Here's Why 'Syncretism' Is the One Word I Loathe and Love So Much

After Bahadur Shah Zafar was found guilty of ‘rebellion’ at his trial in the summer of 1858, the British knew that exiling him from Delhi to far off Rangoon would be worse than giving him the death penalty. They were right.

Within a few years, Bahadur Shah Zafar died, partly of old age but primarily because of homesickness. His broken heart couldn’t bear to be permanently exiled from Delhi, his home. At the trial, he had denied the charges levied against him.

The British knew that the last Mughal was incapable of even participating leave aside providing leadership to the rebellion. They (British) wanted to physically remove the last vestige of the Delhi darbar who for them symbolised the oneness of Hindustan and thus the biggest hurdle in the way of British colonisation.  

Bahadur Shah Zafar also did not expect a fair trial at the hands of the British. However, one fact that became obvious throughout the trial was the unflinching love and devotion of the last Mughal for his home, his country of birth where his ancestors had already lived and died for more than three centuries, his Hindustan.

The state of his broken heart may not be recorded in prose but his poetry in exile is a lament of how leaving Delhi had devastated him.

His epitaph reads: “Kitna hai badnasib zafar, dafn ke liye, do gaz zamin bhi na, mili ku-e-yar mein (‘how unlucky Zafar is, for his burial he could not even get two yards of earth in his beloved country’).”

Authoritative biographies have been written on Babur, Akbar, Humayun, Jahangir, Aurangzeb, and until recently their histories found space in school curriculums throughout India.

With the teaching of Mughal history being discontinued, the NCERT diktat has wiped out an entire episode of India’s history, an era spread over three centuries that was sometimes golden, mostly bronze but always full of surprises. Indeed, the Mughal era was full of contradictions. Sufi thought on the one side, and Jaziya (as the rightwing loves to remind us) on the other.

But one word that encompasses the Mughal era substantially is ‘syncretism’. 

A word I loathe and love in equal parts.

I loathe it as I think we have been moving away from it everyday in the current India. We had also disfigured its meaning and significance before its practice was literally turned into a crime. I love it because it reminds me of a magical childhood in a small town in a country where religion didn’t come in the way of human bonds of love and respect, and where we enjoyed every festival with equal fervour. This syncretism was, in fact, the antithesis of ‘puritanism’ of any form and a tradition that created a connected thread between people of all faiths and belief systems.   

Around 166 years have passed since British exiled the last Mughal from Delhi. We are in 2023 and much has changed. It is the 76th year of independence and ninth year of the Hindutva rule. Today Bahadur Shah Zafar would have been perhaps sent in a plane to Rangoon instead of the Mackinnon Mackenzie ship that ferried him in 1858. He could even have been shot dead by some zealot protesting against Mughals while the British police were taking him for a customary medical check up before exile. 

The most significant and serious change that modern India witnessed, however, was the drafting of the constitution under the leadership of Babasaheb Ambedkar. Apart from the stellar bill of rights that we gave ourselves, the constitution was also envisaged as a contract between the diverse people of this country (region, religion, class, gender, caste). But most fundamentally, it was a check on majoritarianism of all kinds by providing for institutions that would stand up when it mattered. Like right now.

When the BJP came to power under Narendra Modi in 2014, it was thought that the idea of India was strong enough to withstand its slide towards majoritarianism and normalisation of hatred towards its large minority. But the events of the last nine years have proven otherwise. The ‘othering’ of minorities is almost complete and normal across the country.

Hate, particularly against the Indian Muslim has become the new national sport with news anchors, and political leaders of the ruling party competing with each other. The speeches made at the Dharam Sansad were so egregious that the former UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide (2004-2007), Juan Mendez, a very well regarded and long time Argentine human rights crusader gave an interview to Al Jazeera last year saying that he was concerned about India, and the United Nations Security Council should step in to protect the Indian Muslims.

Mendez said, “Whatever they (Hindu nationalists) have done so far should not lead anybody to any kind of complacency because, in fact, I do think the situation is dangerous. Also, some of the public policies of the Modi government are discriminatory against minorities. These breaches are in a continuum between discrimination to hate speech to violence and eventually to genocide.”

In the introduction to his seminal book, The Harm in Hate Speech, eminent constitutional and legal scholar Jeremy Waldron emphasises that hate speech attacks the “public good of inclusiveness that our society sponsors or is committed to” and “undermines this public good, or makes the task of sustaining it much more difficult”.

It is, however, the warning that he sounds subsequently that encapsulates the danger posed by the hate speech:

“It (hate speech) does this not only by intimating discrimination and violence, but by reawakening living nightmares….a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word, so that eventually it becomes harder and less natural for even the good-hearted members of the society to play their part in maintaining this public good”.

It is worrying that in India today hate speech against the Muslims is no longer an isolated phenomenon or being made just by the fringe. It is an open secret that it is enabled right from the top echelons of the Union government either through silence, acquiescence or active support. It can only happen in present day India that a Union cabinet minister and an established hate monger can freely mingle almost wearing his hate speech as a badge of honour. Forget naming and shaming, he is celebrated. Much like Myanmar where the social media enabled the Rohingya genocide, its role (through acts of commission or omission) in perpetrating hatred at an unprecedented speed is worrying. 

But some responsibility must surely fall on the courts too.

When a Truth Commission was formed in 1993 South Africa to investigate and identify the root causes of the conflict, the TRC did not spare the South African courts that had either supported or looked away when the atrocities were being committed.

What should be the role of the courts in India today? When young Muslim students languish in jail after being falsely implicated by the police in the 2020 Delhi riots? Or when young Muslim men are lynched in Haryana? Or when Muslim houses are extrajudicially bulldozed in Uttar Pradesh? Or when one of the most well known human rights activist from Kashmir, Khurram Parvez, languishes in jail with no bail in sight? Or when Akhlaq become just one of the many who received no justice after being brutally lynched?

Or when dissent of any form is crushed with all the might of the state?

Or when Ramzan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar is beset with communal violence and hate mongering.

Or when the NIA, ED, and CBI are unleashed on the political opposition, filing scores of fake cases. What is the role of the judiciary in all this? Where is the suo motu jurisdiction of the constitutional court when the legal system is being used to punish dissent? It has been four years since the Union unilaterally read down Article 370. So why is the top court of the country yet to hear the challenge against this move by scores of political parties from J&K?

Why is the top constitutional court desisting from hearing one of the most important constitutional cases since independence?

For all the brave human rights activists, defenders and journalists who languish in jail, and those who continue to struggle outside against oppression, here is a beautiful couplet by the renowned Urdu poet, Shuja Khawar,

“Kuch nahi bola to andar se mar jayega Shuja,

Aur agar bola to bahar se mara jayega.”

(‘If Shuja does not speak up his soul will die,

And if speaks up then he will be killed’).

I no longer recognise this India. But I hope and pray as a lawyer that the last institution standing against this onslaught is the judiciary. 

Warisha Farasat is a Delhi-based lawyer.