The Curse of Gandhism: A Review of Prakash Jha's "Aarakshan"

I've just returned from seeing Prakash Jha's already-controversial film Aarakshan (Reservation) at the Regal Cinema in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Built by the British in the early 1930s, it is a magnificent, cavernous space complete with a wide balcony, round arches on the side walls, and pictures of old film stars in the lobby. Surprisingly, it's also fairly clean and well kept. All in all, it reminds me once again of how fake, gaudy and soulless the multiplex "experience" can be, especially in India, and how little of the old culture of film-going remains with us.

But I digress. As far as the content of the film goes, this was also a surprise. The pre-release controversy had made it seem like Aarakshan was a bold, reactionary attempt to criticise reservations - hence why it was banned in UP by Mayawati's government. In fact, as the Times of India review notes, very little of the film even references or discusses the issue of reservations in any sustained or serious way. It's more of an incidental device to move the plot forward to the real confrontation: between Amitabh Bachchan's heroic, inspirational ex-principal of a private college who offers free classes to the community and villain Manoj Bajpai's commercial education scheme. True, Bachchan's character does resign from his post at the college over his support for reservations, and there is a fierce conflict in the first half involving Saif Ali Khan's Dalit professor and a high-caste student played by Prateek Babbar. But they come together in the end to help Bachchan defeat the for-profit coaching classes, backed by corrupt politicians and the police. The film's climactic scene is a showdown, as bulldozers approach the gate of Bachchan's compound, between the good guys (students and volunteers of all castes) and lathi-wielding policemen.

By pure coincidence, I caught a bit of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi on TV last night, a film I have not seen in years and certainly not since I began doing a PhD. in Indian history. The moving scene depicting the Dharasana Satyagraha, in which row after row of peaceful marchers are mercilessly clubbed by police, shows just how ideologically and cinematically powerful the imagery of Gandhism continues to be. In effect, Prakash Jha has resolved his plot by using the classic set-up of Gandhian struggle: non-cooperating, non-violent do-gooders versus the mighty apparatus of the state. It comes as no surprise, though it still manages to be an emotional moment drawing cheers from the audience, when the bulldozers' drivers are convinced by Bachchan's appeal and cross over to join the students in solidarity. What does this say about Jha's view of politics, and its appeal?

This has been a hot topic for discussion since last summer's hit Raajneeti, which depicted the political process and very nearly all its participants as fundamentally violent and corrupt. A perceptive essay in the current issue of The Caravan about Jha's career basically makes the point that his characters have become "bereft of a moral core". They do not ask themselves questions about the "ethical consequences" of their actions. In some cases, as in Gangajaal (2003), the film "dangerously leaves the task of public accountability to the individual conscience of one man". It should become apparent from my description that, with Aarakshan, Jha can be absolved of the charge of not creating idealistic or ethically concerned characters anymore. Bachchan's principal is a model of uprightness, honesty and fairness; when the fight over reservations erupts on the grounds of his college, he steps in to reprimand both sides and dutifully carries on the fight to improve children's lives and test scores through tireless work and self-sacrifice. Here, however, Jha's tendency to offer solutions in the form of the virtuous actions of one individual reveals itself. Though an entire community comes together to help with the free classes, and a mass protest including both upper and lower castes ends up facing the villains at the end, in the end the success of the enterprise rests on one man's shoulders. The method of grassroots voluntarism being idealised here is also extra-institutional, and leaves no room for contemplating the reform of existing institutions like the private college. Only after Bachchan is on the outside can he score his great moral victory and then be appointed back to his old post. The crooked politicians are not voted out or held judicially accountable but publicly shamed.

The appeal of this worldview is not only nostalgic but deeply connected to the ongoing debate about corruption. The self-anointed Gandhian activist Anna Hazare has been mobilising the middle classes by fasting in support of the passage of the sweeping anti-corruption Lokpal Bill. Critics of Hazare's approach have pointed to the absolutist nature of the demands, which move beyond and even seek to de-legitimise the political process. A remarkable and profound interview in Tehelka with civil society activist Aruna Roy makes the point that any attempt to change the mechanism or culture of governance in a democracy must go through the painful but necessary process of soliciting opinions from stakeholders, debating drafts of bills, compromising, and, at the end, living with the end result even if it may not be ideal: "Democracy is a dialectic and you can’t afford to lose it. And no matter how imperfect it is and how much we struggle to refine it, unless we want to opt for a dictatorship, even a benign one, it is the only viable political system we have." She tells this story to illustrate the dangers of Hazare's bottom-line approach: "Let me give you a very small example from a meeting in Tilonia in Rajasthan. Every 15 August and 26 January the gram panchayat there has meetings and invites me to speak. Once there was this big talk in the air that “Constitution koh badalna hain”. I asked the 3,000-strong crowd, how many of you have seen the Constitution? About six hands went up. Then I asked, how many of you have touched it, about four went up. Then I asked, how many of you have read it and two went up. So then I said, if a political party is telling you the Constitution of India is anti the people of India and we must amend it, and all of you are saying, yes, yes, it’s bad, change it, are you acting out of reason or ignorance?"

The "curse of Gandhism" I am referring to is not so much the substantive nature of Gandhian political thought, but the enduring appeal of the form. In Hazare's case, as it has become very clear by now, the high-profile fasting and the other theatrical aspects of his movement conceal a contestable political programme (pushing for oversight by building a new bureaucracy) while claiming to be outside and indeed even hostile to politics. Prakash Jha's recent films, along with Rang de Basanti (2006), invoke the social-patriotic conscience of mainstream Hindi cinema (largely absent since the 1950s, the decade of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy). These are films about big issues, daring to ask about how to save the country (Aarakshan's tagline: "India v. India"). The answers they provide, however, are troubling in different ways. Rang de Basanti was an extreme case; its protagonists, apathetic students inspired to love their country by making a documentary about Bhagat Singh, take action by assassinating a corrupt politician. In Aarakshan, the solution is mild and basically unobjectionable by comparison. But by not saying anything about the political process, or offering any hope about building institutions other than the Bachchan character's selfless volunteerism, the film offers a bleak assessment of the prospects of Indian democracy. We never get to hear a full argument about the politics of reservations, or understand what place they have in India's democratic system. All we know by the end is that we must "be the change we wish to see in the world", so to speak. In 2011, that's no longer enough.

The "Gay Girl in Damascus" Hoax: Some Reflections

It's been not 24 hours since the mystery behind detained Syrian lesbian blogger Amina Abdallah Arraf Al-Omari has been solved. What began as an international outcry over the arrest of a popular blogger giving voice to the queer side of the "Arab Spring" quickly turned into a frenzy of Internet investigations, carried out by journalists and bloggers, that has reached a sad and predictable end - there was never an Amina in the first place. The blog, and even more disturbingly, an entire online identity going back almost four years, was the creation of a 40 year-old American man from Georgia now studying in Edinburgh, Tom MacMasters, and his wife Britta. In what follows I'll quickly recount the story, from first suspicions to this morning's denouement, then offer a few thoughts on what this might mean in the larger context of queer politics and the Middle East.

It all began with this post detailing Amina's capture by Syrian security forces, ostensibly put up by Amina's cousin Rania Ismail. The response was swift, with several newspaper reports and a flurry of "Free Amina" facebook groups, like this one and this one, mobilising concerned people around the world. But within a few days, as reporters and State Department officials in Syria attempted to contact Amina's family, doubts began to emerge. No one, it seems, had ever met or spoken to Amina, not even her girlfriend in Montreal, Sandra Bagaria (they had only communicated via e-mail). One of the first to publicly question the story was NPR's Andy Carvin, who was sceptical yet cautious to declare that she didn't exist. Maybe she was simply very good at concealing herself, as all activists living under repressive regimes must be. But then a Croatian woman living in London, Jelena Lecic, noticed that the photos of Amina being circulated were actually of her. There were hundreds, including all the photos on Amina's personal facebook page, all apparently stolen from Jelena's facebook. Troubled, she went on the BBC to prove her identity, and wonder how all this had come about. The evidence was increasingly pointing to an elaborate hoax.

I began following the controversy at Liz Henry's blog, where commenters took to the Internet to uncover as many details about Amina as could be found. The mass of details was confusing, and involved an extensive cast of characters, some real and some fictional. Amina had stated she was born in Virginia and went to high school and college in Georgia. She had a previous blog where she declared her intention to mix fact and fiction; she had also been active in posting on alternate history Yahoo mailing lists, declaring her interest in medieval Byzantium. There were several online dating profiles, one in which she listed her language as Hebrew. Some used pictures of Jelena Lecic, some of another woman. Her cousin Rania Ismail's facebook page turned out to be a likely fake; no one had been able to contact her either. Anything seemed possible. Was she the creation of Rania, a married Syrian woman looking for an escapist fantasy? Did Rania even exist? Was Amina a creation of Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian girlfriend? Or perhaps it was Jelena Lecic herself, whose first statement to the media was released through a suspicious P.R. agency? These theories may seem ridiculous in retrospect, but only through this kind of free-thinking exercise could all options be considered. The truth, when it came out, was perhaps stranger still.

Parallel to Liz Henry's and Andy Carvin's efforts, which later turned out to involve e-mail communications with someone likely to be the person behind the hoax, the website Electronic Intifada and the Washington Post were putting together a story based on two concrete leads. One came from Paula Brooks, an editor at the website LezGetReal (which was the first to introduce Amina's blog to a wide readership). She provided two IP addresses used by Amina, both in Edinburgh. The other came from Scott Palter, a moderator on the alternate history boards, who had once gotten a mailing address from Amina in Stone Mountain, GA. This, it turned out, was Tom MacMaster's home. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place: MacMaster was born in Virginia, had lived in Georgia, currently studies in Edinburgh, and plans to write a thesis on medieval Byzantium. He is a pro-Palestinian activist, and his wife Britta, a Quaker, was involved in organising events on Syria and Israel. Britta is a fellow at St. Andrews in the Centre for Syrian Studies, writing a thesis on the Syrian textile industry. She had posted pictures of her travels in Damascus, the same ones also used by Amina. The game was up.

MacMaster's so-called apology on the blog, posted this morning, is a remarkable display of narcissism, self-delusion and self-righteousness. He declared, "While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground," with the exception, of course, of all the key facts on the blog - that a gay woman, living in Damascus, was experiencing the revolution and had been detained by security forces. He had the gall to claim that, "I do not believe that I have harmed anyone." Let me count the ways:
1) Closest to home, it was Sandra, the Canadian girlfriend, who had been privately lied to for months. Reading her tweets from before the abduction story, one is struck by the sincerity and passion with which she speaks of Amina. She had to endure constant media questioning, when it became clear just how deep the deception went. Interestingly, the abduction story was posted only a few days after Sandra attempted to call Amina at home in Syria and got no answer. That day Amina wrote about security forces visiting her family and her subsequent need to go underground. It may be that this is the point at which Tom and Britta freaked out and looked for a way to take their character off the stage, at least temporarily.
2) Everyone else who had an online relationship with Amina, and who has been affected by the investigation. The website LezGetReal, for example, was subjected to intense scrutiny because Paula Brooks and other editors, who have families working for the federal government and do not wish to be outed, write under pseudonyms; they, too, were suspected of being fake.
3) Finally, most obviously and most importantly, this is a devastating blow to queer activism in Syria and everywhere else in the Middle East. These furious reactions from actual Syrian activists give a sense of the damage. Not only does the hoax make it more difficult for Syrian bloggers to be heard in the future without undue suspicion, but it puts LGBT activists currently in Syria under the spotlight of the authorities. In every way, MacMaster has done about as much harm to the Syrian revolution as could be imagined from a computer in Scotland.

It is, however, the following sentence that deserves the greatest outrage: "This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism." Not only is MacMaster not apologising, he is in fact blaming everyone else for the very sin he has committed. In a sense, "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was the perfect instantiation of liberal Orientalism, wherein Western audiences are enjoined to sympathise with a young, attractive, Westernised and courageous individual battling against the forces of dark, oppressive Islam. If Amina didn't exist, one would have had to invent her. MacMaster's twisted activist vision piled on all the desirable characteristics for what he thought the West should know of the Middle East, but didn't bother because of the biased, Zionist media. The cruel irony is that in not finding a real Syrian who could represent some or all of these things, he confirms the very fantasies he set out to dismantle are just that, fantasies.

It is also troubling, it must be said, how those sceptical of Amina's story from the start have slipped into the same traps of Orientalist fantasy. One of the earliest arguments for the hoax was that, "No one in Syria would ever kiss their girlfriend in public," or speak so freely, etc. Though this may be in a very general sense accurate, it further adds to the erasure of the public presence of LGBT Syrians. Another argument from a commenter on one of the investigating blogs was that MacMaster had wished to show that being gay in Arab countries is not so bad, when in fact he had proved the opposite. There could be no one as free as Amina in Syria; but, the commenter added for good measure, there could be in Israel. It was MacMaster's anti-Israel bias that made him paint such a rosy picture of an Arab country. Both Amina's blog and the arguments of the sceptics are symptomatic of a wider set of highly debilitating discourses. In effect, it is becoming impossible to speak of what being queer in the Middle East is like without falling into one extreme or the other.

All of this brings to mind Jasbir Puar's extraordinary theoretical work Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, in which she tracks the complex ways in which queer activism in the West has become implicated with imperialist projects and mindsets. One effect is the erasure of Muslim queer sexuality, and its converse -Israel's propaganda efforts to brand itself as the only "gay-friendly" country in a homophobic region (known as "pinkwashing"). One of her tasks is to affirm the voices of queer Muslims and queer Arabs speaking out against state violence, against religious intolerance, and against US and Israeli colonialism all at once.
This is the kind of person whom MacMaster, no doubt familiar with this literature, wished to concoct. Two of Amina's blog posts, for example, were on the phenomenon of "pinkwashing." What this odious, despicable individual has managed to do instead is produce the perfect mockery of queer scholarship and activism, a farce that feeds right back into the very discourses he sought to resist, feeding them to the brim and sustaining them for years to come.



EDIT: On point #2 above, regarding the website LezGetReal and its editor, "Paula Brooks," evidence came to light one day after I posted that this person, too, was a man masquerading online as a lesbian blogger. After providing the information that helped expose MacMaster, a 58 year-old man from Ohio named Bill Graber was forced to admit that he had been involved in several online communities using the persona of a deaf lesbian woman. This raises many, many further questions about a possible widespread effort to infiltrate progressive movements, and reminds us once more of the need for vigilance and careful verification in online activism. The indefatigable Liz Henry has a summary of the whole sordid Bill Graber affair here.

The Subaltern of Your Dreams, and Mine: Egyptian Women in Tahrir Square

Over on facebook, Leil Zahra-Mortada has collected an album of photographs of women protesting in Cairo over the past weeks. Here are a few particularly striking ones:

My first impulse, after I broke out in tears, was to think about theories of subjectivity and the challenge of Berkeley anthropologist Saba Mahmood to feminist notions of agency in her book Politics of Piety. Mahmood had studied women who participated in the Islamic revivalist mosque movement in Egypt and focused on how they ethically "trained" their bodies and sensibilities to meet the demands of Islamic norms. In so doing, and building on the work of Talal Asad, she questioned the understanding of "agency" as a reflection of a subject's conscious will and desire. Instead, it was possible for women to express agency even in the very act of following norms that Western feminism would deem oppressive and patriarchal. This, of course, set her on a collision path with those feminists who allied themselves with neo-conservative imperialism in order to "liberate" the women of Afghanistan, Iran and the wider Middle East. In a 2008 essay entitled "Feminism, Democracy and Empire," Mahmood refuses to allow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi and Irshad Manji to serve as spokeswomen for all Muslim women. Why not listen, instead, to the myriad women's movements and organisations, across the political and religious spectrum, in the Muslim world?

The Revolution in Egypt, and especially the photographs above, have shown to whoever cared to listen that Muslim women can make their voices heard alongside with men, demand those same political and social rights that supposedly belong to the Western "liberal" tradition, and scream, cry, bleed and die for them. Of course, Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't care to listen. In a recent op-ed, written while Mubarak's security apparatus was still beating people to a pulp in the streets of Cairo, she worried about the Muslim Brotherhood's hypothetical takeover. Bemoaning the supposed weakness of the "secular democratic forces," she paints a dark scenario based, it appears, on some turgid autobiographical stories from when she was 15. It is assumed throughout, based on her previous books, that one of the bad things about the coming reign of Sharia will be women's oppression.

And then it hit me: what all these critics, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Glenn Beck to French legislators banning the veil, have done is to effectively de-humanise the majority of Muslim women. Any woman who wears a scarf and/or niqab, who bears the outward signs of the patriarchal oppression that lies beneath, cannot be heard in her own voice. Look again at those photos. Those women, caught in a snapshot of anger or passion, are not calculating their own future status under the Muslim Brotherhood, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali does for them while safely ensconced in the US. They are not theorizing how conservative or liberal they are, or how much agency they get. They stand side by side with women in jeans, T-shirts and fashionable scarves. Because what they're wearing doesn't matter, even their being women qua women ceases to matter for the moment. They are demanding Mubarak leave and the country see free elections. Subalterns do speak, and when they do they may not be the subaltern of your dreams, or mine. They don't say, "Freedom, but as long as what comes next isn't too Islamic, in which case we should just stay put." They say, "Freedom. Now."
So these are not Ayaan Hirsi Ali's subalterns. But they aren't Saba Mahmood's either. At this moment, they're not out in the streets to challenge Western norms from an Islamic perspective. They're not questioning Western secularism or ethically training themselves for modesty. They want to topple the dictator, vote in elections, and live a better life. Egyptian women, Muslim women, Arab women, all different kinds of women, do not belong to theories and models, even those put forth by women in the West like Saba Mahmood or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They belong to themselves, and all we can do is try and listen.

To her credit, Hirsi Ali (unlike Beck, for example) does seem to support the Revolution and is more concerned with the future. Rightly so, it must be said. But it still begs the question why she is writing against a hypothetical oppression and not against a real one that has gone on for 30 years. Why has she not worked tirelessly against the Mubarak regime and other corrupt Middle Eastern dictatorships, and written books about the struggle of women's organisations in Egypt instead of shock-value memoirs about general Islamic oppression? What better example for her promotion of "Enlightenment values" to the Islamic world than women standing up for the right to vote? The hollowness of this kind of politics is here revealed. Because when the Revolution is made by women wearing niqabs and Muslim Brothers as well as by Western youths, it's something to worry about and not celebrate.

It's become sadly the norm to say that Egypt and other Arab countries aren't ready for democracy because of their backwardness (including their "treatment of women"). Even the writer of this article, which otherwise highlights the role of women as active participants in the protests, is most impressed by the fact that she wasn't groped! All the men were, you see, too busy making a Revolution.

After Salman Taseer: Follow-up on Secularism and Despair

One of the nicest things (as well as one of the most terrifying) about having a blog is the opportunity to see your thoughts frozen in time and be able to return to them later, thinking either, "Wow, that was smart" or "I'm a complete idiot." This has happened several times since I started writing in the summer of 2008, when I was not yet a senior in college, and into my second year of graduate school where I am today. Sometimes I looked like an idiot: after my first trip to India, I expressed surprise an Indian Muslim might idolise Subhas Chandra Bose (talk about a blinkered "communalist" perspective on life). Other times I was prescient even when I didn't know what I was talking about: without a real insight into caste politics, I got a sense of the peculiar bind many observers feel when attempting to analyse Mayawati. After living in Lucknow for a summer and reading more, I realise I was right in thinking there is no one answer, even among the different Dalit visions of politics. Some (like Christophe Jaffrelot) will largely applaud her for making Dalits visible and challenging the very real caste power structures at work in her state. Others, including some radical Dalit critics, might see a surrender to the lure of the state as an instrument of policy and a failure to focus on development and social issues at the expense of symbolic ones.
My point is, I've rarely been tempted to edit myself or take down old posts because a blog, unlike official academic writing, can serve as a freer and more experimental venue to work out ideas. Especially when no one reads it!

After the assassination of Salman Taseer, Punjab's governor, in retaliation for his public support for Asiya Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, I didn't think so much as I felt. My first instinct was not to be a good academic and explain, contextualise or give nuance to the phenomenon of "extremism" or "fundamentalism." I just felt anger, and sadness, and deep confusion as to what fighting these people, or fighting for Pakistan might mean. The important thing is that I did see it in terms of a fight, a desperate struggle. For what? I couldn't say, but at least so that nothing like this would happen again. We're all conditioned, as academics, to be wary of emotional manipulation, but news report after news report of bombings in Pakistan, and gruesome photographs of dead bodies lying in the streets, can really get to you after a while. Seeing the outpouring of support for Taseer's killer - he was quite literally showered with rose petals - deepens the feeling. But I also know that by "fight" I don't mean more American drones, or a new military dictator in Islamabad, or even rallying around the banner of something called "secularism."

In August, I wrote a piece that challenged writer Aatish Taseer's vision of Pakistan. I thought that his call for Pakistan to recapture its lost "Indianness" masked an insensitivity to the country's legitimacy, and I accused him of wanting to save Pakistan without loving it. Now, reading his moving eulogy to his estranged father, I feel a bit embarrassed. Why should Aatish, born in India, raised by his mother, and largely unacknowledged by his father, feel any love for Pakistan? And how would he feel now, after seeing his father murdered by religious extremists? What right do I have to nuance his statements about the threat of the "bearded men"? But I was still right in the end. Aatish passionately believes that, "Pakistan and its founding in faith, that first throb of a nation made for religion by people who thought naively that they would restrict its role exclusively to the country's founding, was responsible for producing my father's killer." Indeed, this was the very reason father and son drifted apart. If Salman was a "Pakistani patriot," Aatish explicitly didn't believe that Pakistan should even have come into being. What room for compromise?
By itself, the statement that the idea of Pakistan was a doomed experiment from the start is not exceptional or particularly objectionable. But Aatish Taseer's solution is troubling: he wishes that "science and rationality" had been "enshrined at the heart" of the nation instead of religion. By extension, should we combat men like Malik Mumtaz Qadir (the assassin) with science and rationality? What chance do these concepts have against the powerful lure of religion; who would then shower him with rose petals?

This debate reminds me of another dead-end, the fate of state-sponsored "disenchanted" secularism in India. After the Ayodhya verdict, when a sitting judge declared he had determined the actual birthplace of Lord Ram, I experienced the same kind of reactionary despair. "To hell with academic critiques of secularism: fight this superstition to the end!" The problem is that the academics may be right. Secularism alone, and science or rationality alone, are not enough to persuade people to stop seeing themselves as having a set of religious or communitarian interests they must defend to the death.

So if we don't have secularism, and we don't want to fall back on state violence, the only thing we have left is ethics. That is to say, human-to-human, day-to-day interaction. What makes the blasphemy laws and the Ayodhya judgment wrong is not so much that they are superstitious or irrational, but that they destroy the ability of human beings - Christians in Pakistan, Muslims and other minorities in India - to live in peace, to move freely through the cities and villages, to draw water or sell their goods in the bazaars, to express themselves without fear of violence or retribution. These are not even necessarily "human rights" at a universal level. They are local and intimate affairs. With regard to Pakistan, what is most urgently needed is not advocating for science and a secular state - an agenda sure to enrage clerics and disaffected young men like Malik Mumtaz Qadir even further. It is, somehow and in a diffuse and imperceptible way, to cultivate an atmosphere where individuals look upon their neighbours with compassion and mutual sympathy. Notions like "pluralism" and "tolerance" are not political slogans; they are ethical targets for individuals to re-train their sensibilities away from conspiracy and paranoia and toward genuine understanding of the lives of others. It may sound like a naive proposition, but it's actually a realistic description of what happens almost every time individuals come into contact without mutual suspicion and violence anywhere in the world. Yes, even in Pakistan.

Dealing with Darlymple, or the Prude Critics

William Darlymple's popularity as a writer of travelogues and popular histories about India in the West is no great mystery; he is a charming, erudite writer with a keen sense of narrative and literary presentation. Why an expat who knows no Indian languages and has arrogantly dismissed Indian historians for not doing enough research (in Urdu!) on the Mutiny Papers in the National Archives, for not writing well enough, and for not selling enough books, should command such astronomical credibility and popularity in India can be more difficult to understand. His Jaipur Literature Festival, incidentally coming up again this month, is a tremendous success that manages to bring together both Indian and Western literary heavyweights. As anyone who's wandered a bit through the bazaars, he sells. A lot. Dalrymple's books are everywhere, and he has become something of an authority of Indian history, much to his own self-satisfaction. And, if he tells a neo-colonial fantasy tale that may be attractive to his Indian middle-class readership, he also is a great lover of Urdu and Muslim culture, which makes him an unusual and welcome voice of reason in the Indian media.

But I digress, because my post is not actually about Dalrymple himself. It's about this essay by Hartosh Singh Bal in OPEN that tries to explain the Darlymple "phenomenon." Indeed, the curious fact of a foreigner's success (and a British one's, to boot) in the post-colonial Indian literary scene troubles Bal. How could Dalrymple have become "the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India?" Mostly, the answer comes down to a lingering cultural hierarchy whereby the approval of British publishers and critics is fawningly sought after by Indians. The Jaipur Festival, according to this view, is only successful because Ian McEwan shows up, not because it showcases good Indian writing. This critique makes a lot of sense, if only because there is still a difference between the audience, resources, and critical attention received by Westerners or expats who write about India and authors who write from within India. With increasing access to media, the Indian reading public may just be accepting a set of standards without much thought. The problem is, however, that good Indian writing is starting to get out through these channels, much of it encouraged by Dalrymple and the Jaipur Fest.

What really gets me about Bal's critique is his astonishing prudishness, otherwise surprising for someone making an argument that might be termed "nationalist" or even somewhat Marxist in its attention to the aftereffects of colonialism. He believes, perhaps rightly, that "constant need for British approval allows writers from the UK to produce and sell books that should be junked in India." He uses the example of Jad Adams's book on Gandhi, Naked Ambition. He doesn't like it because of this quote: "‘When Gandhi was tormented by sexual thoughts, perhaps his impacted colon was pressing on his prostate gland and stimulating him sexually. This would explain why some diets, by reducing his constipation, would help him feel less sexual.’" Essentially, Bal is shocked that a Founding Father of the nation, the most sacred of cows, is being smeared by *gasp* talking about sex. And it's a foreigner who's doing it!

I can't really say what Bal's motivations are - maybe I am misreading his intentions. But it looks like a subconscious prudishness has reared its head. It's a sentiment echoed by the vehement denunciations of Jeffrey Kripal's book on Ramakrishna (which used psychoanalysis to explore the homoerotic dimension of tantric practice) and the hysterical reactions by Hindus to Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History, again because her analysis was deemed "pornographic." We might also see this in the attacks on James Laine's biography of Shivaji, which was banned in Maharashtra from 2004 to 2010. The chief accusation against Laine was that he was spreading "injurious gossip" by proposing that Shahaji was not Shivaji's biological father. In other words, sex and family drama as neo-colonialist backdoor. In each case, the critic assumes that the objectionable parts of Western scholarly books are deliberately sexually titillating in order to symbolically and politically debase a community under siege: Hindus, Hindus who are devotees of Ramakrishna (or maybe even Bengalis as a whole), and Maharashtrians. This is exactly the kind of reaction Bal has to Adams' discussion of Gandhi's sexuality - it's all part of the same old colonialist plot to discredit Indians, successor statements to Churchill's famous condemnation of Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir."

The larger problem is that, even if a Western author makes scholarly errors, particularly linguistic ones (as both Kripal and Doniger were credibly charged with doing by fellow scholars) or displays a more or less subtle Orientalist bias (as both Dalrymple and Adams may very well do), he or she should not be condemned on the basis of a prudish and defensive reaction concerned with upholding Indian-ness, or Hindu-ness, or Marathi-ness. Indeed, if these books were simply bad scholarship the battles would be fought on the pages of specialist journals. They become the focus of popular and media attention only when they are attacked for explicitly or latently chauvinistic reasons. I am not suggesting Western scholars who are being deceitful, careless or even deliberately provocative should get a pass. But they should be evaluated by Indian critics calmly, dispassionately and above all on a case-by-case basis. Sure, Adams's book contains a maybe silly passage about Gandhi's sexuality. But what about the rest of it? Is it a good book on Gandhi, should be the question. We know that Dalrymple's book is mostly a good book on the Mutiny, some would say even a great one. Maybe that's more important than the colour of his skin, his personality, or how much money he makes.

One-and-a-half cheers for Indian democracy!

Arundhati Roy's breath-taking essays in Outlook, first this summer's "Walking with the Comrades" about her experiences with the Maoists, and then the latest entitled "The Trickle-Down Revolution," inspire so much debate and commentary in the Indian media that there may not be much to add. But most of it, to be honest, is not very good commentary. Take this response in Outlook by Balbir K. Punj, a BJP MP, which begins with the obligatory nod to Arundhati's sincerity and passion. The problem with her relentless advocacy for the 830 million Indians who live on less than Rs. 20 a day and who do not figure on the horizon of India's aggressively neo-liberal state is, according to Punj, that India has not been industrialized enough! Mining bauxite, big dams, even building five-star hotels, all "create jobs." In time, by following the European model as set out from the 19th-c. on, India too can become a welfare state like Sweden. I need not spend any more words on how ridiculous this is.

Yet there is a nagging thorn in Arundhati's side. Her vivid tableaux of poverty, misery and repression are painted so thick that, by the end, she is so exhausted as only to exclaim, "And you want the Maoists to stand for elections?" Well, not so fast. In an interesting critique in the pages of the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner calls Roy a "reactionary" because "she shows nothing but condescension and contempt for democracy" in general, as a process. For instance, he quotes her as saying that, "the institutions of democracy–the courts, the police, the ‘free’ press, and, of course, elections–far from working as a system of checks and balances, often do the opposite.” In other words, the observable realities of the system in India lead her to believe that it is a sham, the rule of the mighty over the weak. Chotiner responds, "democracy is much more, and much harder, and much more precious than that." He again quotes her on the Indian judiciary as railing against the Supreme Court, which has "become the premier arbiter of public policy in this country that markets itself as the World’s Largest Democracy." Chotiner responds, "A judiciary that settles disputes, that concerns itself with environmental questions, that reviews the laws of the elected branch: imagine!"

Part of the problem with Chotiner's otherwise provocative piece is that he doesn't know too much about India, and that he also misreads her. Roy is not disputing those judicial decisions that deal with environmental questions or review the laws of the executive in a fair manner, or to the benefit of economically and politically disadvantaged groups. She would not object to a court that actually lived up to its ideals, but it is observably true that it does not. But Chotiner is correct that there is a slippage in Roy's thinking that leads her to condemn the very desirability of the ideals of the democratic process. Because elections have not resolved the claims of tribals and the poor, no group advocating for those claims (which she, rightly or wrongly, sees the Maoists as) should ever stand in an election.

This more or less philosophical argument about the nature of democracy as a substantive process masks a deeper and more important set of concerns. Instead of asking, "How democratic is India?" we should seek to describe with as much accuracy as possible the particular features of the Indian state, since that is what Roy and her opponents are essentially arguing about. What does this state do, and how does it work?

There has been a mass of scholarship in South Asian history and political theory on this topic, so I will mention only two or three especially helpful interventions. Partha Chatterjee's Gramsci-inspired formulation from back in the dog days of Subaltern Studies in the 1980s introduced the Nehruvian era as one of "passive revolution," in which the technocratic state appropriated the domain of politics from the more restless and unpredictable activities of mobilised peasants, workers etc. In a more recent essay entitled "Democracy and Economic Transformation in India," Chatterjee has pushed his theories further into the neo-liberal era, showing how the influx of foreign capital and the rise of new dominant classes has changed the playing field of the "passive revolution." Yet the persistence of electoral democracy also means that those marginalised groups, the victims of "primitive accumulation," can and will find redress through the "mechanisms of democratic politics," because "it is unacceptable and illegitimate" for the government to create uprooted and discontented masses. In a sharp retort, Amita Baviskar and Nandini Sundar called attention to the "attempt to use procedural democracy and the existence of independent statutory institutions to subvert a more substantive democracy." This is more than an argument about what "substantive democracy" means. It is about the changing configurations of state power: has the state "retreated" since 1991, is it "colluding" with capital, or are its powers (as Chatterjee argues) merely "re-distributed" among a host of other non-state and non-governmental agencies? So far, an open question.

Going back again in time, what is specifically "Indian" about Indian democracy as it emerged after 1947? The celebratory rhetoric usually takes as its implicit point of comparison that shadow country, Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal's one-of-a-kind comparative study, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, places the formation of two political systems - electoral democracy and military dictatorship - in a single frame of analysis.
Jalal's explanation centres on those "structural" factors that forced the early Pakistani state to concentrate spending on the military and on the centre at the expense of the provinces. The "truncated" country that emerged out of the partitions of the two richest Muslim-majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal, left Pakistan with far less of an industrial and agricultural base than its neighbour. India also inherited the administrative structures of the Raj wholesale, most importantly the civil service. The extensive patronage networks and organisational capabilities of the Congress machinery (unlike the Muslim League's corresponding weakness and search for legitimacy) allowed it to co-opt the bureaucracy and the army to an extent that was not possible in Pakistan. As Jalal succinctly puts it, "The qualitatively different balance of power between bureaucrats and politicians in the two states helps explain the relative success of formal democracy in the one and its apparent failure in the other."
India also inherited much of the constitutional framework of the 1935 Government of India Act, with the notable exception of removing restrictions on the franchise. What Jalal terms the "steel frame" of the bureaucracy that kept the Raj running could be adapted with far less difficulty to its successor sovereign power in Delhi than in Karachi. Pakistan faced further difficulties in finding a formula for representation that could balance the numerically superior Bengalis with the demands of the Punjabi elite in the West, while the army grew stronger in the context of conflict with India and a strategic alliance with the United States.


So where does this leave us? One of the most eloquent spokesmen for the uniqueness and vitality of Indian democracy has been Ram Guha, who has taken it upon himself to be India's premier popular historian and national conscience-keeper. In a wonderful essay in Outlook entitled "Ambedkar's Desiderata," he composes a paean to the Indian constitution and to its author, elevating Ambedkar's wise warnings about despotism and corruption and his championing of Dalit and adivasi claims into the kind of clairvoyance enjoyed by the Founding Fathers in US national mythology. Undoubtedly Ambedkar was an unusually far-sighted thinker, and Guha's call for a return to a vision of a substantive social democracy is welcome while the Indian state exuberantly dances with Capital nowadays. But it is important to remember Jalal's point, that much of the constitution drafted by the Constituent Assembly was directly based on its colonial precedent; in many ways this was not a revolutionary document, although Ambedkar's efforts made it radical in its promises.

So when Guha writes in his massive survey India after Gandhi that the verdict on Indian democracy must be, in the words of an old Johnny Walker joke, phiphty-phiphty, he is right but it's all a bit more complicated. Indian democracy in its particular form not only co-exists with authoritarian military ventures (Kashmir, Dantewada) but enables them. The close alliance between bureaucracy, politicians and military, coupled with enormous resources and a diverse population, ensure that the state can engage in a variety of coercive measures without fearing for its existence or legitimacy. After all, there will be elections again in five years. The Pakistani army and bureaucracy never enjoyed such a privilege, having to exercise power more nakedly for fear of completely losing control of the provinces or various recalcitrant segments of the population. This also means that, on the "plus" side of the equation, the pressures of "civil society" and non-governmental power are also brought to bear more easily on the Indian state, while in Pakistan only a few voices claiming to be truly outside the political machine (despite her last name, Fatima Bhutto is one of them) can be heard. There, it appears, is where the fight will be for both India and Pakistan in the next century.

The Ayodhya verdict and the burden of responsibility

Of course, the desire for peace and communal harmony is first and foremost in mind when we read the Ayodhya judgment. Of course it is better for both the RSS and Muslim leaders to urge acceptance and restraint. Of course 1992 was a long time ago.

But it is also impossible to read the verdict without feeling a sense of deep unease from an intellectual standpoint. It should be the responsibility of participants in civil discourse to ask some serious questions about what these judges have written.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267309

1. What does it mean that a judge unequivocally declares the site the birthplace of Lord Ram "as per the faith and belief of the Hindus" and talks uncritically of the shapeless and formless "spirit of the divine"?

2. What does it mean that a judge can now rule about whether a building is or is not a real mosque depending on whether it was built "according to the tenets of Islam"?

3. To what extent is it in the authority of 21st-century courts to construct and rule on historical fact, by using evidence from the Archaeological Survey of India and 18th century travel accounts? What is the difference between a judge and a historian?

The debate around law and "secularism" among the intelligentsia has usually revolved around questions of personal law, minority communities, and the impossibility of a neutral state administering impartial judgments without somehow engaging in political, and more importantly religious, give-and-take. In an essay entitled "Living with Secularism," written earlier in the decade as the Ayodhya case was still pending and the Archaeological Survey of India had just begun its investigations, Nivedita Menon pointed to the complicated position of "secularists" having to appeal to "unelected institutions" (the courts) to protect their values. Even if some decision were reached about temples and mosques, the real question was still what we should do about it as a democratic society? In other words, the real site of the struggle was located squarely "in the murky realms of democratic functioning."

Now that the ASI and the court have issued their decisions, we can see that the problem is actually of a different magnitude altogether. I agree, in principle, that such issues cannot be left to technocratic processes that will inevitably reveal their biases and blind spots. But what both the ASI and the court have done is to "enchant" the law and politics to a far greater extent than the opponents of "disenchantment" (like noted critic of Western-style "secularism" Ashis Nandy) could have imagined. It is not so much that the judges seemed to favour the majority over the minority, or legislate as Hindu chauvinists, though that is certainly what they did. By declaring Ram to be a "juristic person," and appealing to the inviolability of religious traditions against legal action around the world (would this have been an issue if we were talking about Jerusalem or Mecca, they asked), the judges have set a very dangerous precedent that must be combatted at once on all fronts - intellectually, legally and politically. It is no longer enough to frame the problem merely in terms of an oppressed and discriminated Muslim minority. The existence of the law, as imperfect and imperfectly secular an instrument as it may be, as a recourse available to the millions of Indian citizens, including Christians, Dalits, atheists, and all those who do not happen to believe that Ram is a juristic person, is now under threat. It may well be that we have to work to push the law back up to that position we thought it could never occupy - above religious doctrines, in that space where neither Ram nor Mohammed has any standing. Failing that, if the genie indeed cannot be put back in the bottle, if the courts absolutely must take it upon themselves to make such sweeping rulings, we should at least preserve the distinction between religious or community interests (what is good for India's Hindus and Muslims) and absolutist matters of faith. If this had been the standard, I think the ruling may have looked different.

For a sadly instructive contrast, here is an excerpt from the Telegraph about the first Ayodhya case:

"In 1885, the Faizabad deputy commissioner refused to let Mahant Raghubar Das build a temple on land adjoining the disputed structure. Das then filed a title suit in a Faizabad court against the secretary of state for India, seeking permission to build a temple on the Chabutra on the outer courtyard of the disputed structure.

His suit was dismissed on the ground that the event (alleged demolition of an original Ram temple in 1528) had occurred over 350 years earlier, and so it was “too late now” to remedy the grievance. “Maintain status quo. Any innovation may cause more harm than any benefit,” the court said."

We have not since, and could never have done, better than this.