India Number One -- In HIV
Express India. The claim is based on an estimate by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. South Africa still has the highest solid estimate of HIV positive people (5.3 million to India's 5.1 million), but the range of estimates in India is much wider because of the lack of systematic testing.
France: No Compromise
The expulsion of three Sikh students has been held up in the French courts. (Via The Discrimination and National Security Initiative blog)
On some things, the French do not compromise.
On some things, the French do not compromise.
Good snark goes bad
I'm not enjoying this snarky trashing of Foer's new novel by Harry Siegel as much as I normally might. I agree with the sentiment; I'm not a huge fan of Foer's writing (though he interviews quite well). But I'm beginning to think that clever zingers are easy. It's better in principle just to say nothing at all and talk about what matters than it is to talk trash, as pleasurable as that might sometimes be.
That said, it's sometimes hard to stick to principle.
So far, this is good snark. But Siegel goes a little over the deep end when he brings up the flip-book a second time:
The first paragraph is ok. But the second paragraph above is show-offy, and the third is basically nonsense. Writers are allowed to use tragic events as material for their imaginations. 9/11 is not off limits. Deal with it.
And once Siegel starts to go wrong, he really goes wrong. Near the end of the review is the following bit of bareknuckled crap:
Oh, Harry Siegel, come on. So you were at Ground Zero; are you going to play that card every time a liberal opens his mouth? Adam Gopnik is harmless, and the bit about smoked mozzarella is just a line, an idea -- one person's response to a catastrophe. Save the venom for the real bad guys.
That said, it's sometimes hard to stick to principle.
Much has been made of the flipbook with which Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ends, a series of pictures of a silhouette falling from the towers, rearranged so that as one turns or flips the pages, the figure ascends instead of falling. Some advice to our young author: Don't walk the streets naked and complain that no one takes you seriously, and certainly don't write a book culminating with a flipbook and then complain that your words aren't taken seriously.
So far, this is good snark. But Siegel goes a little over the deep end when he brings up the flip-book a second time:
And then the flipbook, which, like the other illustrations, serves no purpose but to remind us that this is an important book, and what a daring young author this Foer is, offering us authenticity, a favorite word of his. In an interview, he explained that "Jay-Z samples from Annie—one of the least likely combinations imaginable—and it changes music. What if novelists were as willing to borrow?" Yes. Jiggaman and "Hard Knock Life" are surely what the novel needs.
Foer is indeed a sampler, throwing in Sebald (the illustrations and Dresden), Borges (the grandparents divide their apartment into something and nothing), Calvino (a tale about the sixth borough that floated off, ripped off wholesale from Cosmicomics), Auster (in the whole city-of-symbols shtick), Night of the Hunter (the grandfather has Yes and No tattooed on his hands) and damn near every other author, technique, reference and symbol he can lay his hands on, as though referencing were the same as meaning.
And with the same easy spirit in which he pillages other authors' techniques, stripping them of their context and using them merely for show, he snatches 9/11 to invest his conceit with gravitas, thus crossing the line that separates the risible from the villainous. The book's themes—the sense of connection we all feel when the coffee or acid hits and everything is illuminated, the brain-gurble and twitch and self-pity we all know better than to write about—have nothing to do with the attack on the towers, or with Dresden or Hiroshima, which Foer tosses in just to make sure we understand what a big and important book we're dealing with.
The first paragraph is ok. But the second paragraph above is show-offy, and the third is basically nonsense. Writers are allowed to use tragic events as material for their imaginations. 9/11 is not off limits. Deal with it.
And once Siegel starts to go wrong, he really goes wrong. Near the end of the review is the following bit of bareknuckled crap:
All of this brings to mind the infamous post-9/11 issue of The New Yorker, in which author after author reduced the attack to the horizon of their writerliness, epitomized by Adam Gopnick's comparing the smell to smoked mozzarella. I was at Ground Zero, so didn't hear about the issue for weeks or read it for months (or smell mozzarella at all), but I understood both why such words were vile and how writers curled into what they know. They felt that the world had become too large and ill-contained to do anything else.
Oh, Harry Siegel, come on. So you were at Ground Zero; are you going to play that card every time a liberal opens his mouth? Adam Gopnik is harmless, and the bit about smoked mozzarella is just a line, an idea -- one person's response to a catastrophe. Save the venom for the real bad guys.
Iriver vs. Ipod
I was a little down about my IRiver H10.
Shortly after I bought it, my wife received a free IPod Mini from work as a perk (ah, the life of the software engineer), and I was instantly jealous. Though my IRiver does have a color screen so you can look at pictures, as well as a text-viewing mode -- neither of which are to be had with IPod Mini -- it doesn't really have the "gee-whiz" quality of the IPod.
For one thing, the IPod's firmware is much, much better. It's easy to use, fast, fun to play with -- well, you already know, because chances are, you probably have an IPod. Also, ITunes is a nice piece of interface software. In contrast, the firmware my IRiver came with was awkward and buggy. Worst of all, it didn't come with it's own software package, and wasn't especially transparent to Windows Explorer. This meant I was stuck using Windows Media Player 10. (Which I don't particularly like)
Fortunately, IRiver released a major Firmware upgrade, which makes the useability of the device much better. This is the first time I can think of where a company has in effect improved a product dramatically after it's already being used by consumers who bought it.
Now I'm respectable at least. But I'm still jealous of the IPod Mini.
Shortly after I bought it, my wife received a free IPod Mini from work as a perk (ah, the life of the software engineer), and I was instantly jealous. Though my IRiver does have a color screen so you can look at pictures, as well as a text-viewing mode -- neither of which are to be had with IPod Mini -- it doesn't really have the "gee-whiz" quality of the IPod.
For one thing, the IPod's firmware is much, much better. It's easy to use, fast, fun to play with -- well, you already know, because chances are, you probably have an IPod. Also, ITunes is a nice piece of interface software. In contrast, the firmware my IRiver came with was awkward and buggy. Worst of all, it didn't come with it's own software package, and wasn't especially transparent to Windows Explorer. This meant I was stuck using Windows Media Player 10. (Which I don't particularly like)
Fortunately, IRiver released a major Firmware upgrade, which makes the useability of the device much better. This is the first time I can think of where a company has in effect improved a product dramatically after it's already being used by consumers who bought it.
Now I'm respectable at least. But I'm still jealous of the IPod Mini.
Professors under Siege: Githa Hariharan and A.S. Byatt
[Cross-posted at The Valve]
I recently taught, in parallel, two books about relatively unassuming professors whose lives actually become a little bit interesting. One was Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege, and the other A.S. Byatt's Possession. As novels about academic life, both deal with academic controversies associated with the politicization of academic work in England in the 1970s and 80s, and India in the 1990s, respectively. As both Hariharan and Byatt have taught at universities on and off, they include a fair bit of direct discussion of the issues; both novels have "lectures" alongside straightfoward narration. I have been meditating on whether the self-conscious intellectualism of the novels crosses the line into academicism (Bad Writing). Below, I say some critical things about In Times of Siege, but conclude that Hariharan finds a way of doing it that works. On the other hand, I say some nice things about Possession, but conclude that its theory about history actually doesn't work.
I also do a fair bit of plot-summary of In Times of Siege (bear with me), but not of Possession, which is a much-better known story.
* * * * *
This is Hariharan's fourth novel. Even though she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Thousand Faces of Night, In Times of Siege is the first book of hers to appear on a major U.S. publishing house (Vintage). It's a worthy debut; the novel is at once nicely executed (short and to the point), and clearly distinct from the kinds of novels published by Indian authors in the past decade. Professor Shiv Murthy is a professor of medieval Indian history at a correspondence university in New Delhi. He is also in some sense deeply emotionally stunted by a childhood experience, the sudden disappearance of a father who had been a frustrated Indian freedom-fighter. Shiv finds himself in hot water when the Hindu right picks up on a series of lessons he's written on a 12th century reform figure named Basava (or Basavanna, depending on how you spell it). Basava was a critic of religious orthodoxies in his day, but also a bit of a religious prophet himself. He is credited with starting a sect, the Veerashaivas (Warriors of Shiva), but he is nevertheless held up by some Indian secularists as an early example of a critic of Brahminical authority, religious dogma in general, and all manner of other backwardness in India. To religious Hindus, however, he can be seen as a religious hero.
Shiv's lectures, Hariharan informs us, are a bit slanted towards the progressive, secularist interpretation, and a loud group of critics (the "Itihas Suraksha Manch," or "History Protection Platform") publicly calls for an apology, a revised lesson, and a more "balanced" syllabus. (Ring some bells?) The Chair of the department and the Dean are spooked by the national media attention, and attempt to strong-arm Shiv to revise the lesson and sign the apology. The Chair's complaint against Shiv is a nice parody of bureaucratic absurdity. Here's a short bit from the Department Chair's list of phrases in Shiv's lesson that were deemed objectionable: "One: Backward looking. Two: Contradictory accounts of Basava's life, conflicting narratives. Three: Birth legends fabricated. Four: Called a bigoted revolutionary by temple priests. Also called a dangerous man, a threat to structure, stability, and religion. Five: The comfort of faith was not enough for Basava." I like this list because it shows how the censorious side of Political Correctness, traditionally a hallmark of the left, can just as easily be deployed by the right. The words "backward looking" in a lesson on Medieval Indian history might in fact suggest a sloppy conception of history, but here they are being censored because they are too progressive.
Normally for Shiv, the response to such coercion would be a bit of a no-brainer -- you sign the apology, change the lesson, and keep your job -- but at the time this controversy happens the daugther of an old friend is staying with him, recuperating from a broken leg. Meena is a campus radical from a different (better) university, and her presence in his life completely transforms Shiv's sense of his role as a historian. She eggs him on as he resists the History Protection Movement. Along the way he also fall a little bit in love with her, even though her age is less than his daughter's (Shiv's wife is away for a time in Seattle). In case you were worried about where this is going, Hariharan handles this part of the story with psychological realism and grace; she keeps the potential for sexual scandal from hijacking a story that is at essence about the professor, Shiv Murthy.
The defining problem, in both novels, is more or less same: what does history mean to us? Ideologically, it can be a chain that binds us to the past, forever constraining our visions of the kind of society we might have. History can be conservative: if people were divided along religious, caste, and class lines in the past, so it must always be. But for most young people today it is much easier to be a kind of Intentionally Naive Radical: who cares? It's not just the 12th century that's old news, it's the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. What matters is what's Big News, today, right now, this very moment.
The protagonists of both of these novels live a very different relationship to history. Even if history's riddles aren't completely decipherable to them, its concerns are animating and open to interpretation. Thinking about history is the kind of thing that can help you get over the loss of your father (Hariharan). Or, discovering history can make you fall in love (Byatt). The theory of history in (serious) historical fiction might be generalized as follows: an engagement with the recesses of the past has the potential to utterly transform the present at every level. History, in short, is the very best kind of 'long tail'.
Of course, this is easier to say than it is to do. In working out her novel's theory of history, Hariharan does have a few moments of professorial geekiness. At one point, for instance, she writes:
To my taste, this is all good until the last sentence, which is a bit like a rhetorical question you ask the class near the end of the hour, which falls flat. The question, which might sound weighty and grave to the ears of professors, reeks of academicism to students. (And perhaps readers as well...)
[To be fair, Hariharan's novel has many moments where the crisis in history is dealt with that don't go this route. I won't quote them here; hopefully some of you will trust me when I say that this novel is worth a read for anyone who has ever worried about academic freedom.]
For some, the essayistic drift one often sees in novels about academics might be a problem in and of itself. One is reminded of the old dictum to "show, don't tell." Fortunately or unfortunately, books that have professors for protagonists tend to do a lot of self-conscious telling alongside unconcious showing.
I think academic novels can work, though it depends on how it's done. Despite the passages on Basava and the sacking of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar (another source of controversy amongst Indian historians and history-writers), Hariharan's novel still feels light, whereas Byatt's Possession has a weighted-down feel. With all the different voices in play, it becomes difficult to sit with it and just read the damn book. Byatt's narration via diaries, letters, and snippets of 'reconstructed' poetry are evidence of a comprehensive, richly textured knowledge of the knowledge Victorian era, but they make Possession seem like a bit of a textbook, rather than a "story."
Of course, one could argue that that's the point of the book: no story worth knowing is ever just one person's story. The emphasis on the individual protagonist and the fixed viewpoint (individuated) narrator who in some sense mirrors the protagonist, is a convention of the modern novel. In passages like the following, Byatt seems to be protesting the trend:
This seems to be a bit of conservative nostalgia for the "old-fashioned" novel where a man and woman fall in love and get married, but the fragmentary structure of the novel in which this quote appears makes it hard to quite believe she means what she says. Byatt's more experimental recent stories seem to make a case for aesthetic seriousness critics attach to the words "postmodern" and "metafiction," while maintaining a more-than-sentimental attachment to the elements of storytelling that postmodernism has, supposedly, rendered passé.
In parallel with the different approaches to the idea of history in their novels are differences in epistemology along modern/postmodern lines. Hariharan's take on Basava leans postmodernist: the final truth about this 12th century figure's relationship to religion will never be definitively known, but the lack of closure can actually be a lesson for the always polarized, ideologically volatile contemporary moment. In contrast, Byatt's English professors recoil against the dicta of the postmodernist era, as they are propelled by a desire to know the Whole Story about the scandalous Victorian romance they are investigating. There is no question in Byatt's novel as to whether there is a Whole Story to be objectively known and explained; there most certainly is. And presumably alongside the "deep human desire" for the Whole Story comes a hunger for a series of other ontologically incorrect terms: Totality, Essence, and Truth.
I recently taught, in parallel, two books about relatively unassuming professors whose lives actually become a little bit interesting. One was Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege, and the other A.S. Byatt's Possession. As novels about academic life, both deal with academic controversies associated with the politicization of academic work in England in the 1970s and 80s, and India in the 1990s, respectively. As both Hariharan and Byatt have taught at universities on and off, they include a fair bit of direct discussion of the issues; both novels have "lectures" alongside straightfoward narration. I have been meditating on whether the self-conscious intellectualism of the novels crosses the line into academicism (Bad Writing). Below, I say some critical things about In Times of Siege, but conclude that Hariharan finds a way of doing it that works. On the other hand, I say some nice things about Possession, but conclude that its theory about history actually doesn't work.
I also do a fair bit of plot-summary of In Times of Siege (bear with me), but not of Possession, which is a much-better known story.
* * * * *
This is Hariharan's fourth novel. Even though she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Thousand Faces of Night, In Times of Siege is the first book of hers to appear on a major U.S. publishing house (Vintage). It's a worthy debut; the novel is at once nicely executed (short and to the point), and clearly distinct from the kinds of novels published by Indian authors in the past decade. Professor Shiv Murthy is a professor of medieval Indian history at a correspondence university in New Delhi. He is also in some sense deeply emotionally stunted by a childhood experience, the sudden disappearance of a father who had been a frustrated Indian freedom-fighter. Shiv finds himself in hot water when the Hindu right picks up on a series of lessons he's written on a 12th century reform figure named Basava (or Basavanna, depending on how you spell it). Basava was a critic of religious orthodoxies in his day, but also a bit of a religious prophet himself. He is credited with starting a sect, the Veerashaivas (Warriors of Shiva), but he is nevertheless held up by some Indian secularists as an early example of a critic of Brahminical authority, religious dogma in general, and all manner of other backwardness in India. To religious Hindus, however, he can be seen as a religious hero.
Shiv's lectures, Hariharan informs us, are a bit slanted towards the progressive, secularist interpretation, and a loud group of critics (the "Itihas Suraksha Manch," or "History Protection Platform") publicly calls for an apology, a revised lesson, and a more "balanced" syllabus. (Ring some bells?) The Chair of the department and the Dean are spooked by the national media attention, and attempt to strong-arm Shiv to revise the lesson and sign the apology. The Chair's complaint against Shiv is a nice parody of bureaucratic absurdity. Here's a short bit from the Department Chair's list of phrases in Shiv's lesson that were deemed objectionable: "One: Backward looking. Two: Contradictory accounts of Basava's life, conflicting narratives. Three: Birth legends fabricated. Four: Called a bigoted revolutionary by temple priests. Also called a dangerous man, a threat to structure, stability, and religion. Five: The comfort of faith was not enough for Basava." I like this list because it shows how the censorious side of Political Correctness, traditionally a hallmark of the left, can just as easily be deployed by the right. The words "backward looking" in a lesson on Medieval Indian history might in fact suggest a sloppy conception of history, but here they are being censored because they are too progressive.
Normally for Shiv, the response to such coercion would be a bit of a no-brainer -- you sign the apology, change the lesson, and keep your job -- but at the time this controversy happens the daugther of an old friend is staying with him, recuperating from a broken leg. Meena is a campus radical from a different (better) university, and her presence in his life completely transforms Shiv's sense of his role as a historian. She eggs him on as he resists the History Protection Movement. Along the way he also fall a little bit in love with her, even though her age is less than his daughter's (Shiv's wife is away for a time in Seattle). In case you were worried about where this is going, Hariharan handles this part of the story with psychological realism and grace; she keeps the potential for sexual scandal from hijacking a story that is at essence about the professor, Shiv Murthy.
The defining problem, in both novels, is more or less same: what does history mean to us? Ideologically, it can be a chain that binds us to the past, forever constraining our visions of the kind of society we might have. History can be conservative: if people were divided along religious, caste, and class lines in the past, so it must always be. But for most young people today it is much easier to be a kind of Intentionally Naive Radical: who cares? It's not just the 12th century that's old news, it's the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. What matters is what's Big News, today, right now, this very moment.
The protagonists of both of these novels live a very different relationship to history. Even if history's riddles aren't completely decipherable to them, its concerns are animating and open to interpretation. Thinking about history is the kind of thing that can help you get over the loss of your father (Hariharan). Or, discovering history can make you fall in love (Byatt). The theory of history in (serious) historical fiction might be generalized as follows: an engagement with the recesses of the past has the potential to utterly transform the present at every level. History, in short, is the very best kind of 'long tail'.
Of course, this is easier to say than it is to do. In working out her novel's theory of history, Hariharan does have a few moments of professorial geekiness. At one point, for instance, she writes:
Each of us carries within ourselves a history, an encyclopedia of images, a landscape with its distinct patterns of mutilation. A dictionary that speaks the languages of several pasts, that moves across borders, back and forth between different times. Some biographers date Basava's death--or the presumption of death-- as January 1168. But in Shiv's mind, this tentative date creeps forward insidiously. Not to June 7, 1962, when his father disappeared, but to its medieval counterpart, June 7, 1168.
Like Shiv's father, Basava disappeared. He was presumed dead. His end would always be shrouded by mysterious circumstances and speculation. Speculative narratives. Narratives of love or faith or revolution. But is all narrative doomed to be inconclusive?
To my taste, this is all good until the last sentence, which is a bit like a rhetorical question you ask the class near the end of the hour, which falls flat. The question, which might sound weighty and grave to the ears of professors, reeks of academicism to students. (And perhaps readers as well...)
[To be fair, Hariharan's novel has many moments where the crisis in history is dealt with that don't go this route. I won't quote them here; hopefully some of you will trust me when I say that this novel is worth a read for anyone who has ever worried about academic freedom.]
For some, the essayistic drift one often sees in novels about academics might be a problem in and of itself. One is reminded of the old dictum to "show, don't tell." Fortunately or unfortunately, books that have professors for protagonists tend to do a lot of self-conscious telling alongside unconcious showing.
I think academic novels can work, though it depends on how it's done. Despite the passages on Basava and the sacking of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar (another source of controversy amongst Indian historians and history-writers), Hariharan's novel still feels light, whereas Byatt's Possession has a weighted-down feel. With all the different voices in play, it becomes difficult to sit with it and just read the damn book. Byatt's narration via diaries, letters, and snippets of 'reconstructed' poetry are evidence of a comprehensive, richly textured knowledge of the knowledge Victorian era, but they make Possession seem like a bit of a textbook, rather than a "story."
Of course, one could argue that that's the point of the book: no story worth knowing is ever just one person's story. The emphasis on the individual protagonist and the fixed viewpoint (individuated) narrator who in some sense mirrors the protagonist, is a convention of the modern novel. In passages like the following, Byatt seems to be protesting the trend:
Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the "free," but structuring, but controlling, but driving to some--to what?--end. Coherence nad closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable.
This seems to be a bit of conservative nostalgia for the "old-fashioned" novel where a man and woman fall in love and get married, but the fragmentary structure of the novel in which this quote appears makes it hard to quite believe she means what she says. Byatt's more experimental recent stories seem to make a case for aesthetic seriousness critics attach to the words "postmodern" and "metafiction," while maintaining a more-than-sentimental attachment to the elements of storytelling that postmodernism has, supposedly, rendered passé.
In parallel with the different approaches to the idea of history in their novels are differences in epistemology along modern/postmodern lines. Hariharan's take on Basava leans postmodernist: the final truth about this 12th century figure's relationship to religion will never be definitively known, but the lack of closure can actually be a lesson for the always polarized, ideologically volatile contemporary moment. In contrast, Byatt's English professors recoil against the dicta of the postmodernist era, as they are propelled by a desire to know the Whole Story about the scandalous Victorian romance they are investigating. There is no question in Byatt's novel as to whether there is a Whole Story to be objectively known and explained; there most certainly is. And presumably alongside the "deep human desire" for the Whole Story comes a hunger for a series of other ontologically incorrect terms: Totality, Essence, and Truth.
Traffic Jam Chaos
If you're stuck on, say, the Jersey Turnpike, you basically just sit there and listen to NPR show after NPR show. But in India everyone keeps fighting to get through. There are lots of motorcycles, and they cut through every available inch of space. Sometimes it doesn't work out, as in this Dilip D'Souza post:
Ouch.
And another section of the post I liked:
Leaving Dandi, we are in an enormous traffic jam, trying to make our way through the hordes of trucks, buses, vans, jeeps, SUVs, cars and people who are trying to make their way to Dandi for the Congress rally. The heat is fierce, and I don't envy the folks stuck in buses or the back of trucks; though in one, they have broken into song and dance and are having a rip-roaring time.
Just ahead of one place we are stalled interminably, a motorbike tries to move ahead on the edge of the road. As I watch, it slips off the edge and rolls down the slope into a thicket of thorny bushes. Its driver gets up screaming. His arm is broken, the bone visible, the blood already staining his sleeve. The amateur nurse with us takes two plastic water bottles and fashions a splint with them for him.
Ouch.
And another section of the post I liked:
Another truck driver decides he's had enough of this snarl. He tries to swing his truck around to go back. Somehow, he manages to get it perpendicular to the road, but then he is stuck. He can't complete the U-turn, he can't go back. The traffic is that snarled. He keeps pleading with the surrounding vehicles to let him get past, but as they can't move either, it's futile.
A motorbike tries to edge past him; at that very moment, he thinks he sees a gap and he tries to move forward to finish his U. In near-slow motion, I see the motorbike toppling sideways, the truck almost running over it, people yelling at the driver to stop. Luckily he does, in time, and nobody is hurt. But several men around are incensed and rush up to his door and start banging on it and on his windscreen, one with a long stick. (What's a man doing with a stick like that in traffic like this?). He has his hands up helplessly, his passengers jump out and run. I'm afraid the men around him are going to lynch him.
But they relent, perhaps because all of us know what a mess we are in and the kinds of things that sometimes happen in such messes. The driver eventually backs his truck down the slope, out of the traffic, into the bushes, and sits there waiting. For all I know, he's still there.
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:
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.
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:
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?
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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