Just Speculations

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

2011-08-15T13:51:00.007-04:00

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

2011-06-13T01:50:00.011-04:00

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

2011-02-12T02:40:00.015-05:00

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

2011-01-13T00:58:00.010-05:00

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

2010-12-31T20:39:00.017-05:00

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!

2010-10-07T23:41:00.014-04:00

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

2010-09-30T14:14:00.005-04:00

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.

"The State of Pakistan," a new genre of journalism

2010-08-10T12:53:00.007-04:00

I don't know what it is about the piece I am about to comment on that made me finally write this post; it could have been one of hundreds of others that have appeared in print and online, from both Western and South Asian sources, over the past few years. Perhaps it is because I am so used to dismissing them as temporary effluvia from the security politics crowd lacking the requisite sense of history, but this time something in me responded to the message. This is Aaatish Taseer's recent article in Mint, entitled "Losing faith in Pakistan."
http://www.livemint.com/2010/08/06210142/Losing-faith-in-Pakistan.html

The interesting thing about this article is that it manages to be half remarkably insightful and half pernicious nonsense. Let's start with the good: Taseer's basic claim is that contemporary religious extremism in Pakistan aims to "cleanse the Islam of that country of its cultural contact with the Indian subcontinent." In practical terms, this refers to the imposition of Saudi-derived ideological puritanism and the political programme of Maududi's Jamaat-e-Islami set up against "the full world, the world of culture, of stories, of songs, of dress, of ornate ritual" epitomised by the "syncretic" Sufis. Taseer is undoubtedly right in saying that the societal conflict tearing Pakistan apart has far, far less to do with clashes of civilisations between West and East than with the largely internal political struggle over the forms public religion should take in Pakistan. Such a position compels us to understand the different fractions and cleavages within the various Muslim movements within Pakistan, as Manan Ahmed pointed out during the height of the "failed state" hysteria in the Western media, aka that "the Taliban are 20 miles outside of Islamabad" time:
http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/just_a_thought_v.html

The recent attacks, first on the Ahmadi mosque, then on the Data Darbar Sufi shrine in Lahore, seem to have awakened even the most hopeful and progressive commentators to the existence of a very real threat. If the country as a whole is in no immediate danger of being "Talibanised," still the audacity and increasing frequency with which the attacks are coming raises the question: who is not a kafir now? Alarmism may not be such a bad word anymore. See Raza Rumi's impassioned appeal:
http://lahorenama.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/stop-lahores-talibanisation/

Taseer also very justly points out that far more of an outcry followed the Sufi attack, even among the lamenters. In the official media, of course, passing off the Ahmadi attack as a Zionist conspiracy was not only easier but also de rigueur. On the other side, with the exception of Manan Ahmed's excellent series on the history of anti-Ahmadi legislation (archived here: http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/category/homistan), the debate is dangerously close to reproducing a "good Sufi"/"bad Wahhabi" dichotomy that has plagued the literature on Pakistan for quite some time.

One take-away point from Taseer's piece is that historians need to pay more attention to the "Islamisation" of Pakistan under General Zia and to the connections, especially via labour migration to the Middle East, between Islam in Pakistan and outside. But we should avoid imposing a dualistic frame over all past events, as William Dalrymple does when he recasts even the history of the 1857 Indian Mutiny as a struggle between the tolerant Sufis of Bahadur Shah's court and the North Indian rebel forerunners of Osama bin Laden. Such wishful thinking avoids the uncomfortable questions about Sufis' role in upholding the feudal order in Pakistan, somewhat forcefully asked in the following article with the provocative title, "The Bad Sufi":
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-the-bad-sufi-ss-02

To better grasp what made me uncomfortable with Taseer's presentation of the story, I re-read the introduction to his otherwise excellent translations of Manto, where he claims that he is rescuing Manto for India out of the ghetto of being considered a "Pakistani writer." By implication he is doing the same thing for Urdu. Similar to his suggestion that Pakistan's problems could be resolved by a rapprochement with some forgotten essence of "Indianness," or as he puts it, the "Indian pink" underneath the "black Arab abaya," this claim has the air of denying the validity or legitimacy of the Pakistani nation itself. Towards the end of the article, the argument gets more and more intense, and in one sentence the problem of Kashmiri azadi is thrown away as a mere fixation of insecure Pakistanis in search of an identity -- which is remarkable, even offensive, considering the massive violence and curtailment of freedoms unleashed by the Indian Army in Kashmir even as we speak. The flavour of the month:
http://kafila.org/2010/07/10/curbs-continue-on-kashmir-media-is-it-martial-law-in-srinagar/

I am, first of all, no nationalist, and least of all a Pakistani nationalist. I have repeatedly said in various conversations on the topic that Pakistan, "moth-eaten" as it was at birth and caught in the paradox between being a "state for Muslims" that was not meant to be a "Muslim state" (Jinnah's utopian dream), divided between Punjabi elites and waves of regional separatism from Bengalis to Balochis, crushed by the army and the centre, has had a sorry run of historical luck. But all that has been over the past 60 years, sab ho gaya and we cannot un-wish Pakistan out of existence. Every single time a Western or Indian commentator suggests that Pakistan is facing an "existential" crisis and goads this enormously diverse and stratified population to breezily "re-think" the basis of their country and to learn "new narratives," the implication remains that the people of Pakistan are somehow a "problem people," engaged for over half a century in the illicit enterprise of having a country. History can't be re-written overnight; as Marx once wrote, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." In Pakistan's case, the fight for social justice, democracy, and pluralism can only start from the rubble around us, brick by brick. It might also have to happen under the same green-and-white flag at the end of the day.

Ayesha Jalal began her Manzur Qadir Memorial Lecture of 1989 in Lahore, by saying that she loved Pakistan "with the same complicated and consuming passion" with which Braudel loved France. The problem with most of the purveyors of the "State of Pakistan" brand of journalism in India and the West is that they wish to save Pakistan without ever having loved it, at least a little bit.

Textures of Print II: Hitler in India and the Street Book Market

2010-07-24T09:48:00.009-04:00

The other day, I was standing in front of the haphazardly organised shelves of a respectable bookstore in Hazratganj, Lucknow's main shopping area. I spotted, cozily standing upright side by side, William Darlymple's White Mughals and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Now, apart from a snide remark one could make about Darlymple in this situation, it's still an astonishing reminder of how deeply into the mainstream Hitler's book has burrowed in this country. In the West, Mein Kampf is not only politically anathema, but also widely regarded as a pedantic and uninteresting text that has little historical or contextual value (unlike, say, the writings of other designated evil people like Lenin). In India, we are intermittently reminded by outraged newspaper articles, Mein Kampf is a self-help book and Hitler is a kind of management guru for the neo-liberal age. Explanations in these articles in the English Indian and foreign press revolve around the supposed need for stability and order amidst the chaos of India's changing economic landscape, and a bizarre but culturally innate fascination with a tale of a self-made man rising by the bootstraps to conquer the world. All of this, of course, is ultimately caused by India's continued isolation from the outside world's respectable opinion, which will in time dissipate and Hitler will be taken off the shelves. This is, for instance, what our old friend Sadanand Dhume writes in the Wall Street Journal. India, as a whole, is a country "too busy having a conversation with itself to pay much attention to what others think," and Indians have an "infinite capacity to compartmentalise" that can be extended to the "murder of six million people."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704853404575322290608186082.html

The issue has been brought into the public eye recently by the announcement of Bollywood director Rajeev Ranjan Kumar that a film entitled Dear Friend Hitler was in the works, starring none other than perennial lovable dad (DDLJ, Wake Up Sid) Anupam Kher as Hitler. Kumar's main reason for admiring Hitler relies upon a reservoir of historical memory that Dhume far too easily dismisses: Subhas Chandra Bose's and the INA's strategic alliance with the Axis against the British Raj during World War II. It is this relationship that forms an important piece of the puzzle. Bose continues to be a national hero in India, and the INA's path of violent resistance is widely credited, and not just by crypto-fascists, with providing the real muscle for decolonisation. Perhaps this should call for a re-thinking of historiographical positions on political violence, as I argued in a post last year. But it certainly is no easy issue that will go away once the average Indian learns from the pious politically correct Westerner that Hitler was evil, as Dhume thinks.

The other piece of the puzzle is the admiration of Hitler by the contemporary Hindu Right, which is also supposed to have faded as today's RSS is a great friend of Israel against the Muslims. Alarmingly, this should lead us to the exact opposite question than the one Dhume & co. ask. Why is it that admirers of fascists can today also be admirers of the state of Israel? I am not saying that Hindutva ideology is somehow behind Hitler's presence on the bookstalls. But today's Hindu Right would never call for its removal simply because they are friends of Israel. The "fetish" for fascism in India, which is of course not culturally innate but historically produced, can extend to celebrating Israel's iron boot in Palestine without shame or contradiction -- so it is, if anything, a marker of how far and fast Israel's credibility on the world stage has pummeled.

But to return to the Indian street. The most fascinating and acrimonious exchange involving Mein Kampf actually took place a few years back between Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who had unenthusiastically reviewed Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger in the LRB, and Pankaj Mishra. Mishra attacked Subrahmanyam's claim that the "subaltern" Balram Halwai, not being able to read English, could have mentioned Hitler as reading material. In doing so, though his critique is unnecessarily acidic, Mishra does successfully isolate the "mofussil bookstall" where cheap editions, in both English and Hindi, of Hitler and Kahlil Gibran or Paulo Coelho are sold side by side, as an important area of study.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/diary

Perhaps Hitler's text is not so different from the others in this specific context. The extension of cheap reading material, especially of the self-help/management kind, is an abiding feature of India's "opening up" to neo-liberal capitalism, and not a holdover of primitive beliefs. I'd wager that under Nehruvian socialism Mein Kampf was not so widely available. Furthermore, these are not locally produced or variable texts. The mass publishing industry, now extending itself throughout the country via these astounding and impressive networks disseminating the printed word, does not know the difference between Hitler and Chetan Bhagat. It is also not clear that some curious feature of consumption practices is driving this trend, as all commentators seem to think. I was in another bookstore and saw a different copy of Mein Kampf, this time featuring an advertisement for a book "countering" Hitler on the inside flap, and a bonus DVD of a critical documentary on Hitler. The text, in other words, is frequently contested within itself and we should not assume its mere presence indicates acceptance of its ideas. After all, in the United States Mein Kampf is available at Border's with a black cover and preface by Abraham Foxman.
But, in the end, Hitler's presence on the bookstalls does say something about our present, where confusion and the failure of discernment in matters of paperback consumption and more are compounded by the day by what is available and possible under "India Shining."

Textures of Print: Matrimonials

2010-06-16T09:03:00.005-04:00

A quick scan of the classifieds section of the Sunday edition of the Hindustan Times throws up a dizzying proliferation of caste-based advertisements. There are Agarwals, Rajputs, Khatris, Yadavs and SC/STs; but there are also regionally-based distinctions – Bengalis, Punjabis, NRIs; and occupational and other categories – defence only, handicapped/disabled. There is, in other words, no single logic according to which a certain ad will be placed under one heading or another. Which characteristic wins out? It all varies and depends.
Furthermore, ads grouped under a caste heading do not necessarily imply restrictions. The “caste no bar” disclaimer recurs with remarkable frequency, particularly in the case of NRIs or Indians working abroad. Some even specifically seek “intercast alliances.” In other cases, it is occupational requirements that are most stringent: “from only AISs Officers, well placed professionals & business family.” Disquietingly, “fair” is the most common descriptor of physical features for both girls and boys, along with the usual professions of attractiveness, slimness and smartness. Caste is one piece of a complex and shifting puzzle of factors that families desirous to secure a match must put together while conceiving a successful advertisement.

The most astonishing category of all is the existence of a separate heading, “cosmopolitan.” This is a step beyond merely proclaiming “caste no bar” within a caste-based ad. The potential brides or grooms advertised may themselves be of mixed background, or choose not to reveal their caste. One ad proclaims the family is simply “broadminded.” Another does reveal the caste background of the girl: the father is Punjabi Aggarwal and the mother is Keralite Nair. She herself works as an assistant professor in Delhi and is an “independent minded person with broad outlook” seeking the same. The ad goes on to explicitly reject “horoscope matching believers” and “dowry seekers.” This family’s views, in other words, represent the kind of progressive politics that wishes to do away with caste restrictions and the whole cultural baggage of signification under which marriages in contemporary India are undertaken. But such a programme is restricted within its own tiny special section; it cannot colonise the rest of the matrimonials page. “Cosmopolitan” is not the blurring and mixing of identities – it has, in fact, become just another micro-identity and niche within the larger system of caste-based recognition.

This system, taken as a whole, is itself quite dynamic and evolving. Perhaps the real cosmopolitan project lies in the changing boundaries and contents of the ads. New categories are established and become acceptable, new openings and restrictions emerge. This week, the government is considering changes to the 1955 Marriage Act to make divorce easier for Hindus and Sikhs. Specialised matrimonial services for second marriages are already in business, advertising colourfully on the right side of the page.

Thinking About Marina

2010-05-27T22:54:00.014-04:00

If performance art is supposed to disturb or otherwise unsettle, then the aftershocks of seeing Marina Abramovic's retrospective at MOMA can only imply, a job well done. I am not talking about what a quick scan through the press coverage reveals to be the main issue of the day: whether re-performing some of her classic works has diluted their effect, and has exposed the soft underbelly of once-radical gestures. I experienced overwhelming feelings, and though I did not sit across from her pallid, glacial self in The Artist Is Present, her body, face, words, and thick texture of her life hung around me for hours, like an aromatic but suffocating stink. The problem was that I didn't know which way these feelings went: towards being sold on her genius and buying into her every move, or towards the occasional nagging suspicion that everything in these galleries is laid on just a little too thick.

The contrast between her late 1980s work, at the end of her prolific collaboration with Ulay, when she travelled around the world hanging out with Australian aboriginals and Tibetan lamas, and her sparse, black-and-white early 1970s Yugoslavian pieces was immense. Somewhere, I thought, Abramovic went off the rails. The student of colonialism in me immediately reached out for the word, "essentialised." What was the Tibetan monk doing sitting across from Marina and Ulay? He was just representing something -- the mystic East, interiority, escape. He wasn't a body, that assemblage of flesh that Abramovic's early pieces laid bare to be manipulated, enjoyed, respected. Throughout her later years a creeping preoccupation with New Age-y elements, including discussions of "fields of energy" and propitious minerals (in one piece, the audience is encouraged to lie on a pillow of quartz), signals a departure from what seemed to me the "essential," bare and raw Rhythms series.

But what made Rhythms appear so immediate, largely beyond symbolism or abstraction? In one word, these pieces are about her, more specifically her body. It is not just a body that is stabbed, caressed, rendered unconscious or threatened by a loaded gun. When in Lips of Thomas (1975), she carves the five-pointed Communist star on her abdomen, she inscribes her personal history onto that body to show how they are inseparable. This is perhaps why the exhibit is suffused with biographical information, from old photographs to a series of remarkable stories from childhood that expose the violence of everyday life: the mutual physical abuse between her mother and father, a near-death experience with her brother, an accident with the automatic washing machine. After her breakup with Ulay, Abramovic's work moves to explore her past and her constituted self (in light of the present that was, then, the Balkan wars). In The Hero (2001), she pays tribute to her war hero father, while in her 2005 performance of Lips of Thomas at the Guggenheim she wears her mother's Partisan cap. Her tortured relationship with her parents that emerges from the sketches of her childhood reveals an artist that doesn't know how to, or more likely isn't interested in, breaking from the past.

In Balkan Erotic Epic (2005), the images of naked men copulating with the ground, and of women exposing their genitalia to the rain, surprisingly do not serve as critique. She doesn't materialise or visualise these folkloric traditions in order to expose them, but is interested in how they persist. Their visceral nature is more apparent with each passing minute, and the temptation for irreverence soon dissolves. But then again, Abramovic knows how to play with and exploit the irreverence inherent in the "Balkan." The video describing a horrifying process of starving rats and driving them to murderous insanity, part of Balkan Baroque (1997), concludes with a kitschy striptease. Tellingly, she inserts her mother and father (holding his faithful gun) into the same piece, connecting the everyday violence in her life with properly "historical" violence. Her father, the old Partisan, is a link to both.
When Abramovic turns inward, she is at her best, almost as if begging for psychoanalysis while all the while keeping herself distant enough to remain the steely artist. When she reaches for universalism and the purifying aura of simplicity (as in The House with the Ocean View, when she lived in a gallery without eating or speaking for 12 days), her myth is punctured and she deflates a little, like a puffed-up balloon.

To return to the body, I think Abramovic feels at once comfortable with it and challenged by it as a medium. In Rhythm 0 (1974), the infamous piece in which the audience was invited to use a variety of objects on her (including a loaded gun), or in Expansions in Space (1977), when she and Ulay repeatedly slammed their bodies against two mobile columns until they could no longer make them move, she describes the intent as going to the "edge," as finding out what the "limit" of the physically possible is. What she does with her body is not to free it from constraints, but to work it so hard that new constraints are produced or revealed. She is constantly aware of her body, and in this sense her notion of "performance" is extremely precise. None of this forgetting-yourself stuff: even in her invitations to the audience or in their spontaneous participation (e.g. in ending Lips of Thomas by taking her battered body off a block of ice), she remains the Artist in control. Most importantly, she never forgets the "point" of her pieces. In the re-creation of Point of Contact (1980), the performers are instructed to feel the energy of nearly-touching fingers in a particular way. In Rhythm 4 (1974), she places herself in front of an air blower and loses consciousness from the pressure; the audience watching a video recording isn't aware, and she judges it a "success" as she continues for 3 minutes in this state undetected. The aim is to get through the conscious/unconscious distinction, to persist in the same state. The maddening, frightening drive to completion underpins Freeing the Voice, Freeing the Body, Freeing the Memory (1976), where she, respectively: screams until she loses her voice, dances until she collapses, and recites words until her mind goes blank.

Abramovic's notion of "performance" can't ever be mistaken for "play." Her work can be, at times, overbearing because her intensity and control mark every movement and object that becomes part of her art. If Nabokov was the autocrat author, she is the autocrat artist par excellence. Looking at her seated for 700 hours and counting across the uneasy, fidgeting audience members, I could sense something very hard and forbidding, yet always, always impressive.

Identity versus Subjectivity

2010-05-21T17:56:00.009-04:00

The realisation that "we all have multiple identities" at some point in one's scholarly and personal development promises a lot but delivers little. Faced with a global political context in which serious cases of violence and inequality operate along the axis of "identity," and in which exclusivist claims acquire the negative epithet of "identity politics," a recourse to a more indeterminate notion of the self can point the way "out" to a more tolerant, pluralist and cosmopolitan path. Unfortunately, several unhelpful conflations between terms are thrown up in the process, obscuring the dynamics of the lived experience of recognition.

One distinction has been helpfully framed by Dipesh Chakrabarty as identity vs. identification. His critique of Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence shows that the assumption that recognising "multiple, contextual identities" can prevent sectarian violence is misguided because what counts is, in fact, "the external and surface signs by which I or others might identify myself as a member of a particular group: my skull cap, my turban, my beard, my name, my clothes, my circumcised or uncircumcised penis." Thus, during the Gujarat riots Muslims would conceal their real names, and Hindu shopkeepers would take care to paint images of Hindu gods on their storefronts to avoid being targeted. While the "complex sense of identity" that marked their "normal everyday life" did not disappear, it became less relevant than the largely symbolic conventions of identification.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a918280932&fulltext=713240928 [in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (January 2010): 149-154]

Chakrabarty's argument is welcome, but it understates the particularised nature of the identity discussion itself. When we speak of identity, we have been led to speak exclusively of an elective affinity. I am Indian because I say I am, but I am also a Sikh, schoolteacher, city-dweller, parent, and so on. In fact, only some of these "identities" merit the name. Whether we like it or not, there is something immutable about identity that all the multi-culti well-wishing in the world cannot make go away. Chakrabarty and Sen would both refuse to acknowledge the dark secret that what makes a Muslim a Muslim, much like what made a Jew a Jew, is not just an uncircumcised penis as a "sign" or an assumption of the name. An entire history, place-based and kinship-based, made one known as a Muslim or Jew. Escaping this complex of material and symbolic factors entails either a radical and never-quite-possible displacement (moving far away where one's new neighbours don't know you or your relatives, and carry no prejudices to boot), or a multi-generational process of re-signification. Of course I am not claiming that identities are stable, and that people take on the attributes of the natural communities into which they are born. But moving from one identity to another is hard work in the real world, and may never be complete. Presumed alterities (being a Jew or Muslim "within" the "body of a nation"), once configured, persist through time.

Moments of crisis like 1947, 1984 or 2002 expose the impossibility of simply assuming the identity one likes. A Muslim hacked to death cannot appeal to "also being a schoolteacher and a father" to save his life. This is Chakrabarty's point. But my explanation for this phenomenon would be that "schoolteacher" is less of an identity than a subjectivity. Most of the categories by which we identify ourselves and recognise others share the common characteristic of being more amenable to being "worked on." I make myself, rather than am, a schoolteacher -- through repetition of certain meaning-making activities. To an extent, this is Foucault's point about categories like "homosexual" (the result of distinct ethical projects), and it can be applied to religion (Saba Mahmood thinks Muslim-ness works this way, through cultivation of the self). I am not claiming that identity and subjectivity are hermetically sealed concepts; they do lie on a continuum and sometimes a category can fall under one or the other. But I do maintain that those categories which are the least malleable and the more susceptible to being "coded" in the signs of identification proposed by Chakrabarty should be seen as more identity than subjectivity. This also means that, for a pluralistic and tolerant future, we need to start thinking in general about subjectivity more than about identity.

In my own case, my identity can be approximated as something like, a Romanian (with some mixed ancestry) child of professionals from Bucharest. This can be dispelled only with great difficulty. My name, my life history, and my education all conspire against easy adoption of other identities -- American, Indian, rural (should I choose to live in a village), labouring (should I choose to start working with my hands). However, being a graduate student, an intellectual, someone interested in Indian history -- all these things are subjectivities, which I carefully work on every day. They are less open to being challenged, but also less politically powerful. When I am concerned with the security and mobility of my person, nationality and class background come into play. This is partly why I would prefer to bypass the reduction of debates about forms of being and belonging to the terrain of identity, and to refuse both its privileges and challenges.

The Affaire Gita Sahgal: New Fault Lines

2010-02-24T01:07:00.007-05:00

As someone whose research has explored the nearly insurmountable contradictions in the conflicts over the "right to represent" in the international women's question, I was primed to react in a certain way to the news that Gita Sahgal was suspended from her post as head of Amnesty International's Gender Unit. She had called attention to the organisation's suspect association with Moazzam Begg, former Guantanamo prisoner and head of charity Cageprisoners, which supposedly has links to the Islamic Right (for instance, by promoting the notorious Anwar al-Awlaki). Her statement and story here:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264244
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264315

My reaction, especially after seeing Salman Rushdie's spirited defence of Sahgal, was suspicion. I remember seeing Rushdie speak ca. 2004, just as my own views on the invasion of Iraq were changing, and realising with some chagrin that he had become in some important ways an apologist for neo-conservative neo-imperialism. But is Sahgal another Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an "establishment feminist" championed by the "enlightened" anti-Muslim literati, hiding a sinister agenda? A glance at the petition supporting her should dispel such doubts:
http://www.human-rights-for-all.org/spip.php?article15

As an aspiring academic, I have my intellectual heroes and political guiding lights. Much to my surprise, so many of them are here: Sumit and Tanika Sarkar, Romila Thapar, Amitav Ghosh, Gayatri Spivak, Ramachandra Guha, Dilip Simeon, Chitra Joshi, Sumit Guha, Suvir Kaul, Raka Ray, Zoya Hasan, Amita Baviskar, Madhu Sarin, Priyamvada Gopal, and more.
One astonishing thing about this list is that it includes both mainstream liberals and various shades of Left-Marxist academics and activists. The even more astonishing thing is that almost all are fierce critics of communalism and imperialism.

This event shows that opposing the formulation of a Muslim problem with the potential of disrupting peaceful co-existence in India and beyond (which I have written about in my previous posts on the legacy of Gujarat and the controversy at the Jaipur Lit Festival) does not, should not, and can never imply fear or retreat from criticising Islamic Right ideologies. The strongest weapon in the hands of people like Hirsi Ali, Rushdie, Hitchens, Pascal Bruckner and the whole "new Enlightenment" intelligentsia is the idea that Left intellectuals are "soft on Muslims." This also forces us (I humbly include myself in the latter category) to desperately contemplate the impossibility of ethical action in the space between the Taliban and the neo-con. What Gita Saghal can teach us, apart from how to bravely go about doing this, is that there are points of commonality and even solidarity between these two factions of "late liberalism." Being vigilant about the dangers of extremisms of all kinds, and yes, still ever-conscious of the vast challenges facing women under various regimes of patriarchal oppression, is quite simply the right thing to do. Convergence on this point has the potential to restructure the intellectual and political field away from the many harmful complicities of the 2000s, and just maybe salvage the integrity of "human rights."

Provincializing America? My Name Is Khan and Modernity

2010-02-15T01:39:00.012-05:00

Seeing My Name Is Khan with a group of sophisticated movie-goers guaranteed the usual bouts of exasperated sighing that accompany the credits of a Karan Johar film. In fact, this one is so over-the-top that the top is no longer even in view; it makes Kuch Kuch Hota Hai look like Scenes from a Marriage by comparison. As with all masala epics, suspension of disbelief is a given...nobody in any audience would think it realistic. But in some ways MNIK reaches much farther than the usual Hindi film. For one thing, in this as in other recent dramas (I'm thinking of Paa, which I just saw), set musical pieces are gone entirely, replaced by a more "Western" soundtrack-montage overlay. For another, and much more importantly, the film turns a sociological lens -both broadly and minutely- upon another country, the United States, in ways that suggest a new form of "globalisation" for the Hindi film. Instead of, as many scholars have pointed out, merely transporting the action to foreign shores or focusing on the culturally cosmopolitan wealthy middle classes in India, the post-1990s Hindi film is also making its first attempts at representational authority.

What do I mean by this? It's not only that a non-Western film takes America as its subject. Plenty of such films exist. MNIK does so, however, without any pretence of subtlety or objectivity, yet from a universalist standpoint. It revels in its own partiality and stereotypes with confidence. Previously, Hollywood filmmakers would throw up a hasty sketch of a foreign country where the workings of that society, including timelines, would be hopelessly blurry. And of course it would all be defensible on the grounds of artistic licence! If a serious foreign film ever looked back, it would be from a verite or underground perspective. But here, we have a Hindi blockbuster taking the same kind of sloppy liberties, and the result is oddly exhilarating. Thus, most average Americans are shrill caricatures, racist and suspicious and decidedly unfriendly (contra the usual view of typical American openness and friendliness; see the scene where the cable car passengers crowding around Shah Rukh in the middle of the street are all abusing him, except for the good-hearted Indian Kajol). George Bush in 2008 is greeted by hundreds of happy supporters waving signs and flags at a speaking appearance. Politics don't exist (conversely, do Slumdog or City of Joy ever discuss the intricacies of party politics and opinion polls?). Along the same lines, teachers in San Francisco Bay Area (!) schools tell children that Muslims are evil. Scrappy college journalists can break a national story regarding torture by passing it on to the local television station...on this count Johar is far too naive and optimistic about America! And so on.

The most head-scratchingly bizarre choice of stereotype is the pre-Civil War Deep South village milieu Johar constructs (on a set in Bombay), with Big Mama Jenny and her little boy living in a shack and praying at the local church with all the other black folk. Prima facie this is all immensely racist, condescending, and ham-handed. There is a wish for some kind of alliance between the oppressed here (singing "We Shall Overcome" together, the convoy of good-hearted Muslims delivering supplies through the waist-deep water when no government aid arrives), but having no understanding of the experiences of minorities in post-industrial society (Katrina affected the poor urban population, not some idyllic hamlet where cows outnumber people 3 to 1) and pulling out the worst from the "yes'm massa" bag of tricks is no way to go about it. Then again, Karan Johar has always been a very conservative kind of filmmaker: witness the considerable abuse heaped upon the Anglo-Indian caricature in KKHH as disloyal and foppish (forget English! Sing Vande Mataram...and this in a film that supposedly celebrated the Anglicised youth).

Yet there is something very telling about this crude attempt to "provincialize America," as Dipesh C. would say. Johar does not merely see America from another (outsider) angle and thus renders it unexceptional, he in fact robs it of the modern and the universal. The loudest howls of protest from my friends were to the effect of, "Where is the government aid? How come Shah Rukh - and Kajol, and the film crews, and the helpful volunteers - can get to this village by taking the bus, while no state or federal authorities are to be found?" In taking the experience of Katrina to its logical extreme, Johar asks: what if America really was a Third-World country, as so many Americans who watched helplessly in 2005 feared it would resemble (yet, of course, not literally ever become)? This isn't an obscure or philosophical point. When a natural disaster happens in India, Pakistan, or even Romania (seasonal floods are always in the news), there is often no government aid for a while, if ever. Many of the places affected are isolated agricultural villages that really exist, unlike the absurd Wilhelmina, GA. The United States and fellow Western democracies are commonly understood as societies where the state has reached hegemony along with dominance (cf. Ranajit Guha), where its apparatus of ameliorative bureaucracy and impartial law extends, imperfectly but expectedly, across every inch of its geographical space. Furthermore, this theme runs throughout the film. The interrogator who tortures Shah Rukh is the mirror of the policewalas in Slumdog, the perfect Western metonym for Indian corruption and arbitrary use of power. Whereas a Western filmmaker would undoubtedly present similar critiques of government inaction or illegality from the realistic, gritty and ultimately liberal point of view that produces "social pressure" for reform, Johar is after the sentimental generalisation that is not so easily resolved. His vision of America is of the many tendencies believed by American reformist progressives to be flaws in an incompletely generalised system needing to be fixed as constitutive elements of a pre-modern, archaic society. This is why, and not because he's stupid or insensitive, he must rely on a vision of rural America from the 1850s.
So, while MNIK is ultimately a silly film, it delights in a cheeky right to represent that it would be a pity for Hindi film to lose. Backed by global capitalism and increasingly entering into international circuits of exchange, such exercises can inject some needed vitality in the rather staid debates about meanings and aspects of modernity.

Danger! More on Indian Muslims and the Possibility of an "International Communalism"

2010-02-07T21:21:00.011-05:00

If what I read in the Wall Street Journal is indicative of things to come, then we're in trouble. A report that should have been innocuous on the Jaipur Literature Festival by journalist and author Sadanand Dhume on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech turns into something very sinister. I expected the commentary to briefly mention that she is "controversial" and maybe say a thing or two about her reception. Instead, the title of the article promised much more, purporting to show how "globalization is changing the debate" about Islam in India:
http://www.asianwindow.com/books/indias-groupthink-on-islam/

Alright, let's go. Right off the bat, Dhume is shockingly brazen in asserting that Ms. Hirsi Ali's well-rehearsed screed about the evils of Islam is delivered "with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians." As Charu Gupta's excellent work on the Hindi public sphere in the early 20th-c. has shown, the stereotype of Muslims as sexually and developmentally backward was entrenched in the earliest formulations of Hindu nationalist identity, and was widely disseminated (see her Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India). Moreover, when respectable Hindu social reformers (like M.G. Ranade in Maharashtra) in the late 19th-c. sought to explain the deplorable state of Indian women under indigenous patriarchy, they firstly and loudly blamed the Muslim invasions for putting an end to the "Golden Age" of women's freedoms under Hinduism. But we don't need to go that far backward and into that much detail. Speak with many educated, "globalised" and "modern" Indians today, or flip through the news channels, and you'll see a picture of Indian Muslims (a disadvantaged minority, after all) quite consistent with Ms. Hirsi Ali's generalisations. Unfamiliar? Hardly.

In a surreal escalation of stupidity, after once more repeating that only with the past 20 years of globalisation is India "starting to grapple with the faith [Islam]" (rendering the past 800 years of coexistence on the subcontinent irrelevant), Dhume claims that the failure to think about Muslims in the way he wants Indians to is due to "the kind of groupthink fostered by decades of socialism." What in the world is he talking about? He cannot possibly mean that the relative absence of serious communal violence during the first few decades of Indian independence, at least when contrasted with the past 20 years (post-Ayodhya, Gujarat), is something we should blame Nehruvian socialism for. Or maybe he means that today's presence of radicalised strains of Islam (i.e. terrorism) had its roots in state socialism's failure to...do what exactly? And how come these radicalisms have proliferated precisely in the era of globalisation he claims is helping Indians "think" better about Islam? Dhume doesn't care to elaborate.

Aha! This is what it's all about: apparently, "mainstream intellectuals...tend to trace the Muslim world's problems almost exclusively to the alleged misdeeds of Israel and the United States." What kind of media is this fellow watching, and what is he smoking all the while? Lest he be accused of unfairness, Dhume admits that the Hindu right isn't all that great because it has a "tendency to group all Muslims together" (tendency?) and its policy "shades into bigotry and religious chauvinism" (shades??). Amazingly, he then claims that Ms. Hirsi Ali is a moderate walking the middle path (whatever you think of her, a moderate of any kind she is not). While she may say bad things about fundamentalism, she also "urged the audience to think of Muslims as 'individuals who are capable of changing their mind.'" My oh my, how charitable of her!

Contradicting the straw man he has himself set up, Dhume lists several authors at the festival who similarly challenge the "mainstream Indian narrative": Tunku Varadarajan, Max Rodenbeck, Lawrence Wright, and Steve Coll. Notice that not only does he not define what this mysterious "mainstream" narrative is, but he can't name a single person who defines it or subscribes to it. Thus, it would seem from his own evidence that the majority of "mainstream intellectuals" (the authors named above come from The Economist, Daily Beast, and the New Yorker) are of his, and Ms. Hirsi Ali's, opinions about Islam.

But the most blatant abuse of journalistic integrity and common sense comes when Dhume attempts to show the "other side." What kinds of arguments might be made against Ms. Hirsi Ali's positions? He cites no academic studies, no political commentaries or respectable authorities who might have intelligent rebuttals. Instead, he refers to "slightly hostile" audience members who are not so "tolerant" (this is just open condescension on his part, as if any kind of contradictory questioning is intolerance). Let's see who he finds:
1) A "young Kashmiri Muslim man" accuses a panel discussing the "Arab-Muslim penchant for conspiracy theories" of "promoting stereotypes" and being "spokespersons for the mainstream media." The way he writes it, we're supposed to think he's crazy. It sounds to me quite reasonable to say they were promoting stereotypes, and the credentials of the panelists indicate they are precisely spokespersons for the mainstream media, no quotes needed.
2) A professor of history at Delhi University "said he would 'defy anyone with the slightest sense of justice' to say what was happening in Palestine was 'fair.'" Tellingly, the professor is not named or interviewed later, as he is the only source with some kind of authority that might destabilize Dhume's argument. Also, this is again presented as a rambling diatribe when in fact it's a very sensible little statement: very few people with a sense of justice would say that what's happening in Palestine is fair. Yet we move on...
3) Javed Akhtar, the great Urdu poet and lyricist, presented as a "writer of Bollywood lyrics" (he's like, their Randy Newman, you see!) says some extreme-sounding things like that all Islamic fudamentalism is supported by the US (this was kind of maybe true until the late 1980s, but obviously stupid to say about today), and that the US is deliberately concealing bin Laden's death. So he's a bit nutty. But Javed Uncle is NOT an authority on policy and shouldn't be the best thing Dhume can muster for his article. That's like running an article about an academic forum on contemporary Jewishness to which Mel Gibson shows up and quoting him as a dissenting view. Pathetic.

In the end, Dhume predicts "the slow but inexorable knitting of India into the mainstream of global discourse on a sensitive subject." He means it as a triumphalist statement, but the state of global discourse on this very sensitive subject is abysmal. Herein lies the danger, and I do not use this word lightly, of this kind of thinking. Dhume's article by itself won't do the damage, but the trend that he is describing (if we notice it to be true) will.
India, a country with ca. 160 million Muslims, has been able to maintain internal religious harmony, with several grievous exceptions. These very exceptions point to its vulnerability; if the Indian public sphere does take on a more strident anti-Muslim tone, as promoted by neoconservative radicals like Ms. Hirsi Ali and the "mainstream" experts admired by the hapless Dhume in the West, disaster would follow. It's easy for the Swiss to fret about four minarets and symbolically punish a few thousand "black sheep." In a country with a long and bloody history of communal violence, rhetoric of this kind is playing with fire. Ayodhya is the test case, so this need not be a hypothetical. Not only would the consequences of escalating mistrust and conflict be grievous for the safety, security and peace of millions of Indian Muslims, it would further radicalise Islamic fundamentalist elements and give rise to more acts of terrorism. India would no longer be a country that knows how to "deal" with its Muslims, which even Ms. Hirsi Ali acknowledges in her speech (though this is too subtle for Dhume to pick up on).

If this odious little piece is to be believed, we may have to worry about more than just the communalism of "khaki shorts and saffron flags," but of a more insidious "international" communalism that seeks to disturb what is, for the moment, a tensely peaceful scene.

Amitava Kumar on Reading, and Graduate School

2010-01-27T02:46:00.022-05:00

This is a post born of exasperation and hope. Only one semester in, the rhythm of the graduate school seminar has settled, and it chugs forward on its well-worn tracks. The sheer intellectual excitement of opening a new syllabus, my eyes rapidly scanning for the texts I know I will enjoy, the smell of an open book, all haven't gone away. It's too soon for that. But occasionally a sense of futility sets in, especially the realization that reading is a mechanical, solitary act, carried out inside a mind that is never stable and never dependable. At what point will I lose it, will the jumbled letters no longer make words, sentences, and of course soundbites for my professional advancement? The historian has much in common with the accountant - poring over minuscule ephemera and producing reports that few read and of those, many ignore. But it's not the monotony or the self-consciousness about social importance that gets to me. It's the discussions. Young, full of facts and ideas, the graduate student spews out an endless stream of jabs, asides, musings, mumblings - his or her favourite thing, slicing and dicing the book lying passively on the desk. "Well I think that Subaltern Studies has gone too far this or the other way..." "So and so essentialises and totalises..." "Not contingent enough..." "Why doesn't this book start fifty years earlier or end twenty years later..." "Where are the voices of the women (men, if about women)..." Reading back over my blog, this poisonous habit of self-importance seems to have taken me over as well.

Let me pause. I am not saying that honest, robust critique should be banished from the academy. The spectre of scholarly fraud and/or misuse is always at the door, so we must keep it tightly shut. But we have also lost a sense of humility and wonder toward the academic text. The graduate student reads an article or book with violence in mind. Like a nosy badger smelling blood, we are trained to burrow for the "holes" in the argument and eviscerate everything in our path. It is little wonder so many grow up to be nasty, vindictive academics sneaking in cowardly jabs in footnotes and pompously battling over the molehill.

In a wonderful recent piece in Tehelka, Amitava Kumar asks us to rethink how we read the literary text. It's also a great blueprint for the nascent academic. He says, too many readers wish to be pundits, who "nurse a secret ambition to be described as someone who has read everything." Graduate students will surely recognize themselves. Also, underneath the ostensible spirit of impartial critique hides a deadness of thought: this "kind of reader will always try to sound knowledgeable, moral, balanced, and always, very reasonable."
Academic writers are as guilty of this sin as fiction writers: "I like that writer who doesn’t address the world from a position of Olympian superiority. It is even better when a piece of writing reveals how its writer’s admittedly partial or flawed vision offers special insight into the world. A reader who reciprocates in the same spirit, reading with empathy or hurt or imagination, produces what may well be a new text."
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ne300110essay2_the_reader.asp
The best discussions I've had in the classroom have been the free ones, when mouths run off from the script, when the student earnestly tries to engage the text, to see if it makes sense or strikes a chord, even to passionately denounce it (from a position of vulnerability, of course). Reading is work, but it is also productive and a joy. It need not lead to a great additive insight or building block for a field examination or paper. What is important is that some idea from the page has been turned over in the mind, has occupied if only a few minutes of one's day. This process requires above all the qualities of humility, openness and patience.

The rewards of an academic life are perhaps small, but none is more exhilarating than the discovery of previously unsuspected complexities. If this discovery makes academic life so antithetical to practical life, or what is nowadays interestingly called "the real world," it also renders academics themselves impatient. We're eager to broadcast our jadedness. This one's "over" Foucault, this one's "had enough" of this or that historiographical turn. The greatest violence we can do is hasty categorisation and the filing away of ideas. It's a surefire road to a closing mind, but even more importantly, to an unhappy mind.

Chandigarh and the Experience of Urban Planning

2010-01-11T01:37:00.012-05:00

In James Scott's influential and oft-quoted Seeing Like a State, the city of Chandigarh makes a brief cameo to support his point that the experience of living in a master-planned capital (like Brasilia) is basically miserable. Scott's condemnation of Le Corbusier, the "high modernist" architect whose rigid, perfectionist, and absurdly ordered designs exemplify the monstrosity of state vision, here comes to its logical end: after all, Le Corbusier himself designed Chandigarh, the only city to have been actually built according to his plans. Scott shows how the wide avenues and plazas, as well as the imposing government buildings, contrast with and replace the busy Indian street and bazaar. Chandigarh seems to fit neatly into a general theory of the "messiness" of everyday life being mercilessly subdued by modernism's blind uniformity. Scott's critique is essentially an experiential one: the city feels unfriendly, austere, segregating; the plazas are empty because people cannot, and do not wish, to congregate in such spaces. One imagines a drab, concrete life whose minute details are governed by the unforgiving design.

In a recent Outlook piece, politician M.S. Gill paints a different picture altogether. He views Nehru's enterprise as a bold, revolutionary one, conceived in the ruins of a divided Punjab with a view to a better future. The plan worked; indeed, it is unplanned growth that poses a problem: "The new necklace of the builders squeezes and strangles Corbu’s ambitious dream. Entry from any side into the town is an adventure. The green belt, specifically kept between Chandigarh and Mani Majra, has gone..." In Gill's view, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh (as well as Lutyens' Delhi) are admirable because of the services they provide to residents. The experience of living in this kind of city is clearly preferable to the chaos of Delhi today, a "collection of crowded colonies, hungry for plots with narrow roads, no parks and ancient monuments hemmed in by houses," where "children have no place to play and the new rich find that while they can build marble palaces, their BMWs rot in narrow lanes." The residents of Chandigarh tend to agree that it's an oasis among Indian cities:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262 010
So if Scott's point was that Chandigarh is not a workable model of urban planning because people don't like living there, it would seem that he stands contradicted.

Part of the problem consists of two different modes of inequality at work. Chandigarh is clearly not for everybody: only a few can live "on the grid," and restrictive zoning laws ensure further population growth and commercial development can occur only outside the city. The exclusionary character inherent in the design is qualitatively different from the more "natural" ghettoizations of Delhi and Bombay that Gill is referring to. But the end result is similar: if Chandigarh works in ensuring a clean, pleasant urban experience for some, it does not make it a scalable or transferable model of planning that can solve India's current problems. Chandigarh is certainly an interesting experiment and an emblem of its time, but is its promise merely nostalgic? Can it teach us anything about the limits of providing services to residents that can be used by other rapidly developing cities with "modernizing" aspirations (i.e. Bangalore, Hyderabad)?
If any readers have themselves experienced Chandigarh, by either living or visiting there, do share your thoughts.

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

2009-12-28T05:37:00.013-05:00

In post-communist Romania, history repeats itself as farce every winter, when talking heads and gray beards congregate on television to re-hash, ostensibly as a form of public service, what exactly happened in 1989. The stale, hours-long "debates" revolve around a set of questions that are both uninteresting and ultimately unanswerable, when those with the most at stake in covering up the truth are the ones being asked. First, there is the "coup d'etat vs. popular revolt" dichotomy, with its faithful subplot: the degree of outside involvement, mainly Gorbachev's and the KGB's. Second, the admittedly important problem of the mysterious "terrorists" whose rumoured presence in the capital led to thousands of deaths. Third, a more expansive chronology argument: was the revolution "stolen," and if so, when and by whom? What were its precise turning points, and how did contingency and conspiracy interact?

Not all of these lines of inquiry are relevant; indeed, keeping the focus on these mostly superficial formulations has allowed Iliescu & co. to spin a lot of yarn in weaving a veil of deceit over an exhausted public's eyes. Every so often, someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to hold the key to the whole highway; this year, it was Gen. Victor Stanculescu, former defense minister during the revolution and immediately after, now in prison for giving orders to shoot before his miraculous conversion to the revolutionary cause. He claims it was all a Soviet plot, and the "terrorists" were partly KGB agents. Provocative, and virulently anti-Iliescu on the surface, yet still not the story. Too much agency is handed over to the best-laid plans - for historians, this cannot do.

The long-term dynamics of Ceausescu's fall are not hard to track: since the 1970s Iliescu was his anointed heir, and his long exile in the wilderness proves the old man was aware of the danger. The "Letter of the Six," reformist communists who in March 1989 publicly challenged Ceausescu, represented but a small opening in the shifting tectonics of Party structures under the Leader. Indeed, the crucial question that no one directly asks the eminent revolutionaries is how and why were they so ready to form a new government hours after Ceausescu's flight? Where did Iliescu and the FSN (National Salvation Front) come from? Such a body does not form overnight; instead, it had probably been busy consolidating itself for most of the 1980s, making connections and building up support. The Letter was a kind of testing of the waters, and Ceausescu's loyal Securitate elements were quick to repress; yet who knows how much of the apparatus was quietly shifting its loyalties? As for the Soviets, they did not need to directly intervene. Gorbachev was certainly against the hard-line regimes of both Ceausescu and Honecker, personally and politically. He saw his own attempts at reforming socialism stymied by the intransigence of Moscow's old-style erstwhile allies. Iliescu's own penchant toward a perestroika-type society is well documented. Believing Ceausescu to have "sullied the ideals of socialism," the FSN was confident at first in its public proclamations to appeal to a vision close to Moscow (and even, in a telling but brief moment, to direct Soviet military support). Gorbachev's silent policy of non-intervention emboldened the growing second-rank communist movement that became the FSN to act; they waited for their opening and seized the day in December '89. They did so because they were convinced that the country was doomed under the status quo, that socialism had to be saved - in this they were close to Gorbachev's ideas. Yet Ceausescu himself held on to a hard-line position for the very same reason, and was paradoxically proven right by history. Once the iron grip was loosened, the game was up and socialism did crumble. Perhaps no one was more aware of the fragility of the regime, both economically and politically, than Ceausescu in his final days. His stubbornness was the sign not of a man who had lost the plot, but simply of one who had run out of options. This also explains his summary trial and execution, by any account a clear perversion of justice. Iliescu & co. tend to stress the necessity of such a move to "reassure" the population in those heady and uncertain days. While this may have been true, what did Ceausescu know and say publicly about those who had pulled the rug out from under him? The point is, we'll never find out. In the end, Soviet involvement is a great canard. Gorbachev may not have even foreseen or approved of the events of 1989 as they unfolded, but he certainly enabled and inspired them. The revolution was neither a coup nor a popular uprising, but a structural re-aligment: a complex, factional transfer of sovereignty involving different elements of party cadres, the Securitate, and the army. The only certainty is that the FSN was left standing as a solid, powerful entity with the will, capacity and legitimacy to govern as 1990 began.

On the second question of the "terrorists," there are many competing theories, ranging from KGB agents to loyal internal Securitate men to, well, nobody - merely a confused population who had been given arms to defend itself against an invisible enemy and had ended up shooting each other. A bombshell revelation, if it were to help resolve anything, would be needed here. But it may not matter all that much, despite the horrific death toll. It seems callous to say, but the greatest tragedy of the revolution has been the seeming irrelevance of its victims' sacrifice. For what did people die in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest? Violence was a manifestation of a moment of suspended sovereignty, a kind of state of exception (where would we be without Agamben and Schmitt?) that allowed the new structures of power to consolidate. The price of the new regime was exacted in blood, not once but several times until the end of the following year.

If there was indeed a true opening for revolutionary action, it was not in the confusion of 1989 but in the growing discontent of 1990, when breakaway elements of the FSN -mainly former dissidents- and returned expatriate parties staged protests against Iliescu's decision to contest the first elections. This led to the infamous mineriads, when Iliescu repeatedly called on miners to march on the capital and beat up the "intellectual" protesters, condemning them as fascists and foreign agents. We are not necessarily dealing either with a genuine popular revolution that was "stolen," nor with an all-powerful coup methodically eliminating its enemies. Indeed, the extraordinary and naked violence of the mineriads, conducted unashamedly and out in the open (unlike 1989), should be read as a recognition by Iliescu's FSN of its limits: a serious crisis of incipient sovereignty. Provoking violent inter-class conflict was the only language with which Iliescu could face this challenge. The story since, wherein by 2009 Iliescu is an elder statesman and ex-FSN members form the backbone of all the major political parties left standing, does make a rigged game seem like the most logical frame. The answer is more subtle. Most remarkably of all, the structures of power put together by second-rank communists in the 1980s were able to outmaneuver both Ceausescu and the few dissident voices from the other side and creatively respond and adapt to the events of 1989-90, including the overthrow of the communist system (which they may not have anticipated, at least so suddenly) and electoral politics, to constitute themselves into an ever-expanding and tightening oligarchy. Such an analysis takes both contingency and large-scale determinants into view, stressing their mutual influence and constitution.

Historians of Romania (I am not one of them, though I could be considered a Romanian historian) face two urgent and monumental tasks in the years ahead. The first, to re-write the history of the revolution "from above," namely: working with Romanian and Soviet archives to trace the relationships between the Ceausescu regime and the outside world; assessing the strength of party structures in the 1980s, especially the development and internal conflicts of different Securitate and army factions - a utopian project, at least until Iliescu and his acolytes are dead or significantly marginalized; above all, explaining how the FSN and other forces became revolutionaries against, and heirs to, Ceausescu's regime. A range of methodologies, from diplomatic history to economics to political science approaches, would have to all be applied in concert. The second angle would make progress on the revolution "from below," namely establish a comprehensive history of popular protest against communism and its effects. One mostly neglected subject of research is the 1987 Brasov workers' revolt, one of the most important moments of resistance against the state. It is not enough to argue for simple causality or prefiguring, nor is it plausible to suggest that people ventured out into the streets out of the blue for the first time in 1989. The successes and failures of these movements, as well as their connection to the institutional story told above, must be carefully built up from still-restricted official documents and popular memory. Indeed, a great work on the genealogy of popular protest under communism going back to the mountain fighters of the early 1950s still remains to be written. Romanian historiography needs its own Ranajit Guha to write an Elementary Aspects of peasant and worker insurgencies. The day when all these levels of analysis can be integrated into a definitive account is far off, and may never come if political conditions in Romania remain as unfriendly to serious historical thinking as they are today.

*FURTHER READING:
The exhaustive blog of tireless researcher Marius Mioc collects video recordings, transcripts, and many other sources on the revolution and is a good place to start piecing it all together:
http://mariusmioc.wordpress.com/
See also Richard Andrew Hall's excellent dissertation:
http://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.wordpress.com/

The Lesson of Gujarat, or How to Talk about Events

2009-11-12T15:30:00.008-05:00

That the recent tragedy at Fort Hood should raise the spectre of anti-Muslim hysteria in the U.S. is by now commonplace. But the real stakes of the debate, namely the precise consequences of a certain way of thinking about events and their repercussions, are obscured by placing the focus of the debate around "how much Islam has to do with it." Framing the shootings of U.S. servicemen by this individual Hasan in the language of "terrorism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" is undoubtedly problematic. But to respond, those of us who wish to re-frame the issue are inevitably forced into a kind of obscurantist cul-de-sac that allows no discussion of Islam or Muslims whatsoever: that this is an isolated act of a "mentally unstable" person, that religion has "nothing to do with it." What we grapple with, in essence, is the singularity of the act and its relationality to a wider field of discourses, or ways of talking about things (in this case, Islam and Muslims).

Here is what I mean: whenever such events occur and are disseminated through the media, as they inevitably will in our globalised age, we should avoid the temptation of seeing them as exceptions, as acts that stand alone in the world, infinitely contingent. Instead, we should accept from the start that they will immediately feed into a vast discursive terrain of things being said, worked out and worked over, about macro-categories we are uncomfortable with, yet ignore at our peril. We should follow this event through the discursive terrain and see where it lands, and thus make visible the consequences of its particular path. The relational consequences of singular events are often so jarring that they might yet enable many (with the exception of those who are willing to pay the price), to look at the terrain anew and be made aware of the treacherous channels through which information travels and is re-directed, of how events acquire meanings.

I will use the example of the 2002 Gujarat massacres to make my point. Here, a much-disputed and yet very "real" event, the burning of 58 Hindus in a train coach in Godhra, happened in all its garish and horrifying singularity. Whether it was deliberate arson by a mob or something else, whether the categories of Hindu victims and Muslim attackers should be deconstructed, are all important yet tangential issues. Trying to disentagle religion and politics, local contexts and broad phenomena etc. etc. from the charred remains of this event, though ethical and honest in a scholarly sense, is mere impotence in the face of what happened next, when as many as 2,000 Muslims were massacred while the state not only stood by, but actively aided and encouraged the violence. A confrontation between certain individuals at a certain point in time was a spark to a fire that burned along the axes of Big categories, "Hindu" and "Muslim," all across Gujarat. In Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines, the traumatic riots in Calcutta and Dhaka of 1964, which so decisively shape the characters' lives, can be traced back to an incident in far-away Kashmir over a stolen relic. Singular events become relational to contexts far distant in time and place. If we have a truly political, indeed moral, task in our complicated world, where information travels at once faster and more insidiously than ever, it is to break the links that are formed in this way.

What would it mean to think of Godhra, minutes or hours after it happened, with the bodies of 2,000 innocent people in mind? What would it mean to follow the contention that an individual Hasan stands in for a "Muslim problem" that must be faced, to its logical conclusion, to a widespread and concerted effort by individuals and the state to "deal" with it? The consequences of thousands of lives lost when so many minds are fixed (or being fixated) onto a category, in this case of the problematic Muslim that must be dealt with, are not worth the mental leap. There are those who will say that such violence is the inevitable result, or collateral damage, of whichever side they think is to blame acting wrongly. Yes, 2,000 Muslims died, but that's because they started it. This is, I would hope, only a small minority of those who are engaged in the conversation. The task for scholars, activists, and all of us concerned about these issues is to show that the price to pay, of creating a climate for civil violence, is far more de-stabilising to the security and internal peace of communities than a singular act unavenged, or a problematic category not properly dealt with. This is especially true in the United States, where the potential for reprisals is always high yet, with almost no exceptions, since September 11th no serious and sustained civil violence has occurred. India's lessons, from the Sikh massacres of 1984 to Gujarat and on, are vital in this regard. Communal bloodshed on general lines, visited upon individuals whose only connection to singular events from another place and time lies in the relation with those events constructed in people's minds, is a price too steep to ever pay. To suppress this urge to relate the singular, to think of unrealised consequences instead of the real and visceral event that has just happened, is admittedly difficult but it is also urgent.

Technologies of Non-Violence: Bayard Rustin in India

2009-10-18T23:23:00.010-04:00

After Proposition 8 passed in California last year, there was much discussion about the "black vote" and how it had damaged the cause of gay rights. Here was a sad case of two kinds of minority politics clashing with each other amidst a dizzying variety of overdetermined oppositions (black v. white, urban v. suburban/rural, middle class v. working class, religion v. secularism).

The figure of Bayard Rustin, civil rights leader and organiser of the 1963 March on Washington, as a black, gay, and labour activist all in one, is occasionally brought up as a hopeful reminder that we can live outside these binaries. Rustin is often quoted in the service of "coalition building," particularly this 1986 speech: "The new 'niggers' are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. … The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people."

But Rustin's life is exemplary in one more sense, demonstrating how certain organisational methods for social movements, particularly techniques of non-violent protest, circulate across borders. We are told that the civil rights movement was "inspired by" Gandhi's efforts against the British. But how did this transfer actually happen, and what tensions did the process reveal? Rustin's trip to India in 1948 provides a sketch of the painstaking ways in which the transfer of ideas happens "on the ground."

Rustin's visit must be placed in the context of a decades-long relationship between African-Americans and India, cultivated by prominent figures like W.E.B. DuBois, and of international pacifist networks in which Rustin participated. He was there for the precise purpose of drawing some lessons from the Indian experience with a view to applying them to the U.S. In other words, Rustin did not come as a wayward traveler: he had a definite agenda and mission, and he was immediately critical toward nationalism and militarism in India as he saw them. John d'Emilio's book Lost Prophet reveals how Rustin was severely disappointed that the Gandhian cause had ultimately served nationalism, and concluded that it was "non-violent in its means, but essentially violent in its ends." At the same time, Rustin tried during his stay to influence Nehru to move in a more pacifist direction (this is, we must remember, the high point of the nation-state's birth, the time of Kashmir and Telangana).

Where should these technologies of non-violence be situated? Did they happen "in India" and were then "brought over" to the United States? Were they located instead in the insitutional workings of international pacifist organisations, or in the very minds of individuals like Rustin, in their ideologies and convictions? We should be aware of the conditions that give rise to certain openings for communication, to exchanges of people and ideas that can be traced, to use that ugly term, "transnationally." The many possibilities of the postwar moment to forge such links, whether in the service of anti-colonialism, anti-racism or anti-nationalism, can serve as examples and warnings for the fractured resistances of today.

On Mayawati II: The Axis of Caste

2009-10-10T23:09:00.007-04:00

A few months ago, just after returning from India, I wrote that "Mayawati,while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster." But also, that "it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain."
I would like to revise some of these thoughts in light of a recent talk on the BSP in 2009 I heard at Harvard given by Christophe Jaffrelot, research fellow at Sciences Po in Paris.

Jaffrelot's most remarkable claim, in addressing why and how the rise of the BSP (especially as a governing party in U.P.) had been "emancipatory," was that it changed the way people thought about caste itself. He also gave Mayawati high marks, with all the necessary qualifiers and caveats, for enforcing laws aimed at preventing crimes against Dalits and attempting to extend reservations into the private sector. But it was the psychological, or rather psycho-social, aspects of her rule that have had the greatest effect. Voter mobilisation of different caste groups by the BSP has resulted, according to Jaffrelot, in Dalits no longer viewing themselves as parts of a vertical hierarchy (and thus subject to Sanskritisation), but as horizontally competing interest groups fighting for spoils. Dalits can now be "proud of who they are," and the presence of one of their own at the top makes all the difference.

One particularly biting challenge to Jaffrelot's view came from a questioner who insisted that the BSP was not "good for U.P.," and that the selective targeting of villages for development under the Ambedkar Village Scheme contrasts unfavourably with the more inclusive approach in states like Tamil Nadu, which as a result perform better in terms of human development indices for lower castes. There was also an "internal critique" by another (sympathetic) questioner about the infamous statues. What this shows, critically, is that for all the sophisticated approach of charts, graphs, and poli-sci bonhomie of Jaffrelot's presentation, the debate at the end of the day is a more visceral, and indeed a political rather than scholarly, one. The sense of deep ambivalence about low-caste governance that I captured in my slipshod June post holds up to scrutiny. This is partly to be explained by an historical conjuncture: the poorest and most backward states in India, Bihar and U.P., are also the most caste-ridden and prone to aggressive Dalit assertion. But their very backwardness begins to reflect badly on the Dalit politicians who rule them, as progress is understandably slow.

Jaffrelot softened some of my earlier truisms. Criticising Dalits in Lucknow as hopelessly corrupt stooges has a whiff of the old attacks on "Reconstruction rule" in the post-Civil War U.S. South. The emancipation of a category of people subjected to systematic oppression for centuries may have to proceed on a bumpy road. And while it is, no doubt, incredibly venal, having giant expensive statues of Ambedkar and other lower-caste leaders in the centre of Lucknow is a kind of symbolic righting of history. But the challenge of good governance, issued nowadays more as a political weapon against Mayawati, still remains. If Jaffrelot is to be believed, Mayawati has made the lives of many Dalits slightly better. For the BSP to succeed, as a Dalit party or otherwise, it must strive to reverse those damning indices (in education, health care, etc.), and quite literally keep the lights on in U.P. Mayawati as a revolutionary figure has been written into the history books. But, if the experience of the CPI(M) in West Bengal is any indication, that is never enough.

The Post-Colonial State in Our Time

2009-09-15T19:41:00.020-04:00

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Vijay Prashad, professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author, most recently, of The Darker Nations: A People's History of The Third World. Much of what he said is not strictly speaking original, but the interpretive framework he is after promises to bring together many disparate phenomena operating across the developed/developing world divide, from urban gentrification to the creation of financial bubbles. To understand the current world order, Prashad takes us back to the imagination of an alternative path, the Third World dream of liberation and self-assertion; through it, as Fanon once said, formerly colonised societies would achieve what Europe could not.

From an economic and geographic perspective, this vision is decidedly not new: we see the invocation of the old I.S.I. (import-substitution-industrialisation) model set against today's neoliberal tyranny, the South-North resource flow as "accumulation by dispossession" (Prashad quotes David Harvey on this), and so on. But in a cultural sense, the awareness of the immediate postwar aftermath as an age of new global connections, which I discussed earlier in the context of Amitav Ghosh's essay on Hindi films in the non-Western world, is a fruitful area of historical thinking that is just now coming to the fore. Prashad's focus on major state figures like Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, and on high-level events like the Bandung conference, thus serves a dual purpose: to render new cultural meanings to traditional diplomatic and political narratives (showing how these figures were important to a deep and wide movement that thought of the world differently, not just seeing them as another Cold War power bloc), and to argue that the idea of the Third World was institutionally anchored in state and transnational power (the implicit contrast is to today's fragmented, subterranean, ragtag resistances epitomised by the World Social Forum). The destruction or "assassination," in his term, of these power structures represented the real death of the dream in the late 1970s.

After his vibrant and provocative presentation, I asked Prashad a nagging question. On the one hand, he still views the "Global South" as a viable force in international relations, and he is interested in studying the developmental models and pathways of "BRIC" (Brazil-India-China) nations as an alternative to the current U.S.-dominated world order. But on the other hand, he rightly pointed out that India's current government continues to send heavy subscriptions to the IMF and is even seeking to restart the Doha round. Is the post-colonial state not now part of the very process that creates an "accumulation by dispossession"? Can it be part of a "globalising" world economy and a source of resistance to it at the same time? Prashad's answer was that elections matter and things may change. The Indian state does not essentially have one role or another, but its policies swing back and forth; therefore, it is also susceptible to influence, to the contingent democratic process. An electoral victory, for example, would presumably reconfigure the state on the world stage. Such a faith in popular democracy to triumph over large-scale structures is in many ways not traditional Marxism at all. It relies instead on forging innovative links between local resistances and state power, and not in the least on a considerable degree of optimism.

The Curious Indian Life of Archie

2009-09-06T20:17:00.003-04:00

From an outsider's perspective, it is odd to observe what appears to be a national obsession with Archie comics in India. This summer, when he proposed to brunette vixen Veronica over wholesome blonde Betty, newspapers ran story after story of analysis. The Times of India conducted a poll asking its readers, "Should Archie Marry Veronica?" 78% said No and emphatically argued the point on the comments page. Another earnest headline in DNA proclaimed, "Betty fans protest as Archie proposes to Veronica." What makes Archie so popular in India that mainstream culture so actively concerns itself with its fictional universe?

A few years ago, there were plans to "Indianise" Archie, perhaps even going to extent of clothing Veronica and Betty in saris. It was noted that the books had been selling well in India for over forty years, and had the largest circulation of any comic in English. In the Indian context, Archie takes on a range of meanings and references, which tenuously reconcile the all-American world of Riverdale High with a very different cultural milieu.

On one level, there is a certain colonial genealogy to Archie. In Aparna Sen's 36 Chowringhee Lane, elderly Anglo-Indian teacher Violet Stoneham visits her brother Eddie in a Calcutta nursing home to bring him tins of biscuits and Archie comics. Here the book itself becomes a symbol of a colonial past, pleasantly quaint yet fundamentally anachronistic. It is also a marginal relic, separated from the surrounding post-colonial cultural world of Calcutta and circulated in an intimate ceremony that memorialises the shared past of Violet and Eddie.

However, despite this highly specific use of the Archie book to suggest a vanishing past, its story is actually deeply implicated in India's post-colonial modernity. In Amit Chaudhuri's essay on America in Granta, which appeared in 2002, he recalls from his childhood "the much thumbed and perused copy, in the 'circulating library', of the Archie Comics Digest; the thin line that separated us from Riverdale." This remarkable statement asserts a connection to America in a non-official space, nurtured by the English language and a particular imagination. Chaudhuri writes that American comic books taught him how to read and "somehow entered our lives in Bombay and became indistinguishable from them." In other words, the universe of the comic book becomes a constituent part of the Indian cultural milieu into which it has been transported.The "thin line" that separates Bombay and Riverdale is finally crossed in Karan Johar's now-classic 1998 melodrama Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. This film has been acknowledged as a sort of turning point in recent Hindi cinema, marking the full bloom of the romantic comedy aimed at young, cosmopolitan audiences. The first half of the film takes place in St. Xavier's College, an ambiguously Americanised space that is part India, part Riverdale. The love triangle between Shah Rukh, Rani and Kajol has even been described as an outright Archie adaptation. What is important here is that Karan Johar deliberately chooses to reference Archie and its universe as a way to express a new modernity for India. His characters live on a stage that is only partly constructed by observing how young Indians actually behave with each other; it also uses comforting allusions and symbols of a "foreign" world that has, for the better part of the last half-century, in fact been India's own.

The Trouble with Jinnah

2009-08-22T15:36:00.014-04:00

On this topic, I will live up to the blog's title (which, by the way, is only 10% a pun based on the assumption that what I have to say is "just," and 90% straightforward, as in an honest admission that what I am offering is merely speculative). I don't know much about Pakistan, even less about Jinnah, and nothing at all about senior now-ex-BJP politician Jaswant Singh's new book on Jinnah that has caused so much controversy, because I haven't read it. From what I've heard, he has proposed that Jinnah was a sincere nationalist with a liberal, secular vision for Muslims whose best efforts at maintaining a united India were stymied by the intransigence of Congress leaders Nehru and Patel. Much has been made of the fact that such an argument at once united Congress and the BJP in outrage, and Narendra Modi banned his book in Gujarat not because he praised the creator of Pakistan but because he insulted the Gujarati hero Patel!

Why would a senior BJP leader praise Jinnah? For that matter, why did L.K. Advani, cheerleader of the Babri Masjid demolition and current head of the party who expelled Jaswant Singh, get into similar trouble four years ago for travelling to Karachi and saying nice things about the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan? The easy answer is that Jaswant is a "moderate liberal" member of the BJP who has always been interested in better relations with Pakistan, also the momentary goal of Advani on that particular trip. We can note that Singh is a scholar with a genuine interest in history who simply couldn't deny a valid explanation of Partition based on evidence (his points are not new in the literature, having been first articulated with great force and originality by Ayesha Jalal in her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman). But is there a Hindu nationalist case for Jinnah? What rhetorical moves can be made to arrive at such a position?

Here I want to repeat that I am not speaking of Jaswant Singh's beliefs per se, since I haven't read his book and don't want to put words into his mouth. He may very well be a liberal man who simply wants to build bridges; I wish to perform an imaginative exercise that would explain how Jinnah fits into a certain kind of Partition narrative.
Let's start with the fact of the division itself. The RSS and BJP have forever been utterly opposed to the very idea of Pakistan's existence. Indeed, one of the things that got Advani into hot water after he came back from Karachi was his assertion that Partition was "irreversible" and should be accepted. I read this statement, together with his comments about Jinnah being secular, as deeply melancholic. The old RSS man Advani is saying, "I don't like the fact that this country exists, but we have to deal with it, and anyway if it should have existed in the first place it would have been better off under secular Jinnah than as it turned out."
What Hindu nationalists don't like about Pakistan as it exists today is 1) its perceived Islamic fundamentalism (they obviously oppose the very notion of an Islamic state, and the threat of terrorism hangs heavy on their minds) and 2) its militarism (they perceive Pakistan not as a neighbor but as a permanent adversary). The distinction of an Islamic state vs. a state for Muslims is a subtle one, and for the average Hindutvavadi there may be no difference. For a sophisticated thinker like Jaswant and even for Advani, the "secular" promise of Jinnah, which included protection of Hindu minorities in Pakistan (Advani is a Sindhi Hindu born in Karachi), is a counterpoint to what they see as today's dangerous Pakistani state. The trick is that Pakistan itself is a story of failure, a grievous error that has ended badly for everyone (but especially for Hindu India, which now has to deal both with a problematic Muslim minority and with a troublesome Muslim state, two if you count Bangladesh). Where this Hindu nationalist thought differs from a liberal Pakistani intellectual in lamenting the difference between Jinnah's vision and reality is that, while it prefers Jinnah's secular Pakistan to actual Pakistan, the best thing of all would have been no Pakistan.

Here the second interesting twist happens, involving the attack on Nehru and Patel. Jaswant Singh himself has asked, "What part of the ‘core belief’ has been demolished by my book? What is core about Patel? He was the first leader to ban the RSS and imprison its leaders...but he didn’t ban the Muslim League.” This is perhaps the most un-subtle yet overlooked aspect of the whole story. The BJP in all its incarnations over time, from the BJS to the Janata Party, has first and foremost been suspicious of Congress-walas. To rehabilitate Jinnah is to redistribute the blame for Partition unto Nehru and Patel's shoulders, men who were actively hostile to the "right" kind of Hindu nationalism. After all, they were the ones who "let" the country fall apart and didn't "deal" with Jinnah properly.

To sum up, the feeling one gets is that there is a strand of Hindu nationalist thought that wishes more was done to prevent the creation of Pakistan, though at the cost of keeping more Muslims within a united India. This seems paradoxical, since the Hindu right has been trying for years to intimidate, and sometimes violently suppress, Muslims in India. But deep in the psychological recesses of that hateful chant aimed at the Indian Muslim, "Go to Pakistan!" lies this very frustration with India's division. "You have your state," they are saying, "now go to it."
What would have been the fate of Muslims in a united India? Do Hindu nationalists who oppose Partition believe they would have been swamped by numbers or "kept down" in their appropriate place?

More importantly, from "our" perspective (as scholars concerned with minority interests), how should we interpret the creation of Pakistan from the standpoint of what should be, in my view, the all-important question: what was/is best for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent? On the one hand, we decry Partition and its loss of life, and may wish that Muslims could have found a place in a united, secular India. But then what of Pakistan's intended purpose, as a safe space for Muslims? In the 1973 film Garam Hawa, Balraj Sahni's character is an aging Muslim shoemaker living in Agra who sees his family gradually disintegrate and, shunned, disempowered, even physically attacked at home, decides to make the move. The director, M.S. Sathyu, ends the film with the character changing his mind and staying in Agra to participate in a protest march. The conclusion affirms the possibility of a secular, socialist future in India that includes Muslims, and Sathyu never shows what happens on the other side of the border. Here Pakistan can appear as an option, a refuge from worsening conditions for Muslims in India. But the plight of the muhajir in Pakistan, as well as that country's turbulent history more generally, question such an assessment.
Pakistan is therefore a difficult subject for the historian, and there is no final verdict that can be rendered on a country so large and complex. Does it even make sense any longer to view Pakistan through the lens of "Muslims as a whole in the Indian subcontinent?" Separated by years of violence and miles of barbed wire, are Pakistani Muslims and Indian Muslims now two separate entities, like two species of Darwin's finches evolving on adjoining islands?

Empire and Nationalism Part II: Independence Day Reflections

2009-08-18T00:57:00.014-04:00

Some weeks ago I wrote about why the idea of empire was, in a sense, destined to fail in its mission to supposedly bring into being a modern, secular, developed nation-state (a more technical way of summarising the laundry list of benefits that commonly goes: railroads, parliaments, laws and stock markets). On the occasion of India's sixty-second Independence Day a slew of articles appeared offering very different points of view on the meaning of a day that symbolised the triumph of nationalism over imperialism, self-rule over paternalism, and freedom over enlightened guidance. To me, accustomed as I am both to leftist-inspired denunciations of "the state" (simmering across South Asia from Kashmir to Lalgarh) and to the smug imperialist pronunciations of conservative European and American intellectuals (simmering in the halls of major universities and Barnes & Noble bookshelves), most shocking was a piece by one Aakar Patel provocatively entitled, "The British left six decades too early":

http://www.livemint.com/2009/08/13204936/The-British-left-six-decades-t.html

None of these arguments are particularly new, and I shouldn't have been surprised that an Indian had expressed them, but I was. He says, among many other things, this:"The British left in 1947, and they left too soon. We celebrate Independence Day, but another six decades of dependence as Great Britain’s colony would have been good for us. We could have learnt how to run cities. No harm in admitting what is obvious for all to see: We cannot even manage traffic." And this: "Europeans, of course, told us who and what we were. After 3,000 years of illiteracy, we learnt of the existence of the Indus Valley civilization from John Marshall in 1924. The identity of our greatest emperor, Ashok (died 232 BC), whose lion capital is our emblem, whose wheel is on our flag, was revealed to us by James Prinsep 175 years ago." Actually, I had never heard such an overt celebration of Orientalism before, at least not by an Indian and not in the last century! Usually critics of the notion that the West wrote India's history maintain that it really wasn't true, and that there was dialogue or collaboration...never that it was true, and it's a bloody good thing too. Finally, we have: "A people who block each other and themselves need a patron."

One is tempted to castigate Patel immediately as an imperialist's stooge. But there is a carefully considered rationale behind these arguments, which at times make Nirad Chaudhuri look like a Gandhian. Judging from some of his other columns, Aakar has a strong preference to the Parsi community. He has elsewhere written, "As the Parsis leave, South Bombay will become like the rest of Bombay - brutish, undisciplined and filthy...[the British] left some of their civilisation behind and the best of it remains the possession of this great Indian community." Parsis have always occupied a strange place in the mosaic of communities in India. Wealthy and Western-oriented, they profited from British contracts from the early days of the East India Company and built up an industrial empire (the Tata family has been at its forefront from the late nineteenth-century until the present day). They have also sought to stand above the fray in times of communal conflict, as shown in Deepa Mehta's heartbreaking film Earth, when the patriarch of a Parsi family in Lahore quietly exhorts his wife and daughter to be neutral "like the Swiss." None of this should be interpreted to mean that Parsis' cosmopolitanism is somehow un-Indian or anti-national. Jamsetji Tata discussed his plan to establish the Indian Institute of Science with an enthusiastic Swami Vivekananda on a boat from Yokohama to Chicago in 1893. The father of the Indian National Congress and the man who first articulated the "drain theory" was Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi. So Aakar Patel's admiration for the West, and especially his aggressive love of classical music (which he thinks, as per another column, that other Indians can't understand), doesn't neatly align with the experience of Parsis or any other group of "modernised" Indians; rather, he has taken a cosmopolitan upbringing and mutated it into a militant political feeling. He does not wish, as the family in Earth did, to merely listen to waltzes and stay out of politics. He wants to make waltzes and clean streets and nice buildings into weapons with which to bludgeon the rest of his billion countrymen, and defend empire bravely into indefensible territory. As I've written before, the British would not have given it all up voluntarily after staying a few more decades just so they could build roads and bridges to Mr. Patel's liking.
Even so, my point is that there are different ways of seeing Independence from the perspectives of different communities. For an affluent Bombay columnist who owns a media services company, the spectacle of an independent India has been more distasteful than inspiring. We may not like it, but we have to acknowledge it, and it's a perspective with far more validity than your run-of-the-mill imperialist historian in a bow tie.

Then, I read an essay that is in many ways the exact opposite: Gopalkrishna Gandhi's meditative piece in Outlook entitled "While It Rains Rose Petals." To the author, who is the Governor of West Bengal and the Mahatma's grandson, India was once "a land of abiding hope":

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?261292

He recalls a pervading sense of optimism: "There was that ‘something’ about the Nehru years which made them precious. Drawing a word from Panditji’s own masterful Hindustani, I have often asked myself: “What was the sifat of those times? What was its quality, its inner attribute, its essential nature, that made it so reassuring?” I think it was, quite simply, imaan. The trustworthiness that went with people and their word, their good faith, their honesty." But today's widespread problems place the great democratic experiment in serious danger: "Yes, and yet, that sense of pride dims even when we see the corruption and the violence that pervades our life, when we see the growing degradation of our environment, when we big-time users of precious resources go merrily on as if they live on a different planet, not our carbon-asphyxiated one. And when we see the plight of India’s vulnerable millions, especially its women. That is when the Nehru years, those rose-petalled Independence Days, seem, suddenly, like another country." The disillusionment is a profound one, even if we discount all the arguments made against it: that it romanticises Nehruvian socialism, that some things are getting better, that Congress and sarkar and democracy are not the answer anyway. Gandhi expresses, in slightly prettier language, the same problems that trouble Aakar Patel. Things aren't working, they say! We cannot celebrate when we have so much yet to do!

But there is an ocean of difference from there on. For Patel, it was all a wasted effort and the nation's failures are evidence of nationalism's inherent failure. Nothing could be achieved without the British. For Gandhi, a certain kind of nationalism, a hopeful one with the right spirit, did and may again inspire Indians as citizens and countrymen. My own sentiments have always been deeply skeptical and resistant to nationalisms of all kinds. But can we let go of the rose-petal vision of the Indian nation, Nehru on the ramparts of the Red Fort, Ambedkar's Constitution? Ranajit Guha once wrote of the nation's "failure to come into its own." This was probably a call for a new revolution, for the excavation of subaltern resistance...but whatever it was, it too begins with that promise of the nation. Sixty-two years on, Indians still have at least the promise of Independence Day, and that should be enough to never wish to go back.

Hindi Film and the World: An Alternative Globalisation

2009-08-06T01:24:00.020-04:00

Once again, Amitav Ghosh has written an essay so thoughtful, rich and beautiful I feel compelled to react at length with my own comparatively disjointed yet (I hope) somewhat constructive thoughts. In "Confessions of a Xenophile," which appeared last year in Outlook, he puts forth something approaching a condensed vision of his entire personal and professional life, anchored in the formative experience of living in an Egyptian village in the 1980s. He begins with a revelation about Hindi films:

"My hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya – that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song – this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals. The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the fifties vintage – films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar and Babita..."

Here we have a classic case of cross-cultural exchange of the kind extensively facilitated by such products as Hindi films in many parts of the world during the 1950s and 60s- not just in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Indeed, so popular were Raj Kapoor films in my native country, Romania, that the name is still readily recognised and frequently used; for instance, reviews of Slumdog Millionaire in the newspapers referenced its hero as an archetypal "vagabond" successor of Kapoor. Of course, much was lost in translation since virtually no Hindi was spoken or understood in the many parts of the world these films reached. Thus, the 1950s Romanian crooner Luigi Ionescu recorded a version of the song "Awaara hoon" (I am a tramp) that came out through misunderstanding as "Avaramu" (it can still be widely found on the internet today under this title, and it's a safe bet almost all Eastern Europeans wouldn't know it as anything else). It's quite an amazing thing that Romanians, Russians and Egyptians were singing in Hindi words they did not know, much in the same way so many of the world's teenagers today ape American pop songs without speaking English. The phenomenal worldwide success of Hindi films at this time was a different kind of globalisation, deeply tied to a specific set of political changes in the postwar era. Ghosh explains,

"Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War. It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers - a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism. These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased."

There is much to discuss here. First, as a point of historiography we can see the organising principles behind Ghosh's tendency in both his fiction and non-fiction to explore the connections between people and places in a pan-Asian or Indian Ocean-centred arc. Thus, he has written movingly and with equal sensitivity about Egypt, the Gulf states, India, Burma, and Cambodia. Historians are nowadays setting their sights on these kinds of "comparative" and "regional" histories, but for clarity of purpose and beauty of prose none can match Ghosh. Secondly, he provides the key institutional context for understanding the spread of a cultural product. Hindi films with Raj Kapoor were not popular in Egypt or Romania because they were socialist (though the affinity of the Nehruvian ethic with the political aspirations of these other nation-states was certainly a factor). Their populism was, if not subversive of the state, certainly not dependent upon it. As Ravi Vasudevan notes, popular Hindi cinema appealed to a "mass public which lies beyond the borders of institutions legitimated by the state," and thus could "provide a distinctive route for the social imaginary." The manner of its translation abroad should not be read as a mere extension of relations between states but as a true globalisation: the spread of words, ideas, images and ways of seeing the world across vast numbers of people in many places at the same time.
Naturally, this included political ideas, and once again we are not speaking exclusively of state structures. The transnational popularity of leaders like Nehru and Nasser alluded to by Ghosh was widespread, and the sentiment is not entirely dead even today. Earlier this year, I was in an electronics store run by an older Egyptian fellow in Berkeley, just off of Telegraph Avenue. I was buying a converter to use with my laptop in England, where I was going to do research for my thesis at the British Library. The man asked me what I was studying, and I said imperialism. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed, "Do you know who the leader of Egypt was after the British left?" "Yes, Nasser." He continued with glee, "Do you remember what he did to the British? He stuck their nose in the mud!" That the Suez incident of 1956 should evoke such a passionate reaction in 2009 from someone who could barely have been a boy at the time is, if anything, a powerful reminder of the persistence with which the non-aligned moment lives on in people's minds.

Today's globalisation is of a fundamentally different kind; Ghosh refers to the alliance of "capital + empire," with fundamentalism thrown in as the third pillar of the new world order. The changes can be easily tracked in Hindi cinema. Rochona Majumdar writes, "In the six decades since the country’s independence, inaugural prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist, populist government, rooted in socialist ideals, has given way to neoliberalism and globalisation. On the screen, this evolution meant the end of the category known as 'the people'" exemplified by Raj Kapoor films. Thus,

"To Bollywood songwriters in the 1950s and ’60s, city streets were playful and teeming with possibilities. Albeit idealized, their depictions animated a then-true national identity: in 'innumerable' songs, Majumdar says, 'you see the dream of socialist India come to life.' As the global economy arrived at India’s shores in the 1980s, however, the collective people disappeared from Bollywood screens. The iconic city street darkened, becoming a 'contested space,' she says, where people from different religions, castes, and professions—criminal or otherwise—strove for dominance. Bollywood itself splintered, producing different films for distinct audiences. India’s wealthy diaspora saw movies in which characters from large, affluent families fall in love and get married, their weddings setting the stage for grand musical sequences. Often these films, which emphasize individual—rather than universal—experiences, are set abroad in places like Switzerland, Egypt, or New Zealand. These are the films foreigners consider typical Bollywood fare, and their popularity has inspired Hollywood and other film industries to use Bollywood conventions, directors, and stars for movies like Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, and Bride and Prejudice."

While Majumdar makes some great observations about the use of space (the changing meanings of the street and the choice of filming locations), what is most important here is the particular kind of globalisation processes Hindi films participate in. In the 1950s, a self-consciously nationalist Indian cultural form resonated with foreign audiences. Today, the mainstream Hindi film is a fragmented product that is slowly being woven into a truly global tapestry of interchangeable symbols. Dancing in the Alps or under the pyramids, surfing on the beach in Australia, partying in nightclubs and so on are the common aspirations of the moneyed "good life" driven by notions once viewed as typically American and Western European. It is not a question of recovering the "Indianness" of films in danger of being "Westernised," but of recognising that such categories are themselves rapidly becoming obsolete.

In parallel, the rise of the Hindu right in the 1990s and the prospect of communal violence has provoked the most sustained attempt by the Hindi film industry to address the relationship between religion and nationalism since the first few decades after the independence. Noted filmmaker Shyam Benegal speaks of a revival in recent years of "hugely successful films like Lagaan which equate an inclusive secular unity with nationalism." Other films that have appeared since then that explore urban life in contemporary India, including Rang de Basanti and Mumbai Meri Jaan, feature explicit plot lines revolving around the suspicion and hostility between Hindu and Muslim characters that is happily resolved in the end. Unlike the old days, however, when censor boards would not allow any impression of communal tension to make it to the screen, the new crop of films are didactic without being unrealistic, as they often begin by openly acknowledging mistrust and conflict. Many of these films perhaps owe more to their Nehruvian predecessors than to the homogenising tendencies of our globalisation. And Hindi films remain popular abroad, though offering a much different kind of entertainment than they once did.

The Lives of Documents

2009-07-17T04:14:00.007-04:00

Recently, the Indian government has announced with much fanfare that former Infosys chief Nandan Nilekani will be put in charge of a project to introduce a national biometric ID card. The advantages, laid out in reports from publications like the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, seem appealingly obvious: better provision of services to the poor, especially migrants, ending the confusing system of local identifications subject to state-level corruption and "vote-bank" politics, and above all domestic security from potential terrorists (read: infiltrating Pakistanis). Most of the reader comments submitted to the above named papers on this story are celebratory, viewing the project as a great step forward for India's development. There is also, however, a troubling reminder of the process by which states come to know their citizens: the Economist article, for example, is titled "Peering into their murky world." Gathering information in order to make individuals legible to the state is one of the first principles of what Foucault termed "governmentality," and much historical research over the past few decades has explored just how complicated this task becomes in colonial and post-colonial societies.

India has a long history, dating back to the Raj, of government attempts to identify, classify and record its population. Previously fluid identities (of ethnicity, caste, class, religion) must be fixed, an often impossible or hopelessly contentious procedure. The ostensibly impartial bureaucratic spirit instead produces its own logic of distinctions and exclusions. This is most evident when ascertaining citizenship in the post-Partition states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Thousands of people are caught between official classifications, their families divided and their identities, loyalties and sentiments of belonging uncertain. Within India, a country that contains a sizable minority population (mostly Muslims), the constant fear of an "enemy within" makes the spectre of Pakistani infiltration all the more effective as a justification for the project of knowing the population. The imperative of domestic security is only partly about terrorism; it also solves the problem of potentially disloyal Muslims and re-defines "Indianness" as something more restrictive. It is therefore not surprising that the ID card scheme was first promoted by L.K. Advani and the BJP, and in the wake of the 2002 state-sponsored massacres of Muslims in Gujarat, trusting governments to be responsible stewards of personal information and not use them toward communal ends is not a given. This mechanism of limiting citizenship and rights is also available for use against illegal or undesired immigrants, threatening further divisions and conflict in the wider South Asian region.

On the other hand, the state's attempt to peer into the "murky world" inherently suffers from enormous difficulties. Of India's 1.2 billion people, those most immediately targeted by the ID card scheme, the poor and migrants who currently lack documentation, are also the hardest to identify and track. Searching for their identity involves actually bestowing documentation upon them for the first time, initiating a confusing and troubled relationship between pieces of paper (or plastic) and the sense of who a person is. During the late colonial period, the need to certify one's status for the purposes of political representation or employment led to lasting anxieties about belonging among marginal groups (like Anglo-Indians on the railways). The document is not a neutral record but a powerful intervention that fundamentally changes the way people perceive themselves and their relationship to the community. The universalising mission of the new ID card likewise threatens not to erase local or regional divisions but to further fracture the personal and political consciousness of those living on the territory of India.

Two of the best books on South Asian history to have appeared in recent years, both as part of the "Cultures of History" series from Columbia University Press, deal with the themes discussed here. Both approach certain modern bureaucratic practices across the colonial/post-colonial divide as living forces intruding into and remaking the most intimate aspects of people's lives. Vazira Zamindar's The Long Partition looks, in part, at the formation of the passport system as the means by which the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan sought to resolve claims of belonging. The stories of divided families, "stateless" individuals, and the long, unfinished process of fixing identities to the nation-state reveal the difficulty and ultimately the violence of such a project. Laura Bear's Lines of the Nation discusses the ambiguous role documentation plays in Anglo-Indians' understanding of themselves: forced by the colonial railway bureaucracy to provide stringent proof of their familial origins, they continue to the present day to be haunted by a lack of (written) evidence that may challenge their status. The struggle of Anglo-Indians to maintain their group identity in the face of an uncertain past and their precarious position in modern Indian society reveals the unforeseen results of centralised bureaucracies attempting to impartially record and classify. Zamindar's and Bear's remarkable historical contributions remind us that documents, whether passports, railway archives, or biometric ID cards, have many lives beyond their role as carriers of information. Their production is an act with serious consequences, and we would do well to heed them.

The Forgotten Orientalist: Louis Malle

2009-07-10T19:28:00.015-04:00

Of all the famous explorations of India by Westerners, from Kim to Slumdog Millionaire, none has been so undeservedly ignored by post-colonial scholarship as Louis Malle's epic seven-part 1969 documentary L'Inde fantome, and its accompanying theatrical release Calcutta. Their recent release in a Criterion Collection DVD box set, with crystal-clear restored picture and English subtitles, promises to remove this extraordinary document from the arthouse circuit and bring it to the attention of more students of Indian history, especially in the classroom. A rigorous analysis of Malle's project has so far been the domain of film enthusiasts, but viewing it beyond the narrow lens of artistic technique reveals a complex and contradictory view of India at a particular point in its history as an independent nation-state.

Malle's extended and multifaceted look at India, from urban poverty to social unrest to the remote concerns of its tribal populations, and touching all the hot topics -religion, caste, class, gender- must be judged both as a measure of its historical work (how it reveals a time and a place) and as a literary device that problematises the relationship between a society and an outside observer. In this respect Malle is surely an Orientalist, a Westerner obsessed with exploring India who continually veers between confidence and despair, condescension and sympathy, sincere effort and authorial laziness. Unlike other Orientalists, however, he is unusually open about his frustrations; his ramshackle narration does not shy away from discussing his struggles at coming to terms with what he sees before him. This is perhaps what makes these documentaries endearing even when the viewer may vehemently disagree or question Malle's approach. Even so, one would have to admit that Malle is always better with the historical particularities than with the generalisations and attempts to extract meaning from the pictures.

The first episode of L'Inde fantome, shown as a miniseries on television, is by far the worst and sets up an unpromising frame. Malle's conceit was that he would let the camera guide him, and he would act more as an observer than as an interpreter. His lack of familiarity with India, especially his choice to travel without translators speaking local languages and apparently without doing much background reading, is a deliberate choice to get at the "real" India. He starts out by emphatically rejecting all the contributions from the middle and upper classes, whom he derisively calls "Anglicised Indians," casting them as inauthentic. Government officials, academics, and anyone who speaks in good English is automatically distrusted and dismissed. The problem with this approach is that first, these groups play a vital role in shaping the realities Malle sees around him, and secondly that he does not interview many of the other Indians anyway, and when he does they speak mostly in English! Malle's prejudices lessen as the series moves on, and we get to hear a lot from businessmen, party leaders, and a few artists. One of the strongest aspects of the film from a historical point of view are the uneasy interviews with famous figures like Jyoti Basu and Bal Thackeray. Malle's suspicious questions do not give them a free pass; indeed, especially in Thackeray's case (then a young, charismatic figure on the rise), letting them speak is enough to allow the viewer to form a decisive opinion about what's going on. Thackeray proudly displays his aggressive communalism, and Malle doesn't need a voice-over to paint him as a dangerous force in Indian politics.
But it is the subalterns who suffer the most in Malle's presentation. Peasants, urban crowds, beggars, tribals, sadhus, and especially women are viewed from a distance, as a spectacle or an object of particular interest. They look into the camera, and the camera looks back, recording silently. They rarely speak, and when they do it is in broken English or with the help of an unknown translator. We never find out where Malle gets his information about who the subject of a particular scene is and what he or she is doing. How do we know how much this bricklayer earns? How do we know which caste this woman is from? Malle of course doesn't need to detail every step of the filming process, but his narration (recorded after he had returned to France) appears as a detached account that is part fact, part imagination and conjecture. For example, when Malle admits that his peaceful utopian view of fishermen on the banks of the sea is disrupted by a banal argument over the price of fish, he doesn't go further by telling us why the people are arguing. He films on and on, the women yelling at each other in the vernacular without translation. The viewer gets the point: the endless interplay between the fantasy of India and the mundane, but Malle is still secretly afraid of the mundane and stops short of letting the viewer go too far into it. Some part of the scene must still remain mysterious and fundamentally incomprehensible.

Malle's Orientalism is dominated by his perceived inability to ultimately "know" India. This is most obvious in the extended Bharatanatyam segment in Part 2. After days of uninterrupted filming of dancers practicing, Malle is convinced that the essence of India is beyond him and all outside observers. Through their movements, the dancers express a quality of "Indianness" that is only known to them and cannot be accessed from the outside. His obvious proof consists of two white dancers, who (Malle thinks) are too clumsy and can learn only by rote, never achieving the natural grace of the Indian students. Here, on the one hand Malle is an atypical Orientalist because he respects Indian culture and does not presume to dissect it, categorise it or manipulate it. On the other hand, what could be more typically Orientalist than advocating such an essential separation of the human experience? Malle is categorically saying that learning the mythology, practicing the dance, speaking the language, and any other kind of epistemic activity is bound to fail. This perspective deeply influences how Malle approaches almost all his subjects, but becomes especially evident in the villages. When discussing caste hierarchy or religious practice, Malle gives a few limited explanations, but always retreats into the impossibility of ever knowing why people behave the way they do. They are Indians, we are Westerners. They think differently than us, and view the world differently. We can observe, record, comment but not understand.
In one way, this is the inevitable outcome of Malle's choice to film from a distance and not to try and know India in the first place. This may be a well-meaning attempt to prevent his own prejudices and investigative techniques from corrupting the desired "real," but it is more often due to a sense of fear and uncertainty that he is inherently incapable of knowing India. In this respect, Malle's documentaries are worth careful study to tease out the ambiguities of the outsider in India. This is rich literary ground.
Historically speaking, this ambiguity is more harmful than interesting. Malle demonstrates several times the ability to make subtle and unique observations about how post-colonial Indian society works, on topics that far too little scholarship has focused on. For example, in the first episode, he notes that mainstream Indian newspapers do not report on violence or rape. This quick point, derived undoubtedly from comparing the Indian press with the one in France, can lead us to ask a thousand questions: about patriarchal norms, a "tacit consent" to construct an information flow that puts some facts in the public sphere while concealing others, or about the distance between the urban literate newspaper reader and the rural site of certain events. Finally, we can ask how this has changed in the past 40 years since Malle's documentary (the observation would certainly not hold true today). In the fifth episode, this theme is briefly touched upon again when Malle notes that few crimes against Dalits are reported in the press, and that it only takes a policeman or minor official to break the "law of silence" (Malle's term) for these acts to see the light of day. Now we also have a glimpse of the middlemen on the information chain, and the complex position they find themselves in. These topics are severely underdeveloped in studies of post-colonial India, for justifiable reasons of sensitivity and obscurity. Malle's outsider view casually and almost unconsciously brings them to light.

But in the end, Malle cannot transcend the central contradiction of his project, between the desire to explain and the inability to know. He spends much of the seven episodes talking about economic exploitation, showing the power of rich landlords and urban capitalists, the proletarianisation of peasants, and the struggle to organise for better working conditions. He interviews prominent Marxists and assists at major demonstrations (including a striking student riot dispersed by tear gas and gunfire in Calcutta). Malle is sympathetic to the oppressed and speaks the language of class, as would be expected of a French intellectual in 1968. But despite his confident and fair economic analysis of India's problems, Malle slips back into the language of peasants as "fatalistic," and incapable of change. In the very last scene, Malle offers what is perhaps the most adventurous explanation he is capable of: that the India of tradition from time immemorial is changing into an India beset by the recognisable economic woes of the modern world. The tyranny of caste becomes the tyranny of class. It's a simplistic judgment that ignores the many ways in which caste and class have interacted and co-existed, and how their relationship evolves across time and space. In the end, when it came to giving his film a title, Malle chose to admit that finding the "real" India was impossible. For him it remained merely a phantom.

The Empire Debate: Thinking at an Angle

2009-07-04T22:18:00.015-04:00

I may be seven years too late on this one. In the months after 11 September 2001, when the United States had finished bombing Afghanistan and was gearing up for another round in Iraq, the word "empire," with its many meanings, past, present and possible, was seemingly on everyone's lips. When Donald Rumsfeld caustically stated, "We don't do empire," the floodgates were opened and historians poured into the breach. The historical balance sheet of previous empires, which almost exclusively meant our apparent predecessors the British (with a few token references to the schoolboy debater's favourite retreat, the good old Romans!), were furiously calculated from both the Left and the Right with a view to answering a surprising question: not merely whether empire was good or bad, but should the United States become one? And if it was one already, should it continue, or even try harder, to be one?

The arguments against the position that the U.S. has an imperial role to play in today's world have been made ad nauseam, and I have no intention of repeating them here. They usually involve a simple rhetorical tactic: directly rebut the apologists' claims that previous empires (read: the British) had done "good things." Thus, the critics started listing a whole lot of "bad things," from famines to massacres to institutionalised racial and economic discrimination. This calculus went back and forth until the only thing a reasonable person who hadn't yet made up their mind about this could conclude was that empires had done both good and bad things, and picking a side was by and large a question of political preference.
An altogether more interesting thing to do is to take the imperial apologists' claims at face value and see how they measure up to their own promises; in other words, to dissect the internal logic of the argument itself.

Summarised quickly, the "good things" the British Empire gave to the world include economic development (the shining example being India's railroad system), parliamentary democracy (plus the rule of law and notions of citizenship and liberty), and some cultural fun stuff like the English language and team sports (cricket). All of these things make it easy for countries like India to be part of a modern, globalising world. Now, if we agree that this is indeed good, the question then becomes, what is the role of empire in the process?
One ingenious critique of the idea of empire was suggested by Amitav Ghosh in the essay "Imperial Temptations," published at the height of the debate in 2003. Empire as a way of bringing good things to the world was bound to fail because it "cannot be the object of universal human aspirations." In other words, not everyone can have an empire, which relies on a permanent hierarchy of ruler and ruled. Ghosh says the idea of a nation-state, whatever its failings, at least holds a generalisable promise: that everyone, everywhere, can be a citizen with equal rights in his or her country. He also points out that empires tend to inevitably expand, leading to overreach and conflict. This is a useful rebuttal to the notion that the U.S. should be the world overlord lest we all descend into a Dark Age of petty squabbling states; instead, hegemonic U.S. power is likely to strain its own resources and give rise to a host of competitors large (China) and small (various terrorist networks and rogue states) all striving to bring down the giant. Perhaps this point has only become clearer since 2003.

But even if empire is a rotten way to get it done, what of those good things? The internal logic of the argument "Empire brought good things therefore empire is good" is fundamentally flawed for a simple reason. All those good things can be fully enjoyed only after the empire is gone! For example, Indians can use their railroads today because the British are no longer there to impose the many restrictions they were built under. Saying this is not necessarily agreeing with the "drain of wealth" theory. On balance, however small the advantage, it's better for Indians to use all the railroads for their own purposes all of the time. Next, parliamentary democracy. Only after a political independence movement that created a separate nation can Indians have constitutions and elections. And so on, until we are left with only cricket (and maybe not even that, considering how deeply Indianised the sport has become).
The conclusion here is that empire needed a powerful counter-force (for example, anti-colonial nationalism) to dissolve itself and spread its good things to the very people it had meant to help all along. An apologist could counter that the British Empire was not brought down by nationalism but by its own weakness and lack of will. Thus, if India and the rest were colonised some more, perhaps a few more decades or centuries until all the good things were in place, the empire could have left of its own accord and its subjects would be better off. This ignores quite forcefully the last thirty or so years of the British Empire: political reforms in India, for example, were not handed down smoothly according to some beneficent master-plan but fought for tooth-and-nail by nationalists (who realised themselves only after many years and internal squabbles that they wanted to be independent). The point is that nobody knew when the end would come, let alone planned it. Without resistance of any kind, it is conceivable that the British Empire would have gone on forever with less of the good things and more of the bad.
This brings me to the final nail in the coffin of the pro-empire argument. Frederick Cooper has brilliantly written in his book Colonialism in Question that when the British and French empires "tried to make themselves more forward-looking economically and more legitimate politically, they could not face the escalation of claim-making their actions encouraged, the tensions that followed from their economic interventions, and the high cost of making an empire meaningful as a unit of belonging." In other words, when empire tried to bring more good things it found the demand so overwhelming it had to give it all up fast. Or, as I've put it above, empire required its own demise to complete its mission, which means that empire is ultimately unable to do the job.

There is one more line of reasoning that could yet salvage the empire: counterfactuals. If empires are doomed to fail, is it not better that we had them for a while, considering the alternatives? Wasn't the British Empire better for its colonies than the German or the Russian? Here there are multiple confusions and nuances. First of all, critics do not condemn the British Empire because it was British but because it was an Empire. The very phenomenon of European imperialism is in question. Secondly, it follows that we cannot imagine a scenario in which only the British would not start an empire. A reasonable historical counterfactual would instead suppose that if one European power did not expand, neither would the others. The conditions that gave rise to imperialism (technological progress, maritime exploration, the interconnected European economy with its industrialising tendencies) gave rise to many empires, often because of competition with each other (i.e. the British became powerful in the late 18th century in large part because they had overtaken the Dutch, then the French). Indeed, as Amitav Ghosh reminds us, if the mark of success for a nation is having an empire, then all nations who aspire to success will want one.
The only counterfactual that remains is, if Europe had not expanded, would the rest of the world be better off evolving on its own, India going forth from the Mughals and so on. This question is impossible to answer, because modernity and empire happened to have progressed together. England in the 18th century, if you didn't know what the future would bring, was not a much better place to live in than Mughal India. And when living conditions and economic development and all that began to improve, they did so in metropole and colony at the same time, to the disadvantage of the colonies. Scholars dreaming up "alternative modernities" can do so at their leisure. Like it or not, the modern world and empires are inseparable. It only remains to be seen if this still holds true.

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

2009-06-12T21:44:00.016-04:00

A few days ago, I was sitting on a bench in a small park behind the Jama Masjid in Delhi on a beautiful afternoon. I was talking to a young man named Mohammed Khan, a schoolteacher from the town of Jhansi in U.P. I looked up at a martial statue in the middle of the park and asked him who the figure was. Subhas Chandra Bose, came the reply. I asked my new friend what he thought of him. He nodded energetically, "Very great man." "You are a Muslim," I said, "and he is a Bengali Hindu." It didn't matter one bit. Netaji was a great man to all Indians because he fought for his country.

This conversation reminded me of another talk I had with a friend in Berkeley, who astutely complained that the problem he had with the Subaltern School historians, many of them Bengali bhadralok (I assume he was speaking of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty et.al.), was their romanticization and glorification of violence. This meant they were prone to expressing at least some degree of affection toward the ongoing Maoist Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh, but also admired that far more mainstream revolutionary, Subhas Chandra Bose (conveniently ignoring his alliance with the Axis and his un-democratic aspirations for India). In one sense, Netaji and the Naxalites are far apart on any spectrum, whether political, ideological or even from the standpoint of Bengali history. The Naxalites are leading a peasant revolt that seeks to destroy that stratum of middle-class life and culture so carefully built up by the bhadralok over the last two hundred years. They are even fiercely against the Communist government of West Bengal, who they accuse of readily capitulating to bourgeois interests (the Nandigram massacre of two years ago represents only the most visible and shocking aspect of the growing divide between peasants and the CPI(M) elite in Calcutta). Bose, while not entirely de-coupled from a kind of authoritarian socialist philosophy by his Axis alliance (a marriage of convenience), represents something totally different: he was the last vessel into which the bhadralok placed their hopes and dreams, the final attempt to rescue the leadership of the nationalist movement from its westward drift to Gandhian ashrams in Gujarat and Nehru's parliamentarianism in New Delhi. Bose, an educated, cosmopolitan, and charismatic leader, shares with the low-class Naxalite agitators only the principle of an ethics of organised violence as the solution to a political claim.
Indeed, Bose is often viewed as Gandhi's counterpart, the other side of the conventional wisdom that India's freedom was won by non-violence. He is also the alternate examplar to emerge from the freedom movement. A recent obituary in the Economist of the Tamil Tiger leader, V. Prabhakaran, tellingly noted that his hero was "not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose."

While having these thoughts, I happened to be reading Ramachandra Guha's collection of essays, The Last Liberal. Guha is one of the most (and few) popular historians in India, and he has undergone something of a transformation in his scholarly career. He made his name by writing a detailed sociological analysis of Chipko, the famed environmental protest movement in the Himalayas. This great book, hitting all the right notes in the "history from below" category, gave way to an increasing focus on individuals and a shift to politics Guha himself describes as "liberal." Aside from withering criticism of Marxist academics and the Communist political establishment in Calcutta, Guha calls himself as a Nehruvian and tries to establish the Congress leadership of newly independent India as the "Founding Fathers" of a democratic, secular and liberal country. This is all well and good, but it raises the most interesting questions when considering the relationship of the historian to social protest and resistance.

For one thing, as Guha points out, historians often confuse their scholarly methodology with their political beliefs. Someone who works on peasant rebellions in Bengal is quite likely to be sympathetic to the Naxalites, while someone who condemns the Indian Left is more likely to view history not as struggle and resistance but as other kinds of narratives, most notably a modernising and democratising trajectory that views violence and "identity politics" as obstacles to be overcome. For the Subalternists and those who Guha quite uncharitably calls "so-called feminists," it's hard to be ideological allies with bands of terrorists who have repeatedly expressed their desire to do away with intellectuals altogether. For those Subalternists working in well-funded academic establishments in the United States, the contradiction is even more glaring. On the other hand, it's hard to be a convincing critic of caste and patriarchy while reflexively reacting against any form of political organisation of the oppressed classes. Guha may have activist clearance on the environmental front, but he dismisses Dalit parties and the "so-called feminists" all too easily.

This brings us to the Indian election of 2009. The defeat handed to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in U.P. by the Congress was seen by many Western-oriented, modernising observers as a defeat of the "politics of caste" by the benign and rational considerations of economic development. Mayawati, while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster. Lalu Prasad, formerly chief minister of Bihar and railway minister, is a garish thug, who presided over the most backward and violent of all Indian states. The greatest difficulty lies here for the historian: as well-meaning and anti-caste as one can be, there is simply no way to justify or even excuse the rise of a man like Lalu in Indian politics. No amount of caste oppression can adequately explain the arrogance and venality of such a figure. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain. Dismissing them as "identity politics" isn't very useful when caste or regional identity in India cannot simply be made to go away by being wished away, or not thought of at all.

The historian of India today has few options. One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to forge this happy compromise and label oneself as "liberal," more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.

The Self-Importance of Self-Criticism

2009-05-03T20:08:00.007-04:00

Perhaps because of the Great Recession, or as an inevitable consequence of globalisation's long-term restructuring of every aspect of our lives (when, as Marx once put it, "all that is solid melts into air"), it has become fashionable to suggest that the university system in the United States is due for a fundamental re-structuring. Most of the animus seems to be directed at humanities education as increasingly "useless" and "irrelevant" in an economic climate where tenured faculty positions are fast disappearing. On the external side, the argument (put forth with some force a few years ago by Thomas Friedman) that the U.S. lags behind Asia in scientific education is a valid policy concern. But it is the internal criticism that has been gathering steam: by this I mean academics turning an introspective, self-critical look on their profession and its limitations for the future.

The most high-profile shot across the bow was fired by Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor in his recent New York Times op-ed entitled (provocatively enough) "End the University as We Know It."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html

To those of us thinking about an academic career, some of his arguments are all too familiar. He correctly notes the oversupply of underpaid, debt-ridden graduate students vying for jobs that do not exist. His attacks of the tenure system and increasing specialisation (which means that young scholars produce, in Taylor's view, obscure books that do not sell) are entering dodgy territory. His solutions, especially his thematic interdisciplinary re-organisation of educational institutions around problem areas like "Water" are in the domain of the fantastic. Though Taylor gets points for creativity, his proposed system would eliminate the opportunity to specialise in a particular discipline that lies at the very basis of interdisciplinarity. A scholar not properly and rigorously trained in history and anthropology can have little to add to a colleague in the mathematics or physical sciences. If everyone is a bit of a poet and a bit of a biologist, they end up being nothing much at all.

It would be easy to take the route of defending humanities education by pointing to the intrinsic worth of "developing the mind," or stressing the transferrability of "critical thinking" skills to the business or policy domain. But this would be a cop-out precisely because it entails a complete surrender to the argument that humanities are useless, by making them either a "Chicken soup for the soul" that cannot be taken seriously in an environment of difficult budget choices, or admitting that the only way a humanities major can be useful is by taking a job in government or business.
Taylor and other critics have named the problem: the humanities do not engage with the wider social world. But the pressure to change should not only be on universities. Why not demand that policymakers, businessmen and NGOs pay greater attention to those obscure books that do not sell? Would not our foreign policy, for instance, be different if people in Washington read less popular histories and simplified security reports and engaged instead with serious in-depth studies of the people of a region (like the Middle East or South Asia)? But the process of translation is tricky. The world of academic writing requires a sense of open-endedness and refusal to prescribe, while the world of policy calls for immediate action. There is a window for dialogue, but historians and anthropologists must be left alone to do their job as observers of our complex world, not transformed into task-oriented bureaucrats.

To return to the crisis of academia, in an even more introspective critique known to many students currently applying to graduate school, Prof. William Pannapacker writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education with some categorical advice: "Just Don't Go."

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm

This is an impassioned plea that is much easier to accept because it is written to help save thousands of unfortunate souls from a life of misery. Once again, much of what Pannapacker says is absolutely spot-on, particularly his astute observation that many students who go to graduate school do so because of esoteric concerns like their "special interest" and "love" for a subject, their refusal to venture out into the real world, their need for validation, their romanticism of scholarly life, and the limits to their skills. His assessment of the declining number of secure jobs and the massive competition that results (thousands of applicants for one position amounting to nothing more than a lottery) is sobering and realistic. His solution is far simpler than Taylor's: unless you have an independent source of income or reliable connection, don't get a PhD.

The problem with all these criticisms is their exaggerated self-importance. Pannapacker is doing precisely what he accuses his naive graduate students of doing: making an emotional argument based on idealistic, insider notions about what academia is. Teaching at a university is simply a job like any other. Garbagemen, foresters, baristas, taxi drivers and call centre operators do not go around on the Internet posting long-winded diatribes about the state of their profession. Those of us who are going into academia certainly need to be, and are being, made aware of the enormous financial and lifestyle risks of such a choice. But we should understand that there are many jobs that are far worse and far less economically secure in a service-based economy. Farmers, manufacturers or people without college degrees in the United States are in an arguably worse position, not to mention everyone in the developing world trying to scrape a living for their families by diversification, immigration and other means. The trials and tribulations of an unemployed PhD. are painful but not catastrophic. Taylor and Pannapacker grew up in an age when academics enjoyed a comparatively more important social position, and their expectations for the profession (as well as their assumptions of students' expectations) reflect this. The future generation of academics already knows better.

Five Life-Changing Undergraduate Readings

2009-02-15T18:11:00.010-05:00

As I rapidly approach the end of my undergraduate education, I look back at what I've accomplished academically in four years at Berkeley and I am tempted to conclude that it's all been rather mundane: semester followed by semester in an indistinguishable haze of half-completed readings, "winged" finals and papers, and beer-soaked celebrations.

There were, however, moments of genuine clarity and learning, when my perspective on the world shifted and I could suddenly think in a new way about a certain subject. I've thought of five assigned readings from my classes so far that have been able to accomplish this, in however small a measure. I do not include the many fascinating books and articles I've read for research or outside interest inspired by my studies, which would be far too many.

1) Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Ed. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen. Trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995). Read for Letters & Science 40: The Soviet Experience, Prof. Irina Paperno (Spring 2006).
This collection of diaries is a remarkable insight into the minds of ordinary Soviet citizens living during the years of Stalin's Terror. What is most surprising about these fragments of memory is how much the official ideologies of the state were a living force in people's daily lives. The most shocking example is that of Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, a student who earnestly tries to become the "new man" and struggles through some unsuccessful attempts at getting a girl. In his clumsy yet charming words the glorious visions of Stalinist propaganda meet the banal facets of everyday life.

2) Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 1999). Read for History 114B: Modern South Asia, Prof. Eugene Irschick (Fall 2007).
Indian women have been traditionally conceptualised by the West either as hopelessly sensuous and sexual or as repressed and traditional, in a perverse dichotomy borne of a heady brew of Orientalist, colonial, patriarchal and other nasty discourses. Puri's work is based on actual interviews with contemporary women, talking about their sexual lives and the challenges they face, from pleasing their husbands to understanding what it means to be an "Indian" woman in the 21st century.

3) Violent Environments. Ed. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts (Cornell University Press, 2001). Selections read for ESPM 168: Political Ecology, Prof. Nancy Peluso (Spring 2008).
This collection of essays takes on dominant assumptions of environmentalist thinking, by debunking the idea of natural scarcity as a driver of conflict and challenging the violence of capitalist enclosures and conservation measures. Perhaps the most interesting piece is by James McCarthy, who does something completely unique in academia: applies the analytical tools of political ecology, normally used to defend local resource control by Third World indigenous peoples against big bad Western environmentalists, to the First World case of the Wise Use movement in North America.

4) Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Political Life (Knopf, 2007). Read for Public Policy 103: Wealth & Poverty, Prof. Robert Reich (Spring 2008).
The main reason why this book makes the list is that having Reich as a Professor is one of the small yet incredibly rewarding perks of being a Berkeley student. What he says is not particularly original or controversial, but he has been able to express in clear language some basic truths of our age: that the economy has undergone a fundamental shift in the last thirty years so that I am now a "symbolic analyst," that corporations have no morality, and that we all have choices to make as consumers and citizens. The fact that I was taking Reich's class in the year of Obama's election and the beginning of the economic crisis makes it that much more of a timely and unforgettable read.

5) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005). Read for History 280U: Histories of the British Empire, Profs. Thomas Metcalf and James Vernon (Fall 2008).
Since I only read the first chapter, I hesitated to include it on this list. But Cooper touches on what is perhaps the most important concern animating my current scholarly interests: the tension between resisting the modernity of colonialism and the fact that colonised people often appealed to "Western" or "Enlightenment" notions of rights, citizenship and justice to make claims. Cooper uses the example of West Africa under French rule, but similar arguments have been made by Indian historians like Sumit Sarkar who have been very inspirational to me outside of my undergraduate curriculum.

Democracy and Popular Protest in India

2008-12-28T18:05:00.012-05:00

Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of last month's attacks in Mumbai was not the sudden realisation by many in the West that India, as the world's largest democracy, was an ally worth standing by far more so than our friend for so many decades, Pakistan. There are serious questions on a large geo-political scale that need asking, but they are part of the ebb and flow of statecraft in South Asia and will not find easy answers soon.

No, what is downright amazing is a less-reported story that, following a wave of popular protests over the handling of the attacks by the Indian government, the Home Minister and national security adviser resigned. The BBC says "hundreds of people took to the streets" in a show of demanding accountability for the government's failure to protect its citizens:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7757122.stm

Reading this story from the U.S., where the parallel with 9/11 has been pushed repeatedly by an unimaginative media, one is struck by the incongruity of such a response: after all, when their country was attacked, why did Indians not rally around their leaders and give Manmohan Singh a 90% approval rating, as George W. Bush was honoured seven years ago? The answer lies, shockingly for Westerners accustomed to believing that their variant of "democracy" is the highest stage of political development, in the truly substantive nature of Indian democracy. The Indian public sphere is not content to shore up the establishment in a show of good faith and solidarity, as the docile and ill-informed American public did. No, the supposedly flawed and backward Indian democracy produced a textbook response to the failure of its government. Where were the masses of people in the streets demanding to know what the Bush administration knew, and did, about terrorism in the year before 9/11? Why was that infamous P.D.B. of August 2001 entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S." not burned in effigy by angry mobs on the streets of New York, Cleveland, and Omaha? And why, if Bush and his national security team presided over the most devastating attack on American soil in history, were they furthermore given carte blanche on their judgment in starting a war?

The answer lies in different traditions of democracy in the U.S. and India, indeed in the differential basis of the nation-state. The U.S. government is an entrenched and hegemonic apparatus that presides over an apathetic and generally politically uninvolved consumer society. In India, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has brilliantly pointed out in a recent essay entitled "'In the Name of Politics': Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India," traditions of popular protest by workers, peasants, and other marginalised groups survive from the early 20th-century struggles of the independence movement to challenge the nation-state. Nehru was opposed to any kind of "unrest," believing it to be incompatible with a "civilised" and mature democracy (where tamer forms of accountability like petitions and the ballot box should prevail). Of course, what the nationalist elites continually failed to understand about the character of the Indian nation was the vast spectrum of minority interests found within it that could not be cajoled, appeased, or integrated without a painful process of adjustment (in other words, that hegemony was hard to come by). In all, this adds up not to a backward and unruly system but to a rich, vibrant, and relevant sense of democracy in India, which should give skeptics about India's future at least some consolation in these dark times.

Stalin in Lipstick

2008-10-05T00:53:00.010-04:00

Sarah Palin's folksiness is viewed by right-wing demagogues as being somehow natural, down-home and in touch with "Joe Six-Pack." Leaving aside this shameless exhibition of cheap populism and the unproven connection between how folksy you are and how qualified you are to be Vice-President of the United States (and quite possibly President), there is a sharper edge to the Palin persona than most observers will allow.

For every attempt to construct yourself as a small-town hockey mom involves the Othering of something else, in this case the vague image of the East Coast liberal elite. This is an old trope in American politics, as old as John Adams being portrayed as an aloof British royalist in contrast with Jefferson as the farmer. We need to look no further than the Folkster-in-Chief himself, George W. Bush, playing this game against the wind-surfing, French-loving, swiss cheese-eating John Kerry, who never stood a chance.

But the situation is fundamentally different four years later. Bush and Kerry were essentially the same: both patrician politicians from New England who went to Yale. Bush, scion of an American political dynasty, was cynically and hypocritically deploying a discourse of simplicity that Karl Rove had taught him. Palin, by contrast, is the Real Thing. She really does come from a small town, and one as peripheral to the nation's centres of power (Washington and New York) as you can possibly get. She really wants to bring some "Wasilla Main Street" spirit to the cocktail-party crowd, gosh darn it.

Here's where the Republican Party's ideology comes out from underneath all the political games and rears its ugly, ugly head. Rudy Giuliani's deplorable RNC speech included this remarkable statement: "I'm sorry -- I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough." The use of the word cosmopolitan reveals, at long last, the Other the Republicans are attacking. It has both a cultural aspect (multiculturalism and the valuation of difference) and a spatial aspect (small towns vs. big cities), and I would go so far as to say that it's the organising principle of the Republican vision of America.

What does this sound like? Surprisingly, another set of ideologues constructed "cosmopolitanism" as their main enemy a long time ago...they were the Leninist-Stalinists. Consider this call to action from a 1949 article by one F. Chernov: "Bourgeois cosmopolitanism is chiefly aimed against patriotism. Therefore the goal of further education, development and cultivation of Soviet patriotism demands a resolute struggle against cosmopolitanism and absolute victory over such disgraceful vestiges of bourgeois ideology as cringing and servility towards the capitalist West." Anyone who lived in the Soviet bloc is familiar with this language, which did the same rhetorical work as the Giuliani-Palin discourse. The "rootless" big-city bourgeois interests (which often included familiar Others like the Jews) were pitted against the Soviet village full of patriotic peasants. Of course Soviet policies, which destroyed the Russian peasantry, were no better for the village than the Republicans' big business-friendly policies are for "Main Street." But that was never the point. The Soviet and Republican ideologies are not mere abstractions; both Palin and Stalin (who also hailed from a small town at the outskirts of the Russian Empire, in this case Georgia) believe every doggone word they say.

The attack on cosmopolitanism is at the heart of any attempt to build the kind of ignorant patriotism that allows a small band of poorly educated, mediocre bureaucrats to enslave a great nation and its people. This is what Stalin did, and this is what the Republicans are doing. What comes out of big cities and universities (freedom of expression in culture and the arts, intelligent political criticism) always threatens this project. This is why "Professor Obama" can't be President. The only acceptable leadership figures are truly mediocre bureaucrats like the mayor of Wasilla who not only exhibit but celebrate their mediocrity.
Stalin was a man of extremely limited intellectual capacity and brutish cultural taste. One need only compare the kind of literature he promoted, which came to be known as "Soviet realism," with Sarah Palin saying that her favourite author is a columnist for Runner's World Magazine and her inquiry about banning books at the Wasilla Library, to realise the danger we are in. Stalin, an embodiment of mediocrity, ended up ruling the country of Tolstoy and Chaikovsky. Palin could very well end up running a country as rich in culture and intellectual diversity as America, which has the best universities and the most Nobel Prize winners in the world. This simply cannot happen.

It's time to embrace cosmopolitanism and difference as the best way to resist the tyranny of mediocrity. It's time to stop eating Palin's bullshit, excuse me mooseshit, by the spoonful.

Eagleton's Manifesto

2008-09-15T15:05:00.009-04:00

Feel how you like about Terry Eagleton and his politics: the man has the unique talent to cut with razor-sharp language. They are precision cuts, even paper cuts that get under the skin of his intellectual opponents, who often find themselves unable to muster replies of comparable clarity. I have to say at the outset, I do not agree with Eagleton's far-too-orthodox-for-the-21st-century Marxist programme, but his critiques must be not only addressed, but embraced, by those of us who care about post-colonialism and theories of resistance.

His stone-cold brilliant essay on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, entitled "In the Gaudy Supermarket," is the single most important piece on the use of language in contemporary thought since George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." It should be more than that: a manifesto for the academic, the polemicist, and anyone interested in promoting a critical view of the world. The link to the whole thing is here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html

and though it is worth a careful read, all one really needs to quote to get the point across is this wonderful opening salvo:

"The second rule of this samizdat handbook reads: ‘Be as obscurantist as you can decently get away with.’ Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonising about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible. You do not need to hail from a shanty town to find a Spivakian metaphorical muddle like ‘many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism’ pretentiously opaque. It is hard to see how anyone can write like this and admire the luminous writings of, say, Freud. Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity. Radical academics, one might have naively imagined, have a certain political responsibility to ensure that their ideas win an audience outside senior common rooms. In US academia, however, such popularising or plumpes Denken is unlikely to win you much in the way of posh chairs and prestigious awards, so that left-wingers like Spivak, for all their stock-in-trade scorn for academia, can churn out writing far more inaccessible to the public than the literary élitists who so heartily despise them."

Any college undergraduate can sympathise with the quotes he chooses from Spivak (they are only infinitesimally more comprehensible when in context), having encountered such "drivel" many times in their education. But what is at stake is not by any means the desire to simplify complex matters for the sake of understanding. On the contrary, Eagleton argues, there is something profoundly pernicious about this kind of hyper-language because it conceals fairly modest and muddled politics. What kind of resistance can this inspire? What kind of intellectual clarity will this provide to someone mired in Enlightenment assumptions and all the other post-colonial bogeys? The tragic thing about Spivak and the hundreds of critics in her wake is that they make post-colonial thought, which is at heart a remarkably incisive body of knowledge, into something obscure and unappealing. Even Foucault, buried underneath the impossible sentence formation of his rather clumsy French, has a certain impishness and instability that can captivate the reader. Most of the post-Saidian academic world in the US and UK is dry as dust by comparison. So what if their politics are modest? To me it seems such politics are preferable to Eagleton's Marxism. But not if they are served to the world as cold porridge and serve to inspire in students looking for alternatives to the dominant discourses an overwhelming feeling of "meh."

Even bona fide revolutionary heroes, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose book Empire was a global best-seller in 2000 and advocated a comprehensive, original worldview of our globalised world, fall prey to this. Their politics are the very opposite of modest; their language is the stilted jargon of post-colonialism's muddy waters. Consider this:
"Precisely by bringing together coherently the different defining characteristics of the biopolitical context that we have described up to this point, and leading them back to the ontology of production, we will be able to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body, which may nonetheless remain as contradictory as it is paradoxical."
Needless to say it's a far cry from "Workers of the world, unite," and raises the question as to whom is this work even meant to speak? Certainly not the multitude, whose spontaneous acts of resistance, from the LA riots to the World Social Forum, are grounded in much more prosaic concerns than, "How contradictory is the collective biopolitical body?" The audience is more likely a coterie of Western academics who have accumulated enough to immerse themselves in Foucault and Deleuze at their leisure, and a marginalised group of radical activists who form as far from a "multitude" as conceivable. Indeed, Hardt and Negri's attempts to provide Marx-like imagery, as in their modification of his working-class-as-mole metaphor to resistance-as-a-snake, are pale imitations and do not burn with the urgency of now. Marx and Engels's manifesto required nothing from its readers than an observant eye to the realities of the world, and their language reflected this (thus, the notion of the expanding bourgeoisie was not just a nice turn of phrase but described a tangible process raging all around). For whatever their ideas were worth, they were expressed in a uniquely purposeful language (Eagleton uses Freud as an example, who also fits this description).

The way to inspire resistance, both as critical inquiry within academia and as political activism, is to use metaphors that are fiery and earthy, not airy and watery. This means they have to be urgent and contextually grounded, not abstract or muddled. The post-Foucauldian concern with the body is a perfect example of how a valuable perspective can be lost. When the body became a mere "site of resistance" or "vehicle of power" and theorists stopped talking about the body, materiality was lost and we came down the winding road to Hardt and Negri's generally superficial references to the "biopolitical." This confuses and turns off even the most well-meaning students, even those with an understanding of Foucault (perhaps especially them).

Critics have responded to Eagleton's attack in a predictably dull fashion. Judith Butler complained that Eagleton doesn't get how much Spivak's work has "inspired" all sorts of activists around the world. To which the rejoinder would question how much of Spivak they really understood, what they actually did with this theory, and whether they're succeeding. Not to mention how much more inspired they could have been with clearer prose. These are simple considerations, perhaps below Butler and the academic establishment's wide horizon. But Occam is due for a comeback sometime this century. Perhaps the most inspiring thing Spivak ever produced is not her venerable body of obscurantist text but her charitable foundation promoting literacy in India. And perhaps post-colonial theory needs re-directing to that most simple concept of all, the American grammar school's number one rule of writing: show, not tell.

Review: The Passion Of Christopher Hitchens

2008-08-29T23:20:00.006-04:00

It is probably impossible to "objectively" review Hitchens's latest and most bristling book-length polemic, entitled God Is Not Great. Either you flat out accept the assumption that Hitchens rejects -that there is a God (in the case of his most vehement American critics, add "and His Son is Jesus")- in which case you are simply arguing past him, or you agree and can throw up your hands in the air with self-satisfaction, secure in your "secular humanism." There are massive problems with his argument for the return of the Enlightenment, and with his adulation of scientific progress (an equally angry book could very well be written about the monstrous injustices of science, from eugenics to the Atom bomb). What is difficult to challenge honestly are his attacks against superstition, fundamentalism, and the inherent hypocrisy of all sycophantic belief.

Hitchens is trapped, however, by his newfound neo-con posturing. In some ways he appears to be consistent: he deplores the whole of Christianity as much as he does the whole of Islam, and has no room for nuance. But when challenged, as he was by Bill Maher on television, to comment on the disturbing Protestantism animating George W. Bush, he cannot throw his friends on the bus. No, Hitch says, Bush is not actually religious, and his conversion from alcoholism was not due to Jesus but to threats from his missus (this said on no evidence whatsoever). He wouldn't even comment on whether Karl Rove was an atheist or not (Rove claims he is). He also ludicrously insisted on referring to this sleazy charlatan as "Dr. Rove" (imagine Hitch's snide huffing and puffing if one gave honorifics to some of his favourite targets like Mother Teresa and Kissinger). The assumption that people, especially those one happens to agree with, are "secretly" humanists and only outwardly religious does a huge disservice to Hitchens's otherwise worthy attack on religion. Bush's faith is real enough, and drove him headlong into the Iraq War. Religion is that much more dangerous than Hitchens would have it because it is more deeply rooted than even Hitchens thinks.

Finally, Hitchens's love for America and its tradition of separation of church and state (he constantly returns to his heroes Paine and Jefferson) grossly misunderstands the reality of religion in America. Yes, the U.S. has never had an official church, and the Jeffersonian position on religion is an example the rest of the world should emulate. But for a country that is upwards of 80% Christian (Hitchens claims, again on little evidence, that people lie to pollsters and spend their Sundays drinking martinis, thus putting the problem out of sight, out of mind), and where presidential candidates have to appear at a ridiculous forum with a bearded gnome asking them questions that sound an awful lot like the religious tests the Constitution forbids, the problem is very real indeed. Perhaps Europe, where much to Hitchens's dismay citizens have to pay taxes for an established church but where belief levels have fallen dramatically, is a better example to follow. In America, unofficial religion rages ever stronger, while in Europe organised Christianity is dying (Islam is another problem altogether). Perhaps this "neutering" of religion's deleterious influence on society is a better way forward than simply saying it's not the government's business and letting it spread privately. Better an irrelevant Pope than a relevant Rick Warren.

Saakashvilli's Gamble, Or We Are Not All Georgians Now

2008-08-19T04:44:00.006-04:00

There is an odd sense of deja vu about the Russia-Georgia War that takes us back not ten years to the obscure Balkan violence of Bosnia and Kosovo but twenty years to the Era of Big Statements, to Afghanistan, "Evil Empire," and "tearing down this wall." The phrase "Cold War" is on everyone's lips, and in the West the old rhetoric has been dutifully dusted off by sanctimonious warriors like John McCain, who declared, echoing the post-9/11 solidarity other nations expressed towards America, "We are all Georgians now." This is patently disingenuous, since McCain, Bush and the U.S. military have no intention and no way of defending Georgia with anything more than words.

Of course we should all be concerned about Russia, and no one likes Putin's authoritarian streak and the revival of Red Square parades. But this is not about Putin or Russia, who has been playing its hand in a familiar scenario on its borders for a long time now. The story is Saakashvili's gamble and the hapless role the United States played in this foreign policy trainwreck. The article below, by a Moscow-based correspondent for the Atlantic, lays it out with startling clarity:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200808u/georgia-russia-war

This war is, to boil it down to the very essentials, about a very old piece of shrewd realpolitik. Stalin's redrawing of boundaries to include disparate ethnic minorities (like importing Russians into Moldova and, in this case, separating Ossetia into two provinces, one inside Georgia and the other inside Russia) ensured that nationalist aspirations would always stumble on internal conflicts. The situation on the eve of this war-du-jour was like that in many other places: a tense stand-off between the Russophile Ossetes and Abkhaz and a brash, ambitious and Western-backed Georgian leader. This prophetic travel journal from a Slate correspondent only a few months ago gives an impression of what life was like before the tanks started rolling in:

http://www.slate.com/id/2197134/entry/2191589/

Saakashvili, whose human rights record has been unimpressive since the Rose Revolution swept him into power in 2003, ostensibly as a beacon of freedom in a lawless region, was emboldened by the Americans' rhetoric of promoting democracy etc. He gladly committed Georgian troops to assist in the invasion of Iraq (an irony that makes Russian propagandists salivate) and expected a commitment in return. Not McCain's vacuous pronouncements or humanitarian aid, but concrete help, a NATO bid and commitment from the West to keep the Russians at bay. When he finally moved for endgame and attacked, he was bitterly surprised to find that he had been let down and lashed out at his erstwhile American friends. Where were they now, when it counted, he wondered as his country burned.

I have a humble suggestion for Saakashvili and for others like him, trying to walk the tightrope of 21st-century geopolitics. They should watch a small film that came out of Romania in 2007 to win a prize at Cannes. California Dreamin' tells the story of a group of American soldiers on their way to Kosovo who are stopped in a small Romanian village in the middle of nowhere. At once the locals try to use the Americans to their benefit: the workers go on strike, the mayor wants to befriend them as leverage against a corrupt gangster, and everyone remembers how, for 50 years, the Americans were always going to "come and save us," from the Nazis, the Russians, and from themselves. Better late than never, right? But all the Americans are interested in is passing through, and they do so as soon as they can, leaving behind the villagers to tear each other apart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG21tT2eE2w

The lesson is not easy to follow, and Bush/McCain's assurances were all too tempting for Saakashvili. What we are left with is a ruined country, a bellicose and unstable Russia, thousands of deaths, and the same tired, hollow threats and promises.

The Day I Became an Originalist

2008-07-07T17:17:00.006-04:00

The one thing that surprised me about the recent Supreme Court opinion in D.C. vs. Heller was my own thought process in reacting to it. I usually am as firmly against Scalia's reading of the Constitution as anyone, and with respect to this particular opinion I once again vehemently disagree with his conclusion. But reading this piece by Stanley Fish in the New York Times made me realize something quite out of the ordinary had happened:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/what-did-the-framers-have-in-mind/index.html

I, too, like Justice Stevens, had interpreted the Second Amendment according to the principles of intentionalism, in fact with the kind of rigid textualism I would normally have ridiculed in the wake of my approval of Justice Kennedy's "internationalism" (on display in his famous ruling about the execution of the mentally ill several years ago). But here I am, and here were the liberal justices, too, parsing a sentence instead of thinking of the living Constitution responding to societal needs.

There is a point, however, which neither the Scalia nor the Stevens position seem to make clear enough. I firmly believe that the first clause, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," does in fact place restrictions on the second clause. To reason by analogy, if the proposition was, "Taking exams being a necessity to graduate, the right of students to bear pens should not be infringed upon," then this would clearly mean original intent was to secure the right of carrying pens for the purpose of taking exams.

But this does not mean that we could formulate a juridically-derived argument for restricting pens only to exams (or guns to militias). This is a key distinction. The Second Amendment, as written, only secures the right in regard to militias. The remainder of possible circumstances in which citizens use guns are not covered by the language, therefore legislative bodies are free to make any decision with regard to restrictions. This means that D.C. can ban handguns, and Montana can force everyone to carry an UZI (provided that the federal statute is gone, as it tragically is).

This is a far cry from my normal enthusiasm for a strong judiciary as a check on populist demagoguery (think gay marriage for a change), but in this case legislators are doing the right thing and the courts are tying their hands. Call me a flip-flopper.