Talk:Maria Misra
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Review in the Independent (UK)
India beyond the clichés
Reviewed by Chandak Sengoopta Friday, 24 August 2007
Born in the carnage of partition and having struggled through a whole galaxy of troubles, the Republic of India has completed its sixth decade in a state of unexpected prosperity. Journalists have been waxing eloquent on this transformation for some time and hard-nosed trade publishers now bring out weighty tomes on Indian culture, history and society. Over the last
year or so, we have had books on modern India by (among others) Pavan Varma, Amartya Sen, Edward Luce, Ramachandra Guha and Martha Nussbaum. Now comes Oxford academic Maria Misra's Vishnu's Crowded Temple, a long but sprightly and idiosyncratic survey of India's history since the Mutiny of 1857.
The Mutiny killed off the East India Company, bringing India under direct control of the British Crown. The Raj, for all its pomp and pomposity, lasted a mere 90 years and its story, one might think, has been told far too often to justify another retelling. Misra's chapters on British India, however, are fascinating for their focus on topics ignored by the Raj industry. Building on recent specialist research, she shows how the British passion to classify and analyse Indian society led to the formulation of rigid concepts of caste, often on the basis of pretty dodgy information. Once set in stone, the different castes turned into interest groups that the British – and later, the democratic politicians of independent India – could manipulate. This is not the kind of legacy the champions of the Raj tend to talk about and Misra's debunking analysis comes like a breath of fresh air.
This refusal to tell a predictable story characterises the whole book. Although broadly chronological, the narrative is not organised around the conventional landmarks of political history. There is little on the Pakistan and China wars, the Kashmir problem, or tensions with tribal peoples. Misra makes up for it by ranging widely over culture and society, returning repeatedly to religion and religiously-tinged forms of hierarchy. Democracy in India, she argues forcefully, is always combined with different degrees of allegiance to tradition: "Identities of caste, religion, community and region often overpower broader-based loyalties to the nation state".
This is a good way of thinking about India's many contradictions and a prophylactic against the common assumption that most Indians share the liberal, secular principles enshrined in the nation's constitution. It's not the cosmopolitan, liberal and honest Jawaharlal Nehru who symbolises modern India for Misra but the entertaining and sometimes impressively efficient politician Laloo Prasad Yadav. Laloo may be regarded as a crooked buffoon by urban intellectuals but he is a hero to his caste and, increasingly, an exemplar of business skills to those US management schools that the children of Laloo's sophisticated critics would give an arm and a leg to get into.
Misra, however, generalises a bit too hastily. Perhaps Laloo does represent the future of Indian politics but the country is too diverse not to throw up other, very different kinds of politician. One interesting trend is the turn towards free enterprise by Marxists like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, chief minister of the once-moribund state of West Bengal. Formerly a valiant fighter for the proletarian revolution, he is now a champion of industrialisation and information technology. He even sends in policemen to shoot peasants protesting against their land being sold off to industrialists. You can't grasp the polymorphous perversity of Indian politics unless you contrast the Laloos with Comrade Bhattacharjee and other secular "reformers".
Also problematic is Misra's tendency to equate religion with Hinduism. True, it is the majority faith, but the Muslims of India, on whose pre-partition politics Misra writes quite splendidly, are still politically significant. Recent Muslim politics does not receive much attention from her.
Misra, however, is very good indeed on some cultural issues historians rarely deal with. Her passages on Indian English are masterly. With the growth of call centres and other ways of making money through the global language, more and more Indians are seeking to learn English. Most do so at unregulated private academies which teach "a mangled hybrid-tongue" which "will not help India in its long-term competition with China, the Philippines and much of South East Asia". This is spot on, but Misra does not contrast it with the vigorous and increasingly widespread cultivation of English literary writing in India and the resulting decline of the vernacular literatures.
The modern, liberal face of India, in short, simply does not interest Misra as much as it ought. Only a fool would deny the importance of religion in Indian life but the strength of secular and liberal trends should not be underestimated. The temples (and mosques) might remain crowded, but the computer labs, libraries, universities and research institutes are also filling up impressively. The coming years are likely to witness powerful contests between the two sides not only for political power, but for the very soul of the nation.
Misra could have done more to explain such divisions to her readers. Within its limits, however, Vishnu's Crowded Temple is a very readable work, packed with information, engagingly written and often bracingly maverick in its interpretations. It is not only worth reading, but worth arguing with. Just don't make it the only book you read on Indian history.
Chandak Sengoopta teaches history at Birkbeck College, London; he is writing a book on Satyajit Ray
I'm going to move this article to "Maria Misra," since googling Anna-Maria Misra brings up "Maria Misra". Hydriotaphia 15:24, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Editing
Could people editing the article provide sources for their changes, either in the article itself or here? See WP:CITE. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 10:53, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Neutral point of view needed
The book reviews of "Vishnu's Crowded Temple" from Indian Express and Telegraph are biased. The content of these reviews is not relevant to the Wikipedia article, which is expected to be scholarly, authoritative, and neutral, but only the fact that such reviews exist might be relevant, if at all. Since the external links can be included, the interested readers can go and read the reviews for themselves. There is no need for Wikipedia to repeat the text from the reviews. Wikipedia is also not a discussion forum where the reviews or the book should be debated. I have deleted the Indian Express review once and replaced it by a short summary. It has been re-inserted, along with a similarly biased review from Telegraph. I am afraid I have to delete it again.
The reason these reviews are biased is that they ignore the substance of Maria Misra's book, which is 500 pages long and has lots of interesting things to say, but only focus on trivial errors. The errors are of course unfortunate, but they only represent a certain amount of sloppiness in the preparation of the book. They do not imply that the author did not take her work seriously or that the whole substance of the book falls down due to these errors. To the extent that the reviewers make such inferences, they are wrong, no matter how respectable they might be as historians in their own right.
The reason that the insertion of these reviews in the Wikipedia article is biased is that these (anonymous) editors have only selectively used the negative (and superficial) reviews. They have not mentioned the numerous positive reviews that the book has also attracted. Such bias is not permitted in Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:NPOV.
Reddyuday (talk) 11:53, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
- I also tried to help with this. Please provide links to positive reviews too. Steve Dufour (talk) 12:16, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Bibek Debroy review (Indian Express)
Bibek Debroy in Indian Express starts his review with a promising start. He says 'unified field theories' of Indian history don't exist and, since the book seems to provide such a theory, one's expectations rise. Brilliant! But the rest of the review says nothing about the 'unified field theory' that Debroy found in the book or what he thought about it. As soon as he found 'Amritsar' misspelt, his confidence was shattered. Then his attention was apparently reduced to counting typos, and nothing more has been learnt. How sad!
Even though Ramlila is indeed based on Tulsidas's text (as correctly mentioned in the book), Debroy is more concerned with Misra's evidenced knowledge of Valmiki Ramayana, or the lack thereof. Does Debroy in fact know that the play of Ramlila is based on Tulsidas?
Given that there are enough howlers as such in the book, I can't understand why Debroy needs to resort to distortions.
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- “High” and “real” Hinduism can be found in the Rig Veda, the Laws of Manu and the Puranas (pp. 25-26).
Misra only uses the term "`high' form" with quotes around the word `high'. She never uses the term "high Hinduism", much less "real Hinduism". She lists Rig Veda and the laws of Manu, but not Puranas, as forming the basis of this form of Hinduism. If one doesn't know what she means by `high' form, then one only needs to read the remainder of her sentence where she contrasts it with the `popular' form of Hinduism which she says is based on ritual sacrifice, personal devotion and the worship of local gods. Unless one is really thick, it is clear that what she means by `high' form is the elite form which is to be contrasted with the popular form. Clearly, Debroy is not thinking far enough in interpreting the text, being ever more ready to pounce on supposed errors in it.
After listing a few such real and imagined minor errors in the book, Debroy concludes, "If she is [an academic], such inaccuracies, bad research and ignorance are unpardonable." Well, being an academic myself, I beg to disagree. Such errors are of course embarrassing. But they hardly break the substance of a massive piece of work such as this. Misra's book spans 150 years of contemporary history which has been studied in depth with a wealth of material, both published and unpublished, and tries to squeeze a new analysis of it. Her bibliography alone runs to 40 pages with roughly a thousand citations, the majority of which are books. It is inevitable that a few errors roll in in such a body of work, regrettable though they are. I am even happy to allow that Misra might be more sloppy than an average academic of her stature. It is quite possible that she is too much in a hurry to produce her output without adequate quality control. But I am sorry to say that Debroy's review says nothing of interest about the book. It is not even clear that Debroy has understood what the book is about.
I have no idea why Wikipedia should pay any attention to this review.Reddyuday (talk) 14:30, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Rudrangshu Mukherjee Review (Telegraph, Calcutta)
Rudrangshu Mukherjee's review deserves to be taken seriously as he is a fellow historian and an Oxford PhD himself. However, titled "Comedy of Errors", the review robs us of the the benefit of Dr Mukherjee's perceptive evaluation, focusing only on the errors in Maria Misra's book. Having already seen how these things go from Bibek Debroy's review, we are again hard pressed to find out anything of interest about the book from the review.
On the other hand, we are illuminated by Dr. Mukherjee's impression that the book is "pedestrian and pretentious; ill-informed and ignorant." "It bristles with egregious errors of which most undergraduates studying Indian history would be ashamed." That sounds pretty damning! What are these egregious errors of history that undergraduates would be ashamed of? Spelling of "Dadabhai" and "swaraj"? "Ingraj" meaning the "babu" (with italics as in the book)? Harischandra being a manifestation of Krishna? ISI not being near Botanical Gardens? Are these all the egregious errors of history that an Oxford PhD can dig up? If so, then we must conclude that everybody has been crying wolf!
Dr Mukherjee seems to be under the impression that this is a history textbook from which undergraduates are expected to look up historical trivia. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that the book presents a thesis and develops it through the narrative of 150 years of contemporary history. If it occurred to him, his Oxford PhD would surely have served him well in finding that thesis. Unfortunately, there is no mention of anything of that sort in his review. Reddyuday (talk) 16:33, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Chandan Mitra Review (India Today)
Here is another very review of Misra's work- this one by Dr Chandran Mitra in India Today, pointing out yet more basic errors:
Clueless in wonderland By Chandan Mitra September 18, 2007
Vishnu’s crowded temple: India since the great rebellion By Maria Misra Allen Lane Price: £6.99 Pages: 450
Maria Misra deserves 10/10 for sheer audacity. None but the hopelessly brave would even conceive of writing a tome on India between Bahadur Shah Zafar and Manmohan Singh in 450 hardback pages, that too, packaged as a scholarly publication. They say a very thin line separates bravado from foolhardiness.
Misra treads that line with rare aplomb. And, thus, manages to confuse the reader about the category in which she should be placed. If raciness could substitute for academic rigour, the author would score yet another perfect 10, although she cannot aspire to more than a five on 10 for scholarship.
Her knowledge base, quite transparently, is second or third-hand, so she believes in leaving nothing out of her voluminous narrative. Thus, bazaar gossip and hearsay at Delhi’s watering holes cohabit with dreary colonial dispatches, periodically adding spice to her haphazard account of India’s evolution over the last 150 years.
Purists may be somewhat puzzled by the slipshod research that characterises the volume and also the incoherence of the narration, which flits between time, space and personalities in a bewildering manner. If there was a category called a grasshopper’s view of history, Misra’s monograph would be eminently qualified to win a prize.
The author appears uncertain about the nature of her laborious project. Is it intended to be a university textbook? Is it a scholarly contribution to the burgeoning body of Raj historiography? Is it a hybrid byproduct of a one-night stand between scholarship and pop history? Is there any particular reason why this book was written, except the hope that it may rake in considerable moolah once adequately promoted? I am no wiser after reading it.
Some anecdotes are admittedly quite funny, especially the one about Congress founder A.O. Hume. Apparently a “tactless” man with “cantankerous habits” and “the greatest liar who ever came to India” according to Raj accounts, Hume was drawn into politics under the influence of the charismatic Russian émigré, Madame Blavatsky.
He attended a séance conducted by her Theosophical Society, during which a certain mahatma, Koot Hoomi Lal Singh, supposedly a deceased 1857 rebel, spoke to Hume, urging him to take up the cause of political reform. “Hume’s commitment to the cause remained undeterred by the scandalous revelation that the bellicose mahatma was none other than the mysterious Madame Blavatsky herself!”
Inordinate dependence on condescending and disparaging remarks about Indian leaders by British officials might make for interesting ‘time-pass’, but can hardly be considered authoritative. Early president of the Indian National Congress, W.C. Bonnerjee, in letters written during his sojourn in England, may have described Hinduism as a moribund religion and called India the most hateful land in the world, but surely his contribution to modern India’s resurgence cannot be summarised in these remarks alone.
Similarly Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s disgust with the “babu culture” is not the sole reason why he is revered. Misra does not even mention Vande Mataram in her sketchy reference to his novel Ananda Math, which finds a place in her account only because she believes his hope of a Hindu army overpowering foreign conquerors almost materialised 150 years later.
Yet, for an anecdotal view of Raj history, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple makes chatpata reading. It recounts the basis of the British obsession with the racial characteristics of Indians, especially their disdain for the “effeminate” Bengali given to “masturbation (the cause, apparently, for the high incidence of diabetes) and (who, therefore) could not stand up for himself against ‘old dames’ who took a particular delight in promoting sexual congress between the very young”. Since the author does not believe in annotating her work with references and footnotes, it is difficult to ascertain the source of such delightful collections.
If the early chapters of the book make interesting reading, the account rapidly degenerates into a précis of existing accounts laced with Misra’s own take on events and personalities. The long narrative on Gandhi, for example, reads like a wide-eyed discovery of the evolution and role of the Mahatma in Indian politics.
On the other hand, events such as the Partition are treated almost cursorily in comparison. One is tempted to conclude that the extent of available secondary material had a direct bearing on the quantum of space devoted to the issue. If the volume had eschewed academic pretensions and been shorter, it would have been easier to recommend as a handbook for an expat to read on the plane.
Probably Misra’s evident unfamiliarity with the country leads her to commit bloomers that immediately downgrade the effort. For no apparent reason, she titles one of her later chapters “Flames” with reference to Sholay, overlooking the correct translation, ‘embers’. Worse, she decides that the film’s protagonist Jaidev (I thought it was simply Jai) portrays a “low caste character”. Having seen Sholay at least a dozen times, I cannot recall Jai’s caste origin being identified. The author goes on to comment that his caste origin determined he had to die in the movie rather than consummate his love with a high-caste Thakur’s daughter-in-law.
Then she remarks that Amitabh Bachchan is “physically a far cry from the chiselled perfection supposedly associated with high caste leading men”. Further, she asserts he is the son of a “Brahman poet and a society-hostess mother”. If only she had spent a few weeks in India, Misra would have known that the late Harivansh Rai is a celebrated Kayasth and his wife Teji not a mere Punjabi socialite.
The final boo-boo takes the cake. On December 13, 2001, the author claims, criticism of the Vajpayee Government reached a peak when a “bomb exploded in the Indian Parliament”. That’s the point where I thought I would explode if I read any further. Little knowledge, it is appropriately said, is dangerous.
Reddyuday (talk) 13:49, 5 January 2008 (UTC): I think this is a sensible review, and I would be happier for it to go on the Wikipedia article instead of the other two silly reviews analysed above. However, I should again take pains to point out that, for somebody with an Oxford PhD on Indian freedom movement, Chandan Mitra does not point out any errors in Misra's coverage of history. Is Amitabh Bacchan's caste the extent of this reviewer's knowledge of history? Note also that the reviewer admits to not understanding the book: "I am no wiser after reading it." One expects that India Today gave him a free copy of the book and a deadline for submitting the review, which he did dutifully and pocketed his commission. What difference does it make if he actually failed to understand the book? If an Oxford DPhil couldn't understand it, there is presumably little chance of the rest of us heathen in understanding it as well!
Here is what I think is really going on. A book with a title like "Vishnu's temple" and a gaudy religious image on its cover but with a Christian name for its author brings out all the right-wingers out of their shells on a war footing. How dare she use our Vishnu for her title? What does she know about Vishnu? Hinduism is in peril! All right-thinking Hindus, come out and protect our heritage!!
Coloured by this jaundiced view, all their Oxford DPhil's go down the tube. And, these otherwise intelligent and knowledgeable readers and reviewers, are reduced to fault-finding. Their brains shut down, they can't even understand what the book is about. Unfortunately for her, Maria Misra is not very good at getting her facts right, which makes her liable to attack. When a Western author writes about Indian affairs, there are always silly mistakes or misunderstandings that an Indian reader can pick out in minutes. Likewise, when an Indian author writes about Western affairs, there are equally silly mistakes that a Western reader can pick out. These are things that one takes in stride. But, if these reviewers and critics are worth their salt, one would expect that they would bring up at least one substantive problem with the history covered in the book, other than trivia.
Here is the full review in the Telegraph:
COMEDY OF ERRORS
Misra: just a pretty face VISHNU’S CROWDED TEMPLE: INDIA SINCE THE GREAT REBELLION By Maria Misra, Allen Lane, £6.99 This book, written by an Oxford don, is a howler-seeker’s delight. Turning to the bibliography, I found a reference to T. Roy, A Countryside in Revolt: Bulandshahr District, 1857. The reference is to The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857-58. Has Maria Misra ever set eyes on this book, let alone ever read it? For me this set the register of the book: pedestrian and pretentious; ill-informed and ignorant. It bristles with egregious errors of which most undergraduates studying Indian history would be ashamed. The scholarship is so shoddy that it is difficult to believe that the author ever trained as a historian; that she now trains others makes one shudder. Lest you think I am exaggerating, allow me to give you a sample of Maria Misra’s knowledge of Indian history. She doesn’t know the spelling of the name of Dadabhai Naoroji: she writes Dhadabhoy. She consistently writes garibhi for garibi, thus rendering the word meaningless. In her hands, Mahatma Gandhi’s classic text, Hind Swaraj becomes Hind Sawaraj. She obviously has no clue about the meaning of swaraj. According to her, Gandhi spoke of “Ram’s Raja’’, thus confusing raja (king) with rajya (kingdom). Gandhi, as most educated people know, spoke of ramrajya. Misra makes shakhas into shakras and confuses, again and again, charkha with chakra. In another show of great erudition, she speaks of Vishnu’s sundarshana chakra! She tells her readers that Ramlila is based on a 16th-century text. Valmiki’s Ramayan is not a name to her. Her ignorance of the epics is manifest when she writes of Bankimchandra, “In his Krishnacharita [the name of the essay is actually “Krishnacharitra”], he reinvented the bucolic and erotic child-god Krishna as a heroic warrior-politician, a battling saviour figure.’’ Bankim reinvented nothing. He merely interpreted the figure of Krishna as depicted in the Mahabharat and the Gita. Readers who know Bengali or Sanskrit will be delighted to learn from Misra that Ingrajstotra translates as “Hymn to the babu’’. It is actually “Hymn to the English”. Whoever knew, before it was revealed by Misra, that the king, Harishchandra, was “a manifestation of Krishna’’? She has every right to describe P.C. Mahalanobis as a dictator in the Indian Statistical Institute but to say that he came under a cloud is to move from opinion to libel. Anyway, what authority does Misra, who thinks the ISI was established near the Botanical Gardens, have to express any opinion on the ISI and its founder? The ISI was founded in Presidency College and it was never relocated to New Delhi. Her references to another man of learning are equally startling. Amartya Sen, and everyone else, will be amused to know from Misra that Sen trained at the Delhi School of Economics. Most of us know that Sen only taught there. How can one take such a book seriously? How can Allen Lane publish this book? More importantly, how can Maria Misra hold a job at Oxford University? RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE
and here is the full Indian Express review of Misra's dreadful book: - - http://www.indianexpress.com/sunday/story/211120.html - - Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India Since the Great - Rebellion - Maria Misra - penguin, 6.99 pounds - - On the 60th anniversary of Independence, this book promises to present a new interpretation of Indian history, since liberal, Marxist and subaltern schools all have imperfections. Unified field theories of India’s history, development and identity don’t exist and one’s expectations rise. Expectations change to trepidation when one realises Amritsar (maps 4 and 5), Dadabhai Naoroji (p. 52), Aryavarta (p. 70), Gadhar Party (p. 109), bania (p. 117), charkha (p. 135, p. 144, p. 452), shakhas (p. 169), Yervada (p. 187, p. 195), Swaraj (p. 220), Sanjeeva Reddy (p. 331), garibi (p. 333, p. 337, p. 341), sudarshana chakra (p. 369), Kaka Saheb Kalelkar (p. 378) can’t be spelt right and Raipur is confused with Dehra Dun (map 4). For that matter, one can’t even spell Robert Louis Stevenson (p. 155) correctly. - - Is this sloppiness, bad eyesight (while proof correction) or ignorance? Here are some examples to establish the ignorance hypothesis. “The Ramlila, or the play of Ram, was based on a sixteenth-century text and tells the story of Ram, the ideal Hindu king, whose wife and kingdom are stolen by the evil god Ravanna (sic) and then restored after epic battles.” This may certainly be a reference to Tulsidas, but there is no evidence that the author knows a Valmiki Ramayana existed. Harischandra (the king), meanwhile, is a manifestation of Krishna (p. 178). - - Vishvamitra is called a lower-caste sage (p. 178). Vishvamitra was born a kshatriya, but one could hardly call him “lower-caste”. While the “Swaraj” part is fine, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were named “Shaheedi” (p. 225). In 1931, the Indian Statistical Institute was established near Calcutta’s Botanical Gardens (p. 275). The ISI was actually set up in a room in Presidency College and the Botanical Gardens are a fair distance away. Varnashrama dharma means the caste system (p. 455). Even if one ignores the equation of varna with caste, what happened to the “ashrama” part? “High” and “real” Hinduism can be found in the Rig Veda, the Laws of Manu and the Puranas (pp. 25-26). - - Since this is the ersatz understanding of Hinduism, it isn’t surprising that there is an assertion (p. 50) that the Brahmo Samaj was set up in 1818 (it was actually set up in 1828) to amalgamate Hinduism and Christianity. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa is described as setting up a “bizarre cult” (pp. 58-59) and Swami Vivekananda is described as a “mystic” (p. 118). - - “In his Krishnacharita (sic) (Life of Krishna, 1892) he reinvented the bucolic and erotic child-god Krishna as a heroic warrior-politician, a battling saviour figure (p. 61).” Bankimchandra analysed, but re-invented nothing and the title of his book is incorrectly stated, not just the content. “Bande Mataram — the unofficial anthem of Indian nationalism, which espouses anti-Muslim sentiments in later verses” (p. 169). No verse in Bande Mataram espouses anti-Muslim sentiments. The controversy was about the image of the Mother and the tenor of “Anandamath”. - - The date for setting up Vishvabharati, as opposed to the ashrama (Santiniketan) or the Institute for Rural Reconstruction (Shriniketan), is wrong (p. 76); no IMF investigation suggested that $1 billion were deposited in private bank accounts in Switzerland (p. 373); Amartya Sen - - wasn’t trained at the Delhi School of Economics (p. 393), he taught there. Subhas Chandra Bose may not have died in the plane crash in 1945 (the author seems to think it was in 1944) and one should get the name and designation of Colonel Prem Kumar Sahgal correct (p. 228, not Captain Prem Saghal). And mind you, this is only a small sample of inaccuracies the volume is ridden with. - - Is Misra an academic (in modern history at Oxford University, as her profile states) or is she a TV presenter? If she is the former, such inaccuracies, bad research and ignorance are unpardonable. Why do academics not stick to what they know and attempt unified field theories in subjects they know little about? Just because she has “spent many weeks” at the IIC (she gets the IIC expansion wrong too)? The parts she knows about (history) aren’t bad, content-wise. But they are boringly written and she has nothing new to add. A TV presenter may be good for bytes, but bytes don’t add up to a good volume. On independent India’s 60th birthday, the publishers have promised “more than thirty great India books”. If this is a sample, that’s a threat. Misra has the right to write (and publish) what she chooses. But you also have the right not to waste your time and the idea of India is resilient enough to withstand vilification.
