| December 18, 2008 | Thursday | Zilhaj 19, 1429 |
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Of monumental tragedies
MUMBAI’S terror attacks evoked a range of emotions focussed on a magnificent hotel that was all but destroyed in its 60-hour long siege. It would be useful to remember that there were always two views about the original Taj Mahal and there are at least as many about the hotel named after it.
On the one hand the resplendent beauty of the real Taj was seen as a grieving emperor’s expression of love for his dead wife. This is how young hearts that throng there like to remember the monument, barring of course Princess Diana whose lonely visit there in 1992 was more like a statement in solitude. But love, unrequited though it may have been, was still the theme of her loneliness.The other view of the Taj Mahal was represented by Sahir Ludhianavi. His love poems, made widely popular through Urdu/Hindi cinema, evoked as much romance as his leftist world view kindled deep reflection on the ironies of an unequal society. The poem on Taj Mahal mirrored the dichotomy well. He wrote:
Ye samanzaar, ye Jamuna ka kinara, ye mahal
Ye munaqqash dar-o-diwar, ye mehraab, ye taaq
Ek shahenshah ne daulat ka sahaara lekar
Hum gharibon ki mohabbat ka udaya hai mazaaq
Meri mehboob kahin aur mila kar mujh se
(The expansive garden in the lap of the Jamuna,
This resplendent palace, its engraved walls,
The delicate arches, and exquisite alcoves
It seems as though a wayward emperor
Has flashed his wealth to mock the love of the poor?
My dearest, can we meet somewhere else?)
Ever since last month’s brutal attacks on Mumbai, two versions of the story of the hotel and its owners have been repeated ad nauseam. One version highlights Jamsetji Tata as an Indian nationalist who came to own the finest hotel in India. At the time, the best hotels in Mumbai (then Bombay) were run by the British — and did not accept Indian guests. According to this version, Jamsetji decided to build a hotel when, already a seriously wealthy man, he was refused entry to a local hotel where whites far less rich were lording it over him. Jamsetji decided he would own the best hotel in India — and it would be open to Indians.
The other version focuses on the fact that the hotel’s Parsi owner initially made his fortune on the back of the opium exports to China, a detail airbrushed out of the company history today. True, opium trade was legal then but it is equally a fact that it was not a straightforward trade but an aspect of colonial wars in which the British side cruelly triumphed over Chinese resistance against forced consumption of opium by their people.
The resultant opium wars formed a brutal chapter in China’s tryst with colonial rule. I do not know what was nationalist about this, but that is not the point. Israeli tourists still admire the great pyramids despite a history of Jewish slavery that hugs the foundations of the mesmeric structures.
What is worrying is that the absence of an honest debate following the horror in Mumbai has divided India into two unequal halves — the well-heeled who wanted carpet-bombing of Pakistan, dissolution of parliament declaration of emergency and the imposition of army rule. One right-wing Rajya Sabha MP declared Ziaul Haq as South Asia’s most successful strategist for bleeding India with a thousand cuts. He demanded a similar strategy to bleed Pakistan in Balochistan and elsewhere.
Someone came on TV screens to suggest that India needed a Gen Musharraf to rule with an iron hand not realising of course that such hero worship would embarrass even the current government in Pakistan. To me there was unmistakable similarity between the objectives of the elites who showed up on TV — one of them demanded that the corporate clubs should get together to take charge of the country because the politicians were a liability — and the terrorists who raided the parliament house on Dec 13, 2001. They both wanted to eliminate Indian democracy.
The first attempt to usher fascism failed but nearly led to a nuclear war; the second attempt is being discussed by parliament. A new law has been proposed to tame terror but its harsh provisions are more likely to be felt by the left-liberal soul of India than by any terrorist. The Naxalites, among the most dispossessed if misguided Indians, whose links with the Mumbai incident are as remote as sunlight is to a dungeon, will most likely be the first to get it in the neck.
Everyone who had an axe to grind did so. I heard a tycoon associated with the scooters industry screaming bang in the middle of the crisis how the government should stop worrying about inflation and focus on growth, a euphemism for letting the poor suffer. The Forbes magazine declared industrialist Ratan Tata as the best candidate to lead India.“As an American, I don’t get a vote in India, but if I did, mine would go to Ratan Tata,” declared Forbes magazine’s senior editor (Asia) Robyn Meredith. “He is not a politician, but he is the country’s most respected business leader. His Tata Group owns the Taj hotel that was just attacked, but his family is just as connected to India’s proud history as its shell-shocked present,” Meredith wrote in a weekly column published online.
Two events went unnoticed in the meantime. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the former prime minister, died of an old illness during the bloody mayhem. A discussion on him would have been totally relevant in the otherwise 24 hours of daily mindlessness churned out by television. Mr Singh had gone on a Gandhian fast for more than a week in 1993 when Mumbai was burning the last time around. His illness was partly worsened by that fast.
The other news that hasn’t really mattered to our round-the-clock vigilant TV anchors is the fact that according to newly released statistics, 16,632 indebted farmers had committed suicide in 2007, one quarter of them in Maharashtra whose capital Mumbai is. Who knows how many of them were planning to or did take leave of this world just when our minds were riveted to the tragic events at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
