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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Technologies of Non-Violence: Bayard Rustin in India

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

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

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

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

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