The Majlis Archival Exhibition – Review

The Majlis team at the exhibition opening. Image credits: Dominica Baerova

The last motion of this term at the Cambridge Majlis, which meets every Sunday at Clare College to debate South Asian issues, was ‘This House regrets the valorisation of South Asian political figures’. That is, do we regret the near-religious reverence in South Asian political life for (Mahatma) Gandhi, (Allama) Iqbal, Jinnah (the Qaid-i-Azam), (Maa) Indira Gandhi, (Pandit) Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib)? The debate was lively, but by its end even the opposition seemed convinced that South Asian countries could exalt their founders and visionaries and Prime Ministers a little less. They might instead spend more time attending to the ideals these personalities tried to champion or the institutions they tried to create. This isespecially needed given the betrayal of those ideals and the destruction of those institutions by new leaders, such as Narendra Modi or Yogi Adityanath in India or Sheikh Husina in Bangladesh, whose personality cults rival or exceed those of any of the people I have mentioned. The motion passed very easily, although I abstained.

I abstained because I still think, despite the monstrous deformations of Modi-worship or its equivalents, that there is something admirable both about some of the founders, prophets, and leaders of South Asian countries and about the attention, even adulation, with which their countries relay them. I was thinking about what might be valuable about constantly returning to these figures as I looked at the display-cases of the Majlis Archival Exhibition in the Wren Library last Saturday, and mingled with the Majlis committee, who were, unlike me, dressed in splendid South Asian clothes. The Majlis in its present form dates from 2020, but this society is a revival of a group set up, informally in 1883 and officially in 1891, to discuss what were then called Indian affairs and to agitate for independence from colonial rule.

The exhibition is an often astonishing array of minutes, pamphlets, photographs and speeches – astonishing in large part for the number of famous names who passed through the Majlis from 1883 until it was dissolved, following the Indo-Pakistani War, in 1971. Nehru and Subash Chandra Bose were members in 1907, and Nehru returned in 1935, only a few months after being released from prison, to speak against the Government of India Act. Jinnah spoke often, and the first public use of the term ‘Pakistan’ was in a pamphlet written in 1933 by a student at Emmanuel, Chaudhry Rehmat Ali. The political-agitator-turned-mystic Sri Aurobindo and the poet, philosopher and leader of the campaign for Pakistan Allama Muhammad Iqbal were both members; Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Betrand Russell, M.K. Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu and V.K. Krishna Menon all gave talks. E.M. Forster spoke in February 1948 at a meeting to mourn Gandhi’s assassination. His speech, quoted in the exhibition, says that when contemplating the Mahatma's “goodness”, “we may well entertain a feeling of awe”.

Image credits: Dominica Baerova

It is hard not to entertain a feeling of awe, despite the strictures of the Majlis, at all these people passing through Cambridge on their way to such large parts in the lives of their nations. If some of this is mere ancestor-worship, there is also something better in it than that. There is the astonishing sense that here, in these documents, in that photo of Jinnah, in those minutes of discussion of Japanese imperialism or the colonial policy of the Labour Party, you can see a record of an immense amount of talking, of arguing, of thinking, and that all this talking led, sometimes very quickly, to real political action. And often the talkers and the actors were the same people; often the best talkers, the best thinkers, were the most effective actors as well. Nehru was here, thinking and talking deeply not only about how to achieve independence but also about what sort of country an independent India should be, what sort of nation would be worth gaining independence for – and he took all that deep thought and he went back to India and he acted upon it, and was successful.

If there is anything still inspiring in the founders of the South Asian nations, it is that they almost all thought intensely about what they were doing – and in enormous volume, indeed it sometimes seems that no other nations have been the subject of more debates and speeches and pamphlets and articles. This thought did not cut them off from action in the world, but made it, most of the time, better and more effective. And if there is anything valuable about the worship of political figures, it is that by doing so we do not just revere a set of political ideals or seek to defend or reform a set of actually-existing institutions, but rather admire the practice of people who constantly navigated between the ideal and actual, the ends and the means, and were convinced that doing so was necessary for both serious thought and serious action. 

It is this ethos of interdependent thought and action which permeates the meetings of the present-day Majlis, and makes them so exciting; it is this which is apparent in the zine they have published and which can be bought at the exhibition; it is this which informed the lives of some of the most inspiring members of the post-independence Majlis, such as the economists Amartya Sen, Mahbub ul Haq and Lal Jayawardena, all of whom tried to use their intellectual brilliance to improve the lives of the very poorest, or Salma Sobhan, who founded Ain-O-Salish Kendra, one of the first human rights organisations in Bangladesh. At the launch of the exhibition, among the people talking excitedly in their saris and kurtas, I felt as if I were being singled out by the men and women in the photos, exhorted to do as they did, to use whatever intellectual or moral powers I possessed, however small, for the good of the world. Doubtless others felt the same. 

The motion passed at the Majlis did have a point. These people may have thought deeply, but that did not prevent them making terrible mistakes; indeed, it may have encouraged them. All the thought, the talk, the minutes, the pamphlets and the speeches of the partisans of India and the partisans of Pakistan did not stop the one million dead and the fifteen million displaced. There is a photograph here of Nehru as Prime Minister; with his spotless topi, his impeccably straight nose, his melancholy eyes, he looks, as he does in every photo, the very picture of the civilised, the thoughtful politician. Is this the same man whose economic policy condemned India to such sluggish growth, who allowed his government to dismiss the democratically elected Communists in Kerala, whose policy on Kashmir paved the way for today’s endless violence? Perhaps most damningly, all the thought and action of the Majlis did not prevent Modi and Sheikh Husina and Shehbaz Sharif, did not stop South Asian countries from falling into their present separate and related political hells. Perhaps, then, reverence is not appropriate. But nothing is going to change this situation except more, and better, thought and action. So go to the Majlis exhibition, go to the Majlis itself, and be emboldened to think and act by the examples and even the failures of its members, so wonderfully laid out in these documents. 

The exhibition is open until Wednesday 15th March. More details are available here.