It's been nearly two months since I reciprocated links. Happily, I can report they've been months during which this blog has grown a bit in readership.
I'm adding the following blogs (that link to me) to the blogroll. Many of these are newer blogs that could use visitors, so do click. Quite a number are by Indians (including people in India, NRIs, and PIOs); the Indian blogosphere seems to be growing pretty rapidly right now.
Desipundit
Indian Writing
Vikrum Sequeira
Scribbler's Delight
Vikram Arumilli
Jay/Badmash (not to be confused with the cartoonist)
Baiscope
Rajpal Sidhu
Bollywood Rumors
Naach Gaana
Suhail Kazi
Michael Higgins
Curious Gawker
Melange/Hurry to Hari
Splenderful Chronicles
Prashant Mullick
Umair Muhajir
We Who Love To Be Astonished
Jonathan Goodwin
Etcetera
Thailava
Thing, Place, Creature...
Arzan Wadia
Girish
Curry Man
Aswin
Reliable Signs
Vijayblog
Because, it's like that only
Chappan
Vishnulokam
Marginal Notations
Some blogs I'm adding don't link to me, at least, I don't think so. But they are people I discovered (or rediscovered) over the past month through Sepia Mutiny:
Mais Non
Punjabi Boy
Quizman
Gene Expression
ChaiTeaLatte
Saheli
Nina Paley
Tilotamma
Dhaavak
Saurav
Kush Tandon
Brimful
Maitri
If I missed you, please don't be embarrassed to remind me in the comments.
Update
A couple of wonderful blogs I can't believe I skipped:
Shashwati
Jabberwock
And some blogs that are new to me that I missed:
Connaissances
Sonia Faleiro
Madhu Nair
The Poetry Blog
Sri Ganesha's Tea and Book Stall
Postcolonial/Global literature and film, Modernism, African American literature, and the Digital Humanities.
Indian English -- Does It Exist? What Do We Call It?
I'm preparing to teach a seminar on "Global English," and as such I've been reading a book called The Story of English, by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran (my version came without pictures, though). The book is incredibly useful as a summary history of the formation and dissemination of the English language. It starts with English's early variants -- Old and Middle English -- and continues through the postcolonial era, with chapters on the dialects (and accents) of English found in Canada, the U.S., Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and of course the Indian subcontinent. The stuff on English in early periods is particularly helpful to me, as I've never really understood things like the 'great vowel shift' (now I do).
As I was reading the India chapter, I began to wonder: is 'Indian English' really a distinct linguistic phenomenon -- a patois or a dialect? McCrum et al. cite the following as an example of Indianized English in an old article (1986) from the Telegraph:
And this is how they interpret it:
Their main claim here -- that Indians are "indigenizing" English -- seems reasonable at first. But in the end, both the word "indigenizing" and the idea that Indian English is a "reinterpretation" of the English language seem too vague to be really supportable. It suggests an ongoing process of systemic, and growing difference from British or American English.
There are many, many examples of Hindustani words entering into everyday English in India (such as "dacoit" in the above passage; there could be dozens of examples). But that's just local vocabulary; it doesn't prove much. Secondly, there are some grammatical tics that Hindi-speakers tend to bring into their English, most of which will be all-too-familiar to readers: overuse of the present participle ("I am doing"), overuse of "only" ("like this only"), and underuse of the definite article (the missing "the").
And there are many more examples listed here and at Wikipedia. (Some are a little questionable, if you ask me.)
But all in all, the structural differences seem pretty small. More importantly, they aren't generally reproduced (and they aren't taught). When Indians become aware of grammatical tics, they tend to try and correct them. The goal is some idea of "standard" English, not "indigenized" English.
The idea that Indian English is evolving into an identifiable dialect has been popular, partly along the lines of "one should respect different cultures": there is this postcolonial awareness that standard (i.e., BBC) English need not apply to everyone. In principle I agree (no one standard should or could be applied), but I find the evidence that thoroughgoing indigenization has actually occurred to be suspect.
To be clear: I'm not saying that people in India who speak less standarized English should become more "correct." Rather, I've observed that people learning English in India eventually do away with Hindi elements. The distinguishing features of the "dialect" disappear, and the only remaining defining feature of Indian English is the vocabulary, which is fascinating, but relatively trivial.
As I was reading the India chapter, I began to wonder: is 'Indian English' really a distinct linguistic phenomenon -- a patois or a dialect? McCrum et al. cite the following as an example of Indianized English in an old article (1986) from the Telegraph:
Frequent dacoities and looting of fish from bheris in the Sonarpur area has created a serious law and order problem. Tension prevails in the entire area which has 60 bheris. Dacoits armed with pipe-guns, swords and sticks strike before the villagers can retaliate. They surround the bheris and loot the fish. For the villagers, the attacks are 'straight out of Hindi movies'.
And this is how they interpret it:
This fragment of Indian journalistm is an unspectacular but typical example of the everyday uses of English in a society that is continuously indigenizing a foreign language. It is the reinterpretation of the English language by the Indian people -- a process echoed in Ireland -- that has fascinated visitors from the very beginnings of the British involvement in India.
Their main claim here -- that Indians are "indigenizing" English -- seems reasonable at first. But in the end, both the word "indigenizing" and the idea that Indian English is a "reinterpretation" of the English language seem too vague to be really supportable. It suggests an ongoing process of systemic, and growing difference from British or American English.
There are many, many examples of Hindustani words entering into everyday English in India (such as "dacoit" in the above passage; there could be dozens of examples). But that's just local vocabulary; it doesn't prove much. Secondly, there are some grammatical tics that Hindi-speakers tend to bring into their English, most of which will be all-too-familiar to readers: overuse of the present participle ("I am doing"), overuse of "only" ("like this only"), and underuse of the definite article (the missing "the").
And there are many more examples listed here and at Wikipedia. (Some are a little questionable, if you ask me.)
But all in all, the structural differences seem pretty small. More importantly, they aren't generally reproduced (and they aren't taught). When Indians become aware of grammatical tics, they tend to try and correct them. The goal is some idea of "standard" English, not "indigenized" English.
The idea that Indian English is evolving into an identifiable dialect has been popular, partly along the lines of "one should respect different cultures": there is this postcolonial awareness that standard (i.e., BBC) English need not apply to everyone. In principle I agree (no one standard should or could be applied), but I find the evidence that thoroughgoing indigenization has actually occurred to be suspect.
To be clear: I'm not saying that people in India who speak less standarized English should become more "correct." Rather, I've observed that people learning English in India eventually do away with Hindi elements. The distinguishing features of the "dialect" disappear, and the only remaining defining feature of Indian English is the vocabulary, which is fascinating, but relatively trivial.
Back to normality; Midival Punditz interview
Ack, classes start next week at Lehigh, and there are 20 things I meant to do this summer that aren't done.
Meanwhile, I just did my last Sepia Mutiny post. Phew. Just trying to keep up the pace there totally took over my normal blogging routine.
So for any readers who were slightly miffed that basically everything I've posted here in the past month has been a cross-post, miff no more. I also have some non-South Asia related posts I want to do, though they've been on the backburner since I went 'Sepia'.
Oh, and here's a little link for you: the Midival Punditz, a Delhi-based Asian underground band, were on NPR last week. Here is the interview. Their CD, Midival Times, is readily available in World Music sections in Borders, and on Amazon as well as Itunes. I was listening to it a lot over the weekend, and definitely recommend it.
Meanwhile, I just did my last Sepia Mutiny post. Phew. Just trying to keep up the pace there totally took over my normal blogging routine.
So for any readers who were slightly miffed that basically everything I've posted here in the past month has been a cross-post, miff no more. I also have some non-South Asia related posts I want to do, though they've been on the backburner since I went 'Sepia'.
Oh, and here's a little link for you: the Midival Punditz, a Delhi-based Asian underground band, were on NPR last week. Here is the interview. Their CD, Midival Times, is readily available in World Music sections in Borders, and on Amazon as well as Itunes. I was listening to it a lot over the weekend, and definitely recommend it.
Reading Azar Nafisi as a Literary Critic
In addition to being a memoir and an intense account of life for a feminist, western-educated academic in post-revolutionary Iran, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is a work of what might be called Aristotelian literary criticism. It has four chapters and four primary subjects: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. She has challenging close readings of each, including an especially inspired read of The Great Gatsby, about which there is more below. I'm not surprised that the publishers of Reading Lolita have played down the lit-crit content in this memoir, as it is considerably less marketable than the publishing phenom that is Oppressed Muslim Women. But ignore the cover blurb from Bernard Lewis, and try and forget that this would be an Oprah Book Club book (if Oprah still had a Book Club... damn you/bless you, Jonathan Franzen!); Nafisi has compelling ideas about the authors she loves, and works them out at length in this memoir.
As a reader, Nafisi is not just avowedly apolitical, she is militantly so. There is a theory of literature scattered through these pages, a theory that I haven't yet been able to pin down in a single phrase or passage, but it's one that is strongly oriented to the freedom of the imagination. A good starting point might be the following paraphrase of something Nafisi told her class while teaching The Great Gatsby at the University of Tehran in the early 1980s:
This metaphor, of reading as breathing is not entirely innocent, as Nafisi well knows. She herself did graduate work in the English department at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, and was a committed leftist early in her career. (Her Ph.D. dissertation, she tells us, was on the American communist Mike Gold, author of Jews Without Money and My Aunt Lena.) In Nafisi's early years as a professor of literature, everything was political. And the early years of the Islamic Revolution made the politicization of literature permanent (albeit in right-wing Islamist terms). After initially resisting the regime, Nafisi settled into a life that entailed compromising with it on matters such as the veil, as well as her own idealism. As the fascistic, repressive hold of the regime deepened, Nafisi started to change her thinking. She came to realize that the line between even divergent orthodoxies is negligible, so long as they aim to quell dissent, deviance, or any kind individuated intelligence whatsoever. Reading Lolita in Tehran, written after Nafisi left the country in 1997, argues this latter point quite forcefully. For Nafisi, any rigidly orthodox mode of reading fails to account for the complexity of the mind, or of the story itself.
Of course, it isn't quite accurate to say that reading Reading Lolita in Tehran is the same as reading a book by, say, Denis Donoghue. Nafisi sets up the Gatsby reading with her own personal experiences leading up to her first attempts at teaching it at the University of Tehran in 1981. The ideologically hyper-charged climate is important, but so is the fact that Nafisi started out teaching immediately after the Islamic Revolution, when left-leaning intellectuals were still somewhat confident that their views would be accepted by the new Regime. They still dominated the universities at the time, and the rich, modernist, almost Parisian arts culture of pre-revolutionary Tehran seemed too important to simply be erased (little did they know).
The university as a whole was not yet Islamized when she first taught this book, but many of her students were. Indeed, as she tried to teach Gatsby in an Intro to the Novel type class, Nafisi found that some of her students simply could not stop objecting to the novel's "immorality," specifically its seeming "advocacy" of "adultery." She resolved the problem through rather drastic means: she allowed her students to put The Great Gatsby on trial. She let the most strident critic of the novel's immorality speak for the prosecution, and one of her female students spoke in the novel's defense. Nafisi herself 'was' the novel in the mock trial (the defendent). The students' statements both contra- and pro-Gatsby make for some of the most memorable passages in the book.
(As I was reading, I was thinking about whether or how such a teaching strategy might work in my own classroom. It seems doubtful, because my students, as much as I like and respect them, simply don't feel as passionately about virtually anything as Nafisi's students did.)
Back to Gatsby. It's important to keep in mind that Nafisi mentions that Fitzgerald was in some sense counter-programming to the leftists on her syllabus:
It was only later that her experience with Gatsby became the defining one for Nafisi. This idea of the betrayal of ideals is one that appears again and again in the Gatsby section of Nafisi's memoir, and it points at what might be the philosophical basis of her approach to literature -- the failure of Platonism.
What Nafisi sees in Gatsby is not a celebration of ideal or idealization, but its inevitable collapse. (In this sense, her reading of the novel is quite different from the one John Holbo outlined on the Valve back in April.) I think it's a point worth mulling over. It's certainly an arguable reading (doesn't Fitzgerald's novel celebrate illusions, not demystify them?). But here is Nafisi, again paraphrasing one of her lectures on the novel:
Even if one might disagree with her take on this and other novels, what's impressive is Nafisi's ability to make this quintessentially American novel a matter of quintessentially Iranian/progressive ethics. She finds, remarkably, a natural channel from Gatsby back to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The index is the danger of ideals, of which Nick Carraway is as guilty as the Islamic Revolution. When Nafisi refers to the Ayatollah Khomeini and the other leaders of the Revolution in Iran as "Philosopher- Kings," as she does several times, she knows exactly what she's doing.
This book provokes serious thinking seriously about the value of the literary. Part of its power comes directly from the text of the memoir, from Nafisi's own pointed arguments about why one reads, and why she herself reads and teaches literature. But it also comes from the strangeness of the situation: here are these women, their lives destroyed by an unthinkably repressive regime, and their most subversive act is... to get together once a week to read photocopied (illegal) copies of Lolita? (Hardly, on the surface, a feminist or progressive text in the received/ conventional readings; Nafisi reads it against the grain.) All in all, it's rather improbable and anti-intuitive that Nafisi became a less political reader, rather than a more political one. But she makes a good case for her response: no matter what they banned or who they imprisoned/tortured/executed, literature provided the means to keep one's imagination free and open. Humbert Humbert, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Elizabeth Benneet were the characters whose stories Nafisi knew and loved best, they were the characters that kept her and her students' minds alive until the they could get out.
As a reader, Nafisi is not just avowedly apolitical, she is militantly so. There is a theory of literature scattered through these pages, a theory that I haven't yet been able to pin down in a single phrase or passage, but it's one that is strongly oriented to the freedom of the imagination. A good starting point might be the following paraphrase of something Nafisi told her class while teaching The Great Gatsby at the University of Tehran in the early 1980s:
A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. it is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empthaize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.
This metaphor, of reading as breathing is not entirely innocent, as Nafisi well knows. She herself did graduate work in the English department at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, and was a committed leftist early in her career. (Her Ph.D. dissertation, she tells us, was on the American communist Mike Gold, author of Jews Without Money and My Aunt Lena.) In Nafisi's early years as a professor of literature, everything was political. And the early years of the Islamic Revolution made the politicization of literature permanent (albeit in right-wing Islamist terms). After initially resisting the regime, Nafisi settled into a life that entailed compromising with it on matters such as the veil, as well as her own idealism. As the fascistic, repressive hold of the regime deepened, Nafisi started to change her thinking. She came to realize that the line between even divergent orthodoxies is negligible, so long as they aim to quell dissent, deviance, or any kind individuated intelligence whatsoever. Reading Lolita in Tehran, written after Nafisi left the country in 1997, argues this latter point quite forcefully. For Nafisi, any rigidly orthodox mode of reading fails to account for the complexity of the mind, or of the story itself.
Of course, it isn't quite accurate to say that reading Reading Lolita in Tehran is the same as reading a book by, say, Denis Donoghue. Nafisi sets up the Gatsby reading with her own personal experiences leading up to her first attempts at teaching it at the University of Tehran in 1981. The ideologically hyper-charged climate is important, but so is the fact that Nafisi started out teaching immediately after the Islamic Revolution, when left-leaning intellectuals were still somewhat confident that their views would be accepted by the new Regime. They still dominated the universities at the time, and the rich, modernist, almost Parisian arts culture of pre-revolutionary Tehran seemed too important to simply be erased (little did they know).
The university as a whole was not yet Islamized when she first taught this book, but many of her students were. Indeed, as she tried to teach Gatsby in an Intro to the Novel type class, Nafisi found that some of her students simply could not stop objecting to the novel's "immorality," specifically its seeming "advocacy" of "adultery." She resolved the problem through rather drastic means: she allowed her students to put The Great Gatsby on trial. She let the most strident critic of the novel's immorality speak for the prosecution, and one of her female students spoke in the novel's defense. Nafisi herself 'was' the novel in the mock trial (the defendent). The students' statements both contra- and pro-Gatsby make for some of the most memorable passages in the book.
(As I was reading, I was thinking about whether or how such a teaching strategy might work in my own classroom. It seems doubtful, because my students, as much as I like and respect them, simply don't feel as passionately about virtually anything as Nafisi's students did.)
Back to Gatsby. It's important to keep in mind that Nafisi mentions that Fitzgerald was in some sense counter-programming to the leftists on her syllabus:
Before I started teaching The Great Gatsby, we had discussed in class some short stories by Maxim Gorky and Mike Gold. Gorky was very popular at the time--many of his stories and the novel The Mother had been translated into Persian, and he was read widely by the revolutionaries, both old and young. This made Gatsby seem oddly irrelevant, a strange choice to teach at a university where almost all the students were burning with revolutionary zeal. Now, in retrospect, I see that Gatsby was the right choice. Only later did I come to realize how the values shaping that novel were the exact opposite of those of the revolution. Ironically, as time went by, it was the values inherent in Gatsby that would triumph, but at the time we had not yet realized just how far we had betrayed our dreams.
It was only later that her experience with Gatsby became the defining one for Nafisi. This idea of the betrayal of ideals is one that appears again and again in the Gatsby section of Nafisi's memoir, and it points at what might be the philosophical basis of her approach to literature -- the failure of Platonism.
What Nafisi sees in Gatsby is not a celebration of ideal or idealization, but its inevitable collapse. (In this sense, her reading of the novel is quite different from the one John Holbo outlined on the Valve back in April.) I think it's a point worth mulling over. It's certainly an arguable reading (doesn't Fitzgerald's novel celebrate illusions, not demystify them?). But here is Nafisi, again paraphrasing one of her lectures on the novel:
I would like to begin with a quote from Fitzgerald that is central to our understanding, not just of Gatsby but of Fitzgerald's whole body of work, I began. We have been talking about what Gatsby is all about and we've mentioned some themes, but there is an overall undercurrent to the novel which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion. Nick disapproves of all the people with whom Gatsby is in one way or another involved, but he does not pass the same judgment on Gatsby. Why? Because Gatsby possesses what Fitzgerald, in his story 'Absolution,' calls the 'honesty of imagination.'
Even if one might disagree with her take on this and other novels, what's impressive is Nafisi's ability to make this quintessentially American novel a matter of quintessentially Iranian/progressive ethics. She finds, remarkably, a natural channel from Gatsby back to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The index is the danger of ideals, of which Nick Carraway is as guilty as the Islamic Revolution. When Nafisi refers to the Ayatollah Khomeini and the other leaders of the Revolution in Iran as "Philosopher- Kings," as she does several times, she knows exactly what she's doing.
This book provokes serious thinking seriously about the value of the literary. Part of its power comes directly from the text of the memoir, from Nafisi's own pointed arguments about why one reads, and why she herself reads and teaches literature. But it also comes from the strangeness of the situation: here are these women, their lives destroyed by an unthinkably repressive regime, and their most subversive act is... to get together once a week to read photocopied (illegal) copies of Lolita? (Hardly, on the surface, a feminist or progressive text in the received/ conventional readings; Nafisi reads it against the grain.) All in all, it's rather improbable and anti-intuitive that Nafisi became a less political reader, rather than a more political one. But she makes a good case for her response: no matter what they banned or who they imprisoned/tortured/executed, literature provided the means to keep one's imagination free and open. Humbert Humbert, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Elizabeth Benneet were the characters whose stories Nafisi knew and loved best, they were the characters that kept her and her students' minds alive until the they could get out.
Versions of the Ramayana
[For people who don't know The Ramayana at all, here is a short version of the story you can look at to gain some familiarity.]
I've been following the discussion of an episode of The Ramayana at Locana. The discussion concerns an event near the end of the saga, after Sita has already undergone the trial by fire (Agni Pariksha), proving her fidelity to Rama during the time she was abducted by Ravana. In some versions of The Ramayana, the trial by fire is essentially the end of the story for Sita. A couple of more things happen, but then Rama rules for 10,000 years.
But in the Malayalam version Anand's father grew up with (the post is actually the text of an article by Anand's father, N.V.P. Unithiri), the Agni Pariksha isn't enough to clear Sita's honor, and the persistent rumors force Rama to abandon Sita once again. Here is the passage quoted:
This episode is known as Sita Parityaga. I'll be referring to it in this post simply as the abandonment of Sita.
A helpful chart of the different written Ramayanas is here. Notably, the first vernacular version of the story was in Tamil. And in at least one version of the story (Tulsi Das's 16th century version in Awadhi/'Old Hindi'), there is no banishment at all for Sita. And some versions listed have Sita banished, but then (and this seems dignified) she refuses to return.
The classic Griffith English translation (episode here; Table of Contents here) also doesn't mention anything about Sita's banishment. The Amar Chitra Katha version is the same -- after Sita's Agni Pariksha, it's Ram and Sita, happily ever after.
A detailed but still skimmable English version of a version of The Ramayana that does include Sita's abandonment can be found at this site at Syracuse (direct link here). In this version, as in the Malayalam version quoted above, Rama instructs Lakshmana to abandon Sita in the forest (interestingly, Rama doesn't tell her himself what he's doing). Sita passes out, and is rescued by Valmiki, who takes her to his Ashram. There she gives birth to Rama's twin sons, Lava and Kusa. As the children grow up, Valmiki composes The Ramayana to tell the sons the story of their father's greatness. A number of years later, the sons recite the story to Rama, who recognizes it and reclaims them. Sita also returns finally, and is proven innocent through yet another divine test. This time, she asks the earth to swallow her up to prove her fidelity, and the earth opens and she disappears. And Rama's 10,000 year rule is without her. (A little sad, is it not?)
In the comments of Anand's post, several of the commentors question Rama's definition of 'honor' in the abandonment of Sita. Dilip D'Souza, for instance, says that if people are casting aspersions on Rama's wife's fidelity, it's his job to stand by her. (Especially since, in this case, she has already been vindicated via a trial by fire. In the passage quoted above, it seems pretty clear that Rama knows Sita was faithful, but is going ahead with the banishment as a matter of public "honor")
The nice thing about an oral tradition is, you can choose for yourself the version you prefer in your own retellings. (In some oral versions of The Ramayana, for instance, it is Sita who kills Ravana with Rama's bow in the great final battle in Lanka, not Rama.) Speaking for myself alone, if I were to tell this story to a child, I would probably take out both episodes -- the trial by fire and the final abandonment of Sita -- and find some other way to introduce the role of Valmiki and the twins (that part I like; interesting self-reflexivity). I don't see why Rama can't simply trust Sita when she says she rejected Ravana's advances.
We have to acknowledge the many trials of Sita in the early written versions of The Ramayana, as a matter of academic accuracy and respect for the history. And The Ramayana is, like The Odyssey, a great and important epic saga that is an important part of the heritage of world literature. (And I hope nothing in this post comes across as disrespectful of either the story or the broader Hindu tradition in which it plays an important part.)
But in terms of using The Ramayana to transmit values to young people today, specifically the value of trust, I might take a different route. Is that political correctness, or is it simply being responsible?
Another question for readers: what other variants of the story have you heard?
I've been following the discussion of an episode of The Ramayana at Locana. The discussion concerns an event near the end of the saga, after Sita has already undergone the trial by fire (Agni Pariksha), proving her fidelity to Rama during the time she was abducted by Ravana. In some versions of The Ramayana, the trial by fire is essentially the end of the story for Sita. A couple of more things happen, but then Rama rules for 10,000 years.
But in the Malayalam version Anand's father grew up with (the post is actually the text of an article by Anand's father, N.V.P. Unithiri), the Agni Pariksha isn't enough to clear Sita's honor, and the persistent rumors force Rama to abandon Sita once again. Here is the passage quoted:
"What the society thinks is important. The Gods too look down upon ill fame, and fame brings respect everywhere. Does not every noble man yearn for it? I fear dishonour, oh, learned men, I'll even renounce your company and my own life, if needed, for the sake of honour. Sita has to be deserted. Understand my state of mind, I wasn't sadder on anyday before. Lakshmana, tomorrow you take Sita in Sumantra's chariot and leave her at our border. Abandon her near the holy Ashram of Sage Valmiki on the banks of the Tamasa river, and get back here soon."
This episode is known as Sita Parityaga. I'll be referring to it in this post simply as the abandonment of Sita.
A helpful chart of the different written Ramayanas is here. Notably, the first vernacular version of the story was in Tamil. And in at least one version of the story (Tulsi Das's 16th century version in Awadhi/'Old Hindi'), there is no banishment at all for Sita. And some versions listed have Sita banished, but then (and this seems dignified) she refuses to return.
The classic Griffith English translation (episode here; Table of Contents here) also doesn't mention anything about Sita's banishment. The Amar Chitra Katha version is the same -- after Sita's Agni Pariksha, it's Ram and Sita, happily ever after.
A detailed but still skimmable English version of a version of The Ramayana that does include Sita's abandonment can be found at this site at Syracuse (direct link here). In this version, as in the Malayalam version quoted above, Rama instructs Lakshmana to abandon Sita in the forest (interestingly, Rama doesn't tell her himself what he's doing). Sita passes out, and is rescued by Valmiki, who takes her to his Ashram. There she gives birth to Rama's twin sons, Lava and Kusa. As the children grow up, Valmiki composes The Ramayana to tell the sons the story of their father's greatness. A number of years later, the sons recite the story to Rama, who recognizes it and reclaims them. Sita also returns finally, and is proven innocent through yet another divine test. This time, she asks the earth to swallow her up to prove her fidelity, and the earth opens and she disappears. And Rama's 10,000 year rule is without her. (A little sad, is it not?)
In the comments of Anand's post, several of the commentors question Rama's definition of 'honor' in the abandonment of Sita. Dilip D'Souza, for instance, says that if people are casting aspersions on Rama's wife's fidelity, it's his job to stand by her. (Especially since, in this case, she has already been vindicated via a trial by fire. In the passage quoted above, it seems pretty clear that Rama knows Sita was faithful, but is going ahead with the banishment as a matter of public "honor")
The nice thing about an oral tradition is, you can choose for yourself the version you prefer in your own retellings. (In some oral versions of The Ramayana, for instance, it is Sita who kills Ravana with Rama's bow in the great final battle in Lanka, not Rama.) Speaking for myself alone, if I were to tell this story to a child, I would probably take out both episodes -- the trial by fire and the final abandonment of Sita -- and find some other way to introduce the role of Valmiki and the twins (that part I like; interesting self-reflexivity). I don't see why Rama can't simply trust Sita when she says she rejected Ravana's advances.
We have to acknowledge the many trials of Sita in the early written versions of The Ramayana, as a matter of academic accuracy and respect for the history. And The Ramayana is, like The Odyssey, a great and important epic saga that is an important part of the heritage of world literature. (And I hope nothing in this post comes across as disrespectful of either the story or the broader Hindu tradition in which it plays an important part.)
But in terms of using The Ramayana to transmit values to young people today, specifically the value of trust, I might take a different route. Is that political correctness, or is it simply being responsible?
Another question for readers: what other variants of the story have you heard?
Satellite Radio Super-Globality
A few months ago, my wife started a job that has a monster commute across the NYC metro area. She spends a lot of time in the car, so as an anniversary present I got her XM radio to make the driving time a little more bearable. She seems to like it.
A few days after installing it, I was bragging about the device a little with my in-laws in Bombay. In the midst of my laborious explanation of how it works, they stopped me and said 'hey, what's the big deal? We already have one of those at home.' Dude, no way? Way. In some cases, the Indian market for consumer goods is actually a bit ahead of the western one. Satellite radio turns out to be one of them (the other space where that is true is in mobile phones).
Worldspace Satellite Radio has been around for seven years, and has had India in its service range for five of them. But it's only this year that it has made a major push to gain subscribers in the Indian market (coinciding with a stock IPO). According to a recent Rediff report, Worldspace currently has about 40,000 customers in India, and 63,000 worldwide (compare to 4 million XM Radio subscribers and 1.1 million Sirius subscribers in the U.S.). Worldspace in fact predates American satellite radio (they originally owned XM Radio), though it seems they've now been eclipsed by it in terms of subscriber base. The big news this summer is that XM Radio has invested $25 million back into its parent company.
Worldspace broadcasts from two geostationary satellites, and covers an area that includes 4 billion people, including the majority of Asia (East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), the Middle East, Africa, and Southern and Western Europe. (See the full coverage map here)
The questionable business strategy and management of this particular company probably isn't that important. More interesting is the potential of the medium as a whole: 4 billion people is a lot of potential listeners, especially considering they are being reached with just two satellites. If other companies enter the space, and put up their own satellites, the industry could explode across Asia. Among other things, it could potentially be an impressive engine for globalization: because satellite broadcasts cover huge swaths of earth on limited bandwidth, they can't be specialized very much by region. Thus, all of South Asia gets the same broadcast. Interesting possibilities...
Satellite bandwidth is very limited, so the number of channels offered generally isn't that impressive. People in major Indian metros are not likely to be blown away by Worldspace's Indian selections (there are about 12 South Asia oriented channels), though they might appreciate the international news and music offerings. People in smaller Indian towns -- where the regular FM offerings are still a little meager -- will probably be much more interested in subcscribing. (Too bad Worldspace's recent marketing push is directed exclusively at the big metro markets...)
A major limitation to Worldspace satellite radio currently is the receiver, which is large and bulky, and not meant to be portable. Indians who buy it are probably people with big stereo systems at home. A portable unit is being developed along the lines of the Delphi MyFi (hopefully cheaper in its Indian incarnation), but until it's released, the biggest potential part of the Indian market isn't being served. (Update: In order for portability to be feasible, the company needs to build a network of terrestrial repeaters, which it has not yet done. So it may take a while...)
More on how Satellite Radio works here. Also see the Wikipedia entry on Satellite Radio.
A few days after installing it, I was bragging about the device a little with my in-laws in Bombay. In the midst of my laborious explanation of how it works, they stopped me and said 'hey, what's the big deal? We already have one of those at home.' Dude, no way? Way. In some cases, the Indian market for consumer goods is actually a bit ahead of the western one. Satellite radio turns out to be one of them (the other space where that is true is in mobile phones).
Worldspace Satellite Radio has been around for seven years, and has had India in its service range for five of them. But it's only this year that it has made a major push to gain subscribers in the Indian market (coinciding with a stock IPO). According to a recent Rediff report, Worldspace currently has about 40,000 customers in India, and 63,000 worldwide (compare to 4 million XM Radio subscribers and 1.1 million Sirius subscribers in the U.S.). Worldspace in fact predates American satellite radio (they originally owned XM Radio), though it seems they've now been eclipsed by it in terms of subscriber base. The big news this summer is that XM Radio has invested $25 million back into its parent company.
Worldspace broadcasts from two geostationary satellites, and covers an area that includes 4 billion people, including the majority of Asia (East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), the Middle East, Africa, and Southern and Western Europe. (See the full coverage map here)
The questionable business strategy and management of this particular company probably isn't that important. More interesting is the potential of the medium as a whole: 4 billion people is a lot of potential listeners, especially considering they are being reached with just two satellites. If other companies enter the space, and put up their own satellites, the industry could explode across Asia. Among other things, it could potentially be an impressive engine for globalization: because satellite broadcasts cover huge swaths of earth on limited bandwidth, they can't be specialized very much by region. Thus, all of South Asia gets the same broadcast. Interesting possibilities...
Satellite bandwidth is very limited, so the number of channels offered generally isn't that impressive. People in major Indian metros are not likely to be blown away by Worldspace's Indian selections (there are about 12 South Asia oriented channels), though they might appreciate the international news and music offerings. People in smaller Indian towns -- where the regular FM offerings are still a little meager -- will probably be much more interested in subcscribing. (Too bad Worldspace's recent marketing push is directed exclusively at the big metro markets...)
A major limitation to Worldspace satellite radio currently is the receiver, which is large and bulky, and not meant to be portable. Indians who buy it are probably people with big stereo systems at home. A portable unit is being developed along the lines of the Delphi MyFi (hopefully cheaper in its Indian incarnation), but until it's released, the biggest potential part of the Indian market isn't being served. (Update: In order for portability to be feasible, the company needs to build a network of terrestrial repeaters, which it has not yet done. So it may take a while...)
More on how Satellite Radio works here. Also see the Wikipedia entry on Satellite Radio.
Language issues in Mangal Pandey: The Rising
The English actors speak quite a bit of Hindi in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and they do it more fluidly and correctly than I've seen in any other Hindi film. There's more here than in Lagaan, certainly, and more also than in the recent flop film Kisna (which was a breakthrough for Bollywood in some ways despite failing as a film; my review here). So I give props to Toby Stephens especially for putting in the extra hours to try and get it right. Props also to the director Ketan Mehta for not simply copping out of the language issue with the usual solution, namely, reducing white actors' roles to an absolute minimum. (Most of the time, white actors in Hindi period films speak only the kind of functional, imperative voice Hindi a Sahib might use with a servant: "darvaaza khul!".)
The issue of Toby Stephens' use of Hindi relates to my earlier SM post on language vs. race in Hindi films. If audiences accept the Toby Stephens character in this movie, it might challenge my claim that badly accented or phonetically incorrect Hindi is unacceptable to mainstream audiences. He's on screen a lot, and many of his lines go well beyond the usual "Baar aa jao!" type of fare. Stephens has to convey quieter emotions -- tenderness, ambivalence, regret -- a tall order even in one's first language. I personally thought Stephens' Hindi was ok: phonetically correct and generally intelligible, though not all of the time. More importantly, he's not convincing in Hindi some of the time. (And as an ABCD, I'm possibly being overly gentle on this score.)
So I have my doubts about whether The Rising really pulls it off; many of the people in the audience where I saw the film (in New Jersey) were tittering when Toby Stephens first started speaking. They eventually stopped, but I'm not at all convinced it was the silence of satisfaction.
The film might fail for other reasons too. I found it bombastic and over-the-top in the usual way of patriotic Hindi films. Some of the dialogue was truly ridiculous, in the vein of: "After a hundred years of the British Raj, the minds of us Indians have grown rusty. But this grease [i.e., from the cartridges of the Enfield rifles] has made them move again..." At times, it seemed like it was a movie about the greased cartridges, not so much the wrongs of imperialism or emergent Indian nationalism. On a more narrative level, The Risinghad too much testosterone with nowhere to go: this a patriotic "war" movie without much war in it.
So I don't quite see where the New York Times is coming from, with their positive review. And I have my doubts about whether Indian audiences will find this story interesting after, or separate from, August 15. We'll see.
The issue of Toby Stephens' use of Hindi relates to my earlier SM post on language vs. race in Hindi films. If audiences accept the Toby Stephens character in this movie, it might challenge my claim that badly accented or phonetically incorrect Hindi is unacceptable to mainstream audiences. He's on screen a lot, and many of his lines go well beyond the usual "Baar aa jao!" type of fare. Stephens has to convey quieter emotions -- tenderness, ambivalence, regret -- a tall order even in one's first language. I personally thought Stephens' Hindi was ok: phonetically correct and generally intelligible, though not all of the time. More importantly, he's not convincing in Hindi some of the time. (And as an ABCD, I'm possibly being overly gentle on this score.)
So I have my doubts about whether The Rising really pulls it off; many of the people in the audience where I saw the film (in New Jersey) were tittering when Toby Stephens first started speaking. They eventually stopped, but I'm not at all convinced it was the silence of satisfaction.
The film might fail for other reasons too. I found it bombastic and over-the-top in the usual way of patriotic Hindi films. Some of the dialogue was truly ridiculous, in the vein of: "After a hundred years of the British Raj, the minds of us Indians have grown rusty. But this grease [i.e., from the cartridges of the Enfield rifles] has made them move again..." At times, it seemed like it was a movie about the greased cartridges, not so much the wrongs of imperialism or emergent Indian nationalism. On a more narrative level, The Risinghad too much testosterone with nowhere to go: this a patriotic "war" movie without much war in it.
So I don't quite see where the New York Times is coming from, with their positive review. And I have my doubts about whether Indian audiences will find this story interesting after, or separate from, August 15. We'll see.
Toy Story Theory: Texts and Readers, Toys and Children
What if Toys were Texts? The children who play with their toys are readers: they absorb the details of character – Buzz Lightyear, Wheezy the Penguin, etc. -- and they do further imaginative work, animating the inanimate. The toys on the shelf can be brought together, and the fictional worlds they inhabit (Woody's Roundup Gang; Buzz Lightyear's epic battle with Zurg) can be cross-referenced and interwoven.
In the Toy Story Theory of the Text, the toys/texts have lives of their own, which turn on when we readers are not around to play with them. They are intelligent, but in Toy Story Theory they are not fully autonomous -- that would be too easy. Their one abiding desire is to be read ("played with"), with affection.
[Update/ A Thesis of a Kind: Looking at the interaction between toys and children in this way, we see a version of the interaction of texts and readers, with some of the usual dynamics turned on their head. What I do below is not 'reader-response' criticism but, in some sense text-response criticism. Though of course, it comes back to the adult reader in the end, as it always must.]
The fictional world in TS2 exists in parallel with the 'real', human world, and has to continually interact with it. There are, in particular, two kinds of humans to contend with, Andy, the imaginative child who loves his toys/stories, and Al, the evil Toy Collector, whose only goal is profit. After Woody is abducted, he experiences his moment of Peripeteia -- not as dramatic perhaps as the famous sequence in Toy Story (i.e., where Buzz Lightyear realized he was only a toy) -- but still a powerful moment: Woody actually has a family he never knew about:
When a blockbuster story comes face to face with its less successful peers, the initial response is confusion. Why aren't you as good a story as me? Social constructionists point out that stories with clear heroic lines are easier to digest than those involving figures like “Prospector Pete,” the sputtering, morally ambiguous protagonist of a depressing work of historical fiction. Deconstructionists take it a step further, pointing out that Prospector Pete, the old man in the box, is the essential truth of every text/toy: no toy is ever really opened. Feminists point out that Emily loves Jessie as much as Andy loves Woody. (And Chloe loves Olivia – note the intriguing homoeroticism of the child/toy bond!)
The endearing thing about the Toy Story universe is that it is aware of the constructedness of toy popularity, and it doesn't attempt to pretend that it can be undone by creating a world where there are no cool toys and Every Toy is Of The Same Value. What it does instead, by forcing the toys to band together in a small “nutty cluster” (Eve Sedgwick's phrase; she was talking about Dickens, but it applies here too), is suggest the power of a group of idiosyncratic personalities working together. It is only by working together, for instance, that the toys can drive a human-sized car (on which, more below).
“Japan” also plays an interesting role in all of this. The name stands in for pure commercialism, which might seem odd, considering this is a movie about commodifiable toys, which has as one of its aims the re-commodification of “Buzz Lightyear” and “Woody” toys in our real (human-humdrum) world. For the children whose parents have already shelled out $20 for the TS2 DVD, there will be another $30-40 to spend on further real editions of the simulacra they have already consumed.
But Japan is also an exotic, bizarro world where the toys that are forgotten 'here' – relegated to life under beds, on forgotten shelves, are enshrined as attractions in museums and worshipped like Gods. In a sense, “Japan” is the biggest and best stage these toys can possibly have. To go there, as Prospector Pete points out (in the movie – it's not in the synopsis above), means eternal life of the spotless kind, even if being sent there in boxes results in a kind of irreversible separation from the space of TS2.
Prospector Pete is a story that is so proud of itself, it doesn't even want to be read. It simply wants to be seen, known about, admired, and “collected.”
This is my favorite part of the movie (actually both Toy Story movies) – where the living toys have to navigate the human world. They are too small, so they have to find creative ways to make the sensors on automatic doors notice their presence. (Living stories inhabit our world like ghosts, stymied by automatic doors that demand material, rather than imaginary, weight.)
And crossing a wide, busy street becomes a task of Scylla-and-Charybdean difficulty. In TS2, the toys hide under traffic cones that seem to move across the street of their own, mad volition. The toys manage to sneak across, but their little journey has led to a series of human accidents, and a massive traffic jam.
And then the strange, terrifying airport, and the toys jumping out of the baggage compartment of a moving plane, and .... oh, it's just too good, analysis fails me. [Perhaps we could say: overly bright, automated places like airports are Toy Story's version of hell.]
And this is perhaps the real point of Toy Story Theory, the painful anagnorisis that all sentient toys/stories must experience before the credits roll: just as every toy is eventually going to be put on the shelf and put away, every story has a shelf-life in the mind of its reader, and must die.
Eventually the reader will “grow up,” which is to say, she will fully absorb the pleasures and possibilities of the fictional world embodied in both toy and story. She will want to go somewhere else, and have a different kind of experience.
In TS2, it is implied that the grown up “Emily” (and presumably also “Andy) give up their toys in favor of things like record players and telephone. They give up their toys –which have narratives attached to them (like Mr. Potato Head's “angry eyes”), for "cool" objects that don't have any kind of inherent narrative association.
We often joke that our gadgets (cellphones, cameras, etc.) are “toys,” but actually they aren't toys in the Toy Story Theory, not even remotely. They are objects or tools, elements perhaps, of things that can become narratives, but they don't take us anywhere by themselves. Though the conceit of Toy Story is the idea that a child's toys are actually alive, the living world of the toy/story is contrasted to an adult world constituted by affectively detached objects -- narrative dead weight.
In the Toy Story Theory of the Text, the toys/texts have lives of their own, which turn on when we readers are not around to play with them. They are intelligent, but in Toy Story Theory they are not fully autonomous -- that would be too easy. Their one abiding desire is to be read ("played with"), with affection.
[Update/ A Thesis of a Kind: Looking at the interaction between toys and children in this way, we see a version of the interaction of texts and readers, with some of the usual dynamics turned on their head. What I do below is not 'reader-response' criticism but, in some sense text-response criticism. Though of course, it comes back to the adult reader in the end, as it always must.]
Some time after the events of Toy Story, presumably the following summer, Andy rips his Woody doll while playing with him and Buzz. Woody is placed on the shelf, where he finds another broken toy, the penguin Wheezy, and begins to fear he'll soon be thrown away. When Wheezy is set out for a yard sale, Woody tries to rescue him, but ends up in the yard sale himself, where he is stolen by Al, an obsessive toy collector and proprietor of "Al's Toy Barn". Buzz and several other toys set out to rescue Woody.
The fictional world in TS2 exists in parallel with the 'real', human world, and has to continually interact with it. There are, in particular, two kinds of humans to contend with, Andy, the imaginative child who loves his toys/stories, and Al, the evil Toy Collector, whose only goal is profit. After Woody is abducted, he experiences his moment of Peripeteia -- not as dramatic perhaps as the famous sequence in Toy Story (i.e., where Buzz Lightyear realized he was only a toy) -- but still a powerful moment: Woody actually has a family he never knew about:
Woody is taken to Al's apartment, where he is greeted by Jessie, Bullseye, and the Prospector (an unsold toy still in its original box). They reveal to him that they are toys based on a forgotten children's TV show, Woody's Roundup. Now that Al has a Woody doll, he has a complete collection and intends to sell the toys to a museum in Japan. Woody initially insists that he has to get back to Andy, but Jessie reveals how she was forgotten and eventually abandoned by her owner as she grew up, and the prospector warns Woody that he faces the same fate as Andy ages. Woody agrees to go with the "Roundup Gang" to the museum. (Link)
When a blockbuster story comes face to face with its less successful peers, the initial response is confusion. Why aren't you as good a story as me? Social constructionists point out that stories with clear heroic lines are easier to digest than those involving figures like “Prospector Pete,” the sputtering, morally ambiguous protagonist of a depressing work of historical fiction. Deconstructionists take it a step further, pointing out that Prospector Pete, the old man in the box, is the essential truth of every text/toy: no toy is ever really opened. Feminists point out that Emily loves Jessie as much as Andy loves Woody. (And Chloe loves Olivia – note the intriguing homoeroticism of the child/toy bond!)
The endearing thing about the Toy Story universe is that it is aware of the constructedness of toy popularity, and it doesn't attempt to pretend that it can be undone by creating a world where there are no cool toys and Every Toy is Of The Same Value. What it does instead, by forcing the toys to band together in a small “nutty cluster” (Eve Sedgwick's phrase; she was talking about Dickens, but it applies here too), is suggest the power of a group of idiosyncratic personalities working together. It is only by working together, for instance, that the toys can drive a human-sized car (on which, more below).
“Japan” also plays an interesting role in all of this. The name stands in for pure commercialism, which might seem odd, considering this is a movie about commodifiable toys, which has as one of its aims the re-commodification of “Buzz Lightyear” and “Woody” toys in our real (human-humdrum) world. For the children whose parents have already shelled out $20 for the TS2 DVD, there will be another $30-40 to spend on further real editions of the simulacra they have already consumed.
But Japan is also an exotic, bizarro world where the toys that are forgotten 'here' – relegated to life under beds, on forgotten shelves, are enshrined as attractions in museums and worshipped like Gods. In a sense, “Japan” is the biggest and best stage these toys can possibly have. To go there, as Prospector Pete points out (in the movie – it's not in the synopsis above), means eternal life of the spotless kind, even if being sent there in boxes results in a kind of irreversible separation from the space of TS2.
Buzz and his friends search for Al at Al's Toy Barn, where Buzz gets into a scuffle with another Buzz Lightyear doll (who, like Buzz in the first movie, doesn't realize he's a toy), and the new Buzz sets off with the other toys for Al's apartment, believing it to be a genuine rescue mission. The original Buzz frees himself and follows them to the apartment.
When they get there, Woody tells them he doesn't want to be rescued and intends to go with his new friends to Japan, since he's now a "collector's item". Buzz reminds him "you are a child's plaything... you are a toy!" (ironically, Woody says exactly the same thing to Buzz in the first film) Woody is unconvinced and Buzz's group leaves without him. But Woody then has a change of heart and invites Jessie, Bullseye, and the Prospector to come home to Andy with him. The first two agree, but the Prospector locks them in the room, saying that the museum trip is his first chance (since he was never sold) and won't have Woody messing it up for him. (Link)
Prospector Pete is a story that is so proud of itself, it doesn't even want to be read. It simply wants to be seen, known about, admired, and “collected.”
Al takes the toys to the airport, where Buzz and his group manage to free Woody and Bullseye from the suitcase, and stick the Prospector in a little girl's backpack so he can "learn the true meaning of play-time". Jessie remains trapped in the suitcase, and Buzz and Woody ride Bullseye to rescue her from the plane's cargo hold. (Link)
This is my favorite part of the movie (actually both Toy Story movies) – where the living toys have to navigate the human world. They are too small, so they have to find creative ways to make the sensors on automatic doors notice their presence. (Living stories inhabit our world like ghosts, stymied by automatic doors that demand material, rather than imaginary, weight.)
And crossing a wide, busy street becomes a task of Scylla-and-Charybdean difficulty. In TS2, the toys hide under traffic cones that seem to move across the street of their own, mad volition. The toys manage to sneak across, but their little journey has led to a series of human accidents, and a massive traffic jam.
And then the strange, terrifying airport, and the toys jumping out of the baggage compartment of a moving plane, and .... oh, it's just too good, analysis fails me. [Perhaps we could say: overly bright, automated places like airports are Toy Story's version of hell.]
At home, the toys are greeted by a fixed Wheezy, who regales them with a concert. Buzz asks Woody if he's still worried about his eventual fate. Woody replies "it'll be fun while it lasts. And when it's all over, I'll have Buzz Lightyear to keep me company... for infinity and beyond." (Link)
And this is perhaps the real point of Toy Story Theory, the painful anagnorisis that all sentient toys/stories must experience before the credits roll: just as every toy is eventually going to be put on the shelf and put away, every story has a shelf-life in the mind of its reader, and must die.
Eventually the reader will “grow up,” which is to say, she will fully absorb the pleasures and possibilities of the fictional world embodied in both toy and story. She will want to go somewhere else, and have a different kind of experience.
In TS2, it is implied that the grown up “Emily” (and presumably also “Andy) give up their toys in favor of things like record players and telephone. They give up their toys –which have narratives attached to them (like Mr. Potato Head's “angry eyes”), for "cool" objects that don't have any kind of inherent narrative association.
We often joke that our gadgets (cellphones, cameras, etc.) are “toys,” but actually they aren't toys in the Toy Story Theory, not even remotely. They are objects or tools, elements perhaps, of things that can become narratives, but they don't take us anywhere by themselves. Though the conceit of Toy Story is the idea that a child's toys are actually alive, the living world of the toy/story is contrasted to an adult world constituted by affectively detached objects -- narrative dead weight.
Women in Sikhism: A Promising Reform
Sikhs like to talk a big game about gender equality, but most of the time it's just talk. Patriarchal institutions like dowry are still quite widespread amongst the Sikh community in India, for one thing. And worse: Punjab, as many people will know, has the highest male/female birth ratio in all of India, due to rampant female foeticide. It's hard to talk about gender equality when that is going on.
Well, this week there is one small but promising reform out of Amritsar, the granting of full inclusion of women in Sikh religious services, according to the IANS:
You might be thinking, wait, don't they already have a woman president of the SGPC? Well, the short answer is, she's no feminist. There's also a longer answer there, involving Bibi Jagir Kaur's likely involvement in the murder of her own daughter five years ago. (She was acquitted.) And there's another issue -- Bibi Jagir Kaur was actually just removed from the position three weeks ago because of a corruption scandal (which means the story above is actually mistaken; more on this at the end of this post).
This reform seems like it might be a big deal for religion in the Indian subcontinent, since neither mainstream Hinduism nor Islam currently allow women to lead prayers or conduct ritual observance. In the Hindu tradition, as I understand it, there have been reformers like Vivekananda who have advocated women's empowerment along the way, but none have gone so far as to advocate women taking on the role of Poojari. (Note: my knowledge of this is very limited; I'm willing to be educated on this by readers.) In Islam, women have been demanding their rights to lead prayers, but it's mainly radical groups in the U.S. like the Daughters of Hajar that are forcing the issue. As far as I know, no one is talking about this in South Asia itself.
While the novelty of this reform is worth celebrating, it's hard to believe it took this long for it to happen. Sikhs have long trumpeted the pro-woman qualities of Sikhism, which are inscribed in the Guru Granth Sahib in various passages, and which go all the way back to Guru Nanak. And Sikh religious services, which revolve around readings from the Guru Granth Sahib (i.e., the holy book), and the singing of hymns (kirtan) are relatively unspecialized, which means the absence of women can't be explained as a matter of "training" or "education." There is also no official priesthood in the Sikh tradition -- technically, any baptized Sikh can lead the singing of kirtan or perform the duties of a Granthi (see here for more). Given those two facts, it's remarkable that the ban on women leading religious services at the Golden Temple -- a flagrant inconsistency -- persisted as long as it did.
This reform is going through even as Bibi Jagir Kaur faces a fresh controversy. She has been accused of embezzling 700 million Rupees (70 crores; US $16 million) from the SGPC coffers. In July she was, in fact, expelled from the SGPC for five years as a result.
As to whether there is any connection between the timing of this reform at the Golden Temple and Bibi Jagir Kaur's (latest) corruption scandal, I can't say.
Well, this week there is one small but promising reform out of Amritsar, the granting of full inclusion of women in Sikh religious services, according to the IANS:
Sixty-five years after making a demand that they be allowed to take part in two rituals at the holiest of Sikh shrines - the Golden Temple at Amritsar - women will finally be able to enter an arena so far dominated by males.
The religious promotion and affairs committee of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) - the governing body for Sikh shrines - decided Monday that Sikh women would be allowed to perform 'kirtan' (singing hymns) and 'palki sewa' (carrying the Sikh holy book Guru Granth Sahib in a palanquin) on religious occasions.
The decision came when the SGPC has a woman president - Jagir Kaur - at the helm of affairs. The first demand to allow women to do religious service at the Golden Temple was made in 1940 but the male-dominated SGPC never allowed it to happen. Jagir Kaur became SGPC president in 1999 but was unable to get the resolution allowing women to join rituals to be passed.
The controversy over women performing voluntary religious service at the Golden Temple erupted in February 2003 when two Sikh women from Britain were prevented from doing religious service there.
Till now, women were allowed to participate only in certain activities at the temple, like preparing food at the langar or community kitchen. (link)
You might be thinking, wait, don't they already have a woman president of the SGPC? Well, the short answer is, she's no feminist. There's also a longer answer there, involving Bibi Jagir Kaur's likely involvement in the murder of her own daughter five years ago. (She was acquitted.) And there's another issue -- Bibi Jagir Kaur was actually just removed from the position three weeks ago because of a corruption scandal (which means the story above is actually mistaken; more on this at the end of this post).
This reform seems like it might be a big deal for religion in the Indian subcontinent, since neither mainstream Hinduism nor Islam currently allow women to lead prayers or conduct ritual observance. In the Hindu tradition, as I understand it, there have been reformers like Vivekananda who have advocated women's empowerment along the way, but none have gone so far as to advocate women taking on the role of Poojari. (Note: my knowledge of this is very limited; I'm willing to be educated on this by readers.) In Islam, women have been demanding their rights to lead prayers, but it's mainly radical groups in the U.S. like the Daughters of Hajar that are forcing the issue. As far as I know, no one is talking about this in South Asia itself.
While the novelty of this reform is worth celebrating, it's hard to believe it took this long for it to happen. Sikhs have long trumpeted the pro-woman qualities of Sikhism, which are inscribed in the Guru Granth Sahib in various passages, and which go all the way back to Guru Nanak. And Sikh religious services, which revolve around readings from the Guru Granth Sahib (i.e., the holy book), and the singing of hymns (kirtan) are relatively unspecialized, which means the absence of women can't be explained as a matter of "training" or "education." There is also no official priesthood in the Sikh tradition -- technically, any baptized Sikh can lead the singing of kirtan or perform the duties of a Granthi (see here for more). Given those two facts, it's remarkable that the ban on women leading religious services at the Golden Temple -- a flagrant inconsistency -- persisted as long as it did.
This reform is going through even as Bibi Jagir Kaur faces a fresh controversy. She has been accused of embezzling 700 million Rupees (70 crores; US $16 million) from the SGPC coffers. In July she was, in fact, expelled from the SGPC for five years as a result.
As to whether there is any connection between the timing of this reform at the Golden Temple and Bibi Jagir Kaur's (latest) corruption scandal, I can't say.
The Kite Runner
I recently read The Kite Runner, and liked it. Besides the primary story about a pair of friends growing up in idyllic, pre-1973 Afghanistan, there is an interesting consideration of life in the Afghan neighborhood in the Bay Area, "Little Kabul" in Fremont (a town which also has a large Indian population, incidentally).
Fremont is where author Khaled Hosseini grew up after his folks left Afghanistan in 1980. It's interesting to me that in real life Hosseini is a practicing physician (age 38), while he makes the protagonist in his somewhat autobiographical book a professional writer. That Amir's father in the novel accepts his son's unconventional choice of profession without a fight -- which no South Asian parent would ever do! -- might be the only thing that really doesn't ring true for me in terms of the immigrant experience reflected in The Kite Runner.
It's hard to say exactly why The Kite Runner has become such a big hit. According to one recent USA Today article, it's sold more than 1.4 million copies and had 17 printings, which makes it a certifiable phenomenon for a first-time author in today's anemic book market. (Other tidbits: it's currently ranked #9 at Amazon, and hit #1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list this spring.) It's almost entirely a word-of-mouth phenomenon, which makes it even more impressive. Americans want to read this book -- by an unknown Afghan who happens to have a name that's not so different from "Hussein." That's something.
And most people I've talked to -- including several of my colleagues in the English department -- seem to really like the story. It clicks; it strikes a nerve; it does something. There are also doubters, such as this Slate writer, who found the book's psychological focus on redemption a little too pat -- almost programmed to appeal to western readers. (Hm, she may have a point there.)
In my view, though it's not quite a literary masterpiece, The Kite Runner does do some interesting things narratively, and is a nicely paced and carefully written story. The most intriguing element for me are the references to the 9th century Persian epic the Shahnamah (sometimes spelled Shahnameh), by the Persian writer Firdawsi.
The particular chapter of the Shahnamah that is singled out in The Kite Runner (and it has resonance in more than one way in the story, but I won't give away exactly how) is the story of Rostam and Sohrab. Rostam is a king and a brave fighter who has a rival named Sohrab. After a series of skirmishes, Rostam mortally wounds Sohrab. In the conversation the two of them have after the battle, as Sohrab is dying, it becomes clear that Sohrab is in fact Rostam's long-lost son. Here's the paragraph quoted in the novel:
Ah yes, fathers, sons, and a scene of primeval violence. It's the kind of thing that only really happens in heatbreaking medieval epics and melodramatic Hindi films, but it gets me every time. It's important in the beginning of the novel -- as the protagonist feels neglected by his father -- and it becomes important again at the end, in an interesting way. If you don't stop to notice the connection, you might miss it.
(Incidentally, check out illustrations from different early manuscripts of the Shahnamah at the Shahnama Project at SOAS. Beautiful... And here is a translation of just the Rostam and Sohrab chapter of the Shahnamah).
The other thing I like in The Kite Runner is the way Hosseini goes easy on the ethnography. You don't hear long lectures on Burqas, or Pashtun marriage rituals, or inter-ethnic rivalries in Afghan society. There is a little on each of the above in the novel -- you might learn a couple of things about relations between Pashtuns and Hazaras -- and that's undoubtedly part of its appeal for some people. But Hosseini doesn't hit the reader over the head with it, the way Asne Seierstad does in The Bookseller of Kabul -- the "other" book on Afghanistan everyone is talking about.
(On the other hand, Seierstad's book is an explicitly feminist account of how Afghani customs are oppressive to women. This is something Hosseini's book doesn't really get into much. His next book, he says, will deal with gender issues in Afghan culture much more directly.)
Hosseini avoids excessive explanation and historical context; perhaps he realized while writing it in 2001-2002 that many readers coming to his book would already know the story of the exile of King Zahir Shah in 1973, of the Soviet invasion and the devastating civil war that followed, and the rise of the Taliban (see Wikipedia for a brief primer on modern Afghani history).
With the ethnography and historical explanation at a minimum, Hosseini is free to jump right into the story.
Fremont is where author Khaled Hosseini grew up after his folks left Afghanistan in 1980. It's interesting to me that in real life Hosseini is a practicing physician (age 38), while he makes the protagonist in his somewhat autobiographical book a professional writer. That Amir's father in the novel accepts his son's unconventional choice of profession without a fight -- which no South Asian parent would ever do! -- might be the only thing that really doesn't ring true for me in terms of the immigrant experience reflected in The Kite Runner.
It's hard to say exactly why The Kite Runner has become such a big hit. According to one recent USA Today article, it's sold more than 1.4 million copies and had 17 printings, which makes it a certifiable phenomenon for a first-time author in today's anemic book market. (Other tidbits: it's currently ranked #9 at Amazon, and hit #1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list this spring.) It's almost entirely a word-of-mouth phenomenon, which makes it even more impressive. Americans want to read this book -- by an unknown Afghan who happens to have a name that's not so different from "Hussein." That's something.
And most people I've talked to -- including several of my colleagues in the English department -- seem to really like the story. It clicks; it strikes a nerve; it does something. There are also doubters, such as this Slate writer, who found the book's psychological focus on redemption a little too pat -- almost programmed to appeal to western readers. (Hm, she may have a point there.)
In my view, though it's not quite a literary masterpiece, The Kite Runner does do some interesting things narratively, and is a nicely paced and carefully written story. The most intriguing element for me are the references to the 9th century Persian epic the Shahnamah (sometimes spelled Shahnameh), by the Persian writer Firdawsi.
The particular chapter of the Shahnamah that is singled out in The Kite Runner (and it has resonance in more than one way in the story, but I won't give away exactly how) is the story of Rostam and Sohrab. Rostam is a king and a brave fighter who has a rival named Sohrab. After a series of skirmishes, Rostam mortally wounds Sohrab. In the conversation the two of them have after the battle, as Sohrab is dying, it becomes clear that Sohrab is in fact Rostam's long-lost son. Here's the paragraph quoted in the novel:
If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thou didst it of thine obstinancy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting...
Ah yes, fathers, sons, and a scene of primeval violence. It's the kind of thing that only really happens in heatbreaking medieval epics and melodramatic Hindi films, but it gets me every time. It's important in the beginning of the novel -- as the protagonist feels neglected by his father -- and it becomes important again at the end, in an interesting way. If you don't stop to notice the connection, you might miss it.
(Incidentally, check out illustrations from different early manuscripts of the Shahnamah at the Shahnama Project at SOAS. Beautiful... And here is a translation of just the Rostam and Sohrab chapter of the Shahnamah).
The other thing I like in The Kite Runner is the way Hosseini goes easy on the ethnography. You don't hear long lectures on Burqas, or Pashtun marriage rituals, or inter-ethnic rivalries in Afghan society. There is a little on each of the above in the novel -- you might learn a couple of things about relations between Pashtuns and Hazaras -- and that's undoubtedly part of its appeal for some people. But Hosseini doesn't hit the reader over the head with it, the way Asne Seierstad does in The Bookseller of Kabul -- the "other" book on Afghanistan everyone is talking about.
(On the other hand, Seierstad's book is an explicitly feminist account of how Afghani customs are oppressive to women. This is something Hosseini's book doesn't really get into much. His next book, he says, will deal with gender issues in Afghan culture much more directly.)
Hosseini avoids excessive explanation and historical context; perhaps he realized while writing it in 2001-2002 that many readers coming to his book would already know the story of the exile of King Zahir Shah in 1973, of the Soviet invasion and the devastating civil war that followed, and the rise of the Taliban (see Wikipedia for a brief primer on modern Afghani history).
With the ethnography and historical explanation at a minimum, Hosseini is free to jump right into the story.
The Wheels of Indian Justice
News about the release of the Nanavati Commission report was in the Indian papers yesterday, but it wasn't until this morning that I finally saw an coherent explanation of what it means, in the Indian Express:
If you were waiting for justice, too bad: as often happens with Indian justice, all you get is bupkis.
Incidentally, some of these guys faced criminal trials earlier, but no one has ever been convicted of anything. Sajjan Kumar, most famously, was acquitted for his involvement in 2002. Both Kumar and Tytler are still in the Congress government.
More recent coverage of Nanavati here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
NEW DELHI, AUGUST 8: Twenty years after hundreds of Sikhs were massacred in the Capital, a judicial inquiry has for the first time given a finding that Congress leaders were involved in it.
The Justice G T Nanavati Commission, which was set up in 2000 to undo the "whitewash" by the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission in 1986, has indicted, among others, a minister in the Manmohan Singh Government, Jagdish Tytler, and Congress MP from the Outer Delhi constituency, Sajjan Kumar.
But, having waited till the last permissible day to table the Nanavati Commission’s report in Parliament, the Government today rejected the finding against Tytler on a ground that is bound to trigger a legal controversy.
The Commission concluded that there was "credible evidence against Jagdish Tytler to the effect that very probably he had a hand in organizing attacks on Sikhs."
In its action taken report (ATR), the Government however interpreted these carefully chosen words to mean that "the Commission itself was not absolutely sure about his involvement in such attacks."
And then, turning Indian jurisprudence on its head, the Government claimed that "in criminal cases, a person cannot be prosecuted simply on the basis of ‘probability."(link)
If you were waiting for justice, too bad: as often happens with Indian justice, all you get is bupkis.
Incidentally, some of these guys faced criminal trials earlier, but no one has ever been convicted of anything. Sajjan Kumar, most famously, was acquitted for his involvement in 2002. Both Kumar and Tytler are still in the Congress government.
More recent coverage of Nanavati here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
Indian Literature Weekend Roundup
1. Novelist Mukul Kesavan has an essay on the rise of the Muslim League in the 1940s (via India Uncut). He argues that Muslim politics only really consolidated between 1937 and 1942. Key incidents include the Congress' decision to participate in elections in 1935, and the changes in the political landscape that occurred with the beginning of World War II.
2. Kitabkhana links to Kamila Shamsie's review of Tariq Ali's latest novel A Sultan in Palermo (the fourth of five in Ali's "Islam Quintet"), in The Guardian. If you weren't aware that Palermo (i.e., in Sicily) had Sultans, you might want to read this review, and perhaps Ali's novel as well.
3. Hurree also links to Amitava Kumar's long critique of Salman Rushdie at Tehelka. The article at Tehelka isn't accessible to the public, so Kumar has posted the article for us at his personal website. Kumar isn't just dismissing one of Rushdie's books, or even a group of them -- he's going after Rushdie as a whole.
Though I generally admire Amitava Kumar, here I have to disagree with him, especially the central thesis of this essay -- the idea that what Rushdie has been writing about all along is himself. There is undoubtedly narcissism there (in the recent books), but there is also a real feel for the subject matter (in the earlier books). Not to mention brilliant wordplay, compelling storytelling, and verve. And Rushdie's narcissism, especially since it is checked by self-consciousness about the same, need not be a mortal sin. In the right hands, it can also be revelatory.
(Incidentally, isn't it a little bit odd that Kumar marks Rushdie's narcissism in a review that is largely structured as a personal essay?)
It's strange to me that Kumar praises the recent Naipaul (Magic Seeds) while digging into Rushdie. Kumar has mentioned his own debt to Naipaul's prose style before, in Bombay, London, New York (which I reviewed informally here), and I can fully see how important Naipaul's dispassionate, methodical eye might have been to someone like Kumar.
The truth is, both Rushdie and Naipaul do have significant fallibilities. Naipaul has an ugly, sneering side, scarcely controlled in early books like India: An Area of Darkenss, or the early African narratives he wrote. He also has a hatred for things Islamic that he has expressed and expressed and expressed -- writing three long, mean-spirited books about the Islamic world, and giving his blessing, before last year's elections, to the ideology of India's Hindu right.
Rushdie is still in my good graces, though he's slipping. He may have many of the weaknesses Kumar cites -- chief among them narcissism and a tendency to the academic -- but all in all his voice has done a lot more good for Indian literature than bad. That said, I have no trouble at all accepting Kumar's dismissive verdict on the forthcoming Shalimar the Clown. With each bad book, people remember the brilliant, compelling, original Rushdie a little less, and think of the smug, "celebrity" Rushdie a little more. That's a substantial loss.
4. Speaking of Naipaul, I'm surprised that no one has been discussing the long essay on him in the New York Times, the product of an interview conducted by Rachel Donadio. Naipaul here reproduces many of the comments about the state of contemporary literature that he's made elsewhere, though he now seems to be reaching a new, completely unprecedented level of transcendent crankiness. The zinger I can't believe he gets away with is his straight-faced claim that the novel is dead:
This is just one of many things in the interview that one can't take seriously. (Another is Naipaul's claim that he's a better travel writer than Joseph Conrad.)
Another bizarre moment is this paragraph:
Here, it seems as if Donadio knows that what Naipaul is saying is incoherent and absurd. But she poses it completely seriously -- as if it makes perfect sense. With the first sentence of the above paragraph, Donadio gives Naipaul's literary nihilism a free pass.
2. Kitabkhana links to Kamila Shamsie's review of Tariq Ali's latest novel A Sultan in Palermo (the fourth of five in Ali's "Islam Quintet"), in The Guardian. If you weren't aware that Palermo (i.e., in Sicily) had Sultans, you might want to read this review, and perhaps Ali's novel as well.
3. Hurree also links to Amitava Kumar's long critique of Salman Rushdie at Tehelka. The article at Tehelka isn't accessible to the public, so Kumar has posted the article for us at his personal website. Kumar isn't just dismissing one of Rushdie's books, or even a group of them -- he's going after Rushdie as a whole.
Though I generally admire Amitava Kumar, here I have to disagree with him, especially the central thesis of this essay -- the idea that what Rushdie has been writing about all along is himself. There is undoubtedly narcissism there (in the recent books), but there is also a real feel for the subject matter (in the earlier books). Not to mention brilliant wordplay, compelling storytelling, and verve. And Rushdie's narcissism, especially since it is checked by self-consciousness about the same, need not be a mortal sin. In the right hands, it can also be revelatory.
(Incidentally, isn't it a little bit odd that Kumar marks Rushdie's narcissism in a review that is largely structured as a personal essay?)
It's strange to me that Kumar praises the recent Naipaul (Magic Seeds) while digging into Rushdie. Kumar has mentioned his own debt to Naipaul's prose style before, in Bombay, London, New York (which I reviewed informally here), and I can fully see how important Naipaul's dispassionate, methodical eye might have been to someone like Kumar.
The truth is, both Rushdie and Naipaul do have significant fallibilities. Naipaul has an ugly, sneering side, scarcely controlled in early books like India: An Area of Darkenss, or the early African narratives he wrote. He also has a hatred for things Islamic that he has expressed and expressed and expressed -- writing three long, mean-spirited books about the Islamic world, and giving his blessing, before last year's elections, to the ideology of India's Hindu right.
Rushdie is still in my good graces, though he's slipping. He may have many of the weaknesses Kumar cites -- chief among them narcissism and a tendency to the academic -- but all in all his voice has done a lot more good for Indian literature than bad. That said, I have no trouble at all accepting Kumar's dismissive verdict on the forthcoming Shalimar the Clown. With each bad book, people remember the brilliant, compelling, original Rushdie a little less, and think of the smug, "celebrity" Rushdie a little more. That's a substantial loss.
4. Speaking of Naipaul, I'm surprised that no one has been discussing the long essay on him in the New York Times, the product of an interview conducted by Rachel Donadio. Naipaul here reproduces many of the comments about the state of contemporary literature that he's made elsewhere, though he now seems to be reaching a new, completely unprecedented level of transcendent crankiness. The zinger I can't believe he gets away with is his straight-faced claim that the novel is dead:
Yet the fact that Naipaul has continued to write novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form's limitations; indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no longer adequate. "If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account," Naipaul said. "If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account."
This is just one of many things in the interview that one can't take seriously. (Another is Naipaul's claim that he's a better travel writer than Joseph Conrad.)
Another bizarre moment is this paragraph:
In conversation, another dynamic becomes apparent, in which the more dismissive Naipaul is of a writer, the more likely it is that he has engaged deeply with that writer's work. Sitting a few feet away from a bookshelf of French novels, Naipaul called Proust "tedious," "repetitive," "self-indulgent," concerned only with a character's social status. "What is missing in Proust is this idea of a moral center," he said. Naipaul also had little respect for Joyce's "Ulysses" -- "the Irish book," he sniffily called it -- and other works "that have to lean on borrowed stories." Lately, he has found Stendhal "repetitive, tedious, infuriating," while "the greatest disappointment was Flaubert."
Here, it seems as if Donadio knows that what Naipaul is saying is incoherent and absurd. But she poses it completely seriously -- as if it makes perfect sense. With the first sentence of the above paragraph, Donadio gives Naipaul's literary nihilism a free pass.
Two Odd Emails Received
I've gotten two especially odd emails lately. One is this:
That's it, exactly as it was sent. At first I thought I was actually getting hate-mail via SMS! Otherwise, how to account for the weirdly compressed writing style? And the conversion of "th" into "z"? But in fact, it's over 138 characters, so it isn't SMS.
Also, the name of the person checked out with Google. He appears to be a young African man in the UK, who was pretty active in the recent G-8/Live-8 media whirlwind. I still don't know what the heck he's saying in this email, though. I think it has something to do with my 'postcolonial theory' essay from a few weeks ago.
The second is a little bit sad:
Sorry my friend, I don't think I can help you. Still, all the best to you in learning a language you basically already know.
Glad I red up 2 wea u say ur Saidian respons is stil instinctiv or I'd have left so shockd @ how intelectual modesty can b used 2 let academic imperialism off ze hook. Ze Saidian instinct can hardly stand orientalism masquerading as neutral scholarship in pursuit of knowledge 4 tze sake of knowledge
That's it, exactly as it was sent. At first I thought I was actually getting hate-mail via SMS! Otherwise, how to account for the weirdly compressed writing style? And the conversion of "th" into "z"? But in fact, it's over 138 characters, so it isn't SMS.
Also, the name of the person checked out with Google. He appears to be a young African man in the UK, who was pretty active in the recent G-8/Live-8 media whirlwind. I still don't know what the heck he's saying in this email, though. I think it has something to do with my 'postcolonial theory' essay from a few weeks ago.
The second is a little bit sad:
Sir
I want to learn Hindi.My mother tongue is Urdu.Please
help me.
Sorry my friend, I don't think I can help you. Still, all the best to you in learning a language you basically already know.
Don't freak
(Today is Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper Columnist Appreciation Day.)
From The Guardian (thanks Punjabi Boy):
Also a bit about it in The Mirror:
* * *
And music critic Siddhartha Mitter had a nice Op-Ed type commentary on NPR a couple of days ago. It turns into a meditation on turbans...
From The Guardian (thanks Punjabi Boy):
An immediate answer to yesterday's G2 front page teaser: has Britain lost its sense of humour? The answer is a clear no, at least judging from the new T-shirts being worn by young Asians on the underground, which display the slogan: "Don't freak, I'm a Sikh". We'll give top marks to the joke writer for that one and (for some obscure reason) the tale has also prompted a very loosely connected thought: does anybody know what happened to the Guardian Angels? Unlike funny Sikhs, you don't see too many on the tube these days. Surely they're missing a fantastic marketing opportunity?
Also a bit about it in The Mirror:
In a humorous, totally British response, some Sikhs have started wearing stickers on their rucksacks and bags bearing the legend: "Don't freak, I'm a Sikh."
Every day, millions of Londoners still use the Tube. But more people are walking to work, taxis are far harder to come by and most prefer to sit downstairs on the bus.
Suddenly the roads of London resemble Beijing, swarming with bicycles.
You stop at the traffic lights and all these born-again cyclists surround you, wobbling all over the place.
They must be nuts.
In London, you are infinitely safer on the Tube than you are on a bike.
* * *
And music critic Siddhartha Mitter had a nice Op-Ed type commentary on NPR a couple of days ago. It turns into a meditation on turbans...
Hanif Kureishi and British Multiculturalism
In the August 4 Guardian, the writer Hanif Kureishi weighs in on what British multiculturalism might mean in light of the atmosphere of extreme intolerance that prevails at some of the London Mosques. (Via Locana)
Kureishi's name has been in the air a bit since it was revealed that the men behind the 7/7 bombings in London were second-generation Brit-Asians. The spread of an ultra-fundamentalist ethos amongst second-generation British Muslims was something Kureishi explored in his screenplay to My Son the Fanatic (which began as a short story in The New Yorker) as well as in The Black Album, a novel responding to the turmoil in the British Muslim community following the Rushdie affair.
But the interesting part of this essay isn't really its central point about the poison of religious extremism –- which I think any moderate or progressive person would probably agree with. What is more intriguing is actually Kureishi's unusual use of the word 'multiculturalism' in the context of British 'faith schools'. There's a lot of confusion about what these schools are and how they work (especially for us non-Brits), and in this post I'll explore them a little.
Here's Kureishi:
The rhetoric of multiculturalism that has supported to the establishment of a number of state-funded Muslim schools in England in recent years, with plans for more to be built –- with the blessings of the Blair government.
But for Kureishi, the people who need to come to terms with multiculturalism aren't mainstream Britons, but radicalized and culturally isolated British Muslims. Kureishi is therefore opposed to these schools, which he sees as 'monocultural' rather than multicultural, and if anything, part of the problem:
For Kureishi, there is no difference between radical clerics in the East London mosques and the state-sponsored Religious Education that is universally taught in the English school system. Most Americans, used to the strong separation of church and state that has been in effect in American public education since 1948 (i.e., when prayer in school was banned; McCollum v. Board of Education), will probably see what Kureishi is saying as essentially common sense.
But it's a more complex story than that. Britain has never been a place where strong separation of church and state has been practiced. The Anglican Church is still technically established (in England at least -– not in Wales or Scotland), and enjoys certain privileges by virtue of its special status in English life. Did you know that the English monarch is not permitted to marry a Catholic? And that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have reserved seats for them in the House of Lords? Most of these are merely symbolic, token privileges, remnants from an era in which the Church of England was one of the driving political powers in English life. But they would be unthinkable in the U.S., India, or France.
Also, the Anglican Church is by law an 'open church', which means that people who ordinarily never go to Church services are still permitted to use local parish Churches for baptisms, marriages, and funerals. Thus, while active membership in the Anglican Church dropped to 11 percent of the English population by the 1990s (according to Monsma and Soper's The Challenge of Pluralism, which is my primary source for much of the background information in this post), 55 percent of England is still baptized into the Church, and 60 percent casually identify as Anglicans. ("Social Anglicans," one could say)
Most importantly of all, Britain (here including Scotland and Wales) has a long tradition of directly funding religious education in schools. Though this tradition of Anglican schooling goes back to the early 19th century, it took significant steps forward in 1870, when the British government first began building primary schools, and then again in 1944, when the modern system of Local Educational Authorities (LEAs) was put into place.
Since then, the “faith schools” Kureishi is referring to in this opinion piece have in fact become quite widespread: 35 percent of British primary and 16 percent of secondary schools fall into this category. Because their students significantly outperform students at non-religious schools, many faith schools are quite selective in their admissions process. Historically the schools were either Anglican or Catholic, with very small numbers of schools given over to other denominations (Presbytarians, Methodists, etc.), as well as a handful to Jews. However, it's important to note that most Christian faith schools do admit students from other faiths without any 'religious tests' (for instance, frequent Sepia Mutiny commentor 'Bong Breaker' –- a Bengali Hindu -– went to one of the more prestigious Anglican schools, and clearly benefited from the experience).
[Some of these schools do not admit non-Christians. There was a controversy in Manchester about this not too long ago.]
The Anglican Church has been quite explicit about their reasoning for this policy of inclusion -– with endlessly declining attendance in England, they are in desperate need of new members, and they see the inclusion of non-Christians in Anglican state schools as a potential source of new converts (see the extracts from the 'Dealer Report' here). This policy of inclusion is also a good one from the civil rights perspective, as it lessens the perception of discrimination amongst England's minorities. Anyone can go to one of these schools if they can get in, and I imagine for Hindu or Muslim parents the danger of their kid converting to Christianity is probably mitigated by the significant educational advantages that this kind of education offers.
Until quite recently, no Muslim schools were able to match the strict criteria necessary to receive state support. Now a few have appeared and more are in the offing, which raises two serious questions to consider. One is, will the Islamic state schools be places where moderate, multiculturalism-friendly Islam is inculcated? The second is, will the principle of the government's 'supportive neutrality' to the different faiths be challenged once more 'foreign' faiths enter the picture? In short, can the British public handle state support for Muslim schools?
With the first question -– do the Islamic schools work? -- I don't have much information, except to say that it appears so. Indeed, because of the strong degree of state control and oversight that is associated with state support, the Labour government has been keen to support these schools wherever possible (see this interview). It appears to be a way for them to 'reach out' to the Muslim community (or more cynically, to appease it), while also gaining leverage against the informal and sometimes dangerous 'education' offered at some Mosques. In essence, if you can't stop the kids from getting religionized, maybe you can control the kind of religion they are exposed to.
A fair criticism of the Islamic faith schools (and a reason why they are in fact potentially a bad idea) is that most Muslims in England are immigrants, unlike the members of majority faiths. Though advocates for the Islamic state schools promise they will be centers for a moderate kind of Islam, the schools might not be helpful to immigrants or the children of immigrants who aspire to learn the ropes of British society. In short, the Islamic state schools run the exact significant risk Kureishi identifies -- 'monoculturalism' rather than multiculturalism.
But the Islamic schools have in fact been controversial for other reasons than this, particularly to English conservatives. A number of Church officials as well as people associated with existing (Christian) faith schools like David Bell have spoken out against them, along fairly predictable lines. This way of thinking -– support for state religious schools, except Muslim schools -– seems openly discriminatory and, in David Bell's case, hypocritical.
One interesting twist on this issue – and a way to potentially resolve the integration/religious freedom dilemma inherent whenever we think about multiculturalism in the realm of religion –- is the proposal for 'multi-faith' schools, which are 'faith schools' that are actually split between four religious communities. The students in such schools are fully integrated, and are given a fair amount of religious education in common, with some separation for specific/advanced instruction.
Another new occurrence is the proposal to start a Hindu state school in northwest London in 2008, which has recently been approved. Once the state school system becomes more complex than simply Christians/Jews vs. Muslims, the parameters of the debate over religious education in England will change yet again. (There are also apparently two Sikh state schools in the UK; I don't know if there are any plans for Jain, or Buddhist state schools.)
* * * *
Some closing thoughts. Though Liberal Democrats and others on the British left would love to see an end to state support for religious schools, it's not likely to happen as long as the schools continue to be popular -- and outperform non-religious government schools. (The Left would also like to see the abolition of the Monarchy, which seems to be about as popular in Britain as Diego Maradona)
The U.S. model of strict separation ensures that the public school classroom cannot be used as a site where extremist religious views are propagated. The simplest and most radical solution to the multiculturalism question in the UK would be to simply dismantle the faith school system entirely, and follow the U.S. Model.
[Similarly, the simplest and most radical solution to the 'Personal Law' conundrum in India would be to establish a Uniform Civil Code with a completely secularized and woman's-rights oriented approach to marriage, divorce, property rights, inheritance, and childhood custodial rights.]
But the American model isn't for everybody, and state support for religion is a fact of life in Britain, and not likely to go anywhere. As long as it exists, fairness dictates that new religious minorities –- Hindus, Muslims, etc. -– should have the right to try and participate in the faith schooling system. It is the task of the British government to try and ensure that such endeavors as Islamic faith schools work to the advantage of the cause of tolerance, integration, and cross-cultural understanding, and benefit British society on the whole.
Moreover, as we're seeing with the corrosion of the secular school system (a corrosion that George Bush himself is promoting, with his support for Intelligent Design), even the vaunted American system is itself in some jeopardy.
[Other links:
--Saheli's response to the Kureishi piece
--Locana's follow-up post, taking it back to the Indian system
--A recent Crooked Timber post on the British religion/education issue.]
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
Kureishi's name has been in the air a bit since it was revealed that the men behind the 7/7 bombings in London were second-generation Brit-Asians. The spread of an ultra-fundamentalist ethos amongst second-generation British Muslims was something Kureishi explored in his screenplay to My Son the Fanatic (which began as a short story in The New Yorker) as well as in The Black Album, a novel responding to the turmoil in the British Muslim community following the Rushdie affair.
But the interesting part of this essay isn't really its central point about the poison of religious extremism –- which I think any moderate or progressive person would probably agree with. What is more intriguing is actually Kureishi's unusual use of the word 'multiculturalism' in the context of British 'faith schools'. There's a lot of confusion about what these schools are and how they work (especially for us non-Brits), and in this post I'll explore them a little.
Here's Kureishi:
If the idea of multiculturalism makes some people vertiginous, monoculturalism -- of whatever sort -- is much worse. Political and social systems have to define themselves in terms of what they exclude, and conservative Islam is leaving out a lot. . . .
You can't ask people to give up their religion; that would be absurd. Religions may be illusions, but these are important and profound illusions. And they will modify as they come into contact with other ideas. This is what an effective multiculturalism is: not a superficial exchange of festivals and food, but a robust and committed exchange of ideas -- a conflict that is worth enduring, rather than a war.
When it comes to teaching the young, we have the human duty to inform them that there is more than one book in the world, and more than one voice, and that if they wish to have their voices heard by others, everyone else is entitled to the same thing. These children deserve better than an education that comes from liberal guilt. (link)
The rhetoric of multiculturalism that has supported to the establishment of a number of state-funded Muslim schools in England in recent years, with plans for more to be built –- with the blessings of the Blair government.
But for Kureishi, the people who need to come to terms with multiculturalism aren't mainstream Britons, but radicalized and culturally isolated British Muslims. Kureishi is therefore opposed to these schools, which he sees as 'monocultural' rather than multicultural, and if anything, part of the problem:
It is not only in the mosques but also in so-called "faith" schools that such ideas are propagated. The Blair government, while attempting to rid us of radical clerics, has pledged to set up more of these schools, as though a "moderate" closed system is completely different to an "extreme" one. This might suit Blair and Bush. A benighted, ignorant enemy, incapable of independent thought, and terrified of criticism, is easily patronised. (link)
For Kureishi, there is no difference between radical clerics in the East London mosques and the state-sponsored Religious Education that is universally taught in the English school system. Most Americans, used to the strong separation of church and state that has been in effect in American public education since 1948 (i.e., when prayer in school was banned; McCollum v. Board of Education), will probably see what Kureishi is saying as essentially common sense.
But it's a more complex story than that. Britain has never been a place where strong separation of church and state has been practiced. The Anglican Church is still technically established (in England at least -– not in Wales or Scotland), and enjoys certain privileges by virtue of its special status in English life. Did you know that the English monarch is not permitted to marry a Catholic? And that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have reserved seats for them in the House of Lords? Most of these are merely symbolic, token privileges, remnants from an era in which the Church of England was one of the driving political powers in English life. But they would be unthinkable in the U.S., India, or France.
Also, the Anglican Church is by law an 'open church', which means that people who ordinarily never go to Church services are still permitted to use local parish Churches for baptisms, marriages, and funerals. Thus, while active membership in the Anglican Church dropped to 11 percent of the English population by the 1990s (according to Monsma and Soper's The Challenge of Pluralism, which is my primary source for much of the background information in this post), 55 percent of England is still baptized into the Church, and 60 percent casually identify as Anglicans. ("Social Anglicans," one could say)
Most importantly of all, Britain (here including Scotland and Wales) has a long tradition of directly funding religious education in schools. Though this tradition of Anglican schooling goes back to the early 19th century, it took significant steps forward in 1870, when the British government first began building primary schools, and then again in 1944, when the modern system of Local Educational Authorities (LEAs) was put into place.
Since then, the “faith schools” Kureishi is referring to in this opinion piece have in fact become quite widespread: 35 percent of British primary and 16 percent of secondary schools fall into this category. Because their students significantly outperform students at non-religious schools, many faith schools are quite selective in their admissions process. Historically the schools were either Anglican or Catholic, with very small numbers of schools given over to other denominations (Presbytarians, Methodists, etc.), as well as a handful to Jews. However, it's important to note that most Christian faith schools do admit students from other faiths without any 'religious tests' (for instance, frequent Sepia Mutiny commentor 'Bong Breaker' –- a Bengali Hindu -– went to one of the more prestigious Anglican schools, and clearly benefited from the experience).
[Some of these schools do not admit non-Christians. There was a controversy in Manchester about this not too long ago.]
The Anglican Church has been quite explicit about their reasoning for this policy of inclusion -– with endlessly declining attendance in England, they are in desperate need of new members, and they see the inclusion of non-Christians in Anglican state schools as a potential source of new converts (see the extracts from the 'Dealer Report' here). This policy of inclusion is also a good one from the civil rights perspective, as it lessens the perception of discrimination amongst England's minorities. Anyone can go to one of these schools if they can get in, and I imagine for Hindu or Muslim parents the danger of their kid converting to Christianity is probably mitigated by the significant educational advantages that this kind of education offers.
Until quite recently, no Muslim schools were able to match the strict criteria necessary to receive state support. Now a few have appeared and more are in the offing, which raises two serious questions to consider. One is, will the Islamic state schools be places where moderate, multiculturalism-friendly Islam is inculcated? The second is, will the principle of the government's 'supportive neutrality' to the different faiths be challenged once more 'foreign' faiths enter the picture? In short, can the British public handle state support for Muslim schools?
With the first question -– do the Islamic schools work? -- I don't have much information, except to say that it appears so. Indeed, because of the strong degree of state control and oversight that is associated with state support, the Labour government has been keen to support these schools wherever possible (see this interview). It appears to be a way for them to 'reach out' to the Muslim community (or more cynically, to appease it), while also gaining leverage against the informal and sometimes dangerous 'education' offered at some Mosques. In essence, if you can't stop the kids from getting religionized, maybe you can control the kind of religion they are exposed to.
A fair criticism of the Islamic faith schools (and a reason why they are in fact potentially a bad idea) is that most Muslims in England are immigrants, unlike the members of majority faiths. Though advocates for the Islamic state schools promise they will be centers for a moderate kind of Islam, the schools might not be helpful to immigrants or the children of immigrants who aspire to learn the ropes of British society. In short, the Islamic state schools run the exact significant risk Kureishi identifies -- 'monoculturalism' rather than multiculturalism.
But the Islamic schools have in fact been controversial for other reasons than this, particularly to English conservatives. A number of Church officials as well as people associated with existing (Christian) faith schools like David Bell have spoken out against them, along fairly predictable lines. This way of thinking -– support for state religious schools, except Muslim schools -– seems openly discriminatory and, in David Bell's case, hypocritical.
One interesting twist on this issue – and a way to potentially resolve the integration/religious freedom dilemma inherent whenever we think about multiculturalism in the realm of religion –- is the proposal for 'multi-faith' schools, which are 'faith schools' that are actually split between four religious communities. The students in such schools are fully integrated, and are given a fair amount of religious education in common, with some separation for specific/advanced instruction.
Another new occurrence is the proposal to start a Hindu state school in northwest London in 2008, which has recently been approved. Once the state school system becomes more complex than simply Christians/Jews vs. Muslims, the parameters of the debate over religious education in England will change yet again. (There are also apparently two Sikh state schools in the UK; I don't know if there are any plans for Jain, or Buddhist state schools.)
* * * *
Some closing thoughts. Though Liberal Democrats and others on the British left would love to see an end to state support for religious schools, it's not likely to happen as long as the schools continue to be popular -- and outperform non-religious government schools. (The Left would also like to see the abolition of the Monarchy, which seems to be about as popular in Britain as Diego Maradona)
The U.S. model of strict separation ensures that the public school classroom cannot be used as a site where extremist religious views are propagated. The simplest and most radical solution to the multiculturalism question in the UK would be to simply dismantle the faith school system entirely, and follow the U.S. Model.
[Similarly, the simplest and most radical solution to the 'Personal Law' conundrum in India would be to establish a Uniform Civil Code with a completely secularized and woman's-rights oriented approach to marriage, divorce, property rights, inheritance, and childhood custodial rights.]
But the American model isn't for everybody, and state support for religion is a fact of life in Britain, and not likely to go anywhere. As long as it exists, fairness dictates that new religious minorities –- Hindus, Muslims, etc. -– should have the right to try and participate in the faith schooling system. It is the task of the British government to try and ensure that such endeavors as Islamic faith schools work to the advantage of the cause of tolerance, integration, and cross-cultural understanding, and benefit British society on the whole.
Moreover, as we're seeing with the corrosion of the secular school system (a corrosion that George Bush himself is promoting, with his support for Intelligent Design), even the vaunted American system is itself in some jeopardy.
[Other links:
--Saheli's response to the Kureishi piece
--Locana's follow-up post, taking it back to the Indian system
--A recent Crooked Timber post on the British religion/education issue.]
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
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