Reviews for Kautiliya Arthasastra Revisited

The average rating for Kautiliya Arthasastra Revisited based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-15 00:00:00 Sarah Brown "Violence is bad but non-violence is hopeless." - Anonymous letter written to a local Lahore Congress Committee, mid 1947 "My father had a soda water shop. We put all the soda water bottles on the roof, lined them up, thinking that when they come we will attack them with bottles. But they were no use because they came with machine guns." - Shanti Seghal, aged 20 in 1946 "I am of 56 and forcibly exiled from my home I am wandering disappointed. Will you kindly advise me what to do and where to in this critical moment of my life." - Letter to local Congress Party, 1947 The precipitous end of the British Raj and the agonizing birth of modern India and Pakistan must be one of the most tremendous events in 20th Century history, but until I read this book I had only the sketchiest idea of what happened. I thought this might be simply down to my own eurocentrism, but Yasmin Khan informs me that this cataclysm is hurried past in the current history text-books of both countries, dismissed in a couple of paragraphs. Eyes are averted. Rwanda, Cambodia under Pol Pot, even distant Darfur, all have become much better known than the great Partition, during which between 500,000 and a million people died. Accurate numbers are not available. WHAT WAS PAKISTAN BEFORE 1947? Muslims had evolved the concept of Pakistan, a land governed by Muslims for Muslims, slowly, vaguely, wishfully, daydreamingly - and one surprising fact is that the name Pakistan was only coined in 1933, just 14 years before it became a reality. It was kind of synonym for Utopia; and for a lot of Muslims it seems to have been a pleasant fantasy - or a fierce political fantasy - but hardly anyone answered the question about WHERE this Pakistan would actually BE in the real territories of British India. Nobody knew what this map was - and nobody was contemplating migrating in 1946, let alone the mass movement of twelve million people only one year later. What happened was that the British, worn down by years of passive resistance Gandhi-style, almost bankrupt at the end of World War Two, knew they were going to have to let India go, so they did it in the worst possible way, and stole away like a thief in the night, no concept of duty of care or responsibility anywhere to be had, no thought that things might go haywire, it was like - Okay, you bastards, you want your independence? HERE! You want your Pakistan? HERE! And the devil take you all. Well, the devil took a lot of them. HINDU WATER, MUSLIM WATER Another surprising fact - How many Europeans living in India in 1946? Best guess: 97,000. And now a question - was there an Indian apartheid between Muslims and Hindus before Partition? I had not thought so, but YK says: Reminders of religious "difference" were built into the brickwork of the colonial state; a Muslim traveler would be directed to the "Mohammedan refreshment room" at a train station and drinking taps on railway platforms were labelled "Hindu water" or "Muslim water". p19 That surprised me too. How pervasive this apartheid-style separation went outside of railway stations is not mentioned. Another thing I did not know : there were "Nationalist Muslims" who strongly opposed the concept of Pakistan. Some of the most forthright and bloody opposition to the Muslim League came from within the Muslim communities themselves ACCURATE NUMBERS ARE NEVER AVAILABLE Between 16 and 18 August 1946 there were riots in Calcutta. Three days, 4000 dead, 10,000 injured. That was the first big one. Then the violence began to boil up over Bihar, the United Provinces, East Bengal (about 5000 people dead), and on and on. What was going on here? For many of those who supported Congress, Pakistan was perceived as a total and sweeping threat which risked shattering the whole of Mother India, rather than as a question of territorial self-determination in a specific part of the sub-continent. …Pakistan had come to signify anti-freedom for many non-Muslims and a utopian future for many Muslims There were three concepts in the minds of Indians in the 1940s, two of which had terrible consequences. First was swaraj, freedom, independence. That could only be good. Second was Pakistan. As already said, that was never defined, was cloudy, a sometime-maybe thing which the hotheads banged on about - but then became ever more urgent, ever more dominating, like a small unnoticed cloud on the horizon which grows and grows until the sun and all rational thought is blotted out; and then the third concept which grew necessarily out of Pakistan was PARTITION, and that drove people insane. KM Panikkar, historian and diplomat Hindustan is the elephant…and Pakistan is the two ears. The elephant can live without the two ears. Aside from being a rather Undiplomatic statement, also uniquely laid-back. No one else was taking this line, unfortunately. Au contraire, says Yasmin: Like a distorted fairground mirror, India and Pakistan became warped , frightening, oppositional images of one another. p104 HUGGER-MUGGER 3 June 1947 - Viceroy Mountbatten announces the plan for the Partition of India into two independent states. Independence Day for the new countries will be 14 and 15 August. YOU HAVE 70 DAYS TO FORM SEPARATE ARMIES, SORT OUT BORDER CONTROLS, CREATE TWO SETS OF GOVERNMENT APPARATUS, ALL THAT JAZZ - BETTER GET GOING! One does not have to look far to find signs of the utter confusion which greeted the 3 June plan…[which was] foisted on a population entirely uninformed about its details and implications. Shahid Hamid, private secretary to Auchinleck : It was a bombshell! Does he realize the consequences? Why this hurry? Why this shock treatment? Why is he bulldozing everything and leaving no time for an organized handover? Journalist : Do you foresee any mass transfer of population? Viceroy Mountbatten : Personally, I don't see it. So why did Jinnah and Nehru accede to such an insane, precipitous, huggermugger plan? The truth is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years…the plan for partition offered a way out and we took it. - Nehru in 1960 By August 1947 all the ingredients were in place for ethnic cleansing in Punjab: a feeble and polarized police force, the steady withdrawal of British troops and their substitution with the limited and undermanned Punjab Boundary Forces and a petrified and well-armed population. P128 If your home fell on the wrong side of the border when it was finally announced, many argued, you would not be living as a minority in a modern, democratic nation state. Instead, you would suffer oppression, exploitation, the dishonoring of religion and perhaps even conversion or death. P 111 In the minds of millions of Indians, once they had an idea that they and their family would be part of the minority in the new country, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that for them the future would be like Jews under Hitler. The terrible decision to stay or go had to be made. This led, in a few months, to Foot columns sometimes 30-40,000 strong created human caravans 45 miles long in places. P 160 In Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR, mass relocations of entire populations were ordered frequently - Crimean Tatars and Chechens to Central Asia, Jews to Poland - these cruel events were enforced by the military. The flight of millions of refugees from or to Pakistan happened without state intervention - both of the brand new states had hardly any military available to them to enforce any controls whatsoever. This was unplanned chaos. This was stampeding for the exit. The two new governments had to solve the crisis almost entirely alone, with the international community barely involved p 168 No Bing Crosby and Doris Day headlining Refugee Aid for them in 1947. The benevolent white races had just nearly obliterated themselves. Sorry India, we know this is not a good situation, but we've got our own disaster to recover from. DELUSIONS "You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan," Jinnah told Hindus and Sikhs…even as arson attacks on these religious buildings and murder of their worshippers continued unabated. P 155 THIS BOOK This is a short book (210 pages of text) but an extremely dense one. I salute Yasmin Khan, undaunted by the huge task of compressing this dizzying , complex, vast story into a comprehensible tale, but I have to say she will win no prizes as a prose stylist. Her book is studded with tired phrases, it's often stilted and awkward, and she loves her outdated clichés - Evidently, in the run up to Partition something had gone badly wrong between Indian Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. P18 (you think, professor? You think?) With the stakes so high and the number of voters so low, winning seats by fair means or foul was the ultimate end of every party p33 Security was the paramount need of the hour p84 And so on. The tale got told in the teeth of these infelicities. But what a tale. (A librarian is given the task of dividing the books in his library, 1947)

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-26 00:00:00 E N Marshall The author's main focus is on the displacement of millions of people and the communal violence that erupted in 1947,as the British finally prepared to leave India. She does seem to be an admirer of Nehru and Gandhi,both of whom she portrays rather flatteringly. Most of the book deals with the violence in the dying days of the British Raj and the plight of millions of displaced persons and refugees as they struggled to cross the new borders. Punjab and Bengal were key battlegrounds as refugees were massacred and women were raped.After some normalcy was restored and the violence had abated,many of the refugees were still left with an uphill task,trying to rebuild their lives with little resources. All that violence hardened the attitudes of both countries towards each other and was the first step in turning them into permanant enemies.An iron curtain descended and wars and nuclearisation followed. In the introduction,the book states that partition benefited a few at the expense of many. Well,hundreds of millions of Pakistanis have benefited from the creation of Pakistan,all the difficulties and sacrificies not withstanding.It would be a bit difficult for an Oxford academic like the author,sitting thousands of miles away,to appreciate this. During the British Raj,India's Muslims did not get sufficient economic opportunities and jobs.The author has nothing to say about this,it was a key factor driving the demand for Pakistan. In addition,what the book does not mention is that even today,communal violence is not an infrequent occurence in India and the lot of India's Muslims is not a happy one.