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August 11, 2002
EXCERPTS: The bridge builder
Achin Vanaik and Paul R. Brass pay tributes to Asghar Ali Engineer who has played a unique role for four decades in focussing on communal peace in India
WHILE many people are involved in this ‘broad front’ struggle, rare is the person who within his or her own life and practice can be said to embody the various facets of this diverse effort. Asghar Ali Engineer is just such a person and this festschrift in his honour is not just richly deserved but too long delayed in its coming. Engineer has been, and is, one of India’s most outstanding scholar-activists or what might well be his own preferred term, activist-scholar. It is both mistaken and impossible to separate these two facets of his personality.
The country’s most important chronicler of communal riots, the indefatigable investigator wherever and whenever such riots take place, Engineer has played a unique role over four decades in focussing on these events and experiences. He has made sure that the powers that be are reminded of these events, are put on notice to do something about them — at least to make sure they do not happen again in places once afflicted — to recompense suffering families and victims, to reform state apparatuses, to uncover the deeper sources of communal tension and hostilities so as to make it more possible to overcome this evil.
However, Engineer has not just been chronicler but also theoriser. The wealth of empirical detail and evidence diligently collected has enabled him to put forward a more generic explanation of the phenomenon of communal riots in India. From his remarkable labours has emerged nothing less than a socio-economic-political geography, a veritable social science atlas of communal violence in the country. This alone assures him of an honourable place in the world of South Asian scholarship. But there is still more to be said.
His writings have stretched beyond the issue of communal violence, its forms, effects and source, to cover various other dimensions the relationship of communalism to nationalism, the erosion of civil liberties, the inadequacies of development, and the failure to institutionalize adequately guarantees of greater and expanding social justice. Most important perhaps, Engineer has sought to explore that immensely slippery terrain concerning the supposed connections between communalism and lived and doctrinal Islam and Hinduism. Here, his judgment is unequivocal. Most of the doctrines of these two religions or the beliefs held by believers, as well as the multiple ways in which belief and affiliation are expressed — the practices of lived religion — are all to be absolved from the charge of being integral to the promotion of Islamic or Hindu communalism.
Going beyond this judgment, Engineer has consistently defended the internal capacities of world religious systems to provide the necessary resources to combat the evil done in their names. The resources of Islam have been his particular preoccupation and, though his work covers a much wider span, it is here, in his defence of the humanist realities and reform possibilities of Islam and of the world of its believers, that much of his work has been most distinctive.
The necessary antidote to the more facile observations regarding Islam (especially in South Asia) that are so often purveyed by the likes of Arun Shourie and other Islam-baiters, resides in the more serious, sophisticated, accurate and far more perceptive writings of Engineer. In this respect, he is not alone. Others who have portrayed Indian Islam with due sensitivity, deep knowledge and critical appreciation include Mushirul Hasan and Imtiaz Ahmad.
Nonetheless, it is again Engineer who treads a particularly lonely path — that of the activist reformer in the Muslim Bohra community within which he was born.....
It is a struggle that has led not only to Engineer’s ostracism from the Bohra community .... but to physical attacks and beatings on a number of occasions, in which he was lucky indeed to escape with his life. The most recent such attack took place in the Spring of 2000 at Mumbai Airport when he was assaulted in full public and police view.... This attack was then followed by a systematic ransacking and destruction of his home and office, the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism in Santa Cruz East Mumbai. Typically, these adversities have only strengthened Engineer’s resolve to keep ploughing his intellectual and political furrow, lonely though this endeavour must often seem to be. The activist organization he helped to found many years ago, called Ekta (Unity), formed to fight communalism and protect civic liberties and rights from being violated, also continues its steady work.
This festschrift in honour of Asghar Ali Engineer is one small way for his many friends and admirers to declare that his efforts have most certainly not been in vain. Too much water has now flowed under the bridges he helped to construct. In honouring Engineer, we seek to honour that small but crucial category, the ‘committed public intellectual’ engaged in public activism of a high order, sometimes as symbol, more often as participant. In Mumbai, one of the great metropolises of India, over the last three decades, the two names of Asghar Ali Engineer and A.R. Desai have been among the most prominent. These were the names that sprang automatically to the lips of almost any progressive group planning some kind of public action on almost any issue. These were the figures whose signatures to a petition would be sought, whose presence at a dharna (sit-in) or march would invariably be wanted, whose solidarity to the said cause had to be elicited. A.R. Desai sadly passed away some years ago. But the figure of equivalent stature, one of Delhi’s most significant public intellectuals, Rajni Kothari, is very much with us and it is no accident or coincidence that he has contributed to this festschrift.
Excerpted with permission from
Competing nationalisms in South Asia: essays for Asghar Ali Engineer
Edited by Paul R. Brass and
Achin Vanaik Orient Longman, 3-6-276, Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029, India. Tel: 91-040-3224294
Email: editor@pol.net.in
ISBN 81-250-2221-X 297pp. Price not stated
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