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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

The Ayodhya verdict and the burden of responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

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 Trouble with Jinnah

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

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.

The Lives of Documents

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 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.

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

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.

Five Life-Changing Undergraduate Readings

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.

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

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.