Month: November 2022

What is Constitution Day (Samvidhan Divas) And Why it Should be Celebrated

The Untaught HistorianLeave a comment

Constitution Day is a rather recent addition to our calendar. 26 November used to be called National Law Day and it was mostly forgotten. But in 2015, the National Law Day was declared Constitution Day (or Samvidhan Divas). It gives me an excuse to delve into one of my favourite topics. Our Constitution.

The Constitution itself has a marvelous history. The drama around the creation of the Constituent Assembly, their debates, and the variety of issues it sought to address (something I hope to write about in a future post). Civics is by far the dullest of the Social Sciences in middle school and yet the most important and relevant. No matter what career a student chooses to take up, they are invariably going to be citizens of a democratic nation. We take this citizenship for granted, never really thinking about how precious this is. My grandparents, just two generations away from me, were part of a generation that knew what it was to live in a non-democratic state. Their ancestors before that were either subjects to the British Raj or in princely states – subjects of a detached and disinterested monarch. Also, for generations, people in the Indian subcontinent were always aware of their duties – duties to their family, duties to their community, religion, king or queen. With independence and the adoption of democracy, Indians were introduced to a new vocabulary. We grew aware of rights, and our Constitution told us what those rights were and also, that we could fight to protect our rights.

The Constitution as an Agent of Transformation

The Civics textbook definition of the Constitution is that the Constitution serves as a rule book for how a democratic state should function. It also provides a sort of mission statement to guide future leaders and citizens about the ideal society that the Constitution seeks to nurture and protect.

The Indian Constitution is often criticized for being derivative. More than 70% of it came from the Government of India Act, 1935. The framework of how our government will run comes from the Act. Curiously, we even incorporated some of the harsher, more autocratic aspects of the Act like preventive detention, or the power to suspend the legal system during an Emergency, etc. Things that Indian freedom fighters had objected to in the 1930s were now powers that the independent Indian state had.

So what was so great about the Indian Constitution? While it is true that most of it is derivative, does something have to be entirely original to be of value? I do not know. I do know that while it may have flaws, the Constitution sought to create an new nation that was built on the precepts of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity as interpreted for the uniquely Indian context.

Here are the top 3 things I think makes our Constitution unique and special:

  1. Universal Adult Franchise: When we read ‘universal adult franchise’ we automatically think of women receiving the right to vote, and this is natural because that was a hard-won right in the rest of the world. Women in India could vote and hold office since the 1920s (Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay becoming the first woman to run for public office, even before her counterparts in Britain, when she ran in the 1926 elections for a seat in the Madras Provincial Legislative Assembly). Interestingly, women got this right much before western women (French women could vote and hold office only in 1944). But, there was a time when voting was the right of just the educated landowners. It was an effective way to disenfranchise the weakest and most vulnerable portions of society. In India this would have excluded not just women but also Dalits and indigenous (tribal) people. So, for a new nation to immediately grant Universal Adult Franchise is a big deal. From its very beginning, it sought to include the very people who had been excluded by society through political and social institutions. (To give us some perspective, South Africa adopted universal adult franchise only in 1996 and Bahrain and some other Muslim states gave women the right in 2005).
  2. It’s Defense of Equality: At the time of independence, India was shaking off the British but was still in the suffocating grips of social and religious authoritarianism. Breaking caste rules or gender rules could lead to severe social, emotional and often physical consequences. Unlike Western nations where the power lay in the hands of the government, India had multiple levels of power, starting at the religious or caste based community level down to the head of the family. Ambedkar, B.N. Rau and members of the Constituent Assembly were writing a constitution for a country that didn’t fully recognize the notion of an individual’s rights. And so, the framers sought to rewire our social structure. Article 15(2) which banned the discrimination in access to restaurants and roads (years before the American Civil Rights movement managed to end segregation in the United States), Article 17 abolishing untouchability and Article 23 forbidding forced labour. In theory, at least, the Constitution was laying the groundwork for a society where every citizen was equal both politically and socially.
  3. The Right to Constitutional Remedies: In India, a citizen can move directly to the Supreme Court to protect their fundamental rights against violation not just by the State but also by institutions. This makes sure that the State and institutions cannot create laws that violate any individuals fundamental rights. The head of your company, religious math, or head of your joint family even cannot force you to do anything that violates your fundamental rights, as the state is duty bound to protect it. As mentioned earlier, our Constitution recognized the various levels of power or sovereignty in India and provided a recourse for the average citizen to protect themselves from social as well as political authoritarianism.

Ambedkar was used to hearing criticisms of the Constitutions by the end of the drafting process. In his final speech to the Constituent Assembly on the 25th of November, he addressed some of them but added “… I feel, however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly upon the nature of the Constitution. The Constitution can provide only the organs of State such as the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary. The factors on which the working of those organs of the State depend are the people and the political parties they will set up as their instruments to carry out their wishes and their politics.”

He continued to say that the Constitution written by the Constituent Assembly reflected the views and pressing concerns of his generation and he was aware that every generation would face its own concerns and have its own views. He quoted Thomas Jefferson, an American founding father –  “We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.”

The Constitution we have today is not perfect. It has also been interpreted in ways we might not agree with. But if we choose to remain ignorant of its contents we do ourselves and our generation a great disservice.

We live in a frighteningly divided time now, where neighbors attack each other personally for differing political views and declare themselves upholders of morality in their community WhatsApp and email groups. The late 1940s were an even more divisive period in Indian history. People disagreed violently with each other on a lot of things. The violence spilt out of their mouths, onto the page and then into the street.

At the time, the subcontinent was divided and two countries were formed. One ended up with a Constitution that was slowly but carefully constructed. The other that seemed accidentally put together with individual egos and prejudices taking precedence over values and ideals. One has survived70 years and is regularly challenged but almost always respected. The other was thrown out and new ones were written to suit the convenience of the man in charge. If we look further at the other countries who gained independence and shook of colonialism in 1940s, 50s and 60s, the story of Indian’s constitution feels even more unique and special.

And so I feel our Constitution should be celebrated every year. The best way to do it is to pay attention to it – understand it, discuss it and defend the rights within it whenever we can.

Resources:

Ambedkar’s final speech to the Constituent Assembly (bits of which I have quoted above) can be found here.

An excerpt of the final speech in a Scroll article titled Why BR Ambedkar’s three warnings in his last speech to the Constituent Assembly resonate even today

An article I wrote earlier about Ambedkar and the narrative of his life.

A book that I am currently reading: The Transformative Constitution by Gautam Bhatia

East India Company’s Plundering of Indian History (and why that matters today)

The Untaught Historian4 Comments

This is Benjamin West’s famous painting of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam handing over the rights to collect taxes in Bengal to Robert Clive and the East India Company (1765). A little over 100 years ago, Aurangzeb had nearly evicted the British, but in the 1760s the scrappy East India Company (EIC) was on the verge of drowning Aurangzeb’s precious empire and emerging as the new power in the subcontinent. If you look at the painting closely, you will see how the British and their allies are cast in the light, while most Indians are in the shadow.

West was a romantic and a patriot. He liked painting famous scenes from history like The Death of Nelson or Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky. The painting above was recording the birth of British India and the British Empire at large. India was to be the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Casting a Shadow over Bengal

Ironically, in his painting, West wasn’t wrong to paint Indians in the shadow because with the handing over of the Diwani to the EIC, a dreadful shadow did indeed fall over Bengal. Within five years, the Company’s exploitative business practices ruined the local economy and compounded a natural disaster that led to the terrible famine of 1770. 10 million people died during this time – 1/3rd of the total population in the province.

To give you some perspective, Covid has caused approximately 6.5 million deaths globally over nearly 3 years. The famine cost 10 million lives in just one province that covers modern day West Bengal, Bangladesh, parts of Odisha and Bihar. Entire generations were effectively wiped out.

To their credit, the world took notice. While descriptions of the famine shocked the English back home, the English were even more outraged when they started seeing Company officials coming home millionaires (the outrage stemmed more from envy, I suspect, than moral uprightness). Robert Clive, the central figure in West’s painting (receiving the scroll from Shah Alam), and considered the founder of the British Empire in India reportedly came back to India with “£1,200,000 in cash, bills, and jewels.” In today’s value, that is £286,400,000 (£286 million). This was one individual’s earnings. There were many other Company millionaires who made their millions by looting India.

In the end, Robert Clive’s career took a nose-dive. In England, he faced charges of corruption, brutality and profiteering. During his life time, he was much hated and he ended up killing himself at the age of 49 in the same brutal manner in which he had lived his life. Later, his story was scrubbed and rewritten by other British viceroys to justify their rule in India. But we won’t go there.

Our textbooks talk in great detail about the significance of the Battles of Plassey and Buxar, the rise of Clive and the Company and their hand in the famine that followed. It makes mention of the wealth that India had at the time and how, in a very short time, the British managed to strip it away.

But textbooks and classrooms do not have the time to fully illustrate what that wealth looked like, or even how it was plundered away, and what that really means in the present.

The Lucrative Career of a Plundering EIC Officer

Robert Clive’s eldest son, Edward Clive, followed in his father’s footsteps and was Governor of Madras as well as part of the wars with Tipu Sultan. He was present when Tipu Sultan was finally defeated and killed in battle. His wife Henrietta, wrote to her brother about the plundering of Srirangapatnam: “The plunder of Seringapatam is immense. General Harris will get between £1,50,000 and £2,00,000. Two of the privates have got £10,000 in jewels and money. The riches are quite extraordinary. Lord Clive has got a very beautiful blunderbuss (a short, large-bored gun) that was Tipu’s and much at Seringapatam. I should like to have the pickings of some of the boxes.”

“I should like to have the pickings of some of the boxes” she says!

Edward and Robert Clive’s collections are housed at Powis Castle in Wales. You can pay an entrance fee, explore the beautiful gardens, the enormous castle and the attached museum that was all funded by the Clive’s adventures in India. The Clive Collection – a collection of Indian items that is one of the biggest in the world – is bigger than the Delhi Museum even. It includes a grand palanquin that belonged to Siraj ud Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal who Clive defeated at the Battle of Plassey, and Tipu Sultan’s gold embroidered slippers, his guns, jewels, and even his battle tent.

The Clives also carried away two of eight finials that adorned Tipu’s throne. Finials are the decorative knobbly bits on the ends of thrones. The finial, like the one in the image above, is made of gold and set with rubies, diamonds and emeralds. One was sold in 2009 for over £3 million.

In 2003, Christies auctioned this 17th century Mughal emerald brooch. According to the listing details it is an “emerald of exceptional colour and clarity weighing 55.8 carats with superb Mughal carving of tulips on both sides”.

According to the note on its provenance, the brooch last belonged to the 10th Duke of Northumberland. It was passed down through the generations from his ancestor, the 3rd Duke of Northumberland, Hugh Percy. His wife was Charlotte Florentia, the daughter of Edward Clive, who stole the finial that we talked about earlier. Charlotte’s mother had wanted to “have the pickings” of Tipu’s treasure. Coming back to 2003, this brooch was sold for £1.2 million.

Whose History is it?

Today, the United Kingdom is working hard to make sure these treasures do not leave their borders.

I found a press release issued in 2021 on gov.uk titled “18th-Century Tipu Sultan Throne Finial worth £1.5 million at risk of leaving UK“. According to the release, an export bar had been placed on the finial (just like the one in the Clive collection) to allow time for a UK institution to purchase the piece, which might otherwise leave the country (UK). Why does the UK still want it?

The UK sees the finial as part of their history now. The release states that “Following his defeat, many objects from Tipu’s treasury arrived in Britain, where they influenced poetry (John Keats), fiction (Charles Dickens; Wilkie Collins), artists (J.M.W.Turner) and were received with huge public interest.” – “arrived” in Britain? Did they just arrive as if of their own volition? Were they looking for cooler climes?

The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) recommended that the export license application for the finial be deferred to 11 February 2022, or extended to 11 June 2022 to try and keep the finial in the UK because the Committee believed that “it is an important symbolic object in Anglo-Indian history in the last years of the 18th Century, with Tipu’s defeat having great historical importance to Britain’s imperial past and leading to a contemporary fascination with Tipu’s story and objects.”

Guess who else might think that Tipu’s defeat might be of greater historical importance? Where else might there be a greater contemporary fascination with Tipu’s story and objects? (India, of course!)

When I was younger I had heard arguments made by the Egyptians and the Indians about how the British had stolen our nation’s wealth. I had not really cared at the time. I didn’t have a concept of time or value of history and cultural identity.

However, if you were to zoom into the image of the finial or the emerald with it delicate tulips etched into it, it tells us a story of advanced Indian artistry and craftwork. There was nothing comparable to it in the world at the time. And it wasn’t even that long ago.

How many Indians, do you think, are aware of this rich history of art in India? Generations of Indian students are coming out of secondary school without fully understanding what the textbooks are telling them – about the wealth that the Mughals and other Indian monarchs commanded, about the quality of artistry, understanding of metallurgy and gems that our ancestors possessed – an understanding that might be more easily grasped with a visit to a well curated museum where the story comes to life.

Today, if I want to show my son, or my class, any of this, I will need to organize a trip to the United Kingdom because that is where the best samples are. We will need to buy tickets to see our own cultural heritage – a heritage that was literally stolen from us. And worse still, some of these items are not even in museums – they are being sold off to be part of private collections, where some rich woman will wear that 17th century brooch as a pendant of a string of pearls at a party. So not only did the treasure make a British person rich in the 18th century, it continues to make British people rich today.

If you want to read more about

Robert Clive, then this article by William Dalrymple on Robert Clive as a vicious asset-stripper

Also, check out this blog about the art in Tipu’s palace in Srirangapatnam.

What does Nehru have to do with Children’s Day?

The Untaught Historian4 Comments

Happy Children’s Day!

When my son was very little, he came home from school and went straight into the kitchen, clearly looking for something. Disappointed, he stood in front of me and demanded to see the cake. What cake, I asked. “It’s Children’s Day, Mamma! You are supposed to celebrate having children!”

Today, it isn’t very different. My son just came home from school where his teachers worked really hard to make him and his classmates feel special and cared for. I appreciate the sentiment even though the day had a very different point of origin.

Significance of Children’s Day

Growing up, I knew that we celebrated Children’s Day on Nehru’s birthday. The reason I had heard was that Nehru loved children, but I later found that Children’s Day was really an awareness and fund-raising drive.

In 1951, a United Nations Social Worker Fellow V.M. Kulkarni who had been studying the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents in England liked how the Queen of England’s birthday had been used to focus attention on children’s issues and raise funds for Save the Child Fund. He proposed that Pandit Nehru’s birthday, November 14, be used to bring awareness to children’s issues and child rights. It is said that the proposal embarrassed Nehru but he agreed to have his birthday attached to the cause.

Perhaps Nehru’s reluctance at Kulkarni’s suggestion was warranted. Soon political bootlickers and sycophants would gather children and have them sing songs in Nehru’s honour and he would pose obligingly with little children. The original intent was forgotten and a new legend grew about Nehru’s great love for children. He certainly had a great love for his own daughter, to whom he wrote wonderful letters from prison that not only outlined Indian and world history but also explained his humanist ideals and values. I often wonder how young Indira felt on receiving these letters. Did she groan at the heavy topics he chose to write about, and wish he would talk more about prison food or other ordinary things – not a draft of a chapter?

At any rate, Nehru’s birthday became Children’s Day from 1956. I looked around for pictures of the first official Children’s Day but the first official interesting material I found was the President’s address on the occasion in 1957.

In a speech titled A Plea for a Better Deal for Children, Prasad said that “it is a welcome idea to have one day every year to be celebrated as Children’s Day when all questions pertaining to children and child welfare would receive special attention.” The theme in 1957 was child hunger. The International Union of Child Welfare declared that “a child that is hungry must be fed”. Prasad extended the theme, by saying “If we put a wider interpretation on this theme, it should encompass wider needs such as hunger for play, hunger for love and hunger for security. After all a child needs these as much as nutritious food.”

Today, India’s President welcomed students from various schools and her speech was simply about the beauty of childhood. The original intent is long forgotten. It is now just a day when we celebrate children and Nehru.

Growing into Nehru

The slide show above covers Nehru’s childhood from infancy to his college years at Cambridge (the last picture is of him with his parents and two younger sisters, who later became famous in their own right – Vijaylakshmi Pandit and Krishna Hutheesing)

Born on November 14, 1889, as a child, Nehru did not hunger for food, love or security. He was born to extraordinary privilege. His family home, Anand Bhavan, in Allahabad had a swimming pool. Of course, do not imagine Nehru living alone with his parents in this palatial estate. The Nehru clan lived together. He was the youngest and his sisters followed much later, so while Nehru might not have hungered for the basics, he did hunger for companionship. Home schooled for nearly most of his education with governesses and private tutors, he did not have a peer group of classmates or playground friends. His much older cousins had neither time nor interest in him, and so although he was part of a bustling household he grew up rather alone.

In his autobiography, Nehru begins his story with refreshing candor and self awareness “An only child of prosperous parents is apt to be spoilt, especially so in India. And when that son happens to be on only child for first 11 years of his existence there is little hope for him to escape this spoiling.” His parents certainly spared no expense on his education. Annie Besant, the great educator and founding member of the Theosophical Society, recommended a tutor – Ferdinand T. Brooks – who, Nehru believes, had a great influence on his thinking. Brooks developed in Nehru a taste for reading and introduced him to a vast variety of literature and philosophy (including Theosophy). He also set up a lab in their home where they performed experiments to explore basic chemistry and physics. At 15, his parents and his infant sister accompanied him to England, where he was dropped off at the famous English public school – Harrows.

Clearly Nehru did not have an average childhood. He was keenly aware of the great difference between his experience of India versus that of the common Indian. This difference is often used against him. While many like to pull Nehru down for his elitism or his post-Independence leadership choices (both valid points), Nehru’s writings from prison in the 1930s reminds us that he was human, with the same human frailties that affect us regardless of income, education, gender, caste or creed.

In fact, I am glad for his intellectual upbringing. India was blessed to have an independence movement led by thinkers rather than wild and spontaneous actors (think of the rather haphazard birth of Pakistan). The men and women who organized our freedom struggle developed democratic ideals and a vision for equality that came from a conversion of intellectual vigor to actual action. The outcome, among other things, is our Constitution. Imperfect though it might be, it has provided us with a stable democracy for 75 years, while our neighbours have floundered. Most of the people who helped put the Constitution together were intellectual giants.

Recently, on social media, I read comments wishing that the India had a military dictatorship. They felt that this would help improve infrastructure and law and order. I wonder if Indian classrooms should spend more time exploring Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Burmese or Sri-Lankan history. All our neighbors have had experiences with military coups (successful and failed) and the outcomes were never positive for the country. In India, Nehru and his colleagues can take some credit for military-proofing Indian democracy. To read more check out this article. His understanding of the potential threats to democracy has often helped us tremendously, and while we might disagree with his politics, we should be grateful that we have a democracy that allows (at least in theory) for dissent.

So this Children’s Day let us not conflate the two events. Nehru probably did like children (it is very difficult not to like children, and even if he did not like them, it would have been political suicide to admit it) but Children’s Day is not to celebrate his love for children. It is to draw awareness to important children’s issues in our society today, as Rajendra Prasad did in his very first Children’s Day address – serious issues concerning children’s health, children’s rights, access to quality nutrition and education.

It is also Nehru’s birthday. We are still a young nation and his legacy is still up for debate and political wrangling but perhaps in a hundred years the man will be remembered for both his contributions and his failings in a more balanced, objective and less divisive manner. That he was extraordinary is hard to deny if you delve into the man’s writing and look carefully at his influence in a myriad issues that concern modern India today. It is also hard to deny that he was not perfect. We should never be satisfied with the legacy of our ancestors – growth and forward movement are our constant civic duties.

Sources:

Joshi, S. (2005) How did Children’s Day begin, The Tribune India. Available at: https://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20051112/saturday/main4.htm (Accessed: November 14, 2022).

Prasad, R. (1958) “A Plea for a Better Deal for Children,” in Speeches of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, President of India, 1957-1958. India, pp. 98–99.

Nehru, J. (1982) “Descent from Kashmir,” in Jawaharlal Nehru, an autobiography. Tehran: Bahman Pr., pp. 1–26.

All images from Wikimedia Commons