Introduction

After the demise of the communist system in 1989, Poland experienced a rapid and largely successful transition to the market economy and liberal democracy. The democratic institutions, although newly established, seemed well grounded and, for a long time, were not overtly contested by any major political forces, including post-communists. The challenge to the Polish version of the liberal, representative democracy came with the rise to power of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, or PiS). The latter, founded in 2001, governed for the first time in 2005–2007 and, later, in 2015–2023. The first period was relatively short and could be seen as forming the concepts and methods which were fully implemented only after the second accession to power. The policy of the PiS has been aimed at subverting the rule of law, especially the division of powers and the independence of the judiciary. The core of the rhetoric of the PiS has been the claim of representing ‘the nation’, which so far was mute, culturally neglected, and economically exploited. The PiS presents itself as the first Polish party that embodies the interests and values of ‘average people’ versus elites, provinces versus large cities, ‘true’ Poles versus cosmopolites, and traitors acting on foreign orders (Germany, the European Union [EU]). The indispensable element of its discourse is the condemnation of allegedly corrupt, inept, post-communist, or liberal elites that ruled Poland for most of the time after the 1989 breakthrough (Kim 2021; Sadurski 2019). The key features of the politics and ideology of the PiS place this party, despite many important differences, among other European populist movements of right-wing and nationalistic orientation. The PiS is often seen alongside the Hungarian Fidesz, whose example it openly declares to follow, the French Rassemblement National, the Fratelli d`Italia, and even, to some extent, the Alternative für Deutschland, although any allegiance with the latter is deliberately avoided.

The specific trait of the PiS as a political and social movement is the importance of culture and religion as sources of mass mobilization and identification and, consequently, its political successes and resilience in holding power. Marta Kotwas and Jan Kubik coined the expression ‘symbolic thickening of public culture’ to refer to the specific cultural grounds from which the Polish version of populism arose and benefited (Kotwas and Kubik 2019).

When Perso-Arabic script renditions of the Mahabharata receive popular or academic attention, it is often in defence of elite Indo-Islamic cosmopolitanism. Mughal engagement with the Mahabharata is held up as evidence of interest in Hinduism or pre-Islamic Indic traditions among Muslim South Asian dynasties. Because the Mughal Persian translation of the Mahabharata, known as the Razmnamah (Book of War), was a courtly project, it is easy to overlook the fact that Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script reached broader, and increasingly transregional, publics, especially in the age of lithographic print. Focusing on the preparation and circulation of Persian and Urdu print editions of the Mahabharata, this chapter aims to reorient discussions of Persianate understandings of Sanskrit epics, emphasizing middle-class, popular readerships in both Iran and India.

Following a brief overview of the translation and circulation of the Razmnamah in Mughal India, the chapter analyses lithographic publications of Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid growth of lithographic print in South Asia allowed for the relatively inexpensive publication and circulation of Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. The chapter argues for a reconsideration of the intellectual work of cadres of printers, translators, scribes, and other workers employed by Indian presses. Late nineteenth-century Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas reflected norms of production within a negotiated system of capitalist print labour, distinguishing them from their courtly manuscript predecessors.

The chapter subsequently turns to the transregional consumption and reception of these Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. In the late nineteenth century in both India and Iran, readers within a Persianate cultural–intellectual milieu understood the Mahabharata in a comparative frame, often with reference to the Persian epic poem, the Shahnamah. Popular audiences in Iran often read the two works through an emerging ‘national’ lens that associated epic literature with discrete peoples and nations. In India, on the other hand, middle-class Persian and Urdu readers often used both the Mahabharata–Razmnamah and the Shahnamah to claim an elite Persianate and cosmopolitan past.

Ultimately, the chapter reorients narratives of shared Indo-Iranian intellectual history by critiquing portrayals of Persianate transregional exchange as exclusively elite or courtly projects. Centring lithographic printers and popular reading publics, the chapter interrogates the reinterpretation of the Mahabharata within transregional communities of Persian and Urdu readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Introduction

In September 2019, more than 300 representatives of farmers’ organizations, trade union federations, indigenous people's organizations, fisher groups, women's organizations, environmental groups, and a few progressive political parties from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and various parts of India met in Hyderabad. This four-day-long convention concluded with the founding of the South Asian People's Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC). The delegates voiced their concerns about the anticipated effects of the impending climate crisis and ‘critiqued the inadequacy of governments’ policies’ (Adve 2019). In the past, India's climate activists focused almost exclusively on multinational corporations and the governments of industrialized countries, who are responsible for causing the climate crisis. They argued that questioning the Indian government would ‘dilute’ the demand for holding industrialized countries accountable. Therefore, the SAPACC's public critiques of India and other countries in South Asia marks an important shift in the evolution of climate movements in the region.

Social movements and civil society organizations work within the complex politico-economic and institutional context of India. On the one hand, the Constitution of India is regarded as highly progressive, affording citizens a variety of civil and political rights and freedoms and a scaffolding of democratic institutions that are functional to some extent. This context is particularly conducive for the functioning of civil society institutions that focus on relatively less controversial and apolitical questions, for example, Gandhian organizations dedicated to the ‘welfare’ of the poor, or those promoting tree-planting programmes. On the other hand, organizations advocating for the rights and entitlement of the poor, and those demanding effective enforcement of constitutional provisions and a welfare state, often confront a state that is extremely opaque and highly vindictive (Banerjee 2008). This ‘Janus-faced nature of the postcolonial state’ explains why some types of environmental movements thrive in Indian society while others face violent threats (Kashwan 2017, 10). Yet these contradictory workings of the Indian state must be understood in the context of global capitalism and its domestic beneficiaries. Instead of weakening state control in the wake of economic liberalization in the early 1990s and beyond, the Indian state has transformed into a highly centralized and extractive state that abuses its authority blatantly to selectively reallocate land and other natural resources (Rajan 2011).

Camille's Inspiration and Anchor

During his lifetime, Camille Bulcke appeared to be an enigma, leaving several of his acquaintances nonplussed to see a devout Christian, an ardent missionary and an ordained priest with such inherent and infinite reverence for Tulsidas and his Rama bhakti. Indeed, Indian spirituality and religious traditions have attracted a fair share of Westerners, who left their homes to adopt India and embrace its religious and cultural practices. This illustrious list includes luminaries such as Annie Besant (England-born Annie Wood), a renowned Theosophist and a prominent campaigner for Indian independence; Sister Nivedita (Irish-born Margaret Noble), who became the disciple of Swami Vivekananda; Mirra Alfassa, or the ‘Mother’ of Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry; and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. Undoubtedly, for these foreigners, India's cultural and spiritual values were the initial attractions, though most of them ended up participating in the independence movement that was pursuing self-respect, self-rule and anti-colonial nationalism. Camille was an exception; he joined the anti-colonial nationalist struggle but not as a political activist. Instead, he participated as a cultural campaigner seeking the respect and restoration of Hindi to its rightful place, by challenging the hegemony of English well beyond the formal end of British colonial rule. Unlike Sister Nivedita, Mirra Alfassa and Mirabehn, Camille came to India as a Christian missionary, and did not have a living person as his guide, mentor or patron; instead, he chose Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century Hindu devotional poet as his anchor.

Tulsidas as the core of Camille's personal, literary and spiritual life is all the more puzzling given that the Indian poet did not figure even remotely in Camille's world when he took the life-changing decision to renounce and become a Christian priest and later to take up missionary work in India. He considered it a divine command to give up worldly affairs and take his priestly vows, drawing inspiration from Father Constant Lievens, the wellknown Belgian missionary who served in the Chhota Nagpur region in India. It was only upon reaching India that Camille witnessed the hegemony of the colonial language, English, over the indigenous Indian languages.

Nepal is one of the few contemporary contexts where blood sacrifice is still a common, authorised and official practice, one which is closely associated with political power. As such, it forms an ideal framework for studying the relationship between sacrifice and violence, which is here considered in terms of a relationship between legitimate violence and transgressive violence.

In a stroke of fortuitous timing, my first visits to Nepal took place during the great buffalo sacrifices of the autumn. I thus found myself, due to politeness, unable to decline invitations and having to stand as close as possible to the scene, holding my camera close to my face like a screen to protect me from the violence of the spectacle and the spurts of blood which resulted from it.

Sacrifice and violence operate in this context in their most absolute form – killing – thereby diminishing the importance of the usual care needed in the use of these categories for wider meanings. Killing constitutes the core of violence, hiṃsā, for speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, who see in it its primary definition. It also forms the constituent act of blood sacrifice, bali dān, regardless of the intentions or logic behind it, the context in which it is performed or any practices which may come to take its place.

In the pages that follow, we shall reconsider the sacrificial device by considering it from its core trait of violence, which is so visible in the unfolding of the ritual itself and yet so hidden in the texts devoted to it. In order to do so, we will attempt to tread the tightrope between an analytical distance, which has often denied the violent nature of such rituals, and a sensitive proximity, which enables one to measure their importance but does not allow understanding the mindsets of those who perform them. One way of getting around these two pitfalls is to consider the sacrifice in terms of its framing and acting out of violence, how violence is transformed by the sacrificial rituals, but also how they themselves are transformed, either when caught up in a violent movement or, alternatively, when the legitimacy of their violence is contested. Nepal offers all of these possibilities.

Against the ‘Current’

On a train from Calcutta (Howrah) to Allahabad, a tall, lanky European with blue eyes and an auburn beard, clad in the white robe of a Christian priest, sat, immersed in a book. In India, during the 1960s and 1970s, the train-running schedule had enough stoppages at major stations to allow a thorough inspection and recharge–refuel of the engines. At the Asansol station, the train took that extra halt; the European priest put his book down and got off the train to stretch his long limbs. Upon his return to the seat, he found the gentleman sitting next to him reading his book; his fellow passenger wore an expression of sheer amazement as he flipped through the pages. Seeing that the book's owner was back, the gentleman hurriedly put the book back and blurted, ‘I did not know that you knew Hindi’ (Ponette 1987, p. 69). The European priest nodded his head in affirmation, and the two started talking; it soon became apparent that the foreigner-looking clergyman was exceptionally proficient in Hindi. The two talked non-stop for several hours until the train reached Allahabad. As the tall priest prepared to leave the train, his fellow passenger said, ‘What a loss for me; I missed the chance to converse with you in Hindi for the first three hours of our journey between Calcutta and Asansol’ (ibid.). As the two passengers bid adieu, the one on the platform started walking towards the exit door of the Allahabad railway station. He was Reverend Father Camille Bulcke, also known as Baba Bulcke by then.

Camille’s appearance, dress and demeanour all marked him as a foreigner, yet his sense of belonging to India held great significance for him throughout his life. He spent most of his life in Ranchi, Jharkhand (erstwhile Bihar), where he taught Hindi and Sanskrit at St Xavier's College. Manresa House, the residential compound of the Jesuits in Ranchi, proudly displays his statue in his white priestly robe. In more recent times, St Xavier's College has installed a bust of the legendary Christian priest on its premises, with his favourite words from the Ramcharitmanas (Divine Lake of Ram's Deeds) inscribed underneath.

Of the numerous scholars of Hindi among the British administrators and European missionaries who came to India over the last two hundred years – most notably John Gilchrist, George Grierson, F. W. Keay and Edwin Greaves – and lately among the post-colonial ‘South Asianists’, only Camille Bulcke seems to have the distinction of becoming a household name in the extensive Hindi-speaking areas of the country.

That is because one can find in countless Hindi homes a copy of his Angreji–Hindi Kosh (English–Hindi Dictionary), first published in 1968, in its third revised edition by 1981, and reprinted altogether 19 times already by 1991 when I belatedly acquired my copy. As Bulcke explained in his preface, he intended it for the use of those who already had English but wished to learn Hindi (like himself) and hoped that it might prove useful ‘also to those whose mother tongue is Hindi, especially those engaged in translation work’ (like myself). But he also added a third category of people to whom this work might be of help: ‘Indian students who wish to improve their knowledge of English’. One may suspect that it is this last category which has benefitted the most from Bulcke's triple-function dictionary, for it nicely supplements or even supersedes the usual English–English dictionaries, where the explanation given is, for many early learners, nearly as challenging as the words they look up.

Bulcke also provided the correct pronunciation of each word in the Devanagari script, which is incomparably more phonetic than the Roman script. Moreover, he cut out the frills which needlessly complicate the life of a language learner. For example, the title of his work has for its first word not the English word ‘English’ but the Hindi word ‘Angreji’, which is here spelt not as ‘Angrezi’ with a z but as ‘Angreji’ with a j, the common pronunciation of the word without the non-native sound z. Bulcke had obviously learnt his Hindi well enough to know what is indigenous to it and what is not (Bulcke 1968, vii).

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

Introduction

This chapter explores the question posed in its title: ‘Does populism challenge the expertise of academic historians?’1 It is well known that populists (or, to be more precise, people who have often been called populists, since at this point I have not suggested a definition of this term) make assertions about the pasts of their own countries and often about historical pasts more generally. In doing so, they are at least in part making knowledge claims about the past and not simply expressing feelings of attachment or aversion. To the extent that their claims have a cognitive content, one might think that this would put populists on a collision course with the narratives that academic historians produce. Moreover, it is well known that ‘the rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on scientific expertise’ (Collins et al. 2020: 1). One might think that this anti-scientific tendency, together with populists’ interest in making claims about the past, would lead them to challenge not just the narratives but also the expertise of academic historians.

But reality turned out to be quite different from what I originally supposed it would be. Although historians are interested in populists, populists rarely show interest in the academic work produced by historians. Even less are populists interested in, or even aware of, the expertise that academic historians claim, by which I mean the toolkit of methods and approaches by which academic historians formulate questions, search for and interpret evidence, evaluate that evidence, and construct accounts of the past well enough grounded to withstand the criticisms offered by their professional colleagues. The fact is, academic historians doing academic work rarely come into the range of view of populists. Even academic historians who step into an activist role and attempt to draw lessons for the present from their study of the past seem to have been barely noticed by populists. I think, for example, of Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny (Snyder 2017), written in the wake of the election in 2016 and Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States of America (USA), which circulated widely among academics and some other readers, but raised hardly a peep from populists.

Many governments and universities have pursued excellence by emulating world-class models and relying on international ranking schemes for validation and ideas for improvement. Others have relied on traditional notions of quality and research productivity. These approaches rely on the accumulation of wealth and talent – strategies that are “rivalrous” limiting the opportunities of others to be as effective. Focusing on portraits of eight different institutions reveals other approaches to excellence, all of which rely on defining and pursuing a purpose.