The Lesson of Gujarat, or How to Talk about Events

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.

Hindi Film and the World: An Alternative Globalisation

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 Empire Debate: Thinking at an Angle

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.