A fake hate crime, and a real one

A fake hate crime in France (via Sharleen).

And a real one, in Queens.

[Update: The story in Newsday has a photo of the victim, Rajinder Singh, after the assault.]

More on English professors

Read this piece by Sharleen Mondal. It's excellent.

It's in response to this long article in this month's The Believer by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. There's too much in the essay to summarize it simply. I guess the best description of his take on attending an MLA convention is open-minded but skeptical. I've only read about half of it so far (have to get back to Susan Jacoby!), but I approve of everything I've seen so far.

I'm also grateful because Sharleen turns directs me to Charlie Bertsch, a 'punk rock' English prof. at Arizona.

Musical oddities and little treasures (and a U2 parody)

I'm preparing to DJ the wedding of two friends this weekend. Mostly that means, lining up the 'Greatest Hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and today!' (pronounced in your best radio voice). It's stressful to line up just the right songs. In this case (it will be a culturally mixed crowd widely variable by age), it might even be impossible. Some will want Abba, others will want the latest Bollywood numbers (as in, Rishi Rich's "U&I" from Hum Tum).

As a way of procrastinating the real work of delineating a tasteful, 'memorable experience,' I've found myself flipping through my collection and enjoying oddities, all of which are utterly unusable:

1. Orlandivo, Onda Anda O meu Amor, from Soul Samba 70s. Somewhere between samba and the Isley Brothers ("Between the Sheets")

2. Ozzy and 'Madonna,' "Crazy Train," white label mix. A hard house beat, sampled guitars from Ozzy Osbourne, and a woman singing bowdlerized Ozzy lyrics (throwing in random riffs to the effect of "show me that your love is for real," etc.). This is supposedly Madonna's voice, and it sometimes even sort of sounds like her. But it's not Madonna.

3. Britney Spears, Madonna, and Rishi Rich, "Me Against the Music (Bhangra mix)." Yes, an authorized remix of Britney Spears with Dhol. It makes the whole thing a little noisy, but it might be playable to a certain crowd under certain conditions.

4. Henry Rollins, "I Hate U2." This is Rollins, doing live stand-up comedy in Dublin. In this bit he's trashing one of Ireland's (many) sacred cows. The parts about U2 are hilarious. The parts where he talks about what he thinks about when he's working out are less so.

[I know U2 is pretty widely liked and respected by most 20-30 somethings out there. Rollins, as a veteran rock n roll guy, has his own beef. And I shouldn't be glib; I have a long history with this band (The Joshua Tree was the first LP I ever bought). But look at these lines:

"I have spoke[n] with the jungle angels
I have held hands with the devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone"

Bono loves the juxtaposition of opposites. He also likes to keep it very, very simple. But can't we do better than angels, devils, warm, and cold? The meanings cancel each other out, leaving only a goopy, indeterminate emotion as a residue.

To illustrate, here are my U2 parody lyrics:

You were on the inside, but now you're out
This world seemed hard before it all went soft
I asked for too much, but now I got nothing,
You were right, baby, you were right
You got to cut to black
before you see the white light

Does it sound U2 ish? ]

5. Yo Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin, "Ave Maria." My man is on the cello. And Señor McFerrin shows he can sing much more than trite reggae-pop. Si, Señor.

6. Grupo Batuque, "Tabla Samba," off the Indica Brazilia CD. Everyone goes, "What is this?"

7. Ursula 1000, "Ram Balram" off the Bombay 2: Electric Vindaloo CD. It might make you laugh, but it's still funky.

8. Jack White, songs from the Cold Mountain soundtrack. Jack White of the White Stripes did a bunch of 'old-timey' style songs for Anthony Minghella. They're nice, in kind of an "O brother, how on earth did you get this gig?" kind of way.

9. Nelly Furtado, "Party's Over (Reprise Mix)" off the Ultra Chilled 2 CD. Listen for all the goofy noises she makes!

Harold and Kumar -- hunting Hamburgers in New Jersey

Dude, am I the only one who is excited about Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle?

See some reviews of the film here.

Unfortunately, I will be in India on July 30, when the film is scheduled to release. So I will miss the first 10 days of the era of HKGTWC.

I'm curious to know how they will retitle this for Indian release. Bend it Like Beckham became Football, Shootball, Hai Rabba! (this is true).
Maybe this will become Burger Chahta Hai?

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers; Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln

[Broadband is down at home; posting will be limited as I'm on the internet at a noisy library terminal]

Secularism teaches us to be good here and now. I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just. . . . Secularism has no 'castles in Spain.' It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end and aim is to make this world better every day--to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes. (Robert Ingersoll, American secularist; quoted in Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers)

I'm finally reading Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, a book that was scheduled to come out in March, but which for some reason I didn't find in the bookstore until yesterday. I'm only about a third of the way through it, but so far I'm enjoying it, and learning a lot. The arguments about secularism aren't always convincing on every point, but the research she's done is great -- it fills in many gaps in my (admittedly paltry) knowledge of these chapters in American history. So far, I've read great chapters on the revolutionary period, Thomas Paine (who was more radical in his beliefs and in the manner of his life than I'd ever imagined), as well as Abraham Lincoln.

One of the most important benefits of Jacoby's argument about the Revolutionary period is the way she links the Evangelical Protestants (many of them southerners) with the elite freethinkers who were responsible for many of the signature features of the U.S. constitution -- Thomas Jefferson, James Madison. The evangelicals wanted to keep religious "tests" as well as any references to God out of the Constitution to protect their freedom to organize as well as proselytize. Baptists and Congregationalists were, therefore, key players in ensuring disestablishment, first in Virginia, and then nationally. Jacoby talks about this briefly in her Beliefnet interview:

A secular government was developed to protect the rights of religious minorities. Most Americans don't know that God is not mentioned in the Constitution. It was a coalition of religious Evangelicals and freethinkers or deists who joined together to get this ratified. And why did the Evangelicals want this then? Because they were a minority and they deeply feared government interference with religion. This Constitution basically placed the Episcopal Church, the established religion in the South before the Revolution, on a level playing field with all of the Evangelical Protestant denominations that were sprouting up. The effect of this was to enable them to proselytize for their own religion in ways that if there had been a union of established church and state they never would have been able to do. Ironically, it's the separation of church and state that has probably enabled religion to flourish throughout the 20th century in this country in ways that it doesn't in other developed nations.

Here are some reviews of the Jacoby, and my reactions to them:

1. Scott McLemee, in a generally positive review, 'grumbles' about Jacoby's over-use of the term "religiously correct" to describe versions of American history that try to simplify the broiling chaos of America's religious and irreligious sects in the interest of unifying American culture under the banner of Protestant Christianity.

2.. Richard Wrightman Fox's review in Slate points out a possible flaw that stems from Jacoby's own research, and that is visible between the lines of her history. And that is that so many of the primary figures in her story are of arguable importance -- they were always a little less than fully respectable, even if they were able to command large audiences.

As a history, Freethinkers does not look critically enough at the notion of "influence." Jacoby's favorite freethinker Robert Ingersoll, an Illinois lawyer and politician, evolved after the Civil War into a well-known "agnostic" lecturer and writer. But to call him "the preeminent orator of his generation" suggests a cultural centrality that he did not command. Infamous as much as famous, he entertained a mass audience without being widely followed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the greatest feminist thinker of the mid-19th century. But her stature stemmed from her general appeal for women's rights, not her dismissal of the churches or her challenge to divorce laws. Most contemporaries regarded her anticlericalism and her free-divorce advocacy as anachronistic survivals from an antebellum era strangely infatuated with "individual sovereignty." Tom Paine's influence took a steep dive as early as 1794, when his Age of Reason assailed Christianity as a laughable "mystery" religion. True, he remained a hero to many 19th-century American anticlerical rationalists. But every social and political viewpoint, secular or religious, gained adherents in a century that saw the population explode from 5 million to 75 million. Paine's relative influence declined dramatically even if the number of his admirers grew.

3. Alan Wolfe, in his New Republic review (not available online), talks about some interesting aspects of the debate that don't appear too much in Jacoby's book, including especially the notorious Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who in the late 1950s and 60s championed the effort to remove prayer from public schools. One of Wolfe's complaints about Jacoby is that in privileging non-believers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she neglects the important role played by pro-religious advocates in the women's rights movement in the 19th century:

One religious dissenter celebrated by Jacoby who did achieve significant historical fame is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader of the first wave of American feminism. Stanton spent a major portion of her late years writing The Woman's Bible, an attack on Christianity for its malecenteredness, and she also gave frequent speeches arguing that organized religion was hostile to women. In this regard, she stood in sharp contrast to Susan B. Anthony, who concluded, not without reason, that it would be good to have on the side of female suffrage all those myriad women willing to join a Christian temperance organization. By Jacoby's lights, we ought to be celebrating Anthony and forgetting Stanton--but, as even Jacoby concludes, Stanton is hardly treated as a non-person by contemporary feminists. And so Jacoby, to protect her thesis, shifts her ground. Yes, Stanton is well known, but "the essential role of agnostics in the women's rights movement has never been acknowledged."

The phrasing in this paragraph is a little shifty -- I don't think it's quite true that Jacoby shifts her ground; I think Wolfe is actually mischaracterizing her position.

4. Christopher Hitchens, in his Washington Post review, seems to really enjoy the book. His complaint is that Jacoby doesn't consider the importance of non-believing conservatives:

If the book has a fault, it is the near-axiomatic identification of the secular cause with the liberal one. Susan Jacoby has what might be called ACLU politics. To read her, you would not know that two of the most prominent intellectual gurus of American conservatism -- Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss -- were both determined nonbelievers. H.L. Mencken, who if not exactly a conservative was certainly not a liberal, had vast contempt for religion but is cited only briefly here for his role in the Scopes trial in Tennessee.

There's probably some truth in this, though it seems a little self-serving on Hitchens' part to mention it.

5. Michael Kazin's review, in the New York Times, is a little disappointing. He ends the review with a couple of paragraphs that don't quite make sense:

On the other hand, freethinkers in the United States are unlikely to talk many people into abandoning their belief in an afterlife and their reverence for Scripture. In 1892 Ingersoll gave a lovely eulogy for his friend Walt Whitman, whom, he said, ''accepted and absorbed all theories, all creeds, all religions, and believed in none.'' But this is a difficult stance to take, and few Americans have ever taken it.

Religious diversity untrammeled by government is a hard-won and signal achievement of our society, thanks to the efforts of James Madison and other enlightened minds. It would be unreasonable to suppose that a rigorous humanism could replace this kind of freedom, which remains rare in a world of warring faiths.

But Jacoby isn't arguing that reason should replace freedom... Nowhere does she say that secularism requires that people give up the freedom to religious expression and belief.

[Expect more on Jacoby from me in the next few days]

India-related resources at the Complete Review

Dan Green from The Reading Experience linked to a site he is associated with called The Complete Review in a recent post.

It has a wealth of resources, including a number of thorough reviews of books by Indian authors (including Upamanyu Chatterjee, Githa Hariharan, and Qurratulain Hyder -- people whose work I enjoy, but who are not widely known outside of India).

Also recommended is this useful analysis of the James Laine book on Sivaji, as well as the subsequent harassment of him and anyone even remotely associated (culminating with the Sambhaji Brigade's attack on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute a a few months ago).

Personal Law in India: Triple Talaq, Mehr, and why it doesn't matter anyways

I was briefly excited to see some movement regarding Triple Talaq (where men can instantly divorce their wives) from the Indian Muslim Personal Law Board. But, as Soma Wadhwa writes in this week's Outlook, what the MPLB has ended up with is pretty disappointing. Moreover, many other substantial issues relating to women's rights in the Muslim community are simply not being addressed by the overwhelmingly male board (1 woman, 41 men).

Muslim women's advocates have other issues they want addressed (such as the right of Muslim women to divorce men), and are clear-headed on what it will take to get there:

This was a far cry from the original promise of a draft model nikahnama, a promise now deferred to the board's November meet in Kozhikode. Women's groups and activists in the community who have been lobbying tirelessly for a ban on triple talaq for years now are obviously disappointed. "The board has little concern for women and their rights," regrets Hasina Khan of Awaz-e-Niswan, a Mumbai-based support group for Muslim women. "ngos and civil society have very little dialogue with them, and there are very few women on the board anyway." Agrees Nazneen Barkath, president of the Madurai-based All India Progressive Muslim Conference, "It is, of course, necessary to get rid of the un-Islamic practice of triple talaq, but the long-term battle must be for women's participation in the affairs of the jamaat (community). Unless Muslim women get a due share in the administration of mosques, women's issues will only be decided by men." A fact that Lucknow-based Naseem Iqtidar Ali, the lone woman in AIMPLB's 41-member-strong executive committee, knows through experience. Her demand that Muslim women be granted the right to divorce their husbands (tafviz-e-talaq) was ignored outright at the Kanpur meeting. "The board just has to make it mandatory that a clause giving wives the right to divorce is inserted in all nikahnamas. Today, talaq can be so unfair to women," she says.

Much of the debate amongst Personal Law Board members relates to what is the best interpretation of Sharia. The problem is that Sharia was composed entirely by human interpretations of the Quran; it is not strictly what the Quran says, and in some cases there are arguably deviations. Moreover, in India in particular, there is a long history of Muslim personal law as adjudicated by British lawyers in colonial India:

While the orthodoxy's strongest argument against abolishing the practice of triple talaq in one sitting has always been that it is based on the Shariat or the Divine Laws, liberals push for a more contemporary understanding of the genesis of these Divine Laws. The original message in the Quran was in its intent and design both radical and humanitarian. The corpus of rules articulated centuries after the death of Prophet Mohammad by the Muslim establishment in the light of the dominant patriarchal ethos of the emerging society were incorporated as the Shariat. Liberals point out that rules characterised by the ulemas as Sharia, even though entirely the creation of a human agency, became vested with the sanctity of being either revealed or divine. Plus, in India, the Anglo-Mohammedan law evolved by the colonial courts in their effort to apply the laws of the Quran (in cases where the parties were Muslims) also began to be construed as a part of the Shariat. These laws, the handiwork of those who were not even nominally Muslims, were justified through the legal fiction that the courts were not interpreting the Shariat but merely applying it.

Muslim personal law as it now stands owes much more to Anglo-Mohammedan law than it does to official Sharia (much less the Quran, only 'real' source of authority in Islam).

The triple talaq issue has been hotly controversial since the Shah Bano decision in 1986. There, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an elderly woman who had been divorced by her husband with a triple talaq. Shah Bano had demanded maintenance (alimony), which her ex-husband had refused. There is actually a provision for this in the sharia. According to Madhu Kishwar, in her essay "Pro-Women or Anti-Muslim? The Shah Bano Controversy" (from Religion at the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays), at the time of the ruling the Supreme Court had already ruled on two earlier Muslim divorce cases in favor of the women plaintiffs. In one case, Justice Krishna Iyer had cited a practice called mehr as justifying his decision to grant maintenance. Kishwar defines mehr as follows:

Mehr, translated as "dower," is somewhat similar to the marriage settlement that used to be prevalent in some European countries whereby the husband settled an estate on the wife as a security for her. The amount of mehr is of two kinds--prompt and deferred. Prompt mehr is that which the husband must give the wife any time she demands it. Deferred mehr is that which the wife agrees not to demand until the marriage is dissolved by death or divorce. The latter form is more prevalent in India.

There is a further wrinkle, which has to do with another form of maintenance. Shah Bhano's ex-husband, Mohammed Ahmed Khan, had actually paid her a lump-sum amount for the divorce, during the iddat, the three-month period following the official talaq. (During that three month period, the husband is supposed to "keep the wife in his houseand maintain her at his own standard of living."). Shah Bano's lawyers had argued for another, ongoing payment, the mataa, which is described in the Quran: "And for divorced women let there be a fair provision (mataa). This is an obligation on those who are mindful of God" (2.241).

Of course, though all the intricacies of sharia are quite fascinating, it's really besides the point, because neither Sharia nor the Quran should decide the legal arrangements of modern nation-states. Constitutions need to be decided democratically in order to serve the interests of all citizens.

In the case of sharia, the interest may be pragmatic as well as principled: it seems to me that the sharia, with its sometimes contradictory concepts of mehr, iddat, and mataa, is simply too arcane to be credible. We shouldn't be discussing fine points of Quranic language, we should be discussing equity and justice.

The MPLB has refused time and again to make substantive changes in Muslim personal law. One can see why they are so reluctant -- for the past twenty years and more, the Muslim community in India has been under constant rhetorical (and sometimes real) attack by the majority. In such a climate, the Board has refused to change its stance as a matter of showing some backbone.

But now, with the setbacks for the Hindu right in the recent elections, the MPLB has plenty of room to move -- there are no new Rath Yatras on the horizon, no riots, no impending wars, and no terrorist hysteria. The fact that they still won't make any meaningful changes in the Personal Law shows that something is deeply wrong with the system.

Race, Baseball, Boston, Bonds

My sympathy for Boston's "curse of the Bambino" dropped a bit after reading this piece on Alternet about Barry Bonds's recent comment that he would never play for the Red Sox because of the city's racism. It turns out that Boston was the last team in Major League Baseball to integrate, and when it did, it did so only half-heartedly:

The Boston Red Sox were the last team in major league baseball to integrate. They waited so long to sign African-Americans, that the hockey team, the Bruins, actually beat them to it. The Sox removed their color line in 1959 twelve years after Jackie Robinson broke through with the Brooklyn Dodgers. They begrudgingly brought marginal infielder Pumpsie Green up from the minors. But it didn't have to be Pumpsie.

In April 1945 the Red Sox held a private tryout at Fenway Park for Robinson himself. With only management in the stands, someone yelled "Get those niggers off the field," and the door was shut. In 1949, the Red Sox laughed off the chance to sign Bonds's godfather, the legendary Willie Mays, who would go on to hit more career home runs than all but one man before him and awe crowds with his speed and defense. As Juan Williams reports, "One of the team's scouts decided that it wasn't worth waiting through a stretch of rainy weather to scout the black player." That decision killed the possibility that Mays and Ted Williams might have played in the same outfield.

In the 1950s, as teams immeasurably strengthened themselves by signing players like Mays, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Elston Howard, and others, the Red Sox stood pat with an all white hand. (The next time you hear a Boston fan complain about "The Curse of the Bambino", correct them that their "Curse of the Racism" has had a much more adverse effect.)

All I can say is: Go Yankees.

Literature Still Rules

There is a debate on Critical Mass about what it is that goes on in literature departments.

It's part of a long (endless, really) debate about the "decline" of literature in global culture. The latest log on the fire is the recent NEA study (covered by McLemee in the Chronicle) showing that Americans are reading fewer books, and considerably less literature.

I think the terms of the lament are sometimes a little confused. Some people see the problem as rampaging political correctness in English departments. Even when literature is taught, these critics allege, it is taught "in the wrong way."

Others (more realististically) see the overwhelming spread of the commercial mass media as to blame. Still, even this argument has some holes in it. TV, the movies, and popular music have been around for a long time. And while their spread has probably had some negative impact on the bottom line of booksellers since 1950 (the beginning of the TV era), the market for fiction continues to be relatively healthy, if not exactly robust.

The internet may actually facilitate the invention and popularization of new kinds of writing. "Hypertext" has turned out to be a bit of a bust, but things like fan-fiction have taken off, mainly through the internet. Moreover, there are a number of people out there who are using blogs to express themselves creatively. Clearly, there's more to come.

There's also the interesting (and I think, growing) synergy between the popular cinema and the world of fiction. In the comments on Critical Mass, I posted this:

[To say that literature is changing is not] the same as saying it's dying, or even that it's declining significantly. Literature is changing, as it must, but I think it's still very vital. I'm also optimistic that imaginative writing in some form (perhaps not always in books) will always be there. For example, note the number of commercially successful movies that are based on books -- that is synergy, and it reflects well on the continuing centrality of literature to our culture. Popular books like Harry Potter are not just glorified screenplays; they are more than that. That they become successful movies reflects well on their authors as well as a culture that recognizes a good story when it sees it.

This might seem like an unusual position for an English professor to take. But I stand by it. Admittedly, many Hollywood blockbusters come from imaginative sources that are not exactly literary. But science fiction and fantasy writers -- Phillip K. Dick and J.K. Rowling supreme among them -- are extremely competitive in the marketplace of stories and images that are considered new, provocative, and yes, commercially viable.

Expect the good ideas and good stories to continue to be mined by the Weinsteins and co. Also, expect people to keep trying to come up with good stories to sell. Ideally, people would write just to tell a good story, and sometimes books (like Cold Mountain and The English Patient) lose something as books once the movies come out. Moreover, capitalism is not always kind to writers that try to do something that isn't flashy enough to be commercial (though you never know -- look at Susan Orlean). But that's the system we have. Literature has a place in it, and I think that will continue to be the case. People should look less at the NEA's statistics and more at the dynamic nature of the market...

About how English departments might respond to these cultural changes (especially the internet), I offered this suggestion:

Interestingly, the creative writing classes in my department are always overflowing -- even if people are apparently reading fewer books on the whole, there sure are many young people want to try their hand at writing them! [Perhaps it represents a cultural shift to a Do-it-yourself mentality?] Thus, one proposal I have for reinvigorating excitement about literary study is to expand the teaching of writing, but NOT in order to produce more interpretive/theoretical papers. Rather, I think English depts. should expand their teaching of creative writing, imaginative non-fiction, and journalism.

In other words, if the overwhelming presence of the internet means people spend less time reading books, it nevertheless seems to mean that ordinary people spend more time than ever before writing. Some just write emails. Others only write goofy blogs. But throughout, what matters is that millions and millions of people are writing, writing, writing, every day and all the time. English departments, if they do their job right, can make that side of contemporary life more rewarding for the writers (not to mention easier to stomach -- for the readers!).

Some background info. on Indian communalism: RSS, VHP, BJP, etc.

I've been looking at some reference books to try and improve my factual understanding of the history of communal politics between 1880 and 1919. One helpful book is India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation, by Robert L. Hargrave, Jr. and Stanley A. Kochanek (HBJ, 2000).

Creation of the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS:

The emergence of Hindu consciousness and identity is rooted in the late 19th century. Its origins can be traced to the Hindu revivalism of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement founded in 1875, and the 'extremism' of the Congress leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The growth of Hindu nationalism, in contrast, is a product of the early 20th century. Politically, the concept of Hindu nationalism (or communalism as it was then called) was first articulated by the Hindu Mahasabha, a movement that was founded in 1914 at Hardwar by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya in reaction to the creation of the Muslim League in 1906. In its early years the organization was obscured by the Congress party with which most of its members were associated. The Lucknow Pact of 1916 and the ascendency of the Moderates within the Congress alienated many of the Hindu extremists, however, and under the leadership of V.D. Savarkar, an admirer of Tilak and, like him, a Chitpavan Brahmin from Maharashtra, the Mahasabha parted with the Congress in a call to 'Hinduize all politics and militarize Hinduism.' (source: Hargrove and Kochanek)

I didn't know that the members of the Mahasabha were in the Congress early on. It's also interesting to hear that they came into existence initially as a reaction to the forming of the Muslim League.

The RSS was briefly banned after the assasination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948 (Godse was associated with the RSS). It was also banned during 1975-1977, when Indira Gandhi had assumed dictatorial powers. It was banned yet again for a short while after the razing of the Babri Masjid in December 1992.

Organizations like the BJP and the VHP were actually formed rather recently:

Over the past 50 years, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has emerged as an increasingly powerful force in India and has become the head of what is now known as the Sangh Parivar, or family of Hindu nationalist organizations, with a spread across all sectors of Hindu society. These organizations include the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, founded in 1948 and now the largest student organization in India; the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), founded in 1955 and today the largest trade union in the country; the Jana Sangh (1951) and its successor, the BJP, representing the political arm of the RSS; the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), founded in 1964, and its thuggish offshoot the Bajrang Dal (1984), which represent the more explicitly religious wing; and the newly formed Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, founded in 1991 to protect Indian economic self-reliance from the threat of foreign capital.

The last is interesting -- I hadn't heard of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (they have a website -- note the iconic use of Gandhi's image!). It seems confusing, since the BJP government was pro-foreign investment and privatization. On the other hand, the nativist slant communalism makes "self-reliance" an obvious ideological endpoint. I'm curious to find out more about how the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch is thought of by the mainstream Hindu nationalist groups.

Finally, the RSS today. It is important to note that they are not just thugs. Indeed, I suspect that much of their mass-support comes from their social programs, which build credibility in local communities:

From 1977, the RSS undertook a major effort to expand membership, and it met with resounding success. It is estimated that there are today more than 2.5 million members who attend meetings of the shakha, or unit, every day of the year. Here, for about one hour at either dawn or dusk, RSS volunteers uniformed in khaki shorts engage in an intensive program of ideological discussion, physical exercise, and military discipline. There are some 40,000 shakhas throughout India, each having 50-100 active members with a neighborhood base. RSS support is predominantly urban and lower middle class. From its traditional geographic core in North India, the movement has spread into the Northeast and into South India. It has also begun to make inroads into the countryside and has won support among Dalits (untouchables) and tribals. The RSS places increasing emphasis on social work and has been active in flood relief and in literacy campaigns.

I don't know if the number given (2.5 million) is still accurate. Does anyone know if that has changed in recent years? Has the support for the RSS changed following the BJP defeat? (Probably not, I'm guessing)

Also, does anyone disagree with Hargrave and Kochanek's factual data or interpretations? They give extensive footnotes, but I'm curious to know if people have other interpretations of the history.

The real issues in James Wood's novel, The Book Against God

James Wood is best known as a book critic. Here is a recent LRB piece that caused a bit of a stir amongst literary bloggers a couple of months ago; and here is a review of a book on the history of the King James Bible from the New Yorker last year. The Book Against God is Wood's first novel. A collection of reviews of the book, most of them lukewarm or positive, can be found here.

The plot: a graduate student in Philosophy at University College London, desultorily writing a dissertation, steadily reveals himself to be a believer in God despite strenuously (and sometimes embarrassingly) imposing his atheism on friends, girlfiend, and family. Actually he is not writing the diss. at all, but instead composing a collection of quotes and arguments pointing at the absence of God in the world, a "Book Against God." In fact, however, Wood wants to show that Tom Bunting's attachment to his father (a Vicar at the church of a small northern English town) carries within it the seeds of a kind of belief.

I can see why the novel was dismissed by some critics -- it has flaws. But I still enjoyed it for its many arguments and insights.

McLemee has some good insights on the book. He explains the thinness of Wood's protagonist (Thomas Bunting) as necessary:

But he is ultimately the victim of the author's still greater ironies. The themes of God and godlessness in the novel may echo passages in Wood's essays, but Bunting's anti-theological speculation lacks the element of self-possession that helps to make the critic's work so intellectually graceful. Bunting's ideas do not grapple with the world so much as evade the moment of having to face it for real, just as his lies, unpaid bills and trial separation from his wife all postpone the inevitable.

He is, then, a kind of scapegoat. Like the "invisible man" in Ralph Ellison's novel--or his closest relative, the narrator of Kenneth Burke's novel Towards a Better Life--Bunting carries the burden of painful experience that he does not yet quite understand how to shape into something meaningful. Or, to choose an example that may be more exact, he has the same problem that Saul Bellow's Herzog does: that of having just a few too many philosophical arguments available to patch over the holes in his life.

I have to admit I haven't read the Bellow or the Burke (and it's even been a long time since I looked at Ellison), so I can't say whether I would agree with these comparisons in a substantive way. But the key word here is "scapegoat" -- Tom Bunting is a scapegoat for the unresolved (and unresolvable) issues the novelist wants to raise.

What are these issues? Well, Wood is struggling with what might be called the phenomenology of belief and disbelief. In plain English: how can you really know when you believe in God? Or: how can you definitively know that you don't believe? The possibility of a middle-ground seems dangerous and intellectually soft (Nietzsche, for instance, would have none of it). Here's a representative discussion between Tom Bunting and his father:

'One of the great Renaissance essayists [Montaigne],' Father continued. 'Posssibly Christian, but more likely an agnostic and sceptic, and sensibly hiding his heresy from the authorities. But, then “Que sais-je?”' he finished, self-mockingly.

'I've always disliked that idea, of covert blasphemy,' I said, perhaps a bit hotly,' like concealing a gun. It seems untruthful, dishonest.' I said this, despite my own multiple dissimulations and deceits. I wasn't at all sure why I was saying it, except to resist my father. I didn't even believe what I was saying. My own 'heresy,' after all, was covert for most of my adolescence. It was still essentially covert when I was with my parents.

'Oh, I don't know,' said Peter, in a sweet, singing tone. 'After all, belief and unbelief are not absolutes, and not absolute opposites. What if they are rather close to each other, I mean belief shadowed by unbelief and vice versa . . . so that one is not exactly sure where one begins and another ends? Then, 'lying' about belief is not like concealing a gun, is not really like lying at all, but more like telling your wife that you slept well when in fact you spent the night racked by insomnia.'

There is a double-irony here. Not only has Tom Bunting been concealing his putative atheism from his family, he has also, we begin to see, been concealing from himself the fact that he is essentially a kind of unconscious believer.

Of more general interest is the question about writers from the early modern period who stop just short of leaving out all references to God in their thinking. Montaigne is one example; Descartes and Locke might be others. Even Kant, one feels, could be as happy arguing against the existence of God as for it (if, for instance, he were writing 100 years later). Are these writers simply unbelievers who mask their lack of faith with salutory references to religion demanded by publishers and censors? Or is it possible that the major figures of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were at once modern and Christian? Are they members of that "middle ground" of belief advocated by Tom Bunting's father (in the passage above)?

From his essays, I get the feeling that Wood prefers to read the professions of belief from the moderns as essentially sincere. He draws the line at the "soft" Establishment writers of the nineteenth-century, especially Arnold and Renan, whose professions are so watered-down as to be essentially unsupportable. In "The Broken Estate," that tradition is extended to twentieth-century theologians like Paul Johnson, for whom Wood has little patience:

No, the great 'strength' of Christianity is not that it offers medicines, but that it is true. Health comes from this. [Paul] Johnson's ecclessiastical cynicism – where “strength” means only “strength for the church”--suspends what is most powerful about Christianity: its claim to be true. Instead, like Arnold and Renan, he offers the milder language of success: does it work for you? He secularizes religion and demonizes secularism. In doing so, he makes Christianity vulnerable where it should be strongest. If Christianity can be defended as merely a set of advantages, then it can be attacked as merely a set of disadvantages by rival advantages, most of them secular. If Christianity is only a therapy service, a matter of comfort and consolation, then why not something more powerful than its withered ardor? (Drugs, love, literature, etc.).

Here Wood points at something that I (as someone in favor of political secularism) can grab onto-–the idea that soft religion can also be soft (or "demonized") secularism. Preserving Christian morality without preserving Christianity continues the coercion of religious dogma without the justification of religious faith. Wood would rather have real "medicine" or no medicine at all.

But here is where I part with Wood: the urgent issue in politics today is not one of real or false religion, so much as it is how to guarantee that societies around the world can continue to protect religious freedoms. Along those lines, what would be more challenging is a protagonist who is a real atheist, poised against a rising tide of (possibly fake) religious fervor in his society. (The believer who invents an atheist protagonist could possibly do a better job than the atheists -- like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi -- who repeatedly conjure improbable "fanatics")

The "rigorous" Christianity of Wood's essays does not help us respond to the arguments and actions of religious extremists. Arnold begins to look better: Wood overlooks the possibility that Arnold's softened, inclusive Establishment in fact might have enabled the public presence of religion to become symbolic in a useful way (the same way that Monarchy is useful), even as modern nation-states transition to secularist politics.

[A final, unrelated thought: One thing no one has mentioned is, the novel is full of classical music. If you decide to pick it up after all, prepare to get a little tutorial in Pollini, Edward Elgar, Schnabel, Rachmaninoff, Richter, Rubinstein, Kempf, Michelangeli, Brendel, Bartok, Glazunov, Schumann's the Kinderszenen, and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition!]

Maqbool vs. Macbeth (or, Shakespeare's Muslim play)

We finally saw Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool last night, thanks to the ingenious VHS piracy of our local Indian store. Now even art films are being pirated!

(Don't worry, when the legal DVD comes out I will still shell out my $10)

It's a version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, set in the Bombay underworld. Dark and moody, it reminds one of recent R.G. Varma horror movies (Ek Haseena Thi, Bhoot), though it is in some ways even darker.

The parallels to Shakepeare are quite close, and appear throughout the film. 'Macbeth' (Maqbool) is played by a powerful actor named Irfan Khan (he also recently played the villain in Charas); 'Lady Macbeth' is played by Tabu, a big star. Irfan's performance is restrained and often understated, sometimes a little too understated I thought (or maybe I've just been watching too many melodramatic Hindi films). Tabu, also, is just naturally so likeable and charismatic that it's hard to read her as murderously evil. She is better later in the film as "mad" Lady Macbeth.

For the doomed 'King Duncan' character Bhardwaj invents a brilliant godfather figure named Abbaji (Pankaj Kapoor). Though Kapoor is borrowing heavily from Brando's Don Corleone (including the trademark mumble), Abbaji is actually a great character -- one of the best Desi Dons I've seen in recent years.

Macbeth is known as Shakespeare's "Scottish Play" because it is set in Scotland, which would have been faintly alien to his English audience -- hence the witches and surreal ambience of the play. Here the sense of alienness is represented by an intense attachment to Islam amongst the film's main characters. These gangsters don't just have Muslim names and say "Salaam" and "Khuda Hafiz" every so often (the usual Hindi film convention); they are very Muslim. They wear skullcaps, many have full beards, prayer beads, and they go heavy on the Urdu vocabulary. At some points, Bhardwaj even has his gangsters on the floor praying! In my view it's not especially offensive to Islam, since he treats it with respect. But it is kind of surreal.

Interestingly, the "witches" (played by the legendary character actors Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri) are male Hindu cops in the employ of Abbaji. The prediction that Maqbool will succeed Abbaji comes from astrological predictions made by Om Puri's "Pandit."

I do find the Hindi film industry's obsession with the Muslim-dominated Bombay underworld generally offensive -- a nuisance rather than a reason to get up and leave the theater. The representation of Islam usually remains at a very general level, perhaps out of an awareness that more specific references would in fact cause problems. Most films aren't especially serious about religion one way or the other.

Here the image of Islam is so detailed, so over the top really, that I have to read Bhardwaj as trying to be serious. It's either more offensive, or not offensive at all(Islam is something essential to the story). Moreover, the casting of a Pandit in the role of Shakespeare's witches (though you only see the connection if you know Shakespeare's play) balances the equation a bit. For Bhardwaj, Hindu astrology is akin to witchcraft; Islam is the normative belief-system.

Overall, the Indianizations of dozens of plot-points from Shakespeare's play (including Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's numerous hallucinations, the plots involving Banquo, Malcolm, and Macduff, to mention just a few) will probably be enjoyable to people who know Shakespeare's play. People just looking for a gangster film will probably be more satisfied with something like Ab Tak Chhappan; Maqbool is much closer to horror.

India's Parliamentary Library, nice and quiet

Sheela Reddy's piece in this week's Outlook, explores the sad state of India's new parliamentary library.

The old library was just next to the Central Hall of Parliament House, and MPs and Rajya Sabha members used to go there all the time. The new building is much better -- Reddy describes it as India's "most expensive and best-equipped" library. But it's in a separate location -- so almost no one goes. There are at most 50 regular users, most of them Rajya Sabha (upper house) members. Members of the Lok Sabha (lower house), don't use the library virtually at all:

But old building or new, as both Biswas and Aiyer point out, the Parliament Library has few serious users. "There are only a handful of MPs who made good use of the library," says Aiyer. "I'd say about 50 members are serious users. Most of them are from the Rajya Sabha. This is because Lok Sabha members get caught up in local politics and very few are interested in serious debate or reading," agrees Biswas.

Which is a pity because, as Biswas says, the new library is ideal for reading. "It's more spacious, there is no noise, the books are well-organised and you can find so much material on any subject if you want to write something." Unfortunately, he adds, "few MPs have such interests."

Speaks for itself.

Fortunately, scholars can use the library in the Inter-session, but because of the bureaucratic hoops one has to jump through it is actually quite difficult to do so.

Edward Said's taste in music, W.B. Yeats's bones, Dylan Thomas's drinking problem

1. There's a new book of posthumous Edward Said essays, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. The review in Bookforum is helpful.

This looks like a good collection. As I myself drift further away from Foucault, the Foucauldian strains in Said's thought (especially in the early argument on "Orientalism") begin to seem fishy. I would be glad to see this other side of Said (i.e., Said the humanist) come to dominate.

Still, I'm not sure whether Said's personal taste in art is relevant (Matthew Price calls him a cultural conservative against conservatism). Does it really matter that he loved opera and was indifferent to popular culture? I'm also not sure whether the term "humanism" is of much use other than as the negation of theology on the one hand and Foucault and Marx on the other. To me, the emphasis on the human is a way of orienting an ethics; it makes less sense as a way of deciding questions of aesthetic value.

2. I enjoy reading reviews of biographies because they always give a capsule version of the life of the subject. This review of R.F. Foster's two-volume Yeats biography, is particularly good on that score. Volume I of Foster's bio has been out for years; Volume II: The Arch-Poet just came out last year. Yeats is a particularly tough subject, since he himself put up so much interference in autobiographical writings where he aimed to set himself up for mythologization. Ellmann was perhaps a little under Yeats' spell; Foster, Brian Phillips claims, is not:

This is especially true of Richard Ellmann, whose masterful biography Yeats: The Man and the Masks, has been since its publication in 1948 the standard work in its line; so Foster’s steady chronologies are trailblazers of a sort. Foster, who holds Oxford’s first professorship devoted to Irish history, is known in Ireland as a “revisionist” historian, a label meant to distinguish him from the “nationalist” historians who long controlled the field. The nationalists see a clear evolutionary line running through Irish history, in which the oppressed Gaelic nation, and especially its Catholic majority, gradually wins independence from English and Protestant oppressors, until at last it achieves self-rule in 1921. The revisionists, in contrast, emphasize the variety and plurality of Irish experience, including both its Protestant strains and those types of Irishness which are, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, “alloyed with Englishness.” Foster’s exhaustive and detailed account, a miracle of interwoven sources, is his method of allowing the greatest multiplicity and range into his treatment of Yeats’s life; it is therefore its own means of analysis, arguing against simplistic reduction and in favor of a complicated wholeness. Yeats’s life, which overlaps with and involves most of the founding moments of modern Ireland—the death of Parnell, the Easter uprising, the creation of the Free State, the Civil War—provides a vast matrix of political, social, literary, military, economic, and religious contexts for Foster to explore, and is to that extent a natural subject for him, as Joyce’s life, say, would not be.

I side with the revisionists. I think it's important to talk about the Protestant contribution in Irish literature, as well as the strong English influence. But I'm not sure why Phillips feels that a contrast with Joyce is in order. Certainly, Joyce was not as personally involved with the "matrix" of historical contexts as Yeats. But Joyce's literature, especially Portrait and Ulysses, are full of references to key moments in modern Irish history. And we find from Joyce's biography (also by Richard Ellmann), that even in exile in Italy and Switzerland his attitude to British colonialism in Ireland was not irrelevant to his daily life.

Though obviously any serious Yeats scholar will have to reckon with Foster, the sheer bulk of these volumes makes me think I will continue to recommend the Ellmann bio to students and friends.

3. I was a little disturbed reading this review of a new biography of Dylan Thomas by Andrew Lycett. For one thing, some sentences in the review paint an extremely unflattering picture of Thomas the person:

In the hectic prewar atmosphere or amid the falling bombs of the London Blitz, there were always pub crawls, black eyes, broken arms and public shouting matches with Caitlin McNamara, whom he married in 1937 and who, aggrieved by her position as the stay-at-home wife, gave as good as she got in terms of loud resentful silences and foul-mouthed abuse. Caitlin was naturally belligerent, but a plea in mitigation might include the description of Dylan's working routine at the Boat House at Laugharne in Wales, a place without running water or electricity but with rats and damp: eight months pregnant with her third child, Caitlin was expected to light the stove in his working shed, then boil the water for his afternoon bath so he could sit in warm water eating sweets until it was time for the evening's drinking.

I see. Well, I hope the sweets were worth it?

Also disturbing is the fact that the reviewer (Lindsay Duguid) doesn't quote a single poem! (Compare to Brian Phillips' review of Foster's Yeats). In honor of Thomas, let me quote a poem that should have been in the review:

The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower (excerpt)
by Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The full poem is here.

The power of a sub-title

Thanks to everyone who emailed me about the title change.

I decided to go with just my name. It's the least likely to become an annoyance of all the options I was thinking about.

Side benefit: in the process of adding in a "formerly..." message, I finally figured out how to add a little slogan under the main title in the Blogger template code. So whenever I get bored of "Amardeep Singh" I can just change the sub-title and put out a new message to amuse myself and hopefully one or two others.

So I can still use "Civilization and Disco," "The Whale," and, er, "Leonine Illumination" for a little while, without having to commit... Maybe a weekly rotation...