Saturday, March 12, 2011
Clash of Culture in Indian Islam
By Ghulam Muhammed
A brisk debate within the inner circle of a select group of Ulama and Stock Brokers committed to Islamic Banking in India, has started with a Time of India news report (http://articles.timesofindia.
The news report hides the fact that a private commercial group has stolen the thunder from the other group that is more concerned with the basics of do’s and don’ts of Sharia Banking and is trying hard to prepare experts and consultants that will be required to oversee the working of all Islamic Banking institutions and products in India, when the time comes. The Ulama or scholar’s group plans to get its teeth from public acceptance of their religious commitments to Islamic banking and trading norm.
On the other hand, the commercial group is trying to show they will not be under any obligation to toe the line of the Ulama or amenable to control from any other Islamic groups, as Islam does not recognize any central authority like Church or Pope, in its religious affairs. Since India is not an Islamic State, the role and duties of a Caliph as a ruler may devolve on Ulama in a pluralist society to guide the Ummah in right path. They have enormous public mandate.
Even before Indian government could prepare for legislation to augur in Islamic Banking and its affiliated commercial activities, with the advent of news that something is got to give, mobilization of investible funds from Muslim community and channeling it all to stock market and insurance industry is progressing with breakneck speed. This financial industry interest in Islamic banking products has become more pronounced after the Wall Street meltdown that exposed the vulnerability of present banking and credit system to the greed and uncontrollable ingenuity of the manipulators in world markets to run miles ahead of any oversight attempt by state authorities.
The control of credit envisaged in Islamic norms of probity and fairness, has come into focus after the secondary market mortgage debacle in the US.
India has been known to have a comparatively well managed banking sector, that in the past had successfully withstood buffeting that unscrupulous operators like the Hungarian Jewish George Soros was able to unleash on East Asia, especially wrecking Malaysian economy. In the new atmosphere of liberalization and globalization, the conservatively controlled Indian Banking and insurance sectors, are being under tremendous pressure to open up and gear itself for a new wave of developments that will make India more in tune with the world markets. It is widely believed by Indian Muslim community that the refusal by Brahmin authorities both in government and in Reserve Bank of India to open up the market for Islamic financial products has to do with communal politics, and not for any reasons of financial prudence. India’s record on its treatment of its Muslim minority is most dismal and its institutions go to any length to see that Indian Muslims do not get any foothold in any area of empowerment, be that political, social, financial, trade and industry. The stranglehold of Brahmin mentality that is deaf and blind to the needs and concerns of Indian Muslim community is so strong that none can dare even mention its name. If readers’ comments are any indication, the recently posted article on Times of India website together readers’ comments is enough to prove, how poisonous is the general public atmosphere for anything Muslim in India.
And the state, ruled by Brahmin political parties like Indian National Congress, BJP and even the much pompous Communist Party of India (Maoist) which swears by its secular credentials, have been unabashedly anti-Muslim in all their deliberations and acts of commission and omission that concern Muslims.
A pioneering effort to float a Non-Banking Financial commercial public corporation by Kerala government’s open endorsement by offering to subscribe to its capital to the extent of ten percent, was instantly challenged by an extremist Hindutva political maverick figure, that has nightmares when he sees Muslims anywhere around in the country, in the government, in the media, industry, business et al. Fortunately, the judiciary threw out his challenge to state participation in a ‘religious’ institution, that ‘Islamic Banking’ would be known as, once its starts it activities. The same Hindutva political groupings openly flaunt constitutional ban on any political party soliciting votes on religious grounds and gets approval by judiciary on the ground that it is only a cultural Hindu and has nothing to do with the ‘religion’ of Hinduism or Hindutva.
The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Malaysia exposed him to the high degree of development and acceptability that Islamic Banking has been witnessing in Muslim dominated ‘secular’ Malaysia. That is enough for India’s banker prime minister to stonewall any required legislation that could accommodate Islamic Banking needs of the 200 million strong Indian Muslim community over its vocal demand to allow them the constitutional freedom to practice their religion, by availing the compulsory adherence to non-interest banking and other Sharia requirement of dealing in finance and trade.
Not withstanding the unpromising response of Indian authorities to Indian demands on Islamic Banking, the interest in the new trend of Islamic finance and its products world-wide and the huge funds now being identified as being tied up to Islamic products, has motivated entrepreneurs and Sharia experts to prepare for the day, hopefully in not too distant future, to see India allotting a big role for Islamic Banking in India as well as in the wider world market.
Within the Indian Muslim community, there is an interesting development of clash of culture now openly attracting public notice. As Aakar Patel has written in a LIVEMINT article, Gujarat and Rajasthan seem to hold a monopoly on trade, industry and finance, especially in the now expanding Indian economy. According to Aakar Patel, India without the Gujaratis and Jain marwaris, will become Bangladesh, a basket case.
Indian Muslims of Gujarat State origin, too appear to share that uncanny gift of entrepreneurship with their Hindu Baniya and Jain counterparts from Gujarat and Rajasthan. Gujarati entrepreneurs from Memon, Ghanchi, Khoja, Bohra mercantile communities are in the forefront of new ventures in mobilization of funds towards Sharia compliant stocks on Dalal Street. This group has now achieved some prominence in identifying with the new emerging market.
A parallel attempt to promote and establish Islamic Banking and Finance institution and its regulation according to Sharia is very enthusiastically and doggedly taken up by some Muslim organisations. An enterprising group has finalized approval of a Sharia Stock index to help investors in Sharia compliant sector. Insurance companies, local as well as foreign joint venture groups now going overboard in infiltrating Indian market too are eager to interact with Sharia experts and consultants to familiarize with the Sharia limits in making suitable offers to a huge untapped Muslim community savings pool.
The clash of civilization is best symbolized by the recent upheaval in Muslim community over the election of a Gujarati Muslim Aalim (Scholar) and Educationist, Maulana Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi to head the prestigious Darul Uloom Madarsa at Deoband. The Muslim community, long dominated by Ulama and community leaders from northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, is now making space for a new breed of enterprising Ulama, who are prepared to expand Madarsa education to new horizons and meet Muslim communities’ new challenges in the emerging New India. Islamic Banking and Finance institutions as planned and proposed by the Ulama are more strictly aligned to the letter and spirit of Sharia while the pragmatic Gujarati Muslim, though deeply religious and observant of Islamic Sharia, are ore flexible in observance of Sharia.
The difference between the two communities’ cultural groundings is becoming more pronounced, now that it is observed that the Brahmin Raj in India is gradually giving way to Baniya Raj.
A competition between Gujarat and the REST, has been as old as India’s freedom struggle. A Brahmin Nehru piped to the post by sidelining Gujarat’s ironman Sardar Vallahbhai Patel. Even the Gujarati Mahatma Gandhi intervened to give Brahmin a chance being acceptable to a wider casteist population, rather than a Kshatri or Baniya. However, new economic politics is bolstering private sector, which is dominated by Gujarat and Rajasthani mercantile class. A similar trend is now visible in Indian Muslim community. New challenges should be recognized and responded by all the flexibility by the Muslim community to keep pace with the joneses.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
- Posted: Thu, Mar 10 2011. 8:39 PM IST
- Columns
Why India is part dysfunctional, fully functional
By Aakar Patel
I wonder how many Gujarati novels have Bengali translations. Probably none, but Gujarat needs the literature of others and I only discovered Camus through his Gujarati translations
Indian society functions as a whole. Observed in part, it’s dysfunctional. Let me explain. Without Gujaratis and Rajasthanis, India wouldn’t have an economy. Delete Tata/Birla/Ambani/Mittal/Relocate: Violent agitation made Ratan Tata ditch Bengal for Gujarat for his Nano. Photo by Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
[Also Read |Aakar’s previous Lounge columns]
That such a tiny community monopolizes the ability to raise and manage capital is frightening. However, it needs to be understood as part of a whole. There are things missing in Gujarat and Rajasthan as well, whole chunks, without which those states wouldn’t function properly.
Gujarat’s contribution to the Armed Forces, for instance, is instructive. In 2009, The Indian Express reported, Gujarat sent its highest ever number of recruits to the Indian Army. How many? A total of 719, in an army of over a million soldiers. Mind you, this was after a big awareness campaign. In the preceding two years the number of Gujarati recruits was 230. Gujarat has 55 million people but it depends on the rest of India to defend it.
Gujarat also needs another thing, though some might disagree. As a mercantile culture, Gujarati literature is quite poor. The shelves of Crossword stores in Ahmedabad (Surat has none) are lined with volumes of Bengali novels in translation. I wonder how many Gujarati novels have Bengali translations. Probably none, but Gujarat needs the literature of others and I only discovered Camus through his Gujarati translations.
Gujaratis speak no English and though Azim Premji and Ratan Tata run billion-dollar information technology businesses, they are dependent on south Indians to staff their companies. This sort of dependency is everywhere we look in India.
Mumbai’s two dominant communities, Marathi and Gujarati, are incidental to Bollywood. Bollywood is properly the product of Punjab and the high culture (“Ganga-Jamuni”) of north India’s Hindustani speakers. Why is this so? Punjab’s peasants have an extroverted physical culture (writer Santosh Desai observed that bhangra was the only Indian dance form which exposed the armpit), which is unusual on the subcontinent. This culture is the basis and the setting for entertainment, and the reason why Bollywood migrates so easily to Pakistan. However, Punjabis and north Indians need the liberal environment that only Mumbai can give for their talents to flower. That’s why Pakistan doesn’t really have a film industry, though there is plenty of talent. Partition hurt Punjabi Muslims, because they are perfect for our film industry.
Why is Pakistan such a mess? Some would blame Islam, but they’d be wrong. The problem isn’t religion at all. The problem is lack of caste balance. There aren’t enough traders to press for restraint and there are too many peasants. Too many people concerned about national honour, and not enough people concerned about national economy. Put simply: Pakistan has too many Punjabis and not enough Gujaratis. The majority of Pakistanis live in Punjab, but well over 50% of government revenue comes from just one city in Sindh: Karachi. Why? That is where the Gujarati is.
Gujaratis are less than 1% of Pakistan’s population, but they dominate its economy because they are from trading communities. Colgate-Palmolive in Pakistan is run by the Lakhani Memons, the Dawood group is run by Memons from Bantva in Saurashtra (the great Abdus Sattar Edhi is also a Memon from Bantva). The Adamjee group, advertisers on BBC, are from Gujarat’s Jetpur village and founded Muslim Commercial Bank. The Khoja businessman Sadruddin Hashwani owns hotels including Islamabad’s bombed-out Marriott. Khojas founded Habib Bank, whose boards are familiar to Indians who watched cricket on television in the 1980s. The Habibs also manufacture Toyota cars through Indus Motors. Pakistan’s only beer is made by Murree Brewery, owned by a Parsi family, the Bhandaras. Also owned by Parsis is Karachi’s Avari Hotels.
People talk of the difference between Karachi and Lahore. I find that the rational view in Pakistani newspapers is put forward by letter-writers from Karachi. Often they have names like Gheewala, a Sunni Vohra name (same caste as Deoband’s rector from Surat, Ghulam Vastanvi), or Parekh, also a Surat name.
Today capital is fleeing Pakistan because of terrorism and poor governance. To convince investors things will get better, the Pakistani government has appointed as minister for investment a Gujarati, Saleem Mandviwalla. The Mandviwallas own Pakistan’s multiplexes, which now show Bollywood. The place where Gujaratis dominate totally, as they do also in India, is Pakistan’s capital market. Going through the list of members of the Karachi Stock Exchange (www.kse.com.pk) this becomes clear. However, few Pakistanis will understand this because as Muslims they have little knowledge of caste.
The Gujarati tries to hold up the Pakistani economy, but the peasant Punjabi (Jat) runs over his effort with his militant stupidity. Why cannot the Pakistani Punjabi also think like a trader? Simple. He’s not converted from the mercantile castes. There are some Khatris, like Najam Sethi, South Asia’s best editor, but they are frustrated because few other Pakistanis think like them. Are they an intellectual minority? Yes, but that is because they are a minority by caste. One great community of Pakistani Punjabi Khatris is called Chinioti. They are excellent at doing business but in a martial society they are the butt of jokes. I once heard Zia Mohyeddin tell a funny story about the cowardice of Chiniotis and I thought of how differently a Gujarati would look at the same story.
Can the individual escape caste? Of course he can. What defines behaviour in this sense is not genes but culture. Baniyas are brought up to seek compromise, to keep emotion in check, to identify value, to understand capital, to persist. This does not come automatically, and it is wrong to believe otherwise.
My teacher, the most learned writer in journalism, is from the Burki tribe of Waziristan. It isn’t the place you would look for intellectuals, but he cannot be defined by his tribe. It takes intellectual effort, however, to distance one’s self from culture and upbringing. This is especially true in a society that is collective. And yet examples of those who defy caste and community are all around us.
There aren’t many Sardarji jokes you can crack about Manmohan Singh, an austere and measured (he would say “meyyered”) intellectual. I believe it is not possible to understand India without feeling caste. That’s why I respect the individual who breaks away, and he is everywhere you look. Our army chiefs immediately after independence were drawn from warrior castes. The Coorgs Cariappa and Thimayya, and Saurashtra’s Jadeja (from a warrior caste Gujaratis call “Bapu”). But in a few decades we had Brahmins (Sharma and Joshi) and even traders (Malhotra, Malik and Kapoor). We can learn from each other since we live with each other.
However horrible a place it may be, India is balanced out by all of us: north Indians, south Indians, east Indians and west Indians. We are a unit, and the unit works.
Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.
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