Conference matters: Suketu Mehta, Samina Ali

The most interesting panels at the "Knowing South Asia" conference (see yesterday's post) were the ones involving Suketu Mehta and Samina Ali.

The questions I'd written up, which were among about 20 questions that had been pre-circulated to conference participants, were essentially ignored -- but there was plenty to talk about nevertheless.

Suketu Mehta.
I had posted something on Mehta's Maximum City earlier, but I don't think I gave the book as much credit as I should have.

The book is a pretty compelling work of investigative journalism -- the interviews he gets, the topics he covers, the depth and richness of his analysis. The one thing to watch out for (and commentor Marginalien [Manjula Padmanahban, I believe] noted this here) is, it's sometimes really, really dark. The chapter on the "Special Branch" of the Bombay police force is especially frightening to read.

At the panel, Mehta talked a bit about how his early journalistic essays on AIDS in India and the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal led him down the path to Maximum City. He mentioned in particular the story of a survivor of Bhopal, who had lost his entire extended family in 1984 (the year of the disaster). Over the course of the next 11 years, this survivor had turned into a kind of street hustler, who exploited his victimhood at every turn, and also did much shady business on the side. For Mehta, this kid was interesting as an example of "moral complexity"; one sees something similar in many of the characters one encounters in Maximum City.

One of the respondents raised the issue of Mehta's seeming nostalgia at some moments in the book. Mehta refers to the rise of a "New Bombay," dominated by a class of entrepeneurs who in fact do not come from the elite, English-speaking world on Malabar Hill, but essentially from anywhere. The new class has few of the inhibitions or scruples of the old ruling class, but it clearly has a great deal of energy and diligence. It is also, it should be said, largely composed of Maharashtrians, and is in some sense tied to the rise of the Shiv Sena in both the government of Bombay the city and at the state level in Maharashtra. The "nostalgia" question led to some pretty lively discussion. After being criticized for seeming to endorse the old Bombay over the new one, Mehta read the following passage from the book:

The Bombay I have grown up with is suffering from a profound sadness: the sadness of lost ownership, the transfer of the keys to the city. No longer is the political life of the city controlled by the Parsis, the Gujuratis, the Marwaris. This passage was marked by the candidacy of Naval Tata in 1971. The powerful industrialist ran as an independent from the Mumbai South constituency, the richest and smallest in the country, and still he lost. In India, unlike in America, fabulous wealth by itself can't buy you an election. Just about the only way the upper class will get into politics now is by being nominated to the upper house of parliament.

As I read it, it's not so much nostalgia here as it is a recognition of the impossibility of occupying a position other than the one that's been given. The kinds of politicians that rule Bombay now -- amoral, but also entrepeneurial, energetic, and perhaps even effective -- are not people one would want to be like. It's dishonest to say that the particular kind of democratization taking place is something "we" (members of India's old elite class) can embrace. If "we" are quite scrupulously honest, we can also admit that the conditions that created the dominance of the old elites were a mix of British colonial patronage and clannish family trade connections (Parsis, Marwaris, Gujuratis) that were as exclusionary as they were recalcitrant to modernization.

Samina Ali
Secondly, I was impressed by Samina Ali.

I managed to get to about the half-way point of her book Madras on Rainy Days the weekend before the conference. The novel is quite critical of the treatment of women within Islam, but the criticisms are given in muted rather than strident terms. This is not the domain of Deepa Mehta's Fire, where all the men are bastards and the women are victims. I should also add that the parts of the novel I've read are rich with interesting observations and finely observed details: Madras on Rainy Days might be a good way for people to gain some familiariztion with how Islam is lived in Old City, Hyderabad.

Perhaps most importantly, at the panel Ali talked about her involvement in a movement called the Daughters of Hajar, along with the outspoken activist and commentator Asra Q. Nomani. A few months ago, they made international headlines when they marched on a Mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, demanding that women be allowed to pray in the central chambers (they had earlier been required to enter the Mosque through the back door, and pray in a separate room).

At the panel (and all this was in response to a question I had asked), Samina Ali seemed a little ambivalent about this. While she was proud of her involvement in the protest in Morgantown, she said she decided to "take a step back" from the organization after it seemed to have been "hijacked" by the interests of the right-wing voices of the American media. So when Amina Wadud led prayers at a Mosque in New York City three weeks ago -- again getting major press attention -- Ali deliberately decided not to be involved. She spoke about all this with a great deal of passion and force; I was happy that my question inspired it.

I can understand Ali's ambivalence about these protests, but I can't help but feel that, if you feel something strongly enough, you should stick with it even if the wrong people are on your side.

"Knowing South Asia" -- questions on Indian Literature

Tomorrow I'm going to be a respondent at a workshop called "Knowing South Asia," at YCIAS at Yale. The writers invited include Samina Ali (Madras on Rainy Days), Suketu Mehta (Maximum City), M.G. Vassanji (most recently The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, and Meena Alexander (Fault Lines, among several others). There is a long list of academics involved, many of them graduate students at Yale itself.

We've been invited to contribute questions in advance of the workshop (in lieu of a paper). I thought I would run the questions I came up with by you guys first:

1. On "South Asia." It sometimes seems to me that "South Asian literature" is a construct that has more to do with North American university syllabi than it does with the literature itself.

All of the writers are personally connected with India, though they are also physically located in North America, some of the time at least. And most contemporary literature dealing with the Subcontinent –- including recent writing from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, or Sri Lanka –- is more or less national (rather than transnationally "subcontinental") in frame. Isn't "South Asia" really a geopolitical term rather than one that is culturally specific enough to actually refer to a community of people or a coherent body of literature?

2. The "Arundhati Roy Trap." When in India recently to promote Vikas Swarup's new novel, British publisher Jane Lawson referred to something she called the "Arundhati Roy trap." By which she meant, writing that is intensely lyrical or exotic in its style. Though her comments seem to be pragmatic and commercially-minded rather than critical in the objective sense (she's thinking about what is likely to sell), her dismissal of Roy raises some legitimate questions for writers as well as critics. How does the post-Arundhati Roy generation respond to Jane Lawson? [See this post]

3. Beyond East/West: the place of the Middle East and Africa in the Indian imaginary. For many years, the main point of reference to "outside" for Indian writers was England or North America. Is that changing? Most of the writers involved in this colloquium refer extensively to the Middle East as well as Africa in various ways. Meena Alexander lived in the Sudan, and has memories of Arabic and the desert mixed mixed in her memoirs with the lush vegetation of Kerala. M.G. Vassanji was born and raised in Africa, and all of the books of his that I have read refer to this quite directly (including his most recent novel, The In-Between Adventures of Vikram Lall). The Middle East in particular is also quite important in the transnational networks that define contemporary Bombay in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City. And Dubai and Saudi Arabia are economically and culturally as important as America in defining the crisis facing the Hyderabadi Muslim community in Samina Ali's Madras on Rainy Days.

Does the Middle East symbolize something for India besides terrorism? And what about Africa? Are the patterns of interaction between these different parts of the world changing? Is India's image of other parts of the third world changing?

4. On Indian writers in Indian vs. U.S. Publishing Houses. Recently book critic Nilanjana Roy commented in the Indian magazine The Business Standard that "The general standard [for books published by Indian writers] is still low; it’s still a struggle every year to recommend great fiction that can stand beside the best of Saramago, Pamuk, Murakami, McEwan, Roth and company; some of what gets published is incredibly dreary, incredibly mediocre." She acknowledges that some very good books are being written every year by Indians (at home and abroad), but she feels that much of the Indian writing published in the west (including that written by people physically located in India) is overhyped, padded by the waves of publicity associated with the western publishing industry. She says that much of this writing is "endorsed by the Western world, stamped with the approval of publishing houses we should be able to trust, foreign editors whose names are legendary, authors who are living shrines."

In a sense this is an authenticity question, but it is also not. Roy is also pointing the finger at the seeming endorsement of writers located in India whose work is marketed for foreign readers. She singles out Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop as an example. In a sense, the problem of authenticity for her is one of marketing and subject matter, not the writer's location. Do you think this is a legitimate distinction? How important is publishing when we think about the situatedness of South Asian literature?

The basic question is: How do you compare the Indian English-language publishing industry with the segment of the American book world dedicated to books by Indian authors?

Note: Nilanjana Roy's articles on Indian literature can be read online: here and here. She also has a blog, Akhond of Swat.

5. Creative Non-fiction. Is there a trend towards creative non-fiction? In recent months we've seen prominent books and essays by people Amitava Kumar, Suketu Mehta, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh. Some of them are best known as fiction writers, but all have used the creative non-fiction format to make powerful political critiques, even as they write with a decidedly "literary" sensibility. What is the role of creative non-fiction in Indian (or "South Asian") literature?

Most of these are questions I've raised on this blog over the past few months (see, this blog is useful after all...)

Question (1) came up just yesterday, in thinking about the PEN World Voices festival in New York. Question 2 I talked about here. I responded to Question (4) a couple of months ago. I now think my answer was a little too hostile; also, Nilanjana's follow-up column published in The Business Standard cleared up many of my concerns.

Any thoughts on any of the questions?

Vaisakhi: Sikh New Year's

Coolie reminds me that today is Vaisakhi (also sometimes spelled Baisakhi). It's technically the Sikh new year's day, though it originates in a secular spring harvest festival. Vaisakhi retains somewhat of the flavor of that kind of holiday, and for most people in India it is basically another excuse to celebrate. In the U.S., the local Sikh communities tend to hold local "Sikh Day Parades" (NYC is having one on April 30th), followed by big after-parties for the young'uns.

There is virtually no news about Vaisakhi anywhere in the media. The most exciting thing I could find is, Daler Mehndi, the King of Punjabi Pop, is set to perform in Bombay for the first time in eight years.

Non-Stop Rushdie; PEN World Voices Festival

Salman Rushdie is everywhere, man. Last week it was introducing Ray's The Home and The World at Masters of Indian Cinema, before that the SAJA Tsunami Benefit.

This week, he's hosting the PEN World Voices Festival, and denouncing the Bush administration by way of publicizing the event.

The most interesting panel at the event, which of course I can't go to, might be The Post-National Writer. I'm becoming increasingly skeptical about whether writers can really pull this off; most "post-national" writers are really better described as "trans-national." Post-national would imply going beyond national boundaries entirely. But you always carry a passport (and therefore a nationality); you always have a mother-tongue you speak (and read); and the space you live in is always limited. Even people who are serial migrants remain bounded as they move.

I think national boundaries define one's sense of space in ways that are hard to shake; the nation is still a kind of defining imaginative frontier for the novel. It's one reason why I mistrust the category "South Asian literature," for instance. Most Indian writers are defined by the borders of India. They barely know Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka, and they certainly don't sit down to read Mohsin Hamid or Jean Arasanayagam to get a sense of what's happening in the "South Asian literary scene."

One might think this disconnect happens because India is in a sense the "center" of South Asia, and people at the center often forget those at the margins. But this nation-oriented provincialism is, I think, equally applicable in the smaller countries as well. If you read Sri Lankan writers like Jean Arasanayagam (based in Colombo), there is very little sense that there is a huge country called India just a few miles off the north coast of the island. The foreign reference points in most Sri Lankan literature are London, Toronto, and New York, not Madras or Trivandrum.

Dickens World

[Cross-posted at The Valve]

Nearly every far-out idea Salman Rushdie came up with in The Satanic Verses (pp. 422-430) has come to pass.

The latest is the Dickens World theme park planned for Chatham (via Shashwati):

Construction of the Dickens World entertainment complex will begin shortly and it is expected to attract up to 300,000 visitors a year when it opens in 2007.

Its backers hope it will introduce characters such as Mr Micawber, Fagin, Magwitch and Uriah Heep to a generation that has grown up knowing little of his classic Victorian texts.

Kevin Christie, who is masterminding the project, said: 'For a man who wrote 15 books and 23 short stories, you would be hard pressed to find anybody under 30 who can name five of them.'

Yes, that's probably true. So who exactly are the 300,000 people who would be in line for tickets again?

What they need to do to drum up interest is some kind of Dickens mash-up literature, which would take his stock characters and places them in 150 page long Walmart friendly action-adventure thrillers and/or Oriental romances along the lines of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Think: Gaffer Hexam, Super-Spy. Or perhaps, a crime-courtroom drama franchise: Our Mutual Friend: Special Victims Unit.

Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin, author Woman Hating, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and the rather unlikely Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, has died.

Everyone talks about her out-there ideas, and her provocations on things like pornography, marriage ("mandated intercourse"), and the family.

But I'd never realized that her life was as rough as it was. I'm thinking especially of the body cavity search after the anti-war protest at the U.N., as well as the Dutch husband who beat her and burned her with cigarettes. I'm also maybe thinking about her trading sex as a young woman to get bus fare to go from Cherry Hill to New York. She went through all that, but she also aggressively lobbied Washington for some years in the 1980s as part of the anti-pornography crusade.

It would be interesting to read an Andrea Dworkin memoir, but somehow I doubt she would have had time to write one.

India's outsourcing business might be in trouble

Rebecca at Offshoring Digest has a troubling post about the prospects for India's BPO companies.

We've seen alarm bells before -- concerns were raised early on about whether employees at India's call centers are as good as those at European or American centers. And for awhile, there was a concern that the political backlash against Offshore Outsourcing in American politics would lead Congress to pass laws restricting it. Neither of those issues have fully gone away, but they haven't succeeded in slowing the momentum in favor of Outsourcing.

But this is the first study I've seen that suggests that the trend may have peaked. The study also has sobering statistics on India's continuing problems with unemployment, in a number of different sectors of the economy.

Emphasis on "MIGHT"; I don't think anyone really knows for sure what the next phase of things is going to be in the Indian economy.

UPDATE: According to Rediff, four employees at a call center in Pune have been arrested for pilfering $350,000 USD from Citibank customers.

Masters of Depressing Indian Cinema

We saw Aparna Sen's Yugant (1995) yesterday at the "Masters of Indian Cinema" Film Festival at the ImaginAsian. It's a serious, well-made film about a dysfunctional marriage, environmental destruction, and perhaps also the midlife challenges experienced by people involved in the arts ("where do I go from here?"). It clearly shows Aparna Sen's skills. Two years ago, her Mr. and Mrs. Iyer was a big art-house hit -- an art movie about communalism that succeeded in being pretty entertaining.

Since it's unlikely that readers will have access to this film anywhere, I won't review Yugant in any depth. Rather, I'll just pose a question:

Is it necessarily the case that "depressing" films leave you depressed? Oddly, though this film shows people who are deeply unhappy -- and not even in an ironic way, a la Todd Solondz, Woody Allen, etc. -- I walked away in a pretty good mood. Sen engages her audience in various philosophical and formal problems as she moves the story forward (and yes, down). The result is that, even with a pretty unhappy ending, the film doesn't leave you feeling down. I think part of it is that Sen uses mood-setting music quite sparingly (though she's not as spartan as the Dogme 95 people are. But a big part of the absence of depression-affect is the philosophical interest the film provokes.

In short, one must in all honesty describe Yugant as "a depressing film," but it is a depressing film that doesn't leave the viewer depressed...

One other quick comment: I was a little shocked by the condition of the print shown at the ImaginAsian. It's not their fault: this is the original film, shipped from India for this festival. I have a feeling that few good prints of films like Yugant exist, anywhere...

The film had clearly been scratched badly from use and misuse, and was a litte unstable. Also, yesterday was the first time I ever saw the melting of film in the projector, projected on screen. It was distressing; it means that the next people to watch Yugant are going to be missing a scene.

She knows where the pants are

Really, this is all about the clever quips it inspires:

A friend of mine has just experienced the defining moment of any new live-in relationship - the one where your man asks where his pants are. This wasn't a bad man, a sexist creep, a cad. As a rule, he could be found seeking her opinion on the new Philip Roth, the Scissor Sisters, or the merits of a restaurant they had just visited. Now, suddenly, surreally, he was asking her about his pants. Where were they? What had she done with them? Could he have a fresh pair, please?

Parody: Hindi film reviews

[I've never quite gotten the parody thing right, but that's no excuse not to try. The following is a parody of this review of Lucky--No Time For Love.]

Set against the romantic and majestic backdrop of Uzbekistan, Love Someone--Kyon Nahin? is a tale of love that brings together two extremely good-looking people with mediocre acting ability. It is a story of passion in a time of terrorism!

Jill (Sunita Hosakta) is the quintessential dreamer - soft, beautiful and gentle. Her one big belief is that if you search from the bottom of your heart, you will find not just the rainbow, but also the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. One fine morning Jill is riding to school, praying that she clears her test, scheduled on that date. But her journey to school becomes her desperate journey of survival.

Jill never reaches school. She meets a stranger (Rajiv Bandu), who for some reason speaks fluent Hindi, and who's smart, wicked, charming.

It's common knowledge that a love story works if and only if it's high on emotional quotient. And the moments linger in your memory. Love Someone walks into your heart gradually!

The film starts off well, but the story comes to a screeching halt the moment Sunita and Rajiv find themselves trapped in the basement of a drug-dealer's mansion. The conversations between Sunita and Rajiv at this juncture are dull and boring, which is a glaring flaw from the writing point of view. The grip is clearly missing!

But the pace picks up gradually, over the course of four hours. And it gets all the more engrossing when the nuclear bomb/terrorism plot is introduced. From thereon, right till the finale, Love Someone goes higher and higher on the graph.

The film wears a Hollywoodish look all through, which matches Sunita's outfits. But from the writing point of view, Salil Besharam looks more like a buffoon than an intelligence officer. Also, you often wonder how Arjun reaches the right place at the right time - there're no explanations offered!

On the whole, Love Someone--Kyon Nahin? works for the aforesaid four reasons (fresh pairing, soul-stirring music, vibrant action and breath-taking locales). And with terrific promotion undertaken by T-Series, besides no major opposition for the next two weeks as well as commencement of summer vacations, Love Someone--Kyon Nahin? may just manage to find some love with audiences. Kyon Nahin?

Read the original review. I do not lie.

Trivial Bollywood Post

I just wanted people to know that Aishwariya Rai and Vivek Oberoi are still together, after all.

This is important to know.

On Saul Bellow's Nobel Lecture

The American writer Saul Bellow has passed away.

I haven't read enough of Saul Bellow to comment on his oeuvre or his legacy. But one way of honoring him while continuing to tangle with him critically might be to point readers to his Nobel Lecture, from 1976.

Amongst the various 'noble' sentiments he offers in the lecture, Bellow makes a pretty specific point about the function of character in contemporary writing. He tangles with Alain Robbe-Grillet's claim that the novel of bourgeois individualism is "obsolete" because in the latter half of the 20th century individuals are less important than ideas, systems, processes. Here is his quote from Robbe-Grillet's essay On Several Obsolete Notions:

"Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the serious essayists," says Robbe-Grillet, "yet nothing has managed to knock it ["character"] off the pedestal on which the 19th century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same phony majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism."

Bellow's lecture defends complex human character as the subject of literature, whose death is rather prematurely announced by Robbe-Grillet and others, beginning in the 1960s.

And art and literature - what of them? Well, there is a violent uproar but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too. The unending cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through terrible, strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods - truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom. I don't think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence for this.

Take away the damage done by war and the noise of ideology, and the reader is still there.

But why do many contemporary writers fail to hold the place of importance they once did for readers? Bellow feels that literature has become in some sense marginal to the center of human activity, and goes to Hegel:

But for a long time art has not been connected, as it was in the past, with the main enterprise. The historian Edgar Wind tells us in Art and Anarchy that Hegel long ago observed that art no longer engaged the central energies of man. These energies were now engaged by science - a "relentless spirit of rational inquiry." Art had moved to the margins. There it formed "a wide and splendidly varied horizon." In an age of science people still painted and wrote poetry but, said Hegel, however splendid the gods looked in modern works of art and whatever dignity and perfection we might find "in the images of God the Father and the Virgin Mary" it was of no use: we no longer bent our knees. It is a long time since the knees were bent in piety. Ingenuity, daring exploration, freshness of invention replaced the art of "direct relevance." The most significant achievement of this pure art, in Hegel's view, was that, freed from its former responsibilities, it was no longer "serious." Instead it raised the soul through the "serenity of form above any painful involvement in the limitations of reality." I don't know who would make such a claim today for an art that raises the soul above painful involvements with reality. Nor am I sure that at this moment, it is the spirit of rational inquiry in pure science that engages the central energies of man. The center seems (temporarily perhaps) to be filled up with the crises I have been describing.

So Bellow isn't sure if "science" rules the roost after all. The prospect of centrality is still available to writers if they are inspired enough to enter it. As he says at the end of the essay, "If writers do not come again into the center it will not be because the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so wish."

There are two things that I find interesting about this. One is, in his resistance to Robbe-Grillet, Bellow sounds an awful lot like people today who (like Terry Eagleton, say) complain about the drift of both contemporary literature and the criticism that is associated with it. It's not just an old debate, it's a very old debate.

The other is in this business about centers and margins, and the purpose of art. For Bellow, the time when art inspired the bending of knees was also the time when it had a ritualistic function -- when it was the image of Jesus and the Virgin Mary that inspired one, not the precision of the craftsmanship or the verisimilitude of the image. Arguably, in a secular culture art and literature can never be quite as powerful as in the kind of pre-modern society Bellow is thinking of, where the thing that "high" art represents is never in fact merely physically present.

Perhaps Bellow's idea of the "center" is just a euphemism for writing really, really well. Or maybe it's more serious: but what might it mean to make a work of art that accesses the central nerves of human development at the present moment? More concretely, if it were a novel, what kind of novel would it be? Would it look like Saul Bellow's own work?

"My Brother Nikhil," and AIDS in India

The Times' Somini Sengupta has a report on a film that has come out in India, called My Brother, Nikhil, which features a 'hip' young gay man dealing with AIDS and HIV. It's set in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when AIDS was not being discussed in India at all.

The film easily passed the censor board, and thus far there has been no controversy about it whatsoever. I gather that there is no explicit sexuality in it.

Reading the (glowing) Rediff review, one gets the distinct sense that the film will be over-the-top and melodramatic in that Bollywood way. The article is a little ambiguous on this point, but it sounds like part of the plot is "the sad plight of India's patient zero."

Oh well. I'll still go see it if/when it comes out.

This comes on a day when Sepia Mutiny has a post on a BBC report on a study that Indians carrying HIV seem to develop full-blown AIDS at a higher rate than people in other parts of the world. The researchers have attributed the to genetics: "protective genes are rare while harmful genes are common." It's an interesting claim; I'm skeptical, but willing to be convinced.

Still, the statistics are sobering: at least 5 million Indians are infected with HIV.

John Ruskin and Particularism

I listened to the BBC 4 In Our Time discussion of John Ruskin on the way to work this morning, and was struck by a couple of things. (Here is the (main page; the discussants are Dinah Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University; Keith Hanley, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University; and Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge).

One thing that struck me was the extent to which Ruskin's political investments overlap with those of succeeding generations. For those who haven't heard of him, Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and William Morris are the dominant voices in the "Pre-Raphaelite" movement in Victorian literature and the arts. [See George Landow's page on Ruskin for more details; and here is a site on Pre-Raphaelite painting] Philosophically, the Pre-Raphaelites were interested in a kind of neo-Feudalism that verged on Fourier-style socialism. Following Ruskin's Modern Painters books, they celebrated Gothic architecture and hierarchical authority. Ruskin apparently described himself as "the sternest kind of Tory," but he was nothing like the other Tories of his era.

In the sense that his work was critical of Victorian industrialization and Capitalism, Ruskin's work had a big influence on many Marxist and progressive thinkers. Also of particular note is his big influence on Gandhi, whose anti-industrial pose owes quite a bit to the ideas of Ruskin and Carlyle (the latter is mentioned with particular enthusiasm in Gandhi's Autobiography).

But the three British Victorianists who are the discussants on this BBC show suggest that, with the seeming current irrelevance of anti-Industrialism protests (except perhaps amongst radical environmentalists), it's unlikely that the political economy side of Ruskin will continue to be compelling for current and future readers. The broad philosophical motive behind Ruskin's political thought is now no longer especially exciting to engage. We are no longer interested in the moral obligation to return to nature, live with the land, or (in the Indian idiom), spin, sew, and embroider our own clothes.

What does remain thrilling in Ruskin's writing is, if anything, the writing itself. As one of the discussants says towards the end of the discussion, Ruskin was not all philosophical abstractions, by no means just an "-ism" thinker as the earlier comments in this post might suggest. If you read Modern Painters (and I confess I've only read a few select sections), you find passage after passage dwelling on the particular visual textures of the English countryside, both natural and man-made. Here's one particularly beautiful paragraph I culled from this website:

For instance, I cannot find words to express the intense pleasure I have always in first finding myself, after some prolonged stay in England, at the foot of the old tower of Calais church. The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses; its slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not falling; its desert of brickwork full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, and yet strong, like a bare brown rock; its carelessness of what any one thinks or feels about it, putting forth no claim, having no beauty or desirableness, pride, nor grace; yet neither asking for pity; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous of better days; but usefill still, going through its own daily work, - as some old fisherman beaten grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint about its past youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceableness, gathering human souls together underneath it; the sound of its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents; and the grey peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of the three that rise above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked shore, - the lighthouse for life, and the belfry for labour, and this for patience and praise.

The idea behind Ruskin's celebration of the decaying church at Calais is roughly congruent with that of Romanticism broadly construed -- the beauty produced by the evidence of the forces of nature, the inextricable (there's that word again) link between human artifice and the inevitable effects of time and age. But more than anything, what I walk away from a passage like that with is the desire to go see the Church he's talking about. (I can't imagine it could still be there.)

That said, if one reads just a little further, one finds that the sweep of comparative architecture, and moral/philosophical investments return in short order to the fore-front:

I cannot tell the half of the strange pleasures and thoughts that come about me at the sight of that old tower; for, in some sort, it is the epitome of all that makes the Continent of Europe interesting, as opposed to new countries; and, above all, it completely expresses that agedness in the midst of active life which binds the old and the new into harmony. We, in England, have our new street, our new inn, our green shaven lawn, and our piece of ruin emergent from it, - a mere specimen of the Middle Ages put on a bit of velvet carpet to be shown, which, but for its size, might as well be on a museum shelf at once, under cover. But, on the Continent, the links are unbroken between the past and present, and, in such use as they can serve for, the grey-headed wrecks are suffered to stay with men; while, in unbroken line, the generations of spared buildings are seen succeeding each in its place. And thus in its largeness, in its permitted evidence of slow decline, in its poverty, in its absence of all pretence, of all show and care for outside aspect, that Calais tower has an infinite of symbolism in it, all the more striking because usually seen in contrast with English scenes expressive of feelings the exact reverse of these.

For Ruskin, the English have a penchant for marking off the past in a museumy way, while Continentals (Ruskin had traveled extensively in France, Germany, and Italy), live with the distant past in a much more mundane, functional, and integrated way. Ruskin never met a generalization he didn't like: he reads the distinction as symbolic of a broad moral divide between English and Continental thinking.

The challenge is to bracket Ruskin's penchant for "symbolism," and read against the grain of his philosophy by reading in the grain of his finely descriptive language. Perhaps if we look closely at the rhythms of his prose (especially in the first passage I quoted), we might continue to find new and vital ways to read Ruskin.

Penguin India to Publish in Vernacular Languages

Via Literary Saloon: Penguin India is going to start publishing books in Indian languages. The representative for Penguin quoted in the article says the Indian book market has the potential to grow dramatically.

I'm hoping they're right: the more books, the merrier.