Of Saffron Flags and Skullcaps
Hindutva, Muslim Identity and the Idea of India
- Ziya Us Salam - Associate Editor, Frontline
We live in an age when most Muslims take pride in singing Saare Jahan Se Achcha, penned by Muhammad Iqbal. Many though have forgotten that the same poet-philosopher called Ram as Imam-e-Hind. The Hindutva forces, meanwhile, have forgotten the unifying Saare Jahan Se Achcha in their pursuit of divisive nationalism. Their exclusionary politics stems from a mindset of self-limiting segregation: a world of ‘we’ and ‘they’, a world where a Muslim man is lynched for refusing to say ‘Vande Mataram’.
Of Saffron Flags and Skullcaps attempts to trace the growth of the Hindutva ideology from the time of V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar to the contemporary age, and how it precedes any talk of Muslim appeasement. Faced with these existential challenges, the Muslim community is involved in simultaneous churning within where the words of Islamic scholar and teacher Farhat Hashmi are bringing about a silent change at the grassroots level. Amidst all the challenges, the idea of India, often challenged, continues to show the way to a nation looking for direction.
This book is a must-read for every Indian. It brings out the frightening growth of religious communalism in India, which threatens to tear apart the delicate fabric woven by the Indian people over the centuries. Yet the author is optimistic that what will endure is this very practice of the Indian people living together for centuries evolving a syncretic, plural, multi-cultural society which our nation builders tried to promote as the ‘idea of India’.
This is a searing exposé of the violence, hatred and narrow communal prejudices that are integral to the Hindutva DNA. In tracing the trajectory from Savarkar to Modi, Ziya Us Salam shows that nothing has changed and how, therefore, our secular nationhood is currently threatened. He sums up by explaining how the Muslim community might best meet this challenge through internal social reforms. A balanced account with a wise ending, I would highly commend the book to general and specialist readers.
This book by Ziya Us Salam tells us about the twists and turns in the history of our country during the recent years, especially during the period of Modi regime. He has a lot to say about the Hindutva phenomenon, the issue of cow, mob lynching of Muslims, engineered communal riots, the Muslim identity, the politics of triple talaq and so on. The author has written about these and several other related issues with his characteristic elegance, felicity and persuasiveness.... The book is a must-read for understanding India’s current predicament.
Ziya Us Salam’s Of Saffron Flags and Skullcaps: Hindutva, Muslim Identity and the Idea of India is a timely work which tries to grapple with a burning issue which is seminal to the survival of the concept of a secular nation as envisioned and guaranteed by the Constitution of India. Salam not only deals with the growth of Hindutva ‘Nationalism’ which in the present day is trying to appropriate some of the foundational philosophies of people like Sardar Patel, Bhagat Singh and Dr Ambedkar, but also exposes those who are trying to propagate a divisive agenda where the ‘other’ is tried to be demonized. Through this work Salam makes an attempt to put the ‘idea of India’ back on its secular rails and show how Muslims are an important component of this nation, historically and otherwise.
A thorough, multi-faceted and clear-eyed historical account of relations between Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent: Ziya Us Salam has produced a much needed up-to-date analytical narrative which, rightly, warns against the rise of majoritarian Hindutva under the garb of nationalism. A timely book to inspire all those who uphold India’s traditional unity in diversity.
This book is a bold and frank account of the transformation of the relationship between Muslims and the Indian nation. It questions the civilized denial about the antagonistic othering of Muslims and their marginalization. It tells us that the disenfranchisement of Muslims and destruction of the secular project of the Indian freedom struggle did not happen overnight. Set in a period when the RSS started capturing all institutional, cultural and political spaces, the book observes and registers different episodes of the gradual decline and fall of the idea of India shaped by Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar.
This is a searing exposé of the violence, hatred and narrow communal prejudices that are integral to the Hindutva DNA…. A balanced account with a wise ending, I would highly commend the book to general and specialist readers.