GUJARAT FILES – A Review*

I am quite sure that Maithili Tyagi, a Kayastha girl from Kanpur, would be an extremely unique person. For that matter, any man, woman or child belonging to the Kayastha community, hailing from any part of India (the Kayastha community is quite widespread over Bengal, Bihar & Jharkhand, UP, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and parts of South India such as Hyderabad & Aurangabad) with the surname of Tyagi would be a particularly rare exception. I have not met anyone or heard of any Kayastha with such a surname. Though I am sure, so many seasoned, senior IPS officers many of whom had had successful stints with RAW and IB and were thick skinned diplomats would have been easily hoodwinked into believing that Maithili Tyagi, was a Kayastha girl from Kanpur.

I am also surprised as why Maithili Tyagi, a Kayastha girl from Kanpur and daughter of a conservative Sanskrit teacher, could not and should not have been familiar and comfortable with the Urdu language (page 83 – The urge to reply to Ashok Naraya in an Urdu couplet was strong but I had to refrain from doing so). The Kayastha community is known for its long association and erudition in Urdu and Persian, with local lore in UP & Bihar often referring to them as adha-Mussalman (semi-Muslims). Prominent Kayasthas such as Munshi Premchand wrote in Urdu and Firaq Gorakhpuri was a very famous Urdu shaiyar. Babu Rajendra Prasad, mentions in his autobiography that he learned Hindi after the age of 24-25 and had started his law practice. Prior to this, the languages in which he had had his formal education and in which he was comfortable were English and Persian. That is, apart from Bengali, having picked up that language on shifting to Calcutta for his education from his middle-school onwards. Hyderabad is famous for its Kayastha connection with prominent members of their nobility being from this community. Incidentally, Wikipedia informs that there is a fairly large Kayastha Muslim community in India (and Pakistan)!

If Maithili Tyagi, as a good investigative Kayatha journalist, had done some background check, she would have come to be aware that as per some modern (and much respected) academic work on social change in India, the Kayastha community owes its formation to those Indians who associated themselves with Muslim rulers in helping them run their administration, which could not be done without local help. While caste Hindus, would lose their caste by associating themselves with the Muslims, this left only those locals for this purpose who were outside the caste system – the Outcastes (referred to variously as Depressed classes, Scheduled Castes, or Dalits) and who had no caste to lose! Therefore, while Kayasthas remained Hindus by religion, they are not part of any of the four varnas – they are neither Brahmins, Kshatriya, Vaishya, nor Sudra. The community is essentially formed of those dalits who moved up the  social ladder by associating themselves with the Muslim rulers and in the process picked up various Muslim cultural traditions such as love for non-vegetarian food and partiality to Persian, Arabic, and Urdu language. By the way, a friend informs me (and I have no reason to disbelieve him) that  Tyagis are a sect of Brahmins who have given up (tyaag diyaa) presiding over pooja and yagya.     

By the way, yours truly (another Kayastha) had his aksharabhyas (a child’s initiation to formal education) on Basant Panchami in front of image of Goddess Saraswati by writing alif, be, the with a piece of chalk on a wooden slade and not ka, kha, ga. For the aksharabhyas of one of my cousins, the Moulavi Saheb, was an intrinsic part of the ceremony!  

For a book with an arm long list of endorsements (at least 16 in the edition of the book with me) and acclaimed by among others, Caravan, The Wire, and Scroll who published chapters of the book, it has too many mistakes - typographical, grammatical, syntactical, and conceptual. For example, Rajan Priyadarshi, moves from being an OBC (page 38 – Priyadarshi, he informed us, also belonged to the OBC class) to being a Dalit (page 43 – I met Rajan Priyadarshi, the person you had asked me to speak to as a Dalit; and page 44 – I am a Dalit). Similarly, Girish Singhal’s surname suggests that he is from the bania caste, ie, which would make him from the OBC community and not a Dalit. I little more serious, careful proof reading might have helped.  

Like any respectably Bollywood potboiler, the book inserts an item number in the form of Usha Rada (with all due respect to this lady). There is virtually a whole chapter (Chapter 5) devoted to her, though her only connection to the subject matter of the book seems to be that she was an IPS officer of the Gujarat cadre and as such a professional colleague of most of the other dramatis personae around whom the book revolves. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason as to why she should find mention in the narrative.

One aspect of the author’s personality which is surely to be lauded is her sense of self-importance verging on the psychotic. Statements such as, “That I was the journalist who had sent the Home Minister of Gujarat behind bars” surely seems to suggest something like that.  

Justice B N Srikrishna mentions in the Forward to the book that, the nature of truth has baffled philosophers all over the world for ages. He goes on to mention, “As to whether the material presented in this book represents facts, or mere perspective events, is for the reader to judge.”  After reading the book, cover to cover, twice over, I have a dirty hunch that he might be hinting to the hapless readers, who would be investing their time and money in wading through the tome in the hope of finding some gems, that it could also be a piece of hallucinatory outpourings or its more sophisticated version, magic realism. I have no hesitation in confessing that I am neither a philosopher, nor omniscient, nor an award winning investigative journalist of national and international fame. I am just a semi-literate, schizophrenic, unemployed kabbadi player

If, the basic rule of journalism is evidence, the wealth of ‘evidence’ presented in the book should surely have resulted in a string of convictions by now. 

Overall, the book lacks both focus and credibility – it just seems to be a product of some slick marketing.

* Notes:

         

         My views are based on the Second Edition of the book.
         Direct quotations from the book are in italics.