Ghazala Wahab's new book looks into the ‘diseased' heart of the Hindi belt

Mint

19 hours ago

What is wrong with the 'Hindi heartland"? Like a lot of Bihari professionals living in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, I have often been asked variants of this question. A colleague once used the term 'bimaru" ('diseased" in Hindi; BIMARU is the derogatory acronym used to describe Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) while asking me why Biharis always voted along caste lines.
The episode reminded me, once again, of the extent to which my home state has been caricatured in popular imagination, a fate that it shares with Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, sometimes referred to as 'the Hindi belt" for clarity. I would recommend Ghazala Wahab's new non-fiction book, The Hindi Heartland, to such people.
Across 500-odd well-researched, copiously reported pages, she has captured the past and present realities of these regions with the kind of nuance and attention to detail that serious readers deserve.
The book is divided into five sections, moving chronologically from the medieval past towards the contemporary moment. The first two sections are unfussy demonstrations of Wahab's methodology. Each begins with a condensed history involving the specific context being discussed (the first section is divided into chapters like 'Society", 'Economy", 'Culture", and so on).
More often than not, Wahab is on point with her choice of history books. While discussing the Harappan period, she refers extensively to Tony Joseph's Early Indians. In a segment on the influence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), we get A.G. Noorani (The Muslims of India) and Christophe Jaffrelot on the page. G.N. Devy is cited when we are being introduced to the linguistic diversity of the region, and Nandini Sundar when we're talking about the influence of the Naxalite movement in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Urvashi Butalia is interviewed about her book The Other Side of Silence in the segment analysing the impact of Partition on the Hindi belt.
These research-heavy, historiographic summaries are bookended by interview segments—cinematic 'cold opens" at the beginning and then more in-depth conversations that fulfil dual purposes. One, the interviews act as a tonal counterweight to the 'book-smart" parts of the text. Two, the interviews often give the readers a counter-intuitive, contemporary spin on the research findings, reminding them that sociopolitical forces keep the Hindi belt in a protean state, always on the churn, always evolving.
The chapter on gender relations is a good example of how and why this twin-pronged research-and-interview strategy works. Wahab is diligent and methodical while presenting the condensed histories of phenomena like sati across north India, underlining cases like that of Roop Kanwar, the teenaged Rajput widow whose death in 1987 forced the Central government to enact the Sati (Prevention) Act later that year. But sati is an evil in the rear-view mirror, so to speak, and Wahab knows this. She, therefore, rolls out the interviews just after this history-led segment, so the reader understands that the current state of gender relations in the Hindi belt did not come about in a vacuum. This series of wide-ranging conversations with both Hindu and Muslim women makes this chapter insightful.
The historian Rana Safvi makes an appearance here with a lovely little riff on wedding customs, like hiding the groom's shoes and the application of turmeric-sandalwood paste. Thanks to popular culture we have become accustomed to seeing these activities as either Hindu or Muslim rituals (depending on our upbringing) but, as Safvi points out, these are quintessential north Indian customs that have nothing to do with any religious rationale. Safvi, who had grown up thinking of these phenomena as Islamic customs, only realised this after she spent a few years living in Saudi Arabia and then in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Similarly, the writer and columnist Natasha Badhwar opens up about her Hindu father and Muslim father-in-law, especially in terms of their very similar attitudes towards women in the formal workforce.
I especially enjoyed how this section ended, with the story of Badhwar bringing the patriarchs around to her point of view, after 'years of gentle persuasion by her, overt support by her husband, and covert encouragement by her mother-in-law". It's a powerful reminder of how outlier individualism can trump seemingly insurmountable societal influence.
Of course, not every sociopolitical force can be worn down by individual interventions, as the chapter on caste reminds us. The groundwork for this section lies in Wahab correctly locating a key difference between the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in this context. Whereas UP saw a successful era of land redistribution after the country gained independence, leading to dignity and upward mobility for Scheduled Caste (SC) communities, the upper castes in Bihar did not allow such a redistribution to happen. As a consequence, caste hierarchy and class remained closely correlated in Bihar, even in the 21st century. Historically poor communities, for the most part, have remained poor. As Wahab is quick to note, this explains both the electoral success of socialist/communist parties in Bihar, and the extra-judicial appeal of Maoists/Naxalites. Lalu Prasad Yadav's tenure as chief minister of Bihar—much-maligned in popular culture and mainstream journalism—was actually a time of unprecedentedly low levels of communal and caste-related violence.
In the handful of places where the book falters, it is because the interview segments are inadequately backed up by citations. For example, at one place, the journalist Sankarshan Thakur says that barbers in Bihar (ordinarily occupying the 'untouchable" rung of the caste ladder) were given the 'Thakur" surname so that they could safely touch the faces of their upper-caste clients. This is an entertaining story, and a Bihari person would accept this without further explanation or citation (it's not uncommon to hear Bihari barbers repeating this story) but it would have been nice to hear an academic address this point directly.
Similarly, Chapter 15, titled The Dance of Democracy, features the writer and journalist Rasheed Kidwai narrating a story about how Bhopal came to be the capital of Madhya Pradesh. In Kidwai's telling, Jabalpur was locked in as the capital-to-be, leading to veteran Congress leader Seth Govind Das buying up a lot of property in the city, in anticipation of future gains. Jawaharlal Nehru, enraged at even the suggestion of insider profiteering, decided to move the capital to Bhopal. Once again, cool story, but I could not find a history book that actually backs this up with proof.
Overall, though, I really enjoyed reading The Hindi Heartland, not least because its ambitions are not limited to historiography and journalism. When it wants to, the book also unlocks a deeply literary mode, without diluting its focus. This is a work of non-fiction where syncretism is demonstrated via an Amir Khusrau poem with both Braj Bhasha and Persian bits, where the poet Ramdhari Singh Dinkar's world view is expertly connected to the median Bihari take on communal violence, and where the berserk linguistic diversity of the Hindi belt is shown through a novelistic detour (Rahi Masoom Raza's Topi Shukla). I can visualise this book becoming a staple at educational institutions and libraries in the country. The few missteps can be ironed out in future editions.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.