Iqbal Masud insists Hindus and Muslims don't comprise a composite culture.

By Dileep Padgaonkar

Saffronites will go to town with these memoirs. Not that Iqbal Masud has spotted any virtue in Hindutva. He remains hostile to it from end to end. But now that he has jettisoned his image of a "progressive Muslim intellectual" for good, he is even more bitter about liberals and leftists: all stand condemned in his eyes as closet sympathisers of the Sangh Parivar.

Hindus and Muslims, he asserts, do not really "know" each other. They never did, in fact. Their much-touted composite culture "was never really composite". Masud approvingly quotes Syed Shahabuddin's remark made to him: "Whatever you may say, Masud saheb, don't forget that our religious and cultural foundation extends beyond India to the Middle East. We are the only religious minority of which this is true and this offends the nationalism of the most liberal Hindu." That, precisely, has been the refrain of the parivar, from V.D. Savarkar down to its present-day propagandists.

The Muslim community has been in a state of shock since the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Parties professing secularism have done precious little to alleviate its pain. But can that justify the touch of paranoia in Masud's grouse against the upholders of the secular order? He finds nothing at all to commend in the works of poets and novelists, filmmakers and scholars who have dealt with Hindu-Muslim relations and Partition with a great deal of sensitivity. He attributes the problems he has faced with editors -- this includes an incident involving me, which I simply cannot recall -- to their hostility towards a dissenter who is a "minority man" with a "municipal education". These editors "basically favour the majoritarian discourse" not for communal reasons but because the "urban, English-reading public is majoritarian in word, thought and deed".

Nowhere does Masud explain the difference between "communal" and "majoritarian". One had always assumed that they were synonyms. But that apart, his allegations are plainly absurd. For, in their reporting and comments on the felling of the Babri Masjid, the subsequent riots and the Bombay blasts of 1993, the Indian press, barring a few notorious exceptions, gave an admirable account of itself. This so angered the Sangh Parivar that one of its leading lights, Balasaheb Thackeray, criticised the press, in particular English-language newspapers, with vicious fury. That Masud and Thackeray should both target the English press -- and the liberals and leftists who allegedly control it -- does lend a new and dangerous dimension to our public life. Clearly those who wish to cast national and cultural identities solely in religious moulds cannot entertain the thought of celebrating the pluralism of Indian society and the multi-layered identity of every Indian.

All the same, Masud emerges from these pages as an individual endowed with sterling integrity. He displayed it through the long years he served in the Income Tax Department and especially during the Emergency (1975-77). I may find his snap judgements on films and filmmakers often commonplace and his compulsive habit of flaunting his erudition a bit irksome. But this must not detract from his genuine passion for "the life examined".

How one wishes this passion also covered attention to detail. Masud gets the names of the Film and Television Institute of India and the National Film Archives of India wrong (page 110). He mistakes B.K. Karanjia, the film journalist, for his brother, R.K. Karanjia. Russi Karanjia himself -- in excellent spirits despite his advanced age -- figures on page 64 as the "late R.K. Karanjia of Blitz". Ah, these majoritarian nit-pickers...

BOOKS: On The Salt March
Return to Dandi

Story of a humble man's march, told with humility.

By P Ananthakrishnan

They were all sceptical. Motilal Nehru, for instance, was worried salt had become another of Mahatma Gandhi's hobby horses that had little meaning for anyone else. In the end, it become a textbook satyagraha campaign. Motilal's son, writing from Naini prison, gushed, "May I congratulate you on the new India you have created by your magic touch!" Thomas Weber has caught this magic in simple, unadorned prose. He alternates between a meticulous account of the Salt March of 1930 and the story of his attempt to retrace Gandhi's steps in 1983.

Was Gandhi successful? After all, the salt laws were not repealed by the British and India had to wait another 17 years to attain the swaraj that Gandhi sought to achieve when he left Sabarmati Ashram for Dandi. But, as Weber points out, through the march Gandhi tried to provide means for the lowliest to undertake the change of self and take part in the change of society. So it will be wrong to judge such movements purely on utilitarian grounds.

Weber writes of Gandhi's dietary prescriptions for the marchers, of his gentle persuasion of villagers to sit among the "untouchables", of his condemnation of the use of petromax lanterns in his meetings as an act of extravagance and of his admonition of a marcher for having had an ice-cream. The saint of small things instinctively understood that even epic battles should start from the basics. The excellent account by Webb Miller, the American correspondent, of the Dharasana raids -- which Weber has included in his book -- shows Gandhi's disciples had learnt the basics.

Though Weber's story of his own march is by and large insipid, this is not just another Gandhi book. It has a halo of truth that makes it important. We need a similar, scrupulous account of 1942 if only to understand how "sometimes legends make reality".

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