1. Prologue: the point of this post
We literary critics often get accused of not talking enough about actual literature. On one's blog, that is probably forgivable, partly because it generally seems more pressing to talk about what is happening currently in the world than to do long close-readings. Writing about literature in a meaningful way every day is hard!
Still, here is an excerpt from the final lecture I gave in one of my classes this fall. Maybe it will give readers who do other things in life some idea of what people like me do in the classroom. And for my colleagues in English, I'm posting this with a request for feedback and criticisms.
2. Another Prologue: the course
This fall I taught an introduction to the major course we have at Lehigh called “Working With Texts.” Though the course is supposed to have a particular focus (on developing close reading skills and the methods of criticism), how we teach it is actually up to us. I decided to do a unit on each of the three literary forms –- poetry, fiction, and drama. With the poetry, I used an old textbook called Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. I had found this anthology in a used bookstore, and was really impressed by both the selection of poems and the analyses of many of the poems included. I find this better than the usual poetry anthologies. With those, students are highly dependent on my (subjective) readings of the poems. In Brooks and Warren, studying poetry is at least partly a matter of objective comprehension. They also helpfully had sections of poems without analysis, which are necessary if you want to get students to apply lessons they learned from the textbook editors to something else. In fiction, I decided to go with just short stories –- no novels. Novels in a course like this can bog you down. Swamped with short story anthologies, I went with Updike's The Best American Short Stories of the Century, probably a little arbitrarily (it worked out just fine). And finally, I used a more-or-less generic drama anthology, edited by R.S. Gwynn, for the drama section of the course. There are several good drama texts out there, but this one seemed to be a bit cheaper than some others. And the introduction is helpful.
The result was a course in which students got exposure to stuff by the following authors:
William Shakespeare (some sonnets, and also Othello), Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Billy Collins, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, Raymond Chandler, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Alice Munro, Carolyn Ferrell, Tim O'Brien, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Henrik Ibsen, and August Wilson. Not bad, for 14 weeks.
Blog. I also used a course blog to get students to find out more about the authors we were reading. For the most part they used simple web searches. Some students took it a little further, and wrote more opinionated or personalized comments on the blog. It was moderately successful. The students didn't comment much on each other's entries, and I got the sense that they weren't reading each other's entries all that much either, so some of the functionality of the blog format might have been lost. Maybe next time around I'll try and evolve the uses of the course blog a bit more.
3. The lecture itself (excerpt, with emphasis on the sections where I was talking about poetry)
Working With Texts is not meant to be a definitive course, in the sense of “I'll never look at a work of literature the same way again.” Studying English and American literature is an incremental process – you'll only know it all once you've read lots and lots of books. Over the course of a good English major experience, you should read upwards of 100 novels, 300-400 poems, and maybe 50 plays. But even if you've read that many books (and I mean, you've read and understood every page – you've given a real block of time to each text), you've actually only scratched the surface of major literature. For each author you read, there are likely to be 10 other authors from the same period you haven't read. And the same goes for even the authors you have read – there are ten other books waiting for you. The point is, English literature is very, very big.
Unlike, say, an Engineering major, you don't graduate with an English major as a capable expert in literature. A graduating English major is probably better described as an exceptionally well-prepared novice, someone who might be able to pick up a novel or a poem from virtually any period, and make sense of it. Also, English majors have a pretty good sense of how to continually find new things to read, which might capture their interest. It’s partly a matter of recognizing names and titles in the library or bookstore, but it’s also the ability to size up new things you haven’t heard of, that you might just happen to pick up.
Though we did do some close technical work at various points in the term, the course was not meant to be highly technical in nature. We did the most technical work with poetry and poetics, and the reason for that is that poetry – especially poetry from early periods really requires it. The romanticized notion that you pick up a poem and are vaguely moved by its contents doesn't hold up for any except the easiest poetry. The best poetry involves the reader (or the listener) in an intensified experience of language itself. It can't be read casually.
I believe it's extremely important that English majors develop some familiarity with the incredible diversity and complexity of English language poetry. The idea of a serious awareness of the inner workings of poetry is kind of a dying art in English departments around the country, and its decline suggests that poetry as a whole may be in a little trouble. In earlier eras, people gathered around campfires to hear poetry recited. People memorized poems, people felt it in a very natural, organic way. Now, however, it's not always clear what the role of poetry is for ordinary people (i.e., for people who aren't English majors, and even for many who are). How many people actually seek it out? How many people would read poems if their English teachers didn’t require them to do so?
During the semester, I did mention one situation in which poetry seemed to be spontaneously important, and that is in finding language that helps us deal with extremely difficult events. Poems were important all around America after 9/11, and people dealing with smaller, more personal kinds of grief (such as the death of a loved one) often turn to poetry for some kind of solace. You heard people reciting Auden on the radio. So: another role for poetry might be as a kind of substitute for religion – which can also provide such solace – in a secular society. It’s a potentially universal language of reflection. But that turn to the reflective, while a hopeful sign for poetry as a literary form, is still a somewhat more limited role for poetry than what one saw in earlier eras. What about poetry that celebrates life, that celebrates love? What about romantic poetry, comic poetry?
Is romantic poetry now just a joke?
Is comic poetry now the exclusive territory of “slam poets” and rappers? (When was the last time you heard or read a “literary” poem (meaning, not a rap song) that actually made you laugh?) [Discuss. Students pointed out that one way in which poetry stays alive is in the lyrics to popular music. James Taylor and Bob Dylan were mentioned. The students have a point, though poetry set to music is nevertheless something different from poetry for the page. Still, there is a whole course waiting to be taught – not sure if it will be by me – on the relationship between poetry and music.]
If we had this class to do over again, I might have started the work on poetics earlier and shown the value of it in somewhat greater depth. It's good if you can figure out the meter or rhyme scheme of a poem now, but it's also important that you see how these aspects of style might affect the fundamental meaning of a poem.
The other place where some technical details are important is with drama, so I asked you to study theatrical terms like the 'tragic flaw' (hamartia), open and closed denouements, and catharsis (release). The significance of these was a bit easier to identify. Most people would certainly agree that characters like Othello or Desdemona have a tragic flaw, though we might not necessarily agree on what it is. Most people would also agree that it's very important to a play like A Doll's House that it ends with an open denouement – Nora is leaving her husband, but what happens next is wide open. And finally, the fight between Troy and Cory near the end of Fences seems to be the moment at which a kind of catharsis is occurring. The fight between them is a big, physical one that brings to the surface all the suppressed (or merely verbal) hostility and tension that seemed to be building up throughout the earlier part of the play. After the fight ends – and Troy wins – something is different, both for him and for the other characters. It's not so important whether he wins or loses the fight, so much as he gets to have it all out.
Interestingly, these technical terms of drama might be helpful in understanding other kinds of stories, including novels and films. They are essentially terms that have to do with human psychology – how human beings experience conflicts, and respond to them. Serious drama is always driven by conflict. And good actors in serious plays have the potential to show us the visceral experience of individuals who genuinely don't know what they are going to do next. Is Othello really going to kill Desdemona? Is Nora going to leave her husband? The actor will always know what is going to happen (and the audience will sometimes know), but a good actor will show us the experience of a person who is genuinely unsure. At its best, the result is that the audience itself doesn’t know what it would do in that same situation. (This is very hard to do)
The essential definition of poetry
All cultures have some form of poetry. And nearly all early poetry was written in some kind of formal meter. The essential quality of poetry then was that it was meant to be recited aloud. It descended from a pre-literate tradition of epic storytelling. Rhyme helped people remember how poems went.
But modern poetry goes by different rules. When it doesn't rhyme, and when there's no meter, it's nevertheless true that there is an essential element, something that all poetry must have for it to be called “poetry” and not “prose,” and that is the rhythmic use of language. There also many, many secondary characteristics that we discussed. Chief among them is the intense and precise use of language (especially important in modern poetry). The best modern poets aim to crystallize some observation or insight about the world around them in such a way that it causes us to look at the same things they are looking at in a fresh way.
A great example of this is William Carlos Williams's poem again: So much depends/ Upon a Red Wheelbarrow/ glazed with rain water/ beside the white chickens.” That line, “so much depends” does everything in this poem. The first thing it does is, heighten your sensibilities. Whatever this poem is about, it is about something that is very important to the speaker. Secondly, the line makes us look at the wheelbarrow differently. Perhaps we are (at first) a little incredulous. So much depends on that? It's an everyday object. But then... but then... a wheelbarrow is, in the life of a farm, a very important object. It potentially carries everything. And it is, despite its incredible features as a tool for farmers, kind of a beautiful object. Imagine a red wheelbarrow, sparkling wet and clean after a rainfall...
In just a few words, Williams's poem changes the reader's perception of an everyday object. In some sense, then, those brilliant first three words are also even bigger. They might be a kind of commentary on language itself. Williams, in my view, reminding us how much can be done with just a few words, how powerful language itself is. He is saying, not just that so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, but rather, “So much depends upon -- the next five words of this poem.”
That is poetry at its best.
"Just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else." --Toni Morrison
Another sign that listservs are dead
It's not just the spoons lists. Even much more professionalized lists like C18-L are having problems, according to Little Professor. I think it's a generalized problem; it's really time to try and get academics to change their behavior with regard to informal professional conversations over the Internet.
"Our civil service was designed to rule a colony"
Indian Express reports on a speech given by a junior minister named Prithviraj Chavan yesterday, calling for major reforms in India's government bureaucracy.
The best line quoted is the title of this post. (True, all too true.)
But the specific government reforms being proposed are good ones too:
The best line quoted is the title of this post. (True, all too true.)
But the specific government reforms being proposed are good ones too:
Political and electoral reforms so that political parties become more transparent about their funding. Elections, the Minister said, were funded in such a way that this not only bred corruption but bred a parallel economy. In the areas of police and judicial reform the Minister said there would be no more police commissions but implementation of the many reports that have gathered dust for years.
On judicial reform he admitted that it takes ‘‘forever to punish anybody’’ and irrelevant laws made a hundred years ago are still being implemented. The Minister went on to talk about reforms in economic governance, meaning more regulatory bodies rather than controls, and the restoration of the fundamental right to property.
Leftists respond to Niall Ferguson
Ann Talbot of the World Socialist Web Site reads Niall Ferguson's Colossus. She makes him sound further to the right than I had previously thought him to be. For instance, she characterizes him as follows:
Is this a position he holds consistently?
Also, she challenges his version of the Cold War, where my knowledge is, I must admit, pretty superficial. Is she right about Macarthur and the Korean War, or is Ferguson?
Also see Part 2 of Talbot's critique; and Part 3.
The trouble with America, Ferguson complains, is that its citizens “like Social Security more than national security.” In his eyes it is a country burdened by too many policies that date back to the New Deal. Bush’s failure, according to Ferguson, is that he has simply not done enough to bring welfare spending, especially Medicare, under control. “The decline and fall of America’s undeclared empire may be due not to terrorists at the gates or to the rogue regimes that sponsor them, but to a fiscal crisis of the welfare state at home,” Ferguson writes in Colossus. If America is to succeed as an imperial power, he argues, the government needs to cut welfare spending more aggressively.
Is this a position he holds consistently?
Also, she challenges his version of the Cold War, where my knowledge is, I must admit, pretty superficial. Is she right about Macarthur and the Korean War, or is Ferguson?
Also see Part 2 of Talbot's critique; and Part 3.
"North America Kicks Europe's A##"
If you google that phrase (and substitute the correct letters in), my blog comes up #1. I discovered this through poking through my Sitemeter statistics (truly, I'm not motivated to do my grading just yet... think I need about 5 more cups of coffee).
You may be thinking, "in what, exactly?" But if you're asking that question, you're clearly not on board with the spirit of this particular Google search.
You may also be wondering, "but was such a sentiment ever expressed on this particular blog?" "Is it possible that Google is quoting out of context?" Google points to this archive page as the most direct instance of North America kicking European posterior. The culprit is Irshad Manji of all people.
Finally, you might even object that the statement in question isn't, in fact, true. That would be your prerogative. Certainly Northern North America wins hands down in terms of weather. Outside, it's currently drizzling, dark, and about 41 Degrees Fahrenheit. Now don't all come visit at once...
Ok, cancel that. Someone get me on a plane to Buenos Aires, pronto por favor.
(Or anywhere where it's warm and sunny.)
You may be thinking, "in what, exactly?" But if you're asking that question, you're clearly not on board with the spirit of this particular Google search.
You may also be wondering, "but was such a sentiment ever expressed on this particular blog?" "Is it possible that Google is quoting out of context?" Google points to this archive page as the most direct instance of North America kicking European posterior. The culprit is Irshad Manji of all people.
Finally, you might even object that the statement in question isn't, in fact, true. That would be your prerogative. Certainly Northern North America wins hands down in terms of weather. Outside, it's currently drizzling, dark, and about 41 Degrees Fahrenheit. Now don't all come visit at once...
Ok, cancel that. Someone get me on a plane to Buenos Aires, pronto por favor.
(Or anywhere where it's warm and sunny.)
Coverage of Rushdie in Calcutta/Kolkata
See Kitabkhana for links to the Indian media's coverage of Rushdie in Calcutta this week. Far more entertaining than Rumsfeld in Delhi!
From Edmund Burke to Donald Rumsfeld to "Shibrum-Shibrum"
[A bit of an academic links round-up this morning]
Nick Robins is about to release a book critical of the East India Company. He has a piece in the New Statesman where he tears apart their business policy, as well as some 'heroes' of the British Empire. Robert Clive comes in for a special bashing.
It's also always a pleasant surprise to be reminded about the Trial of Hastings. It's a gloomy December morning in Connecticut, and the image of Edmund Burke preaching that Morality Must be Universal for four days straight is somehow cheering.
Chapati Mystery has a nice post on the need for academics to disseminate examples of good academic writing as an antidote to the "shibrum-shibrum." It might also help us when we are attacked (as most recently by Mark Bauerlein) for being bad writers.
Juan Cole links to an article in the Daily Princetonian, about the tension in the Princeton Middle East Studies department. Under the influence of Bernard Lewis and now Michael Doran, the department is considered highly conservative, though some graduate students are trying to rebel against its senior leadership. The piece, which laboriously explains the famous conflict between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said, is a little long-winded. But the quotes from Rashid Khalidi are pretty good. And the flame-up at a recent dissertation defence makes for some high academic drama...
Donald Rumsfeld is in India, talking with the PM Manmohan Singh about things like how to further peace prospects with Pakistan, and how much those F-16s are gonna cost. I didn't realize the Secretary of Defense was also a missile and planes salesman!
Nick Robins is about to release a book critical of the East India Company. He has a piece in the New Statesman where he tears apart their business policy, as well as some 'heroes' of the British Empire. Robert Clive comes in for a special bashing.
It's also always a pleasant surprise to be reminded about the Trial of Hastings. It's a gloomy December morning in Connecticut, and the image of Edmund Burke preaching that Morality Must be Universal for four days straight is somehow cheering.
Chapati Mystery has a nice post on the need for academics to disseminate examples of good academic writing as an antidote to the "shibrum-shibrum." It might also help us when we are attacked (as most recently by Mark Bauerlein) for being bad writers.
Juan Cole links to an article in the Daily Princetonian, about the tension in the Princeton Middle East Studies department. Under the influence of Bernard Lewis and now Michael Doran, the department is considered highly conservative, though some graduate students are trying to rebel against its senior leadership. The piece, which laboriously explains the famous conflict between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said, is a little long-winded. But the quotes from Rashid Khalidi are pretty good. And the flame-up at a recent dissertation defence makes for some high academic drama...
Donald Rumsfeld is in India, talking with the PM Manmohan Singh about things like how to further peace prospects with Pakistan, and how much those F-16s are gonna cost. I didn't realize the Secretary of Defense was also a missile and planes salesman!
Christian consumers, and getting my act together
In the Revealer. I went to gradaute school with one of the authors whose book is being reviewed, Amy Frykholm. We were in the same cohort at Duke.
Note to self: Amy's book is out on Oxford, and getting positively reviewed in the Revealer. Your book is where, exactly?
Note to self: Amy's book is out on Oxford, and getting positively reviewed in the Revealer. Your book is where, exactly?
The books are about the Church; the movie will be about "Authority"
Henry at Crooked Timber writes about an upcoming movie called His Dark Materials, which is based on a seris of books criticizing the Anglican church by a British author named Philip Pullman.
He links to an article in the London Times, where the film studio's decision to remove references to the Church is explained.
Sorry to throw around jargon, but I think this shows what's wrong with Foucault: it's now safer to criticize "Power" than it is to talk about individual instances of the abuse of it.
It also tells us something about the dynamics of representing power on screen vs. in books. The mainstream movies can show an aesthetic of totalitarian oppression, but they can't pinpoint it with any historical precision. Historial details still matter, but only in books.
He links to an article in the London Times, where the film studio's decision to remove references to the Church is explained.
Sorry to throw around jargon, but I think this shows what's wrong with Foucault: it's now safer to criticize "Power" than it is to talk about individual instances of the abuse of it.
It also tells us something about the dynamics of representing power on screen vs. in books. The mainstream movies can show an aesthetic of totalitarian oppression, but they can't pinpoint it with any historical precision. Historial details still matter, but only in books.
Update on "Triple Talaq"
Indian Express: The National Commission for Women is trying to set the record straight on Triple Talaq in other parts of the Muslim world.
They are arguing that Muslim personal law in India is particularly backwards. In Pakistan, "triple talaq," or instantaneous verbal divorce, has been illegal since 1961. More facts about personal (marriage) laws in other parts of the Muslim world:
These are useful facts to have, and not to make debating points in favor of the Uniform Civil Code. I follow the NCW and Nafia Hussein here in thinking primarily of human rights for Muslim women in India.
They are arguing that Muslim personal law in India is particularly backwards. In Pakistan, "triple talaq," or instantaneous verbal divorce, has been illegal since 1961. More facts about personal (marriage) laws in other parts of the Muslim world:
She said creating awareness about other Islamic societies would help fight the propaganda that the Shariat laws could not be interpreted or changed. In countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, even a second marriage is banned.
However, in countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Bangladesh, second marriages are discouraged through a strict legal and administrative mechanism. [In India, polygamy is still legal under Muslim personal law. -AS]
Unlike in India, where Muslim women have no right to divorce, in Turkey and Iran, both husband and wife enjoy equal rights for seeking divorce. In Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, government officials have to prove that they had gone for a divorce only after having made serious efforts to patch up their differences with their spouse. In all these Islamic countries, divorce is final only after a court verdict.
Again Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran and Bangladesh have legally banned one-sided divorces, which gave men arbitrary powers to break marriages, while countries like Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh had banned the practice of triple talaq long ago.
These are useful facts to have, and not to make debating points in favor of the Uniform Civil Code. I follow the NCW and Nafia Hussein here in thinking primarily of human rights for Muslim women in India.
A little more on names and naming in Suketu Mehta
Pennathur's criticisms prompted me to read past the first 50 pages of Suketu Mehta's book Maximum City, partly in the interest of finding out the exact quote.
But it's also true that it's when you see real criticism of a book that you start to think seriously about it. What will its staying power be? Is it just this year's Desi publishing sensation, or is it going to be something you can come back to, and maybe teach from?
As an early general assessment, I do think this book will be of value as a source of pretty solid ideas and information about Bombay. It does have quite a few moments of diasporic writerly Romanticism (show-offy self-reflexivity), but it also has a lot of concrete information about unromantic things like architecture, the economics of the city, the politics of water, the changing dynamics of labor, and immigration to the city. Mehta's arguments will need to be verified and checked, but together they do offer a lot that will be new to non-Bombayites.
Ok, here are the two paragraphs where the Bombay/Mumbai issue comes to the forefront. He mentions it a few times earlier (the early history of the Portuguese settlers) -- you might want to read the whole "Mumbai" chapter of the book before forming a final judgment -- but these are the two key paragraphs:
Mehta's resistance seems to be a conflation two rather different sorts of issues. He first mentions the renaming of Bombay's streets and chowks (corners), before he gets to the renaming of the city; he seems to be considering them as of a piece. On the one hand, he is clinging to the place names he grew up with, out of what might be called nostalgia. He points out that there is a significant degree of corruption behind the street-name changes going on in Bombay. He also points out (rightly, from my experience) that practically no one knows the names of the minor figures who get slices of the city named after them. The names aren't being used. In my view, this argument is a bit self-indulgent, but I don't see that he will generate a great deal of vehement opposition.
The name of the city is a different matter, and his statements on it now seem (after hearing people's objections) a little sloppy. Unlike Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg (which no taxi driver in Bombay is likely to recognize), the name of a city is big enough that its official name absolutely does matter, both to inhabitants and to others; it can't be cheekily ignored. Further, I gather that a pretty substantial number of people actually use the new name. In my experience, the people who are most likely to resist it are the "English-medium" educated Indians -- who also happen constitute the bulk of my friends and family. But I'm willing to accept that large numbers of Indians now accept the name "Mumbai," even when speaking English. Non-Indians are forced to accept the name by default.
Mehta should probably have kept the two issues separate.
One further thought: It also seems to me that Mehta's class bias is a little unbecoming in the passage quoted above. The line about the 'revenge of the ghatis' is a reference to the following paragraph from earlier in the book:
Mehta is well aware of the power of a slur (this book as a whole is quite sensitive to the question of the language one uses), so it's unclear to me why he allows this one to slip out unchallenged in the passage about "Mumbai."
But it's also true that it's when you see real criticism of a book that you start to think seriously about it. What will its staying power be? Is it just this year's Desi publishing sensation, or is it going to be something you can come back to, and maybe teach from?
As an early general assessment, I do think this book will be of value as a source of pretty solid ideas and information about Bombay. It does have quite a few moments of diasporic writerly Romanticism (show-offy self-reflexivity), but it also has a lot of concrete information about unromantic things like architecture, the economics of the city, the politics of water, the changing dynamics of labor, and immigration to the city. Mehta's arguments will need to be verified and checked, but together they do offer a lot that will be new to non-Bombayites.
Ok, here are the two paragraphs where the Bombay/Mumbai issue comes to the forefront. He mentions it a few times earlier (the early history of the Portuguese settlers) -- you might want to read the whole "Mumbai" chapter of the book before forming a final judgment -- but these are the two key paragraphs:
A name is such that if you grow up with it you get attached to it, whatever its origins. I grew up on Nepean Sea Road, which is now Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg. I have no idea who Sir Ernest Nepean was nor do I know who Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas was, but I am attached to the original name and see no reason why it should change. The name has acquired a resonance, over time, distinct from its origin; as Rue Pascal or West 4th Street or Maiden Lane might ahve for someone who has grown up in those cities. I got used to the sound of it. It is incorporated into my address, into my dream life. I can come back to Nepean Sea Road; if some municipal functionary bent on exacting revenge on history changes it to Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg, he is doing a disservice to my memory.
Name-changing is in vogue all over India nowadays: Madras has been renamed Chennai; Calcutta, that British-made city, has changed its name to Kolkata. A BJP member of parliament has demanded that India's name be changed to Bharat. This is a process not just of decolonization but of de-Islamicization. The idea is to go back not just to past but an idealized past, in all cases a Hindu past. But to change a name, for a person or a road or a city, there had better be a very good reason. And there was no good reason to change the name of Bombay. It is nonsense to say that Mumbai was the original name. Bombay was created by the Portuguese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujuratis and Maharashtrians always called it Mumbai when speaking Gujurati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English. There was no need to choose. In 1995, the Sena demanded that we choose, in all our languages, Mumbai. This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city. If they couldn't afford to live on our roads, they could at least occupy the road signs.
Mehta's resistance seems to be a conflation two rather different sorts of issues. He first mentions the renaming of Bombay's streets and chowks (corners), before he gets to the renaming of the city; he seems to be considering them as of a piece. On the one hand, he is clinging to the place names he grew up with, out of what might be called nostalgia. He points out that there is a significant degree of corruption behind the street-name changes going on in Bombay. He also points out (rightly, from my experience) that practically no one knows the names of the minor figures who get slices of the city named after them. The names aren't being used. In my view, this argument is a bit self-indulgent, but I don't see that he will generate a great deal of vehement opposition.
The name of the city is a different matter, and his statements on it now seem (after hearing people's objections) a little sloppy. Unlike Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg (which no taxi driver in Bombay is likely to recognize), the name of a city is big enough that its official name absolutely does matter, both to inhabitants and to others; it can't be cheekily ignored. Further, I gather that a pretty substantial number of people actually use the new name. In my experience, the people who are most likely to resist it are the "English-medium" educated Indians -- who also happen constitute the bulk of my friends and family. But I'm willing to accept that large numbers of Indians now accept the name "Mumbai," even when speaking English. Non-Indians are forced to accept the name by default.
Mehta should probably have kept the two issues separate.
One further thought: It also seems to me that Mehta's class bias is a little unbecoming in the passage quoted above. The line about the 'revenge of the ghatis' is a reference to the following paragraph from earlier in the book:
I did not know many Maharashtrians when I was growing up. There was the world I lived in on Nepean Sea Road, and there was nother world whose people came to wash our clothes, look at our electric meters, drive our cars, inhabit our nightmares. We lived in Bombay and never had much to do with Mumbai. Maharashtra to us was our servants, the banana lady downstairs, the textbooks we were force-fed in school. We had a term for them: ghatis--literally, the people from the ghats, or hills. It was also the word we used, generically, for "servant."
Mehta is well aware of the power of a slur (this book as a whole is quite sensitive to the question of the language one uses), so it's unclear to me why he allows this one to slip out unchallenged in the passage about "Mumbai."
Suketu Mehta central: Denver Post, NPR interview
The Suketu Mehta Maximum City publicity juggernaut continues. Today he is in the Denver Post, where the book reviewer praises the book, but makes what I feel is an unnecessary reference to his accent. (Via Kitabkhana)
And yesterday, he was on Fresh Air. It's an interesting interview, about 15 minutes long. Topics covered include: "Bombay" vs. "Mumbai", the role of third world mega-cities, communalism (Bombay riots), and Bollywood. I'm feeling a little generous this morning, so I'll include some excerpts that I transcribed by hand while listening to the interview. You should really listen to the whole thing.
NOTE: All quotations below are approximations.
While I don't think this take on Bombay is the most exciting thing ever, I do think Suketu Metha does a good job as a kind of cultural ambassador for the new, cosmopolitan India. Warts (gangsters, capitalists, filmmakers...) and all.
I'll probably be recommending the book to friends and colleagues...
And yesterday, he was on Fresh Air. It's an interesting interview, about 15 minutes long. Topics covered include: "Bombay" vs. "Mumbai", the role of third world mega-cities, communalism (Bombay riots), and Bollywood. I'm feeling a little generous this morning, so I'll include some excerpts that I transcribed by hand while listening to the interview. You should really listen to the whole thing.
NOTE: All quotations below are approximations.
Terry: Why don't you refer to Bombay as “Mumbai”?
Mehta: Bombay changed its name, or rather the name was changed for Bombay in 1995 by the Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist party. The British and the Portuguese created the city from a clump of malarial islands, so they should get the naming rights. The name is exclusionary. A number of people in the city refuse to call it Mumbai.
Terry: So it's a political statement you're making?
Mehta: Very much so. The politics of the Shiv Sena are nativist and exclusionist, which runs against the cosmopolitan spirit of the city of Bombay. I refuse to go along.
Terry: Is the Shiv Sena a Hindu fundamentalist party?
Suketu: The phrase 'Hindu fundamentalist' doesn't make much sense. There isn't a fundamental scripture. "Hindu nationalist" is more appropriate.
[...skip a few minutes: on "mega-cities"...]
Terry: You interviewed all kinds of people, including a Hindu nationalist leader who actually set a Muslim or two on fire.
Suketu: This was during the riots after Ayodhya. There was a group of Hindus out early in the morning looking for Muslims to kill. He knew a man who sold him bread every day. He set him on fire for no other reason than that he was Muslim.
A mob assaulted him and poured Kerosene on him. As this was happening, he was weeping and he was crying, and reminding Sunil, the Shiv Sena man, that he used to sell him bread every day. He was begging for his life, saying that he had children.
Sunil, the man I interviewed, said to him, “When your people were killing our people, did you think of your children?” And he proceeded to kill him. I talked to a number of people who told me that they had killed Muslims. And I talked to Muslims who said they had killed Hindus.
I asked them about what it feels like to take a human life. As I was listening to them, I tried to withhold judgment. I had to remain expressionless, I could not show shock or horror. They were telling me what they had been living with for years. I was there, just writing it down.
At some point, they stopped talking to me, and were just explaining something to themselves. That was when I got the best stuff.
[...skip a few minutes: more on communalism...]
Terry: Seeing how Muslims and Hindus do not get along, famously, in Bomay now, and having researched what happened in the riots, and having talked to people who had participated in communal killings, what are your thoughts about the growing role of religion in American politics?
Suketu: I lived in Iowa for several years. I had some experience with the Evangelical churches there. Just as many people say that much of India is a Hindu nationalist country, much of the US is a Christian nationalist country. It's a troubling development. It's really a reaction to modernity, people who don't know how to respond to changes. [...]
One difference is, in India, Communalism is largely an urban problem. In India, you hardly ever hear about riots in the country. The opposite is true in the U.S. Most of Christian fundamentalism is found in 'flyover country.'
Also, in India, this spring, the Hindu nationalist party was voted out of power. People got tired of that kind of politics. I frankly was hoping the same thing would happen this fall in the U.S. Perhaps people here may need to live with that kind of government for a little while before they do the same.
Terry: You write that, since moving to the U.S., you've never felt any patriotism.
Suketu: Yes, growing up in India we were inundated with patriotic songs. [...] Every time you went to see a movie, you had to stand for the national anthem, on pain of arrest. And then I came to America, I found much the same sort of thing. Anthems playing, people thinking that America is the best country in the world...
It seems like lunacy. I think that migration is the best antidote to patriotism. These countries have had lots interactions with each other. [Refers to the influence of the Gita on Thoreau and the influence of Thoreau on Gandhi]. I'm most interested in the idea of looking outward from oneself. I really feel that a passport is just a travel document.
[...skip a few minutes of basic intro to Bollywood films...]
Terry: Where do the songs come in?
Suketu: The songs are in my view the most delightful part of the films. They aren't just a diversion from the plot. It's part of a Complete Entertainment.
There's a movie out called Veer Zaara, which I was also part of the making of. It's 3 ½ hours long – most Americans would be killing themselves if they had to watch a movie that long. But if you take a villager in India, he comes in from a long day's work, he wants to get his money's worth. He wants to watch these gorgeous people for 3 ½ hours, he wants the songs, he wants the action, he wants a bit of titillation -- he wants it all. When he goes back, there's not that much to go back for.
Terry: So do you think you'll ever live in Bombay again?
Suketu: I think so. I began this book with the question – can you go home again? I found that, not only can you go home, you can also leave again. Home for people like me moves with me. I have a room in New York and a room in Bombay.
Home is where my people are. And they are in the cities of the world. I have family in Paris, Antwerp, etc.
Everywhere you go, you find similar elements. There are piece of the first world in the midst of the third world – islands of convenience and wealth in the midst of urban squalor.
Terry: Thank you...
While I don't think this take on Bombay is the most exciting thing ever, I do think Suketu Metha does a good job as a kind of cultural ambassador for the new, cosmopolitan India. Warts (gangsters, capitalists, filmmakers...) and all.
I'll probably be recommending the book to friends and colleagues...
Profile of Tukey's Erdogan in FT
December 17 is D-Day for Turkey's admission to the EU.
A profile of Turkey's current PM, starting with his imprisonment in 1999 for criticizing secularism, and ending with the considerations affecting Turkey's bid for EU membership.
A profile of Turkey's current PM, starting with his imprisonment in 1999 for criticizing secularism, and ending with the considerations affecting Turkey's bid for EU membership.
Epstein Dislikes Blagues
Joseph Epstein is skeptical about blogs. The best line in his piece for the WSJ when he notes the similarity between the word 'blog' and the French word 'blague':
The RAM issue he mentions is a real one, as is the chaff-humbug problem. But I wonder if the limits of how much information a person can take in might be altered by conditioning? I also think things like RSS can help us scan quite a broad range of material, while the text we actually read with some measure of attentiveness remains somewhat limited.
After admitting all the successes of bloggers in politics and journalism in recent years, I myself remain a bit of a blogophobe. My problem with blogs is, to stay within computerese, a RAM problem. RAM is, of course, random access memory, denoting how much information one can store in one's computer, or, in human terms, in one's brain. Those little gray cells, as Inspector Poirot likes to call them, are dying off in impressive numbers in all of us; and do we wish to spend many of them reading blogs, in which a large percentage of the material cannot be relied upon, and lots more of which is beside any possible point? Well to remember that the French word blague, pronounced the same as blog, means to talk chaff, to hoax, to humbug.
The RAM issue he mentions is a real one, as is the chaff-humbug problem. But I wonder if the limits of how much information a person can take in might be altered by conditioning? I also think things like RSS can help us scan quite a broad range of material, while the text we actually read with some measure of attentiveness remains somewhat limited.
Another Unhappy Anniversary: Ayodhya
Check out Anand's (i.e., Locana's) thoughtful reflection on Ayodhya. Today is the 12th anniversary of the razing of the temple. It proves yet again that he is one of the best India bloggers out there. I agree with him on all points.
[For background on this event, Wikipedia has a very good entry.]
Today in India, 600 Muslim activists were arrested for attempting to stage a protest at the site.
And some testy words were exchanged in the Indian Parliament over the issue.
Big whoop. Other than that, I'm not finding any acknowledgment of the anniversary in the either the Indian or the International press. Maybe it will come back to the forefront when a decision is finally made as to what happens next at the site, which remains in post-demolition limbo.
[For background on this event, Wikipedia has a very good entry.]
Today in India, 600 Muslim activists were arrested for attempting to stage a protest at the site.
And some testy words were exchanged in the Indian Parliament over the issue.
Big whoop. Other than that, I'm not finding any acknowledgment of the anniversary in the either the Indian or the International press. Maybe it will come back to the forefront when a decision is finally made as to what happens next at the site, which remains in post-demolition limbo.
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