The one national document that promised a different, potentially more egalitarian future in a country with a long and troubling history of sectarian strife, hierarchy and discrimination is under vociferous attack. The Constitution has become the focus of myriad discontents, with surprising attention now being paid to the imagery in it as well. What do these multiple and sustained assaults imply?
Starting in Karnataka
Many of these attacks have originated from Karnataka, but they cannot be explained away by the State’s forthcoming polls. Devanoor Mahadeva, one of Kannada’s most critically acclaimed writers, has recently said that like the thieves who set the haystack at the village edge on fire, to move in and loot the village when its inhabitants were dousing those flames, the country is being set on fire, not sparing even the relationship between husband and wife.
The fires are many and growing. The Swamiji of the Pejawar Matha, among the most venerated of Karnataka’s religious heads, set the ball rolling recently in the remarks he made at the Dharma Sansad organised at Udupi in late November. He pointed out that B.R. Ambedkar was not the sole author of the Constitution: “Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, Benegal Narsing Rau, and K.M. Munshi were also contributors.” Now, it is certainly important for all Indians to be aware of the massive, protracted collective exercise that brought the Indian Constitution into being, especially when consultative processes are given short shrift. But why were only three Brahmin men singled out for special mention? Why not remind the Indian public of Dakshayani Velayudhan, Rafi Ahmad Kidwai or Frank Anthony?
Hot on the heels of Swamiji’s words came the warning from a Member of Parliament, Anant Kumar Hegde. He claimed that the BJP’s massive mandate is a mandate to change the Constitution. We now know his carefully crafted ‘apology’ has not restrained him, and he has gone on to darkly speak of ‘cleansing’ as a political duty.
Taken together, the remarks of the Pejawar Swamiji and Mr. Hegde speak of their yearning for the comfortable caste hierarchies of the past. Mr. Hegde, who hails from the economically dominant, garden-landowning Havyak (Brahmin) community, has recently ominously compared the field of politics to a bath house that needs regular ‘cleansing’ of slime.
The sociologist Ramesh Bairy’s book had drawn our attention to the growing sense of ‘beleaguerment’ among Karnataka Brahmins and their perceived social and cultural ‘losses’ in the democratic present. The attack on the secular may not therefore be just another instance of a well-shaped attack on Indian Muslims. The erstwhile princely Mysore, which forms a dominant part of contemporary Karnataka, was the first to implement reservations to educational institutions and jobs in 1919. Through its ‘‘communal order’’ (at a time when the word had a non-pejorative association), the savarna stranglehold on jobs, education, and space was challenged, though far from totally dislodged, by the early actions of a bureaucracy under Krishna Raja Wodeyar IV, who was personally invested in bringing other backward classes in particular to the forefront. These early legacies have been given a firmer footing in the Constitution.
The criticism of the Constitution takes other forms as well. Addressing a seminar in New Delhi recently, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad referred to how the drafting committee had commissioned Nandalal Bose to illustrate the document. Nandalal Bose, he claimed, filled the pages of the original Constitution with sketches appropriate to the ideas the chapters themselves conveyed. For example, he said, for the section on Citizenship, there is a sketch on the ‘Vedic life in India’; in the section on Fundamental Rights, there is ‘a visual of Rama returning to Ayodhya from Lanka with Sita and Lakshmana’; for Finance, Property and Suits there is a dancing Nataraja. He asked the audience to ‘remember’ there is Akbar in the illustrated edition, ‘but not Aurangzeb’. Summing up his short foray into art history, he noted that the illustrated Constitution was signed by all members of the Constituent Assembly! His implication was that today’s ‘secular’ constitutional nationalists would today object to such (namely ‘religious’) illustrations by arguing India was going ‘communal’.
Text in the margins
Mr. Prasad reads Nandalal Bose’s art-historical tour of a complex Indian heritage so literally that it takes your breath away. Bose spent five years creating the rich images not as a sectarian vandalising of the past. It was a respectful review in which the images ran parallel to, but did not illustrate, the text. That is why some of the 22 images are line drawings, others are in colour, yet others feature the non-figural landscapes of mountain, sea and desert. It was the culmination of a decades-long engagement with the annual Congress sessions, and with Mahatma Gandhi in particular, in building an art historical heritage appropriate to the times. His team captured the long and diverse art practices of the Indian subcontinent, borrowing from well known clay, stone and metal sculptures, temple representations, folk forms, illustrated Mughal manuscripts, frescoes, and infusing them with a contemporariness that is truly a work of art in itself. The team drew from myth, history and imagination with equal ease and consummate skill, and, as K.G. Subramanyan has put it, Bose himself drew on “traditional continuities (though not traditional stagnation).”
We would do well indeed to take the Minister at his word, quite literally, and search for the instructive spirit of the Constitution both in its text in its ‘margins’, not as a weapon with which to strike at our political enemies, but for its nuanced understanding of Indian pasts and futures. It is this text, its images and rich borders that should be compulsory reading in every Indian classroom.
Janaki Nair is professor of history, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
