Meenakshi Jain

Meenakshi Jain is an Indian political scientist and historian sympathetic to Hindu revivalism and Hindu nationalism. She is the author of the controversial history textbook Medieval India published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) during the NDA government to replace the prior text by Romila Thapar.^[1] Her recent book Rama and Ayodhya sets out the Hindu revivalist perspective on the Ayodhya dispute.^[2]

Life and career

Meenakshi Jain is the daughter of Girilal Jain, journalist, who retired as the editor of The Times of India.

Meenakshi received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Delhi. Her thesis on the social base and relations between caste and politics was published in 1991.^[3][4] She worked as a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of History at the Gargi College affiliated to the University of Delhi.^[5]

In December 2014, she was nominated as a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research by the Narendra Modi government.^[6]

Works

Books

• Congress Party, 1967-77: Role of Caste in Indian Politics (Vikas, 1991), ISBN 0706953193.
• Medieval India: A Textbook for Class XI (NCERT, 2002), ISBN 8174501711.
• Rajah-Moonje Pact: Documents On A Forgotten Chapter Of Indian History (with Devendra Svarupa, Low Price Publishers, 2007), ISBN 8184540787.
• Parallel Pathways: Essays on Hindu-Muslim Relations, 1707-1857 (Konark Publishers, 2010), ISBN 9788122007831.
• The India They Saw (co-edited with Sandhya Jain, 4 Volumes, Prabhat Prakashan), ISBN 8184301065, ISBN 8184301073, ISBN 8184301081, ISBN 818430109X.
• Rama and Ayodhya (Aryan Books International, 2013), ISBN 8173054517.

Articles

• "Congress 1967: Strategies of Mobilisation in D. A. Low" in The Indian National Congress Centenary Hindsights, 1988.
• "Backward Castes and Social Change in U. P. and Bihar" in Srinivas (2000).
• "Power Equations in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century India: the Empirical Backdrop to Nationalism, International Forum for India's Heritage, 2003.

Jain also wrote a review of Romila Thapar's Somanatha: Many Voices of a History.^[7]

Reception

Martha Nussbaum finds Jain's Medieval India lacking in the complexity of the medieval period and its historical sources. Her account is seen to oscillate between responsibility to the truth and the demands of a "prior ideological commitment."^[8] Nandini Sundar states that the exactions of the Sultanate rulers and the Mughals are exaggerated. Their contributions to the society, culture and polity are ignored.^[9] John Stratton Hawley finds the book going against the grain in its treatment of the Bhakti movement. Jain presents the movement as a response to Shankaracharya's monism rather than as a reaction to the egalitarian message of Islam. She rejects any idea that the Indian masses converted to Islam due to its egalitarian appeal. Rather, she believes that the Muslim elites suffered from "extreme racialism" that continued well into the seventeenth century. Hence there is no place to look but the bhakti movement for a class-comprehensive view of religion.^[10]

Jain's review of Somanatha contains a heavy dose of "dogmatic ideology" in Nussbaum's view, "making her serious points less convincing". Among the serious points, Nussbaum counts the contention that Thapar has not paid attention to the religious motivations of Mahmud of Ghazni in desecrating Hindu temples.^[8]

Chander Pal Singh finds Jain's Parallel Pathways to be "path-breaking work" that questions the standard narrative of amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims during the medieval times broken only by the divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial government. Jain argues that there were fundamental differences between the two communities and they got aggravated during the period of Mughal decline which saw the resurgence of Hindu and Sikh powers and the rise of Muslim orthodoxy. Jain notes that a great majority of the nobility in the Mughal court consisted of immigrants, which consciously transformed Hindavi into Urdu by substituting a large number of Sanskrit origin words by Persian and Arabic words in order to maintain a separate identity. She even holds the Muslim orthodoxy responsible for inviting the invasions of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali for the sake of preserving Islam. She also questions the thesis that the 1857 Revolt was a joint Hindu-Muslim project and notes that the Islamic institutions issued over 200,000 fatwas in the post-Revolt period to outlaw the customary practices shared with Hindus.^[11]

M. V. Kamath in the Free Press Journal describes Jain's Rama and Ayodhya as briefly examining the antiquity of Rama's story and its spread through the Indian subcontinent, and then devoting the rest of the book to the Ayodhya dispute. Jain's enormous research makes Rama "come alive," tracing stories about him from the 4th century BC to the present. She has provided "fair" criticism to Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar, reporting the presentation of their case in considerable detail.^[12] Pralay Kanungo of the Jawaharlal Nehru University calls the book a "serious exercise" that aspires to make a quiet impact. It succeeds in trying to create a coherent and authentic historical narrative that aims to demolish the dominant narrative of the `Left Historians.'^[13] Koenraad Elst has called the book a "definitive Ayodhya chronicle," forming required reading for any one talking about the Ayodhya dispute. He finds the chapter on Hindu testimonies of Muslim iconoclasm "highly original," which also details the measures taken by the Hindu society to prevent or remedy instances of such iconoclasm. Another chapter gives an "exhaustive enumeration" of all the testimonies of the tradition that the Babri Masjid replaced a Hindu temple, including the statements made in Allahabad High Court. Also detailed are the testimonies of the pro-Masjid historians in the court and outside, which were eventually disregarded by the Allahabad High Court for their lack of competence.^[14]

References

Sources