Identity versus Subjectivity

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

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

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"

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

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

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?262010
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.

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.

On Mayawati II: The Axis of Caste

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.