In many cases names mattered more than the things they were actually meant to designate. The authors of the Khilafat-e-Pakistan Scheme of the, Lahore: Punjab Muslim Student Federation, in 1939 , for instance, spent most of their creative energy on finding appropriate Islamic-sounding terms for state institutions but paid little attention to how these institutions were supposed to operate. Amongst other things, they insisted that their country needed a 'bait ul-mal' (lit. 'House of Property') instead of a 'State Bank' even though they openly acknowledged that there was no substantive difference between the two.This was not simply a matter of translation. Both terms were equally 'foreign' to the linguistic context of North India, but the Arabic term conjured up a link with the time of the Prophet of Islam that suggested a sense of justice and common welfare, while the English equivalent smacked of an illegitimate European presence . Names were believed to encapsulate an inner authenticity that was in accord with the larger national soul. Something similar was at play when Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were renamed Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai over the last decade, or when the regime of Pervez Musharraf claimed that calling the 'District Commissioner' a 'District Nazim' would make a real difference to how this figure related to the people.
Another explicit and philosophically grounded approach to the politics of naming was to be found in the oeuvre of VD. Savarkar. His famous pamphlet Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? actually started off with a meditation on the ontological status of names. This was necessary because the recasting of Hindu identity as 'Hindutva' was directly grounded in the belief that the abolition of the European term 'Hinduism' would lead to substantive changes in the nature of the Hindu community itself. Savarkar's reasoning went as follows:
The very fact that a thing is indicated by a dozen names in a dozen human tongues disarms the concomitance between sound and the meaning it conveys. Yet, as the association of the word with the thing grows stronger and lasts long, so does the channel which connects the two states of consciousness tend to allow an easy flow of thoughts from one to another, till at last it seems almost impossible to separate them. And when in addition to this, a number of secondary thoughts or feelings that are generally roused by the thing get mystically entwined with the word that signifies it, the name seems to matter as much as the thing itself. ( ... ) ... there are words which imply an idea in itself extremely complex or an ideal or a vast and abstract generalization which seem to take, as it were, a being unto themselves or live and grow as an organism would do. C ... ) Inscribe at the foot of one of those beautiful paintings of 'Madona' [sic] the name 'Fatima' and a Spaniard would keep gazing at it as curiously as at any other piece of art; but just restore the name of 'Madona' instead, and behold his knees would lose their stiffness and bend, his eyes their inquisitiveness and turn inwards in adoring recognition, and his whole being get suffused with a consciousness of the presence of Divine Motherhood and Love! (Savarkar, Hindutva, pp. 1-2.)
Savarkar's ruminations describe nothing less than a reification of names. Although he said earlier in the pamphlet that things matter more than names, he ends up with the very opposite - that a name makes all the difference for how people interact with things. In fact, as the case of the Spanish Madonna demonstrates, things may no longer matter at all. The example assumes that there is nothing meaningful about the depicted figure as such; meaning is entirely produced by the label. A tentative step towards some form of Sassurian linguistics - that there is really no inherent connection between name and thing, the signifier and the signified - is taken in order to make names appear as if they were the only things that really existed. This manoeuvre was necessary for Savarkar's entire political enterprise. He had to detach names from things in order to be free to create a new name - 'Hindutva' - that was independent of social structures on the ground; having done this, Savarkar then had to start to assume that there was some 'organic' substance to his neologism in order to give it relevance and solidity.
A somewhat similar process of symbolic investment of names was at play in the Pakistan movement. Following the work of Ayesha Jalal, it has now become part of the scholarly consensus that the demand for 'Pakistan' could be politically effective, precisely because the exact meaning of the term was never really spelt out. (Ja1a1, Sole Spokesman, p. 4.)
Chaudhri Rehmat Ali's original coinage was based on an acronym involving letters from the names of each of 'Pakistan's' prospective provinces - 'P' for Punjab, 'A' for Afghania, 'K' for Kashmir and so on, but this was nothing more than an exercise in name fetishism that few Muslim nationalists at the time took very seriously. The alternative reading of Pakistan as 'Land of the Pure' was hardly more precise. A UP Muslim League leader could tell a crowd of supporters that 'Pak'-istan had no territorial basis, but was simply everywhere that Muslims practiced their faith properly. (U. Sanya1, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmed Riza Khan Barelvi and his movement, 1870--1920, OUP India, 1996, pp. 311-2.)
Apart from recognizing the geographical indeterminacy of 'Pakistan' - all the places mentioned eventually ended up in 'India' - this description also points to something immediately relevant for this chapter. Like the 'P' in Pakistan, names and even letters could be quite literally turned into fetishes or talismans. The magic of Pakistan as a political ideal lay in the fact that people could project their own hopes and aspirations - for states of empowerment and rausch, justice and social equality, religious purity and historical greatness - on to a cipher that became all the more evocative the more people interacted with it.
It is easy to place the preoccupation with naming in the context of late colonial middle-class politics. The creation of terminologies for states and institutions, communities and imaginary armies could propose something radically new without having to deal with the complexities of political action on the ground. The most prolific of neologists were typically those excluded from politics - Savarkar in prison, Rehmat Ali in Cambridge - or members of erstwhile political sects who suddenly found themselves at the core of nationalist movements - such as Mashriqi or the authors of the Scheme. The desire to take possession of something by literally 'branding' it with a name was paramount; the actual qualities of the thing in question - its use value so to speak - secondary. No doubt, there was a sense of joyful creativity in conjuring up names. The drafting of new terminologies generated a state of temporary elation that fed upon the self-expressionist longing for power, beauty and states of de-societalization. Naming was a natural component of the desire to communicate essential being to 'the eyes of the world' and of an aestheticism that revelled in the beauty of political language or the regularity of paramilitary displays. The ultimate roots of the politics of naming were the same that sustained the politics of self-_expression more generally: a middleclass existence that bred both frustration and ambition, but did not provide much room for constructive radical politics. But there appears to be a more direct and specific link between middle-class culture and the politics of naming - consumption as a new form of social communication.
But the universal need of post-colonial societies to protect the memory of the nationalist struggle has been compounded in the South Asian context by the widespread espousal of a culture of frugality. Nobody exemplifies this better than the figure of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi - the Mahatma who rejected most of the amenities of normal life and insisted on wearing little more than a loincloth. Indian nationalism, and to an extent also Pakistani nationalism, were in the eyes of their followers not only too sincere and important to be involved in consumerism, they also appear to have taken a direct stance against it. But anti-consumerism of this kind was not opposed to a political culture ruled by consumption, but in fact one of its most striking manifestations. The false assumption is the conflation of consumption with affluence or comfort. Nothing could be further from the truth; as this chapter will demonstrate, the demonstrative _expression of austerity is under certain circumstances no less consumerist than the demonstrative expression of affluence.
Thus politics also had been a driving force behind the consumerist use of sign objects, where ideologist lusted after material incarnations of their own conditions of existence, which people in turn not only as the justification for an independent political consciousness, but even for a wider claim to political hegemony: knowledge and education, a familiarity with the ways of the world, self-control. Already early on, Romesh Chandra Dutt in The Economic History of India (1906), suggested that the enforced import of British manufactured goods had destroyed an indigenous Indian industry and thus created a state of dependency and poverty. These ideas were translated into political action during the Swadeshi Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century that demanded the boycott of foreign-made goods, particularly English-made cloth. Although the aim of such actions was to hurt the colonial power economically while supporting indigenous industry, this was not their only effect. More important was that the creation of choice between different consumer goods became a vehicle to demonstrate true commitment to the nationalist ideal.
This encouraged the development of a language of product personalization that sought to exploit political commitment for commercial gain. Wherever possible, imperial products were subjected to competition with self-publicizing swadeshi counterparts. The double logic of consumerism - that you always have a choice, and that what you buy is what you are - was thus introduced to the Indian social environment long before advertising discourse and product branding were able to propose a fully developed semiotic identity grid. (See C. Bayly, 'The Origins of Swadeshi: Cloth and Indian Society 1700-1930', in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by A. Appadurai, Cambridge, 1986.)
A number of advertisers - particularly in a paper like Weekly Tej - tried to turn the desire to express support for self-determination into a selling point for a great variety of products. Nationalist personalities from Dr Satyapal, Dr Ansari and Lala Lajpat Rai to Subhas Chandra Bose and Annie Besant were recruited by various manufacturers to publicly endorse their wares. (D. Mishra, Advertising in Indian Newspapers, 1780-1947,1987, pp. 63, 72.)
Financial ventures and textile mills, in particular, were often advertised with special reference to their directors and board members who in many cases happened to be prominent political leaders. The trust in the safety of an investment was directly linked to the credibility that a sound nationalist political stance bestowed on an entrepreneur. The acquisition of a consumer sign object was thus doubly justified; it allowed consumers to express their desire to mark out the social status they aspired to, while at the same time making this in itself profoundly selfish act appear as if it was beneficial to a larger collective. This connection was even explicitly recognized in the slogan used by Jagilal Kamalapat Mills, Cawnpur: 'apko bhi faida hoga aur apki mulk bhi' - 'Benefit yourself and your country'. (Weekly Tej, 6 May 1935, p. 18.) Even the most politically quietist of middle-class readers could acquire a good political conscience simply by going shopping.
The same logic of consumer politics was adopted by a wide variety of other political movements and opinions. A noteworthy one was Muslim consumer nationalism (or communalism) that mimicked the original swadeshi stance several decades later. As the shops dreamt up by Haji Laqlaq already indicated, the indulgence in a treat - such as mangoes and perfumes - could be legitimized as a statement of collective loyalty to the Muslim community. Long before the Muslim League called for a general boycott of non-Muslim shops in 1946, newspapers included references to 'Islamic' insurances, shipping companies, shops, banks and restaurants, some of which were directly aimed against their non-Muslim competitors. In 1936 the Muslim India Insurance Company, Lahore, which stood in direct competition with the upcoming insurance companies rightly or wrongly associated with Hindu entrepreneurs, made it known to readers that 'Every discerning Muslim must prefer this company to a non-Muslim one'. (In qilabNewspaper, 15 October 1936.)
A shop in Kashmiri Bazaar, a predominantly Muslim area, exhorted its customers in the Zamindar Newspaper, 15 February 1938: 'Always buy from the shops of your Islamic brethren, not from their Sikh competitors! A similar advert was placed by an Amritsari shopkeeper in the same paper on 10 July 1940.
Consumer nationalism was an easy way to dress up the middle-class desire to consume as a service to the nation; but it was also a form of political identity that - like the products it was based on - would invite constant scrutiny and suspicion. Many swadeshi products were not qualitatively different from their imported counterparts, and their swadeshi-ness hence not immediately visible. The following example may illustrate this. A full-page advertisement for Godrej Sandal Soap - published in the Lahore commercial Muslim daily Paisa Akhbarclaimed nationalist credibility by virtue of the ingredients from which the soap was made. Unlike other soaps - the advertisement claimed - Godrej only contained vegetable oils of swadeshi origin, and no factory-made glycerine imported from outside India. (Paysa Akhbar Newspaper, 4 January 1934.)
The nationalism of soap in this case did not lie in its use value or indeed any other visible characteristic, but was somehow inherent to material being itself. The idea that Godrej was quite literally nationalist 'to the core' was designed to invoke utmost solidity, but due to the invisibility of such qualities there was ample opportunity for insinuation and denunciation. The Godrej advert itself suggested that other manufacturers also professed to produce swadeshi soap, but that their claims were a lie; the nationalist commitment of their products was in reality debased by the secret admixture of illicit animal fats. Similar suspicions could be raised elsewhere. Japanese cloth was found to be labelled as 'Indian made'. (Weekle Tej, 22 July, p. 11.)
Even more confusingly, both Lipton Tea and Hindustani Chai were produced in India under colonial tutelage, but one was adorned with an 'imperial' product identity, the other with a 'national' one. Thus the kind of nationalist identity that the choice of sign objects bestowed on their consumers was riddled by the same contradiction that undercut the nationalist credentials of a product like Godrej Soap. On the one hand, there was the suggestion of a profound expression of authenticity. As the advertising specialist Moorhouse pointed out so eloquently, advertising works because it brings a product in connection with people's innermost desires and identities. Only those who were truly nationalist at heart would hence opt for a product with a nationalist product identity. But as the relationship between such products and actual political action was tenuous at best, one could never be quite sure whether the nationalism expressed by product choices was free from political impurities. What if the revelatory magic of advertising was in fact a black magic? Was it not its cardinal feature to lie, to dress up the inferior as the superior? This strange combination of assumed solidity and persistent instability was inherent to the nature of the consumer sign object in general. In a consumer society identities are created with reference to a self-referential and free-floating semiotic grid. Because there is no social structure to ground identities in, consumer choice alone must bear the burden of profundity - an obligation that consumption can only meet if it does not give the consumers pause for thought, but continually propels them on to make more and more consumer choices.
The question of authenticity and inauthenticity was never a problem for the participants in the politics of interest. Their material interests were solid and practical, and their membership in one of the patronage networks identified by colonial social science beyond question. The men of interest were 'men of substance', not 'hollow gentlemen' as satirized by popular commentators. For activists, in contrast, the politics of consumption was the source of a never-ending process of introspection and radicalization. Ismat Chughtai's derogatory comments about the upper-middle-class lifestyles of her communist comrades was a typical instance of denunciation that was bound to lead its targets deeper into an obsession with sign objects, rather than towards a more effective understanding of political action. The basic assumption was that the persistent use of the wrong kind of consumer goods in daily life was bound to contaminate whatever political stance these activists otherwise took. The obvious middle-class answer to such an accusation was not a radicalization of political thinking, but a drive to make sign objects more commensurate with what they believed to be their innermost ideological commitments. This is precisely the logic behind the politics of 'de-classing', legitimate action could not even begin before political identity had been established with essentialist certainty. In a consumer society this was impossible, however. Without any roots in immediate social relationships, the construction of identities with the help of sign objects always had to remain hollow. This void could not be filled, but it could be hidden behind a veneer of frantic political activity that was not really political in the conventional sense of the term. Politics was no longer about managing social relationships, but became restricted to the identification and consumption of more and more sign objects. Thus Jinnah revealed an essential truth when he referred to Pakistan the 'your talisman' in a speech to his followers.( Speech in front of the Youngmen's Khatri association, Karachi, 22 October 1945, quoted in Yusufi Yusufi (ed.), Quaid Speeches, p. 2078.)
Another powerful example of appropriation was the Indian Muslim reaction to the death of Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk. The event created immense excitement. Prayer meetings were held in all major mosques of the subcontinent, in some cases involving several hundreds of thousands of Muslims. But the Atatiirk that Indians mourned and the Atatiirk who had emerged during the founding years of the Turkish republic had preciously little in common. The front page of Inqilab, a respectable, even high-brow paper, reported the following on 10 November 1938: shortly before his death Atatiirk briefly awoke from a coma and conveyed a message to his servant, which the latter was told to pass on to the 'Islamic Nation' (millat Islamiyya). Atatiirk is reported to have sighed 'Allah' and then passed out of consciousness.
This is hardly credible for a leader who died of the effects of life-long alcoholism, and endeavored to break the link between Turkish Islam and the world Muslim community. Thus it is remarkable how the Indo-Muslim account literally and shamelessly colonizes the Turkish historical experience for its own purpose. To make the case more clear, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, the Unionist Premier of the Punjab, declared in a public speech, that the Muslim Ataturk had been more successful in overcoming the world than Hitler and Mussolini (the most cherished non-Muslim Fascist icons), and that the Muslims of Lahore should not believe what the non-Muslim English language papers had to say about their hero's hostility towards religion. (Letter Diwan Chaman Lal to Acharya Ram 11 November 1938, quoted in NAI: File-Home Political- 28/18/38, Passport Dewan Chaman Lal. Activities of Chaman Lal, author of the prohibited book “The Vanishing Empire”.)
Other speakers and newspaper commentators noted maliciously that Hindu shops and offices had not responded to the general hartal, which the Muslims of Lahore had called to commemorate their Leader's death, adding to the general feeling that Ataturk belonged to the Muslim community, and to nobody else. There was, of course, again an element of symbolic transfer of power involved: both the enforcement and the defiance of the call for a close-down could produce states of empowerment that were in a way directly linked to the perceived power of their symbolic cause, Atatiirk.
However, similar imperialist relationships with faraway places existed in the middle-class Hindu mind. Around 1935, Weekly Tej was full of articles trying to establish that ancient India was the true cradle of world civilization, and that the ancient cultures appropriated by Westerners were in fact offspring’s of original Aryan Hindu culture. (6 May, p. 34, 13 May, p. 6, 10 June 1935, p. 15.)
An often repeated example is that the Greek epic of the Iliad was in fact a local adaptation of the Ramayana. Religiousminded Arya Samajists would go even further, proving that both the Bible and the Quran, as far as they were truthful, were in fact translations of the ancient Vedas. (Aryah Musafir Newspaper, October 1899, November 1899, pp. 35-6. 41 Aryah Musafir, April 1899, p. 23.)
Lengthy tables were introduced to demonstrate that Arabic and Latin were derivatives of Sanskrit. But it was not only the Western claim to a superior past that was literally expropriated. European colonization in modern times was similarly requisitioned. As reported in the Arya Musafir in 1900, Indians had discovered America long before Columbus, all allegedly well-established in Vedic literature. (Aryah Musafir, April 1899, p. 2, and February 1900.)
At times, Hindu opinion took the step from mental colonization ex posteriori, so to speak, to real colonization in the here and now. A series of editorials in Weekly Tej 5 August 1935( p. 9), commented on the great population density in India and debated the acquisition of colonies in under-populated regions around the world to ensure national survival for India.The originator of the debate was one Prof. Mukheljee who had arrived at his conclusions with the help of the latest in statistical and geographic science. The immediate background to such ideas were most probably Mussolini's very similar arguments with regards to the Italian acquisition of Ethiopia, all covered in the Indian press. Hitler's lebensraum philosophy, again familiar to many Indians, may also have been of influence.
But Hindu middle-class appropriations of global space were not only reactions to Western imperialism and fascism. They also developed in direct opposition to Muslim aspirations. One of the most lethal examples was perhaps the Arya Samaj assertion in the Aryah Musafir of March 1899, very popular to this day amongst Sangh Parivar activists, that the Kacba in Mecca was really a Hindu temple, established long before the advent of Islam. In other words, the Muslim claim over territory abroad was seen as equally tenuous and false as their claim over spaces in India itself; both depended allegedly on wanton acts of destruction that could, at least theoretically, be reversed. Some sections of the Hindu middle classes directly measured their own will to power in terms of their ability to undermine the Muslim project of self-empowerment. In their eyes, it was the colonizing impulse inherent in the middle-class Muslim conception of space itself that made the latter' communalist'. (P.I.V. Prashad, Pakistan kz vujud mumkin hai?, Gulbarga: Arya Samaj Press, 1945, pp. 12, 16-17,26, 34.)
This immediately ostracized the great majority of Indian Muslims from 'legitimate' Indian nationalism. Yet the desire to undermine Muslim conceptual space was not restricted to the Hindu right; it also permeated more mainstream nationalist positions that were avowedly 'anti-communal'. Nothing illustrates this better than a travel report in Weekly Tej, 13 May 1935 (pp. 7-8) about Egypt, by the Bengali radical Subhas Chandra Bose.
The piece was published in a Delhi magazine in Urdu translation, a location that further amplified the implicit anti-Muslim bias of the original text. The headline - produced in all probability by the paper, not by Bose - was both enigmatic and ominous: 'The Pyramids and the Sphinx: Nahas pours scorn on the communalist Muslims of India'. The subheading referred to a relatively brief passage towards the end of the article in which Bose describes his encounter with the leader of the nationalist Wafd Party; the latter turns out to be a staunch supporter of Gandhi and the Congress and has little love lost for most Muslim politicians in India. But the main charge against middle-class Islam is far more subtle. More than half of the article deals, as announced, with the sphinx and the pyramids. This gives Bose an opportunity to ruminate at length about the message of history, about the patterns of decay and survival of ancient civilizations. In the course of his deliberations the author goes into the debate about the meaning of the sphinx and considers sun worship as probable origin. The magnificent displays in the Egyptian Museum, described a little later, prompt some more typically Hindu middle-class theoretizing, this time about the long-term effects of spiritual and material superiority. The history and present of Islamic Egypt, in contrast, is only mentioned in one short paragraph. The mosques of Cairo were amongst the nicest to be seen anywhere, Bose simply says without giving any more details.
All this was printed at a time when Egypt was at the centre of attention of middle-class Pan-Islamism. The description of Egypt in terms of its ancient preIslamic past is nothing else than an implicit denial of Muslim ownership which culminates in an explicit political slap in the face, courtesy of Nahas Pasha. The still somewhat oblique anti-Muslim charge of the article is amplified by its context. The same magazine carried numerous stories about archaeological artefacts and great ancient civilizations, which allied to the same conclusion: that the true cradle of civilization was India and that other civilizations were either copies of ancient Indian civilization or in some ways inferior to it. This explicitly included attempts to redefine any act of deity worship worldwide as derivatives of Vedic practice. ('Tahz;IbkIraftar', Weekly Tej, 20 May 1935, p.15.)
The average Hindu middle-class reader would immediately transpose this argument to Bose's oblique reference about the sphinx and sun worship. The de-Islamization of Egypt could thus be pushed to a de facto Hinduization of Egypt. Just as in the case of geography and Western imperialism, the very construction of conceptual global space in Indian middle-class circles was inseparably tied to their will to power.
Thus differences between neo-Fascism in S.Asia and normal nationalism are the formers; inherent open-endedness; and its tendency in the literature to rationalize certain features as staging posts towards national liberation; or as an ideological cover for a project of ‘hegemony'-- violating the conceptual autonomy of its subject and failing to account for its innermost character. The shift into politics was facilitated by the global climate of fascism and the presence of a nationalist mass movement in India itself.
For India the result was a large-scale relocation of major segments of the Urdu-using Hindu middle classes from Lahore to the Delhi area. Savarkar's disciples remained active and attempted to revive the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy in order to challenge the new nationalist state. And in Punjab, the prePartition agitation against Muslim nationalism tipped almost immediately into new demands for an ethnic Punjabi Sikh state. Plus the mainstream Communist Parties moved more and more towards a 'politics of interest' mode of operating, young middle-class activists - often inspired by events in China and the student rebellion in the West – also, adopted more and more radical forms of leftwing politics.
In Pakistan, politics was to a large extent suppressed by the emerging martial state in the early 1950s. But a resurgence of neo-Fascism occurred in the late 1960s when the newly formed Pakistan People's Party challenged the position of General Ayub Khan's military regime. As was the case in the 1930s and 1940s there were strong and direct links to events elsewhere in the world, at that moment no longer dominated by fascism, however, but by a leftwing student rebellion. The ideological orientation of the PPP was a mixture of old- fashioned Islamo- fascism Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's promise of a 'thousand years of war with India' was not very different from the pronouncements of Mashriqi or the Khilafat-e-Pakistan Scheme - and the kind of left-wingism then globally en vogue. The group of people that carried the PPP agitation forward consisted of erstwhile self-expressionist student activists from the 1940s, now in middle age, and younger members of a middle-class constituency who had expanded during the time of economic prosperity of the early 1960s. As was the case in the first period of self-expressionism, the new political culture was pushed underground by a combination of cooption and coercion. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto himself initiated the process when he turned away from the ideological politics of the PPP in the mid-1970s, and returned to a politics of interest based on landlord power. More recently then there was a sort of Talibanisation of Pakistan leading to its involvement with the incursions into Afghanistan, now in limbo, but to a degree still active today.