Bye bye, Mughalsarai — new name, same old debate
So, it’s official now. The Mughalsarai Junction railway junction, the fourth-busiest in India, established by the British in the 1800s as a crucial link between Delhi and Kolkata, has now been renamed Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction.
The renaming is in memory of the right-wing Hindutva ideologue, found dead in mysterious circumstances at Mughalsarai on February 11, 1968.
Macabre? Yes, a touch, maybe. But hardly a renaming to get your tracks in a twist over.
Yet, that is exactly what happened.
Two schools of thought — if you can call it that — have clashed as loudly online as train wheels screeching on the rails.
One school comprises the Hindutva Hothead (HH) types, all aglow with the "victory" of the renaming, stating proudly that with this change in signage, centuries of "slavery" have been avenged. The other school comprises the Secular Sanctimony League (SSL), which, hearing of the renaming, immediately got busy drawing on the wells of their nostalgia — "Ah, Mughalsarai! It’s where, when we were going to our house in the hills in the summer of '69, my ayah got me the most deeeelish mango juice" — or making lists of all things "Mughal" which we must protect from those horrible saffron chaddi types.
Whatever will they rename next? Asked a former TV anchor. Mughal Gardens?
Why just that though? So many things can be renamed. Mughal-E-Azam. The Mughal Empire. Mughal miniatures. Mughal turban. Mughal zamindari system. Mughlai Paratha.
Much gnashing of secular teeth and furrowing of tolerant brows has thus taken place over the renaming of Mughalsarai Junction.
But, by doing this, and making the usual tamasha of their tolerance, the Linen Liberals have fallen straight into the BJP’s trap.
The BJP always stated it would rename this particular railway junction after one of its most important leaders. By doing so, it has delivered on at least one promise to its core votary. And, by doing so, it has further polarised a discourse which was already bubbling over with divisions and discussions of the most nonsensical kind.
Were the Mughals lovely lads or luccha-lafanga-louts? Were they rapists or philosophers? Was Ashoka sexier or Akbar cooler? Which had a greater impact on Indian society — Vedic Age ke test-tube babies or Pandit Nehru’s alleged romantic activities?
These are the "historical" debates we find ourselves hemmed in by these days.
It’s no big surprise. Again, the BJP never made any secret about the udan khatola school of history — where we all once lived in a golden Vedic age, of flying chariots that could deliver philosophical tomes plus atom bombs, where plastic surgery was perfect and internet uninterrupted — that it really likes. In this version of the past, the party was over when "the invaders" — first, the Mughals, then the British — came along and yoked every son of the soil to the reins of their servitude. These reins continued to choke us post-Independence and must be thrown off now, for India to place its feet back on those wonderful udan khatolas of yore.
That the BJP would hark back to such historicity when in power — do not underestimate the narrative's power, gilded in gold, tarnished by an idea of paradise lost — should not be such a shock to anybody.
But it is — and there’s a reason for that.
The BJP’s opponents suffer from another delusion of history. This is basically the "zamzama" school of thought, derived from a kind of peculiar mishmash between Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (who sat on the "zamzama" or great canon of Lahore and viewed India thereby), Nehru’s Discovery of India (dirty secret: no one reads it — everyone quotes it), lots of "secular-type" Bollywood films and some Urdu poetry-woetry, made more famous by Jagjit Singh’s boozy renditions than the original 1950s-60s shayars who spent time in jail suffering the tyrannies of their freedom-fighter leaders.
But those are unpleasant historical facts.
They find little mention in the "zamzama" school where "India", clothed in super-sensuous traditional muslin, is composed of a vibrant mix of secular bazaars (where we embrace while crooking each other), feel-good galiyan and chowbaara where we continually or dobaara welcome intruders just so charmed by our mangoes and masti, they decide to stop pillaging and sit down and chill.
In short, we are caught between a feel-bad history and a feel-good history.
Both are probably entirely wrong.
Who’s to really say, for what is "history" anyway in India? A clutch of fables, a trove of tales, a fistful of fantasies, a pile of rubble, a heap of broken rocks, on which we can at most scrawl "Pappu loves Payal".
What is "history" but medieval mystery, vintage forts in which old scoundrels and new refugees seek shelter, beautiful palaces where you can feel like a post-spa maharaja, crumbling Grand Truck Roads that shudder under a million trucks, pillars and shadows where students sit mugging up, lovers kiss, householders plan futures, the elderly think of their past.
That’s the history we know in India. The kind which lets us sit down and have a snooze, a cuddle, a pause from the daily, the momentary, the life which otherwise threatens to entirely drown us.
History in India is an island. It’s where you go to switch off.
But, when it becomes a tool in contemporary politics, it’s very different.
And it’s a winning card in the hands of a party that knows how to play history’s losers — and winners — alternately, how to beat on the drums of distress and righteousness with perfect timing, how to rush in — and raze — a historical monument, the doors to which were unlocked for a rather non-secular ritual by India’s most secular party.
Given the BJP’s usage of history, to fall into its "Vedic-Babur-Nehru" discourse is our Khan Market Communists being lazy again.
The more it counters the right wing’s claims — "Of course India has always been tolerant!" "Of course Nehru was not a flirty debauch!" "Of course Veer Savarkar pleaded for mercy while Congress leaders wrote so nobly about philosophy!" — it gives up any original thought and only emphasises the gap between itself and "the common man". This person’s history is not Oxford or Cambridge or The Gazetteer of India or the wonderfully wry Marxist professors of Calcutta, the sarcastic upper lip of Irfan Habib, the stiff silken writing of Romila Thapar, those volumes of Gibbon and EH Carr which so proudly line our TV debaters’ bookshelves, gleaming like only unopened books can.
This person’s history is mofusil legend and village tales. Subaltern whispers and vernacular anecdotes. WhatsApp forwards and Facebook posts — and a sense of persecution which can, perhaps, be righted now.
With stuff like renaming "Mughalsarai Junction".
The move could have been greeted with the sheer irony it deserved. With interesting questions — "Who cares about the signboard? Will there be anything more than rubble beneath it?" — that deserve to be asked. With concerns — "Will there be hygienic toilets at the station now?" "Better staircases?" "More safety?" — that actually impact us today, as opposed to the fantasies — "Once upon a time, we were all Mughals, going wah-wah to Desh Raag" — of a perfect, perfumed past.
But instead, by going into the piety of platitudes, the monotony of moralising — and the dangerous balancing of 'secular' Mughalsarai with 'divisive' Deen Dayal Upadhyaya — our Linen Liberals again played the BJP’s game on its shrewd terms.
And lost.