The beautiful Gazi scroll ridicules the "clash of civilizations"

By Madeleine Bunting - The Guardian - London, UK

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

One of the most striking exhibits in the current British Museum exhibition Myths of Bengal is the beautiful Gazi scroll - not just for its rich colours and vivid figures, but because it illustrates the enriching coexistence of two of the world's great faiths.

Images of Hindus making puja offerings are juxtaposed with those of Muslims making similar offerings at the tombs of their saints (pirs). It shows how a remarkable, syncretic culture emerged in which the tombs of many pirs became places of pilgrimage for both Hindus and Muslims.

The syncretism is also evident in the Bengali tradition of bauls, itinerant singers who came from both faiths and used the same songs, full of the yearning of the humble man for God. These songs were a great inspiration to the Bengali Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore (whose paintings are also on show at the British Museum) and expressed the same sentiments found in both religious traditions. The national anthems of the predominantly Muslim country of Bangladesh and the predominantly Hindu country of India were both written by Tagore.

This tantalising glimpse of exchange and commonality across faiths explodes the 21st-century idea of fixed religious identities always coming into conflict with each other throughout history. It exposes the falseness of defining a civilisation by a single discrete religious identity, as proposed by the US political scientist Samuel Huntington in his infamous "clash of civilisations" thesis.

In his most recent book, Identity and Violence, Amartya Sen, a Bengali, describes how civilisations are built on the exchange and encounter of different cultural traditions. It is both an impoverishment and a deeply dangerous development to recast the identity of regions in terms of just one faith. He cites Tagore, who described his family background as a "confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British".

Bengal has been one of the world's great melting pots, perhaps the place where east has met west for the longest period of settled coexistence. For more than 200 years it was at the heart of Britain's power in India, and Calcutta was the second city of the British empire. British rule brought shocking misgovernment, such as the Bengal famine of 1943 and economic exploitation, but it also brought western ideas, producing a vibrant cultural life in the 19th century.

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Vestiges of the syncretism survive, despite the fact that West Bengal is now largely Hindu, and Bangladesh Muslim, but the process of erosion grinds on. In both countries, wealthier diasporas exacerbate the sharpening of antagonistic religious identities. The faith of huge numbers of Bangladeshi migrant workers now owes more to a global Islam influenced by Saudi Arabia than to Bengal's traditional Sufism.

Upward social mobility in the villages of Sylhet - the region from which most British Bangladeshis come - is associated with a rejection of the folkloric piety in which even Bengal's pre-Islamic Buddhism was discernible.

One of the most poignant symbols of this abandonment of Bengal's history was in 2003. In Sylhet's main mosque there was a tank full of gajar fish. According to local tradition, the Sufi saint Shah Jalal had brought the fish along with Islam hundreds of years ago. But Islamist extremists see him and his fish as evidence of corrupt religious practice, and killed hundreds of the fish in 2003.

Looking at the Gazi scroll, one cannot but conclude that the past offers more enlightened models of living with difference than we are achieving. We need to be reminded - and inspired - by the history of places such as Bengal so that we can guard against the easy simplification that human beings can be parcelled into discrete civilisational categories based on faith. Some of the world's richest cultural traditions are the legacy of the interaction of several faiths.

www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
Myths of Bengal: 14 September 2006–7 January 2007

Room 91, Admission free

Amartya Sen is speaking at a Guardian/British Museum forum, Faith, Nation, Culture: What Bengal's History Tells Us About Multiple Identities, at 6.30pm on Friday at the British Museum, London U.K.