On Wendy Doniger

I've been away for a few days in Vieques -- a place where it was very difficult to get cell-phone reception, let alone blog.

I might write on that experience soon, and also explain why it's appropriate to take a mini-holiday in the still-overwhelming second week of the term. For now, a link from Tyler: a review of Wendy Doniger's latest book in the New York Times. Only one paragraph actually talks about the book, and that is this one:

Such is the spirit of wry playfulness that can be found in Ms. Doniger's work, and certainly throughout this new book, which almost gleefully catalogs myths and movies and plots about characters who disguise themselves as themselves. There is Hermione in Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale," who pretends to be a dead woman pretending to be a live woman. There is Kim Novak's character in Hitchcock's "Vertigo," who is covered with so many self-reflexive masks that only at the end does James Stewart see the awful truth. And there are Indian stories of Shiva and his wife, Parvati, whose identities refract over multiple incarnations. Through it all are hints of sexuality misdirected and redirected, sexuality that tricks or reveals.

That's it; the new book doesn't seem to elicit a lot of attention or direct interest. In fact, the reviewer devotes the remainder of the review to Wendy Doniger's encounters with the self-appointed Defender of Hinduism, Mr. Rajiv Malhotra.

(I've written on Malhotra's anti-Doniger crusade a couple of times (start here, if interested)

Covering the Distance: Nilanjana Roy on South Asian writers

Via Chapati Mystery and Moorish Girl, Nilanjana Roy's column in the Business-Standard about South Asian writers. Most of her column is what I would call measured praise. She gets down to business at the end, however.

There is more than a little truth in what she's saying, but I still think her claims fall apart under close scrutiny. I'm going to take a slightly different tack than Sepoy does, however, when he defends English-language South Asian fiction from what he calls the "gallows of authenticity." (Sepoy has a way with words!)

My interest is in the overlapping question of narratorial "distance" that Roy refers to toward the end of her piece.

Bajwa, Suri and Swarup appropriate the lives of people whom they do not understand; unlike Bibhutibhushan, who lived Apu’s life of deprivation in the city and the village, unlike Mulk Raj Anand, who saw at first hand what the humiliations of an untouchable encompassed, they are at a remove from their subjects.

Yes, that's true about Bajwa and Suri (I haven't read Swarup, so I can't say). They are at some distance from their subjects. In Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop, it's a real problem -- one senses she has more in common with the wealthy clients in the novel than with the lower middle-class sari seller who is her protagonist. (I still rather enjoyed reading the book, except perhaps for the ill-conceived ending.)

But it's also true of every preceding generation of Indian writers, especially those who have tried to represent the perspectives of non-elite Indians. Mulk Raj Anand may have seen the humiliations of untouchability, but he was not an untouchable himself. Moreover, he himself wrote in English, was inspired by British modernism, and got started only after spending time abroad. He was as much inflicted by 'distance' as the more recent writers Roy names.

To continue:

Monica Ali does a more sophisticated version of the same thing, using a journalist’s techniques and a ham playwright’s voice when she employs pidgin English to convey the pathos of a Bangladeshi woman’s letters from the village to a luckier relative abroad. This does not make their novels any less entertaining, in the cases of Bajwa and Swarup, or any less well-written, in the case of Monica Ali and Manil Suri. But it does set up a constant, low-level interference that prevents an astute reader from engaging with their novels at a deeper level.

The pidgin English in Brick Lane is troubling at first. But it quickly becomes clear that Ali isn't using it to represent a person who writes poorly in English. Rather, the character of the sister (Hasina) in the novel writes poorly in Bengali. The pidgin is not necessarily a comment on an uneducated women's command of English so much as it is an attempt to represent a character whose literacy is limited. Obviously, Ali is quite different from her character Hasina -- we wouldn't have this novel if that weren't the case -- but given the social conditions of Hasina's life in Dhaka, the use of Pidgin seems appropriate. It is in keeping with Ali's realism, and it is far from disrespectful.

In my view Roy's reference to a "deeper level" of engagement with the South Asian fiction she mentions is a red herring. There is no "deeper level"; there are merely story, characters, and language.

In a nutshell: all writers, Desi and non-desi, deal with the problem of distance from their subjects. Good writers convince us that they've crossed that distance. Less talented (or less experienced) writers leave room for us to question the gap.

Condi as Hegelian

I took some heat via email over my "grudging respect" for Condoleezza Rice's performance at her confirmation hearings last week; most of my friends & colleagues don't want to give an inch where this woman is concerned.

I can understand that. I'm bitter too -- the Democratic Party just graduated from the third to the fourth circle of Hell. But I also think one needs to keep in mind Condi's immense ambition and her talents as a political operator... At the very least, it's a matter of knowing one's enemy.

Anyway, here is yet another reading of Condi by Jeffrey Hurf in the New Republic. Hurf feels Condi's philosophy of history resembles that of Hegel, and that is troubling to him. Rice made this statement:

I said yesterday, Senator, we've made a lot of decisions in this period of time. Some of them have been very good. Some of them have not been very good. Some of them have been bad decisions, I'm sure. I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment but in how it all adds up. And that's just strongly the way I feel about big historical changes."

And Hurf argues that this is Hegelian for the following reason:

In his lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in the early nineteenth century, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel argued that history was a slaughter bench on which the happiness of individuals was sacrificed. (He also claimed that the course of history comprised the teleological unfolding of God's plan on earth at whose endpoint all human beings would be free, an idea that also appears to have some supporters in Washington.) The achievement of freedom, or in the case of the communists, the classless society, justified the sacrifices on the path to its perfection--as if such perfection could not, in the end, have come about without those sacrifices. In the aftermath of the Soviet victory in World War II, communist apologists, including sophisticated French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued that the victory of 1945 either justified or sent into oblivion the horrors and crimes of the Stalin years. Stalin's decision to sign the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler and his refusal to recognize the imminence of the Nazi invasion were blunders of unprecedented proportions that contributed to the capture of three million Soviet prisoners of war in 1941, two million of whom died. If the Soviet regime had been a democracy, Joseph Stalin would have been quickly ousted from office, just as Neville Chamberlain was defeated following the failure of his appeasement policy. Yet in 1945, in the glow of victory, Stalin was presented as a great genius whose wise decisions in the end worked out. Fidel Castro captured this communist faith in the redeeming power of history in one pithy phrase: "History will absolve me."

I'm much more sympathetic to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre than Hurf is, but maybe he has a point about the differential political fates of Chamberlain (whose deceptions in the House of Commons led to the downfall of his government) and Stalin (who was never held accountable for his mistakes -- or his crimes).

But the difference between George W. Bush and Neville Chamberlain is that, while it was clear at the moment that Chamberlain's policies weren't working, it's by no means been made clear to the American public that George Bush's war didn't work (and won't work). When Condoleezza Rice talks about history, she doesn't mean it the way Castro or even Hegel meant it. What she means is, "History will absolve us, because we will write it ourselves."

Music Challenge

Sutton issued me a challenge.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer.
17 Gibabytes. That's a lot, or at least it seems like it to me. I have somewhere in the range of 2000 CDs in my collection. It's an absurd amount, but I forgive myself: many of them are used (somewhat cheaper), bought cheaply from Indian music stores (definitely cheaper), or bought in India (very cheap).

2. The CD you last bought is:
I blogged it two weeks ago: Friction, Mehsopuria, Bally Sagoo. I also bought a deep house compilation called Bargrooves pretty recently, which has been getting a fair amount of play at chez Singh. And I've been planning to buy the Lascivious Biddies' Get Lucky from their website at some point soon.

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?
I had MTV on when I was getting ready this morning. The last song I remember before turning it off was Destiny's Child's, "Soldier," which is frighteningly post-feminist in outlook (lyrics), but also frighteningly catchy ("the devil has all the best tunes").

Still, what happened to "Independent Woman"? Oh well, guess that was a fad. Still, you've got to give it to Beyoncé.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

This is tough; I listen to a lot of music, and I could as easily put 50 songs here as 5. I'll pick a few songs sort of at random, cheating a little by referring to multiple versions of the same song:

1. "Chura Liya," with Asha Bhosle singing, Bally Sagoo's reggae remix. Major Hindi film-song nostalgia. A couple of similar songs could go in this slot, but this one best represents my particular tastes and sensibilities. It doesn't take much to get me to start singing along, in or (more likely) out of tune.

2. John Cale's version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Shameless post-Christian, negative theological melodrama. Somehow the Cale version gets me more than Cohen's version, or the Rufus Wainwright version that was used in Shrek.


3. Any version of the jazz standard "Tenderly," but especially the old Sarah Vaughn version, and the more recent jazz/deep house version by the San Francisco group Soulstice.

4. Cole Porter's "Well Did You Evah," either the old Frank Sinatra/Bing Crosby version, or the Iggy Pop/Deborah Harry version from Red, Hot + Blue. Always a good way to get a party started, even if it's just a party in one's own mind.

5. The Pixies, "Subbacultcha." I've been listening to the Pixies a bit lately. Even though I missed their reunion tour, some of my friends went to some of their shows, and they've kind of been on my mind.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons), and why?

No time for why, so here's three people I can think of who might be into this:

G. Zombie
Anjali Taneja
Julian Myers

Advice from a retiring Pundit

William Safire, in one of his final columns for the Times.

Most of his advice holds true for bloggers.

Goodbye William Safire. We'll miss you, en peu.

K-12 Literature: Girls Read, Boys Don't

Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky have a column in the Washington Post highlighting a tidbit from last year's NEH study about the nation-wide decline in the reading of books. What no one noticed is that, while there has been a marked decline amongst girls reading books, the decline for boys is phenomenal -- less than 50 percent of boys in K-12 are readers of books.

But here's their explanation for it:

But boys prefer adventure tales, war, sports and historical nonfiction, while girls prefer stories about personal relationships and fantasy. Moreover, when given choices, boys do not choose stories that feature girls, while girls frequently select stories that appeal to boys.

Unfortunately, the textbooks and literature assigned in the elementary grades do not reflect the dispositions of male students. Few strong and active male role models can be found as lead characters. Gone are the inspiring biographies of the most important American presidents, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs. No military valor, no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventurous and brave women abound. Publishers seem to be more interested in avoiding "masculine" perspectives or "stereotypes" than in getting boys to like what they are assigned to read.

Hm, I don't know... Could Sony PS2, XBOX, and GameCube might have something to do with it? And: peer-to-peer downloading, internet chat, MP3s, etc. etc.

Shauna Singh Baldwin's Latest

Kitabkhana

I had a chance to buy Shauna Singh Baldwin's The Tiger Claw a couple of months ago, when I was in Vancouver, but I flaked. Now I'm not sure it's coming out in the U.S. It's too bad, because if Babu likes it, there's probably something to it...

You may remember that I've talked about one of Baldwin's earlier novels before. In fact, I was yelled at for mentioning her name back in April.

old post

More on uses of literature

I've been having an ongoing dialogue with Dan Green about the uses of teaching literature. Dan's latest post on the subject is here.

Unfortunately, I am so swamped with work right now that I don't have time to respond intelligently. All I can say right now is, I find the "literary literary" way of thinking to be a bit theological. (I hope I get a chance to try and explain what I mean by that soon...)

I can point people, quickly, to Scott McLemee's mini-biography of Helen Vendler in the latest Chronicle. Dan gets a mention there for his post on Vendler's Jefferson lectures; he generally agrees with Vendler on things.

Shakespeare's License

Via A&L Daily, a review of a book on Shakespeare's relationship with his 'players,' and the official authorization he had from both Queen Elizabeth and King James I. The reviewer reads Andrew Gurr's The Shakespeare Company as yet another twist in New Historicism:

Gurr has become the chief chronicler of the playhouse culture of Shakespeare’s age—and a key arbiter of the way Shakespeare is played today. His groundbreaking research on Shakespeare’s two playhouses, the open-air Globe and the indoor Blackfriars, has shaped the present-day reproductions of those theaters and the way the plays are staged there and elsewhere. Here he considers not the physical structures or the audiences (topics of his classic 1987 study Playgoing in Shake­speare’s London) but the team: the company who built the audiences, acted the plays, and helped create the phenomenon of Shakespeare.

Gurr explains the crafty deal that gave birth to what he calls “duopoly,” the domination of London playgoing by two companies for nearly half a century. In 1594, seeking to keep public performances out of the inns, where they’d been a source of disorder, the Lord Chamberlain gave just two companies licenses to put on plays; one, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later, under James I, the King’s Men), featured William Shakespeare as actor, writer, and partner. The stability of this arrangement (the company kept going for a quarter-century after his death in 1616) seems to have given Shakespeare the ability to develop his art, and it gave his plays the continuing production that helped entrench them in the canon.

This might be an example of the influence of "material culture" on the creation of "Shakespeare"; at least that is how the reviewer characterizes Gurr's argument.

Or, much more simply, it could just be a twist on what Indians call "Licence Raj": Shakespeare is Shakespeare because a queen and a king liked him, and gave him money and authority to do what he wanted to do.

More Lovely East Coast Radio

See Shashwati

Art: Popularity vs. Quality, Mathematically Speaking

On the one hand, evaluating art by statistical popularity seems pretty stupid -- nothing to do with the art.

But someone should go back and index these statistical popularity charts, which are based mainly on the annual number of exhibitions in major, public museums, with the relative value of the artists' works that are sold. I have a sneaking suspicion that the monetary value of an artist's best work correlates positively with popularity, even if the people who actually buy and sell very expensive works of art are about as distant from the 'masses' whose opinions are feeding these websites.

I say best work, because people like Andy Warhol and Paul Klee made lots and lots of art. Most of it isn't for sale, or it's relatively inexpensive. Their best work, however, is much more limited in quantity, and sells for lots of dinero.

The interest of thinking in this way is that it could potentially make art critics somewhat irrelevant as determiners of value. Are they already? What is the real value of their mediation? The same questions could and should be asked of literary critics and film critics. What is the value of formal, institutional literary criticism in an era of Amazon sales rankings and DIY reviews? What is the value of film criticism in an era of "Rotten Tomatoes"?

These questions suggest a tilt towards market fundamentalism. Do I really subscribe to that ethos? No, this is more of a thought-experiment. Even if the aesthetic value works of art is directly indexed to market value, there might still be ways to value the role of criticism. One such might be to think of critics as themselves market players. That is what an index like Rotten Tomatoes does -- it creates a statistical value that averages the opinions of film critics. Because those critics are pretty reliable, it represents a reliable stat. We'll have to see if the Artfacts.net index that is the inspiration for this post will be as good...

Ok, enough half-assed economics.

Surprises from the chart: Paul Klee (#3), Gerhard Richter (#5), and Joseph Beuys (#6). I like these artists (Klee and Richter moreso than Beuys), but I didn't imagine that other people liked them as much. Perhaps Klee and Richter are more popular in Europe than they are here?

Also, how is Nam June Paik so low (#89)? And Marcel Duchamp is only #27?

Art-class lesson for today -- the painting above (Richter's "Woman Descending the Staircase," 1965) is a response to the painting below (Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," 1912). Write a 50 word (ok 25 word) compare-and-contrast essay in the comments. (Note, you might also consider another Richter painting, called "Ema, Nude on a Staircase". And a hint: it has something to do with Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction").

Major Minors, and the Quandary they Present for Culture Snobs

We've seen the emergence of a commercial art-house in the U.S. It has a pretty recognizable product, means of distribution, as well as a clearly-defined audience. It is financed by specialty wings of major studios, which actually aim to make some money, though I gather they would be just as happy winning their parent studios some Oscars each year.

All of this year's 'cool' movies were major minors: Eternal Sunshine, Before Sunset, Being Julia, Vanity Fair, Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Sideways, and Motorcycle Diaries, to name just a few. In the year that I've lived in New Haven (soon coming to an end, I think), those are the pretty much the kinds of movies I've been shelling out to see -- usually at one of the art-house theaters downtown. New Haven now has two competing art house theaters -- York Square and the pompously named Criterion -- that, for some reason, seem to play basically the exact same films.

A.O Scott compares the situation to the music industry. But, while that does work to an extent (most "indie rock" that you've actually heard of has backing from major labels), it seems to me it's actually a little more insidious here with the movies. That's because, outside of New York and maybe 10 other big cities, it's impossible to even see any films that aren't Fox Searchlight, Miramax, Focus, Warner Independent, etc. A serious music listener might have tastes consisting entirely of obscure musical styles and performers. A reader has infinite possibilites as well. But 'serious' movie-goers in most places are stuck choosing between Sideways and crap like Garden State for their favorite movie of the year. Taste is defined along a much narrower range than it is with the other media I mentioned. Consequently, one's own particular regime of taste is somewhat less than truly meaningful. I am sorry to say, my taste in films has gone from Eric Rohmer when I was in graduate school (good video store) to Charlie Kaufmann and Richard Linklater (the good video store is now too far away!).

The only solution for the serious movie fan in a non-major metro is to find a really good, foreign and independent-friendly video store, if there is one nearby. But even that's a bit of a sacrifice.

We're soon moving to suburban north New Jersey (for awhile), so perhaps this quandary will be a thing of the past.

AIDS Drugs: Indian Parliament vs. the WTO

In the NYT: India joined the WTO in 1994, making a deal that would allow its drug manufacturers to make copycat pharmaceuticals cheaply until January 1, 2005.

Now, Indian drug manufacturers will have to stop selling copycat versions of drugs invented after 1995 (including recent AIDS 'cocktail' drugs) unless Parliament votes to exempt them. Those cheap Indian drugs have benefited Indians with AIDS, but also thousands of people fighting the disease in other countries.

Let's hope it happens.

Proto-fusion -- early Hindi appropriations of jazz and fado

Dilip D'Souza has a great post on early Bollywood musical fusion.

Death ends fun: Hey My Heart, Show Me

My own latest bizarre example: "Gela Gela Gela," one of the songs from the recent film Aitraaz samples "Thoia Thoing," R. Kelly's huge (and nonsensical) R&B hit from 2003. It actually kind of works.

Youth Curry (new blog)

I came across a brand new blog called Youth Curry, via Om Malik. Rashmi Bansal is a journalist in Bombay; it seems like this will be a blog oriented to Indian youth-culture trends.

Her point about IPods seems pretty self-evident -- the market that can afford 20,000+ Rupees on an MP3 player is very small.

I also like her point about how cell phones change the dynamic for teenagers in more conservative households. Unintentional liberalization:

The paradox of technology

Parents may feel a sense of security in knowing 'where their kids are', but the truth is - they have less idea than ever before. In simpler times, when you went to a friend's house for a sleepover you left your firend's telephone number behind.

In the cellphone era there's no way to tell where you really are. And when you don't want to be reached, you can always claim the signal was weak or you are out of network coverage. I'm not saying all teens use the cellphone to deceive their parents but many sure do.

Further, there is unprecedented privacy for the young person - especially girls from less liberal backgrounds. No longer can paranoid pappas vet all incoming calls and ask to know why such and such boy keeps calling.

The balance of power has shifted. Calls can be received after midnight on silent mode, with nobody the wiser for it.

True in America as much as in India.

(It also obviously brings up the issue of the recent MMS video cell phone scandal, but that was kind of an anomaly. This is going to be nearly universal middle-class households.)

Films Division: Another India Teaching/Learning Resource

The Indian Government's Ministry of Information & Broadcasting has a website where you can watch old, state-sponsored documentary films online. They are black & white films, seemingly from the 1950s, that have a strong statist, secularist, and patriotic tone to them. They are in "official" English.

After watching most of the film on the Partition and part of another one on the "Quit India" movement, I can say this: 1) the narration is densely historical, to the point that it is more than a bit boring, and 2) the reason they're worth watching anyway is for their status as visual archive of the nationalist and the early post-independence periods.

(Perhaps you have to be a bit of a history buff... but maybe try flipping around to get at the juicier parts.)

I can't hyperlink to individual documentaries on the site, but you can find them easily along the top of the page (the images in the 'film reel' click to the individual films that are available). Also, if you watch them in Windows Media Player at least, you can view the films in full-screen mode using the right-click. (I don't know how or whether this would work on a Mac.)

I found out about this via Another Subcontinent.

Grudging Respect

I find myself in profound opposition to her world-view, and I think her role in the Bush presidency has been, well, not good. [Insert forceful tirade about Iraq war here]

I saw some of the footage of her Senate confirmation hearings yesterday on C-Span. It seemed to me she destroyed Barbara Boxer both rhetorically and stylistically; it wasn't even remotely competitive. If things continue as they are, Rice will probably continue to be a force after the Bush presidency as long as the Republicans continue to run things. Vice President in 2008? Watch out.

[Also see Chapati Mystery on Condi]

Paris, not London. And literature, itself

I thought this would be a light blogging day, but there is just too much going on.

Pascale Casanova has a "big argument" book called The World Republic of Letters that was reviewed in The Nation by William Deresiewicz in December. There seem to be two prongs to her argument. One has to do with situating literature withing the world-system:

Casanova's work amounts to a radical remapping of global literary space--which means, first of all, the recognition that there is a global literary space. Her insights build on world systems theory, the idea, developed by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, that the capitalist economy that has emerged since about 1500 must be understood as a single global system of interlinked national economies. Some of these economies belong to the ruling "core," others to the dependent "periphery," but none can coherently be studied as a discrete entity. Casanova, a scholar at the Center for Research in Arts and Language in Paris, argues, convincingly, that an analogous literary system, a "world republic of letters," has gradually taken shape since around the same time. In her analysis, a core group of nations--France, England and the founders of other "major" European literatures--having built up large reserves of "literary capital" over the past several centuries, control the means of cultural legitimation for the countries of the global literary periphery--a region that, as in the capitalist world system, has grown ever larger over the past two centuries with, first, the rise of European nationalism and, second, decolonization, as nations without previous literary standing, and writers from those nations, have sought international validation. And the capital of the world republic of letters, the place to which even other countries of the core must look for ultimate consecration and the global reputation it brings, is Paris.

The surprise being, of course, Paris. Most of us English lit. types think of it as London...

The other prong of her argument is about the autonomy of literature, its separatenes from social history. She is rebelling against historicism.

Whatever the terms under which it was conducted, however, it was this rivalry among national literatures that led to the creation of an international literary space. Indeed, it led, one might say, to the creation of literature itself--literature as an autonomous realm--for it was, paradoxically, through this same struggle that literary values were asserted independently of national political and moral agendas. By constituting a transnational sphere in which literature could be judged on its own terms, this rivalry enabled writers to appeal beyond their national publics, with their invariably conservative values. It made possible, in other words, the creation of an avant-garde. (And it is because of its unique hospitality to the avant-garde that Paris has endured as the world's literary center.) Here is where Casanova parts company with the historicism that has swept literary studies over the past two decades. Rather than tying literary phenomena to underlying social and political developments, she charts an autonomous history for literature itself. The world republic of letters is governed by its own rules, keeps time by its own historical clock, partitions the world according to its own map and features its own economics, its own inequalities and its own forms of violence.

Aha. I wonder what Dan Green will think of all this.

I may or may not end up agreeing with all of Casanova's claims, but from this review I have a feeling it's something I'll really enjoy reading.

Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste

From Professor Frances Pritchett of Columbia, another stunning Internet resource: an online edition of Ambedkar's Annihiliation of Caste, which is based on a speech he gave in the 1930s. For those who don't know, Ambedkar was India's first high-profile Dalit ("untouchable") intellectual. He had a Ph.D. himself from Columbia, and was a major player in the independence struggle. He is also one of the primary framers of the Indian Constitution.

Pritchett's edition of his book is here.

It's fully annotated. Specific terms and names are hyperlinked and defined. Also searchable. This is about as good as it gets... It's almost a Wiki!

My only criticism is that she's using frames, so it's hard to link into the project -- you don't get unique URLs for each section.

Avoid the Arundhati Roy Trap

Again, Via the Literary Saloon, editor Jane Lawson on how not to write Indian literature, in the newspaper New Kerala.

If you are haunted by dreams of literary stardom and Booker fantasies, shun exotica and think big. For a start, avoid the Arundhati Roy trap, says British publisher and literary critic Jane Lawson.

"There is a fatigue about Indian novels post-Arundhati Roy, specially of the exotic and lyrical kind symbolised by Roy's Booker Prize-wining novel - 'The God of Small Things'," Lawson told IANS in an interview.

Lawson, a senior editor at Transworld Publishers, a division of the US' leading publishing conglomerate Random House group, is here to promote the diplomat-turned-author Vikas Swarup's debut novel "Q and A", a poignant story of a penniless waiter who wins a billion-dollar quiz contest.

It was Lawson who discovered Swarup's novel and snapped it up for Doubleday, the prestigious British imprint she represents, for a fabulous six-figure advance.

Going by what Lawson says, exotica is passe and multi-culturalism is the new prima donna of the British literary world.

"Quasi-poetic flourishes of Arundhati Roy variety have become a shade too cloying. There is more interest in novels with multi-cultural settings," adds Lawson, who scans at least 1,000 manuscripts every week as part of her job.

Lawson's brutally candid critiques of Indian writing in English shouldn't, however, force a misreading of her position.

"Although the Indian novel written by Indians living in India is slightly out of fashion, Indian writing in English is becoming a full-blown genre in itself," says the polyglot publisher who studied modern languages at Durham University.

The market for British Asian writing is, however, growing, says Lawson, who also discovered Monica Ali's Brick Lane - a Booker-short-listed novel in 2003.

"I am inclined to look at Indian novels more than at anything else. India is a very fertile land. Indians are very good with family histories and big themes," says Lawson, who points at the relative insularity of British writers by way of contrast.

Pitching in for more works celebrating the multi-cultural ethos, she adds: "There is a danger to be parochial with British writers. The works of diasporic writers settled in Britain like Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Hanif Qureishi straddle various worlds and are more interesting."

Keep it in mind, kids! Cut out the cloying, exotic stuff. But keep in the family-shamily, scope-shope, and straddle-twaddle. But let me offer a toast to non-lyrical, historically sensitive multiculturalism. Oh, and the death of irony!

(That was meant to be a joke. It was also a reference to John Waters's film Pecker. Seen it? --Ed.)

Side note: It's the first week of classes, which means I am overwhelmed and exhausted, even after not actually doing very much. Blogging is/will be light.

MLK and MKG

Biddies Live: A night in Middletown

We went to see the Lascivious Biddies last night at a place called the Buttonwood Tree, in Middletown. What can I say? It was fun. They are very talented ladies.

I'm not making big predictions of greatness; I don't know if that's even what they're aiming for. But for the sake of argument, where on the radio would they go (besides College Radio, of course)? They are between two, and maybe three, genres. Jazz radio stations are way too conservative in their playlists; they only go as far into the 1990s as the candy-coated croonings of Diana Krall. And even Diana Krall is pretty rare, at least on the jazz stations I currently get.

I do think it might be really interesting if the Biddies teamed up with a playwright and... wrote a musical? Biddies, if you're reading this, think about it: Broadway ("Famous").

There is a fresh interview with the Biddies at Brian Ibbott's Coverville. You can download it as a single MP3 file ("podcast") here. There's a lot of chat, but Ibbott does include three full songs in the interview, if you're just looking to get a sense of what it's all about.

Amitav Ghosh on politics of Tsunami relief; Locana on Ghosh

A couple of days ago, Anand posted links to the series in The Hindu by Amitav Ghosh. (For those who don't know, Ghosh is one of postcolonial India's greatest writers. Much of what he writes is a cross between journalism, history, and creative non-fiction essay. I've written about him a bit here.)

Here are the links Anand posted:

• The town by the sea.
  
• No aid needed.
  
• Overlapping faults.
  

Anand has also offered a kind of critique of the essays here with a review of Shonali Bose's novel Amu as well. Anand compares this Ghosh piece (the three articles really run together, and form a single essay) unfavorably with Ghosh's own essay on the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" (which you can read in The Imam and the Indian; I don't believe it is online anywhere.

I have two thoughts.

1) I think the Ghosh pieces on the Tsunami are worth reading as journalism -- very few journalists have written on what happened at Car Nicobar thus far (partly because the Indian government itself wasn't allowing anyone to go for awhile). Reading this essay, you learn about the history of Andaman and Nicobar, as well as the unusual mix of people who have ended up settling there since independence. Ghosh also makes an important observation about the failure of the local and national government structure to adequately help the survivors of the Tsunami in the ways that they need to be helped. It's not just about food and water. People's entire livelihoods have been wiped off the face of the earth. Many people have no papers, and no money. Their farms have been permanently ruined. Some or all of their families are gone. The kind of help they need is simply of a different order than a sack of rice.

It's expected that the government is unable to process something like this. As many people have been documenting, the government has been a lot less proactive in providing relief than the NGOs. Ghosh points out that the situation is especially bad in Andaman-Nicobar because the islands are governed directly from the center, without an elected local legislature.

In some cases, the government crosses the line between incompetency and outright corruption, as this BBC article demonstrates.

Still, I'm not sure that even the international relief agencies are equipped to assist on this scale. They have the money now (lots of money), but are they concentrating on the problem in that way?

2) Ghosh's search for metaphors for the Tsunami are indeed questionable, as is his ending to the essay.

It's not at all surprising he's thinking in these terms. Privileging the position of the writer, for instance, is something he's done many times in his books. But I'm not sure that it works in the context of the particular narrative he's describing (see sections 2 and 3 in the links above).

Expanded Interrogation Techniques

Andrew Sullivan reviews new accounts of the U.S.'s use of "expanded interrogation techniques" (torture) since 9/11. The new books are Steven Strasser's The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Report of the Independent Panel and Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq, and Mark Danner's Torture and Truth: America Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror.

Sullivan's piece is more than a 'review': it's a comprehensive account of the logic and administrative process that opened the way for systemic prisoner abuse authorized by the Bush administration. It occurred as much at Guantanamo as at Abu Ghraib. It occurred at several other prison/interrogation facilities in Iraq. And it occurred in Afghanistan. Sullivan also looks carefully at what was done, and how it was received by military and governmental authorities. Among the stuff I didn't know was this:

These are not allegations made by antiwar journalists. They are incidents reported within the confines of the United States government. The Schlesinger panel has officially conceded, although the president has never publicly acknowledged, that American soldiers have tortured five inmates to death. Twenty-three other deaths that occurred during American custody had not been fully investigated by the time the panel issued its report in August. Some of the techniques were simply brutal, like persistent vicious beatings to unconsciousness. Others were more inventive. In April 2004, according to internal Defense Department documents recently procured by the A.C.L.U., three marines in Mahmudiya used an electric transformer, forcing a detainee to ''dance'' as the electricity coursed through him. We also now know that in Guantánamo, burning cigarettes were placed in the ears of detainees.

There are also lots of graphic accounts of torture in the piece (what I included above is among the tamer material), most of which you probably haven't heard about yet.

Andrew Sullivan, in case you didn't know, is a Republican, who initially supported the war. The fact that he's speaking out so publicly on this issue now, when most on the right have assiduously ignored it, or even obliquely supported the use of torture, says something about him.

The ending paragraphs speculate on how it's possible that this has been such a small issue in American politics, especially given the fact that the U.S. is losing the war over Iraqi hearts and minds. It's also shocking that it was ignored during the election, when Kerry had enough knowledge about the Administration's role in authorizing torture (the 'torture memos') to use it as a campaign issue. It's a game played by the left as well as by the right:

American political polarization also contributed. Most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents - like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh - were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas. Advocates of the war, especially those allied with the administration, kept relatively quiet, or attempted to belittle what had gone on, or made facile arguments that such things always occur in wartime. But it seems to me that those of us who are most committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential to winning this war.

I'm not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results are this horrifying, it's worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ''heroic'' protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.

[See Amygdala]

Only in Bush's America: "That's just the way it is."

It started out as a good day for Bush. Earlier, it was being reported that he admitted to making a mistake when he used the phrase "bring it on!" in response to the Iraqi insurgency. No dice.

Pharyngula has a link to some really disturbing quotes from George W. Bush from the conservative newspaper The Washington Times :

"I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person," Mr. Bush said. "I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is.

"On the other hand, I think more and more people understand the importance of faith in their life," he said. "America is a remarkable place when it comes to religion and faith. We had people come to our rallies who were there specifically to say, 'I'm here to pray for you, let you know I'm praying for you.' And I was very grateful about that."

No wait, there's more:

"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit," Mr. Bush said. "That's what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have or one of the greatest freedoms is the right to worship the way you see fit.
"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord," he said.

Both statements have a certain bimodal pattern. 1) "On the one hand, blah blah blah secularism." --> 2) "On the other hand, you need the Lord." In other words, despite the imperative for secularism, you can't deny the final authority of My Religious Beliefs.

The first statement ("That's just the way it is...") seems like it might be misstatement -- a Bushism, if you will. Whether it comes from a loose tongue or just a moment of total logical lapse (I hope it's the former), I can't say. Perhaps it is a riddle?

(Bush is a little like Ghalib, in his moments of "impossible simplicity." Will people recite Bushisms 200 years from now they way they now recite Ghalib, savoring the gnomic, discordant quality of his poetry? A century after religious intolerance produces World War III, will subsequent generations of tortured young aesthetes look back on this with a certain melancholy pleasure?)

Another Prominent Desi Author Has Immigration Issues

According to lit-blogger Beatrice (thanks to The Literary Saloon for the tip!) Pankaj Mishra recently got a taste of American immigration pareshaani when returning to the U.S. from South Asia. He was eventually allowed in, but not before being threatened with deportation:

Apparently I had a much easier time getting to the NYPL than Mishra did; we learned that just last week, Mishra had been coming back from a journalistic trip through Pakistan and Afghanistan when he was stopped at customs in JFK and, as he described it, "taken to a little cell where people who looked like me were sitting," where he was detained for several hours and threatened with deportation because an immigration official spotted "something on his computer" that made Mishra look suspect. Sounds like Ian McEwan got off easy compared to Mishra, who was clearly still rattled by the experience--and the blue-city New York audience was sympathetically anxious for him as well.

Now I can sort of see it if Ramachandra Guha, who is very well-known in India but less known abroad, gets the "something on my computer doesn't look right" treatment. And after all, he was just giving lectures at Oberlin and Berkeley -- are those even real colleges?

But Pankaj Mishra? I mean, come on, just Google the guy -- you get 35,000 hits! They guy has his name on seven books (counting the Naipaul Literary Occasions, and the edition of Kim for which he wrote the forward).

For all this talk about "Intelligence," I'm continually amazed by the evidence that USCIS officials are operating in its absence.

Bhangra CD Mini-reviews: Friction, Mehsopuria, Bally Sagoo

I picked up some new CDs the other day at SaReGaMa in New Jersey. All three are marked for release in India -- prices on the back are in Rupees.



1. Crossover dance party recommendation: Friction. It's a compilation of mostly UK Punjabi remix tracks, with a fair amount of Desi rapping (in English), and some heavy-duty hip hop sampling. I think it might be legalized material, since the label on the back says Sony, but I'm not sure how they can afford samples from Dr. Dre, Missy Elliot, Timbaland, Ed Lover, Groove Armada, and Beyonce... So this might be one of those CDs that's "legal in India"? Anyway, Bobby Friction, the BBC1 DJ, put it together. (I'm also looking forward to the Bobby Friction and Nihal joint compilation, which is supposed to be out sometime.)

This CD would be good for getting people out on a dance floor. Some of the tracks are catchy, and have monster beats -- that "whoa, where did you get this?" quality. It would work even if most of the people in the room aren't South Asian. You'll get most of what's going on even if you don't know Hindi or Punjabi; it's all about the beats and the hooks. You could probably get this only at an Indian grocery/music store; I'm not finding it online anywhere. It's ironic, because of the three CDs I'm talking about here, this one is the most influenced by American hip hop.



2. Traditional Bhangra recommendation: Mehsopuria, self-titled CD. Mehsopuria came out of nowhere last year, and stormed the UK Bhangra charts. He's doing traditional Bhangra, with the only nod to the Clubs being the heavy beats he uses on some tracks. On one track ("Dil Sada," our heart) he does use a 2-step beat; he never uses hip hop. For a guy born and raised in the UK, it's amazing that he resists the temptation to use English.

His name, apparently, comes from his family's village in Punjab, Mehsumpur. You should get this if you're looking for traditional Bhangra in the vein of Gurdas Mann. It also helps if you understand some Punjabi, and have a taste for this already. Not that the lyrics are all that original; most of it is classic Punjabi, "When you looked at me with those eyes, it made me lose my cool," material. But he has a good voice, lots of energy, and some nice melodies here. "Tumka", "Ranglay Punjab Diyaan", "Mahi" and "Punoo Haniya" are all really good. You can hear some audio samples (and watch music videos) at Mehsopuria's webpage.



3. Not quite a recommendation: Bally Sagoo, Bollywood Buzz, with vocals by Gunjan.

This one promised more in the vein of Bollywood Flashback, with hip-hoppy and R&B remakes of classic Hindi songs, and while it's a little thin (three out of ten tracks are mixes of the same song), it has at least two club-friendly tracks.

[Update: Cancel all that] The likely hit is the version of "Bindiya Chamkegi," which will not surprise people familiar with Bally Sagoo's earlier "Noorie" or "Chura Liya." But it does have the virtue of being a bit faster -- probably danceable.
Sagoo has for years relied on Gunjan's voice. She's good at getting that classic Hindi sound most of the time, but she doesn't quite carry the day on "Tune O Rangiley."

It seems that they've released basically the same album in the UK as Bindiya Chamkegi. (There are also some short samples from the songs at that link)

University of California Press Puts 400 Books Online, free

I'm not 100% sure I see what's in it for them to make 400 books available to the general public, completely free. (Thanks, Bookish) But there will be time enough for analysis later. In the short run, I'm celebrating, passing it on, and hoping other presses will follow suit.

Here are some of the titles that interested me (not that I have time to actually read through many of them in the week before classes start). The books at the top of the list are generally books I've read parts of already:

Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India by Parama Roy

Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics by Frances Pritchett

A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity by Daniel Boyarin

At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain

The Irish Ulysses by Maria Tymoczko

J.M Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing by David Attwell

The Travels of Dean Mahomet:
An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India by Dean Mahomet (!)

The Magic Mountain: Hill Stations and the British Raj

Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia

Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918

A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity

Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre

The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines

Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars

Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India

The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India

The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity

Freud and His Critics

Hysteria Beyond Freud

Historians get Materialistic

I was hoping there would be some big controversy to report about some of the big disciplinary conventions that meet around now, other than MLA -- the American Historical Association, the Linguistic Society of America, etc.

Well, the LSA did get a little media, mainly because of their goofy annual contests for interesting new words. I was pleased to see that "crunk" was nominated, and sad that it lost out to "red state/blue state" as "most likely to succeed." Then again, it's not as if "crunk" is likely to be a word anyone is still using a year from now!

Tim Burke did have some interesting insights on Historians' discipline-wide neglect of Africa at Cliopatria, but it's hardly on the order of "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." (The scandal of Eve Sedgwick's title never gets old.)

Well, the Boston Globe at least has something to report about Historians: they've got a tendency to be materialistic.

Ouch, bad joke; sorry. But I've been desperate to see some metacommentary on a discipline other than literature for once.

One Nation, Under a Dimly Understood God...

Stephen Prothero, in the LA Times (via A&L Daily). He's arguing that the U.S. needs more education about religion in its primary schools, which is to be distinguished from religious education.

Things are different in Europe, and not just in Sweden. The Dutch are four times less likely than Americans to believe in miracles, hell and biblical inerrancy. The euro does not trust in God. But here is the paradox: Although Americans are far more religious than Europeans, they know far less about religion.

In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can't be bothered to read what he has to say.

Seems plausible to me, though this argument could easily be twisted into "Prothero says cure for religious extremism is more religion in school." Still, it's interesting where he ends up in this op-ed:

A few days after 9/11, a turbaned Indian American man was shot and killed in Arizona by a bigot who believed the man's dress marked him as a Muslim. But what killed Balbir Singh Sodhi (who was not a Muslim but a Sikh) was not so much bigotry as ignorance. The moral of his story is not just that we need more tolerance. It is that Americans — of both the religious and the secular variety — need to understand religion. Resolving in 2005 to read for yourself either the Bible or the Koran (or both) might not be a bad place to start.

Power 99: Racial slurs lead to DJ Star's suspension

Final follow-up on the Power 99 controversy: Star is suspended for a day.

The point has been made, folks. I'm ready to move on.

C.L. Smooth, widely cited poet

Apropos of nothing in particular...

C.L. Smooth was an artsy rapper in the early 1990s. His collaboration with producer Pete Rock, "Mecca and the Soul Brother," was one of the classics of early 1990s hip hop. Though he doesn't get appreciated the way KRS-One, Q-Tip, and the early Nas do for their artistry, C.L. Smooth gets a place in my -- but probably not just my -- Artistic Rap Hall of Fame.

The classic song -- really the one song that everyone should know -- is called "They Reminisce Over You". It's got a beautiful jazz saxophone sample, and pretty thoughtful lyrics as rap songs go. The following lines from the middle of the song have been hard-wired in my memory for about 11 or 12 years:

When I date back I recall a man off the family tree
My right hand poppa doc I see
Took me from a boy to a man so I always had a father
When my biological didn’t bother
Taking care of this so who am I to bicker
Not a bad ticker but I’m clocking pop’s liver ["clocking," meaning "copying"]
But you can never say that his life is through
5 kids at 21 believe he got a right too
Here we go while I check the scene
With the Portuguese lover at the age of 14 [he's talking about himself now]
The same age, front page, no fuss
But I bet you all your dough, they live longer than us

There are some moments that are a little confusing in a narrative sense to be sure. (For example, I've never really understood "My right hand poppa doc I see". Is that a reference to Haiti's Papa Doc Duvalier?) But despite its confusing points, fundamentally this is a song about memory, dysfunctional families, and death, especially from AIDS, which shows up later in the song. As (presumably) autobiography, it hangs together thematically in a way that few other rap songs do. It works as rap, but it also works as 'poetry' in a more technical sense.

I was happy to see that serious poets are citing it, as in this New York Times review of some new books of poetry out.

In ''The Listening: Poems,'' Kyle Dargan writes an attractive, melodic line that no one would mistake for prose. But his first loyalty -- like that of his models, particularly the Black Arts Movement poets -- is to the language people speak. That's not to say his language isn't stylized. It's like a spoken shorthand, blending the creative elision of lyric poetry with the wit, brio and irony of black English and hip-hop slang (''The Listening'' is almost certainly the first poetry collection to include epigraphs from both Elizabeth Bishop and C. L. Smooth). In the sonnet ''Bluff,'' Dargan sketches the troubled relationship between his street-savvy father and his disciplinarian grandfather in just a few strokes: ''sometimes it's easier to beat the city / than to beat the house.''

Elizabeth Bishop... and C.L. Smooth!

Harassing call center workers for fun

This is sort of a follow-up on the Power 99 thing: Times of India.

Of course, because it is The Times of India, the whole thing could just be fiction (remember Bhaskar, the "serial killer"? [I miss Jivha]).

Notice how no quote is given a direct attribution or source! So, while it seems plausible, I wouldn't take it too seriously.

Indian National Anthem to be changed?

Awhile ago I posted on the controversy over India's national anthem. A small number of people on the Hindu right wanted it to be changed from "Jana Gana Mana" to more spiritual/devotional sounding "Bande Mataram." But the issue went away pretty quickly.

Now there is a new issue, following notice from the Supreme Court that the word "Sindh" should be removed from "Jana Gana Mana," because Sindh is a province that is now in Pakistan.

Also, Sindhi poet Lekhraj Aziz has written a note of protest in the Times of India.

No opinion on this yet...

Traveling bloggers

Unfortunately this winter break did not have anything in the way of exciting travels for me. But others were much more lucky.

Kerim and Shashwati, for example, have been doing interesting stuff in India. Read Kerim's posts on Dehradun, Denotified tribes (especially that one), and Adivasis.

Elck (Vernacular Body) also has been in India, and has great posts on it. I especially liked the post on Bombay.

And Ms. World has been all over Southeast Asia. There are a number of good posts there, so I'll just link to her whole blog.

And you should also read this week's bit from Fareed Zakaria (not a blogger, but I found his latest through Manish, who is one) has been in Delhi and Chennai recently. He is impressed -- to an extent -- at what's happening business-wise and otherwise. (Manish is less pleased... read his post too)

Only in India: Delhi Airport Broadcasts Smut

Hard to believe.

Via Buchu

IndiBloggies nomination; and Year in Review

I've been nominated in three IndiBloggies categories. It's the Indian version of the more U.S. focused "Bloggies." If you're so inclined, you can vote for me.

Though I'm grateful to be nominated (thanks especially to Nitin) I must say I do feel these awards things are a little strange. I'm nominated in the same category as Om Malik, whose blog is a high-tech oriented, "industry" news-aggregator produced by a professional journalist, and Tsunami Help, which is less a blog than it is a massive news and information aggregator (they've gotten 1.5 million hits in about 10 days!). We are talking about comparing a professionalized apple (Om), a massive humanitarian orange (Tsunami), and in my own personal case, a very small, brainy grape.

Another problem: I hardly write exclusively about things related to India. I'm deeply interested in India, and I spent two weeks traveling around there this past summer, but I'm firmly attached to the soil (really, the pavement) of the I-95 corridor of the eastern United States. And my range of interests extends to all kinds of non-India-ish things. This is really a cross-category blog, not an "India blog," or an academic blog. (Then again, I am hardly alone in this.)

In lieu of begging for votes, this might be a good opportunity to review what in fact happened in 2004, which was a very busy year with regard to the Indian Subcontinent and its various diasporas. In addition to the Tsunami, there were historic elections and some major intellectual/academic controversies. There were some depressing anniversaries (Bhopal, Indira Gandhi's assasination, Operation Bluestar, communal violence against Sikhs). And there was Behzti. Here are some of what I consider to be the better more substantial posts related to Indian politics, literature, and film that I've written from the past year:

I enjoyed talking about Suketu Mehta's new book, Maximum City, which is probably the main "must read" book about India published in the U.S. this fall. I responded particularly to Mehta's point about naming and re-naming in "Bombay." Another promising young writer and critic whose work I praised in this blog is Amitava Kumar.

I closely followed the Behzti controversy, involving the Sikh community in England. I even posted a short story I wrote, inspired by the events. On Sikh issues, I also posted a consideration of the 20th anniversay of Operation Bluestar.

I provided short reviews of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Hari Kunzru's Transmission.

My post on Agha Shahid Ali tried to take an original approach to this sometimes neglected figure.

I've been following the ongoing trials and tribulations of Indian secularism, including the debates on Triple Talaq, and the half-hearted reforms of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board. I've also provided some background on communalism.

I've been following the implementation of the Hijab and Turban ban in France, and have posted my critique.

I've talked about a couple of big controversies this past year in the Indian intellectual scene. One is the controversy surrounding Hinduism Studies in the U.S., especially the vehement attack on Wendy Doniger instigated by Rajiv Malhotra. See parts 1 and 2. I've also responded to the controversy around V.S. Naipaul's support for the Hindu right, which is seemingly out of keeping with his historical self-identification as an atheist and a rootless cosmopolitan.

I followed the upheaval of the Indian elections back in May, and wrote detailed profiles of Manmohan Singh as well as President Abdul Kalam.

On a lighter (but not that much lighter) note, I've written about my experiences DJing Bhangra parties, here, here, and here.

And amongst my reviews of Hindi films, I put a fair amount of thought into my review of Yuva, which I think is an extraordinary film by India's best commercial filmmaker.

All in all, a very busy year in Indian subcontinent happenings, and also, therefore, in India-related postings on this blog.

Thanks to everyone out there for reading, linking to me, and commenting.

Power99 Controversy: The Question of "Racism"

In college (and even in grad school, as I recall), we used to have debates about whether you could be "racist" if you happened to be black. Most of my African American friends at the time said no, it doesn't make sense to use that term. The argument goes something like this: the systematic victims of oppression can instigate it themselves, but when they do it it's something less severe than when members of a majority community do it. To describe that species of behavior, my friends tended to use the term "ignorant" (or the more vernacular "ign'ant"), which is also derogatory, but nowhere near as strong.

I used to be sympathetic to that argument, but I'm less so now. Does the language a Power99 DJ used (listen to the MP3 of it here -- it's recently been pulled off the station's website) reflect systematic anger and hostility that "racism" requires? I tend to think so. Does it reflect unequal relations of power? Yes -- a call-center worker in India is not likely to have any legal standing to take action in response. Is it therefore "racism"? Is it a "hate crime"? I tend to think so, but I also think it doesn't matter much whether we use the race/hate idiom or not. It may not be "racism," but it is a racial insult, as it singles out a group behavior. It may not be a "hate" crime, but it is a crime in our current legal system. Libel and slander are crimes (they always have been) even though they are "just speech."

The term the DJ repeatedly used is "rat-eater." (He also used a misogynist term [B---], which is no better.) But "rat-eater" -- where does that come from? Like a lot of racial codes, it's a strange insult, something ugly that seems to have more to do with the DJ's own twisted imagination than with the person -- people, really -- he was trying to insult. It seems to be tied to anti-Chinese and anti-Phillipino insults (Dog-eater, etc.), which stand-up comedians still often throw around, especially when cracking jokes about Chinese restaurants. At the least, the insult is misapplied (similar to when Sikhs are hit with "Bin Laden" insults). But it seems more correct to say in this case that the insult makes no sense whatsoever; it's incoherent.

That too doesn't lessen its offensiveness. Contrary to the commonly held belief that racial insults are based on some kernel of truth, I believe it doesn't matter whether the attribute he's referring to has any basis in anthropological reality. Indeed, the specific content of racial insults (or any insults) doesn't matter; it's the relationship of power between the parties involved, and the the motive and form of the delivery that count. DJ Star meant to insult, and if you listen to the hurt in "Steena's" voice on the MP3, you can tell that it worked. The association of the insultee with a group behavior, however poorly defined or understood by the insulter, does give it its racial edge. Also, he knows that he won't be held accountable for what he's said, and that she isn't in a position to return the insult with one of her own.

I try and keep a thick skin about most things, but this hits home, partly because for two years I listened to that radio station all the time on my way to and from work (that and NPR). It's virtually an institution in Philly; everyone knows Power99. It has the biggest audience, and huge influence over the Philadelphia music scene. People who've grown up there have likely listened to the station for their whole lives.

Well, from now on it's all Terry Gross, all the time for me. And following Anna's lead, I'm sending in a letter of protest to the station, requesting an apology from the DJ.

Music Suggestion: Lascivious Biddies

Biddies4ever. Also, they have a blog. Try listening to the excerpt from Famous, for instance...

File Under: Ironic feminist jazz/cabaret

Blog roundup: Tsunami

This week's "Indian Blog Fair". Check out especially Amit Varma and Dilip D'Souza. Amazing stuff...

Another film review: Swades

Swades was one of the most hyped Hindi films of the year. It has some merits, but it is essentially a rather grand failure.

Written and directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar, who also wrote and directed the international hit Lagaan, this was expected to be a big hit both in the international and domestic markets. Like Lagaan, the film had a huge budget. Also like Lagaan, there is a pointedly "uplifting" message about Indian society (the film's title means "one's own country," and is an allusion to a famous anti-colonial agitation in Bengal in the early 1900s).

The premise of Swades is a little hard to swallow. Shah Rukh Khan plays a NASA engineer in Washington DC, who goes back to India to find the nanny who raised him after his parents were killed in a car accident. He finds her in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, cared for by her daughter Gita (Gayatri Joshi -- a fashion model making her screen debut). He wants to bring her back to the U.S. with him, but along the way he falls in love with Gita and takes an interest in furthering the Development of the village.

Positives: The emphasis on caste, merely a token presence in Lagaan, is here spelled out in much greater detail. Also central to the film are the many difficulties involved in bringing modern amenities to India's backward villages; one of the climactic moments in the film involves the installation of self-sustaining electricity. (Just as the NASA framing of the film seems to be an allusion to deceased astronaut Kalpana Chawla, the hydroelectric power sequence is certainly an allusion to Narmada.) And there are a couple of dynamite songs ("Yeh Tara Woh Tara") from A.R. Rahman.

But here's where it gets odd. More than Lagaan, this film feels like an old-fashioned 'social reform' film from the 1950s. (One thinks of the paeans to collectivized farming in Mother India, for instance.) Swades argues for: do-it-yourself Development, take Repsonsibility here and now, and don't stay Abroad too long making money. Nice sentiments, all.

But those sentiments seem to be out of touch with today's audiences. In an era of video-phone underage sex scandals, making a film this self-consciously naive seems risky, if not stupid.

Lagaan was equally preachy and hackneyed, but it had cricket for its saving grace. (There aren't very many Hindi movies that involve the sport, oddly enough; it was a novelty in more than one sense.) Perhaps it can be said that Swades fails because it has a picturesque village in need of Uplift without a cricket match at the center to divert audiences from all the heavy dogmatism.

That's not to say I don't agree with the idealism of Swades. I myself share many of those all old-fashioned sentiments...

And I think the recent explosion of concern for the victims of the Tsunami within India shows that civic responsibility is very much alive and well there.

Trivial Post #1: Sideways and Closer

We saw Sideways (last night) and Closer (a couple of weeks ago). Both are Oscar-contenders, and both can be placed in the "arty divorce drama" genre. I liked them, but was left feeling a little hollow in both cases.

On the positive, I appreciated the quality of both films. They are unquestionablly intelligent and nicely shot. Closer has some beautifully taut dialogue, and an interesting play between symmetry and asymmetry in the plot that would do Tristan Todorov proud. And Sideways has moments of neurotic, offbeat genius, usually involving the spilling of wine or the travails of flabby middle-aged masculinity. Also, Paul Giamatti's performance as the depressed wine aficionado and failed writer is a pretty classic -- the schlemiel sublime. (There were half a dozen moments when the dialogue reminded me of my own life: "So what's your book about? When's it coming out? Can I read it?" Argh)

That said, I found both films a little depressing. In contrast to romantic comedies and bildungsroman (coming-of-age) stories, divorce dramas are about coming to terms with a life that is somewhat less than expected. It's an important lesson, to be sure, but I still recoil from this type of film at an involuntary, emotional level.

I'm not sure where my faint sense of disdain for these films is coming from; three years ago I'd probably be raving enthusiastically. It's possible I've lately been corrupted by too many sunny Hindi films, which are almost always "comedy" (in that they end in a marriage), even when they have a serious component. Or maybe the American art house obsession with chronicling squandered intelligence (a tradition that goes back to Woody Allen, and before) has always been basically a waste of time, but it took me until now to notice it.

I prefer Before Sunset -- which I would happily watch again -- to either of these films.