little for Dalits and women. Such reduction of secularism to minority protection alone, and the disconnect of minority-rights discourses from feminist and Dalit concerns, has led to the weakening of all vulnerable sections. Instead of complementing one another, today, secular, feminist, and Dalit supporters confront one another as competitors, if not opponents. The strength of Indian secularism – its advocacy of minority rights – ends up appearing as its weakness. Rather than being shared by all citizens, the burden of its defense falls unfairly and exclusively on minorities and “pro-minority” secularists. A second lesson pertains to the misunderstanding of Indian secularism as an anti-religious doctrine. This implies that Nehruvian secularists have not maintained a proper distinction between the communitarian and the communal. A communitarian position is one where an individual is at least partly defined by his or

124  Rajeev Bhargava her religious/philosophical commitments and traditions (community) and therefore finds nothing inappropriate in proclaiming that one is a Hindu/Muslim/Sikh/ Christian/Marxist/Advaita, and so forth. Indeed, in some instances, a person may even take legitimate pride in his or her community and community identity, as long as the person is also prepared to be openly ashamed when there is good reason to be. A communitarian position is different from a communal one. In this perspective one’s community identity is defined in opposition to, not in dialogue with, other communities (recall the modern conception of confessional religion that I alluded to earlier), such that existence and interests are necessarily viewed as being at the expense of other communities and community identities. It is communal to believe or act in a way that presupposes one cannot be a Hindu without being antiMuslim, or vice versa. Communalism is communitarianism gone sour. “Communal” is also a term that can be legitimately used for communitarian excesses that thwart individual interests and autonomy. The conflation of communitarian and communal in India has often meant that secular persons with a Hindu identity have not found a way of articulating at least some religious or socio-religious interests of Hindus without sounding communal. They end up appearing to have defended Muslim faith and interests in bad faith, as if in doing so they were really being communal, but that this was permissible given the vulnerability of minorities in a representative democracy dominated by Hindus. The fact is that there is nothing wrong in articulating and defending some Hindu, Muslim, and Christian interests when they do not come into conflict with one another. This can be done without guilt or shame. However, sadly, thanks to Nehruvian secularists, but also due to tremendous adverse pressure from majoritarian Hindus, India has rarely sorted out this issue and dispelled the confusion. Lack of clarity has bred indefensible swings from one communal position to another, and much avoidable hypocrisy. Proponents of secularism have managed to avoid this problem occasionally, sporadically, inconsistently, somewhat superficially and half-heartedly, but will have to do so with greater understanding of each other’s religious traditions, consistently, all the time. A third and final lesson from this discussion of Nehru’s secularism concerns the issue of Indian universities rarely having departments of religious studies or those of comparative religion. Unlike Nehru’s secularism that was informed by deep understanding of India’s rich religious and philosophical heritage, a general ignorance of religious and philosophical heritage and traditions, both one’s own and that of others, plagues our current education system.10 Students emerge from the university system without a deep, critical understanding of the great religious traditions of the world. Both the critique and defense of our own religion and that of others is at best shallow and frequently mischievous. It is heartening to see some of the best studies of ancient Hindu traditions and medieval and modern Hinduism emanating from university departments in the West, but also deeply disappointing that very few originate in India. This huge gap in understanding has led to the creation of bizarre and absurdly self-glorifying accounts of our pasts, and mischievous distortions of the pasts of others. How else can these misunderstandings

Nehru against Nehruvians  125 be removed, if not by an open-minded enquiry with an attitude of critical respect towards all our religious and philosophical traditions?

Notes 1 There is enough evidence, of course, that Nehru also held these views. For example, he says, “Religion tries to give a complete and dogmatic answer to the question [of] what has been the quest of man” (Nehru 2003a: 74). The various religions have especially helped in petrifying old beliefs and faiths and customs which may have had some use in the age and country of their birth but which are singularly unsuitable in our present age. 2 For an illuminating theoretical discussion of this, see Assmann (2010). 3 This lay at the heart of another feature that Nehru deeply liked, the propensity to develop what he called “composite culture” (see, e.g., Nehru 2003a: 173). 4 Again, “the good things in life suffer, the very basis of a decent approach to life – call it religious, call it spiritual, call it scientific. They are submerged in the deluge of hatred and violence. Fear, hatred, violence are the worst companions of an individual or a nation. And yet today these probably are the dominating urges in many countries and people. I do not know what an individual or a nation can do to fight this menace or to face it. In the final analysis one has to rely on some kind of a basic faith in the future of man. Without the basic faith in something in man, it would be difficult enough to see or save a world which is drifting apparently towards an almost irretrievable disaster” (Nehru 1983: 436–37). 5 On the reification of religion, see Smith (1962). 6 He noted that “one of the biggest obstacles to the creation of the general (regrettable) atmosphere that prevails is the repeated declaration that Pakistan is an Islamic state.” 7 On the conditions necessary for a secular state, see, for instance, Bhargava (2015). 8 See Bhargava (1999) and (2004). 9 “I believe in India being a secular state with complete freedom for all religions and cultures and for cooperation between them” (Nehru 2003a: 173). 10 See, for instance, his thoughts on India’s rich heritage more generally and in particular on the value of Sanskrit in accessing India’s past (Nehru 1983: 36–8; 418–32).

References Assmann, Jan (2010) The Price of Monotheism, R. Savage (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bhargava, Rajeev (1999) “Should We Abandon the Majority-Minority Framework?,” in D. L. Sheth and G. Mahajan (eds.) Nation-States and Minority Rights, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——— (2004) “Muslim Personal Law and the Majority-Minority Syndrome,” in M. Seymour (ed.) The Fate of the Nation-State, Montreal: Montreal University Press. ——— (2008) “The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism,” in T. N. Srinivasan (ed.) The Future of Secularism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——— (2015) “Secular Politico-Legal Regimes in Religiously Homogenous and Diverse Societies,” in S. Ferrari (ed.) Law, Religion, State and Society, Routledge Handbook of Law and Religion, NewYork: Routledge, 229–44. Nehru, Jawaharlal (1983) Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, Vol. 3, New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India. ——— (1989) An Autobiography. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——— (2003a) The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol. 1, S. Gopal and U. Iyengar (eds.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

126  Rajeev Bhargava ——— (2003b) The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol. 2, S. Gopal and U. Iyengar (eds.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Seymour, Michel (2004), The Fate of the Nation Sate, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1962) The Meaning and End of Religion, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

8 Redefining the minority

Mustafa ŞenRedefining the minority

Alevis in Turkey1 Mustafa Şen

Introduction Alevis are a non-Sunni group who regard Ali as the rightful successor to Prophet Muhammad, and see Hacı Bektash Veli as their patron saint.2 Although substantially different from Shias, Alevis form a religious minority vis-à-vis Turkey’s majority Sunni population. Owing to various historical and contemporary factors, Alevis hesitate to be considered a minority, instead preferring to remain part of the mainstream as Turkish citizens. Their approach stems from the fear that an official recognition of them as a religious minority vis-à-vis Turkish Sunni Muslims could undermine their efforts to maintain their distinctive identity, and place possible legal hurdles in the realization of their rights as equal citizens. The Alevi case also throws up some comparisons and contrasts with Muslims in India, the quintessential religious minority. Paradoxically, while Alevis, on their own, strive not to be treated as minorities and resist being subsumed under the minority label, for Muslims in India, the status of minority is something to be safeguarded at all costs. In the latter case, it is rather the contemporary Indian state that is attempting to divest Indian Muslims of this status, with the state going so far as perceiving them as not a minority at all. For instance, in May 2014, the minister of minority affairs of the Modi-led government, Najma Heptullah, made a statement that “Muslims are not a minority, Parsees are.”3 This chapter reflects on what may be learned from the Alevi case about minority struggles. I seek to understand what Alevis hope to gain by underplaying their minority status, when in fact, other religious minorities, such as Muslims in India, have claimed just the opposite: a continued recognition as minorities in predominantly Hindu India. In the first section, to highlight the contrasting politico-cultural context, I provide a brief account of the dilemma specific to Indian Muslims, along with the contemporary challenges they face from the Hindu Right. The second section moves to the main concern of this chapter with a brief historical account of the emergence of Alevi subjecthood. The third section is about the impact of party politics in contemporary Turkey in order to highlight the main contours of the ‘Alevi Opening’. The fourth and concluding section brings together the various strands and asks about the extent to which the Indian case might help illuminate the Alevi one. Hovering over the entire exercise is the question about

128  Mustafa Şen the relevance of points of comparison between vastly divergent contexts, wherein the experience of being a minority is perforce conditioned by specificities of history, society, and politics. A brief account of the challenges faced by Muslims in India follows.

Muslims in India: Contemporary challenges While the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan was predicated upon notions of majority versus minority, India’s post-partition socio-political environment further reinforced perceptions about Indian Muslims as India’s religious minority. As it was largely the poorer and disadvantaged segments of the Muslim population that had stayed behind in India after partition, perceptions about Muslim backwardness became further entrenched. Muslim migration to Pakistan and the violence accompanying it had its own impact on subsequent questions of Muslim identity and politics. At that time, recognition of Muslim minority and backward status under a broad secular framework was seen as a step towards safeguarding the interests and security of Muslims who had chosen to stay behind in India. Despite nearly seven decades of democratic politics, and the Indian state’s official claims about its responsiveness to minority rights, as well as its secular developmental agenda, Indian Muslims remain vastly under-represented in all sectors of the Indian economy. The Sachar Report of 20064 offered a comprehensive review of the status of Muslims in India as a minority since independence, showing how ‘backwardness’ and minority status are intertwined in the Indian context. Backwardness, or lack of socio-economic development, has been an enduring theme, though the political contexts of this discussion have continually changed.5 The Sachar Report underlines Muslim backwardness as being consistent, widespread, and similar under different political regimes since independence, as well as in the various regions and states of India. The data presented in this report tend to be side-lined today by the Hindu Right, in a bid to reiterate its stance that Muslims in India have been consistently ‘pampered’ and ‘appeased’ since the Nehruvian era. The political rhetoric of Muslim appeasement remains the recurrent theme in the Hindu Right’s argument for a policy reversal vis-à-vis Muslims. It is now well known that this approach had gathered enormous momentum with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the late 1980s that culminated in the public destruction of the Babri Masjid, a Moghul-era monument erected on the sacred site of Lord Rama’s birth – so as to make way for the construction of a future Ram temple. In response to the report’s findings, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a statement on 9 December 2006 that “Muslims must have first claim to resources.” This assertion at the 52nd meeting of the National Congress was met with widespread criticism by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) – which puts into perspective the persisting deep political divide that exists with regard to the Muslim community in India’s political landscape. The issue remains contentious, and while there are enough constitutional provisions in place for a religious minority to enjoy equal status, discrimination against Muslims has arguably escalated over

Redefining the minority 129 the decades (Rehman 2010). It is argued that evidence of covert discrimination is seen in the socio-economic conditions of the community, indicating that constitutional safeguards on their own remain inadequate. Moreover, in an effort to dismantle safeguards for minority rights inscribed in the Indian Constitution, the Hindu Right also attempts to realise its ideological goals of Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation. To contextualize the importance of examining the Alevi question in Turkey vis-à-vis the Muslim Indian one, the following figures put into comparative perspective the understanding about minorities based on their numerical strength in the population. While there are no official population statistics for Alevis, estimates range between 20 and 30  percent of the total population. The majority of Alevis are Turkish, in addition to Alevis of Kurdish and Arabic origin. Originally concentrated in central, west, and northern Anatolia, from the 1950s, rural-to-urban migration changed this distribution, and today the majority live in Turkish cities, while some are migrants in western European countries. The census of 2011 revealed that 14.2 percent of India’s population were Muslims. Indian Muslims are a majority in two states, namely Jammu and Kashmir and Lakshadweep. The percentage of Muslim population is greater than their national average in five states: Assam (34.2 percent), West Bengal (27 percent), Kerala (26.6  percent), Uttar Pradesh (19.3  percent), and Bihar (16.9  percent). Indian’s Muslim population has increased from 172 million in 2011 to 186 million in 2017.6 It is against the broad comparative backdrop provided above that in the following sections I attempt to identify some key landmarks in the political evolution of Alevis in Turkey. If the Indian Muslim case is illustrative of a classic minority, what makes Alevis resist the minority label? What might be the challenges that confront Alevis in the absence of an accompanying formal recognition of their minority status? To answer these questions, let us turn to a brief history of Alevis in Turkey.

Alevi subjecthood in Turkey The history of oppression and exclusion of Alevis dates back to the SafavidOttoman struggle in the 16th century. Alienated from Sunni Ottomans, Kizilbash (‘red-heads’, a widely used name for Alevis until the 20th century), consisting of nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes scattered in Anatolia, adhered to the Safavids. However, the Ottomans not only defeated the Safavids, but also massacred Alevis. Escaping persecution, Alevi tribes retreated to isolated rural areas and were largely excluded from the Ottoman system. Furthermore, through constant campaigns for centuries, Ottoman authorities fuelled negative prejudices towards Alevis within the Sunni population (Melikoff 1998: 5–7). The Ottomans never recognized Alevism as a religious belief. Sunni authorities had been openly hostile to Alevis at least since the 16th century, a time when the Ottoman Empire accepted Sunnism as its official religion. For them, Alevis were a heretic and deviant group, out of Islam. However, they did not see Alevis as non-Muslim either, because under the

130  Mustafa Şen Ottoman rule, non-Muslims had certain rights and their own institutions. Thus, Alevis were neither Muslims nor non-Muslims, but a group of people who were either persecuted or assimilated into Sunnism.7 Alevis wholeheartedly supported the war of independence and the declaration of the republic in 1923. Their major expectation was to become equal to Sunni citizens in the new republic. Until the 1950s, Alevis largely lived in semi-isolated rural and mountainous areas and the majority did manage to preserve most of their socio-religious traditions. Inhabiting the poorest areas, Alevis were more predisposed to internal and international migration than were Sunni villagers (Şahin 2005: 470). However, migration weakened the Alevi socio-religious organization that was largely in conformity with rural life. Nonetheless, in urban areas, Alevis from different backgrounds had the opportunity to develop close and dense relationships with each other. Migration also redefined the social and religious boundaries between Alevis and Sunnis. Most important was the emergence of Alevi associations and journals in the big cities during the 1960s, and the establishment of a political party, Union Party (Birlik Partisi), led by prominent Alevis in 1969. However, these activities did not evolve into a powerful Alevi movement in the 1960s, owing to the growing influence of leftist movements that deflected interest away from the Alevi cause (Ata 2007; Şahin 2005: 471). With transition to the multiparty parliamentary system in 1950, a significant section of Alevis supported the newly founded centre-right Democrat Party (DP) and its liberal and developmental rhetoric that appealed to peasants, the poor, and other excluded groups. However, after taking office, the DP abandoned its liberal stance, displayed authoritarian tendencies, and supported organized Sunni groups. All this distanced Alevis from the DP, leading them to turn to the centreleft Republican People’s Party (RPP, or Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi). Since then, Alevis regularly support the RPP, which emphasizes secularism as the basic principle of the republic (Schuler 1999: 157–85; Göner 2005: 115). In the 1970s Alevi adherence to the Left qualitatively changed from passive support to active participation. Youngsters actively joined socialist groups, trade unions, student associations, and illegal armed organizations. In the unstable political environment of the 1970s, Alevis became the target of violent attacks by the extreme Right that has usually equated Alevism with atheism and the ‘subversive’ and ‘divisive’ ideology of communism. Hundreds of Alevis, leftists, and socialists were killed by ultra-nationalists and fundamentalists in Malatya (1978), Sivas (1978), Kahramanmaraş (1978), and Çorum (1980). Socialist Alevi youngsters attacked Alevi institutions, regarding them as archaic and backward remnants of feudal society. This eroded Alevi institutions, already shattered by mass migrations and urbanization after the 1950s (Çamuroğlu 1998: 80; Sincliar-Webb 2003: 215–20; Koçan and Öncü 2004: 476–77; Zırh 2008: 112–13). The military coup in 1980 brutally crushed the left opposition. Turkey experienced dramatic changes with the military regime, which was followed by civil governments led by Özal (1983–89), who introduced a liberal economy. The military, which regarded Sunni Islam as the cement for social cohesion and national unity, introduced compulsory religious instruction based on Sunnism in

Redefining the minority  131 schools, and backed the main official religious organization, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, Diyanet for short),8 to forcibly build mosques in Alevi villages. Özal also gave extra support to Sunni religious groups. In short, starting in the 1980s, Sunni Islam acquired a new and central role in the state definition of the Turkish nation.

Party politics and their impact on Alevis in Turkey Just as the rise of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) with its clear anti-minority agenda created new conditions of hostility and discrimination for Indian Muslims, the rise of the Justice and Development Party (JDP, or Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) shaped a new agenda for Alevis in Turkey. Alevis began to protest state-led assimilation campaigns and exclusion of their identity in the late 1980s. The first attempt was the Alevi Manifesto, written by Alevi and Sunni intellectuals in 1989. The document was an important step in publicizing Alevi problems and demands of recognition about Alevism as a belief different from, but equal to Sunnism. Further, it challenged as tools of assimilation and oppression state-sponsored religious services of Diyanet and compulsory Sunni religious instruction in schools (Şahin 2005: 478–9; Özyürek 2009a: 239–40).9 The 2002 rise of the JDP was another turning point for Alevis in particular, and for Turkey in general. It was the first time that a party with Islamist roots had controlled almost two-thirds of the seats in parliament and formed a singleparty majority government. The party leadership declared that, being detached from their Islamist roots, their party’s identity was of ‘conservative democrats’. Furthermore, in its first term (2002–07), the JDP used a powerful rhetoric of democratization and adopted a pro-EU stand, deemed as the guarantee of its democratization agenda. This radical shift in the political stance of the Islamists was ardently supported by the public, by intellectuals, and by international circles. Although Alevis have been keenly opposed to the socio-political project of Turkish Islamists, the JDP government initiated what it called the ‘Alevi opening’, aiming at solving the so-called Alevi question. There were several national and international factors that compelled the JDP to focus attention on Alevi demands. The most important factor was the JDP’s democratization program that consisted of dialogue with Kurds, the Roma, and non-Muslim minority groups. In its first and second term in power, the democratization program, although its content was never clearly declared, was indispensable for the JDP in order to consolidate its legitimacy. Furthermore, the JDP’s democratization agenda conformed to the EU membership negotiation process. Indeed, some problems of Alevis have been regularly listed in EU annual reports since the early 2000s. Thus, EU circles supported the Alevi opening as a positive step towards meeting EU norms (Soner and Toktaş 2011: 427–8; Borovalı and Boyraz 2014: 482; Bardakçı 2015: 354–5). For the JDP, there was also the possibility of political gain in starting the Alevi opening. Alevis had massively supported the main opposition party, the RPP, which had not been active in defending Alevi demands. Therefore, an official dialogue

132  Mustafa Şen with Alevis, it was felt, would likely weaken the links between Alevis and the RPP, and could destabilize the RPP’s electoral base. Additionally, Alevi mobilization played a key role in the inauguration of the Alevi opening. Alevi organization efforts to publicize their demands compelled the JDP to take Alevi problems into account. The legal struggle in Turkey and the EU was also an important component of Alevi mobilization. Since the early 2000s, Alevis had won quite a few court cases in the European Court of Human Rights. The court cases also exerted a pressure on the JDP government (Bardakçı 2015: 355; 361–2). In short, Alevis had been one of the most active socio-­religious groups to challenge and limit the JDP’s power and legitimacy at home and abroad. Thus, a dialogue with a religiously and politically distant group provided an invaluable opportunity for the JDP to show its sincerity and good intentions. It was the first government that started an open dialogue with Alevis. The JDP’s most vital step was the organization of seven successive workshops, known as Alevi workshops, between 2009 and 2010. The workshops hosted over 400 participants from diverse backgrounds, including Sunni theologians, academics, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists from the centre-right, liberal, and Islamist circles. The participants and agenda of workshops were determined by the JDP without input from Alevi associations. The majority of participants were from non-Alevi backgrounds. Excluding two, non-Alevi participants comprised the majority in all these workshops (Soner and Toktaş 2011: 430; Borovalı and Boyraz 2014: 482). In the initial stages, even Alevi organizations that were highly suspicious and critical of the JDP’s aims attended the workshops. However, as they turned into an arena for JDP theological discussions about the definition of Alevism, the space that had existed for Alevis to frame their demands about equal citizenship and religious freedom had now considerably shrunk (Borovalı and Boyraz 2014: 483–4; Akdemir 2014: 67). Theological discussion converted the workshops into a test for Alevi organizations to clarify their way of defining Alevism and to explain whether or not Alevism falls within Islam. The definition of Alevism itself became a pre-condition for Alevi demands for religious freedom and equal citizenship. But Alevi participants boycotted these discussions on the ground that their problems are not theological but political, and that the state cannot determine or define what Alevism is. In their view, the move to turn the workshops into a platform for theological discussion was a way for the JDP and Islamists to force Alevis to concede to the authority and terms of Sunnism and its definition of Alevism. Additionally, they were seen as attempting to manipulate differences among Alevis to avert a meaningful solution to their problems. In short, the final report of the workshops, released in 2011, includes demands and views of Alevis and admits the existence of discrimination against them. But, it still reflects the JDP’s and Diyanet’s position. It also shows the unequal power relations between Alevis and the JDP. While the report projects the JDP as benevolent and tolerant, ready to enter into dialogue with the Alevis, it classifies Alevis into two distinct groups: good (cooperating) and bad (non-cooperating) (Akdemir 2014). Additionally, it frames Diyanet as an indispensable institution of

Redefining the minority  133 the secular state, arguing that compulsory religious courses cannot be withdrawn, while conceding the possibility of adding some topics on Alevism in school textbooks. Nevertheless, it views as an obstacle the difficulty of legal change, raising the issue of sensitivities of the general public – thereby suggesting that powerful resistance from the general public exists, while mentioning the lack of consensus among Alevis in the definition of Alevism. It also finds some demands of Alevis as too radical and unrealistic, claiming that Alevis in Europe were manipulated by foreign powers. Some Alevi organizations publicly protested this final report as a product of Sunni theologians seeking ways to ‘Sunnify’ Alevis and create a JDP-friendly Alevism (Borovalı and Boyraz 2014: 12–3; Soner and Toktaş 2011: 430–31; Özkul 2015: 6). After the workshops, the JDP gradually closed the Alevi opening. It did not produce any meaningful political solution for Alevis. Madımak Hotel was turned into a cultural centre, and only five pages about Alevism were added to textbooks. Thus, the JDP’s attempt may be seen as a false dialogue without legal recognition and viable solutions. The end of the opening denoted a new phase in JDP–Alevi relations. In this phase, the JDP made some public gestures as if it still professed to maintain a dialogue with Alevis, but in fact it showed an aggressive and humiliating stance toward them. The first blow came from Prime Minister Erdoğan in the 2011 general elections, when he consistently attacked the RPP’s new leader, Kılıçdaroğlu, by referring to the latter’s Alevi origins (Özkul 2015:12). Erdoğan incited his audience to boo Kılıçdaroğlu in the election meetings. For the first time in Turkish history, a leader had openly articulated and drawn attention to a person’s Alevi background in a public meeting. Perhaps the JDP’s most notorious and dangerous action was its accusation of Alevis as supporters of the Assad regime in Syria. Although the JDP developed extraordinarily close relations with the Assad family, after the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011, it had fervently supported Syrian opposition. The RPP criticized JDP’s Syrian policy, its involvement with civil war, and its support to armed Islamist groups. For the JDP, the RPP was defending the Syrian regime due to its leader’s Alevi background. It also accused Alevis of supporting the Assad regime based on sectarian affinity (Akdemir 2014: 68–73; Borovalı and Boyraz 2014: 17; Özkul 2015: 12). In fact, the majority of Alevis have historically had very limited contact with Syrian Alevis owing to linguistic, ritual, and theological differences. Suggesting that the regime was Alevi, although the Syrian regime’s legitimacy is based on Arab nationalism, the JDP demonized and stigmatized Alevis as a group that may easily lend support to, and thus be used by, external powers. Another of JDP’s offensive actions towards Alevis was the naming the third bridge constructed on the Bosphorus after the Ottoman Sultan Selim I. As this sultan had been responsible for the mass killing of Alevis in the 16th century during the ­Ottoman-Safavid War, Alevis were insulted (Borovalı and Boyraz 2014: 17; Özkul 2015: 12; Akdemir 2014: 72). In the 1990s the differences within Alevi organizations about defining Alevism had remained intra-group. However, with the EU accession process, defining Alevism had become an international issue. Beginning in the late 1990s, the EU

134  Mustafa Şen reports on Turkey paid special attention to Alevi problems and defined Alevism as a ‘non-Sunni community.’ In 2004 Alevism was defined as a ‘non-Sunni minority.’ This definition was rejected by the state on the grounds that in accordance with the Treaty of Lausanne, (1923) through which Turkey received recognition as an independent state, only non-Muslim communities are defined as minorities (Oran 2007). Indeed, as we have seen above, Alevis had never formulated their demands in the framework of minority rights. Furthermore, the vast majority of Alevis remain apprehensive that their acceptance of minority status could expedite their isolation and marginalization. As the socio-political conditions of legal minorities in Turkey show, being a minority in Turkey implies unequal treatment and living on the margins of society. In Turkey, historically, minorities have largely been perceived as disloyal to national values and are not considered as essential elements in the construction of socio-political community. Thus, under certain conditions, they are liable to be expelled from the country. However, Alevis see themselves as constitutive of and integral to society, and formulate their demands in conformity with equal citizenship, human rights, and democracy, not minority rights (Zırh 2008; Özyürek 2009b; Hurd 2014; Dressler 2014). In short, Alevis are aware that if they accept being defined as a minority, they might be excluded from the symbolic construction of society and socio-­political relations. This would lead to their isolation from the wider society and their relegation to powerless and marginal positions which would in turn erode their capacity to intervene in the nation’s socio-political discourses while limiting their ability to effect transformational and democratic change. Two additional actors in the articulation of Alevi demands include their relationship with the left, which prioritizes socio-economic equality rather than minority rights; and the existence of powerful socio-cultural and socio-political links between Alevis and non-Islamist Sunnis.

Conclusion In this chapter, I attempted to provide a flavor of the contemporary struggles faced by the Alevi community in Turkey. In showing how Alevis have responded to the multiplicity of challenges that came their way as political and social actors in recent decades, I sought to answer the question of why Alevis resist being seen as minorities. Compared to Indian Muslims who embrace their minority status so as to preserve their rights in an increasingly Hinduized social order, Alevis reject the minority label out of fear that it will further marginalize them and erode their capacity to play a meaningful role in the political life of Turkey. Thus, in contrast to Indian Muslim efforts to safeguard their minority status in the context of a resurgent Hindu Right, the innumerable Alevi attempts to maintain political dialogue with the Sunni mainstream in Turkey is reflective of a keen desire to remain politically relevant. In not giving in to the pressure of reduction to minority status, Alevis not only seek to preserve the political space available to them but have also shifted the

Redefining the minority  135 terms of discourse away from that of religious difference and numerical disadvantage to that of equal citizenship. Therefore, it could be argued that Alevis in Turkey are also engaged in interrogating the very nature of the minority. While Alevi strategies of negotiation are shaped by the challenges thrown up by the wider political, historical, and social context, I have argued that, in addition, the contrasting perspective provided by an existing case of a classic minority, such as the Muslims of modern India, allows us to think through the multiple meanings and strategies of the minorities today. Seen against the case of Indian Muslims, then, the Alevi experience of being a minority not only illuminates the varied nature of struggles faced by minorities in contemporary societies, it also points to the potential to redefine the very nature of minorityism itself.

Notes 1 I am deeply indebted to Professor Mujibur Rehman of Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia for the comparative perspectives on Indian Muslims he provided for this essay. I am also grateful to Professor Smita Jassal for her comments, suggestions, and valuable guidance and to Professor Halil Turan for his comments and help on various points. 2 The Alevis do not have a “five-times-a-day” praying rule; they have no mosques and no officially appointed religious officials. They instead use cemevi as their places of worship and their religious leaders, the dedes, do stem from the holy family Ahl alBayt. They have different fasting periods, and men and women gather together for their religious ceremonies. The traditional Alevi socio-religious organization is mainly based on the bond between dede (literally ‘grandfather’, hereditary religious leader) and talip (followers). In this system, Alevi villages in a certain region are attached to a particular ocak (literally ‘hearth’, holy lineage). Endowed with religious content and knowledge inherited through patrilineal lines, the dedes visit the villages attached to their holy lineages to hold cem (communal religious ceremony). The rituals are conducted by married couples. In cem ceremonies, crimes committed and problems inside the community are brought to light, religious matters are discussed, religious songs sung and the religious dance semah is danced. The major tasks of dede are to keep this network intact and maintain the way (Yaman 1998; Şahin 2005: 471). 3 I am grateful to Professor Mujibur Rehman of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University for this reference. He points out that at the Bhartiya Janata Party’s National Council Meeting (NCM) at Kozikhode, Kerala, Prime Minister Modi apparently quoted Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, a key thinker of the Hindu Right, and urged BJP workers that they should not hate Muslims – instead they should empower them. According to Modi, ‘Do not hate or rebuke Muslims; empower them.’ While a majority of the media reported this verbatim, in Upadhyaya’s original writings he had urged the ‘purification’ of Muslims. Rehman argues that these observations reflect the attitude of the Hindu Right emanating directly from its ideological stance on Muslims. 4 In 2006 the Sachar Report was prepared under the chairmanship of Rajinder Sachar under the United Progressive Association (UPA). It showed widespread under-­representation of Muslims in all major sectors of the Indian economy. For further information, please see Sachar Report (2006). 5 Professor Rehman reminds us that prior to the Sachar Report, the Indian state had also prepared the Gopal Singh Panel Report, submitted to Indira Gandhi in 1983 and presented to the Indian parliament in 1990 when V. P. Singh was India’s prime minister. Neither Indira Gandhi nor Rajiv Gandhi made any effort to present it to India’s parliament. When Rafiq Zakaria, secretary of the Gopal Singh Panel report, asked Indira Gandhi about it, her reply was, ‘Post mortem does not help.’ Since the Sachar Report

136  Mustafa Şen was published almost a decade and half into India’s economic reform/globalization, and the Gopal Singh Panel Report was submitted in 1983, after more than four decades of Nehruvian development, it is obvious that neither state intervention nor the market economy had worked for Indian Muslims. 6 For further information, see www.census2011.co.in/religion.php, www.censusindia.gov. in/2011census/Religion_PCA.html, and also www.indiaonlinepages.com/population/ muslim-population-in-india.html. 7 Nevertheless, in the early 20th century, the newly emergent Turkish nationalist movement tried to integrate Alevis into their Turkification policies, regarding them as genuine and uncorrupted Turks and Alevism as the remnant of shamanism, the original religion of Turks in Central Asia. For nationalists, Alevis were real Turks who preserved pre-Islamic and pre-Ottoman Turkish customs and traditions. Later, this idea became a component of Turkish historiography. For further information, see Ateş (2011) and Taş (2015). 8 Diyanet was established in 1924 and has been fully funded by the state since then. It is responsible for handling affairs related to mosques, Qur’an courses, and appointment of religious functionaries. With its national and international branches, it disseminates Sunni belief and practices. In 2010 the JDP made major changes in its organizational and institutional structure and widened the scope and scale of its activity areas. 9 Two violent attacks on Alevis were also of crucial importance in the rise of Alevi organizations. The first was the killing of 37 persons, including famous novelists, poets, and artists in Sivas on 2 July 1993. During an Alevi cultural festival, Madımak Hotel, where the festival was located, was burned down by an Islamist mob (Çoşkun 1995). After the massacre, Alevis in Turkey and Europe started to join associations in great numbers. Second, on 12 March 1995 coffeehouses and patisseries attended by Alevis in a poor neighbourhood of Istanbul were sprayed with bullets. Three unidentified gunmen killed two Alevis. Leftist and Alevi youngsters took the street to protest against this violent attack, but 20 demonstrators were killed and many were injured by the police (Marcus 1996). Alevis regarded these attacks as concrete results of the rise of Islamism. Indeed, the Islamist Welfare Party’s success in the 1994 municipal elections and its formation of a coalition government with the centre-right party in 1996 gave a further boost to the rise of Alevi organizations. Alevis have considered the rise of Islamism as a direct threat to their existence (Göner 2005; Şahin 2005; Özyürek 2009a).

References Akdemir, Ayşegül (2014) “Alevis and the JDP: From Cautious or Neutral Relations to Open Conflict,” Eurasian Journal of Anthropology, 5(2): 63–77. Ata, Kelime (2007) Alevilerin İlk Siyasal Denemesi: (Türkiye) Birlik Partisi (1966–1980), Ankara: Kelime Yayınevi. Ateş, Kazım (2011) Yurttaşlığın Kıyısında: “Öz Türkler” ve “Heretikler Ötekiler,” Phoenix: Ankara. Bardakçı, Mehmet (2015) “The Alevi Opening of the AKP Government in Turkey: Walking a Tightrope Between Democracy and Identity,” Turkish Studies, 16(3): 349–70. Borovalı, Murat and Boyraz, Cemil (2014) “Turkish Secularism and Islam: A Difficult Dialogue With the Alevis,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 40(4–5): 479–88. Çamuroğlu, Reha (1998) “Alevi Revival in Turkey,” in Tord Olsson, Elizabeth Özdalga and Catharina Raudvere (eds.) Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious, and Social Perspectives, Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 79–84. Çoşkun, Zeki (1995) Aleviler, Sünniler ve . . . Öteki Sivas, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Dressler, Marcus (2014) “ ‘Our Alevi and Kurdish Brothers’ – Some Remarks on Nationalism and Minority Politics in Turkey,” in Khanna Omarkhali (ed.) Religious Minorities in Kurdistan Beyond Mainstream, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 139–57.

Redefining the minority  137 Göner, Özlem (2005) “The Transformation of Alevi Collective Identity,” Cultural Dynamics, 17(3): 107–34. Hurd, Elizabeth S. (2014) “Alevis Under Law: The Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey,” Journal of Religion and Law, 29(3): 416–35. Koçan, Gürcan and Öncü, Ahmet (2004) “Citizen Alevi in Turkey: Beyond Confirmation and Denial,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 17(4): 464–89. Marcus, Aliza (1996) “ ‘Should I Shoot You?’ An Eyewitness Account of an Alevi Uprising in Gazi,” Middle East Report, April–June 1996: 24–6. Melikoff, İrene (1998) “Bektashi/Kızılbaş: Historical Bipartition and Its Consequences,” in T. Olsson, E. Ozdalga and C. Raudvere (eds.) Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious, and Social Perspectives, Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 1–8. Oran, Baskın (2007) “The Minorty Concept and Rights in Turkey: The Lausanne Peace Treaty and Current Issues,” in Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat (ed.) Human Rights in Turkey, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 35–56. Özkul, Derya (2015) “Alevi ‘Openings’ and Politicization of the ‘Alevi Issue’ During the AKP Rule,” Turkish Studies, 16(1): 80–96. Özyürek, Esra (2009a) “The Light of the Alevi Fire Was Lit in Germany and then Spread to Turkey: A Transnational Debate on the Boundaries of Islam,” Turkish Studies, 10(2): 233–53. ——— (2009b) “Beyond Integration and Recognition: Diasporic Constructions of Alevi Muslim Identity Between Germany and Turkey,” in Thomas J. Csordas (ed.) Transnational Transcendence, Berkeley: University of California Press, 121–44. Rehman, Mujibur (2010) “Muslim Politics in India and the 15th General Election,” in A. K. Mehra (ed.) The Emerging Trends in Indian Politics, New Delhi: Routledge Publications. Sachar Report (2006) Socio- Economic and Educational Status of Muslim Country in India: A  Report, Prime Minister’s High Level Committee (Chairperson: Rajinder Sachar), Government of India. Şahin, Şehriban (2005) “The Rise of Alevism as a Public Religion,” Current Sociology, 53(3): 465–85. Schuler, Harald (1999) Türkiye’de Sosyal Demokrasi, Particilik, Hemşehrilik, Alevilik, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Sincliar-Webb, Emma (2003) “Sectarian Violence, the Alevi Minority and the Left: Kahramanmaraş 1978,” in Paul J. White and Joost Jogerden (eds.) Turkey’s Alevi Enigma: A Comprehensive Overview, Leiden: Brill, 215–34. Sökefeld, Martin (2008) Struggle for Recognition: The Alevi Movement in Germany and in Transnational Space, New York: Berghahn Books. Soner, Bayram Ali and Toktaş, Şule (2011) “Alevis and Alevism in the Changing Context of Turkish Politics: The Justice and Development Party’s Alevi Opening,” Turkish Studies, 12(3): 419–34. Taş, Hakkı (2015) “Can the Alevi Speak? The Politics of Representations in Early Writings on Alevism,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 26(3): 325–38. Yaman, Ali (1998) Alevilikte Dedeler, Ocaklar, İstanbul: Ufuk Matbaacılık. Zırh, Besim Can (2008) “Euro-Alevis: From Gastarbeiter to Transnational Community,” in Remus Gabriel Anghel, Eva Gerharz, Gilberto Rescher and Monika Salzbrunn (eds.) The Making of World Society: Perspective from Transnational Research, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 103–31.

Part IV

Development debates

9 Locating agency in global connections Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli AltunışıkLocating agency in global connections

The case of India and Turkey as ‘rising powers’ Derya Göçer Akder and Meliha Benli Altunışık In their regional contexts as well as global connections, India and Turkey have been presented as ‘rising powers’ for over a decade. India is part of BRICS, has claims and support for its regional leadership and plays a noteworthy role in global governance platforms. Turkey, in the last decade, was hailed as a ‘moderate Islamist’ democracy that the region needed, as well as an economic success story next to Europe in crisis, and engaged in a more proactive foreign policy toward the region and the world. This chapter aims to compare these two ‘rising powers’ in their engagement with the world. Rising powers have their special demands and assertions on the international political scene as well as on the global economic arrangements. As we compare we will particularly focus on two aspects of the international system that affects both countries in similar but also varying ways. First, the end of the Cold War allowed more room for manoeuvre for cusp countries like India and Turkey that straddle different regions as well as political and ideational contexts.1 Second, the rise of neoliberalism across the globe affected both the domestic and foreign policies of India and Turkey. They both were deeply affected by the homogenizing impact of neoliberalism, especially the neoliberal vision of governance. Currently both countries have conservative and neoliberal governments that promise economic growth as well as commitment to nationalism and religious conservatism. First part of the chapter will focus on responses of each of these countries to the transformation of global politics particularly with regard to three periods: the Cold War years; post–Cold War transformation and the current decade. Within this context the current ruling parties, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), are particularly significant as they came to power with a certain claim of authenticity and thus challenging the established norms and powers. Then the chapter will focus on three issues of comparison: attitudes toward policies of global governance, regionalism and, finally, politics of foreign aid. This comparison is inspired by encompassing comparison, a type of comparative method articulated by Charles Tilly (1989) as he was outlining different types of comparison. Encompassing comparison strives to learn not just about the units compared but the encompassing system within which they are located. Thus, the aim here is to understand not only the similarities and differences between these

142  Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli Altunışık two cases but also what these similarities and differences indicate about the nature of the current international political and economic order. Beyond the ‘rising power’ label, these two countries are also cases entwined in the discourse of exceptionalism. In the speeches of political elites, one finds many references to the ‘unique’ culture, history and civilizational status of these countries. The political elites justify their agential choices by referring to this exceptionalism. Nonetheless, despite this claim they seem to share similar characteristics. Firstly, each has its own trauma of fashioning themselves into the internationally recognized ‘nation-state model’ from multi-ethnic and multi-religious civilizational backgrounds. Secondly, each straddles different regions. Indeed, Turkey is seen as a country on the cusp of several regions (Altunışık 2014) and India straddles South Asia and the Indo-Pacific region. Thirdly, they are also seen as straddling different international roles at the same time, such as the role of the victim (Zarakol 2011) of the international system versus the aspirations for leading the non-West or their region and for great power status. Their responses to these traumas and their ways of navigating the different poles of gravity in their external and internal dimensions are indeed comparable. Thus, a comparative perspective will serve as a sobering exercise, to see these common threads in this quest for power and status. In the spirit of encompassing comparison, we should note that an analysis of these common threads is not just about comparing the two countries but also informative about the international political system, particularly about transition from bipolarity to unipolarity and then to uni-multipolarity,2 which constrains and enables these actors at the same time about patterns of integration to neoliberal globalization, in their economic, political and ideational dimensions.

From independence to the end of the Cold War: the longue durée of straddling regions and roles India and Turkey were established as independent states in distinctly different but comparable periods. For both, independence came after a trying period and in the aftermath of world wars. No doubt their responses to their different international environments reflected the different historical dynamics at play in the 1920s and 1940s. Turkey, after a war of independence (1919–1923) experienced the tension between increasing its autonomy and guarding sovereignty on the one hand, and is continuing its quest for being accepted as part of the Western state system on the other. India in its post-colonial position more staunchly aimed to carve itself an autonomous space in the increasingly polarized international system of the post–World War II period. Historically, the trauma of transitioning from a ‘multiethnic, multi-religious civilization’ to ‘nationhood’ is seen in both cases: “both republics were born amidst civil conflict, war and massive exchanges of population” (Ghosh 2014). The nature of the regimes after independence in both India and Turkey was part of a wider trend outside the West that represented nationalist movements with a developmental agenda. In the case of India, this narrative was “a state project based on a unified but multi-ethnic and multi-religious social democracy with a

Locating agency in global connections  143 centrally planned economy based on import-substituting industrialization, [. . .] a foreign policy based on active multilateral engagement and a non-aligned stance towards the emerging Cold War” (Chacko 2014: 438). In the case of Turkey, it was a unitary state with a centrally planned economy based on import-substituting industrialization, a secular political system, development of a multi-party system and a foreign policy that aimed at keeping national integrity. This sometimes meant that the newly founded republic engaged in international agreements such as the Montreux Convention (1936) regarding the regime of the straits, with the great powers of the time and yet kept neutrality during World War II. It also meant a great interest in regional pacts such as the Saadabad Pact (1937). During the Cold War, both republics situated themselves as proud democracies (despite periodic military interventions in Turkey) in otherwise non-democratic regions, and both had complex relationships with the West. Each republic navigated its relationships with the West differently. For Turkey’s founding leaders, the new state could become a ‘sovereign and respected’ member of the international community only through reaching the level of contemporary civilization that was defined as “Westernization” (Zarakol 2011: 143). In this narrative, however, ‘the West’ was both a source of inspiration and insecurity, which formed the basis of the ambiguity in their relations. Yet, with the advent of the Cold War, Turkey opted to join NATO for its external security as well as domestic regime concerns. For India, on the other hand, gaining its independence at another historical turning point after 150  years of British rule, choosing to be independent in a world divided into blocs was seen as necessary for its peace and security. One of the founding leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru, presented this as India’s unique role in global politics. Since the independence period was also marked by the founding of Pakistan, India had to focus firmly on territory, in a process labelled by Abraham (2014) as reterritorialization, and in the meantime, excluded a critical part of Indian population, that of the diaspora, choosing territory over nationality. Reterritorialization was also a big part of Turkish narrative in both foreign policy and domestic politics, determining the state’s role towards its newly drawn borders. The first constitution (1924) defined Turkishness as inhabitants of Turkey and claims for the so-called outside Turks were put aside. Reterritorialization and non-alignment were the two of the many strategies with which India responded to the trauma of colonialism. Indeed, these two strategies are also an example of the straddling qualities of Indian politics. On the one hand, there was a certain degree of realism along with pragmatism regarding the realities of nation and state building; on the other hand, there was the idealism of the Asian Relations Conference where India was supposed to lead a peaceful idealist and internationalist movement amidst the realpolitik of the era (Sharma and Mikliani 2016). Another axis that India straddled throughout the Cold War and arguably even today is the position of victimhood and great power status. Writing on the continuity of the ‘destined for greatness’ attitude in Indian foreign policy, Chris Ogden (2011: 4) argues that during the Cold War this was pronounced at the ideational level.

144  Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli Altunışık Turkey, on the other hand, used the strategies of reterritorialization and Westernization to deal with the difficulties of the transformation from an empire to the nation-state. In doing so, however, Turkey similarly had adopted contradictory roles. For one, Turkey straddled the roles of the “inheritor of a great empire” and the victim of the “Sèvres mentality,” referring to the Sèvres treaty, which aimed to carve out all of the former Ottoman Empire and yet was thwarted by the war of independence. Turkey also adopted the strategic goal of Westernization while keeping its ambiguity about the “West.” Having started with the strategy of neutrality immediately after their independence, India and Turkey evolved into different positions within the international system that we believe were the result of the interaction between the international context and their respective historical path dependencies. The colonial past combined with the post-1945 international dynamics led India to choose the non-aligned camp, playing a leadership role in that movement, while Turkey, in responding to the same international context in the 1940s, chose to anchor itself in the Western bloc through its NATO membership, its participation in the Marshall Plan and membership in the Council of Europe. The dynamics of the Cold War concealed many of the past fault lines inside the societies as well as the tensions in their foreign policy. The founding narrative in both countries emphasized independence and autonomy, Turkey having survived an independence war, India having survived colonialism.

The end of bipolarity: searching for new roles In the post–Cold War period, responding to the structural changes in the international system, both actors sought a new place in the newly emerging world order. This period presented the challenge of both rethinking their past and shaping their future. For India, in a world where there were no blocs, being non-aligned had lost its meaning. Although the non-aligned movement had been weakening since the mid-1970s, it was still the end of bipolarity that presented a major challenge for India. This was an issue because non-alignment was one of the anchors of state narrative. More importantly, it was an organizing principle of international relations, especially with the West. Interestingly for Turkey, which was a member of the “winning bloc” of the Cold War, the end of bipolarity also created some ambiguities as well. The demise of the Soviet Union meant that being a member of NATO was not enough anymore to be accepted in the West, as demonstrated by the EU’s rejection of Turkey’s membership application in 1989. Therefore, three similar drivers gave direction to the post–Cold War transformation of both countries: the debates about foreign policy; the choices made in the integration to the capitalist economy; and a narrative that legitimated these two steps based on identity and the accompanying claims of authenticity. These drivers were already at play in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the

Locating agency in global connections  145 Soviet Union throughout the 1990s, but they eventually culminated in the rise of the conservative neoliberal regimes that we see today. When we analyze and compare India and Turkey’s recent regimes from this framework, they do not emerge as two unique, exceptional and deeply parochial cases; instead they emerge as parts of the worldwide trends of globalisation, transformation of the international political system and an extension of their respective countries’ interaction with these trends. Debates about foreign policy The end of the Cold War brought forward different views as to the position and foreign policy direction of both countries and the nature of state identity. The debate revolved around competing worldviews and produced a revisiting of founding ideologies, Kemalist and Nehruvian paradigms.3 In India’s case there have been seemingly contradictory trends in foreign policy such as realism and idealism, militarism and pacifism (Ollapally and Rajagopalan 2012). There has been a continuing aspiration for great power, which at the same time accompanied the representation of India as a victim and voice of the South.4 In Turkey, there has been a straddling between the West and the East that continues well into the AKP period. Initially concerned about Turkey losing its strategic importance with the demise of bipolarity, several key Turkish politicians began to develop a discourse for Turkey’s importance in the world by focusing on its ideational ‘assets’ and bridging the East and the West. Such branding of Turkey came with a critique of traditional foreign policy as passive and a call for pro-activism. The new claim to a “regional” and even a “global power” has been put forward by several actors in Turkey’s politics since the late 1980s and culminated in the period of AKP, which has formed a majoritarian government since 2002. In the post–Cold War period, India also had to craft a place for itself, while straddling different roles in international politics. As a result, the new conjuncture brought some serious revisions to foreign policy, one of which involved the nuclear issue, a concern of different Indian governments in the post–Cold War period. “It was the conjuncture of the shift in the distribution of power in the post–cold war world and the advent in government of Hindu nationalists [. . .] that caused India’s abandonment of four decades of nuclear ambiguity” (Chiriyankandath 2004: 205). ‘Looking East’ and increased cooperation within the region were also foreign policy directions shared by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and Congress governments, again pointing to the search for a new place in the world system. Another important foreign policy arena was the relation with Pakistan. “During the NDA, there was therefore evidence of competing norms as the BJP’s ideology (successfully) challenged existing foreign policy precepts” (Ogden 2010: 308). These debates and the responses they produced to the changing international and domestic politics, despite their contradictions, constitute the Turkish and Indian landscapes that gave rise to the AKP government in 2002 and the BJP government in 2014, respectively.5

146  Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli Altunışık Engagement with globalization The 1990s were marked by economic liberalization and integration to the neoliberal globalization in both countries. In Turkey the shift from state-led development to economic liberalization had started in 1980, whereas the same process started in 1991 in India. Yet neoliberal transformation in Turkey also entered into a new phase in the 1990s, especially with the start of financial liberalization. On the other hand, “the Nehruvian paradigm of inward-looking economics and nonaligned foreign policy had been increasingly challenged by domestic critics since the early 1980s and there was the perception that the earlier approach in economics had reached its limits” (Ollapally and Rajagopalan 2012: 80). In India as well as in Turkey, a series of economic reforms were formulated and implemented and this had foreign policy implications as well. In India, “the economic reforms initiated by Narasimha Rao government just in the aftermath of the crumbling down of the bipolar world order led to massive readjustment in India’s foreign policy strategy. Since then, economics has emerged as the powerful locomotive of foreign policy calculus” (Pillai 2015: 2). A similar trend was also to occur in Turkish foreign policy starting in the late 1980s. Political leaders such as Turgut Özal and Süleyman Demirel in particular made the search for new markets an important part of foreign policy initiatives. This trend continued under AKP to the extent that, especially in its first 10 years, the AKP rule was likened to a trading state where economic imperatives became a significant guiding principle for foreign policy engagements (Kirişçi 2009). Issues of identity In the post–Cold War era, foreign policy increasingly became a locus of identity debates in both India and Turkey. This process culminated in the coming to power of BJP in India and AKP in Turkey, two parties that aimed to reshape domestic identity and implement foreign policies to that end. We read the rise of the identity politics as an outcome of the interaction between global politics and domestic context. Identity as an anchor in politics became increasingly prominent after the end of the Cold War with the weakening of other anchors in politics, especially the former ideologies along the lines of left and right. These developments bolstered ideology formation based on identities. At the domestic level, both India and Turkey were already amenable to identity politics since they had multiple ethnicities and religious affiliations among their populations but also one majority identity, Sunni Turk in the Turkish case and Hindutva in the Indian one. In the 1990s and the 2000s these identities were brought to the fore of political debates in India and Turkey. The secular state identity along with its Western connotations was losing ground as these majority identities were tweaked into modern political ideologies and movements. We should also note that the rise of political Islam in Turkey and Hinduism in India did not result in parochial and isolationist foreign policy attitudes. These conservative movements were well placed

Locating agency in global connections 147 to reap the benefits of this particular articulation of identity and globalization, and as such they advocated further globalization, while also constructing and benefiting from the civilizational pride in their countries.

Foreign policies of BJP and AKP: quest for power and prestige In this section, we will take a closer look at the BJP and AKP governments, their foreign policies and possible points of comparison. Later in the section, we will also present three case studies, the attitudes of these two governments with regard to global governance, regionalism and foreign aid. The BJP that returned to power in 2014 now as a majoritarian government “has as its ‘mother organization’ the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organization or RSS), an anti-Muslim, Hindu-nationalist, occasionally uniformed and stick-bearing mass movement that has often been called semi-fascist” (Stepan 2015: 129). Despite the fact that RSS members were allowed in political space, the discourse that Modi used during the elections carefully shied away from such issues. Instead, Modi focused on development, growth and governance. Many of the RSS members have been warned not to speak against non-Hindus and there was a considerable effort to burnish BJP’s new image by suppressing talk of past actions involving violence against Muslims. Very similar to the Turkish experience, questions were raised as to the sincerity of “change of heart” of the prime minister from a more militant, nationalist and religious past to one that is integrated into international forms of liberal governance. Chris Ogden claims that the BJP-led NDA governments from 1998 onwards solidified the ongoing changes in foreign policy and domestic politics and left BJP’s mark on them by mainstreaming what were indeed elements of Hindu nationalism and the belief in ‘Great India’. In this period, between late 1990s and 2014, lie the precursors to the Modi period, and the hints that the Modi regime does not represent a clear rupture but is the result of changes in the international political economy and the international system as well as how these changes interacted with the rise of uneven regional development and Hindu nationalism in India. Hindu nationalism as the narrative to bind foreign policy and domestic politics has resurfaced more strongly in the current Modi government, together with an emphasis on better integration with liberal world governance and global trade (Kavalski 2012: 46). Modi made several foreign policy moves that were more in line with his discourse of development and governance than with the conservative roots of his party. The rapprochement with Pakistan, the reaching out toward neighbours on sensitive issues, and in general, a more proactive attitude may be included here. We also have witnessed a surge of articles in international media outlets emphasizing Modi’s proactiveness and pro-business attitude, making India first, making India a smart power and so on. These discussions on foreign policy successes, some of which we mention below, were part of the attempt to dilute the fears of a BJP government in India.

148  Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli Altunışık After decades of debate about India’s place in the world, Modi’s proactive attitude also found an amenable international context, including U.S. support for India’s rising role in the Indo-Pacific In fact, the U.S. has started to express “a desire for an enhanced global role for India” (Rajendram 2015). Think tanks began to recommend that India “abandon its traditional non-aligned stance and use the Indo-Pacific concept to tie India more closely with the USA, Australia and Japan” (Chacko 2014: 444). Thus, what has arisen out of this amenable international context is a special blend of nationalism, religion, market economy and a re-reading of foreign relations, labelled by some as “Market Hinduism” (Ghosh 2014). Driven by the need for economic growth, relying on a pragmatist approach to international relations, especially for the sake of encouraging economic relations in its immediate and wider neighbourhood as well as globally, Modi claims to work towards giving India its rightful place in the world. The rise of AKP can be interpreted as interplay between international and domestic politics. A group split from Turkey’s Islamist National View movement established the party, which they described as a conservative democrat one. Initially, a curious combination of pragmatism and ideology, it found an amenable international context in the post-9/11 world when moderate Islam was promoted, especially by the U.S., as a panacea for Islamic radicalism. This was in line with AKP’s agenda for furthering economic integration for its Anatolian-based entrepreneur constituency, as well as looking for new global roles and crafting a new state identity. Domestically the AKP came to power after the severe economic crisis in 2001 and the collapse of the centre-right parties. Turkey’s search for a new place in the emerging world, combined with the post9/11 context and culmination of domestic social and economic transformations that had continued since the beginning of neo-liberal economic policies in 1980, eventually facilitated the electoral success of the AKP. In such an international and domestic context, the AKP’s foreign policy discourse began to emphasize the need for multi-dimensional and regional foreign policy by referring to historical and cultural characteristics that are accepted as given (Bilgin 2009: 119). Such a conceptualization has been related to re-casting Turkey’s domestic and international identity. Two concepts become particularly relevant. One is a constant reference to a monolithic understanding of an “Islamic civilization” and recasting Turkey as the global representative of it. For instance, Turkey’s leadership, together with Spain, of the Alliance of Civilizations, is a case in point. This was a rather new image for Turkey in the international scene. Second, there is ‘making peace’ with the Ottoman past and claiming that imperial identity, which led to the labelling of Turkey’s foreign policy as “neo-Ottomanism.” In fact, during the AKP period Turkey has been intensely involved with the former Ottoman regions of the Balkans and the Middle East. This ideational recasting coexisted with and was reinforced by the desire for further economic integration of, especially, new domestic economic centres with the global economy and to create new opportunities for them. Therefore, an interesting and novel combination of identity politics and pragmatism is common in both governments, and their foreign policy practices reflect

Locating agency in global connections 149 this combination. Thanks to the comparative emphasis here, we can see how this curious combination is not only the result of particular leaders or even particular domestic political contexts but also a result of the interplay between these and international politics and economics. Indeed, it is this specific conjuncture that initially gave rise to these parties. They share the international context that is amenable to identity politics that moderates presentations of religious politics and gives impetus for further pragmatism via mechanisms of integration to global capitalism as well as regionalism. India and Turkey also share the domestic feature of straddling different regions and roles, “cuspness.” In a uni-multipolar world that actually seems to favour the flexibility that comes from cuspness, these parties could further benefit from the opportunities brought on by the particular conjuncture they were in. The two countries also share the intriguing relationship between the democratic claims in domestic politics and their foreign policies. There is always a significant interaction between these two realms. In the case of Turkey in the 2000s, foreign policy became a significant venue from which interventions and manipulations were made to domestic politics. Furthermore, the AKP government was keen on using any international legitimacy that it could gather through its foreign policy to feed back its domestic legitimacy, especially in times of crisis. However, this relationship also took a negative turn when the proactive foreign policy seemed to fail in terms of reaching its objectives, especially towards the Middle East and specifically towards Syria. This intimate linkage between the two policy realms had a negative impact on AKP’s image as a peaceful, moderate and essentially liberal power. Similarly, the Modi government has the same potential to feed the domestic legitimacy from the international realm, especially through proactive diplomacy. However, there is a tension in this interplay of domestic politics and foreign policies. Stepan (2015: 130) calls both countries majoritarian democracies, and indeed both are proudly claiming to be democratic powers in otherwise authoritarian neighbourhoods. In the case of Turkey, as Turkey relied on its democratic credentials in increasing its profile in the international system, the cracks in its democratic practices and its increasing authoritarian tendencies put this international profile into jeopardy, especially since 2012. In the case of India as well, the democratic character of the regime is put forward as an attraction in the international arena. However, the recent practices of the Modi government are increasingly accused of being exclusionary and antidemocratic and thus tarnish India’s attractiveness as a democratic power in the Global South. It is now imperative to examine three cases that reflect both India’s and Turkey’s increasing demands from the international system and their plans to play more important roles. Global governance Reform in the global governance has been high in the agenda of both BJP and AKP governments. Both governments have been critical of existing norms of global governance and representation in international institutions. As such, they

150  Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli Altunışık have been suggesting reforms. They both interpreted this issue as part of recasting their place in the world. Despite the advances in transnational integration to global capitalism, integration to the liberal global governance has been more problematic in the two cases. For India, reform in key global governance institutions, such as the UN, is crucial, as it would reflect the changing realities around the globe and give a voice to the Global South, as well as giving India its “rightful place in the world.” Modi stated in an address to the UN General Assembly: We must reform the United Nations, including the Security Council, and make it more democratic and participative. Institutions that reflect the imperatives of 20th century won’t be effective in the 21st. It would face the risk of irrelevance and we will face the risk of continuing turbulence with no one capable of addressing it. (2014) For Turkey, UN reform has also been on the agenda. President Erdoğan has launched a campaign, “The world is bigger than five,” which criticizes representation and veto power in the UN Security Council. He also raised the issue of what he saw as the inability of the Security Council, an organ designed at the beginning of the 20th century, to face today’s challenges, particularly through his criticism of what he saw as the UN’s inaction in the Syrian conflict. Erdoğan (World Bulletin 2015) has also focused especially on non-representation of Islamic and African countries in the Security Council. India and Turkey also share a reformist attitude towards global economic institutions to which they are well integrated. Stephen argues that in the emerging powers, this integration occurs through the state, rather than the dominant classes. “The integrated state capitalism of the BRICS and their isolation from liberal processes of transnational class formation vindicates their depiction as relying more heavily on sovereignty and state initiative” (Stephen 2014: 928). So, in the absence of transnationally integrated elite, the state seeks to control the integration process through increased participation in institutions such as the UN, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank (Wall Street Journal 2015). Proactive engagement with global governance organizations is about not only international status but also having a degree of control in an increasingly denationalized and deterritorialized world, as has been demonstrated in these countries’ efforts to increase their presence in international economic institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. Regionalism For both India and Turkey the regional claim to leadership is linked to the general global status of the country, as in fact the region is seen as a ‘springboard’ to global power. Modi is proactive in the region in a self-proclaimed fashion. The publications of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of India highlight declarations of changes to policy. One of these key changes is regarding the East. The “Look

Locating agency in global connections  151 East” policy has been changed to “Act East” policy, indicating the emphasis on action and results, which are very familiar themes of AKP’s engagement with the Middle East, promising concrete results in regional trade, regional cooperation and regional leadership. The focus on regional infrastructure, to set up trade routes, to ease visa requirements for business travellers, to ease the barriers for trade and to facilitate cultural exchanges, are common policies of Erdoğan and Modi (Rajendram 2015 Kirişçi 2009). However, there are also tensions in the countries’ relations with their regions that are difficult to ease even with a proactive policy. In the Turkish case, especially since the Arab uprisings, relations with the region have become problematic. Turkey’s policies towards Syria, the Iraqi central government and Egypt became more controversial. Competition with Iran, on the other hand, has been exposed due to the Syrian crisis. AKP did not show much hesitation in engaging with the sectarian turn in Middle East politics and became a part of regional conflicts with a depth that is unprecedented in republican history. In the Indian case, conflicts in the south and northeast present difficulties in dealing with the neighbourhood, where the government is constrained by historical cleavages. Although Pakistan-India relations constitute a key issue that Modi seemed eager to change, he has failed to do so until now. Thus, the discourse of regional engagement is difficult to match in reality. The two governments’ attitudes toward economic integration and pragmatist policies seem to facilitate regional integration. But they are equally constrained at times by their own nationalism, religious backgrounds and historical cleavages. Foreign aid Foreign aid is another realm where the claims to power mix with pragmatism. Both countries have been receivers of foreign aid until very recently. However, at the same time they have aspired to become actors in the global foreign aid ecosystem. Turkey established its main foreign aid organization, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) in 1992, yet, especially in the 2000s, it increased the amount of foreign aid and diversified its regional distribution, reaching out not only to its immediate neighbourhood but also to Africa. More significantly, Turkey became the number one humanitarian aid provider in the world due to the Syrian crisis. India, on the other hand, established the Indian Development Initiative in 2003 and focused on the countries of the Global South, similarly transcending its neighbourhood and including Africa (Ollapally and Rajagopalan 2012: 95). Thanks to these efforts, India and Turkey are now perceived as emerging donors (Walz and Ramachandran 2010). They have two interesting points of comparison in this regard. Firstly, both countries are able to straddle different roles of aid receiver and aid donor simultaneously, which is most prominent in the Indian case but also visible in the Turkish case. Thus, foreign aid is another realm where the two countries are on the cusp of distinctly different international roles. Secondly,

152  Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli Altunışık like all other donors, they utilize foreign aid as an extension of their foreign policy and yet they diverge from globally established practices, innovating novel forms of aid.

Conclusion Comparing India and Turkey’s foreign policies is perhaps not the most intuitive exercise. Yet this chapter demonstrated useful venues for comparison, including both similarities and differences. It also revealed a great deal about the international context within which the foreign policies of these rising powers have been formed. Indeed India and Turkey are no ordinary players, and their position and alignment in the system does make a difference to international politics. First, this chapter emphasized the role of the interplay between domestic politics and the international system in how the state identity of India and Turkey evolved and how they situated themselves as active international actors. India and Turkey are traditionally perceived as well as self-presented as countries with a great deal of unique characteristics. This has been the case since their founding and is also a pronounced phenomenon in the BJP and AKP periods. Focusing on the interplay of domestic politics and the international system in explaining these seemingly unique characteristics not only helps to find the commonalities but also mitigates exceptionalist arguments. Key commonalities identified here are as follows. Firstly, the trajectories of their international positioning showed us that both countries are on the cusp of different regions and have different international roles. Many of the seemingly contradictory foreign policy behaviour can be explained by focusing on how India and Turkey straddled these varying roles and regions in the face of structural changes in the international system. Secondly, in the aftermath of the Cold War, both India and Turkey experienced debates that revolved around identity politics, which in turn shaped their foreign policy behaviour. These debates were accompanied by concerns about and demands about their ‘rightful place in world politics’ based on their historical depth, geopolitical significances and their material and ideational resources. Thirdly, responding to globalization, India and Turkey developed a pragmatic and enthusiastic attitude towards global economic integration and managed with some caveats to merge this attitude with their persistence in identity politics. Nevertheless, political and economic developments in the past five years in Turkey have demonstrated the pitfalls of this project. India in the first two years of the BJP government has already created doubts about the political sustainability of Modi’s “Market Hinduism.” Comparing India’s and Turkey’s foreign policies reveals, not just these similarities,6 but also the characteristics of the encompassing international system with which they interact. The main lesson of this encompassing comparison is that the conservative religious and nationalist governments that are at the same time eager to deepen their integration with global capitalism and pragmatically engage with world politics could not have risen this far without an amenable international system. Thus, studying them reveals as much about them as about the encompassing system. On the other hand, recent narrowing down of the opportunities from the

Locating agency in global connections  153 international system also means changing dynamics in domestic politics which then feed the international repositioning of these countries.

Notes 1 Cusp states are broadly defined as “states that lie uneasily on the political and/or normative edge of what is widely believed to be an established region” (Robins, 2014: 21). 2 On uni-multipolarity, Huntington (1999) says the following: It is instead a strange hybrid, a uni-multipolar system with one superpower and several major powers. The settlement of key international issues requires action by the single superpower but always with some combination of other major states; the single superpower can, however, veto action on key issues by combinations of other states. 3 For worldviews in India, see Ollapally and Rajagopalan (2012). For worldviews in Turkey, see Altunışık (2009). 4 There are many references to victimhood in the literature on Indian foreign policy. To cite a recent example: “These states [India and China], despite the wide variation in colonial experience, believed themselves to be victims of colonial domination. The political narrative they wove emphasized the wrongs they had suffered and the quest for restitution” (Miller 2013: 2). 5 For an argument on the continuity between Modi’s foreign policy and the previous two decades, see Hall (2015). 6 Although there are, of course, differences between the two cases, in the general framework of analysis we underlined the similarities.

References Abraham, I. (2014) How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Altunışık, M. B. (2009) “Worldviews and Turkey’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 40: 169–92. ——— (2014) “Geopolitical Representation of Turkey’s Cuspness: Discourse and Practice,” in M. Herzog and P. Robins (eds.) The Role, Position and Agency of Cusp States in International Relations, London: Routledge. Bilgin, P. (2009) “Securing Turkey Through Western-Oriented Foreign Policy,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 4: 105–25. Chacko, P. (2014) “The Rise of the Indo-Pacific: Understanding Ideational Change and Continuity in India’s Foreign Policy,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 68(4): 433–52. Chiriyankandath, J. (2004) “Realigning India: Indian Foreign Policy After the Cold War,” The Round Table, 93(374): 199–211. Erdoğan, R. T. (2015) World Bulletin, 2 February. Available at: www.worldbulletin.net/ news/154225/turkey-erdogan-calls-for-change-in-un-security-council [Accessed 26 July 2016]. Ghosh, A. (2014) “Erdogan and Modi: Paralel Journeys?” The Times of India (online), 30 November. Available at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deepfocus/Erdogan-and-Modi-Parallel-journeys/articleshow/45322671.cms [Accessed 30 January 2015]. Hall, I. (2015) “Is a ‘Modi Doctrine’ Emerging in Indian Foreign Policy?” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 69(3): 247–52.

154  Derya Göçer Akder, Meliha Benli Altunışık Huntington, Samuel (1999) “The Lonely Superpower,” Foreign Affairs (online). Available at: www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1999-03-01/lonely-superpower [Accessed 18 November 2016]. Kavalski, E. (2012) “ ‘Brand India’ or ‘Pax Indica’? The Myth of Assertive Posturing in India’s Post-1998 Foreign Policy Making,” Harvard University Asia Quarterly, 14(3): 46–51. Kirişçi, K. (2009) “The Transformation of Turkish Foreign Policy: The Rise of the Trading State,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 40: 29–56. Miller, M. C. (2013) Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Modi, N. (2014) “Address to the General Assembly,” United Nations, 27 September. Available at: www.un.org/en/ga/69/meetings/gadebate/pdf/IN_en.pdf [Accessed 19 January 2015]. Ogden, C. (2010) “Norms, Indian Foreign Policy and the 1998–2004 National Democratic Alliance,” The Round Table, 99(408): 303–15. ——— (2011) “International ‘Aspirations’ of a Rising Power,” in D. Scott (ed.) Handbook of India’s International Relations. London: Routledge. Ollapally, D. M. and Rajagopalan, R. (2012) “India: Foreign Policy Perspectives of an Ambiguous Power,” in H. Nau and D. Ollapally (eds.) Worldviews of Aspiring Powers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pillai, M. (2015) “ ‘Modi-Fication’ of India’s Foreign Policy Strategies: Some Reflections from a Political Economy Perspective,” ISDA Journal: Studies in Development and Public Policy, 25(1). Robins, P. (2014) “Cusp States in International Relations,” in M. Herzog and P. Robins (eds.) The Role, Position and Agency of Cusp States in International Relations, London: Routledge. Rajendram, D. (2015) “India’s New Asia-Pacific Strategy: Modi Acts East.” Available at: www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/indias-new-asia-pacific-strategy-modi-acts-east [Accessed 19 January 2015]. Sharma, D. and Mikliani, J. (2016) “India’s Global Foreign Policy Engagements – a New Paradigm?” NOREF Report (online), February, p. 2. Available at: www.peacebuilding. no/var/ezflow_site/storage/original/application/5b8313e0b6a939d7f0aff25b7cb1218b. pdf [Accessed 28 July 2016]. Stepan, A. (2015) “India, Sri Lanka and the Majoritarian Danger,” Journal of Democracy, 26(1): 128–40. Stephen, M. D. (2014) “Rising Powers, Global Capitalism and Liberal Global Governance: A Historical Materialist Account of the BRICs Challenge,” European Journal of International Relations, 20(4): 912–38. Tilly, C. (1989) Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, Russell: Sage Foundation. The Wall Street Journal (2015) “India, U.S. Reach Agreement on Food Stockpiling, Clearing Way for WTO Deal.” Available at: www.wsj.com/articles/india-u-s-reachagreement-on-food-stockpiling-clearing-way-for-wto-deal-1415861725 [Accessed 19 January 2015]. Walz, J. and Ramachandran, V. (2010) “Brave New World: A Literature Review of Emerging Donors and the Changing Nature of Foreign Assistance,” Centre for Global Development: Working Paper 273. Zarakol, A. (2011) After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live With the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10 Diaspora engagement in the United States Şebnem Köşer AkçaparDiaspora engagement in the United States

The case of India and Turkey Şebnem Köşer Akçapar

Introduction Both Turkey and India have large diasporas in the world. By extending rights as well as extracting new obligations, these two states are increasingly integrating their diasporas into social, economic, and political spheres. Transnational engagements between diaspora members and nation-states surpass traditional forms of statehood. More and more countries in the world today are actively involved with migrant communities and have established administrative mechanisms to encourage their migrant populations abroad to act as lobbyists on their behalf.1 In the United States particularly, besides fostering transnational networks for development, economic growth, and investment in the homeland, such initiatives have resulted in the mobilization of soft power to affect host country policies and change the negative stereotyping of Turks and Indians. There are two major reasons for taking up the case of the Indian and Turkish diasporas in the United States. First, when compared with the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom and the Turkish diaspora in Germany, those who migrated to the US had more cultural and economic capital with mostly urban backgrounds. Thanks to different understandings of integration and the political opportunity structures available to immigrant populations in the US, both diasporas were either free of the baggage of the colonial past (as in the case of Indians) or the discrimatory policies in Germany (as in the case of Turks). The second reason has to do with the relationship of India and Turkey to the United States, and the political opportunities available to immigrants in the United States. Since both India and Turkey have strategic ties with the United States, their respective national institutions are able to mobilize their diasporas for ‘soft power’ political gains in the United States. Hence both Indian-Americans and Turkish-Americans have successfully established caucuses in the U.S. House of Representatives alongside friendship groups in the Senate. This essay attempts to compare the formation of Indian and Turkish diasporas in the United States and the different stages in the development of diaspora institutions. It examines the role of diaspora institutions and the kind of influence and impact they wield back home. A comparative approach is important to understand the overall role of institutions in international migration, diaspora engagement, and state-led transnationalism.

156  Şebnem Köşer Akçapar In order to examine the differences and similarities in terms of challenges and opportunities available to these two different diasporic communities, the essay is divided into two sections. The first considers the characteristics of Indian and Turkish diasporas in the United States. Based on secondary sources and interviews with a number of diaspora institutions, I evaluate the composition and formation of diaspora institutions. In the second section, I analyze the role of Indian and Turkish national institutions towards immigrants and focus on diaspora engagement activities. In this section, I suggest a theoretical framework for mobilizing diaspora for the countries of origin. The chapter concludes with some recommendations and underlines the importance of conceptualizing diasporas under a new paradigm.

Brief history of Indian migration and the formation of Indian diaspora in the United States India’s heterogeneity in terms of ethnicity, language, religious background, caste/ class divisions, and regional affiliation is well represented within the Indian diaspora. In 2001 the number of Indians living abroad in more than 180 countries was estimated at 20–22  million (Pande 2013: 63; Rajan 2011: 31). The latest estimates of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs place this figure at 25–27 million. As such, the Indian diaspora is the second largest in the world, and Indians are the third largest immigrant group in the United States. The ‘old diaspora’ includes the indentured – usually involuntary – agricultural labour migrants taken by the British to far-off places like the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia, as well as kangani and maistry systems (kinship-based labour migration to work as estate overseer or headman with no formal contracts) and other trading communities who left India voluntarily from the 1830s until World War II (Grieco 1998: 704–36; Jayaram 2011: 1–24). ‘New diaspora’ refers to people who moved to Western countries, the Persian Gulf, and Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, and other Asia-Pacific countries), and international student flows and political diaspora after the establishment of the Indian state in 1947. The first Indian immigrants in the New World arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially from Punjab. These groups of single men were Hindus and Sikhs, employed in railway construction and in the agriculture sector. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act fundamentally changed the background of Indians migrating to the United States (Rangaswamy 2000: 40; Rubinoff 2005: 173). Unlike the first wave of the Punjabi Sikh diaspora, the second wave of Indian migrants comprised highly skilled professionals, including medical doctors, engineers, scientists, university professors, and doctoral and postdoctoral students in disciplines like chemistry, biochemistry, math, physics, biology, and medicine (Judge 2011). Today these professionals are privileged minorities living in suburban, upper-middle-class neighbourhoods, earning as much or more than their American-born counterparts. There is abundant literature on the identity of middle-class and skilled Indian diaspora in the United States and their success stories (see, e.g., Bhatia 2007;

Diaspora engagement in the United States  157 Bhattacharya 2008, Koshy 2008). It is widely documented that Indian Americans hold managerial or professional positions more than any other minority group and have higher per capita income (see also Rubinoff 2005: 180). The socio-economic background before departure, strong family ties, the colonial and postcolonial history of India, and discourses about race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and otherness all had an immediate impact on how Indians of the diaspora shaped their transnational identity in the United States and elsewhere. The Indian diaspora members founded many regional and small associations for cultural purposes. In time, Indian Americans established two umbrella organizations, the Federation of Indian Associations in America (FIAA) and the Association of Indians in America (AIA) with the aim of representing Indian community’s interests in the host land. Another umbrella migrant organization representing millions of Indian Americans who trace their roots to India is the National Federation of Indian American Associations (NFIA). Other important Indian diaspora organizations are the Indian American Forum for Political Education (IAFPE) and Indian American Political Advocacy Council (IAPAC), which are politically and financially active both in India and the United States. Two diasporic newspapers, namely India West and India Abroad, published in the United States, contributed significantly to the image of the ‘successful and hard-working Indian abroad’ (Lesinger 2003:173). While some of the Indian newcomers lack education, employability, and linguistic skills, there is an ongoing student migration from India to the United States, resulting in long-term or even permanent residence that may eventually feed into the existing highly skilled diasporans in the country.2 The post-1965 immigrants from India are an excellent example for transnationals, who may preserve close links with their country of origin for family and business reasons (Lesinger 2003: 174). According to statistics provided by the Ministry of Overseas Indians, almost 5 million Indians and Indian-origin people live in the United States, out of which 1,272,846 are non-resident Indians (NRI) and 3,569,050 are persons of Indian origin (POI) as of 2015.

Brief history of Turkish migration to the United States and the formation of Turkish diaspora Conservative estimates on the number of Turkish diaspora today are around 7 million, scattered in 72 countries with the largest numbers living in Germany, France, and the United States. Turkish migration to the United States was insignificant until 1900. During the last 15 years of Sultan Abdülhamid’s 33 year rule (1876– 1909), many immigrants whose country of last residence was recorded as Turkey came to the United States. By the early 1900s, larger numbers of Turks immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Only a small number of those were of Muslim origin, whereas the majority of early immigrants were non-Muslims carrying Ottoman passports who identified themselves by ethnicity and/or religion (Karpat 2006; Bali 2004). The number of Muslim Turks entering the United States between 1900 and 1920 was estimated to be around 15,000 and 20,000 and they were

158  Şebnem Köşer Akçapar mainly from southeastern Anatolia and from the lower socio-economic classes. The Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, World War I, and the Great Depression limited Turkish entry to the United States (Grabowski 2005). Following a trend similar to the Indian migration to the United States, immigration from Turkey resumed after World War II but especially after 1965, thanks to the liberalization of United States immigration laws. Another common characteristic between Indian and Turkish migrants to the United States pertains to the skills of these new immigrants. The number of people coming from Turkey increased by more than threefold between 1961 and 1970. Together with the skilled migration, several hundred semi-skilled workers, especially tailors, came from Turkey between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Halman 1980; Karpat 2006). The profile of Turkish immigrants in the United States especially diversified, however, after the 1980s with the influx of semi-skilled and unskilled migrants, also referred to as ‘Germanification’ after the Turkish labour migrants in Germany and western Europe. Today, the numbers of the Turkish immigrants are contested. The consular offices of the Turkish Foreign Ministry in the United States and the TurkishAmerican Associations estimate the numbers of people born in Turkey and of Turkish ancestry are between 450,000 and 500,000. Other sources indicate the number of people of Turkish origin in the United States in 2010 was around 250,000.3 Although the Turkish diaspora in the United States is much smaller than the Indian diaspora, Turks started to mobilize in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s. Their activities intensified in the 1990s  – at approximately the same time as Indian-Americans’. One of the umbrella organizations of Turkish-Americans, the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA) was founded in 1979 in an effort to create a more politically oriented Turkish-American organization to represent Turkish interests. Another umbrella organization, the Federation of Turkish American Associations (FTAA) started in 1956 with two associations, namely the Turkish Cypriot Aid Society and the Turkish Hars Society, and hosts over 40 member associations today. Both of these organizations compete for membership and representation among Turkish Americans as well as recognition by the Turkish Republic. Other Turkish American organizations are the American Turkish Council (ATC), American Turkish Society (ATS), and the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA). Apart from these main migrant organizations, there are several political action committees (PACs) run by Turkish-Americans raising money to campaign for political candidates (Akcapar 2012).

“Transnationalism from below” versus “transnationalism from above”: diaspora institutions in the United States and engagement activities of India and Turkey Concepts such as “transnationalism from below” and “transnationalism from above” (Smith and Guarnizo 1998) wherein the former refers to migrant organizations established in the countries of settlement and the latter underlines the homeland’s state-centred approaches to diaspora, have contributed to changing the current discourse. As transnationals par excellence, nation-states and

Diaspora engagement in the United States  159 diasporas are in constant negotiation with each other (Kastaryano 2000: 353). On the one hand, diaspora institutions represent “state-led transnationalism” or “long-distance nationalism” (Gamlen 2014: 189; Basch et al. 1992: 1–24), since such national agencies project domestic policies beyond their borders into diasporas as well as to those who stay at home; on the other, diaspora institutions also include migrant organizations that demand recognition by nation-states and even stipulate changes in practices existing in the home country. Contemporary diaspora institutions can be regarded “as an expression of post-national, supranational, or transnational membership” (Gamlen 2014: 189). What is new is the extension of the term “diaspora” that migration scholars use to include such migrant groups, and the density with which diaspora institutions operate, thanks to larger migration flows, transnational links, and growing interest in countries of origin. In the next section, I analyze and compare the two cases of Indian and Turkish diaspora engagement in the United States in the past three decades, based on extra-territorial understandings of citizenry management and reproduction of a national diasporic population with close ties of allegiance to nation-states and the political opinion of ruling governments.

The case of India: from brain drain to major support networks for Bharat Mata Between the 1950s and 1960s, establishing a relationship with older diasporas and new immigrants was not a priority in Indian foreign policy. It is reported that Prime Minister Nehru even advised Indian diplomats not to engage with them in any way. In a public speech in New York in 1978, the Indian foreign minister at the time described NRIs in the United States as deserters: ‘Bharat se Bhaga Bhartiya’ (Indians who fled from India). This is also when the “brain drain” discussion dominated the international and national agenda. The fear of India losing its talented people to the American dream seemed real and threatening at the time (Dubey 2008: 73–5). Rajiv Gandhi was probably the first Indian prime minister to change the hands-off diaspora policy by inviting all Indians back to the homeland to participate in nation-building processes. Consequently, the relationship between India and its diaspora started to change in the 1990s. First, India faced a major foreign exchange crisis during the first Gulf War but could not mobilize the much-needed assistance from NRI businessmen. Secondly, the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1990s made many Indian Americans look for opportunities for investment in India. As a result, return migration among the Indian highly skilled from the United States started because of economic and personal reasons (Sahay 2009). The presence of large number of Indian IT professionals in the United States laid the grounds for the flourishing IT sector in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The IT industry used new technologies in the Indian market that were mostly run by diaspora professionals. The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) pointed out that the majority of top Indian software businesses were founded by Indian diaspora members based in Silicon Valley (Ray 2013).

160  Şebnem Köşer Akçapar Finally, the increase in the volume of remittances was among the other major reasons leading to changing attitudes of the origin country. According to the World Bank and the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, India is among the top three remittance-receiving countries. The remittances India received in 1991 were US$2.1 billion. Between 2001 and 2002, this amount reached to US$15.8 billion, showing a steady increase each year and reaching its peak between 2011 and 2012 at US$70 billion, constituting more than 3 percent of India’s GDP. Immigrants, criticized not long ago, became the new heroes in India working for Bharat Mata (Mother India). From 1990s onwards, Indian Americans were seen as a unifying force – an asset for both the United States and India in terms of economic gain and lobbying on important political issues. In line with these developments and the political will, different policies targeting diaspora engagement were adopted in India, such as facilitating brain gain and brain circulation, strengthening the IT sector, and securing investment opportunities and philanthropic donations. While Pratham USA, the American India Foundation, TiE Global, and the National Federation of India-American Associations can be cited among the most influential Indian diaspora institutions, the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora set up in 2001 defines Indian diaspora as: “people migrated from the territories that are currently within the borders of the Republic of India.” Diaspora conventions began to be held in 2003 to engage at economic, social and cultural levels Indians living abroad. Named Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (The Overseas Indians Meetings), these large gatherings take place every January to mark the contribution of Indian diasporic community in the development of India. According to Gollerkeri and Chhabra, “This impressive gathering of [Indian] migrants epitomizes the symbiosis of transnationalism and development in all its dimensions” (2016: 224–5). January 9 was chosen as the day to celebrate this occasion since it was on this day in 1915 that Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest Pravasi, returned to India from South Africa to lead India’s freedom struggle and touched the lives of Indians forever. Simultaneously, Indian diaspora started to mobilize for elections in their country of origin. During the 1992 elections, for example, diaspora members raised US$4 million, and in 1998 their contributions reached US$7 million.4 It is also documented that Hindu nationalist politics are funded and found supporters among white-collar Indian Americans through such diaspora institutions as Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council). Hindu Swyamsevak Sangh, an overseas branch of the Hindu fundamentalist movement of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), propagates the Hindutva ideology in the United States by creating a collective Hindu identity (Rajagopal 2000; Bhatt and Mukta 2000). In 2006, speaking at the meeting, the former prime minister Manmohan Singh called for the celebration of the ‘global Indian’, praising Indian diaspora efforts and ultimately changing Nehru’s distant approach toward diasporas forever. During one of his visits to the United States, Prime Minister Modi, in his interaction with Indian diaspora at Madison Square Garden in 2014, said, “I live thousands of miles from you, but I know the things that bother you. I will make the India of your dreams.”5

Diaspora engagement in the United States  161 Following the example of China in attracting the financial and social capital of its diaspora, the Indian government developed two major legal categories for its immigrants: non-resident Indians (NRI) and persons of Indian origin (PIO). NRIs are full-fledged Indian citizens holding Indian passports but not residing in the homeland, whereas PIOs are of Indian origin but they are no longer Indian citizens. India does not recognize dual citizenship, therefore immigrants who have become naturalized American citizens can no longer enjoy their civic rights in India. The Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) scheme was introduced in 2005 after an amendment of the Citizenship Act dated 1955. The scheme was launched during the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas convention in 2006 and it grants multiple entry, lifelong visas for visiting Indians, exempt from registration with Indian police. The OCI card was given up to four generations since 2006, and replaced the earlier PIO cards. Nevertheless, this falls short of the expectations of the diaspora, such as allowing dual citizenship and voting rights.6 The U.S. Indian diaspora took up many projects in the homeland. In the field of poverty eradication, microfinance organizations for women in Bangalore were established, and in the health sector, hospitals and medical institutes were built and run by NRI doctors. The America India Foundation raised US$4.7 million for the Gujarat earthquake victims and US$2 million dollars for the Tsunami Relief Fund (Dubey 2008: 80–1; Sahay 2009: 151–2). In order to attract more investment and remittances, the Indian government created some lucrative banking incentives. For example, the Overseas Indian Facilitation Investment Center was set up in 2007. In 2013 a special scheme for the diaspora drew US$34 billion into India in months. The Global Indian Network of Knowledge was founded in 2009 to reverse the brain drain and ensure technology and skills transfer into India. The importance attached to maintaining transnational links with the upcoming generations, between the ages of 18 and 26, led to the creation of Know India Program in 2004 and Study India in 2012 by the Ministry of Overseas Indians. More scholarships were allocated for diaspora children and even the idea of establishing a university for PIOs in India was taken up for future consideration.

The case of Turkey: fragmentations within American diaspora Similarly, Turkey made an attempt to change relations with its diaspora in the 1990s. Departing from negative connotations of labelling the highly-skilled as traitors in the 1970s, a more positive image of Turks with transnational ties and in close contact with homeland prevailed. This simultaneously overlapped with Turkey’s pre-accession process to the European Union as the period after the 1990s was considered as one of economic and democratic transformation. Turkish policy during this period was directed towards integration of its immigrants in the receiving countries without losing cultural values and allegiance towards Turkey. The turning point for the creation of diaspora institutions in the US and engagement of the Turkish state was a culmination of a series of events: The American military embargo following the Turkish intervention in Cyprus in 1974, hostility

162  Şebnem Köşer Akçapar of the Greek and Armenian diaspora groups that have been very active in the United States, the damage to the image of the homeland after the release in 1978 of the movie Midnight Express, and the assassination of two Turkish diplomats in 1973 and another two in 1982 in Los Angeles by members of the Armenian diaspora who supported ASALA, an Armenian terrorist organization. The Turkish Foreign Ministry then recognized the need to mobilize highly skilled migrants in the United States to influence American policies in favour of Turkey. Within a short time, Turkish-American associations were united around a political agenda and changed their mission from organizing picnics to defending Turkey’s interests vis-à-vis the American public and politicians often in collaboration with the support of the Jewish lobby (Akcapar 2009: 178). Remittances declined sharply beginning in the 1990s due to the Turkish financial crisis, as well as immigrant populations’ growing interest in investing in host lands. Turkey received US$4.5 billion in remittances in 1990. The Turkish Statistical Institute points out that in 2015, remittances targeting Turkey totalled only US$714 million, comprising less than 0.1 per cent of the GDP and 1.3 per cent of Turkey’s trade deficit in 2015. Current policy is therefore more focused on channelling earnings into investments in the homeland and on devising development projects via philanthropy. “Social remittances” (Levitt 1996) are also important in the sense that closer contacts with Turkish-American organizations would help Turkey benefit from a flow of ideas, know-how, and the exchange of information. The biggest scientific organization of Turkish-Americans, the Turkish American Scientists and Scholars Association (TASSA), aims to build a symbolic bridge between the United States and Turkey. Established in 2004, this organization facilitates scientific exchange and short-term circular movements of highly skilled Turkish Americans. Unlike the western European context, although religion and Islam had almost no place among the secular associations formed by people coming from a certain educational and socio-cultural background in the 1960s and 1970s, there are now more and more Turkish Americans who define themselves as Turks, Americans, and Muslims. Especially after the 1980s, some religious organizations, Islamic cultural centres, and mosques were founded to serve the needs of Turkish people with even more diverse backgrounds living in the United States. The new Turkish diaspora policy is shaped by the recognition of an emerging transnational Turkish diaspora in western Europe and the United States and the re-orientation of Turkish foreign policy after 2002 when AKP (the Justice and Development Party) came to power. The establishment of a new state elite and a shift in power has led to the implementation of a new discourse on modernity and Muslim national identity in Turkey. In 1998 the Advisory Committee for Turkish Citizens Living Abroad and High Committee for Turkish Citizens Living Abroad, were founded under the Prime Ministry, in order to research and monitor the problems faced by Turkish citizens abroad and communicate them to the Turkish parliament. In the early 2000s the AKP government needed its diaspora to refurbish the image of Turkey and boost the stale EU membership agenda. In 2001 the responsibilities of the General Directorate of Foreign Relations and Workers Abroad Services, established in 2001 under the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, were reorganized and

Diaspora engagement in the United States  163 expanded. One latest institutional step was taken with the establishment of the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Relative Communities in 2010. It coordinates different institutions’ engagements with Turkish citizens abroad, as well as international students living in Turkey and civil society organizations abroad. As part of the outreach to its diaspora, Turkey granted its immigrants the right to have dual citizenship in 1981. External electoral participation, that is, out-of-the-country voting, was introduced in 2014 during the presidential elections and later on, during the general elections in 2015 and the referendum process in 2017. Turkey’s engagement with its diasporic communities in western Europe and the United States also differed to a great extent. In Germany, there is a large Turkish immigrant population, around 3 million, of which 1,383,040 have Turkish citizenship. Yet, these immigrants from Turkey are very heterogeneous, from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, such as Kurds, Alevis, Assyrians, and even Armenians. In addition to heterogeneity, the socio-cultural composition and political inclination of the Turkish diaspora in Germany has changed over time. The early migrant workers who started to head for Germany in the 1960s came from rural backgrounds and the later immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s were urban, more educated, and political dissidents. Therefore, other than already hostile migrant organizations like the Kurdish associations, the lobbying potential in Germany by Turkish migrant organizations was quite limited for two major reasons: a) the lack of willingness to lobby on behalf of the Turkish government due to differences in opinion or fear of losing institutional autonomy, like the Alevi community in Germany (AAAF); b) the focus of certain migrant organizations like the Turkish Community in Germany (TGD) and the Federation of Democratic Workers’ Associations (DIDF) with a large representation to secure equal treatment in Germany rather than to be mobilized as a lobbying force by Turkey (Aydın 2014: 23–5). In the United States, other than the highly skilled, highly educated, and ‘Kemalist’ actors in the diaspora who continue to support Turkey despite their distance from the governing party and criticism of their Islamist outlook, new actors supporting Kurdish and Alevi rights and those with closer ties to government also emerged. Diyanet Center of America (Turkish American Community Center) is run by state officials from Turkey. It has a giant mosque complex in Maryland and offers Koran courses and community-building activities for the more observant in the United States. The Turkish American Cultural Society (TACS) works closely with the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities established in 2010 that also funds migrant organizations in the United States. Since the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016, there has been an ongoing effort to put an end to the activities of Gülenists and their organizations, namely the American Turkish Friendship Association (ATFA) and the Rumi Forum in the United States.7

Conclusion Diasporas are no longer victims of the nation-state but have become its challengers (Cohen 1996). In the 21st century, nation-states are rising to meet this challenge

164  Şebnem Köşer Akçapar to engage their diasporas more intensively. As stated by Gamlenet al., “[D]iaspora institutions are overlooked both because of this [new challenge], and because they operate in the grey zone between domestic politics and international affairs – a zone that is growing more dynamic and important as global flows thicken” (2013: 4). These diaspora institutions are formal offices like ministries, directorates, and centres, dedicated to emigrants and their descendants (transnationalism from above), and non-governmental diaspora organizations led by migrants (transnationalism from below) (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). In the Turkish case, diaspora members in the United States, albeit becoming diverse and fragmented as a result of political developments, are united when it comes to supporting Turkish interests vis-à-vis other diasporic groups, such as Greeks and Armenians. Despite the increasing “political transnationalism” they enjoy in the United States, they cannot exert enough political power back home. The Indian diaspora, on the other hand, feel that India’s policy makers are mostly interested in bringing the diaspora’s economic power to India as Foreign Direct Investments, whereas the dual citizenship option is quite restricted. At the moment, South Asian diaspora based in the US has immense financial means to invest at least US$130 billion in the region (Xavier 2011; Lum 2012). Channelling this potential to India in equal and transparent ways, to maximize benefits to all layers of the society, constitutes a high priority. Anecdotal evidence further suggests that what the Indian diaspora wants to accomplish is to induce positive change in India and be recognized as equal partners in development projects. As stated by a senior diplomat working at the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, diaspora members are law-abiding ‘good citizens’ wherever they live, and are acting as permanent representatives of India. He also stated that the sole reason for diaspora conventions is not to lure investments and generate business transactions from well-to-do diasporans, but to develop mutual trust, exchange views, and provide a venue to meet different diaspora leaders.8 Both India and Turkey have intensified their engagement efforts with their diasporas since the mid-1990s, although these are by no means monolithic. Diaspora engagement involves the need to recognize the existence of multiple diaspora(s) and develop strategies and policies accordingly to address the specific needs of diasporic members. Most importantly, the position of Turkey and India in the global economy, the democratic steps they continue to take despite political problems they face at home, and the leverage they enjoy in the international community determine the level of success of their diaspora engagement.

Notes 1 Examples of such countries include, but are not limited to, those that govern through “diaspora” ministries or agencies: Serbia and Armenia established Ministries of Diaspora, Mexico founded an Institute for Mexicans Abroad, Ireland created the Irish Abroad Unit. Similarly, Italy, the Philippines, and China set up government offices to engage with their diasporas in a more effective way. 2 Between 1966 and 1977, 83 per cent of Indians who migrated to the United States were highly skilled professionals, comprising about 20,000 scientists with PhD’s, 40,000

Diaspora engagement in the United States  165 engineers, and 25,000 doctors. Indian students still constitute one of the highest numbers of international students in the United States. Student migration acts as the most important gateway for H-1B visas given to highly skilled foreign nationals after graduating from American universities. 3 The figures are from an unpublished SOPEMI report released in 2016. The U.S. Census Bureau’s numbers on Turkish Americans were much lower, partly because of failure to declare ancestry and naturalization. 4 The Gulf News reported that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) “Modi for PM” campaign run by Overseas Friends of the BJP in the United States and the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) anti-corruption and good governance promise found financial support among Indian Americans. (Available at: http://gulfnews.com/opinion/thinkers/diasporamakes-indian-election-exciting-1.1314754: “Diaspora makes Indian Election Exciting”, April 5, 2014.) 5 According to the Wall Street Journal, 28 September  2014: “Narendra Modi taps Indian diaspora in the U.S.” (Available at: www.wsj.com/articles/narendra-modi-tapsindian-diaspora-in-u-s-1411946161). 6 In 2014 Indian citizens living abroad were able to vote in India on the condition that they return to their home constituency on the election day. According to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, 1.4 million individuals of Indian origin were accorded OCI cards up to 2014. 7 These organizations led by the followers of Gülen acted as if they were ardent supporters of Turkey’s interests and participated actively in ethnic lobbying in the past. Gülen has been living in Pennsylvania since 1999, when he was found guilty by Turkish authorities for plotting the failed coup attempt in 2016. 8 Interview with Joint Secretary H. E. Vanlalhuma in New Delhi on 15 August 2016.

References Akcapar, S. K. (2009) “Turkish Associations in the United States,” Turkish Studies, 19(2): 165–93. ——— (2012) “Turkish Associations in the United States: Towards Building a Transnational Identity,” in S. K. Akcapar (ed.) Turkish Immigrants in Western Europe and North America: Immigration and Political Mobilization. New York: Routledge, 28–56. Aydın, Y. (2014) “The New Turkish Diaspora Policy,” SWP Research Paper, Berlin. Bali, R. N. (2004) Anadolu’dan Yeni Dünyaya: Amerika’ya Göç Eden ilk Türklerin Yaşam Öyküleri [From Anatolia to the New World: Life Stories of First Turks who Migrated to the United States of America], İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Basch, L., Glick-Schiller, N. and Blanc, C. S. (1992) “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration,” Annals of the New York Academy of Social Sciences, 645: 1–24. Bhatia, S. (2007) American Karma: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora, New York: New York University Press. Bhatt, C. and Mukta, P. (2000) “Hindutva in the West: Mapping the Antinomies of Diaspora Nationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(3): 436–8. Bhattacharya, G. (2008) “The Indian Diaspora in Transnational Context: Social Relations and Cultural Identities of Immigrants to New York City,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29(1): 65–80. Cohen, R. (1996) “Diasporas and the Nation-State: From Victims to Challengers,” International Affairs, 72(3): 507–20. Dubey, M. (2008) “Changing Salience of the Relationship Between the Indian Diaspora and India,” Diaspora Studies, 1(2): 73–84.

166  Şebnem Köşer Akçapar Gamlen, A. (2014) “Diaspora Institutions and Diaspora Governance,” International Migration Review, 48(1): 180–217. Gamlen, A., Cummings, M., Vaaler, P. M. and Rossouw, L. (2013) “Explaining the Rise of Diaspora Institutions,” IMI Working Paper Series, Paper 78, November. Gollerkeri, G. and Chhabra, N. (2016) Migration Matters: Mobility in a Globalizing World, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Grabowski, J. J. (2005) “Prospects and Challenges: The Study of Early Turkish Immigration to the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 25(1): 85–100. Grieco, E. M. (1998) “The Effects of Migration on the Establishment of Network: Caste Disintegration and Reformation Among the Indians of Fiji,” International Migration Review, 32(3): 704–36. Halman, T. S. (1980) “Turks,” in S. Thernstrom (ed.) Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jayaram, N. (2011) “Introduction: Understanding Diversities in the Indian Diaspora,” in N. Jayaram (ed.) Diversities in the Indian Diaspora: Nature, Implications, Responses, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1–24. Judge, P. S. (2011) “Diversity Within the Punjabi Diaspora and the Construction of Nationhood,” in N. Jayaram (ed.) Diversities in the Indian Diaspora: Nature, Implications, Responses, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 25–48. Karpat, K. H. (2006) “The Turks Finally Establish a Community in the United States,” International Journal of Turkish Studies, 12(1&2): 167–86. Kastaryano, R. (2000) “Immigration, Transnational Community and Citizenship,” International Journal of Social Sciences, 165: 353–61. Koshy, S. (2008) “Introduction: Theorizing a Neo-Diaspora,” in S. Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan (eds.) Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lesinger, J. (2003) “Indian Immigrants in the United States: The Emergence of a Transnational Population,” in B. Parekh, Gurharpal Singh and‎ Steven Vertovec (eds.) Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora, London-New York: Routledge. Levitt, P. (1996) “Social Remittances: A Conceptual Tool for Understanding Migration for Development,” Working Paper No. 96.04, Cambridge: Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Lum, K. (2012) “India’s Engagement with Its Diaspora in Comparative Perspective with China,” November, Migration Policy Centre. Available at: www.india-eu-migration.eu/ media/CARIM-India-ASN2012-01.pdf. Pande, A. (2013) “Conceptualising Indian Diaspora: Diversities Within a Common Identity,” Economic and Political Weekly, 48(49): 59–65. Rajagopal, A. (2000) “Hindu Nationalism in the US: Changing Configurations of Political Practice,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(3): 468–86. Rajan, S. I. (2011) “India,” in S. Kelegama (ed.) Migration, Remittances and Development in South Asia, New Delhi: Sage, 31–69. Rangaswamy, P. (2000) Namaste America: Indian Immigrants in an American Metropolis, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Ray, M. (2013) “Global Circulation of Skill and Capital – Pathways of Return Migration of Indian Entrepreneurs from the United States to India,” in T. T. Yong and Md. M. Rahman (eds.) Diaspora Engagement and Development in South Asia, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 75–102. Rubinoff, A. G. (2005) “The Diaspora as a Factor in US-India Relations,” Asian Affairs, 32(3): 169–87.

Diaspora engagement in the United States  167 Sahay, A. (2009) Indian Diaspora in the United States: Brain Drain or Gain? Lanham: Lexington Books. Smith, M. P. and Guarnizo, L. E. (1998) Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Xavier, C. (2011) “Experimenting with Diasporic Incorporation: The Overseas Citizenship of India,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 17(1): 34–53.

11 Perspectives on development incentives Halil TuranPerspectives on development incentives

18th-century philosophers, India and Turkey Halil Turan Contemporary developing countries are marked by distinctive social dynamics and relatively high economic growth rates compared to the rest of the world. The growth in question is the cumulative effect of the labour force that produces the commodities and services made available through selfish motivations, as certain philosophers have maintained. Each person must have a particular worldview through which she/he assesses the prospects to achieve what appears valuable. No doubt this evaluation has to do with values one attaches to the ends and the means to attain them. Hence, understanding the will to raise one’s standard of living or to raise one’s status is a matter of moral philosophy, just as the resulting improvement in society is one of economics. Eighteenth-century Britain is a historical example of economic growth; it was the leading trading and manufacturing country of Europe, and as such, attracted the attention of philosophers of the time by its dazzling trend of development. Bernard Mandeville, David Hume and Adam Smith considered the development of a society as the cumulative effect of individual selfish aspirations, and hence emphasized the role of self-love in economic and social development. Now, it is tempting to look at contemporary developing countries through the same perspective, re-employing the tools that these philosophers once had to account for the dynamics of the flourishing societies of Europe in an era that may be called the ‘infancy of capitalism’. Today, India and Turkey, having made considerable advances in industry, having command over extensive markets, appear to be comparable to the earlier European examples in terms of their economic rates of growth. A critical reconsideration of the 18th-century viewpoints could provide us with valuable insights into the nature and causes of increase in wealth, and individual development in terms of capabilities.

I Daniel Lak, the author of the influential book India Express: The Future of the New Superpower, reports a story from the early 1990s which he had heard from one of his journalist friends. The account is about Ram, a ‘press-wallah’ in Chennai. Ram irons clothes for a living, is a hard-working and reliable man. Ram is like the barbers, tailors or street vendors one may see in any city in India. One of Ram’s customers, a

Perspectives on development incentives  169 friend of Lak, narrates: Ram tells him that he plans to borrow some money from his regular customers, 1,000 rupees (US$50) from each. This is for his sons, who would study computer programming at night. Ram wants his sons to be ‘software men’. He borrows the sum he needs from a group of his customers. The press-wallah’s life changes: he works harder, he does not take Saturday afternoon off, he takes on extra work from other streets and local businesses, his sons help him on weekends and deliver his work on their bicycles (Lak 2008: 3). This goes on for two years, and one day Ram comes and proudly introduces his sons. Dressed as businessmen, they are now working ‘in real offices’. As Lak puts it, a low-caste worker has achieved his goal, and he has every reason to be proud. He repays his debts with interest. Lak says that “[f]rom a caste perspective, it was . . . once unthinkable . . . the elderly lower caste ironing man talking about his sons with Brahmins . . . and proudly repaying the money they had loaned him” (ibid.: 4).1 For Lak, “Ram is no ordinary street worker. He is part of the new India, . . . already showing the developed world how to be an economic and political superpower” (ibid.). Ram’s case seems to be exemplary for contemporary Indian society, as Lak holds, for today caste distinctions do not seem insurmountable obstacles to people who can envisage ‘rising’, and dreams of becoming rich or powerful constitute favourite topics for those who are optimistic about the future of developing countries. Gurcharan Das, for example, believes that individual aspirations for wealth and status provide the dynamism for economic growth. In Das’ book India Unbound, we find an account about a 14-year-old café waiter, Raju, who plans to finance his future computer lessons in the neighbouring village with his monthly earning of US$11.50 (Das 2001: xiii–xiv). No doubt there are many young people who dream of becoming Bill Gates, as Raju does, but first they need to be informed about the prospects of education.2 Ram’s and Raju’s stories must be familiar in countries like Turkey and India. But how many people like Ram and Raju realize their dreams? In a recent study, Anirudh Krishna asks the question “Who becomes an engineer in India?” and seeks an answer through a comprehensive empirical survey.3 Let us consider some of his findings: among the students of the six engineering colleges, members of poor Scheduled Castes or poor Scheduled Tribes are totally absent (Krishna 2014: 12). The percentage of students who have previously attended rural schools is less than 10 for the two best colleges, and reaches only as much as 20 in the lowerranking ones. Students coming from rural agriculturalist families too are almost absent in all those colleges (reaching only to 2.6% in the fourth-tier college). Students who have attended English medium schools constitute the majority in all the colleges – 80.2% in the highest-ranking college (2014: 11–12). Hence, stories like those of Ram and Raju, though they are moving, appear to be exceptions, albeit not miracles, when we refer to facts. But it seems clear that in countries like India and Turkey, or in the so-called developing countries in general, members of the lower classes and/or castes strive to prepare a better life for their children. Orhan Pamuk, in his 2015 novel A Strangeness in My Mind, narrates a story about two families who migrated to Istanbul in the late 1960s. The story ends in

170  Halil Turan 2012 when almost all the children and grandchildren of these families have succeeded in moving upwards in economic terms. The villagers of central Anatolia, peasants from Beysehir come to Istanbul as street vendors and settle in a slum (gecekondu) area near one of the centers of the city (Mecidiyekoy, near Taksim). Mevlut, the main character of the novel, joins his father selling yogurt and boza on the street at age 12. Mevlut now has the chance to go to a secondary school, an opportunity he does not have in his village. Mevlut’s student life ends in the ninth year, due to inconveniences that the life of a street vendor brings. Nevertheless, he manages to get nine years of schooling. Mevlut’s relatives, his uncle and cousins are more successful, although his cousins’ school lives are no better than Mevlut’s. They become small-scale entrepreneurs in retail and construction businesses and get associated with extreme right politics, through which they support their trade. Pamuk depicts, among other things, cases of upward mobility in Istanbul; the slum residents exchange their land for apartments in high-rise buildings; Mevlut’s daughters get much better education than their parents; one of them even gets accepted into college (Pamuk 2015). No doubt the novel is a creation of the author’s imagination, but the story sounds realistic. Pamuk’s novel provides us with an exemplary case that can hardly be called unusual in Turkey’s mega cities. Most gecekondu (slum) residents of the 1960s and 70s now own comfortable apartments, thanks to urban reconstruction policies of the 2000s. Many of the migrants’ children had schooling to some extent and fare much better than their parents and grandparents. This is not to say that this is a success story for Turkey, but social mobility, in the sense of improvement in standards of living and work, seems to be a reality in the major cities.4 ‘Upward mobility’ must appear to be a realizable ideal (at least in principle) for societies classified as ‘developing’, otherwise labour could hardly seem conducive to welfare and happiness to anyone in Ram’s or Mevlut’s station. Ram’s or Mevlut’s sons and daughters would receive better education and health care than they could in rural areas,5 and find better jobs than those of their parents.6 If the development of a society is closely related (if not identical) to the improvement of its standards of living, and to the productivity of its workforce, then Ram’s sons working in IT (information technology) or BPO (business process outsourcing) companies, or Mevlut’s daughter in the tourism sector, as ‘real office workers’, having realized at least some of their dreams, serve as evidence that the country has developed. More importantly, it is generally believed that such success stories constitute ideals for others, for they make dreams both conceivable and plausible.

II More than three centuries ago, Bernard Mandeville, one of the most influential thinkers of the 18th century, witnessed the role of emulation in economic growth. Mandeville depicted the universal characteristics of development in the sense of increase of wealth, taking London of the early decades of the 18th century as his cityscape. Although his work The Fable of the Bees, The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn’d Honest and his appended essays on the nature of a flourishing

Perspectives on development incentives 171 society, and therefore his metaphor ‘the grumbling hive’ refer to the British society of the time, Mandeville’s observations appear to be valid for all societies in states of growth, and seem relevant especially for contemporary developing countries like Turkey and India. Cities like Istanbul or Mumbai could well be Mandeville’s modern ‘grumbling hives’, where vice and virtue, poverty and opulence, oppression and will to power exist side by side: The Root of Evil, Avarice, That damn’d ill-natur’d baneful Vice, Was Slave to Prodigality, That noble Sin; whilst Luxury Employ’d a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more: Envy it self, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry; Their darling Folly, Fickleness, In Diet, Furniture and Dress, The strange ridic’lous Vice, was made The very Wheel that turned the Trade. (Mandeville 1988: 25) In “Remark M”, referring to the verses above, Mandeville writes: Pride is that Natural Faculty by which every Mortal that has any Understanding over-values and imagines better Things of himself than any impartial Judge, thoroughly acquainted with all his Qualities and Circumstances, could allow him. We are possess’d of no other Quality so beneficial to Society, and so necessary to render it wealthy and flourishing as this, yet it is that which is most generally detested. (1988: 124)7 Pride, vanity and envy are indeed universally recognized as vices. Mandeville argues that they are “natural” and “necessary to render [the society] wealthy and flourishing”. Hence, for Mandeville vice – and in particular pride, that is, the predisposition to over-value oneself, the desire to acquire every visible mark of superiority for oneself, or, simply, ‘egoism’ – constitutes the principal motivation for prosperity. Marks of distinction may be dress, machinery, house, furniture, title, lifestyle and so on. Mandeville says that “[c]lothes were originally made for two Ends, to hide our Nakedness, and to fence our Bodies against the Weather, and outward Injuries: To these our boundless Pride has added a third, which is Ornament” (1988: 127). Mandeville continues in his rather cynical language: [T]he poorest Labourer’s Wife in the Parish, who scorns to wear a strong wholesome Frize, as she might, will half starve her self and her Husband to

172  Halil Turan purchase a second-hand Gown and Petticoat. . . . The Weaver, the Shoemaker, the Tailor, the Barber, and every mean working Fellow, that can set up with little, has the Impudence with the first Money he gets, to Dress himself like a Tradesman of Substance. (1988: 129) This inclination to influence others through outward appearance is among the examples Mandeville elaborates to convince his readers that what is generally called vice, namely pride or vanity, is a ‘natural’ inclination in human nature. And it is this vice that Mandeville calls “the very Wheel that turned the Trade”. Mandeville’s uncompromising attitude towards the society he was observing made him a controversial figure  among his contemporaries. David Hume and Adam Smith, who were among his readers, were tackling the same issues concerning economic growth and selfish passions, but they were cautious about how to apply the term ‘vice’ for such inclinations. Hume, in his essay “On Refinement in the Arts”, drawing on the question of whether sloth or luxury is more pernicious to society, writes: “by banishing vicious luxury, without curing sloth and an indifference to others, you only diminish industry in the state. . . . [B]ut let us never pronounce vice in itself advantageous. . . . [I]t seems . . . little less than a contradiction in terms, to talk of a vice, which is in general beneficial to society” (Hume 2001: 114).8 Adam Smith spares a chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Part VII, Chapter  IV: “Of Licentious Systems”) to refute Mandeville’s views, where he identifies him as arguing fallaciously by calling all passions wholly vicious. For Smith, Mandeville starts from doubtful “popular ascetic doctrines which placed virtue in the entire extirpation and annihilation of all our passions” (Smith 2004: 369). Smith says that everything according to Mandeville “is luxury which exceeds what is absolutely necessary . . . [that] there is vice even in the use of a clean shirt, or of a convenient habitation” (2004: 368). Both Smith and Hume, however, admit that passions are incentives to development; but they cannot consider a general equation of passion with ‘vice’ as appropriate in a discourse that is normally supposed to attach a positive value to development in the sense of increase of wealth.9 Nevertheless, it is difficult to draw a line between virtuous and vicious ‘passions’, given the long-established view that passion itself is impairment to virtue. Almost all the major schools of ancient and modern moral philosophy seem to have agreed that virtue implies control of passions. For Hume and Smith, the term ‘passion’ could have positive connotations, especially in the context of development, and hence they find a language like Mandeville’s too cynical for an appropriate description of the nature of a flourishing society. They were observing the development of the same trading society, and they too tried to understand the same transformation in terms of passions. But they disagreed with Mandeville as they distinguished between moderate and violent passions, holding that the former are proper motivations for industry, and therefore for development.10

Perspectives on development incentives  173 Let us come back to the Indian press-wallah Ram’s case and try to understand him in his search for happiness through his sons’ achievements. He presents his sons to his customers whom he comes to visit to repay the money he had been loaned and says “already they have jobs . . . in real offices where they wear clothes like these”, pointing at the “starched white shirts and narrow black ties” (Lak 2008: 3–4). It would hardly be just to call Ram’s attitude to outward appearance ‘vicious’ since he falls victim to his pride (or to his passions). Ram’s recognition of the general symbols of wealth or of class distinctions might be naïve due to his rather restricted view, but he appears to be fully justified in his pride. Evidently, he cannot hide his childish joy. Perhaps he himself has ironed and starched those shirts. Ram and others like him do deserve to be called noble, and their deeds seem truly honourable, since these people sacrifice themselves for valuable ends. Let us note that Smith made a clear distinction between deserved pride and pride in the sense of vanity, or self-conceit: [T]he desire of doing what is honourable and noble, of rendering ourselves the proper objects of esteem and approbation, cannot with any propriety be called vanity. Even the love of well-grounded fame and reputation, the desire of acquiring esteem by what is really estimable, does not deserve that name.11 (Smith 2004: 365)

III Today, we are familiar with the tacit approval of excessive inequalities in wealth. The late Zygmunt Bauman, in his book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? warned against the normalization of injustice (Bauman 2015: 69–77). For Bauman, one no longer needs an argument for the justification of inequalities of fortune that is based on the natural inequality of talents, abilities and capacities of individuals, since “[t]oday’s natural inequality . . . finds ways to self-perpetuate without resorting to the pretence of its ‘naturalness’ ” (2015: 77). This self-­ perpetuation does not even need an argument concerning the common good, namely the stereotypical moral justification that “the pursuit of individual profit . . . provides the best mechanism for the pursuit of the common good” (2015: 3), but merely a factual justification that depends on ‘egoism’ embodied in the individuals of the consumerist world order. Bauman calls this attitude ‘one-upmanship’, which means “measuring one’s own success by the degree of others’ failure, the extent of one’s advancement by the number of others lagging behind” (2015: 62). In our world, inequalities in wealth are seen as inevitable and in fact necessary for economic growth: necessary, it may be argued, since emulation – hence productivity – depends on such inequalities, and inevitable, since distribution of wealth is one of the greatest problems that a growing economy has to face. Economic growth in the current conditions of the global economy requires the employment of qualified labour to increase productivity, as is the case in the IT

174  Halil Turan sector. However, because, as many would suggest, it is very difficult to educate the larger part of the population in step with current significant rates of economic growth, the poor have to wait until the accumulation of wealth enables governments to spend more for, say, education and health services. Unfortunately, the growth rates of the ‘developing countries’ decline, and the poor, who have nothing to sell other than their unqualified labour, will still have to wait for a just order. Therefore, inequality will continue, for it is allegedly both practical and unavoidable in the short or middle term. On the other hand, it is believed that emulation is the major incentive to improve one’s condition, as exemplified by Ram’s and others’ stories. But emulation itself could hardly be called vice, unless in a Rousseauian sense, that is, as inevitably leading to the corruption of humankind from the beginnings of society.12 Notwithstanding Bauman’s criticism of consumerist societies where excessive inequality is factually justified by ‘one-upmanship’ and related arguments on its power to enhance economic growth, emulation appears innocent in the perseverance of the poor. Hence, in relatively poor countries like Turkey and India, the view that there is an antagonism between virtue – in the sense of contentment or moderation – and the will to prosperity becomes contestable, if we consider Rams, Rajus or Mevluts, who have no other choice than to fight for a better future as their imaginations and means permit. For Mandeville, pride is the spur of industry and the cause of the wealth of a people. Eradicate vice, in the sense of pride, vanity, or covetousness, he argued, and you will stop development: Content, the Bane of Industry, Makes ’em admire their homely Store, And neither seek nor covet more. (Mandeville 1988: 34–5) Ram’s and other such stories are familiar to us; we are deeply affected to see the poor struggle for a better life, we feel that we have to consider these people as exemplars of virtue and their pride in their success as praiseworthy. However, pride has other, not so attractive faces too. Let us consider “the poorest Labourer’s Wife”, who will “half starve her self and her Husband to purchase a second-hand Gown and Petticoat” instead of wearing a simple dress that would equally keep her warm (Mandeville 1988: 129). It is not difficult to find similar examples in the world we live in: a poor waiter or a construction worker could spend a month’s wages for a smartphone or similar superfluities.13 As the income group varies, the objects of pointless consumption change; for the relatively affluent European or American worker, for example, these would be travels to distant parts of the world, newer and more comfortable cars and the like. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a tacit approval of Mandeville’s point of view today as these expenditures are seen to be necessary for economic growth: many argue that the immoderate attitude of consumption turns ‘the wheel of the trade’. Daniel Lak’s comments on India’s developing market constitute an example: “one good sign [of encouragement of employment in labour-intensive sectors] could be that Wal-Mart is

Perspectives on development incentives  175 coming to India. . . . [M]all culture is catching on, as are supermarkets. . . . It may dismay traditionalists, but advanced economies rely on shopping and retail employment as a primary engine for domestic growth” (Lak 2008: 247). It is controversial whether mall shopping and the employment it brings should be “a primary engine of growth”. No doubt malls have a significant weight in the economic activities of cities, considering the turnover and hence the jobs they create, but whether the culture they bring is truly beneficial to the society is always a matter of doubt. Could not the labour employed in the retail trade be used in a more efficient manner in other sectors? Does the stimulation to consumption that malls engender contribute to the development of human capabilities? Is it possible to evaluate human development by the quantity of consumption and economic growth?

IV The celebrated contemporary economist and philosopher Amartya Sen questions the viability of the quantitative approach underlying such optimistic views on development, arguing that it is insensitive to the perception of happiness of individuals.14 Sen draws attention to the importance of opportunities for self-­ realization, their contribution to happiness, which become detectable in life expectancy or in contentment in general. Do new trends in consumption help people realize themselves? Although Sen admits that there may be certain relations between the quantitative measures of consumption and self-realization, he advises that we should be more attentive to details. In Development as Freedom he says the following: The need to take part in the life of a community may induce demands for modern equipment (televisions, videocassette recorders, automobiles and so on) in a country where such facilities are more or less universal (unlike what would be needed in less affluent countries), and this imposes a strain on a relatively poor person in a rich country even when that person is at a much higher level of income compared with people in less opulent countries. Indeed the paradoxical phenomenon of hunger in rich countries . . . has something to do with the competing demands of these expenses. (Sen 1999: 89–90) These anxieties of relative poverty do not have to be seen as solely concerning people living in relatively opulent countries; as the world becomes connected through globalization, problems related to dissatisfaction with one’s possessions come to the fore as universal issues. There is relative poverty everywhere, and it is even more visible in developing countries where contrasts among income groups are striking. The boom in the consumption of electronic devices such as expensive smartphones, or the continually increasing demand for automobiles in a middleincome country like Turkey, seem to validate Sen’s doubts about the relations between indicators of economic growth and human development.15 It is clear that

176  Halil Turan increase in wealth cannot by itself facilitate self-realization; thus, for example, one can hardly consider car ownership – unlike education – as conducive to it. Let us ask whether relatively poor people dream of a smartphone or a car because they feel forced to hide their poverty, or because they believe that they can lead a better life by means of those ‘baubles and trinkets’ – as Smith would call such objects (Smith 2004: 215; 1981: 346). We can hardly expect a Stoic wisdom from everyone, especially from those who are not fortunate enough to receive an education that would enable them to think about the nature of a philosophically valuable life. For Amartya Sen, the attitude of evaluating advancement peculiar to welfare economics has a utilitarian background. Sen argues that since the utilitarian approach focuses solely on individual utilities as criteria, methodologically disregarding interpersonal comparisons, welfarism remains a “restrictive basis for social judgments” (Sen 2010: 278). Apparently, the ‘social judgments’ under consideration are evaluations concerning the individuals’ capabilities of pursuing the ends they consider valuable for themselves. This is development in the sense of freedom. But it seems that this freedom that the educated would be justified to value from an empathetic perspective may hardly be perceived as genuine freedom of choice in the case of the “poorest laborer’s wife” who half-starves the family for “a second hand Petticoat” – or in today’s “one-upmanship.” One could possibly argue that humanity must first be educated for freedom. But such an argument would, of course, lead to a paradox, if we ought to conceive of freedom as an inalienable right for all, without any stipulations. It seems that there remains another alternative: we can expect that an ‘invisible hand’ would in the long run secure the happiness of humanity as a whole, as each freely chooses to do whatever seems valuable to her/himself. However, this freedom could also be construed as slavery to passions. It seems that Adam Smith had to face a dilemma as he tried to re-interpret Mandeville’s view of humanity. Indeed, Smith can be seen only to be restating Mandeville in the following quotation from The Theory of Moral Sentiments: The pleasures of wealth and greatness . . . strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety. . . . And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. . . . They are led by an invisible hand to advance the interest of the society. . . . When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out of the partition. (Smith 2004: 214–6) Adam Smith, like Mandeville, seems to believe that ‘private vices’ could be ‘public benefits’; the avarice of the landlord or the factory owner creates jobs and wages, which in turn creates further jobs and wages and so on. For Smith, luxury is related to rarity and involves only some more labour: “the rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the

Perspectives on development incentives 177 poor” (ibid.: 215). I believe that this assumption is questionable if we consider the contemporary world in which there are enormous differences in wealth, both between countries and between individuals. From our perspectives, Smith seems too optimistic in assuming that ‘Providence’ neither forgets nor abandons those who are “left out of the partition”, but it is not clear why they must first be left out. If we are to believe Smith, we must expect that inequalities will be compensated for automatically by creating more jobs for producing ‘baubles and trinkets’. But why should we believe that nature, or a superior power, needs ‘baubles and trinkets’ or avarice to govern us?

Notes 1 Although caste relations fall beyond the scope of this paper, let us note that caste perspectives have been in continual change in India since the 1950s, as sociologists have noted for a long time. In 1962 Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas wrote: “a ranking of castes on principally economic or political considerations would produce a stratification somewhat different on that based on ritual considerations” (Srinivas 1970: 67–8). Srinivas, in a more recent study (Srinivas 1989 in Gupta 2012 [1992]: 312–25), argues that a new kind of caste and class mobility is to be expected for the future: the Westernized style of life leads to a life “minimally in the universe of caste and maximally in that of class.” Further, since the occupations of the contemporary generations bear no relation to those of their castes, and since universal franchise opens new horizons for mobility through politics, caste appears to be less of a hindrance for lower castes in contemporary Indian society (Srinivas 1989 in Gupta 2012 [1992]: 324). In a similar vein, Dipankar Gupta argues that “[d]emocratic politics and urbanization have made it easier for hitherto ‘low’ castes to move out and make any claim [to upper caste status] they wish to” (2000: 123). Gupta holds that mobility and transfer of occupation occur at every level, and that members of castes do not feel obliged to follow their hereditary occupations: “if certain members of a caste believe that they can forsake their traditional occupations because they do not regard them as prestigious, then they promptly abandon them at the earliest opportunity” (2000: 132–3). 2 “ ‘What will you do when you grow up?’ I asked. ‘I am going to run a computer company’, said Raju. He had decided this when he ‘saw it on TV, where this man Bilgay [Bill Gates] has a software company and he is the richest man in the world’ ” (Das 2001: xiv). Das emphasizes the motivation that TV occasions. In a similar vein, Anirudh Krishna stresses the crucial role of information and mentoring for students to visualize a future in higher education (Krishna 2014: 20; Krishna and Brihmadesam 2006: 3311–2). It appears that students in the rural parts of the country are much disadvantaged in this respect. See also note 3, below. 3 It is reported that in 2010 there were 1,600 engineering colleges in India, which admit over 500,000 students every year (2014: 2). Krishna’s survey covers six different colleges ranked by qualifications of the teaching staff and the success of their students in a standardized examination (AMCAT). The results display percentages of students with different education (rural, urban, public, private), caste, wealth and parent education backgrounds (Krishna 2014). 4 An empirical study that surveys social mobility of the population in relatively poor quarters of Istanbul and towns of central Anatolia in the early 1990s marks some upward mobility for the children of fathers from lower classes, whose members are mostly migrants to Istanbul. For example, children of unqualified service sector workers are found to become highly qualified employees or small entrepreneurs at above average rates (Boratav 2004: 48). Boratav notes a possibility of mobility through

178  Halil Turan higher education for relatively rich migrant agriculturalists’ children as well (2004: 54). The survey also shows remarkable rates of secondary and higher education for blue-collar workers’ and tradesmen’s (artisans’)/marginal men’s children in Istanbul (2004: 67). A relatively recent (2010) OECD document, “A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD Countries,” which concentrates on the influence of socio-economic family background on Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) science scores in the 2006 PISA test, shows Turkey among the countries where the related influence is relatively low (OECD 2010: 188). The analysis seems to corroborate Boratav’s findings about educational mobility of the lower classes in Istanbul. 5 Let us note that urbanization facilitates education and health care. Turkey’s rural population was 61.5% in 1970, but decreased to 22.7% in 2012 (TUIK, www.tuik.gov.tr/ UstMenu.do?metod=temelist, Nufus Istatistikleri). There is not a corresponding rapid urbanization in India, whose rural population was still about 68.8% according to the 2011 census (http://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/censusinfodashboard/index.html). 6 Although social mobility can be shown to be a fact, it must also be noted that for both Turkey and India, stability is a more concrete one. Sanjay Kumar, Anthony Heath and Oliver Heath in their paper “Determinants of Social Mobility in India” (Kumar, Heath and Heath 2002), using the 1996 National Election Study (NES) of 1996 conducted by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), calculate (men’s) inflow and outflow mobilities. The summary indexes of mobility show that the percentage of stability is 66.5 and that of horizontal movements 7.1, whereas those upwardly mobile constitute 19.4% of the total sample (approximately 10,000) (2002: 2985). According to the findings of the study, 6.4% of the present ‘higher salariat’ class is constituted by those whose fathers were ‘skilled or semi skilled manual labourers’; whereas 37% of the higher salariat come from families of the same class (inflow mobility) (2002: 2984). Calculations concerning outflow mobility show that 66% of skilled or semiskilled labourers’ children remained in the same class, while 7% managed to become high-salaried employees. Similar considerations apply to Turkey, as Boratav’s survey indicates (Boratav 2004: 48). As Boratav’s study shows, the class of ‘qualified employees’ comprises mostly those whose fathers belong to the same class (2.71 times the average); whereas the same factor is 1.35 for unqualified service workers and 1.03 for blue-collar labourers in Turkey. 7 My emphases. 8 But Hume, like Mandeville, thinks that luxury is beneficial to the society; he is only against calling luxury a vice: “luxury, when excessive, is the source of many ills; but is in general preferable to sloth and idleness, which would commonly succeed in its place, and are more hurtful both to private persons and to the public” (2001: 114). 9 It should be noted that a renowned contemporary of Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held the contrary view, arguing that luxury is detrimental to society, as it stems from inequality and aggravates injustice. For Rousseau, inequality and consequently injustice is deep-rooted in the foundations of society. From the time when the first human societies were formed, no one could bear to be ranked below the others with respect to qualities assessed by comparison. Rousseau sees the natural history of the human being as one leading to hypocrisy in the form of display and deceit: [E]very man’s rank and fate set, not only as to the amount of their goods and the power to help or to hurt, but also as to mind, beauty, strength or skill, as to merit or talents . . . one soon had to have or to affect them; for one’s own advantage one had to seem other than one in fact was. To be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake. (Rousseau 2002: 170; see also166) Hence, Mandeville’s, Hume’s and Smith’s common view on the nature of development of the society met a severe opposition by Rousseau, who read Mandeville and

Perspectives on development incentives 179 had personal contacts with Hume. Perhaps Rousseau’s most clear-cut argument against luxury is found in The Social Contract: [L]uxury is either the effect of riches, or makes them necessary; it corrupts rich and poor alike, the one by possession, the other by covetousness; it sells out the fatherland to laxity, to vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by making them slaves to one another, and all of them slaves to opinion. (Rousseau 2004: 91) 10 Amartya Sen draws our attention to Adam Smith’s distinction between motivations: In his most famous and widely quoted passage from The Wealth of Nations, [Adam Smith] wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.” Unfortunately, in the tradition of interpreting Smith as the guru of selfishness or self-love . . . the reading of his writings does not seem to go much beyond those few lines, even though that discussion is addressed only to one specific issue, namely exchange (rather than distribution or production). . . . In the rest of Smith’s writings there are extensive discussions of the role of other motivations that influence human action and behavior. (Sen 2009: xi) For Sen, those “other motivations have important roles in explaining other types of choices – for example, work discipline and commitment to obeying good rules and to treating others with respect and honour . . . in the understanding of other economic regularities” (2009: ix). Nevertheless, it still seems possible to argue that for Smith those “other motivations” too are passions that can be reduced to self-love as the ultimate motive. 11 This passage corroborates Amartya Sen’s point that we referred to in the previous note. 12 See note 9, above. 13 No doubt, one must also note the marginal utility of these gadgets. Adam Smith and David Hume drew a relation between utility and beauty (Smith 2004: 212–3; Hume 1978: 299). Smith, who put an emphasis on the economic usefulness of accumulation of goods in the society as the principal cause of increase in wealth, argues for the marginal utility of “baubles and trinkets”, whether these are buildings, equipage, garments or tweezers (Smith 1981: 346–9).   Similarly, modern electronic equipment such as cellphones or similar instruments are certainly useful. Dipankar Gupta draws our attention to the use of such equipment by Indian migrant workers: Why cellphones, I asked [the casual job seekers]? As it turned out, cellphones make a lot of sense to the wandering poor. This is the cheapest and most economical way to keep in touch with their families in faraway villages. . . . They all have cellphones for they have shrewdly realized that it helps them in their meager business. I can now call them up to deliver at my doorstep and they can receive my instructions at absolutely no cost. (Gupta 2009: 74–5) Hence, modern baubles and trinkets are useful for everyone. However, consumption assumes a different colour through consumerism, as it becomes a matter of ‘oneupmanship’ to own such things (Bauman 2015: 54, 62). This point was what Mandeville stressed in his remarks about the poor: “every mean working Fellow, that can set up with little, has the Impudence with the first Money he gets, to Dress himself like a Tradesman of Substance” (1988: 129). 14 In The Idea of Justice Sen writes: Even though the much used criteria of advancement, reflected in a mass of readily produced statistics, have tended to focus specifically on the enhancement of

180  Halil Turan inanimate objects of convenience (for example, in the gross national product (GNP), and the gross domestic product (GDP)) . . . [T]hat concentration could be ultimately justified . . . only through what these objects do to human lives they can directly or indirectly influence. The case for using instead direct indicators of the quality of life and of the well-being and freedoms that human lives can bring has been increasingly recognized. (Sen 2010: 225) 15 The Turkish Statistical Institute’s (TUIK) survey of consumption patterns in Turkey that measures distribution of household consumption expenditures from 2002 to 2015 shows that the overall expenditure for transportation has increased to 17% of the total expenditure in 2015 from 8.7% in 2002; whereas the average percentage of expenditure for educational services has remained virtually unchanged: the rate was 1.3% in 2002, (2.0% in 2003) and 2.2% in 2015 (www.turkstat.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1012, “Household Consumption Expenditure by Types of Expenditure, Turkey”). The drastic change in household consumption expenditure for transportation can be explained by the rapid increase in automobile ownership: TUIK gives the percentage of automobile ownership as 28.8%in 2006 and 42.3% in 2015 (www.turkstat.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_ id=1011, “Living condition statistics, Distribution of non-institutional population by equivalised household disposable median income groups and possession of durables, 2006–2015, Turkey”).

References Bauman, Zygmunt (2015) Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? Cambridge: Polity Press. Boratav, Korkut (2004) Istanbul ve Anadolu’dan Sinif Profilleri [Class Profiles from Istanbul and Anatolia], Ankara: Imge Kitabevi. Das, Gurcharan (2001) India Unbound, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gupta, Dipankar (2000) Interrogating Caste, New Delhi: Penguin Books. ——— (2009) The Caged Phoenix, New Delhi: Viking-Penguin Books. ——— (ed.) (2012 [1992]) Social Stratification, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hume, David (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2001) Political Essays, K. Haakonssen (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krishna, Anirudh (2014) “Examining the Structure of Opportunity and Social Mobility in India: Who Becomes an Engineer?” Development and Change, 45(1): 1–28. Krishna, Anirudh and Brihmadesam, Vijay (2006) “What Does It Take to Become a Software Professional?” Economic and Political Weekly, 29 July: 3307–14. Kumar, Sanjay, Heath, Anthony and Heath, Oliver (2002) “Determinants of Social Mobility in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 20 July: 2983–7. Lak, Daniel (2008) India Express, the Future of the New Superpower, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mandeville, Bernard (1988) The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, Vol. 1, F. B. Kaye (ed.), Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund. OECD (2010) “A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility Across OECD Countries.” Available at: www.oecd.org/dataoecd/2/7/45002641.pdf. Pamuk, Orhan (2015) A Strangeness in My Mind, E. Oklap (trans.), New York: Vintage Books. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2002) “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in V. Gourevitch (ed. and trans.) Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Perspectives on development incentives 181 ——— (2004) “The Social Contract,” in V. Gourevitch (ed. and trans.) The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, Amartya (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2009) “Introduction,” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, London: Penguin. ——— (2010) The Idea of Justice, London: Penguin. Smith, Adam (1981) The Wealth of Nations, R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, W. B. Todd (eds.), Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund. ——— (2004) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, K. Haakonssen (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Srinivas, M. N. (1970 [1962]) Caste in Modern India, New York: Asia Publishing House. ——— (1989) “Mobility in the Caste System,” in D. Gupta (ed.) (2012 [1992]) Social Stratification, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 312–25. TUIK (Turkish Statistical Institute). “Population of Province/District Centers and Towns/ Villages by Years and Sex, 1927–2016.” Available at: www.tuik.gov.tr/UstMenu. do?metod=temelist, Nufus Istatistikleri [Accessed 26 June 2017]. ——— “Types of Household Expenditure by Types of Expenditure, Turkey, 2002–2015.” Available at: www.turkstat.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1012 [Accessed 26 June 2017]. ——— “Living Condition Statistics, Distribution of Non-Institutional Population by Equivalised Household Disposable Median Income Groups and Possession of Durables, 2006–2015, Turkey.” Available at: www.turkstat.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1011 [Accessed 26 June 2017].

12 Waterproof development?

Zeynep KadirbeyoğluWaterproof development?

Impact of advocacy networks on anti-dam movements in India and Turkey1 Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu Large dams have been constructed not only as energy or irrigation projects but as prestige monuments or “modern temples” (Klingensmith 2003), driven by the obsession for growth and developmentalism2 of modern states. The environment, local livelihoods or cultures are often sidelined. The past decades have witnessed considerable contestation in relation to the construction of large dams throughout the world. In some cases, a dam has been constructed despite severe tensions and conflicts involving society, states, construction companies and donors, whereas in others, dam projects have been suspended or even cancelled. This chapter aims to investigate the effectiveness of Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) where getting an issue onto the agenda, motivating policy change and changing procedures and practices are features of effective TANs (McAteer and Pulver 2009). Therefore, effectiveness is not evaluated through a static success/failure dichotomy but takes into account the processes of project implementation and impacts in changing global and domestic norms about the issue being contested. Although effectiveness is generally considered maximized when TANs succeed in a dam project being cancelled, they may still be considered to be effective if they lead to the development of new norms and principles. This chapter examines the dam projects of Sardar Sarovar in India and Ilısu in Turkey, both of which were led by top-down developmentalist states with a modernizing vision and contested by local as well as national and transnational networks. Advocacy networks are fluid organizations that bring a complex set of relations among social movements, civil society organizations and individuals into a loose coalition (Acosta 2012). In cases where a local movement or national advocacy network is unable to influence state authorities, it may link up with a TAN or serve as the central node in creating one. In many instances they are formed by scientists or activists wishing to influence policy-making (Keck and Sikkink 1999: 89). Through the boomerang effect, TANs attempt to pressure the state from abroad, using a variety of strategies (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Feminist networks (Harcourt 2013), environmental activists (Wapner 1995) and human rights advocates (Sikkink 1993) have made extensive use of TANs. The usefulness of TANs stems from their ability to provide information and support to social movements: “information politics” is a crucial component of TANs (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 18). Within such networks, information flows

Waterproof development?  183 in two directions: outsiders provide valuable knowledge to activists in order to increase their effectiveness in defending their interests against opponents, while activists may be able to pose a credible threat to their contenders by disseminating information. Contact among network members is informal and, although fax and phone calls used to be important, more recently, email and social media are the main vehicles of communication (Hervé 2014). This chapter argues that social movements and TANs against the adverse effects of large dams are effective in changing global norms pertaining to such large-scale projects and these new norms provide pressure points to other social movements throughout the globe. An example of this is the way norms developed in the case of the Narmada Projects in India became global as a result of the World Commission on Dams and were later resorted to in the struggle against the Ilısu Dam, in Turkey. However, the immediate impact of stopping the dam construction is harder to achieve once the international financing of the project is halted and the leverage such TANs had over the states disappears.

India: the Sardar Sarovar Project In the case of the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), the Narmada River flows through three states. The dam is situated in Gujarat, with the submergence zone divided between Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Maharashtra. In such a case, the Union Government can decide to coordinate the project (Vajpeyi and Zhang 1998: 101). When the project first appeared as a possibility and feasibility studies were conducted, the states of MP and Maharashtra opposed it because Gujarat was benefiting disproportionately. Of the various government entities that were supposed to give clearance to the project – the Irrigation Department, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Water Resources, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) – only the last-named refused, in 1983. Clearance for the project was finally granted in 1987, when the MoEF agreed to the construction under certain conditions, including compensatory afforestation, treatment of watershed areas near the reservoir and improved resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) (Blinkhorn and Smith 1995: 95). The project implementation accelerated as soon as the World Bank declared it would grant a start-up loan of $450 million (Wood 1993: 975). The participation of the World Bank, whose contribution of 10% of the total cost was in no way insignificant (Herbertson and Hunter 2007), served as a signal to other investors that the project was a viable investment, which thus encouraged Japan, the UK, Germany and Canada to fund different parts of the project, ranging from the development of fisheries to the funding of turbines (Patkar 1995). Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) and the ARCH Vahini were two groups that effectively organized people for various purposes. The initial goal of both organizations was to get better R&R policies and practices (Fisher 1995). Delhi University students and an environmental NGO had carried out a field study in 1983 and produced a report on environmental and social impacts of the dam that challenged the government report (Khagram 2002). When the Gujarat government

184  Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu announced new R&R plans in 1988, the NBA claimed to have realized that it was impossible to rehabilitate all those that needed to be resettled. The NBA commissioned studies that filled the vacuum of information left by the state. These studies were important in making the NBA realize that the numbers proffered by the government were not accurate (Patkar 1995). For instance, the amount of water available had been exaggerated (Turaga 2000) and the number of persons that would be displaced was underestimated (Appa and Sridharan 2000). At that point the NBA adopted an anti-dam position, even though the ARCH Vahini had started cooperating with the government in order to ease the R&R of the displaced (Fisher 1995). There were other groups such as the Student Youth Struggle Force in Gujarat, the Narmada Valley New Consciousness Committee in MP, and the Narmada Valley Committee for the Dam Affected (Vajpeyi and Zhang 1998: 104). A national network, the National Campaign Against Big Dams, was created to scrutinize the policies and alleged benefits of large dams (Swain 1997: 828). The NBA produced the most effective critique of the SSP within the valley and was part of a loose network of national and international NGOs and organizations called the Narmada Action Committee (NAC).3 In the transnational arena, the NAC was coordinated by Lori Udall of the Environmental Defense Fund and worked to draw attention to the international campaign about the SSP (Fisher 1995: 5). The human cost of the project – the plight of the displaced – was the main frame of the movement.4 Although the Supreme Court of India ordered the project postponed, it later decided that the project should proceed in national interest (Baviskar 2005). The NAC and the International Rivers Network (IRN) organized international campaigns to raise awareness about the problems of the SSP and to pressure donor agencies. In 1989 Medha Patkar – one of the main figures of the movement against the SSP – testified at a U.S. congressional hearing on behalf of the NBA. The aim of the hearing was to evaluate the performance of the World Bank in terms of the social and environmental conditions prevailing at the sites affected by the projects that the bank supported (Sims 2001). The TAN attempted to force the multilateral and bilateral donors to refrain from financing the project. An open letter to the World Bank published in the Financial Times in September 1992 was signed by 250 organizations, coalitions and movements from around the world, requesting the bank to stop supporting the SSP (Udall 1995). News about the SSP spread immediately through the press, fax, the internet and informational meetings with NGOs from around the world (Fisher 1995). As a result of the anti-dam campaign carried out by local, national and transnational networks, the first independent review of a World Bank–supported project was commissioned in 1990 with a focus on the SSP, aiming to determine whether the allegations voiced by the anti-dam groups that related to the poor quality of R&R were true. The review was to evaluate the human and environmental impact of the project (Appa and Sridharan 2000). After examining numerous projectrelated documents and receiving input from actors on both sides (the pro-dam and the anti-dam groups) the report was submitted to the World Bank. Released in 1992, it concluded that there were serious problems with the implementation

Waterproof development?  185 of R&R because neither the World Bank nor the Indian government had appropriately assessed the human costs of the project (Wood 1993: 979). The report also pointed out that the needs of the tribal people were not adequately met by the R&R policies, and that most of the compensation policies fell short of World Bank standards (Wood 1993: 980). The World Bank reacted, not by withdrawing, but instead by trying to convince the states to take action to be more responsive to the needs of the displaced. However, European and Japanese creditors decided to withdraw their support, responding to pressure from the TAN. With the withdrawal of other supporters, the World Bank felt obliged to act, and asked the state governments to adopt R&R policies that would align with several benchmarks. On 30 March 1993, several days before the deadline for achieving the benchmarks, the state of India announced that it would withdraw its loan request (Vajpeyi and Zhang 1998: 104). When the Indian government realized it was impossible to meet the standards, it decided to build the dam with its own resources. The dam height was increased repeatedly during construction in the 2000s. The final height of 121.92 meters (considerably higher than the originally proposed 80 meters) was the last of the contestations. Despite a Supreme Court ruling that the final increase in height from 110 meters to 121.92 was not to be implemented before the states developed plans to deal with the additional displacement (Cullet 2007), the height was increased. Mired in controversy, the dam is now promoted as a tourist attraction by the government of Gujarat. In 2010, Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat and current prime minister, announced plans to place a 182-meter Statue of Unity at the top of the dam.5 The symbolic nature of the dam and its touristic appeal will be further emphasized following the completion of the statue in 2018.

Turkey: the Ilisu Dam project The Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP) is a large-scale multi-purpose development intervention consisting of 13 irrigation projects, 22 dams and 19 hydropower plants (Kibaroglu and Baskan 2011). The Ilısu Dam is part of this mega-project and has been the focal point of three rounds of mobilization that objected to the submerging of the area by the dam. The area to be flooded includes Hasankeyf, one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Turkey, with a history going back to Roman times and even earlier (Ahunbay 1999), 300 archeological sites of which only a handful have been excavated, and approximately 200 villages inhabited by more than 50,000 people – mostly Kurds.6 The first round began with the contracting of the dam in 1988. The Istanbulbased Hasankeyf Committee attempted to mobilize the Ministry of Culture to contest the project to protect the remains of Hasankeyf. The movement organized panels and concerts and lobbied ministers to secure an amendment to the project such that Hasankeyf would not be inundated. The Ministry of Culture prepared reports and challenged the State Hydraulic Works, but the response was negative: the project was declared to be compulsory if Turkey’s energy needs were to be met.7

186  Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu In the mid-1990s the government awarded the contract for the dam project to an international consortium consisting of corporations from the UK, Italy, Sweden and Turkey (Bosshard 2000). Towards the mid-1980s, the World Bank had decided to stop funding dam projects related to GAP, reflecting a change in the bank’s policy towards projects with significant negative social and environmental impacts. This negative attitude towards large dams was partly a result of activism by NBA and NAC. Short of multilateral financing, the consortium applied for export credit guarantees from various countries (Kibaroglu and Scheumann 2011). Following the formation of the consortium, the second round of mobilization began in the mid-1990s. The Volunteers for Hasankeyf (VH), composed of artists, archeologists, lawyers, academics and concerned citizens, gained prominence as the movement organized on a national scale. According to the VH, alternative projects that would not submerge cultural heritage could be devised while still providing the same amount of energy. Seeing that their demands were ignored or rejected by the government, the movement changed tactics and turned to countries that were either home to corporations that constituted the consortium, or otherwise provided credit for the project. The members of the transnational network during the second round of the anti-dam mobilization were the Berne Declaration (Switzerland), World Economy, Ecology and Development (Germany), International Rivers Network (United States), the Eye on SACE Campaign (Italy) and the Ilısu Dam Campaign (IDC) – composed of the Kurdish Human Rights Project UK, Friends of the Earth UK and Cornerhouse. The VH in Turkey was in close contact with the members of this network. The VH organized photo exhibits and panels, applied to UNESCO to have Hasankeyf listed as a World Heritage Site and sent letters to the leaders of the countries involved, demanding that they cease to support a project that would submerge a historical site. In 1999 a local civil society organization, the Hasankeyf Volunteers Association (HVA), based in the Batman province, where Hasankeyf is located, was founded to mobilize the local people against the dam project.8 The HVA mobilized despite the political problems inherent to a region that was under military emergency rule due to the Kurdish conflict.9 This political conjuncture was partly responsible for the lack of local activism until the later phases of the second round of mobilization. Furthermore, both the local movement and the national network focused on networking and issuing declarations and press releases, yet they refrained from demonstration – even the movement in Istanbul focused on pressuring the governments of other countries rather than the government of Turkey. As a result of activism the consortium disintegrated and the governments that had been in favor of providing funding ended their involvement in 2002 (Eberlein et al. 2010). Issues of concern for the transnational network were the human rights of those who would be displaced, the environmental impact and regional tensions with Syria and Iraq (Bosshard 2000). These were the movement frames of the transnational campaign during the second round, whereas the movement in Turkey focused predominantly on the cultural heritage that would be lost. The third round of the movement gained momentum when a new consortium was formed in 2005, composed of Austrian, German, Swiss and Turkish

Waterproof development? 187 contractors (Eberlein et al. 2010). These companies asked for export credit guarantees from their respective export credit agencies (ECAs). The anti-dam movement was re-activated with some of the existing networks at the transnational level, yet this time there was a clear awareness that the grassroots component had to be more active (Ilhan 2009). The main actors of the movement in Turkey in this third round were the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive and the Doga Association, an environmental NGO in Turkey. The Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive (formed in 2006), henceforth referred to as “the Initiative,” was a coalition of more than 50 human rights and environmental organizations, professional organizations, municipalities and individual activists from the region where the dam would be built. The Initiative established links with other anti-dam movements in Turkey and was active in organizing protests and issuing press releases from 2006. They even prepared a petition in collaboration with the Immigrants’ Association for Social Cooperation and Culture asking Germany for asylum for those who would be displaced by the project.10 The Doga Association formally joined the campaign in 2007 but had already been involved in organizing two “loyalty trains” from Istanbul to Hasankeyf in 2005 and 2007. The Doga Association organized protests in Hasankeyf, Istanbul, Ankara and Berlin, carried out a signature campaign to “Save Hasankeyf ” and declare it a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was active in enlisting the support of celebrities for the anti-dam movement. It even set up a local chapter in Hasankeyf. The movement had much more visibility and reaction domestically this time. The Minister of Environment and Forestry labeled those who opposed the Ilısu Dam as separatists and filed a lawsuit against the chair of the Doga Association, which referred to the minister as a serial killer of nature.11 The transnational campaign in the third round, STOP Ilısu – Save Hasankeyf, consisted of the ECA Watch (Austria), the Berne Declaration (Switzerland) and NGOs from Germany (Atzl 2014). The movement in Turkey communicated on a regular basis with the actors in the transnational network. ECAs were the target of the anti-dam TAN, and these agencies managed to strike a deal with Turkey whereby the latter agreed to abide by 153 conditions of best practice related to resettlement, the environment, cultural heritage and the neighboring states. The Initiative organized a fact-finding trip in 2007 and sent a report to the credit agencies on the state of affairs. The credit agencies organized trips to the region and documented the progress that the Turkish authorities had achieved. The final assessment found progress in the areas of resettlement and environment, but the targets related to cultural heritage had not been met (Atzl 2014). The European credit agencies withdrew because the 153 conditions which they required were not met by 2009 (Ilhan 2009). The Swiss and German companies withdrew from the project and transferred their shares to the Austrian corporation Andritz (Eberlein et al. 2010). In 2010 the government decided to rely on Turkish banks to finance the project, which triggered yet another wave of activism, this time targeting the two private banks. The Doga Association organized protests and media campaigns to raise awareness and pressure the banks to withdraw.12

188  Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu The fact that it had been a long and protracted campaign, combined with increasing pressure from the security apparatus of the state and the ongoing construction of the dam, led to TAN’s losing momentum in 2011. Intimidation, arrest and pressure on activists were partly responsible for the dissolution of the movement even though some of the most important activists of the national and transnational advocacy networks were still active. The Chamber of Architects took the dam project to court in 2012 and the court decided in 2013 that it was unlawful to construct the dam without an environmental impact assessment (EIA).13 While the construction of the Ilısu Dam continued without a valid EIA report, the government amended the 1983 Environment Law to prevent future lawsuits from challenging EIA exemptions (Scheumann et al. 2014). The VH first went to court in 2000 to object to the project, without any outcome. The European Court of Human Rights case began in 2006 where the case is still pending as of February 2016.14 As of February 2016, the construction was 85 percent complete. Despite strong national activism coupled with transnational pressure, the government continued to pursue the project, relying on funding from domestic banks.

Discussion This chapter sets out to examine the effectiveness of TANs through a comparative case study of two dams: the Sardar Sarovar and Ilısu. The effectiveness of TANs is measured by their impact on the outcome of the dam project as well as whether or not it had any influence on global and domestic norms relating to large dams. The dams in both cases described above were constructed (completed in the case of India and in the process of being completed in the case of Turkey), meaning that the initial and immediate aim of the TAN was not achieved. Top-down developmentalism without room for bottom-up participation in decision-making prevailed in both Turkey and India (Adaman and Arsel 2010; Akbulut and Adaman 2013; Klingensmith 2007; Gupta 1998). More specifically, as the dam was promoted as being in the national interest and compulsory for the energy needs to be met, developmentalism, as the predominant and “waterproof ” norm, overrides norms relating to human rights, cultural heritage and biodiversity. This partly explains why TANs were ineffective in achieving their primary goal of stopping dam constructions. As it relates to the creation of new norms and their dissemination, TAN and local movements were effective in both cases, as the discussion below reveals. In the case of India, norms “circulating in the domestic policy domain (. . .) became an international anchor when WCD [World Commission on Dams] was established” (Choudhury 2014: 122). In fact, the anti-dam movement and the TAN in the case of the SSP were influential in bringing about the formation of the WCD, which was appointed by the World Bank and World Conservation Union in 1998 (Kothari 2002). The purpose of the WCD was to “review the development effectiveness of large dams . . . and develop internationally acceptable criteria, guidelines and standards for the planning, design, appraisal, construction, operation, monitoring and decommissioning of dams.”15 The commission released a report

Waterproof development? 189 in 2000 which, according to Sims (2001), marks the watershed for social displacement becoming a global concern. Although the governments of India and Turkey did not welcome the WCD recommendations, international financial institutions were pressured into adopting standards for environmental and social impacts of large energy projects. These norms spread also to export credit agencies and private banks in the form of OECD Common Approaches for the former and Equator Principles for the latter (Herbertson and Hunter 2007). These norms, although not binding, do provide benchmarks for social movements mobilized against dams to pressure governments and international organizations to abide by higher standards in relation to resettlement, environment, cultural heritage and public participation in relation to dam-related decision-making. In the case of the Ilısu movement, the participants of TAN made use of such standards, and the anti-dam campaign in India influenced some of the actors within the Ilısu TAN, such that the WCD recommendations were immediately accepted and a fact-finding mission was organized in 2000 (the second round of mobilization in the case of Ilısu) to determine whether Turkey had made any progress in relation to the four conditions set by the ECA as a precondition for approval of export credit guarantees.16 The fact-finding mission judged the state of progress in the case of Turkey vis-à-vis the WCD recommendations, as well. As a result of the actions of TAN and the local movement in the third round of mobilization, ECAs withdrew from a project that they had initially decided to support (Atzl 2014). In analyzing whether or not the norms for large dams influence domestic policymaking, Scheumann et al. (2014) evaluate the international embeddedness of the country in question, social mobilization and the reliance of projects on foreign financial assistance and their impact on the efficacy of norms in domestic decisionmaking. Norms did not necessarily filter down to domestic decision-making in the cases of the Sardar Sarovar and Ilısu dams. The decision-making processes in Turkey and India are not the same, however. In the case of India, there are multiple actors and various stages in decision-making about dams (Choudhury 2014), whereas Turkey is highly centralized and the state agency making the decision cannot be challenged even by other ministries such as the Ministry of Culture. Therefore, the strong central bureaucracies in energy and water resource planning in Turkey go unchallenged by actors and agencies with different concerns and norms (Scheumann et al. 2014). Instead, in the case of India, the MoEF was able to challenge dam construction by initially withholding the license. However, the end result was the same, and all the ministries approved of the dam construction despite the “supposedly” greater participatory mechanisms in Indian decision-making. Social mobilization was effective in both cases and was actually the key trigger for critical evaluation of the dam projects. In India, there was a strong grassroots component from the beginning, whereas in Turkey, the grassroots component was activated much later. Silier (2012) argues that preservation of the cultural and historical environment in Turkey was an elitist movement that relied primarily on legal action or bureaucratic hindrance and was unable to appeal to, or

190  Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu mobilize the grassroots because it thought this would create further complications for attaining their objectives. Silier argues that this elitism, which was less prevalent in the cases of environmental or human rights movements, resulted in a failure to preserve cultural heritage. Hence the preservation movement should build connections with local populations and green or human rights movements such that a mass movement may be forged. This elitism, as Silier also points out, started to shatter with the Doga Association and Atlas magazine joining the struggle for Hasankeyf in the mid-2000s. Grassroots mobilization has spread further with the Turkish government’s decision to “accelerate hydropower development on an unprecedented scale” (Scheumann et al. 2014:168), especially the run-of-the-river hydropower projects (see, among others, Islar 2012; Kadirbeyoglu and Kurtic 2013). The level of grassroots challenge after 2010 in Turkey was present in India much earlier, and the pressure of civil society even achieved the legislation of a new resettlement policy through deliberation with civil society in 2007. However, although some WCD recommendations were incorporated into the policy, it binds neither the project developer nor the government (Choudhudry 2014). In both cases, a reliance on foreign financial assistance compelled the states to be more responsive to the demands of the social movements and donors for adopting higher standards. But when it became obvious through fact-finding missions and reports that they were unable to fulfill these conditions, India withdrew its demand for funds, whereas in Turkey, donors and corporations in the consortium withdrew, with the sole exception of the Austrian company. Even though TANs were able to change the norms, these did not significantly alter the fate of the two projects under investigation. Nelson (1997) argues that NGOs have not been able to influence how states view their interests, but they have modified how the World Bank is able to exercise its leverage vis-à-vis borrowing countries. When the borrowing states are able to finance the project without resorting to World Bank or international funders, then the leverage ceases to exist and the projects are implemented. Therefore, it is not possible to argue that global norms related to large dams were able to influence domestic norms. Further research is necessary to evaluate the reasons for such failure. More recently, at the global level, hydropower development is being projected as “clean, favorable and inevitable” and “controversial dam projects have again featured prominently in development planning, including on the World Bank’s funding agenda” (Huber and Joshi 2015: 13). This shows that even the norms developed at the transnational level may be challenged by pro-hydropower interest groups and by states that collaborate with them. However, studies on collective action and resistance to hydropower projects reveal that the “latent ‘political’ (. . .) exists and can resurface even in highly coercive situations and among subjugated local populations” (Huber and Joshi 2015: 22). Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the social movements and TANs in these two cases were effective in changing the norms related to large dams even though, over time, hydropower lobbies attempt to challenge these.

Waterproof development? 191

Conclusion The comparison of the mobilization to counter the Sardar Sarovar and Ilısu dams reveals the advantages of carrying out a comparative study of India and Turkey. Although there are many differences between India and Turkey (unitary versus federal states; framing of the movement; the grassroots component of the movement), there are also similarities (the hegemony of a top-down developmentalist discourse and practice). This chapter revealed that the norms and principles that were established during the Sardar Sarovar anti-dam movement were later used by the transnational and national advocacy networks in Turkey in order to pressure the ECAs and European governments. The TAN in the case of India can be said to have a cross-case effectiveness since it had an impact on the mobilization against dams in Turkey and across the globe. TANs were effective in getting the issue of adverse effects of dams on the agenda globally. This is significant, as there was hardly any funding available for large dam projects by the late 1990s and social movements contesting large dams across the globe were referring to the norms set by the WCD recommendations. The most important leverage for TANs in both cases came from the foreign funding institutions, and once their relationship to the project ended because of the state’s inability to meet standards set by funders, the movements had less leverage in their own states. Both Turkey and India, being adamant when it comes to prestigious development projects, did not backtrack from their ambitions to complete the dam construction even when norms about large dams changed, and there was no more international funding for such projects. This comparative study reveals that in both Turkey and India, so long as developmentalism is more entrenched than consideration for environmental and social impacts, the process of project planning and implementation bypasses the norms by exempting projects from environmental impact assessment or amending the EIA regulations many times, as was the case in both India and Turkey (see the edited volume by Scheumann and Hensengerth 2014). However, it is hard to generalize since both India and Turkey are states with significant control over their populations, bureaucracies and even judiciary when it comes to prestigious development projects. Further research is needed in both cases to investigate what could make states more responsive and accountable to social movements. It is possible to suggest that activists and social movements ought to challenge the hegemony of top-down developmentalism and forge alliances with such social movements at both the domestic and transnational levels.

Notes 1 The author wishes to thank Amelie Huber, Ekin Kurtic and Hande Paker for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter and Peggy Alptekin for editing. The usual caveat applies. 2 “Developmentalism” refers to a state’s actively implementing policies and projects to foster economic development.

192  Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu 3 Members of the network were “Save the Narmada Movement (India), the Rainforest Information Center (Australia), Survival International (England), Action for World Solidarity (Germany), the Environmental Defense Fund and International Rivers Network (US), Probe International (Canada) and Friends of the Earth” (Khagram 2002: 233). 4 “Movement framing” refers to the way certain issues are brought to the forefront in attempting to mobilize different parties for a common cause. 5 The Indian Express, 8 July 2013. 6 Biehl, J. (2011) “Hasankeyf: A  Story of Resistance” Z Magazine, 3 May. https:// zcomm.org/zmagazine/hasankeyf-a-story-of-resistance-by-janet-biehl/. Accessed 13 January 2016. 7 Cumhuriyet, 5 December 1988. 8 Aylin Köyatası (2014) “Modern Nuh Tufanı, Hasankeyf ” Gaia Dergi, 16. https://gaia dergi.com/modern-nuh-tufani-hasankeyf/. Accessed 30 December 2017. 9 The armed conflict between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was very intense in the early 1990s and the region was under emergency rule. PKK is considered a terrorist group by the Turkish state and has been fighting for political and cultural autonomy in Turkey. 10 Cumhuriyet, 14 September 2007. 11 Cumhuriyet, 18 July 2010. 12 Cumhuriyet, 5 January 2010. 13 Atlas, February  2013, No.  239. The prime minister’s office had issued a circular in 2012 that exempted Ilısu Dam from EIA (Radikal, 10 January 2013). 14 Cumhuriyet, 3 April 2006. 15 http://staging.unep.org/dams/WCD/. Accessed 30 December 2017. 16 The Ilısu Dam, the World Commission on Dams and Export Credit Reform: The Final Report of a Fact-Finding Mission to the Ilısu Dam Region, www.thecornerhouse.org. uk/resource/Ilısu-dam-world-commission-dams-and-export-credit-reform. Accessed 15 January 2015.

References Acosta, R. (2012) “Advocacy Networks Through a Multidisciplinary Lens: Implications for Research Agendas,” Voluntas, 23: 156–81. Adaman, F. and Arsel, M. (2010) “Globalization, Development, and Environmental Policies in Turkey,” in T. Çetin and F. Yılmaz (eds.) Understanding the Process of Economic Change in Turkey, New York: Nova Science Publishers. Ahunbay, Z. (1999) “Dünya Kültür Mirası Ölçütleri Açısından Hasankeyf ve Kurtarılma Olasılıkları,” Mimarlık, 290: 29–34. Akbulut, B. and Adaman, F. (2013) “Modernleşmenin Dayanılmaz Cazibesi: Büyüme fetişizmi,” Perspectives, 5(13): 14–17. Appa, G. and Sridharan, R. (2000) “OR Helps the Poor in a Controversial Irrigation Project,” Interfaces, 30(2): 13–28. Atzl, A. (2014) “Transnational NGO Networks Campaign Against the Ilisu Dam, Turkey,” in W. Scheumann and O. Hensengerth (eds.) Evolution of Dam Policies: Evidence From the Big Hydropower States, Berlin: Springer. Baviskar, A. (2005) In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley, 2nd ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Blinkhorn, T. A. and Smith, W. T. (1995) “India’s Narmada: River of Hope,” in W. F. Fisher (ed.) Toward Sustainable Development: Struggling Over India’s Narmada River, London: M. E. Sharpe.

Waterproof development?  193 Bosshard, P. (2000) “An NGO Perspective on the Ilısu Dam: Vested Interests and Politics,” International Water Power and Dam Construction, 1 April. Choudhury, N. (2014) “Towards Responsible Hydropower Development Through Contentious Multi-Stakeholder Negotiations: The Case of India,” in W. Scheumann and O. Hensengerth (eds.) Evolution of Dam Policies: Evidence from the Big Hydropower States, Berlin: Springer. Cullet, P. (2007) “The Sardar Sarovar Dam Project and Overview,” in P. Cullet (ed.) The Sardar Sarovar Dam Project: Selected Documents, Aldershot: Ashgate. Eberlein, C., Drillisch, H., Ayboga, E. and Wenidoppler, T. (2010) “The Ilısu Dam in Turkey and the Role of Export Credit Agencies and NGO Networks,” Water Alternatives, 3(2): 291–312. Fisher, W. F. (1995) “Development and Resistance in the Narmada Valley,” in W. F. Fisher (ed.) Toward Sustainable Development: Struggling Over India’s Narmada River, London: M. E. Sharpe. Gupta, A. (1998) Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Durham: Duke University Press. Harcourt, W. (2013) “Transnational Feminist Engagement With 2010+ Activisms,” Development and Change, 44(3): 621–37. Herbertson, K. and Hunter, D. (2007) “Emerging Standards for Sustainable Finance of the Energy Sector,” Sustainable Development Law & Policy, 7(3): 4–9. Hervé, A. (2014) “Roles of Brokerage Networks in Transnational Advocacy Networks,” Environmental Politics, 23(3): 395–416. Huber, A. and Joshi, D. (2015) “Hydropower, Anti-Politics, and the Opening of New Political Spaces in the Eastern Himalayas,” World Development, 76: 13–25. Ilhan, A. (2009) Social Movements in Sustainability Transitions: Identity, Social Learning & Power in the Spanish And Turkish Water Domains, PhD Thesis Dissertation, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Islar, M. (2012) “Privatised Hydropower Development in Turkey: A Case of Water Grabbing?” Water Alternatives, 5(2): 376–91. Kadirbeyoglu, Z. and Kurtic, E. (2013) “Problems and Prospects for Genuine Participation in Water Governance in Turkey,” in J. Goldin, L. Harris and C. Sneddon (eds.) Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South: Scarcity, Marketization and Participation, Oxon: Routledge. Keck, M. E. and Sikkink, K. (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Relations, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ——— (1999) “Transnational Advocacy Networks in International and Regional Politics,” International Social Science Journal, 51(1): 89–104. Khagram, S. (2002) “Restructuring the Global Politics of Development: The Case of India’s Narmada Valley Dams,” in S. Khagram, J. V. Riker and K. Sikkink (eds.) Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kibaroglu, A. and Baskan, A. (2011) “Turkey’s Water Policy Framework: National Frameworks and International Cooperation,” in A. Kibaroglu, W. Scheumann and A. Kramer (eds.) Turkey’s Water Policy: National Frameworks and International Cooperation, Heidelberg: Springer. Kibaroglu, A. and Scheumann, W. (2011) “Euphrates-Tigris Rivers System: Political Rapprochement and Transboundary Water Cooperation,” in A. Kibaroglu, W. Scheumann

194  Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu and A. Kramer (eds.) Turkey’s Water Policy: National Frameworks and International Cooperation, Heidelberg: Springer. Klingensmith, D. (2003) “Building India’s ‘Modern Temples’: Indians and Americans in the Damodar Valley Corporation 1945–60,” in K. Sivaramakrishnan and A. Agrawal (eds.) Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——— (2007) ‘One Valley and a Thousand’: Dams, Nationalism and Development, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kothari. S. (2002) “Globalization, Global Alliances and the Narmada Movement,” in S. Khagram, J. V. Riker and K. Sikkink (eds.) Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McAteer, E. and Pulver, S. (2009) “The Corporate Boomerang: Shareholder Transnational Advocacy Networks Targeting Oil Companies in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Global Environmental Politics, 9(1): 1–30. Nelson, P. J. (1997) “Deliberation, Leverage or Coercion? The World Bank, NGOs, and Global Environmental Politics,” Journal of Peace Research, 34(4): 467–70. Patkar, M. (1995) “The Struggle for Participation and Justice: A Historical Narrative (in conversation with Smithu Kothari),” in W. F. Fisher (ed.) Toward Sustainable Development: Struggling Over India’s Narmada River, London: M. E. Sharpe. Scheumann, W., Baumann, V., Mueller, A., Mutschler, D., Ismail, S. and Walenta, T. (2014) “Sustainable Dam Development in Turkey: Between Europeanization and Authoritarian Governance,” in W. Scheumann and O. Hensengerth (eds.) Evolution of Dam Policies: Evidence from the Big Hydropower States, Berlin: Springer. Scheumann, W. and Hensengerth, O. (eds.) (2014) Evolution of Dam Policies: Evidence from the Big Hydropower States, Berlin: Springer. Sikkink, K. (1993) “Human Rights, Principled Issue-Networks and Sovereignty in Latin America,” International Organization, 47(3): 411–41. Silier, O. (2012) “Three Hypotheses on the Establishment of a Cultural Heritage Movement in Turkey,” in D. Ünsal (ed.) Cultural Policy and Management (KPY) Yearbook 2011, Istanbul: Bilgi University Press. Sims, H. (2001) “Moved, Left No Address: Dam Construction, Displacement and Issue Salience,” Public Administration and Development, 21: 187–200. Swain, A. (1997) “Democratic Consolidation? Environmental Movements in India,” Asian Survey, 37(9): 818–32. Turaga, U. (2000) “Damming Waters and Wisdom: Protest in the Narmada River Valley,” Technology in Society, 22: 237–53. Udall, L. (1995) “The International Narmada Campaign: A Case of Sustained Advocacy,” in W. F. Fisher (ed.) Toward Sustainable Development: Struggling Over India’s Narmada River, London: M. E. Sharpe. Vajpeyi, D. K. and Zhang, (1998) “To Dam or Not to Dam: India’s Narmada River Basin Project,” in D. K. Vajpeyi (ed.) Water Management: A Comparative Perspective, London: Praeger. Wapner, P. (1995) “Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics,” World Politics, 47: 311–40. Wood, J. R. (1993) “India’s Narmada River Dams: Sardar Sarovar Under Siege,” Asian Survey, 33(10): 968–84.

Part V

Claiming the city

13 Notes on informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta Durba ChattarajInformal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta

Durba Chattaraj

R. P. Gupta, the author of a book on the sounds and cries of Calcutta’s street vendors, in a nostalgic and sentimental essay writes, “Shortly after the cleaning of the lanes and the streets began the sounds and cries of the street peddlers. All these represented the combination of voices, some hoarse, and some stentorian, songs and doggerels, the sounds of gongs and castanets, the flute and the drum . . . I will not moralize but end by saying that tired by the ceaseless decibels of mechanical sounds, I miss the old street cries and sounds” (Gupta 1990: 216, 219). While Gupta chose not the moralize in his essay, he would have been interested to hear Orhan Pamuk’s description, real or fictional, of Ataturk’s lament over the absence of street cries in 1920s Istanbul. In Pamuk’s telling, Ataturk being Ataturk, he follows up his lament with both strong moral judgement and immediate political action, and in a sort of secular-republican original myth, street vendors are allowed again into the city. Pamuk writes, “His Excellency Field Marshal Mustafa Kemal Pasha passed through Aksehir, near where I came from, in the year 1922. . . . Then he set up the Republic in Ankara, and then he went to Istanbul, where he stayed at the Park Hotel in Taksim. . . . One day he was standing at the window of his room when he noticed that the usual joy and bustle seemed to be missing from the city. He asked his assistant about it, who told him Your Excellency, we’ve banned street vendors from entering the city, because they don’t have those in Europe and we thought you’d get angry. But it was precisely this which made Ataturk angry. Street vendors are the songbirds of the streets, they are the life and soul of Istanbul, he said. Under no circumstances must they ever be banned. From that day on, street vendors were free to roam the streets of Istanbul” (Pamuk 2015a: 27). Nostalgia aside, something that strikes even a casual visitor to either Calcutta or Istanbul to this day is the dense profusion of street vending and hawking activity in these cities. Streets and main areas are lined with vendors and hawkers, selling items ranging from food, to leather goods, to vegetables, handkerchiefs, fish, flowers, plastic toys and innumerable other items. Hawkers may set up semipermanent stalls, stroll the streets with mobile carts, or set up very temporary stations from which to sell goods in a set area each day, sometimes with little more than a box from which to sell a particular good. There may be shared histories of bazaar retail forms in both India and Turkey which inform this profusion, and the

198  Durba Chattaraj persistence of vending and hawking activity across these cities can be explored in greater comparative detail, particularly given the relatively recent emergence of the restaurant proper as a form (Gharipour 2012).1 In this essay, through analyzing the practices of street vending, particularly of street food, I consider certain similarities between the cities of Calcutta and Istanbul; their relationship to neoliberal ideas of privatized, ordered and regulated cities and state responses to the dense and layered life which exists on their streets; and alternative imaginaries of urban life which can accommodate this street life, rather than dream always of its removal, of which, if we follow Pamuk, even Ataturk disapproved.2 My arguments about Calcutta emerge from extensive fieldwork on unregulated economic life in India, in both urban and rural settings, and my arguments about Istanbul, from a summer spent in the city; engagement with academic literature on space and informality in Turkey; and from a close reading of Orhan Pamuk’s recently published A Strangeness in My Mind – a novel about a street vendor in Istanbul which is essential reading for anyone interested in urban informality anywhere. Ultimately, through considering street vending in Istanbul and Calcutta in comparative perspective, I argue that the governments of these cities need alternative imaginaries of public space which acknowledge the ways in which street vending, hawking and densely layered streetscapes form part of the distinctive identities of these cities. Both cities are examined in conversation with trends towards the neoliberal re-orientation of cities globally towards privatization and new forms of regulation of their burgeoning informal sectors. In these cities, some hawkers may be officially licensed or regulated by the state, but in both cities, a majority of hawkers are informal. Hawking presents a line of work which is believed to have low entry and exit costs compared to many other lines of work in cities where formal industrial employment is on the wane, but which continue to attract rural populations. While street vending was previously seen as a “catch-all” form of employment3 which could accommodate ever-increasing numbers of people who were excluded from formal economic ordering, more recent research on urban hawking and vending suggests that entry and exit costs are not as low as previously believed (Bromley 2000; Carkoglu and Eder 2007). For formal and regulated hawkers, state sanctions and licenses are extremely limited and hard to come by. Even among informal and unregulated hawkers, entry is increasingly difficult, with space claimed, contested, and fought over, where established vendors and hawkers form associations which seek to improve the lot of their members while often simultaneously keeping new entrants out (Bhowmik 2010). While street vending and hawking does take place in many Western cities, it can be argued that it is less dense, more regulated and has fewer illegal and informal vendors compared to the two cities being considered – Istanbul and Calcutta. In New York, street vending has existed for a long time, but for much of that time there was a desire to get rid of this form of activity, culminating in 1930s with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia radically reforming vending in New York through a project of “wholesale reform, moving vendors off the streets, constructing

Informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta 199 markets and rehousing vendors in the new market buildings” (Devlin 2011). In Paris, we see a similar history, with the building and relocation of the modern Les Halles in the 1970s (Kasten 2013). Under high modernism the point of the street became the need to move automobiles in clear, neat and ordered ways. The spaces of the city were to be zoned and ordered for single-use purposes. These tenets of high modernist urban planning were then exported to the developing world in many ways and while they had extremely varied, piecemeal and uneven applications, not producing the same results everywhere, they nonetheless become models which many other cities in the Global South aspired to (Devlin 2011). In more recent times there have been moves from high modernist models of ordering to neoliberal orderings of cities, which have favored the increasing privatization of urban space, and these moves have taken place in cities across the global North and South, from New York to Tehran (Bayat 2000). At the core is a desire to privatize public space and to cleanse urban space of many forms of licit and illicit activity, from political protests to street vending. The recent protests in Istanbul have been covered in many ways – for example as student protests against a repressive state, or as secular uprisings against the AK party. Yet perhaps less attention has been paid to the fact that one of the core issues that was being protested was the building of a mall in Gezi Park, where mall-building could hardly be seen as an intrinsic part of an “Islamist” agenda. Rather than a clash between competing religio-political agendas, as was often reported in the West, the catalyst for the protest was the proposed building of a mall complex, and about differing visions of how urban space should be used within the city. In terms of the state patronage of and support for building malls, in state alignments with real estate lobbies, in order to collect rents, there is generally a push in the direction of privatization and commercial uses. There is a concomitant stepping away from mixed public uses, which range between the licit and the illicit, the legal and the illegal, and which allow for precisely the largescale forms of political protest which the state in Turkey was seeking to repress. In this neoliberal reorientation of spaces in cities towards privatization and commercial uses, Istanbul is hardly unique (Kuyucu and Unsal 2010). Indeed, in recent years in Calcutta, and India more generally, one witnesses the “mall-ification” of urban space, where the state seeks to spatially reorient cities, often aggressively, in favor of large-scale private retail. Over the past 25 years, many cities in the developing world have witnessed both the unprecedented growth of informal sectors, including street vending activities, along with the simultaneous increase in state crackdowns on these types of activities (Bhowmik 2010). In response to these crackdowns, urban informal workers have formed a number of associations in order to organize against these practices, and also to effect policies towards these activities globally (Bhowmik 2010). For those in the informal sector, the most precious and contested asset emerges as access to public space, whether on which to live (as in the case of informal housing), or on which to make a living (as in the case of mobile vendors). In such a milieu, we see the growing phenomenon of mobile hawkers, who make little claim to space, and who vend from extremely ephemeral or

200  Durba Chattaraj temporary setups, walk the city streets, or vend from buses, trains and other forms of transport, in a form of work which represents perhaps the end of the line for people seeking to make a place in the city. Mobile hawkers in buses, young men who were often supplementing family incomes, and who were extensively interviewed in Calcutta, narrated lives of extreme precariousness. The vendors I spoke with sold various items: small books with cricket statistics, metal necklaces, peanuts, sliced cucumbers and coconuts, small packets of water and cold drinks, headache medicines and balms, religious pamphlets, watch straps, garlands of jasmine, and biscuits. They earned on average $3 a day, and described the ways in which they had entered this line of work after failing to find employment in any other circumstance. They tended to be from rural areas around the city of Calcutta, and to be mostly landless, having few resources, including land, to fall back on in their home villages. Some had worked in factories around Calcutta’s peri-urbanity that had shut down. Others had voluntarily left jobs in small workshops around the city (for example in a workshop unit which produced rubber gloves) because of the very low pay, the tedium of the work and the supervision that they were subject to there. Most of them arrived at bus vending as a last-case scenario, and it represented the end of the line in an urban labor market which had few avenues to accommodate them formally, and indeed very few to accommodate them informally in more stable forms of informal work (such as setting up semi-permanent pavement stalls, driving auto-rickshaws or subcontracting with the small manufacturing workshops which dot the city). Indeed, the bus vendors, while bitter and angry about their inability to find better jobs, the extreme difficulty of making a living given their line of work and the indignity and physical ardors of their jobs, also repeatedly spoke with a measure of pride regarding being their own maalik, or boss. Their narratives were not entirely accounts of gloom and misery, and contained a strong element of how much they valued working for themselves and the travel and “freedom” that their work afforded them. This narrative of freedom was an important one for the itinerant bus vendors I spoke with. Indeed, journalist Aman Sethi’s recent excellent ethnography of a daily wage laborer in New Delhi, A Free Man, demonstrates the ways in which footloose laborers at the bottom of urban labor hierarchies should not be represented simply through narratives of deprivation and “poverty,” but rather as complex, agentive human beings who make and embrace a range of decisions, particularly those of being “free” or not being beholden to employers. Indeed, Pamuk says that the challenge he faced when writing about Mevlut Karatas, an Istanbul street vendor who variously sells boza, yogurt, ice cream, chickpeas and rice at different times in his life, was what to “make his individuality like in Hamlet or The Brothers Karamazov – to construct him as a full character” (Pamuk 2015b). One of the ways that Pamuk does this is to imbue Mevlut with some of Pamuk’s own “strange” thoughts, with some of his own being, because Pamuk and Mevlut, though separated by so many things, are both inveterate wanderers of Istanbul’s streets, and through these walks, they come to know the city. Consider the following, which could have been written about Istanbul, or Calcutta really (is there a

Informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta 201 Calcutta street pole anywhere which doesn’t advertise tuitions of some kind?), but perhaps not about New York: In October, Mevlut started selling boza again in the evenings. He’d walk for kilometers every night with all kinds of beautiful images and strange thoughts crossing his mind. During these walks, he discovered that the shadows of the trees in some neighborhoods moved even when there as no breeze at all, stray dogs got braver and cockier where street lamps were broken or switched off, and the flyers for circumcision ceremonies and cram schools pasted on utility poles and in doorways were all written in rhyming couplets. Hearing the things the city told him at night and reading the language of the streets filled Mevlut with pride. But when he went back to his rice cart in the morning and stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets, the power of his imagination waned, he sensed that the world was hollow and meaningless, and he felt the urge to return to Rayiha as quickly as possible, afraid of the overwhelming loneliness growing inside him. (2015a: 241) Loneliness and alienation are features of urban life that we all share, and Pamuk makes Mevlut’s companionship with his wife Rayiha – which comes about as a result of a fairly soap-operaish plot line involving a case of mistaken identity at a friend’s wedding – and his devastation at her loss a central theme of the book. And while reading about Mevlut and Rayiha, I kept thinking back to a strangely haunting conversation I had with a bus vendor in Calcutta who half-jokingly asked me to arrange his wedding: “Sister, do you know I haven’t married yet? Who will marry a madman? . . . Okay, sister, you find me a wife, will you? If you find a madwoman tell her there’s a madman here, right?” Many of the mobile hawkers I spoke with sold food items on buses, particularly small packets of peanuts, and sliced cucumbers and coconuts, which many bus passengers welcomed during their hot, long and tiring bus journeys. They spoke of the difficulties that they encountered when they sold their goods – including bribing the police (ranging between $0.20 to $0.50 cents a day, which is a significant amount when daily earnings tend to be around $3). They also discussed the physical demands of the work, the lack of respect from passengers and customers, and the fact that bus drivers and conductors often rudely and arbitrarily refused them entry in buses, even when they paid drivers for the right to vend their items within the buses. Food vendors in particular faced difficulties in convincing bus drivers and conductors to allow them to vend in their buses, because they were perceived to sell items (peanuts, food) which made the bus dirty and difficult to clean. Indeed, the informal selling of street food in particular in non-Western cities faces a “double control” on the part of state and other regulatory actors – first, because they face all the attempts at control aimed at informal street activity in general, and second, because food is the object of sale they become subject to another set of state controls and regulations related to issues of public safety, health and hygiene (Tinker 1997).

202  Durba Chattaraj

You can’t eat just one: street foods as danger and deliciousness Shifting ideas of dirt and hygiene can be used to trace broader societal transformations. Sudipta Kaviraj has traced the ways in which ideas of filth in the public sphere became the vehicle through which distinct classes in a city engaged in a class-based struggle for access to public spaces and appropriate behaviors within them (Kaviraj 1997). Through contesting ideas and practices of civility, order and containment in the public spaces of third-world cities, the concept of the public itself is transformed in urban South Asia, demonstrating the ways in which modernity unfolds in differing ways in divergent spaces, in a direct counter to transition narratives. Across many non-Western cities where one sees a profusion of street foods, states have increasingly become concerned about the health implications of selling prepared foods on streets (Tinker 1997). Questions of illness, hygiene and control abound. These concerns are often shared by elites within these cities, where the media often presents sensationalist accounts of the dangers of street foods (for example, reports that these foods are tainted with fecal matter and bacterial contaminants), which then result in increasing state regulation or clamping down on vendors. What does not often enter the conversation in these representations is that street food, rather than being an exotic, delicious and dangerous forms of food for urban elites, provides one of the most essential avenues for the everyday nutrition of millions of non-elites across these cities, and for the most part is safe enough to avoid mass illness and certainly fatality (Tinker 1997). Yet despite these diurnal, quotidian and functional aspects in forming an important part of urban food systems, the association of street food with filth and danger from the perspective of state regulation often persists. The abiding discourse regarding street food is one of dirt. Anthropologist Mary Douglas has famously defined dirt as “matter out of place,” and with regard to street food, it always causes anxiety because from a modernist and neoliberal perspective on space, food that is prepared, sold, served, and eaten on streets is never quite in place. That is, the place for the sale, eating and especially the preparation of food is not really meant to be the street. Yet while the history of the restaurant, an indoor space where prepared food is sold, shows that this form is really very young (many accounts place the genealogy of the modern restaurant to 1770s Paris), the restaurant form has become naturalized, while the street food form, which arguably has much deeper roots in bazaar cultures, continues to cause particular forms of anxiety. Across many places in the world, over the course of only a 300-year history, preparing food for sale in a contained, closed and covered space (that is, a restaurant) has become matter-in-place, even in places where there may be other strong cultural practices which would run counter to restaurants (for example, caste rules of commensality in South Asia). Yes, the question as to whether street food is matter-in-place persists. Should foods be vended on streets? Are streets places to eat? The continuing anxieties produced by these questions often result in state actions to regulate, curtail, control, limit or even outright remove the selling and

Informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta  203 buying of certain types of foods on streets (Tinker 1997). In the two cities discussed, Istanbul and Calcutta, street food eviction, regulation and control drives are many. At bottom is the desire to present a city of contained order, of cleanliness and delimitations, which mirrors, perhaps, in some way, the fantasy of an ordered, clean and modern Western metropolis with strict limitations and orders placed on what may be sold, prepared and consumed on city streets (Devlin 2011). There have been various counter-arguments to these efforts to remove, relocate or excessively control the production, sale and consumption of street foods in both cities. The first set of arguments are largely functional, noting that street food serves an important social function – feeding millions of people cheaply and efficiently on a daily basis where there are few other such systems and services in place (Tinker 1997). Second, that street vending itself provides a much-needed source of work and livelihood to hundreds of thousands of people working in cities across the Global South. And finally, that the market itself takes care of questions of hygiene and public health and safety – that is, no one is able to establish a successful street vending business and stay in business through poisoning customers. The very quotidian nature of street eating is seen to protect against health crises, as most street vendors tend to function through attracting large numbers of daily and repeat customers, rather than occasional customers and tourists (Tinker 1997). Pamuk titles a chapter of his novel “Rice with Chickpeas: Food Tastes Better When It’s Got Some Dirt in It,” and indeed this is an oft-repeated argument in favor of street food (often made by elites themselves) that embraces the unique dangers posed by street food as matter-not-quite-in-place, and centers on the ineffability of taste and the unique urban experiences provided by street food and street vendors. In many narratives in defense of street foods in cities in the Global South, they are presented as being essential and central to the urban “terroir” of these cities – what makes them distinct, unique and individual. While conducting fieldwork in Calcutta, and during the summer of 2012 when I lived in Istanbul, I heard the same phrase repeated regarding two popular street foods in both cities: “you can’t eat just one.” These foods, midye dolma and puchkas, mirror each other in several ways, and contrast sharply with each other in others. They are both sold mostly by mobile vendors who do not have permanent stalls, but rather temporary setups, either wheeled carts or temporary stands with trays. They are both small, round, pungently and intensely flavored, and intended to be eaten in one bite. They are eaten by people from various classes, often bringing together working-class and elite customers in enjoyment of them. And these same customers tend to believe that their best version, their ideal form, is the one which is sold on the street, not more sanitized forms which are available in restaurants, though these versions may be seen to be safer or cleaner. Pamuk has this to say about midye dolma vendors, which shows the meticulous detail and the sociological reach of his book, as well as his understanding, even as he highlights the nostalgic, traditional and historical continuities present in street vending, that these traditions themselves are constantly invented: “The two

204  Durba Chattaraj boys from Mardin had their hearts set on selling stuffed mussels. All the stuffedmussel vendors in Istanbul and Turkey were from Mardin. The boys kept going on about how Mardin had cornered the stuffed-mussel business even though it was an inland city, and clearly this must mean that people from Mardin were all exceptionally cunning and clever” (168). Indeed, Pamuk has this to say about people who wallow too much in nostalgia and celebrate too much the historical continuities presented by street vending, “ ‘Boo-zaa,’ he’d call, smiling. Customers who told him ‘You are doing something very important here’ and launched into lectures on the value of tradition and the Ottoman era mostly never came back” (387). Not just nostalgia, and not just functionality, but also taste and desire are essential for street food vendors to connect with customers. Midye dolma are mussels stuffed with rice. They are slightly spicy and intensely lemony. Selling them again is an act which necessitates the “double control” associated with street foods – first because of their informal nature, and second because of fears regarding their safety as forms of seafood sold on the street which may be unsafe and cause illness. They are sold by mobile vendors again, who often sell them from round trays mounted on stands. The dolma are spread out on these trays, their black shells radiating outwards. They are sold by the Galata bridge, along the Bosphorus, in Arnavutkoy, near Istanbul University and in many other parts of the city. Each individual dolma is inexpensive, and people tend to eat several, one after the other. A dousing of lemon provides a sour hit. Even writing this I want one now. In Calcutta, the sight of the puchkawalla (or gollgappawalla if you are from Delhi) is a familiar one. They sell small, crisp, round fried wheat shells from trays on stands, or from trays held around the vendor’s necks by a chain, or from mobile carts. Once a customer orders one, the vendor makes a small hole in the puchka with his fingers, and fills it with chickpeas and potatoes and a fiery sour tamarind water. These little crisp rounds too come with that hit of sour provided by the tamarind in the water. A discourse of danger and illness surrounds both foods: the danger in the midye dolma is seen to come from the fact that it is seafood, with seafood’s susceptibility to decay, sold outdoors with no refrigeration (Bingol, Colak, Hampikyan and Moratuglu 2008). Puchkas are vegetarian, but what makes them risky is the tamarind water that they are dipped in, believed to contain bacterial and fecal contaminants, and blamed for outbreaks of jaundice (ibid.; Gupta 2004). In both cases they present from one perspective matter-out-of-place, yet they remain immensely popular and intrinsic to the food cultures and streetscapes of their respective cities. These two foods, their popularity with a diverse range of customers in their cities and the anxieties that they produce can be read to present us with a diverse set of propositions regarding street vending practices in nonWestern cities. The first is that there are many reasons why street foods should be allowed to continue and indeed be encouraged in urban space. The reasons, ranging from functional to ineffable, include the livelihoods that vending provides, the fact that they meet a clear social need in terms of the product that they provide customers and that they play a key part in the tastes, distinctiveness and streetscapes of the cities in which they ply their wares.

Informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta  205 Ultimately, it is important for city governments to recognize the range of contributions that vending makes to these cities and their streetscapes, rather than dreaming always of their excision in favor of other, more contained urban forms which present food as matter-carefully-in-place, such as the contained, closed space of the restaurant or the private mall. Rather, they should expand their definitions of matter that is in place, and try to cultivate other imaginaries of the shared enjoyment of urban space which can allow for a wide range of urban social practices which exist on the ground to be considered intrinsic to the formations of the city.

Incomplete feedback loops of modernity If we cut to the present moment in many Western cities, particularly in the United States, we see massive desires to re-invest the city with (highly controlled) new forms of street life and street food. Food trucks across America have become hugely popular and celebrated as key players in urban resurgence, as have outdoor markets, farmers’ markets and the desire and practice to have food be local, vibrant and on the street. Accompanying these acts of celebration are policies which actively seek to revitalize urban space through the expansion of various types of street retail, including (highly controlled and licensed) street vending. These cities have come a long way from advocating for the removal of street vendors (Devlin 2011), to now advocating for their centrality to contemporary urban life. This move is not just on the part of cities in the West, in addition. Indeed, the hallmark of state investing in and ordering (highly controlled forms of ) highquality street food as inherent to a city’s cultural and social fabric is the city-state of Singapore, famed for its street food. There lies the rub of the widespread exporting of certain Western models – from high modernist to neoliberal – of how to plan, order, organize and imagine city space across a wide range of cities with very diverse social, political and cultural contexts. Once a particular idea is born – for example high modernist, centrally planned and single-use neighborhoods – it is exported to other contexts (for an excellent discussion of this transposition to New Delhi, see Ravi Sundaram’s Pirate Modernity). Yet often after a model’s export, it begins to be questioned in the place where it was born, and a new paradigm emerges (for example, the celebration of mixed-use neighborhoods in current planning practices in the West). There is always a lag, with the destination country continuing with a variation of the older method (high modernist planning). Later, there are piecemeal attempts at catching up, which lead to the paradoxical situation of the latest paradigm involving “catching up” with the very past that was meant to be excised. Let me explain what I mean with regard to street vending. Since La Guardia’s eviction drives in New York, large-scale street vending was seen to be unclean, disorderly and undesirable within a modern city. These perceptions of city space made it to many other cities in the Global South, where to be clean and modern was to get rid of the matter-out-of-place that street vending represented. At a time when these cities are aligning themselves with the greater privatization of space,

206  Durba Chattaraj crackdowns on street vendors have increased. Yet, in the West, after many years of the removal paradigm, street life in many avatars, from the local market to the food truck, is now being revitalized and celebrated. So in the cities of the Global South one ends up with piecemeal and uneven adoption of contradictory impulses – removal and celebration – all at the same time, yet both often shaped and targeted by paradigm shifts in Western planning and ideas of the city and urban space. What is needed, perhaps, are other imaginaries of urban spaces – what the cities are, what they can be and where they can go – which may lead to alternate imaginaries of cities which do not contain a desire to excise their street life in favor of mall-ification. In this, perhaps cities in the Global South can begin to dialogue with and consider each other. The orientation and imaginary should not always be towards Western cities, but rather towards other urbanities with some shared, and some divergent experiences. Mamata Banerjee, when she came to power in West Bengal’s landmark 2011 elections, declared that she would build a “Calcutta Eye” to rival the London Eye – that large Ferris wheel on London’s skyline which provides slow, expensive rides mostly to tourists, allowing them to take in the colonial magnificence of the city. While it remains to be built, the first imagination of a contemporary monument to Calcutta was a fancy Ferris wheel from London, which would provide questionable pleasure in a low-rise city of crumbling mansions, a chai-coloured river and an overwhelmingly poor population (Basul 2017). What if she looked instead to the fish sandwich (balik ekmek) boats by the Galata Bridge in Istanbul? These boats provide excellent and delicious mackerel sandwiches for less than $5. They are thronged by crowds of people from many walks of life, and the boats form a meeting place in the city for those looking for an affordable and satisfying bite in an iconic site. The boats themselves, with their ornate exteriors, bobbing up and down on the Golden Horn, recall the city’s past and form a meeting place for its present. Istanbul abounds with places like this, and Erdogan’s vision to shut down Gezi Park to build a mall was singularly destructive to the collective and public ethos of the city. Rather than the Calcutta Eye, a monument for contemporary Calcutta could include imaginaries of affordable fish-boat restaurants along the Ganges, in a city where fish is so central to everyday culinary and cultural life, and where, as in Istanbul, many residents of the city have intimate knowledge of the seasonality and freshness of local fish. When these cities consider each other, rather than looking solely to the West, other ideas, imaginaries and practices may emerge.

Notes 1 I am aware that Calcutta was created as a colonial city by the British and has no history as an Islamic city. But given longer histories of Islamic rule in the state of West Bengal, there is a possibility that these forms entered into everyday market practices. 2 This chapter is inspired by Ashis Nandy’s essay “Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin,” an impressionistic, “cultural psychological” analysis of how an alternative form of cosmopolitanism survives in the city

Informal vending in Istanbul and Calcutta 207 (Nandy 2000). As Nandy writes, his piece should not be read as a “professional ethnography,” nor is it “grounded in history.” Rather than being deeply grounded in the contemporary life of the city, the suggestive piece considers Cochin’s contemporary social fabric, presents conversations, interviews and impressions, and leaves the reader with possibilities and questions deserving of further study.   Thinking through Nandy’s methodology inspired me to think about informal street activity in Calcutta and Istanbul in comparative perspective. I am a sociocultural anthropologist who works on informality in India, in both urban and rural contexts. I also lived in Istanbul for three months in the summer of 2012, and have followed conversations over informality and space in the city over the years. This piece is necessarily impressionistic and will make modest claims, which, I hope, might be suggestive of future ideas and themes for comparative study. 3 See Sharit K. Bhowmik, “Hawkers and the Urban Sector: A Study of Street Vending in Seven Cities” at www.streetnet.org.za/docs/research/2006/en/sevencitiesindia.pdf

References Basul, S. (2017) “At 135 Metres, Kolkata to Stare London in the Eye,” The Times of India (online), 30 November. Available at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/ at-135-metres-kolkata-to-stare-london-in-the-eye/articleshow/61855559.cms. Bayat, Asef (2000) “From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’ Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South,” International Sociology, 15(3): 533–57. Bhowmik, Sharit (2010) Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy, New Delhi: Routledge. Bingol, Enver, Colak, Hilal, Hampikyan, Hamparsun, and Muratoglu, Karlo (2008) “The Microbiological Quality of Stuffed Mussels (Midye Dolma) Sold in Istanbul,” British Food Journal, 110(11): 1079–87. Bromley, Ray (2000) “Street Vending and Public Policy: A Global Review,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 20(1/2): 1–28. Carkoglu, Ali and Eder, Mine (2007) “Urban Informality and Economic Vulnerability: The Case of Turkey,” Sabanci University. Available at: http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/28/1/ stvkaf01670.pdf. Devlin, Ryan Thomas (2011) “ ‘An Area That Governs Itself’: Informality, Uncertainty and the Management of Street Vending in NewYork City,” Planning Theory, 10(1), 53–65. Gharipour, Mohammad (ed.) (2012) The Bazaar in the Islamic City: Design, Culture, and History, Cairo: University of Cairo Press. Gupta, H. (2004) “Five-Star Road Food,” The Hindu (online) 22 June. Available at: www. thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2004/06/22/stories/2004062200960400.htm. Gupta, R. P. (1990) “Sounds and Street Cries of Calcutta,” in G. Sen (ed.) The Calcutta Psyche, New Delhi: India International Centre. Kasten, Scott A. (2013) Destroying the Mystique of Paris: How the Destruction of Les Halles Served as a Symbol for Gaullist Power and Modernization in 1960s and 1970s Paris, Thesis, Georgia State University. Kaviraj, Sudipta (1997) “Filth and the Public Sphere, Concepts and Practices About Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture, 10(1): 83–113. Kuyucu, Tuna and Ünsal, Özlem (2010) “Urban Transformation as State-Led Property Transfer: An Analysis of Two Cases of Urban Renewal in Istanbul,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 47(7): 1479–99. Nandy, Ashis (2000) “Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin,” Japanese Journal of Political Science, 1(2): 295–327.

208  Durba Chattaraj Pamuk, Orhan (2015a) A Strangeness in My Mind. Gurgaon: Hamish Hamilton for Penguin Books India. ——— (2015b) “I Walk in the City all the Time: an Interview with Orhan Pamuk by Tobias Carroll.” Available at: http://hazlitt.net/feature/i-walk-city-all-time-interview-orhan-pamuk. Tinker, Irene (1997) Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries, New York: Oxford University Press.

14 The endangered pleasures of Indian cities Kushanava ChoudhuryEndangered pleasures of Indian cities

Notes from the good life in Istanbul Kushanava Choudhury

The festival in Piraeus Socrates had gone to the port city of Piraeus for a religious festival, because the goddess there was said to be powerful. He was turning to head home when someone came running after him. Polemarchus followed not far behind his slave, demanding that Socrates stay a while as his guest. After all, Socrates came to Piraeus so seldom, and to not stay and talk would be a shame. Besides, the festival to the goddess would go on all night, and there would be feasting and grand spectacles, including men racing on horseback carrying flaming torches. So instead of rushing back to Athens, why not stay the night, and talk and eat and go to the festival together, Polemarchus suggested. Socrates politely refused, and said: What if I  can persuade you to let me go today? But he was outnumbered, as Polemarchus had several friends with him and they persuaded him to stay. Thus begins Plato’s Republic, the first book in the Western canon of political philosophy (Bloom 1991). Of course, as we might have guessed, Socrates ultimately never makes it to the all-night festival that Polemarchus had promised, because the discussion becomes too interesting. In most books of contemporary political philosophy, the argument proceeds like a train on a set of tracks, and indeed, the arguments made in the Republic often have this methodical structure. But the form of the book is a dialogue, with scenes and characters as one might find in a work of literature, and the argument proceeds, as it might in a novel or a play, by indirection (Nehamas 1999: 318). The book itself is more capacious than the arguments of Socrates and his interlocutors. Instead of separating dialogue from reasoning, form from content, poetry from argument, philosophy from context, scholars as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin, Leo Strauss and Alexander Nehamas have suggested that we read the Republic as a whole, on its own terms, paying attention to its form as much as its message (Strauss and Cropsey 2012; Nehamas 1998; Bakhtin 1984). The Republic begins with the scene I describe and ends in a narration of myths. Thematically, it starts with the question of justice and ends in an argument about pleasure. In Book I, among the young men who detain Socrates is a fellow named Thrasymachus who argues with Socrates about justice, stating that it is determined by

210  Kushanava Choudhury the strong: might makes right. This Thrasymachus is a brash fellow who has an overblown faith in his intellect. He wants to argue that Socrates cannot understand the difference between rulers and ruled, between shepherds and sheep. “Do you have a wet nurse?” he asks Socrates, at one point, “Because she neglects your sniveling nose and doesn’t give you the wiping you need, since it’s her fault you don’t even recognize sheep and shepherd” (Nehamas 1998: 21). When Socrates finally wipes the floor with Thrasymachus a few pages later, he describes the scene this way: “[Thrasymachus produced a] wonderful quantity of sweat, for it was summer. And then I saw what I had not yet seen before – Thrasymachus blushing” (Nehamas 1998: 29). I quote all this for those readers who have never read the Republic, who know it only second hand as a set of arguments about forms, guardians and caves. The Republic also has characters and jokes. It is funny. I have a second reason, for Thrasymachus is described by Plato as a Chalcedonian, or a native of a town called Chalcedon, which today we know as Kadikoy, a neighbourhood on the Asian side of the great city of Istanbul. I have never been to Piraeus but I have been to Kadikoy. It was my sheer good fortune one summer to teach political science as a visiting lecturer at Bogazici University in Istanbul. I have wandered the back streets of Kadikoy on several occasions, had tea at outdoor stalls sitting on small stools amid men playing backgammon, and rummaged through the junk shops that line the area. It was on one such expedition that I discovered a record shop full of HMV Records made in Calcutta, the city where I grew up. The owner was a man from the Black Sea named Mustafa who repaired old gramophones. He took me up to his workshop above the store, which led into a cosy parlor with a flowery gramophone, and asked me to sit down. He put on a record and the gramophone boomed to life with a Bengali song by Sandhya Ray, a singer of my grandparents’ generation. As the sun hung low over the Bosphorus, we listened to Sandhya Ray in Kadikoy, erstwhile home of Thrasymachus, surrounded by antique gramophones and Mustafa’s collection of HMV records, luxuriating in the sublime moment. Contingency, change, the unexpected – they all comprise the pleasures of travel as of city life. After all, cities across the world are filled up each day by people escaping the drudgery and boredom of their lives back home, pulled by the lures of the city’s myriad pleasures and their power over our imaginations, beyond our concerns for the material conditions of human existence. Socrates goes to Piraeus to see the goddess and somehow ends up staying for a discussion that we now read, 2,000 years later, as the Republic. They talk and talk. What are they talking about? They begin by discussing justice, and soon they are talking about the city, and what justice means in the context of the city. There is the argument about how a city must be led by a class of “guardians” and be ruled by a philosopher king, and a standard reading of the Republic sees Plato’s argument as a proposed program, a how-to model for rule. But Thrasymachus and his taunts, and Socrates and his ironies, are as much a part of the Republic as the argument for philosopher kings. For the Republic is not a programmatic text, strictly speaking, but rather a way of thinking about what is just and what is good. The

Endangered pleasures of Indian cities 211 goal of the text is to bring philosophy out of its recesses, to engage the worldly questions of human society (Strauss and Cropsey 2012). Through the dialogic mode, philosophy enters the realm of politics. Abstraction has to engage with the mess of life. By bringing philosophy to the city, it necessarily has to engage with questions which are by their nature political, and it is the context of the city that shapes philosophy. The Republic has been read retroactively as a programmatic guide, on how to produce what is – if read literally – a kind of proto-fascist social order where a few rule over the many through wielding powerful lies (Popper 2012). But the text also shows a way of talking, and of reasoning through talking. Doing political philosophy, then, is not primarily about laying down rules but rather a way, an orientation. It frames the questions instead of providing answers. The big question in the Republic is about the role of philosophy in the city. Answering the question requires the cacophony of the city, the range of voices who populate the pages of the Republic.

Galata Bridge I have always wondered what would emerge if political philosophy was done from the Galata Bridge. For those who have never been there, the Galata Bridge crosses the inlet of the Bosphorus Strait called the Golden Horn, and connects two parts of the European side of Istanbul. On one side is Eminonu, and the New Mosque, which is no longer so new, and on the other side is Karakoy, and the hill that leads up to the Galata Tower where it is said that in the 17th century Ahmed Celebi wore giant wings, like an eagle or an angel, and flew across the Bosphorus Strait, from Europe to Asia, a couple of kilometres away. Anything is possible. At all hours, trams rush across the Galata Bridge, and ferries depart from the docks at Eminonu and Karakoy, taking passengers across to the Asian side of the city, to Thrasymachus’ Kadikoy, and Uskudar, and elsewhere. On both sides of the bridge, and on the bridge itself, are crowds of people at all hours, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, religious and not-religious (by all appearances). You will find them eating fish sandwiches that are freshly grilled on the boats docked along the bridge, a steady stream of customers partaking in what is the democratic pleasure of eating outdoors. The other great gastronomic attraction at the bridge is the midye dolma vendors, who sell mussels cooked in fragrant rice, which are pockets of flavor that explodes in your mouth like a puchka.1 It is illegal to sell them, but each stall has its regulars, who eat one after the other in quick succession – for no one eats one midye – standing up, just like puchka eaters, knowing that no vendor would willingly poison you and lose a steady customer. The city meets there, literally and metaphorically. Up the hill is Istiklal and the bars and clubs that are open seemingly till dawn. Along Karakoy are the electric supplies shops just like in Chandni Chowk in Calcutta, then up the hill is the old synagogue and the hotels where you can rent rooms hourly. All of this is surrounded by the great glorious sea, the Horn and the Bosphorus Strait, which is always bewitching and mercurial, its color changing through the day from blue, to azure, to grey to emerald green, to black.

212  Kushanava Choudhury The government says that in the summer, fishing is forbidden, and sometimes there is a police sweep, but otherwise, who listens? All along the railings of the Galata Bridge are men and women with fishing rods, their lines dipped into the water of the Golden Horn. Amid the incessant sounds of hawkers and trams, each fisherman or woman stands with a box of tackle and a bucket of water, drinking Efes beer and fishing. What is fishing but a way to escape the clock and the routine that it imposes, to defy all attempts to rush, to do nothing and wait? You will find them there from dawn till dusk as if outside the tyranny of time. In the middle of the bustle of the city, it is as if they rise up, like angels, like Ahmed Celebi must have soared, above the banality of the mortal world.

The road to Tate Modern Time is the tyrant that rules all imaginations outside the First World. The cities in which we live are always running behind schedule, unable to catch up to the cities of the West. In Calcutta or Istanbul, we share that anxiety. Our future is in those other “modern” cities, we believe, which we seem forever unable to reach. I have never felt the anxiety of modernization as acutely as in Turkey. Porfirio Diaz’s lament of Mexico’s fate, to be so close to America and so far from God, could perhaps also be said of Turkey: so close to Europe . . . Perhaps no space exemplifies this condition as acutely as the Istanbul Modern, an art museum which has copied even the form of the museum itself, its industrial design and even its waterfront location – never mind its name – from the Tate Modern in London. Each part of the museum tells the same story, for each chronological period of European art, there are Turkish examples. Turkish cubists, Turkish impressionists, Turkish pop art. Like those fashions which come to India a few years after Europe or America, there are knockoffs of all European trends in art for the last 100-odd years, as if to prove, by copying, that they too are artists, and thereby also moderns. The poignancy of the modernization anxiety is especially acute here because modern Western art is premised on the fetishizing of originality, of the new, and so to faithfully copy – to be mimic men – in art is to cease to be artists at all. To become moderns, one must prove oneself by performing in front of an imaginary audience that is Europe. But what becomes apparent is the sense of shame that drives the performance. In 2003 the Turkish artists Sener Ozmen and Erkan Ozgen made a video installation called “The Road to Tate Modern,” which is a wonderful commentary on this condition. The two artists are dressed in suits, riding donkeys through rocky hills, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, looking for the Tate Modern. It is clear that they will never reach the modern on their donkeys, that they have lost their way, but they are so hopeful and sincere that they press forward, in suits and dress shoes in the middle of a desolate landscape. The anxiety for modernization is shown to be a quixotic quest, one propelled by fantasy and not by reason, an adventure to the absurd. But of course, even though they appear to be in the hills near Diyarbakir, they must go to London, for where else is there to go?

Endangered pleasures of Indian cities  213 In India, colonization is over but modernization still reigns supreme. Since the “Liberalization” of India’s economy in the early 1990s, those lucky enough to be urban educated professionals have become dramatically wealthier. We can now afford consumer goods and international brands. Most dramatically, our lives have become car-centric and air-conditioned, and these changes have helped insulate us from the rest of the urban public and from the elements, enabling a kind of sensory secession from the city. Increasingly, elites have begun to dream of an Indian city without the sensory overload of an Indian city, and without the overwhelming pressures of migration of people less prosperous than themselves. In short, we have begun dreaming of an Indian city cleansed of most Indians. In the media and the bureaucratic arms of the state, there is an elite discourse of making Delhi “a world-class city” and Mumbai “like Shanghai.” Well-travelled businessmen often lament how our cities fail to measure up to the ideal forms of Shanghai, Dubai or Singapore. In these fantasies, the ideal city is a place where the streets are clean, the skyscrapers are tall and where the majority of the people do not make the rules but do follow them. London is too far. The archetypal city now is an Asian metropolis under authoritarian rule. In New Delhi, a journalist friend had returned from a three-month stint in Singapore, singing the city’s praises. Why don’t you move there, then? I asked. A look of panic slowly seized his face as he considered my suggestion. He began murmuring objections about the high cost of living, about the aging population, the need for two full-time incomes and so on. Then he said, “Living in Singapore is like living in Tihar jail!” An Indian visiting these utopias feels a sense of triumphal hope, hope that all that is jarring and intractable about urban life in India can actually be sorted out. But what one also feels, once the sense of elite triumphalism has worn off, is what my friend felt: panic. This is surely the future we must desire, we think, but why must our future also be so limp and lifeless when compared to our present? Why must our futures exorcise the kinds of pleasures that one can avail of only in the city, pleasures connected with the unprecedented mixing of strangers which produce distinctly urban idioms, new forms of comportment and mentalities. In those straitjacketed utopian/dystopian cities, what we miss is the social life of neighbourhoods, of the corner and the street, the sharing of various public spaces like coffeehouses and parks for lovers, and the public spectacles of festivals, rituals and rallies which are a constant in urban Indian life. Most of all, we miss the thickness and texturing of experience – both of hardship and of the sublime – that makes everyday life in an Indian metropolis worth living. These aspects of the Indian metropolis remain integral to the urban experience of those who have lived in cities for decades. They have been depicted in countless films, in music and literature. And yet, these essential aspects of urban experience remain absent in the futuristic imaginings of elite urban Indians. Where are these pleasures in the archetypal new cities, like Gurgaon, which are being built with purported elite preferences in mind? These are spaces of the flyover, the car and the mall, where the pleasures of the Indian city are conspicuously absent.

214  Kushanava Choudhury It is our sad fate that the tyranny of modernization deems that we must repeat even the mistakes of the cities of our future. The basic planning errors made by Western cities in the 1950s were to build for the car, the flyover and the high rise, to forget that cities are social constructions, not machines. The expressways cut through neighbourhoods, high rises broke up communities, cars alienated people from one another and from place, turning them into isolated units. The city is a social construction, not a giant machine made of roads and buildings. It is human beings living together to make the world. When that social world is disrupted, the whole order of the city – its economics and its politics, its law and order, all those aspects which powerful people believe to be truly important – breaks down. After 60 years of failed technical solutions to human problems, Western cities are only now learning that what keeps crime low in places of immense poverty are not cameras but cold-drinks sellers and old ladies who are every neighbourhood’s eyes on the street. They know better now what makes cities work and what makes them break down. Meanwhile, in India, our Road to the Tate Modern dictates that we build “smart cities,” places with absolute surveillance, which are intended for robots, not people. Riding our donkeys into the imagined future, we build malls which the Americans have stopped building, and eat in food courts where the food is difficult for the tongue to distinguish from its plastic wrapping. But if the new government can lay a carpet of food courts from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, will the cellophane wrapped pani puri bring us succour? Are we doomed to dream only of futures which require us to deny our basic pleasures?

Justice and pleasure A few years ago, Ashis Nandy wrote a suggestive essay titled “Time Travel to a Possible Self ” on an alternate form of cosmopolitanism – alternate, that is, to the dominant Kantian liberal idea of cosmopolitanism – which is practiced in the southern Indian city of Cochin (Nandy 2000). Nandy’s essay surveys how people in Cochin understand their identity in the multi-religious space of the city and their community’s history in the context of the city’s multiple myths, and how that understanding is about a different sense of the self than the liberal individual model of Enlightenment Europe. In a similar way, the city of Istanbul, with its extraordinary public spaces, its modes of enjoyment of urban space, its celebration of the pleasures which are unique to urban life, its mixing of strangers, the culture of its tea shops and its streets, provides clues of another future for our selves and our cities. The city articulates a way of being which does not sacrifice the pleasures which draw millions to the city every day – the pleasures of being in public and the pleasures of being a public. These days, entire courses are taught in Third World planning schools on the “Right to the City” (Harvey 2003). In an article by the same name, the urban theorist David Harvey provides an analysis of contemporary geo-politics in the context of cities by arguing that cities, and their poor citizens, are under the assault

Endangered pleasures of Indian cities  215 of neoliberalism. In other words, capital is buying up land and bullying citizens out of the spaces of the city. Indeed, in Calcutta as in Istanbul, the boom in construction and large-scale development projects is well underway. The clearing of populated areas by questionable methods, with government collusion, to buy up land at a low price or to sell public land to private developers who then convert it into luxury apartments or malls, is now quite a familiar process. By the end of the first part of the Republic, it has become clear that no discussion of justice can take place without a discussion of the city. And so the next books are devoted to this question: what makes a city just? The discussion revolves around what the best form of government is for a city, and what kind of society each form – tyranny, democracy, timocracy, and so forth – produces among its citizens. In Platonic terms, we might call such regimes as we see in our cities today, where the rich eat up the possessions of the poor, a tyranny. We can concede that the “right to the city” discourse addresses the question of justice in the contemporary city. But, that said, it is an impoverished discourse, because it excludes all discussion of the culture and particularity of our cities, our ways of being in the world with others. It flattens all places and people to an abstraction where spaces are interchangeable – Calcutta could be Istanbul could be Rio de Janeiro – all equally acted upon by the world historical forces of neoliberalism. It is as if our cities are bulldozed by materialist forces which are propelled by the thrust of universal history. In this sense, it differs little from earlier Marxist theories of urbanism. In the poor cities of the world, this impoverished critique keeps being reproduced, because even the critiques of the modern which we produce are written from the capitals of the modernity. Justice may demand that neoliberalism be defended against, but first one has to articulate what it is that one is defending, and why it must be defended at all. At the end of the Republic, in Book IX, after discussing each of the various types of cities, Socrates, introduces a discussion of pleasures. There are pleasures which require the destruction of others and pleasures which are sociable, which require others in order to be pleasurable at all. The just city, Socrates explains, enables the good by enhancing those pleasures which are sociable which do not require hurting others, which are not done at the expense of others but rather are enhanced by the richness of the social world of the city. Justice, then, is not only about a right to the city, but also about the right kind of pleasure. In Calcutta today, boys who grew up playing cricket in the street are now rich enough to play golf. But does that mean one now has to spend one’s Sundays wandering in meadows like a shepherd from dawn till dusk? There are those who are running like sheep to buy flats in the terra nullius on the eastern edge of the city, when they have grown up in the congestion of Bhowanipur or Bagbazar. It is as if an invisible hand is shackling them into servitude that their souls cannot abide. What will their children be like, I sometimes wonder, raised by televisions, so far from the cadences of the streets? What kind of jokes will they learn to make? We marvel at Istanbul when we gaze with Calcutta eyes. There is always a chaiwala when you want one, and fresh fish fried and grilled upon demand, and streets

216  Kushanava Choudhury full of life from dusk till dawn, and neighbourhoods where the aunties gather in parks and the old men in the neighbourhood clubs reading the newspaper, while their grandchildren play football in the streets. What is most impressive is that each act seems an affirmation, what the ancients said, what we know in our bones, that the pleasures of life are not in what you can consume in private but how you can be with others in public. The just and the good have to be thought together, for politics was not merely a way of determining the just, but also of living the good life. The great relief we feel in Istanbul is that all our futures do not have to look like Singapore. The city shows a way of urban living which we recognize as almost like our own.

What is politics for? In the neighbourhood in Istanbul where I lived, I used to go to a cafe called Beyaz Kale – literally, “White Castle” – which opened at what hour I do not know but stayed open till 3 am. At any hour of the day, people of all types would gather there to smoke and talk, play backgammon and drink tea. I was teaching at a university of talkers set in a universe of talkers. I frequently ran into my students at Beyaz Kale (though I never ran into them in the library). They always sat in groups, talking. They argued about politics in class brilliantly, because they had so much practice in the art. On the western coast of Anatolia, or what was once called Asia Minor, was the city of Ephesus, which I imagine is not unlike Piraeus, where we find ourselves in the dialogues of the Republic, for Ephesus too was a port city famed for its temple, in this case to the goddess Artemis. The ruins of Ephesus are so well preserved that when you walk through its library you can still see the drawings of Hecuba behind the columns, much like we find tiles of Hanuman or Rabindranath Tagore in our public institutions, to ward off would-be piddlers. The agora or marketplace in Ephesus is not unlike the one where Socrates would have talked and debated in Athens. Etched into the agora’s stones you will find backgammon boards from thousands of years ago, no different from the boards at Beyaz Kale. When I saw those backgammon boards, I understood intuitively an idea at the core of the classical conception of politics, which had always eluded me. What is politics for? In the 1950s, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in her book The Human Condition that modern man had become what the ancients would call an animal laborans, a labouring animal caught in a cycle of consumption and waste production (Arendt 2013). We were withdrawing from the public sphere of politics, of being in the world, and acting in concert with others. Arendt stressed the distinction, made by Plato’s student Aristotle, between the household and the city, where the household is a place of duty and necessity, the sphere of things one must do to maintain one’s life, whereas the polis, the public sphere of politics, is what defines the good life. For Aristotle, economics meant the management of the household or the questions of private life, while for the moderns, Arendt argued, resolving economic questions by bureaucratic means had become the main objective of politics.

Endangered pleasures of Indian cities 217 Indeed, today the question of justice has become largely an economic question. Politics is a kind of distribution centre for who gets what, when and how. What is politics if it is not to be about development and five-year plans and the public distribution of food and funds and sundry schemes and programs for the well-being of the populace? If politics is not to be about determining who gets what, about economic policies and redistribution of resources, taxation, budgets and welfare, then what is it to be about? The writer Mary McCarthy, who was Arendt’s friend, had once asked, what, then, is politics for? (Arendt and McCarthy 1995). There are necessities, no doubt, that need to be met. But the city does not exist to meet needs, nor do we come together in public for the instrumental reasons of meeting private needs alone. Politics in the classical sense is not instrumental, as Arendt argued. It is not for anything, but the end in itself. Politics is the good life. I had always struggled to grasp this idea until I saw the backgammon boards at Ephesus. It is difficult to understand the ancients with an impatient modern mind that is utilitarian and instrumentalist by default, for the political in modern political philosophy is always an instrument, always a means to another end. But in another way, just as we recognize Thrasymachus, and know a thousand more like him, we can recognize the pleasure of the political life for its sake. It is the pleasure that my students feel at Beyaz Kale, that we feel at teashops and coffeehouses, that kept Socrates at Piraeus against his intentions – the pleasure of the company of others in public. That is the highest good, the greatest pleasure, which the ideal just city should provide.

The good life The first time my wife and I  went to Cukur Meyhane  – a traditional tavern in Cukurcuma, just up the hill from Galata – was on a Monday night. The tables in the gully were full, but on seeing us waiting, a group of young people motioned us over, inviting us to share their table. When the menus came, we did not know what to order, so they did so on our behalf. When the waiter asked us to order drinks we were again confused. Then our neighbours grew tired of instructing us and offered the plates from their table, commanding us to try this and that, and soon, their cloudy glasses of raki. We ordered a bottle of the anise-flavoured liquor, were taught how to drink, slowly. And so our adda began, much like any adda – a gathering for purpose-free, digressive conversation – would in Calcutta. We spoke about Istanbul and India, about the Islamists and the Coen brothers and the Bosphorus and club music and the ancient ruins of Antalya and politics. They had a set adda schedule, just like cliques I knew that gathered at the Coffee House in Calcutta. Every first Monday of every month, the friends met there, to eat and drink and talk. We felt at home, except the food here was better than at Coffee House, the climate more salubrious and waiters even smiled. In the Republic, the question of justice that leads to the question of pleasure, ultimately becomes a matter for the soul. What does the soul want? The silence of Singapore and Dubai, the desultory whirling of the Eye of London, the quiet desperation of a flat on the 17th floor? Who among us would not forsake it all

218  Kushanava Choudhury for a little peace and a little civilization, a place where you can drink tea without smelling urine on the street, and enjoy a kathi roll on the roadside without eating a side order of soot? If our populist politicians would provide cheap fresh fish sandwiches along the banks of the river Ganga below the Howrah Bridge which could be enjoyed in clean environs, then they would surely be elected forever. Along the waterfront in Kumkapi, at all hours there are always children shooting balloons, grandmas making tea in samovars at family picnics, teenagers playing football, and men and women of all ages fishing in the Marmara Sea. Istanbul is so alluring because it is the city we might be. It is a place blessed with natural beauty which few other cities can match. No other city in the world has the Bosphorus as its boulevard. But its devotion to the myriad pleasures of city life is one to which all cities can aspire. The relationship between the just city and pleasures of city living can be seen as much in conversations in Beyoglu’s meyhanes as while fishing on the Galata Bridge or in the political debates around Bogazici. But in 2013, the world learned of this aspect of the city in the clashes which took place at Gezi Park, within walking distance of Cukur Meyhane, which we frequented. It was at base a very simple fight, to protect a park against the planned construction of a shopping mall. I admire the bravery of those who stood up and acted and galvanized a city and a nation. And I fear that such a battle between the ephemeral pleasures of the present and the planned utopian future would be unimaginable in urban India today, where our future is being forged at the cost of our own unarticulated and undefended sensibilities of what makes life in our cities good.

Note 1 A puchka, also known as a panipuri or a golgappa, is a popular Indian street food, with a crisp, round shell filled with potatoes and a spicy tamarind sauce.

References Arendt, Hannah (2013) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah and McCarthy, Mary (1995) Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, 1949–1975, Carol Brightman (ed.), New York: Harcourt Brace. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson (ed. and trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bloom, Allan (1991) The Republic of Plato, New York: Basic Books. Harvey, David (2003) “The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4): 939–41. Nandy, Ashis (2000) “Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin,” Japanese Journal of Political Science, 1(2): 295–327. Nehamas, Alexander (1998) The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections From Plato to Foucault, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——— (1999) Virtues of Authenticity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Popper, Karl (2012) The Open Society and Its Enemies, London: Routledge. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph (eds.) (2012) History of Political Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

15 A political analysis of middleclass-based social movements

Ceren ErgençMiddle-class-based social movements

India and Turkey compared Ceren Ergenç

Introduction The Anna Hazare Movement, a rural anti-corruption movement, garnered the attention and support of the urban middle classes in India beginning in 2011. The movement later evolved into a national political party, Aam Aadmi (AAP, or Common Man’s Party), which quickly secured a place in the minority government in the 2013 elections, and won a landslide victory in the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections. The year AAP entered electoral politics, urban middle classes all around Turkey occupied the streets, demanding public control over neoliberal urban regeneration policies. The street protests, named the Gezi movement, soon evolved into neighborhood forums, squats and political coalitions. However, the Gezi movement did not organize itself into a political party. Even though it was an urban movement, it had almost no impact on the next local elections in early 2014, although some of the Gezi forums supported a minority party in the 2015 national elections. Both movements were labeled as urban middle-class movements and either praised or criticized. Therefore, while there are differences between the Anna Hazare and Gezi movements, a comparison of their demographics, discourse and organization provide tools to better understand the new middle classes and their political involvement. While the immediate outcomes of these two urban movements are divergent, they evoked similar debates in their respective countries with regards to their constituent classes. The shift away from class-based movements to citizen-based movements in the global era is often associated with the new urban middle classes who engage in discontinuous, local urban mobilizations (Harvey 2013; Hardt and Negri 2005; Merrifield 2013). The grassroots movements both in India and Turkey were immediately categorized as yet another form of this global phenomenon. If that is the case, what explains the divergent outcomes of urban movements in two Asian countries with comparable modern institutional and societal histories? This chapter analyzes the socioeconomic, institutional and ideological backgrounds of the formation of middle classes in India and Turkey, and traces the recent urban movements in these two countries within the broader context of global neoliberalism. This chapter argues that there are several similarities between the formation of the middle classes in India and Turkey. For instance,

220  Ceren Ergenç their self-identification goes beyond their economic status, yet they react against the socioeconomic challenges neoliberal policies pose to their lifestyle. The decentralized nature of the Indian state appears to provide the newly emerging political activism of the middle classes with strategies and knowledge to form an organized political entity. In contrast, the Turkish middle classes remain organizationally dispersed. This chapter contributes to the literature on new activism of the middle classes by analyzing the urban movements in India and Turkey in a comparative perspective. It has two main arguments: 1

Both urban movements were perceived as middle-class movements and received mixed reactions in the context of the hegemonic position the Nehruvian and Kemalist middle classes have enjoyed historically in India and Turkey. However, in the post-1980s neoliberal era, both the demographics and class interests of the middle classes should be reconsidered. In both the Anna Hazare and the Gezi movements, those mobilized were mostly “precariat,” i.e., precariously employed lower stratum of white-collar workers (in the case of Turkey) or informal workers (in the case of India).

In both cases, there are two phases dominated by different segments of the middle class. In India, the Anna Hazare movement was initially supported by the upper middle classes who express disengagement from party politics. The anticorruption rhetoric of Anna Hazare, the movement leader at the time, conveniently catered to the dissatisfaction of the urban, educated elite whose contact with the state was lost due to the changing nature of electoral politics in the neoliberal era (Steur 2014). While rightfully fighting against corruption in India’s political and administrative system, this segment of the middle classes was not necessarily against the neoliberal era. The Aam Aadmi Party, established by Arvind Kejriwal, a secondary leader in the Anna Hazare movement, soon reframed the “common man” in the name of the party, not as the upper middle class that initially supported the Anna Hazare movement, but as the precariously employed young professionals and informal workers. The support that the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAMP) lent to the AAP helped transform the party program to one that advocates for the rights of disadvantaged segments beyond the technocratic and intentionally apolitical anti-corruption discourse of the upper middle class. The victory in the Delhi assembly elections was a result of the alliance between the NAMP and the AAP. In Turkey, the Gezi movement began as a spontaneous rally against neoliberal urbanization in Istanbul. After it spread across the country, the focus of the protests expanded to include dislocation of the poor, attacks on “lifestyle” minorities such as LGBTIs, increasing Islamization in public life and precarious work conditions. The mass protests soon shifted to local gatherings called “neighborhood forums.” The latter did not constitute a basis for electoral success due to the overcentralized nature of the Turkish state, but some of the communities and movements that participated in the Gezi movement later lent electoral support to a minority party, HDP, in the general elections in 2015, in exchange for liberalization of the party

Middle-class-based social movements 221 program to include disadvantaged segments of society and minorities other than the ethnic minority the HDP represents. 2

They can be analyzed as manifestations of new social movements as a global phenomenon. The immediate outcomes of these two social movements, however, are different even though they also show similarities in terms of the main actor, the new middle classes. Local histories, politics and administrative systems, explain the divergent outcomes.

In India, the decentralized administrative structure leaves room for the emergence of new political entities in electoral politics (see, e.g., Jagannathan 2014). These new actors create a support base locally, by grounding their policy program in specific localities. The AAP success is an example of a party program tailored to address the problems of a specific region, Delhi. While criticized for the lack of a broader political agenda and populism for addressing Delhi-specific issues, the AAP still proved itself to be a legitimate political actor when it won a landslide victory in the Delhi assembly elections in 2015. On the contrary, in Turkey, the centralized state and electoral threshold (a legacy of the successive military coups in the modern history of Turkey) prevents the entry of new actors in formal politics. The Gezi forums did not have any presence in the next local elections as local election campaigns in 2014 mirrored central politics, with next to no emphasis on urban policies (Celik and Ergenc 2015). Similarly, the Gezi forums neither established a political party nor lent official support to a political party. The Gezi movement played only a partial role in electoral politics in the form of a shifting voter base for the Kurdish minority party, HDP.

Middle classes in historical perspective The middle class has been significant in explaining many social phenomena in the modern era. This chapter takes the middle class as a distinct social class with economic and political interests of its own. This is against the view that the middle class is not a social class but a stratum in the society defined by its income level and consumption patterns (see, e.g., Unaldi et al. 2014). According to the latter view, the economic behavior of the middle class can be determined by looking at demographic data such as education, age, gender and income. The demographic data does not reveal much about the political behavior of the middle, nor does it expect to do so, as it is not seen as a social class in this view. Defining the middle class primarily in economic terms fails to see the role it plays in political processes. The middle class as a social actor with political and economic interests, however, should not be treated as an ahistorical, homogeneous entity. Various middle classes (or segments of a class) can be identified according to their political and economic interests such as intellectuals, state bureaucracy and white-collar professionals (Ehrenreich 1990; Lange and Meier 2010; Fernandes 2006). The economic and political interests of these middle classes also change over time, as

222  Ceren Ergenç their relationship with the state, the actor governing or regulating the distribution of resources, changes (Gunal 2013). State-class relations might change due to technological advancement (Braverman 1998), economic liberalization (Poulantzas 1978), corporatization (Mills 1959), democratization of education, and precarization of labor. It is not merely a demographic change due to social mobility but also a change in the power structures and the realignment of power positions. In the case of India, a comparable shift in the dominant segment of the middle class led to certain political outcomes. There is a shift from the middle classes who identify with the central state to the regional capitalist class (Menon and Nigam 2007: 58). The central middle classes are often called Nehruvian as they belong to the state-building higher castes. This class is accused of alienating itself from the lower classes even though they initially supported the anti-poverty developmentalist policies of the Nehruvian state (Menon and Nigam 2007: 22). The regional elite, in contrast, benefit from the particularistic policies of the neoliberal era and mostly support ethnic nationalisms. The latter garnered support among the rural poor for the current governing party, the BJP. In Turkey, there is a shift from state-building middle classes (often referred to as the Kemalist elite) who are wary of religion due to their secular background, to the new capitalists with Islamist allegiance called Anatolian Tigers (Öncü 2014: 154–155). As in India, the former middle classes lost their electoral dominance to the latter in the 2000s (De Leon et  al. 2009: 214–216). Moreover, through the neoliberal policies that replaced the developmentalist welfare policies, the younger generations of the traditional middle classes sought employment in the private sector. In both cases, the dissociation of the traditional middle classes from the state apparatus in the neoliberal era created two new middle-class cleavages: the aforementioned new bourgeois and the precariously employed and economically disadvantaged class who still maintain their social status, thanks to the education system. As the middle class is heterogeneous both across segments and throughout historical periods, it has multiple political potentials (Tuğal 2015: 86–91). These potentials can be realized through various class coalitions within and across classes. The political processes that actualize the class coalitions in India and Turkey will be explained in the following sections. To provide a background to the contemporary class positions in these two countries, Table 15.1 will briefly introduce the historical development of middle classes in India and Turkey. To conclude, there are two concurrent trends in the Gezi and Anna Hazare movements in Turkey and India respectively: 1 The downward social mobility that takes place in two forms for the middle classes. The younger generations of those who enjoyed upward social mobility through education in the state-centric years, found themselves on a downward spiral due to the increasing precarization of employment for white-collar professionals in the second half of the 2000s. The second trend of downward social mobility arises from the hegemonic shift from urban to rural capital and the electoral domination of their conservative politics represented by the BJP and the AKP.

Middle-class-based social movements  223 Table 15.1 Historical Development of Middle Classes in India and Turkey Pre-Nation-State Period

State-Building Years

Post-Liberalization Era

Globalization Era

India

Precariat, urban Upper castes Developmentalist Rise of regional poor. Rise capitalist elite. educated in the Nehruvian of ethnic Traditional middle British colonial middle classes. nationalism, class shifting to institutions. Administrative urban violence. private sector with and intellectual Urban social the shrinking of positions. movements. the state. Precariat, urban Turkey Late Ottoman era Developmentalist Rise of regional poor. Ethnic capitalist elite. modernized Kemalist tensions, urban Traditional middle civilian and middle classes. dislocations. class shifting to military elite. Administrative Urban social private sector with and intellectual movements. the shrinking of positions. the state.

Sources: Bedirhanoğlu and Yalman 2010; Menon and Nigam 2007

2

There is a decoupling of the middle class and the state as a result of economic liberalization. The end of political alliance between the traditional middle class and the developmentalist state resulted in the takeover of electoral politics by the new middle classes (rural capitalists and urban entrepreneurs who benefited from the new economic regime). Previously underrepresented poor classes also rediscovered electoral politics, supporting Erdogan and Modi as socially conservative, nationalistic yet charismatic leaders (Steur 2014; De Leon et al. 2009: 214–216).

Intellectuals and white-collar professionals turned to civil society to realize their social and political goals in the 2000s. These segments of the middle class constitute the majority of the “lifestyle” minorities such as the women in India who run the anti-rape legal movement in India (Palshikar 2016; Jodhka and Prakash 2011) and the LGBTIs and environmentalists who conduct rights activism in Turkey (Gürcan and Peker 2015a). These “lifestyle” minorities collaborate with ethnic and religious minorities as well as with the economically underprivileged segments of the society such as urban blue-collar workers, informal workers in India (Ananya Roy 2009) and domestic migrant workers in Turkey (Yoruk and Yuksel 2014).

Anna Hazare meets Gezi: urban grassroots movements in India and Turkey “One honest man”: from an anti-corruption campaign to assembly elections The Anna Hazare movement had two distinctly separate periods in terms of political organization. The first period was the anti-corruption movement of the activist

224  Ceren Ergenç Anna Hazare, and the second period was the electoral success of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) under the leadership of Arvind Kejriwal. Kejriwal was a close aide of Anna Hazare during the Lokpal Bill hunger strike period in 2011, and he and his team decided to establish the AAP, initially relying on popular support that Anna Hazare garnered until 2011. Anna Hazare himself denounced the AAP and Arvind Kejriwal for betraying the original movement’s values. Anna Hazare is a social activist, known for his long-lasting fight for rural development and against state corruption in rural Delhi. His Gandhian values allow him to commit only pacifist activities such as hunger strikes, and he was decidedly against using the tools of organized politics. His most famous fight was to have the Delhi Assembly establish an Ombudsman’s Office to deal with citizen disputes such as income-tax calculations (Palshikar 2016). Until his famous hunger strike with regard to the Lokpal Bill drafting commission in April 2011, Anna Hazare had a small but dedicated group of followers. By August 2011, his hunger strike had attracted thousands of supporters in New Delhi, ranging from opinion leaders in the capital to participants of the then ongoing tiffin carriers’ strike (Palshikar 2016). Even though Anna Hazare was based in the countryside, his fight against corruption attracted the attention of urban middle classes in Delhi thanks to his “antipolitics” rhetoric. Denouncing party politics as “morally corrupt” had become popular among corporate white-collar professionals in the 2000s, and this segment of the society turned to civil society organizations to express their legal-rights-centered activism (Fernandes 2006: 90–91). Accordingly, the square where Anna Hazare held his rally during spring 2011 was replete with banners and other tools associated with urban middle classes rather than Anna’s traditional support base, the rural poor. The months-long campaign was sponsored by contributions by urban middle classes and their civil society organizations (S. Roy 2014; Steur 2014). Being anti-politics is still a common rhetoric shared by many members of Indian upper middle classes, as party politics is seen as inherently corrupt and self-serving (Mishra 2012). The high degree of corruption in state organs, especially in the post-liberalization period, is subject to criticism from all segments of society; however, the upper-middle-class supporters of Anna Hazare’s hunger strike were criticized for associating politics only with corrupt party politics and therefore limiting the opposition to the bureaucratic elite and not taking into consideration the economic interests of the new class coalitions (Kumar 2011; Chatterjee 2011). The Aam Aadmi Party was established in 2012 with Arvind Kejriwal, an accountant formerly working for the local state, acting as the national convener. Kejriwal began his political life as an activist in a transparency advocacy NGO (Steur 2014; Palshikar 2016), and the initial support base of the AAP was also the urban upper middle classes, who saw the new party as an opportunity to create a new, “managerial”-style politics to ensure transparency and accountability (S. Roy 2014). In 2013 the AAP won the Delhi Legislative Assembly elections and formed a minority government with the Congress Party. Kejriwal acted as the Chief Minister of Delhi, albeit for 49 days, and resigned after his minority

Middle-class-based social movements  225 government failed to garner support for the anti-corruption bill for which it had been advocating since the Anna Hazare days. The Delhi Assembly experience made the AAP realize that the support of the upper middle classes would not be enough to carry it through national politics. The citizens’ rights rhetoric that mobilizes the upper middle classes resonates little with the urban poor, rural populations, minorities and lower castes. The extreme poverty as a result of the exclusion from the state growth programs that replaced the welfare programs of the developmentalist era combined with the structural violence committed by the state coercive forces alienated urban poor from middle-class ideals (Chatterjee 2011). The AAP entered into a political alliance with the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) in January 2014. The NAPM is an alliance of many urban and rural rights activism movements who fight against structural poverty, discrimination and violence across the country. The leaders of the NAPM agreed to lend support to the AAP on grounds that the party would broaden its program to include not only citizenship rights that would satisfy the upper middle classes but a fight against structural inequalities that would win the support of the lower middle classes under precarious work conditions, urban poor, minorities and other disadvantaged groups. Besides, the localized nature of the NAPM networks provided the AAP with a locally grounded voter base in the elections (Steur 2014). Indeed, the support of the latter groups brought the AAP a landslide victory in the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections. The AAP had 67 out of 70 seats in the Delhi Assembly in the following term. Some of the policies that Kejriwal pursues are to provide a more egalitarian education system in Delhi. He also lent shy support to the student protestors at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2016. “For a bunch of trees”: from anti-redevelopment protests to national elections There are three phases of the Gezi movement and its aftermath. Similar to the Anna Hazare movement, the protest phase of the Gezi movement also started with lifestyle demands of the middle class. When people withdrew from the streets and got together again in the neighborhood forums, the political demands mostly focused on neoliberal urbanism and its consequences. The third phase was when the Gezi forum-related networks supported the HDP in the national elections. By then, the Gezi forum declarations included a political stand targeting structural violence and poverty, as well as lifestyle concerns (Ozen and Avci 2013: 31–33; Gürcan and Peker 2015b: 12–18). The Taksim Solidarity platform had been trying to create public awareness about the mayor’s gentrification project for the Taksim Square green area at the very center of Istanbul. The public support they had longed for came at once and in a volume they would have not imagined on the night of 31 May  2013. Overnight, the protests spread nationwide as a reaction to police violence. When people filled Kizilay Square, the city center of Ankara, the capital city where government buildings are located, the protest became bigger than an anti-urban

226  Ceren Ergenç redevelopment rally. It was now against the central government and its policies reflecting concerns over pressures on lifestyles as well as neoliberal urbanization (Gürcan and Peker 2015a: 60–62). The street protests lasted a full month, and protestors were able to stop the demolition of Gezi Park. The scope of the other issues voiced by the demonstrators during the protests required a long-haul approach, and protestors gradually withdrew from the streets and formed neighborhood forums to organize for further action (Celik and Ergenc 2015; Turan 2014). The Gezi forums became part of a previously existing urban-based network of rights activism along with coordination networks, solidarity networks, activism platforms and squat houses. These platforms each had their specific causes, such as right to transportation, right to housing and forests protection, and they also contributed to a broader political movement reclaiming urban commons, experimenting with selfgovernance and advocating for checks and balances against the state (Celik and Ergenc 2015). In this sense, the network of Gezi forums is comparable to the NAPM in India. The Gezi movement did not demonstrate any tangible outcome immediately. However, as social movements literature demonstrates elsewhere (Diani and McAdam 2003), the emerging networks formed during the protests (and, later, the forums) serve to positively create new class coalitions in the opposition. The forums first tried to influence the March  2014 local elections for the mayor’s office across the country (Celik and Ergenc 2015). That intended influence was an extra-electoral one as Gezi forums wanted to remain outside party politics, similar to the Anna Harare movement. They claimed to be beyond traditional party ideologies and to represent ‘new’ politics that cannot be reduced to traditional party politics (Celik and Ergenc 2015). That claim led to analyses that Gezi was a localized version of the global “Occupy” movements (Gürcan and Peker 2015a; Kuymulu 2013). Accordingly, the Gezi forums attempted to act as a checks and balances agency instead of channeling their networks into a voter base (Celik and Ergenc 2015). The forums opted to force the candidates to make certain promises during their election campaign with regard to right to equal access to transportation, utilities, recreational areas, education and transparency, and hold the winner accountable for the promises made (Celik and Ergenc 2015). The failure in influencing the local elections, and the corruption scandal in the central politics in the second half of 2013, inadvertently led the Gezi forums to flirt with electoral politics. In the 7 June 2015 elections, some of the Gezi forums individually declared their support for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a Kurdish minority party which changed its party program to be comprehensive enough to include all disadvantaged segments, including women, youth, LGBTI, disabled, unemployed and homeless regardless of their previous relation to Kurdish politics, as well as other religious and ethnic minorities such as Alevis and non-Muslims (Kurkcu 2014). The abovementioned coalition got HDP above the extraordinarily high election threshold with 13% of the votes and 80 seats in the national assembly. The HDP’s

Middle-class-based social movements 227 election result was the only immediate electoral outcome of the Gezi movement, unlike the AAP’s local electoral successes in India.

In lieu of conclusion: a case for comparison? The new social movements literature points at the new middle class as the new actor of the post-ideology globalized world (Bagguley 1992). The middle class, however, proved to be too heterogeneous in demographics and too eclectic as an analytical concept. The post-Marxists offered alternatives to the straitjacket of the middle-class concept: multitude (Hardt and Negri 2005), crowds (in encounter) (Merrifield 2013), (people uniting against) the common enemy (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). The neoliberal era led to a shift from people to citizens and individualization of the petty bourgeois and their long-lasting fear of proletarianization (Poulantzas 1978). While Poulantzas declared the “death of the social,” the later post-Marxists proved to be against it. While the post-Marxists were right that grassroots movements are alive and well, their all-encompassing concepts were also subject to criticism for analytical weakness in explaining why some local movements succeed and others fail. This study claims that the shifting intra- and cross-class coalitions and the local institutional structures are two factors that contribute to the outcome of the new social movements. In both India and Turkey, there are two major segments of the middle class. These two segments act either together or separately, depending on their sub-class interests during social movements and electoral campaigns. The two major middle-class segments in India and Turkey are: 1

2

The small and medium-size entrepreneurs in both the urban and rural spheres who later benefited from the liberalization period. Some aligned with the leading parties with conservative ideologies (in India it was BJP that promoted Hindu nationalism, and in Turkey, it was AKP with Turco-Islamist nationalism). This segment of the middle class enjoyed the neoliberal consumption-based lifestyle, and constituted the customers of neoliberal urban redevelopment. In the second half of the 2000s, parts of this segment of the middle class aligned with lifestyle minorities upon attacks on their lives through cases of corruption, rape, deforestation and gentrification in the initial stages of the Anna Hazare and Gezi. The educated bureaucrats of the Nehruvian and Kemalist period, whose next generation turned into professionals in the liberalization period. A significant portion in this group fell down to the working-class level due to precarization from the 2000s onwards. Their demographics include lifestyle minorities who are against neoliberal urbanism, atomization and conservatism. They are the major part of the middle class who aligned with the working class politically as their employment conditions still required the welfare state to keep up with the lifestyle the middle classes traditionally maintain. The support that the intellectuals lent to the NAPM in India and to the Tekel tobacco industry workers’ strike in Turkey are two examples of such convergence.

228  Ceren Ergenç The AAP in India and the HDP in Turkey enjoyed the benefits of this political coalition prior to their existence. Both the Anna Hazare and Gezi movements faced criticism with regards to their participant demographics and political goals. The support base of the Anna Hazare movement was initially seen to be neo-Gandhians who benefited from the long-disputed Congress Party era, the India Shining movement initiated by the new entrepreneurs of the neoliberal era and the legal activists whose political goal allegedly does not go beyond creating public consciousness about legal rights of citizens (Sitapati 2011; Jodhka and Prakash 2011). The moralistic anti-politics stance of the Anna Hazare movements was criticized for its lack of a systemic challenge (Kumar 2011; Chatterjee 2011) and its lack of individual morality as the individual members of the middle class benefit from the neoliberal order in India (Arundhati Roy 2011a). After the reorganization of the movement as a political party, however, analyses focused more on the heterogeneous nature of the AAP support base: the precariously employed urban professionals and the landless rural population disadvantaged by the neoliberal policies beside the public sector employees and the corporate white-collar professionals among the voters of the AAP in its first round of elections in the Delhi Assembly (Singh 2014). It was no coincidence that the 2015 campaign of the AAP was decidedly pro-poor and pro-minority (Palshikar 2016). The shift of analysis started a discussion on the changing nature of mass politics and the role of the precariat in Indian politics (Fernandes 2006; Menon and Nigam 2007). Turkey witnessed similar debates in the immediate aftermath of the Gezi movement. There were three groups of arguments about the demographics of the Gezi movement: some scholars claimed that the Gezi participants were “not-so-new working class” (Boratav 2013), and “a part of the larger class struggle” (Ercan and Oguz 2014) while some others pointed at the Gezi participants as the symbol of the new middle class (Keyder 2014) or the traditional middle class (Tonak 2013). Last but not least, some christened the Gezi participants as the precariat of Turkey (Ogutle and Goker 2014; Yoruk and Yuksel 2014; Saracoglu 2014). Relatedly, some pointed out the connection between the Gezi movement and the global urban movements (Kuymulu 2013; Celik and Ergenc 2015). The critics of the Gezi movement pointed out that the challenge of the Gezi protesters was not anti-systemic and it lacked the broader critique of the neoliberal order as it was focused almost exclusively on the current government of Turkey. Therefore, the Gezi movement was not able to develop alternatives to the existing system. The demographics of the Anna Hazare and the Gezi indeed confirmed the initial analyses about the traditional middle-class nature of these two movements. Among Gezi participants only 22% were politically affiliated by the time they participated, 96% of respondents declared that they participated in Gezi as individuals and for 56% Gezi was their first protest (“Gezi Raporu Haziran 2014” 2014).

Middle-class-based social movements 229 Ethnographic data from the Anna Hazare movement offers similar insights. “A new generation of urban youth” (Singh 2014) took to the streets for the first time: Speaking to some of the protesters, I found most were from residential colonies across Tihar Jail, or were traders in the area, or were students from the nearby Raj Guru College. They were not the so-called upwardly mobile from the posh colonies of South Delhi, but middle class – yes. (Singh 2014) Most people I spoke to were mobilized by the Resident Welfare Association, or through announcements made at the local temple, friends in college or in the colony. (Singh 2014) One protester remarked, “This is the first time I am stepping out for something like this” (Singh 2014). The volunteers of the Anna Hazare movement were also white-collar workers who were involved in rights activism for the first time (S. Roy 2014). The demographics of the later stages of both movements demonstrate a comparable transformation in the demographics of their support and volunteer base. The CSDS Survey reveals that “AAP’s vote-share was highest among the youth, Muslims, Dalits and voters with low media exposure” in the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections (Gautam 2016). Muslims in Delhi voted for AAP in the 2013 Assembly elections (Kumar 2014). Muslims in India, as a religious minority, are regarded as the traditional voter base of the Congress Party for its ideological attachment to secular and egalitarian Nehruvian Consensus. In this sense, Muslims in India are comparable to Alevis in Turkey, who are regarded as the traditional support base of the Republic People’s Party (CHP) for its ideological attachment to secular and egalitarian Kemalist principles. The HDP in Turkey also attracted Alevi votes in the 2015 general elections for its emphasis on societal plurality in its election campaign (DIHA 2015). The post-Gezi neighborhood forums in Turkey constituted the first step of the transition towards a demographic presence in the general elections heavily comprising the lower middle class. According to a survey, 42% of the forum participants across Turkey had active previous political engagement, mostly trade unions, or platforms with only 35% of them being political party members. Of the forum participants, 34% previously had experience in the form of social activism other than protest, and 76% saw the solution outside of the electoral system (Ergenc and Saurina 2015). We came together as Ankara Solidarity because the former Capital Solidarity was too much feeding into the system – NGOs and all that. Projects are fine, but you’re nothing if you don’t challenge the frame. (interviewee quote from Celik and Ergenc 2015)

230  Ceren Ergenç The fact that 90% of those who see the ultimate solution as outside of the electoral system still had voted and declared that they would vote in the upcoming elections also explains the support the Gezi forums lent to the HDP in the 2015 general elections. The AAP and the HDP both seized the transformative potential of the lower middle classes in their respective countries during the election process. The urban poor, heavily composed of informal workers coming from migrant backgrounds were the common cleavage in both countries. One of the primary causes of migration was ethnic tension in Turkey, and the Kurdish migrant population in the urban centers of Western Turkey would constitute a significant portion of the HDP votes in the non-Kurdish areas. In India’s case, domestic migration was primarily caused by caste-based inequalities. Besides the urban poor, the urban educated and under-employed youth were a major force behind the HDP’s success, whereas in India rural support was garnered for the AAP’s party program that emphasized equal access to public services. The support base of both the HDP was a “political class whose potential goes beyond its demographic” (Saracoglu 2014) and the same claim holds true for the AAP. Both parties framed their electoral campaign to mobilize this new lower middle class composed of the precariat, the urban poor and their rural roots. The common rhetoric was the criticism of neoliberal policies, the criticism of the ruling party’s corruption within these neoliberal policies and a call for unity against the “common enemy” represented by the above-mentioned two perils. You are not only Turkish, Kurdish; not solely Armenian, Arab, Circassian, Georgian or Bosniak . . . Alevi, Sunni, Syriac, or Yazidi . . . Jewish, Hebrew, or Christian. You are all of them. (Demirtas, co-chair of the HDP, during the electoral campaign, in Fildes 2015) The “Common Man” in the name of the AAP resonates with the “Us for the Parliament” slogan of the HDP. The alliance between the AAP and the NAPM shifted the meaning of “common man” from the apolitical middle class to the disadvantaged segments. Similarly, the lifestyle minorities transformed the previously parochial Kurdish minority party, the HDP, and made it possible to include all the disadvantaged segments within the “Us for the Parliament” framework. Both movements contain a coalition of classes and segments of the society that carried them beyond middle-class politics. While the Gezi movement was more articulate in its anti-systemic aspirations and influenced the political language of the HDP party program, the Anna Hazare movement–based AAP organized itself better thanks to the its existing knowledge in local politics. Commentaries about the 2020 national elections are favorable towards the AAP. The Gezi’s impact on the electoral politics is comparable to that of the NAPM’s support to the AAP. The comparison between the Indian and Turkish urban grassroots movements demonstrates the variations within local manifestations of global neoliberalism. This comparison demonstrates how to operationalize the literature on the new

Middle-class-based social movements  231 social movements that are not necessarily organized by formal class-based parties. The operationalization of grassroots social movements that go beyond atomized issue-based activism such as Anna Hazare/AAP and Gezi require in-depth analysis of local conditions. Structural factors such as the administrative structure of the state, electoral and judicial systems as well as the history of mass mobilizations shaped the outcomes of the new social movements in different contexts. Further research comparing various cases from Western and non-Western contexts is likely to reveal other patterns conducive to generalization.

Resources Bagguley, Paul (1992) “Social Change, the Middle Class and the Emergence of ‘New Social Movements’: A  Critical Analysis,” The Sociological Review, 40(1): 26–48. doi:10.1111/j.1467–954X.1992.tb02944.x Bedirhanoğlu, Pinar and Yalman, Galip (2010) “Neoliberal Transformation in Turkey: State, Class and Discourse,” in A. Saad-Filho and G. Yalman (eds.) Economic Transitions to Neoliberalism in Middle-Income Countries Policy Dilemmas, Crises, Mass Resistance, London: Routledge. Boratav, Korkut (2013) “Olgunlaşmış Bir Sınıfsal Başkaldırı,” Sendika, 22 June. Braverman, Harry (1998) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, 25th Anniversary ed., New York: Monthly Review Press. Celik, Ozlem and Ergenc, Ceren (2015) “Whose Right to What City? Voices from PostGezi Movement Urban Forums in Ankara, Turkey,” American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Conference Proceeding. Chatterjee, Partha (2011) “Against Corruption = Against Politics,” Kafila, 28August.Available at: https://kafila.org/2011/08/28/against-corruption-against-politics-partha-chatterjee/. De Leon, Cedric, Desai, Manali and Tuğal, Cihan (2009) “Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey*,” Sociological Theory, 27(3): 193–219. doi:10.1111/j.1467–9558.2009.01345.x. Diani, Mario and McAdam, Doug (eds.) (2003) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, 1st ed., Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press. DIHA. (2015) “Alevilerin Türkiye Seçim Kronolojisi,” Aleviliğe Açılan Sayfa, 8 October. Available at: www.alevikulturdernekleri.com/alevilerin-turkiye-secim-kronolojisi/. Ehrenreich, Barbara (1990) Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Reprint ed., New York: HarperCollins. Ercan, Fuat and Oguz, Sebnem (2014) “From Gezi Resistance to Soma Massacre: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle in Turkey,” Socialist Register, 51(51). Available at: http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/22097. Ergenc, Ceren and Saurina, Marc (2015) “ ‘This Is Only the Beginning, We’ll Keep Fighting!’ Political Efficacy Through Participation in Post—Gezi Movement Urban Forums in Turkey,” ESA Research Network on Social Movements – Midterm Conference 2015, Conference Proceedings. Fernandes, Leela (2006) India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform, 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fildes, Harriet (2015) “The Rise of the HDP  – Elections and Democracy in Turkey,” openDemocracy, 3 June. Available at: www.opendemocracy.net/harriet-fildes/ rise-of-hdp-elections-and-democracy-in-turkey.

232  Ceren Ergenç Gautam, Ravi (2016) “Center for the Study of Developing Societies Survey,” Quora. Available at: www.quora.com/What-do-Delhiites-think-about-Arvind-Kejriwal-now. “Gezi Raporu Haziran 2014.” (2014) Konda Araştırma ve Danışmanlık. Available at: www.konda.com.tr/tr/raporlar.php. Gunal, Yeliz (2013) Neoliberal Transformation and Professional Middle Classes: Case of Engineers in Turkey, Ankara, Turkey: Middle East Technical University. Gürcan, Efe Can and Peker, Efe (2015a). Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey’s Gezi Park. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: http://link.springer.com/10.1057/ 9781137469021. ——— (2015b) “A  Class Analytic Approach to the Gezi Park Events: Challenging the ‘middle Class’ Myth,” Capital & Class, 39(2): 321–43. doi:10.1177/0309816815584015. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2005) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Reprint ed., New York: Penguin Books. Harvey, David (2013) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, 1st ed., London-New York: Verso. Jagannathan, R. (2014) “AAP Ka Baap, BJP Ka Dada: The Rise of India’s Middle Class – Firstpost,” First Post, 3 January. Available at: www.firstpost.com/politics/aap-ka-baapbjp-ka-dada-the-rise-of-indias-middle-class-1319103.html. Jodhka, Surinder and Prakash, Aseem (2011) “The Indian Middle-Class: Emerging Cultures of Politics and Economics,” International Reports Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, no. 12. Available at: www.kas.de/wf/en/33.29624/. Keyder, Caglar (2014) “The New Middle Class,” Bilim Akademisi, 1 August. Kumar, Sanjay (2011) “Politics of Anna Hazare Anti-Corruption Movement,” Kafila. Available at: https://kafila.org/2011/08/31/politics-of-anna-hazare-anti-corruption-move ment-by-sanjay-kumar/. ——— (2014) “Who Did India’s Muslims Vote for in General Election?” BBC News, 30 May, sec. India. Available at: www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27615592. Kurkcu, Ertugrul (2014) “Gezi İsyanı’nın Siyasi Çağrısı,” PoliTez.com, 30 May. Available at: www.politez.com/detail/endiseli-/4026/gezi-isyaninin-siyasi-cagrisi-hdp-esbas kani-ertugrul-kurkcu. Kuymulu, Mehmet Bariş (2013) “Reclaiming the Right to the City: Reflections on the Urban Uprisings in Turkey,” City, 17(3): 274–78. doi:10.1080/13604813.2013.815450. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed., London-New York: Verso. Lange, Hellmuth and Meier, Lars (eds.) (2010) The New Middle Classes: Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmental Concern, Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed., 2009 ed., Dordrecht-New York: Springer. Menon, Nivedita and Nigam, Aditya (2007) Power and Contestation: India Since 1989. Halifax, NS, London-New York: Zed Books. Merrifield, Andy (2013) The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Power Elite, London: Oxford University Press. Mishra, Pankaj (2012) “Indians Against Democracy,” The New York Review of Books. 24 January. Available at: www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/01/24/indians-against-democracy/. Ogutle, Vefa Saygin and Goker, Emrah (2014) Gezi ve Sosyoloji, İstanbul: Ayrinti Yayinlari. Öncü, Ahmet (2014) “Turkish Capitalist Modernity and the Gezi Revolt,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 27(2): 151–76. doi:10.1111/johs.12036. Ozen, Hayriye and Avci, Ozgur (2013) “Her Yer Taksim Her Yer Direniş: Kentsel Bir Hareketin Ulusal Yayılımı,” Atılım Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 3(1–2): 31–45.

Middle-class-based social movements  233 Palshikar, Suhas (2016) “Who Is Delhi’s Common Man?” New Left Review, II(98): 113–28. Poulantzas, Nicos (1978) Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, David Fernbach (ed. and trans.), London: Verso. Roy, Ananya (2009) “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence and the Idiom of Urbanization,” Planning Theory, 8(1): 76–87. doi:10.1177/1473095208099299. Roy, Arundhati (2011a) “I’d Rather Not Be Anna,” The Hindu, 21 August. Available at: www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/id-rather-not-be-anna/article2379704.ece. Roy, Biswajit (2011b) “Whither Anna Hazare Movement?” Frontier, 44(17). Roy, Srirupa (2014) “Being the Change: The Aam Aadmi Party and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Indian Democracy,” Economic and Political Weekly, 49(15): 45–54. Saracoglu, Cenk (2014) “Gezi Direnişi ve Müzmin Orta Sınıf Sorunu,” soL Haber Portalı. 29 January. Available at: http://haber.sol.org.tr/bilim-teknoloji/cenk-saracoglu-yazdigezi-direnisi-ve-muzmin-orta-sinif-sorunu-haberi-86805. Singh, Puninder (2014) “History and Idealism in the Aam Aadmi Party’s 2014 Victories in Punjab,” Kafila, 29 May. Sitapati, Vinay (2011) “What Anna Hazare’s Movement and India’s New Middle Classes Say about Each Other,” Economic and Political Weekly, 46(30). Available at: www. epw.in/journal/2011/30/perspectives/what-anna-hazares-movement-and-indias-newmiddle-classes-say-about-each. Steur, Luisa (2014) “Trajectories of the Common Man’s Party,” Focaalblog, 3 November. Available at: www.focaalblog.com/2014/11/03/luisa-steur-trajectories-of-the-commonmans-party/. Tonak, Ahmet (2013) “Isyanin Siniflari,” in O. Goztepe (ed.) Gezi Direnisi Uzerine Dusunceler, Ankara: Nota Bene Press, 21–8. Tuğal, Cihan (2015) “Elusive Revolt the Contradictory Rise of Middle-Class Politics1,” Thesis Eleven, 130(1): 74–95. doi:10.1177/0725513615602183. Turan, Omer (2014) “Gezi Direnişi: Kamusal Alan ve Çekişmeci Siyaset Üzerinden Bir Analiz,” Felsefeden Siyasete Bir Gezi Sempozyumu, Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi Felsefe Bölümü. Unaldi, Serhat, Spiess, Clemens and Bartsch, Bernhardt (2014) “Asian Middle Classes – Drivers of Political Change?” Asia Policy Brief, 6. Available at: www.bertelsmann-stiftung. de/en/publications/publication/did/asian-middle-classes-drivers-of-political-change/. Yoruk, Erdem and Yuksel, Murat (2014) “Class and Politics in Turkey’s Gezi Protests,” New Left Review, 89. Available at: https://newleftreview.org/II/89/erdem-yoruk-muratyuksel-class-and-politics-in-turkey-s-gezi-protests.

Index

AAP 13, 219 – 231, 224, 228 AKP Justice and Development Party (JDP) 10, 37, 93, 131 – 33, 135, 141, 145 – 47, 148 – 52, 162, 199, 222 Abdul Kader Gilani or Abd el Qadir Jilani 36, 47, 52 – 53. Ahmadiya 66 – 67 Alexander the Great 6, 26 Alevi 9, 59, 101 – 7, 127 – 135, 163 Alevi Opening 127, 131 – 33 Alevism 9 – 10, 50, 107, 127 – 28, 129 – 35 Al-Ghazali 34 – 35 Ambedkar Dr. 69, 119 Amin, Shahid 5 Anna Hazare 219 – 229 Arendt, H. 216 – 17 Aristotle 35 Atatürk, Kemal 8, 20, 22, 50, 91, 103, 105, 113, 197, Kemal Pasha, Mustafa Kemal 66 – 67, 73, 77 – 80, 84, Atay, F. R. 17 – 18, 21, 24 – 7, 30, 84, 86 Babri Masjid 128 Bakhtin, M. 209 bandagan e khass 4 – 5 Banerjee, M. 206 Bauman, Zygmunt 12, 173, bereket 47, 52 Berkes, N. 18, 23 – 4, 27 Bharatiya Janata Party BJP 92, 128, 131, 135, 141, 145,147,149, 152, 222 Braudel, F. 22 – 4, 29 – 30. BRICS 141, 150

Delhi Sultanate 3 – 5, 38 Democrat Party (DP) 130 democratic 2, 19, 95, 110 democracy 32, 102, 113,119, 141 democratization 131 development 1, 8, 11, 96, 100, 182, 190. 191, 217, developmentalism 142, 182, 188, 191, 225 diaspora 10, 155 – 167 Diyanet 50, 56, 131 – 132 economic growth 8, 10,11 Ecevit, B. 17 – 22, 29 Edib, H. 8, 30, 76 – 87 Erdogan, R. T. 133, 150 EU 131,133, 144 Fethullah Gulen 37 foreign aid 141, 147, 151 Galata Bridge 204, 206, 211 – 12, 217 – 18 Gandhi, Mahatma 8, 22, 67 – 71, 76 – 77, 80 – 84, 114, 116, 119, 160 Gezi Park 199, 218, Gezi Movement 13, 219, 220, 225, 227 Ghazi 3, 73 Ghazi Miyan 5, 6, 43 global capitalism, economy, globalization 11, 12, 145, 147,152 Gupta, D. 10 – 11, 177, 179

Caliphate 7, 8, 18, 68, 76,105 Chishti 38 – 39, 42, 44 Cold War 141, 143 – 4, 145, 152

Haci Bayram 47, 50 – 52, 54, 56 Haci Bektash Veli 127 Harvey D. 214 Hasankeyf 185 – 87, 190 HDP (People’s Democratic Party) 220 – 21, 225 – 30 Hume, David 11, 168, 172, 178 – 79

Dalits 119 Dara Shikoh 6, 39 – 40

Ibn Arabi 52, 54 Ibn Batuta 2 – 3, 4 – 5, 7, 27

236 Index Ilisu Project 12, 181 – 82, 185 – 89, 191 Iltutmish, Shams al din, 4 Kadiköy 210 – 11 Khiljis 4, 38 Khilafat 7, 8, 68, 70, 71, 76 Kizilbash 129 Kurds 108, 131, 163 Kurdish 108, 129, party 226 Kemalist 18, 93, 103 – 104, 220, 227 Kemalism 104, 106, 107 Krishna, Anirudh 10 – 11, 169, 177 La Guardia, F. 198, 205 Lak, Daniel 168 – 69, 173, 175 Mahmud of Ghazni 5, 43 majority 9, 97, 102, 109, 119 majoritarianism 97, 98, 107,110, 149 Mandeville, Bernard 11, 168, 170 – 72, 174, 176, 178 – 79 Marco Polo 7, 26 – 7 middle class 10, 105, 156, 219, 221, 224 – 25, 227 migration 10 migrants 13 minority 1, 2, 9 – 10, 92, 96 – 98, 101 – 102, 107 – 109, 119, 123 – 124, 127 – 128, 134 – 135, 146 modernization 8, 68, 72, 75, 94, 214 anxiety 212 citizens 83, 99, 100 – 102, 109 modernity 6, 8, 76 – 78, 95, 98, 99, 100,101,104, 146, 205 Montreux Convention 143 Mughals 3, 22, 24, 32, 34, 37, 39 Nakshbandi 36 – 37, 39, 43, 50 Nandy, A. 206 – 7, 214. nation, nationhood, nation-states 3, 103 – 110, 117, 142, 158, nationality 143 nation building 8, national awakening 18 nationalism 9,21,59, 67, 69, 70,71, 80, 92, 102, 159 nationalist 69, 71, 77, 94, 96, 98 – 9, 105 – 109, 142, 145 National Democratic Alliance 145, 147 NATO 143 – 44 Navya Nyaya 6 Nehamas, A. 209 – 10 Nehru, Jawaharlal 9, 22, 69, 91, 99, 101, 113 – 121, 143, 159 Nehruvian 92 – 93,93, 100 – 102, 108, 113, 121, 128,145, 146, 220, 222, 227

neoliberal era 221 – 22, lifestyle 227 neoliberalism 141, 145, 205, 214 – 15, 219 – 20, urban liberalization 226, economic liberalization 222, 227 one-upmanship 12, 173 – 74, 176 Ottomans 7, 24, 129, neo-Ottomanism 10, 148 Ottoman Empire 8, 17 – 18, 22 – 24, 28, 32, 33, 36 – 37, 67, 76, 103 – 105, 129, era 204 past 10, Ottoman citizens 78, 83, Jewry 81, intellectual 82, monarchy 77, tradition 37 Pakistan 8, 20, 32, 33, 42, 76, 96, 97, 119, 143, 147 Pamuk, Orhan 169 – 70, 197 – 8, 200 – 201, 203 – 4 patriarchy 120 partition 8, 18, 97, 128. Plato 13, 115, 209 – 10, 215 – 16 Polemarchus 209 Popper K. 211 Prophet Muhammad 32, 33, 36,65, 70 public sphere 9, 18,109 Rabindranath Tagore 17 – 18, 20 – 22, 29, 216 religious politics 94, 110 Republican People’s Party 19, 130 Republican Turkey 68, 103 rising powers 142, 152 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 174, 178 – 79 RSS 147, 160 Sachar Report 128 Safavids 37, 129, 133 Salafi 32 – 34, 40, 41 – 43 Sardar Sarovar Project 12, 182 – 83, 188, 190 Sen, Amartya 10 – 11, 175 – 176, 179 Shamsi slaves 4 shrines 3, 5, 7, 32, 40 – 43, 47 – 54, 55 – 60 Singh, M. 128, 135 Smith, Adam 168, 172 – 73, 176 – 77, 179 social 1,2, 71 activity 114, processes 2 capital costs 11, change 72, conservatism 99, impacts, inequalities 11, 71, 73 movements, mobility 170, 177 – 78, 222 mobilization 189, order 9, 211, 134, networks 68, sphere, reforms 72 truth 79 Socrates 13, 209 – 10, 215 – 17

Index  237 Strauss, L. 209, 211 Sufi 6, 32, 33, 36, 38 – 39, 40 – 43, 51, 52, 54, 57 Sufism 34, 60 Sultan Abdul Hamid II 7, 24, 25 – 27, 66, 77 Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq 2, 38 Sultan Selim 1, 133 Suez Canal 24 – 27 sultanate 3 – 5, 18, 24, 49 Sunni 10, 32, 36, 59, 104,107, 127, 129, 134, 146 Islam 109 Sunnification 32 Sunnism 129, 130, 132 Swaraj 7, 66, 69 Syria 26, 34, 82, 83, 133, 149, 151 Tamil self-respecters 8, 72 – 75 Thousand and One Nights, the 7, 25, 27 – 9 Thrasymachus 209 – 11, 217

Tipu Sultan 18 Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) 182, 184 – 85, 187 – 89, 191 transnationalism 27, 155, 158 Treaty of Lausanne 18, 107, 134 Tughluqs 4 Turk 3 – 5, 7, 25, 37, 67, 72, 146, 155, 157, 161 UN 150 UNESCO 186 – 87 Wahhabi 33, 34 World Bank 12, 150, 160, 183 – 86, 188, 190 WTO 150 ziyaret 7, 41, 48, 51, 53