The fashion potential of the
Nazis has been undeniable from the outset. Hugo Boss knew it, Goebbels and Leni
Riefenstahl recognized it, and glamorous Englishmen from David Bowie to the
current princelings have shown their appreciation. Americans have been
resistant (except in prison wards and Idaho), but recently in India, in
Ahmedabad of all places, a shiny new store named after Adolf opened its doors,
the ‘i’ in the ‘Hitler’ dotted cleverly with a small swastika. (It cannot be
pretended that this is the innocent Hindu swastika, although that cover can of
course be utilized if necessary.) Hitler does not sell storm-trooper uniforms,
jackboots or even armbands. It sells run-of-the-mill menswear to well-heeled
men in the ‘best governed state in India.’ (A brown shirt or two can probably
be found on the racks.) Nevertheless, Ahmedabad’s tiny Jewish community has
protested, reporters have shown up with cameras, the Israeli embassy in Delhi
has made some very mild unhappy noises, and the proprietor has issued a decidedly
unapologetic defense.
What the gentleman said boils
down to this: only a few Jews are complaining, ‘the Hindu majority’ doesn’t
seem to have a problem (so what’s your beef?), and besides, Hitler wasn’t all
that bad. He was being a bit brazen, no doubt, but not all that unusual in the
middle-class Indian context, where a casual fondness for the FΓΌhrer has long been evident. ‘I
have read his autobiography and agree with a lot of what he wrote,’ declared
another businessman-admirer recently. Mein
Kampf is sold openly in sidewalk bookstalls all over India, and it’s certainly
possible – although unlikely – that the man, carried away by his fascination
with interwar German angst, actually read the whole thing in its tedious entirety.
A German friend who teaches Indian
history is regularly confronted, during visits to India, by people who declare
their admiration of Hitler and congratulate him on his good fortune at being
the great man’s compatriot. My friend is married to a woman with an Indian
parent, has blond children with Indian names, and lives in
kick-out-the-black-sheep Switzerland, so he has enough on his plate without
being asked to raise his arm in Aryan solidarity. He is more
polite than I would be in his shoes. Taking umbrage and
responding with ‘Sala, fuck you,’ would be unbecoming of a research scholar in
a foreign country, and like most other Germans, he makes an earnest attempt to
explain that Hitler was a bad guy.
But is that explanation really
necessary? The answer, in the Indian case, is yes and no. That Hitler killed a
lot of people is known to Indians who know his name. But the details, the
context and the history are typically a blank. Moreover, it is known (as Justice Radhabinod Pal noted in his dissent at the Tokyo war crimes trials) that history and its
judgments are the discourses of victors. And since the victors in this case are
also the colonial powers from whose grasp modern India emerged, the history
that declares Hitler to be a bad guy is automatically suspect, something to
defy along with tut-tutting foreign reporters. What become more vital are Hitler’s
credentials as an enemy of Britain, which in the absence of credible history
are easily construed as a kind of anti-colonialism. Indian nationalism, like
many other anti-colonial nationalist movements (including, ironically, the
Zionist) flirted more or less openly with Germany and Japan during the war, and
that rationale – with its mixture of delusion and canny opportunism – remains
alive.
Beyond that, however, the
substance of Indian Hitlerphilia becomes unreliable and thin. The ideological
foundations are either missing or very different. There is no recognizable anti-Semitism
in India; most Indians couldn’t care less about Jews one way or the other. They
neither hate them nor feel guilty about them. They usually don’t know any
personally either, since there are about five thousand Jews in all of India,
give or take a ‘lost tribe’ in Mizoram. Indians think about Jews as often as they do
about Kung ‘bushmen’ in the Kalahari. There is nothing strange in this: how
many Americans, or Germans for that matter, spend time thinking about the Kung or the Herero,
or even about Europe’s own Roma and Sinti? There is nothing automatic or
natural about the status of history’s victims: it must be achieved politically. The notion that
anti-Semitism is a ‘universal’ problem that everybody should prioritize merely
reflects a larger hegemony. Anti-Semitism is Europe’s
misfortune: a problem within a specific arrangement of culture, religion and
race.
It can be argued that everybody should know about the Holocaust, or that
one should not have to be a Jew or a Gypsy to recoil from mass murderers, but
mass murder is so ubiquitous in the history of the modern world that there is no
space in a ‘world history’ textbook to include every episode, and to reject all
the murderers on principle would be to call into question the organization of
the world itself. Even Gandhi, who was ready to ask such questions, and who
counted Jews among his most intimate partners, knew practically
nothing about the Holocaust, which led him to make idiotic remarks about the
Jewish predicament in wartime Europe. In the brief moment between the end of
the war and his death, with political disaster and mass killing creeping over
India, Gandhi could hardly be expected to pay much attention to a European
catastrophe, yet he could not ignore it either. In such circumstances, parochialism,
ignorance and stupidity become normative responses to ‘world history.’ It
is more embarrassing for people in the ‘Third World’ than it is for Europeans
and Americans, because whereas the latter are not expected to know anything about Third World catastrophes and hence
have no obligation to respond, the former cannot remain untouched by Western history and must improvise responses, especially if they are to count as
modern and worldly.
The opening of the shop called
Hitler reminded me of an incident on the cricket field a few years ago, when
Indian fans in Baroda and then Bombay made monkey gestures at the black
Australian player Andrew Symonds. It was disgraceful, and was justifiably
condemned by Indians as well as Australians. I think, however, that there is
room for debate on the specific condemnation, which was a charge of racism. As
a form of spectator behavior, monkey gestures directed at black players are
straight out of the copybook of European football, where racism is an ongoing
problem, and which is now accessible on television to newly moneyed
sports fans even in a provincial city like Baroda. Given that African students
are routinely abused and insulted on Indian college campuses, and that Indian
immigrants in America have appalling views on kallus, it would certainly appear that racism of the European sort
has established its Indian pedigree. This is, however, misleading. Kallu-phobic NRIs take their cues from
the white-American mainstream; their sense of a ‘bad school’ or a ‘bad
neighborhood’ is only half-baked when they first arrive at JFK or LAX. Anti-black
racism, like anti-Semitism, requires discursive meat: it needs, in other words,
a deep consensus about what race is, what blackness is, what a Jew is like, and
so on. Those discourses are so threadbare and shallow in India that it becomes
rather doubtful whether a monkey gesture in Baroda means what it would in
Barcelona or Liverpool. (This is not to say that the effect on the target is less hurtful.)
What then does it mean? What
might an Indian who has picked up a copy of Mein
Kampf mean when he says that he agrees with Hitler,
assuming he is being sincere and not merely provocative? He means, presumably,
that he empathizes with what he perceives to be a desire for order and a stifled nationalism: the
Romantic notion of a community defined not only by its humiliation by outsiders
but also by its failure to be a
community united in purpose, yearning for unity, purity, revenge and
fulfillment. What is peculiar about the Nazis is not the fact of mass murder, but the extent to which they imbued murder with the magic of industrial-bureaucratic efficiency. That magic is largely alien to India: it is desired in a general way by the middle class, but resisted in its particulars by nearly everybody, including the middle class. Indian admiration for Hitler is, in that sense, an ‘innocent’ empathy, or the
misidentification of one set of frustrations with another. Likewise, the behavior
of the monkeys in Baroda and Bombay was a kind of innocent pleasure: that of being a crowd in the winter sunshine, having a bit of fun at the
expense of a total outsider who was just passing through anyway. The members of
the crowd knew that they were being hurtful, but had only the vaguest idea of
the historical context and political significance of the pain, and hence, of
the scale of the offence.
As an insider of sorts in
America, I do not – cannot – use the word ‘innocence’ innocently. I recall Hugh
Richmond saying years ago, in a class on Shakespeare, that
innocence is the highly destructive conviction that your own ignorance, honesty
and good intentions (or at least the absence of malice) will
have good consequences. (Richmond is an Englishman, and several students were outraged
by his cynicism. Graham
Greene had their ilk in mind when he wrote The Quiet American.) Modern Indian society is hardly innocent of
racism, but the races at the heart of this racism have been local: Dalits,
Adivasis, northeasterners, Muslims, and so on. When it comes to them, there can
be no claim to innocence. When it comes to the victims of Western racism,
however, Indian malice can be as innocent as American benevolence, although
less deadly. It is, to some extent, a matter of aping a Western norm of desire
and display that is represented by
Hitler and football hooligans. More than that, however, it is the utilization of Western symbols – Hitler,
football hooligans – to assert a modernity that is substantially autonomous of
the West. When European and American news readers are startled by a boutique
named Hitler, or a politician’s son named Stalin Karunanidhi, or a restaurant in
Japan with a concentration camp theme and swastikas on the dinner plates, much
of the shock comes from the recognition of this autonomy.
It would be a mistake to assume
that because the autonomous use of Hitler in Asia is counter-hegemonic and
innocent, it is harmless. This is not merely or even largely because it offends
the local Jews. It is because when a businessman in Gujarat cites the feelings
(or rather, indifference) of the Hindu majority, he is not talking about the impertinence of Jews. He is talking about
Muslims, who have a long and deep discursive history as the ‘misfortune’ of the
Indian nation. When another Indian ‘agrees’ with Mein Kampf, he is not expressing an opinion on Anglo-French perfidy
or trying belatedly to join the NSDAP, but indicating his sympathy for a vision
of Indian nationhood that privileges perceptions of victimhood, sabotage and
resurgence, and devalues the rights of individuals, dissidents and internal
minorities. Who needs France when you have Pakistan? Pakistan is not just a
country, but also an Indian state of
mind: the historical misfortune that is as much within as without the nation. This
nationhood, with its fantastic/innocent visions of Hitler and Stalin, is of
course fundamentally hybrid in its parentage; it could hardly be otherwise. But
it is more dangerous to Indians than it is to foreigners.
September 2, 2012
Note: Since I wrote this piece, the owner of the shop in Ahmedabad has decided to change the name of his business. May I suggest 'Arthur Harris' as the new name? The initials would remain the same and nobody would complain, although business might suffer from public apathy. Alternately, he could call it 'Modi.' Catchy, ethnic, popular.
September 2, 2012
Note: Since I wrote this piece, the owner of the shop in Ahmedabad has decided to change the name of his business. May I suggest 'Arthur Harris' as the new name? The initials would remain the same and nobody would complain, although business might suffer from public apathy. Alternately, he could call it 'Modi.' Catchy, ethnic, popular.
