Say it aint so, Govinda!
The low-brow (and proud of it) Bollywood actor Govinda, lately a Member of Parliament in the Congress party for north Bombay, may have been hobnobbing with gangsters in Dubai. And not just any gangsters -- Dawood Ibrahim himself! Mr. D.
Apparently there is a videotape. With their sense of irony firmly challenged, the BJP is demanding immediate action. (You can't make this stuff up)
On the other hand, on this blog, Congress officials are quoted as saying that the video is from before 1993. Dawood Ibrahim wasn't known as a super-criminal until after the Bombay blasts, so it's not as bad as it might look.
Hooch and Hamlet/ Acting Like a Thief
Shashwati and Kerim are working on a documentary on the Chhara community in Ahmedabad, Gujurat. The Chharas were formerly known as a "criminal tribe" (also known as a Denotified Tribe, or DNT), and are still routinely harassed by the police in Gujurat. Most of them make a living by making and selling bootleg liquor (Gujurat is a dry state, so there is always a healthy market for liquor!), though I gather that some still might continue to be involved with petty criminal activities.
More about the Chharas can be found at this story at IndiaTogether.org
Shashwati and Kerim have made a 15 minute segment of the larger documentary (Hooch and Hamlet) available for free via BitTorrent from their website for the film. The focus of this section ("Acting Like a Thief") is the Budhan theater group in Chharanagar, named after a member of the community who was killed in police custody in 1989.
I downloaded and watched the clip, and would definitely recommend it: another glimpse of how the other half (or, to be more precise, the other three-quarters!) lives in India. At a simple level, it's interesting just to hear these people talk. At times they are speaking the language of an aggrieved minority, focusing on the way they are victimized by the police and by the mainstream communities that surround them. But at other moments they acknowledge (and even embrace) their community's "dakku" legacy. Some of the folks interviewed seem morally complicated (particularly the older lady who shows up in the second half of the clip). To me this makes the documentary different from others that have focused on minority or SC/OBC communities in India.
Oh, did I mention? S + K are trying to raise funds to complete the film! Consider donating, or buy something through their Amazon Associates links (I did).
Yoga Yug
--Hari Kunzru decided not to go to the Maldives, after finding out the island is run by a questionable leader:
See my earlier post on Hari Kunzru's writing here.
--The Literary Saloon has been providing consistent coverage of the case against Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (which will go before a judge in December). In their latest post, they have links to articles where Pamuk himself is quoted speaking about why he felt it important to mention the Armenian genocide. An earlier post also had a link to an Op-Ed by Salman Rushdie in the London Times.
--The winning essay in the Indian Express' essay competition on secularism is by Shashi Warrier, and is available here (more on it soon).
--Dilip D'Souza, one of the judges for the Indian Express competition, also posts other shortlisted essays in the competition here and here. (I linked to Uma's essay last week)
--B. K. S. Iyengar, one of the chief proponents ofthe exercise regime known as Yoga, is visiting the U.S., where he is apparently only a notch less famous than the Dalai Lama. Click on the link; the picture at Rediff is sure to cause a chuckle.
--Also visiting the U.S. are Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta, and a long list of Bollywood stars. They are filming a big Karan Johar picture in New York, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, which I'm sure will be as unexciting and overblown as every other Karan Johar movie (and sadly, I must admit that I've seen quite a few of them!). Rediff is apparently now paying U.S. based paparazzi to get 'snaps' of them. You know you've arrived when...
At the meeting I heard reports of torture, imprisonment and disappearances in these 'paradise' islands. Since 1978 it's been ruled by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. You can check him out, hob-nobbing with the British High Commissioner, former US president Bill Clinton, and other notables on www.presidencymaldives.gov.mv. Gayoom was elected for a record sixth five-year term in 2003 - though there were no other candidates - thus making him Asia's longest serving leader. His unprecedented popularity is assisted by his control over the Maldivian media and his practice of imprisoning people who criticise his regime. Government jobs and tourist revenue go to his cronies. Do the maths: per capita GDP is the highest in South Asia but nearly half of the population live on less than a dollar a day.
See my earlier post on Hari Kunzru's writing here.
--The Literary Saloon has been providing consistent coverage of the case against Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (which will go before a judge in December). In their latest post, they have links to articles where Pamuk himself is quoted speaking about why he felt it important to mention the Armenian genocide. An earlier post also had a link to an Op-Ed by Salman Rushdie in the London Times.
--The winning essay in the Indian Express' essay competition on secularism is by Shashi Warrier, and is available here (more on it soon).
--Dilip D'Souza, one of the judges for the Indian Express competition, also posts other shortlisted essays in the competition here and here. (I linked to Uma's essay last week)
--B. K. S. Iyengar, one of the chief proponents of
--Also visiting the U.S. are Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta, and a long list of Bollywood stars. They are filming a big Karan Johar picture in New York, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, which I'm sure will be as unexciting and overblown as every other Karan Johar movie (and sadly, I must admit that I've seen quite a few of them!). Rediff is apparently now paying U.S. based paparazzi to get 'snaps' of them. You know you've arrived when...
Myrna Loy Goes to India: The Rains Came
While flipping channels this weekend, I came across a 1939 film called The Rains Came, starring Myrna Loy as the wife of a British lord in colonial India. It was on Fox Classic Movies, which is a clone of AMC: you don't have to pay extra for it, and most of the time it's quite obvious why.
But this film is one I would have gladly paid to see. The Rains Came is based on a 1937 novel of the same name by Louis Bromfield. It is a romance melodrama, with Myrna Loy in all her eyelid-fluttering glory. Think two solid hours of perfect make-up and hair, amazing outfits, anguished sobs, and sultry glares. For some readers, I hope that sounds like heaven. (Others, I'm sure, will run screaming from the room! But hopefully even melodrama-averse readers might still find something of interest in this film...)
The Rains Came is set during the monsoon in a princely territory called "Ranchipur," which sounds a little like "Ranch-uh-poor" the way the actors pronounce it. If we take the name a little too literally -- Ranch 'o the Poor -- The Rains Came is an eastern western, except full of poor, skinny Eastern Indians instead of fierce, feather-hatted and ululating American ones. (Borrowing a joke there from Salman Rushdie)
Anyway, the monsoon was apparently not exotic enough: a huge earthquake also occurs, freakishly relevant to recent events. And even that's not enough; the quake leads the local dam to crack, flooding the town of Ranchipur, and that leads to the rapid spread of disease. Myrna Loy, whose romance with the Hindu doctor Major Rana Safti seems doomed, leaves off her frivolous, pampered lifestyle and dedicates herself to taking care of the sick natives. She soon finds herself sick with whatever it is they have... and, oh, you know the rest.
The film, IMDB informs us, was decently successful, though it was heavily overshadowed by Gone With The Wind, which was released the same year, instantly becoming the benchmark for Big Hollywood Total Disaster melodrama. (The Rains Came was still nominated for six Academy Awards, and won for best special effects -- the flood scene is pretty spectacular).
* * *
The Hollywood version of the Raj in The Rains Came is sometimes surprising, and sometimes quite conventional. On the whole, the film is relatively thin on offensive caricatures, and seems to lack any overt 'racial' theme. Many readers will be familiar with Hollywood stereotypes of India and eastern Asia, as found with everyone's favorite loin-cloth wearing sidekick, Sabu. It's an old mess: bad accents, servile postures, treachery, laughable mimicry, eye-popping religious devotion, and so on. (The only thing that saves old kitschy Sabu movies like The Thief of Baghdad is the Mexican bombshell Maria Montez, who happily hammed her way through a dozen 'Arabian princess' roles without ever modifying her thick Mexican accent!)
Oddly, both racism and kitch are mostly absent from The Rains Came. As mentioned above, Myrna Loy has an affair with a Native Doctor, Major Rana Safti (played by Nigel Bruce), and the cross-racial element goes almost without mention. Indeed, Bruce doesn't even attempt to approximate an Indian accent, nor is his make-up particularly 'dark'. He looks like a moderately tan Italian, and sounds like he's from Wyoming. When Loy first sees him at a dinner party, she describes him (to her husband, no less) as a "copper Adonis."
There is still an interesting charge associated with the romance, but not the kind of charge associated with breaking the racial taboo. Rather, it might be the other taboo Loy's character is violating -- she's married! To me, the treatment of their romance suggests that Hollywood is here not thinking of Major Rana Safti's brown skin as representing a meaningful racial divide, which is hard to fathom given that this was an era which was obsessed with such differences. (Think of the race-politics of Gone With The Wind, for example)
We might be able to interpret of the lack of controversy about The Rains Came as follows. First, keep in mind this was an era of strict racial divides in films with domestic settings (the ban on cross-racial romance in Hollywood was maintained at least up until Sidney Poitier and the 1960s; see this site for more details). Second, despite the ban there was still an intense (perhaps unconscious) interest in cross-racial themes amongst moviegoers, though audiences and censors would certainly have balked at any overt representation of white women and black American men. So one way to deal with the theme obliquely is to go 'Oriental': handsome white actors in gentle 'brown-face' rather than garish (and always disturbing) black-face, paired up with Hollywood's reigning starlets. To put it quite directly, white actors playing Indians (and perhaps Arabs and east Asians) are a kind of lighter substitute for African-Americans. Or we might say, with the adventure films of the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood simultaneously addresses and avoids its domestic race problem.
Well, it's a theory. The appeal of 'brown-face' is certainly not universal to Hollywood films dealing with India, from this era or the following ones. But it might also be in the air in the Ava Gardner film version of Bhowani Junction, in which Gardner plays a mixed-race Anglo-Indian who ditches her Anglo-Indian boyfriend, nearly marries a Punjabi Sikh, and then ends up falling in love with a full-blooded British soldier. All of her love interests in the film are played by white actors (in brown-face where appropriate). I've never actually seen the film, but I did read John Masters' novel a few years ago: as with Kipling's Kim, there is a sense that Gardner's character has to discover her true "whiteness," and eschew other possible racial destinies. In that sense, it's a little messier (meaning, more race-obsessed) than The Rains Came.
I'm curious to compare the 1939 film version of Bromfield's novel with the 1955 remake (The Rains of Ranchipur, with Lana Turner and Richard Burton). Do they make the racial barrier more of an issue, or keep all of that as is? Do they do more ethnic caricatures, or is that also kept to a minimum? Perhaps I'll report back once I've tracked these other films down.
* * *
One other point, on language.
Given that The Rains Came is almost completely skipping any attempt at authenticity or verisimilitude amongst the actors, it's still a bit shocking when some of the charaters start speaking in real (if slightly bowdlerized) Hindi at certain points in the film ("Bannerjee, mein jaldi vaapas aa jayega" "Sahib, mujhe nahin chayega"...). The sets are also pretty impressively desi; the latticework, moulding, and interior decoration is often pretty convincingly Mughal to my eye at least. A lot of effort clearly went into creating a visual sense of India, which is a surprise considering it's highly unlikely that anyone directly involved with the film actually went to India during the making of The Rains Came.
My guess is they got it from Bromfield's novel. Bromfield was an American writer who spent time in Paris and India in the 1920s, and wrote a series of novels set in those locales. There might well be a few phrases in Hindi in the book that the filmmakers picked up. Bromfield, incidentally, did write another novel about India, called Night in Bombay, though that was never made into a film. Bromfield -- yet another author to track down!
Relief Diplomacy: Politics and Propaganda in Kashmir
Pervez Hoodboy has a nice report and editorial about the Pakistan earthquake on the website Chowk.com. (It might be somewhere else too, but I haven't been able to find it). Hoodboy is a university professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, and he's been up to the affected regions with his students.
As sometimes happens with massive catastrophes like this one, there seems to be a spurt in national unity in the relief effort. Also, the U.S. Chinooks delivering relief have made an impact, even if only a dozen or so are currently being used. As Hoodboy notes:
Note the reference to the Edhi Trust. Sepoy has also been talking about this agency, and has even started his own aid drive on his blog.
Still, there is some questionable politicking occurring on the other propaganda front, which is India's attempt to build goodwill in Pakistan Controlled Kashmir/Azad Kashmir. India has done a number of things to try and help, including sending two consignments of relief goods to Lahore. They have also been allowing Pakistani helicopters to fly in the no-fly zone at the Line of Control. And further, private relief agencies in India have been authorized to send relief (this might not sound like much, but I believe it's unprecedented).
There was even some talk of Indian troops crossing the Line of Control to deliver aid, though I read elsewhere that Pakistan is denying it occurred. Moreover, according to Hoodboy (in the article linked to above), Indian relief workers who want to go to Pakistan to help will not be granted visas, whereas other foreign volunteers who want to come in will not need visas for the next few weeks. And the BBC has more reports of relief missteps and shenanigans here.
Still, it's clear that the Indian government, while sincerely trying to help, is also hoping to generate strategic goodwill amongst Kashmiris at a time when many of them are likely to be quite frustrated with the failings of their own government's mobilization. Will it have an impact on the broader political situation in Kashmir? We'll probably have to wait and see.
As sometimes happens with massive catastrophes like this one, there seems to be a spurt in national unity in the relief effort. Also, the U.S. Chinooks delivering relief have made an impact, even if only a dozen or so are currently being used. As Hoodboy notes:
There is good news. The Mansehra to Balakot road stretch, finally forced open by huge army bulldozers and earth moving machinery, is now open to relief trucks and goods donated across the country are piled to the truck roofs. If there ever was a time when the people of Pakistan moved together, this is it. Even the armed bandits who waylay relief supplies – to guard against whom soldiers with automatic weapons stand at alert every few hundred yards – cannot destroy the euphoria of having this solitary moment of unspoiled national unity.
The army’s presence is important and positive, but no senior officers appeared to be present. I heard criticism that soldiers did little to stop looting. The Edhi Trust was visible and effective.
Aid from across the world is making its way, and the United States is here too. Double bladed Chinook helicopters, diverted from fighting Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, weave their way through the mountains. They fly over the heartland of jihad and the militant training camps in Mansehra to drop food and tents a few miles beyond. Temporarily birds of peace instead of war, they do immensely more to soothe the highly Islamic, highly conservative, bearded mountain people than the reams of silly propaganda on glossy paper put out by the US information services in Pakistan.
Note the reference to the Edhi Trust. Sepoy has also been talking about this agency, and has even started his own aid drive on his blog.
Still, there is some questionable politicking occurring on the other propaganda front, which is India's attempt to build goodwill in Pakistan Controlled Kashmir/Azad Kashmir. India has done a number of things to try and help, including sending two consignments of relief goods to Lahore. They have also been allowing Pakistani helicopters to fly in the no-fly zone at the Line of Control. And further, private relief agencies in India have been authorized to send relief (this might not sound like much, but I believe it's unprecedented).
There was even some talk of Indian troops crossing the Line of Control to deliver aid, though I read elsewhere that Pakistan is denying it occurred. Moreover, according to Hoodboy (in the article linked to above), Indian relief workers who want to go to Pakistan to help will not be granted visas, whereas other foreign volunteers who want to come in will not need visas for the next few weeks. And the BBC has more reports of relief missteps and shenanigans here.
Still, it's clear that the Indian government, while sincerely trying to help, is also hoping to generate strategic goodwill amongst Kashmiris at a time when many of them are likely to be quite frustrated with the failings of their own government's mobilization. Will it have an impact on the broader political situation in Kashmir? We'll probably have to wait and see.
Slated
My little Harold Pinter post yesterday got me a mention in Slate.
If you're too lazy to click, here is the text:
If you're too lazy to click, here is the text:
Some bloggers are happily posting their favorite bits of Pinter's dialogue. Noting that "[Pinter's] stuff really comes alive when it's performed," Lehigh University professor Amardeep Singh suggests that newcomers should start with the movies for which Pinter wrote the screenplays.
Others are examining Pinter's politics. Under the headline "Nobel Academy slaps America," conservative Western Resistance claims,"[O]nce again, we see the subjugation of everything to the cause of oppossing mythical American Imperialism, and protecting very real Islamic Imperialism."
But some fans are irritated by news stories that foreground Pinter's opposition to the Iraq war. "I really don't think the Swedes looked at Dear Harold and decided to award him the highest honour in writing on the basis of his opposition to a war that almost every writer, artist, musician, actor, and soccer mom opposed with every fibre of his or her body. It's not like every other writer in the running was saying, 'F*** it, man. Tikrit has to go. Let's nuke the bitch from orbit and go to Denny's afterward.' Unless Hitchens was nominated this year," writes Canadian blogger Deep Fried Gold.
After the World (a poem against the rain)
At some point that night, the rocking stopped.
His bed was a boat on gray water, amid the sea.
He felt himself asleep, but truly he was not:
he was lost on water, with every tree and being
washed away. He was alone on the rocking, floating bed
(that should have sunk), clinging to shadowy memories
of wine, the evening, and company.
The light of the world could be remade, he thought,
on shore he could see the shadows of moving trees,
glowing dim after the deluge finally stopped.
But when in his weakness he let the rocking stop,
then he ceased aspiring to be.
He was in a bed, which was a boat, at sea.
This poem is "anti-inspired" inspired by Walt Whitman's Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking. Inspired by, but in some sense opposite...
His bed was a boat on gray water, amid the sea.
He felt himself asleep, but truly he was not:
he was lost on water, with every tree and being
washed away. He was alone on the rocking, floating bed
(that should have sunk), clinging to shadowy memories
of wine, the evening, and company.
The light of the world could be remade, he thought,
on shore he could see the shadows of moving trees,
glowing dim after the deluge finally stopped.
But when in his weakness he let the rocking stop,
then he ceased aspiring to be.
He was in a bed, which was a boat, at sea.
This poem is "anti-inspired" inspired by Walt Whitman's Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking. Inspired by, but in some sense opposite...
Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate
Congratulations to Harold Pinter on the Nobel Prize for Literature! Nicely done.
The last play of Pinter's I saw was The Lover, at Yale, in the summer of 2004. There is a review of it at Harold Pinter's web site, but it gives away an important secret.
My review would simply be: Harold Pinter's The Lover is a perfectly shaped and somewhat demonic play about marriage. It's challenging and psychologically disorienting, but still essentially realist in form.
(Photograph above by Chris Saunders)
Google Reader: RSS Heaven
Furthering my colonization by everything Google, I just discovered Google Reader, which you can use for any blog that has an RSS subscription.
Some initial observations:
--User Interface. It sure beats Bloglines for UI, which is by itself a huge advantage. Bloglines gets sort of annoying after awhile (I hate frames).
However, at this point Google Reader lacks some functionality. Two Bloglines functions I'll especially miss are the option to keep public lists on Bloglines, as well as the clips blog. (My subscription list and clips blog are here) Still, Google Reader is so much smoother that it's pretty likely that I'm going to go off Bloglines...
--Keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader are really cool. Really speeds up the blog-surf process.
--No BlogThis? I'm surprised Google hasn't incorporated a "Blog This" function into Google Reader (i.e., along the lines of the function in the Google Toolbar). Maybe that's coming, or maybe they just want to keep Google Reader and Blogger somewhat separate from one another.
--Search. The "search for new content" function is powerful (and quite fast), but it's sometimes a little wonky. If you do a search for "Maud Newton," you get a bunch of comments on things related to Maud Newton, but not Maud Newton's blog. I also noticed this with the Literary Saloon.
--Import function. It's pretty easy to import your Bloglines subscriptions: export your Bloglines subscriptions to an OPML file, then import the OPML into your Google Reader interface. It took a little while when I tried it, but it did work on the first try. (Om Malik says he had trouble with it)
(And yes, I might be one of just a handful of English professors on the planet who knows what an OPML file is...)
Some initial observations:
--User Interface. It sure beats Bloglines for UI, which is by itself a huge advantage. Bloglines gets sort of annoying after awhile (I hate frames).
However, at this point Google Reader lacks some functionality. Two Bloglines functions I'll especially miss are the option to keep public lists on Bloglines, as well as the clips blog. (My subscription list and clips blog are here) Still, Google Reader is so much smoother that it's pretty likely that I'm going to go off Bloglines...
--Keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader are really cool. Really speeds up the blog-surf process.
--No BlogThis? I'm surprised Google hasn't incorporated a "Blog This" function into Google Reader (i.e., along the lines of the function in the Google Toolbar). Maybe that's coming, or maybe they just want to keep Google Reader and Blogger somewhat separate from one another.
--Search. The "search for new content" function is powerful (and quite fast), but it's sometimes a little wonky. If you do a search for "Maud Newton," you get a bunch of comments on things related to Maud Newton, but not Maud Newton's blog. I also noticed this with the Literary Saloon.
--Import function. It's pretty easy to import your Bloglines subscriptions: export your Bloglines subscriptions to an OPML file, then import the OPML into your Google Reader interface. It took a little while when I tried it, but it did work on the first try. (Om Malik says he had trouble with it)
(And yes, I might be one of just a handful of English professors on the planet who knows what an OPML file is...)
The Right to Information; and a follow-up on Human Rights/Terrorism in Punjab
[Incidentally, I wanted to express my ongoing concern about the humanitarian situation in northeast Pakistan/Kashmir. I might suggest donating to the Oxfam Global Emergencies Fund. While there are sometimes doubts about the effectiveness of certain relief agencies, it is clear from things like this that Oxfam is playing an active part in the current relief efforts in Pakistan.]
The Indian Parliament recently passed a law guaranteeing citizens access to a broad array of information about both local and national government. The new law is designed to increase transparency and give citizens a tool to combat government corruption.
It's a heartening event, though it may not help in one of the areas where India has historically been weakest, and that is its criminal justice system. The lack of police accountability for its treatment of prisoners is an ongoing national disgrace. Moreover, the widespread use of torture (illegal under Indian law) severely weakens the government's credibility in fighting its internal terrorism problems.
Somewhat relatedly, the human rights group ENSAAF has recently released a report detailing human rights violations in the Punjab Police's arrests' of alleged Babbar Khalsa International members this past summer. Members of ENSAAF went around Punjab and interviewed family members of people (men and women) who were arrested, and came away with some pretty disturbing accounts of torture, indiscriminate arrests, and intimidation by Punjab police.
It's a compelling report, carefully written and documented, with lots of references (links) to media coverage of the recent arrests. (See the footnotes in the PDF file.) One article they cite that stands out to me is this piece from the Chandigarh Tribune on September 2:
This article directly supports the claim made by ENSAAF that the arrests this past summer were at times indiscriminate. It also raises the worrying question of the possible police fabrication of charges relating to RDX possession. If some people were charged with having possessed explosive material that they did not in fact have, could it be true in other cases?
On the other hand, the critical response to the investigations by the Punjab Chief Minister suggests there is beginning to be some limited element of accountability within the Punjab Police itself. The last sentence would be funny, if it weren't so serious: "They started investigations before registering cases..."
My one criticism is that the ENSAAF report, with its exclusive emphasis on human rights, does not really recognize the potential danger the guilty individuals might have posed to society. For instance, there is nothing in the ENSAAF report that makes me doubt the widespread sense that Jagtar Singh Hawara in particular is a hardened terrorist, who actively attempted to revive the BKI organization in India in the year. I see no reason to doubt his involvement in a murder of a Sikh granthi at the age of 15, his conspiring to assasinate the Punjab Chiefof Police Minister Beant Singh, his attempted assasination of Pari Singh Baniarewala, or his distribution of RDX, plastique, and weapons to a number of associates.
It could well be said in response that ENSAAF's mission is human rights, and it would be inappropriate to speculate on matters of jurisprudence. That may be true, and the need to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners remains pressing (both in India and in U.S. detention centers around the world). But a concern for human rights needs to be balanced by a concern for the greater common good, which in this case requires aggressively rooting out terrorist networks and capturing bomb-making material. I see no reason to doubt that these folks were in possession of enough material to kill many innocent people.
Finally, I should say that this post is a kind of addendum to my Sepia Mutiny post on Hawara and the Babbar Khalsa from the summer. While things look a little different now that some of the people in the summer's large-scale roundup have been released without being charged, I stand by my take on Hawara and the BKI.
The Indian Parliament recently passed a law guaranteeing citizens access to a broad array of information about both local and national government. The new law is designed to increase transparency and give citizens a tool to combat government corruption.
It's a heartening event, though it may not help in one of the areas where India has historically been weakest, and that is its criminal justice system. The lack of police accountability for its treatment of prisoners is an ongoing national disgrace. Moreover, the widespread use of torture (illegal under Indian law) severely weakens the government's credibility in fighting its internal terrorism problems.
Somewhat relatedly, the human rights group ENSAAF has recently released a report detailing human rights violations in the Punjab Police's arrests' of alleged Babbar Khalsa International members this past summer. Members of ENSAAF went around Punjab and interviewed family members of people (men and women) who were arrested, and came away with some pretty disturbing accounts of torture, indiscriminate arrests, and intimidation by Punjab police.
It's a compelling report, carefully written and documented, with lots of references (links) to media coverage of the recent arrests. (See the footnotes in the PDF file.) One article they cite that stands out to me is this piece from the Chandigarh Tribune on September 2:
Sixteen persons are to be excluded from the list of those who have been booked by the Punjab police for allegedly harbouring or helping terrorist Jagtar Singh Hawara. Sources in the Punjab police said 60 persons had been booked during the past three months after Hawara was nabbed by the Delhi police in Patiala in June.
The Punjab police had alleged that several persons were linked to Hawara’s network and rounded them up. RDX was recovered from some while others just happened to know Hawara. Some of those to be let off knew Hawara but had not helped him.
In the last week of July, the Punjab Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh, hauled up police officers for creating an unnecessary scare among people through hype regarding terrorist-related cases, "human bombs" and recoveries.
Recently, the police withdrew its case against Mrs Manjot Kaur in court allowing her to walk free. She had been booked for serious offences like possessing RDX. The police claimed she was arrested in Punjab. Her 10-year-old son claimed his mother was picked from their home in Sector 34 here. He had then called up the Chandigarh police control room in this connection.
The sources said the Chief Minister was aware that certain persons had been detained under the garb of "investigating cases against terrorists." He had cautioned police officers "not to harass and intimidate anybody." Following the dressing down from the Chief Minister, the SSPs were forced to change their investigating tactics. They started investigations before registering cases related to terrorist activity.
This article directly supports the claim made by ENSAAF that the arrests this past summer were at times indiscriminate. It also raises the worrying question of the possible police fabrication of charges relating to RDX possession. If some people were charged with having possessed explosive material that they did not in fact have, could it be true in other cases?
On the other hand, the critical response to the investigations by the Punjab Chief Minister suggests there is beginning to be some limited element of accountability within the Punjab Police itself. The last sentence would be funny, if it weren't so serious: "They started investigations before registering cases..."
My one criticism is that the ENSAAF report, with its exclusive emphasis on human rights, does not really recognize the potential danger the guilty individuals might have posed to society. For instance, there is nothing in the ENSAAF report that makes me doubt the widespread sense that Jagtar Singh Hawara in particular is a hardened terrorist, who actively attempted to revive the BKI organization in India in the year. I see no reason to doubt his involvement in a murder of a Sikh granthi at the age of 15, his conspiring to assasinate the Punjab Chief
It could well be said in response that ENSAAF's mission is human rights, and it would be inappropriate to speculate on matters of jurisprudence. That may be true, and the need to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners remains pressing (both in India and in U.S. detention centers around the world). But a concern for human rights needs to be balanced by a concern for the greater common good, which in this case requires aggressively rooting out terrorist networks and capturing bomb-making material. I see no reason to doubt that these folks were in possession of enough material to kill many innocent people.
Finally, I should say that this post is a kind of addendum to my Sepia Mutiny post on Hawara and the Babbar Khalsa from the summer. While things look a little different now that some of the people in the summer's large-scale roundup have been released without being charged, I stand by my take on Hawara and the BKI.
Rumpelstiltskin and the Realm of Fiction
I want to thank Ray Davis for picking up on my Toy/Story idea from a couple of months ago. Following his recent post on The Valve, I went and read Hans Christian Anderson's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" (which was nasty but damn good, I thought). My own earlier reading of Toy Story was driven by the story's Fairy Tale qualities, so here is another literary reading of a fairy tale, only a little less heavy on "theory" this time around.
* * *
Everyone knows the story of Rumpelstiltskin, yes? If you're hazy, here's a nano-summary of the standard, Brothers Grimm version:
(And here is the Grimm version in translation, more or less intact; scroll down links to the German)
This story, to state the obvious, is about the power of a secret name, the knowledge of which gives you have essentially infinite power over your enemy. If we look a little deeper, though, we notice that it's not one but two secrets, which are paired but asymmetrical: the peasant girl/princess learns the secret of making gold, while the gnome (I prefer "gnome" over "manikin") holds the secret of his name, until he stupidly gives it away. The secret she's interested in is linked to the value of labor, whereas the secret the gnome keeps to himself is in language. Lingua-philes and Derrida fans should find this story to be congenial: the power of language trumps the material and labor-oriented power of the spinning-wheel.
Also congenial: in fairy tales, the editors of the Norton The Great Fairy Tale Tradition tell us, gnomes are usually assigned names that are never given to humans. That might seem small, but there's a lot in it, if you consider that 1) the names inevitably expose a gnome's gnomy-ness, and that 2) human beings can always learn, and utter, a gnome's name. The gnome is a terrifying Other -- defined by his often irrational (or non-selfish) malevolence. But he can always be beaten in language.
Back to Rumpelstiltskin. A little digging reveals much, much more behind the basic story. For one thing, there are dozens of versions of this tale outside of the German tradition. In England, Scotland, and Wales, the gnome was alternately known as Trit-a-Trot, Terrytip, Whuppity Stoorie, and Tom Tit-Tot. Of the batch, none of them have quite the same ring as Rumpelstiltskin, though "Whuppity Stoorie" is pretty memorable. "Rumpelstiltskin" works so well in English because it seems to conjoin three existing English words: "rumple," "stilts," and "kin," making it relatively easy to pronounce -- but still utterly anomalous. (And no, I can't make anything meaningful of the combination of these particular three; I tend to think "Rumpelstiltskin" is a purely phonetic pleasure, that happens to derive from the German "Rumpelstiltzchen.")
Most importantly for my purposes, there is a very juicy French version of "Rumpelstiltskin". Here, his name is Ricdin-Ricdon, and the same Norton Great Fairly Tale Tradition volume mentioned above includes a long version of the story, by Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier. It was first published in 1696 (well before both the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson), in a volume of stories called Ouvres meslées.
"Ricdin-Ricdon" unlocks many of the elements of the Brothers Grimm Rumpelstiltskin narrative that seem a bit pat. First, the power granted to the peasant girl Rosanie by Ricdin-Ricdon is attached to a magic wand that enables her to spin raw flax and hemp into fine yarn without effort, and also, at a second wave, to weave the yarn into fabulous and intricate tapestries. It's not gold, but fine fabric, that is her ticket to the Queen's (in this case) good graces. This tells you something about the role of fabric and weaving in Europe's history: it was potentially a powerful tool for social advancement, and central to social positioning in a way that might seem quite strange today. What you wore literally and immediately revealed your social caste.
There are also a number of other features in "Ricdin-Ricdon" that are quite different (and better) than "Rumpelstiltskin." Short of actually giving you the story to read, it's difficult to explain it, so let me try a list:
--Labor. It's not just that Rosanie's poor. She's also clearly marked by Lhéritier as lazy; she knows how to weave well, but doesn't want to work. She could in theory satisfy the Queen's demands for fabric, but she would have to weave night and day to do it.
Also, the good King and Queen who take Rosanie under their wing are known as prudent and productive rulers (I think this was published in during the time of Louis XIV, so perhaps there is a bit of court flattery going on). Lhéritier underscores monarchical goodness by naming them "King Prud'homme" and "Queen Laborieuse," respectively. They admire Rosanie partly for her beauty, but really because of her reputation as a weaver (which is, as we know, based on an illusion).
--No confusing motherhood angle. When she's adopted by the Queen, she doesn't get to marry the Prince right away. In the Grimm version she has a child that Rumpelstiltskin threatens to steal, which doesn't quite fit the social advancement/wealth acquisition theme of the story. Here the Prince is in love with Rosanie, but the class barrier makes any thought of a marriage impossible, that is, until it's revealed at the end of the story that Rosanie is actually of royal birth from another kingdom. Then a marriage can be properly arranged by the two royal families. (It's only via an arranged marriage that the couple will really get to do the all-expenses paid, "happily ever after" honeymoon.)
--Storytelling reflexivity. Rosanie's real parents are named "Lord Longuevue" and "Queen Riant-image," and her father-figure guardian (who had seemingly abandoned her earlier in her life without telling her the secret of her birth) is named "Disantpeu." They are -- I'm not making this up -- the Rulers of the "Realm of Fiction."
The parallels between storytelling and weaving are pretty obvious -- one weaves a yarn, etc. -- but in the case of "Ricdin-Ricdon" they are doubled and even tripled. Much of the structure of this story is actually narrated indirectly, as characters recount events to each other (much of Rosanie's own story is narrated in dialogue to Ricdin-Ricdon). After hearing of Rosanie's woes, Ricdin-Ricdon offers her his wand, and actually tells her his name.
And literacy and writing plays a part in this. It's only after she's ensconced in the court of Queen Laborieuse that Rosanie starts to learn to read but, as with weaving, she finds to be a bit too hard to make it a habit. Still, she uses the tool when she's struggling to remember Ricdin-Ricdon's name:
Writing is, historically, the essential tool for remembering language, though usually one uses something previously written as an aid to memory. It send Rosanie down the right track, but she hasn't quite mastered it. (When she does, Lhéritier hints, she will be able to expose every Gnome who comes her way with the light of her Logos.)
There's a whole essay on Of Grammatology lurking here, but I'll save it (and I'm sure you'll thank me).
--Ricdin-Ricdon's interiority. In this version, the gnome actually has a motive of a kind, which is revealed in the scene at the end where gives his name away. The song tells you part of the story:
The editors of the Norton volume suggest that "spinner" folktales like Rumpelstiltskin/Ricdin-Ricdon might have been told by groups of women weavers working together. This is one moment where that really seems to click: there is a distinctly feminist warning here -- to women who don't know how to earn your keep, or who aren't smart enough to look after yourselves, watch out!
He follows it up with a rant about, well, the Courtly Gaze:
The grammar here is a little tricky. Keep in mind that the Prince is overhearing Ricdin-Ricdon talking to an evil sorceress (who I haven't mentioned... there is a whole 'mirror' plot where sorceress attempts to trick the Prince...).
The first part of the passage above seems to be straightforward enough: this is how you trick men, and that is how you trick women. But even as Ricdin-Ricon explains his method, in the final sentence of the passage quote above he hints that it's not just gnomes and sorceresses who play the game of ensnarement: it's inherent in the fabric of (non-supernatural) human desire and attraction. And I think that Ricdin-Ricdon is suggesting that it goes both ways.
* * *
So, yeah, go read "Ricdin-Ricdon," if you can get hold of a copy. (I didn't see any versions of the Lhéritier story on the internet, but I didn't try very hard. If anyone can track down a link, it would be appreciated.)
But more than that, I'm curious to see if people have ideas about other classic fairy tales that they want to revisit. Everyone has probably considered (and hopefully rejected) the deep sexism of something like Snow White (women as pure/virginal pedestalized 'statues' until released by the desire of men). But maybe there are other tricks in these old stories that might take us in fresh directions.
[Cross-posted to The Valve]
* * *
Everyone knows the story of Rumpelstiltskin, yes? If you're hazy, here's a nano-summary of the standard, Brothers Grimm version:
1. Peasant girl; her dad promises the King she'll weave straw into gold, leaving her stuck. 2. Troll/Gnome/Manikin/demon feller sells her the secret but requires that she learn his secret name. 3. She does ("Rumpelstiltskin"), and wins.
(And here is the Grimm version in translation, more or less intact; scroll down links to the German)
This story, to state the obvious, is about the power of a secret name, the knowledge of which gives you have essentially infinite power over your enemy. If we look a little deeper, though, we notice that it's not one but two secrets, which are paired but asymmetrical: the peasant girl/princess learns the secret of making gold, while the gnome (I prefer "gnome" over "manikin") holds the secret of his name, until he stupidly gives it away. The secret she's interested in is linked to the value of labor, whereas the secret the gnome keeps to himself is in language. Lingua-philes and Derrida fans should find this story to be congenial: the power of language trumps the material and labor-oriented power of the spinning-wheel.
Also congenial: in fairy tales, the editors of the Norton The Great Fairy Tale Tradition tell us, gnomes are usually assigned names that are never given to humans. That might seem small, but there's a lot in it, if you consider that 1) the names inevitably expose a gnome's gnomy-ness, and that 2) human beings can always learn, and utter, a gnome's name. The gnome is a terrifying Other -- defined by his often irrational (or non-selfish) malevolence. But he can always be beaten in language.
Back to Rumpelstiltskin. A little digging reveals much, much more behind the basic story. For one thing, there are dozens of versions of this tale outside of the German tradition. In England, Scotland, and Wales, the gnome was alternately known as Trit-a-Trot, Terrytip, Whuppity Stoorie, and Tom Tit-Tot. Of the batch, none of them have quite the same ring as Rumpelstiltskin, though "Whuppity Stoorie" is pretty memorable. "Rumpelstiltskin" works so well in English because it seems to conjoin three existing English words: "rumple," "stilts," and "kin," making it relatively easy to pronounce -- but still utterly anomalous. (And no, I can't make anything meaningful of the combination of these particular three; I tend to think "Rumpelstiltskin" is a purely phonetic pleasure, that happens to derive from the German "Rumpelstiltzchen.")
Most importantly for my purposes, there is a very juicy French version of "Rumpelstiltskin". Here, his name is Ricdin-Ricdon, and the same Norton Great Fairly Tale Tradition volume mentioned above includes a long version of the story, by Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier. It was first published in 1696 (well before both the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson), in a volume of stories called Ouvres meslées.
"Ricdin-Ricdon" unlocks many of the elements of the Brothers Grimm Rumpelstiltskin narrative that seem a bit pat. First, the power granted to the peasant girl Rosanie by Ricdin-Ricdon is attached to a magic wand that enables her to spin raw flax and hemp into fine yarn without effort, and also, at a second wave, to weave the yarn into fabulous and intricate tapestries. It's not gold, but fine fabric, that is her ticket to the Queen's (in this case) good graces. This tells you something about the role of fabric and weaving in Europe's history: it was potentially a powerful tool for social advancement, and central to social positioning in a way that might seem quite strange today. What you wore literally and immediately revealed your social caste.
There are also a number of other features in "Ricdin-Ricdon" that are quite different (and better) than "Rumpelstiltskin." Short of actually giving you the story to read, it's difficult to explain it, so let me try a list:
--Labor. It's not just that Rosanie's poor. She's also clearly marked by Lhéritier as lazy; she knows how to weave well, but doesn't want to work. She could in theory satisfy the Queen's demands for fabric, but she would have to weave night and day to do it.
Also, the good King and Queen who take Rosanie under their wing are known as prudent and productive rulers (I think this was published in during the time of Louis XIV, so perhaps there is a bit of court flattery going on). Lhéritier underscores monarchical goodness by naming them "King Prud'homme" and "Queen Laborieuse," respectively. They admire Rosanie partly for her beauty, but really because of her reputation as a weaver (which is, as we know, based on an illusion).
--No confusing motherhood angle. When she's adopted by the Queen, she doesn't get to marry the Prince right away. In the Grimm version she has a child that Rumpelstiltskin threatens to steal, which doesn't quite fit the social advancement/wealth acquisition theme of the story. Here the Prince is in love with Rosanie, but the class barrier makes any thought of a marriage impossible, that is, until it's revealed at the end of the story that Rosanie is actually of royal birth from another kingdom. Then a marriage can be properly arranged by the two royal families. (It's only via an arranged marriage that the couple will really get to do the all-expenses paid, "happily ever after" honeymoon.)
--Storytelling reflexivity. Rosanie's real parents are named "Lord Longuevue" and "Queen Riant-image," and her father-figure guardian (who had seemingly abandoned her earlier in her life without telling her the secret of her birth) is named "Disantpeu." They are -- I'm not making this up -- the Rulers of the "Realm of Fiction."
The parallels between storytelling and weaving are pretty obvious -- one weaves a yarn, etc. -- but in the case of "Ricdin-Ricdon" they are doubled and even tripled. Much of the structure of this story is actually narrated indirectly, as characters recount events to each other (much of Rosanie's own story is narrated in dialogue to Ricdin-Ricdon). After hearing of Rosanie's woes, Ricdin-Ricdon offers her his wand, and actually tells her his name.
And literacy and writing plays a part in this. It's only after she's ensconced in the court of Queen Laborieuse that Rosanie starts to learn to read but, as with weaving, she finds to be a bit too hard to make it a habit. Still, she uses the tool when she's struggling to remember Ricdin-Ricdon's name:
Even though Rosanie still had difficulty in forming the letters of the alphabet, she wanted to see whether these letters could help her recall the name she passionately sought. She went through great pain and applied herself as best she could until she wrote down Racdon, then Ricordon, and finally Ringaudon. In some instances, she was on the verge of joy because she thought she was about to find the name. But then she would fall into despair, convinced that the names her memory recalled were nowhere near the right and proper name.
Writing is, historically, the essential tool for remembering language, though usually one uses something previously written as an aid to memory. It send Rosanie down the right track, but she hasn't quite mastered it. (When she does, Lhéritier hints, she will be able to expose every Gnome who comes her way with the light of her Logos.)
There's a whole essay on Of Grammatology lurking here, but I'll save it (and I'm sure you'll thank me).
--Ricdin-Ricdon's interiority. In this version, the gnome actually has a motive of a kind, which is revealed in the scene at the end where gives his name away. The song tells you part of the story:
If a young and tender female,
Loving only childish pleasures,
Had fixed it in her mind
That my name is Ricdin-Ricdon,
She would not fall into my trap.
But the beautiful lass will soon be mine,
For my name has slipped her mind.
The editors of the Norton volume suggest that "spinner" folktales like Rumpelstiltskin/Ricdin-Ricdon might have been told by groups of women weavers working together. This is one moment where that really seems to click: there is a distinctly feminist warning here -- to women who don't know how to earn your keep, or who aren't smart enough to look after yourselves, watch out!
He follows it up with a rant about, well, the Courtly Gaze:
"Since men are educated and more cultivated than women, we ordinarily have more trouble in seducing them than we have in duping the gullible sex unless we make use of this sex to get men to fall into our traps. On the other hand, men often cause women to fall into our snares. I myself have acquired more young girls by exploiting their desire to appear beautiful and to groom themselves than twenty of my comrades who have tried one hundred other means to capture them. And this powerful passion that makes them want to acquire beauty and elegance with such fury stems from their boundless desire to captivate men."
The grammar here is a little tricky. Keep in mind that the Prince is overhearing Ricdin-Ricdon talking to an evil sorceress (who I haven't mentioned... there is a whole 'mirror' plot where sorceress attempts to trick the Prince...).
The first part of the passage above seems to be straightforward enough: this is how you trick men, and that is how you trick women. But even as Ricdin-Ricon explains his method, in the final sentence of the passage quote above he hints that it's not just gnomes and sorceresses who play the game of ensnarement: it's inherent in the fabric of (non-supernatural) human desire and attraction. And I think that Ricdin-Ricdon is suggesting that it goes both ways.
* * *
So, yeah, go read "Ricdin-Ricdon," if you can get hold of a copy. (I didn't see any versions of the Lhéritier story on the internet, but I didn't try very hard. If anyone can track down a link, it would be appreciated.)
But more than that, I'm curious to see if people have ideas about other classic fairy tales that they want to revisit. Everyone has probably considered (and hopefully rejected) the deep sexism of something like Snow White (women as pure/virginal pedestalized 'statues' until released by the desire of men). But maybe there are other tricks in these old stories that might take us in fresh directions.
[Cross-posted to The Valve]
Some Notes on the Conference on South Asia 2005
I missed the two keynote addresses, and I missed most of the first day of papers as well as the two ‘pre-conference’ meetings held on Thursday. But I still saw a lot of interesting papers.
[Note: I'm going to be a bit circumspect in describing the talks I saw. For one thing, work presented in a talk, while ‘public,’ is often still in progress. And I wouldn’t want to give anyone’s major conclusions away if they haven’t been published. Incidentally, abstracts from the conference are available as a PDF here. Still, it might be interesting to some readers to see a thin slice of the work South Asian Area Studies scholars are doing these days...]
* * *
Let's start with the ‘Delhi’ panel on Saturday, with Vasudha Dalmia, Lawrence Cohen, Rashmi Sadana, and Veena Das. Given all the attention given to Bombay recently, it seems apropos to think about urbanism in ‘swinging’ Delhi. Of the four papers, Dalmia’s and Cohen’s really seemed to focus in on urbanism and cosmopolitanism. The other two papers were ‘set’ in Delhi, but had other concerns.
Vasudha Dalmia spoke about a Hindi novel by Krishna Sobti called Samay Sargam (2000). Given Delhi's turn to suburbanization in the past 15-20 years, there is a special value attached to some of the gardens in ‘old-New Delhi’; these are the setting of many of the events in the novel. (A review of the novel is here).
Rashmi Sadana spoke about the debates over translation, focusing specifically on the Hindi and Bengali translations of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Apparently, the Hindi translator of the novel, Gopal Gandhi, excised a number of sections dealing with Chamar (low-caste) leather-workers, which he thought might offend his ‘vegetarian’ (read: high caste) Hindi readers. But Seth praised the translation nevertheless (the characters in Seth’s novel are understood to be Hindi speakers, though Seth renders their voices in English).
Lawrence Cohen spoke about some of the recent multimedia-triggered scandals that have rocked the Indian media recently. His primary concern was with the murder of two gay men in a posh south Delhi apartment last summer: Pushkin Chandra and Kuldeep. In the Indian media, the double-murder prompted some discussion of why it might be time to finally try and decriminalize homosexuality in India (Cohen didn't address this issue). But it also provoked a rather offensive and troubling column by Sapan Dasgupta ("The Problem Is Not Homosexuality")>
Along the way, Cohen also alluded to other media scandals, including the MMS sex-video scandal involving two Delhi students, as well as the Tehelka videotaping of BJP officials discussing their flagrant bribes of Zaheera, the chief survivor/witness in the Best Bakery case coming out of the Gujurat riots of 2002.
Veena Das's paper was the product of fresh interviews she and a team of researchers have been doing with working-class Delhi women on their relationship to sexuality. She's making a kind of rejoinder to the psychoanalytic generalizations of Sudhir Kakar, but it sounded to me that the work might be in an early stage.
* * *
Kumkum Sangari’s paper was on Gandhi’s later writings, where he seemed to be going in a new direction philosophically. Written just before his death (and with the tragedy of the Partition fresh in mind), he came to accept a number of propositions that he had earlier rejected -– including the need for separation of "religion" from "culture" (and possibly, by extension, of church and state). (I tried to Google some of the writings from 1947-1948 that Sangari mentioned, but couldn't find reference to them on the internet)
On the same panel, Abha Sur spoke about Meghnad Saha, a famous astrophysicist from Presidency College, Calcutta. Saha is especially notable because he was from a lower caste at a time when most scholars at elite institutions like Presidency College were from higher caste backgrounds. Sur sees an alignment between Saha’s use of social metaphors in his scientific writing with his critique of caste hierarchies at the College.
As an aside (this was not in Sur's talk), Presidency College in general seems to be an important site for many Indian social scientists and humanists in American universities. Many famous people -– including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -- went there. And while Presidency College is not quite as central as it once was to intellectual life in India, it’s still surprising how many of the people one meets at the Madison conference are Presidency College graduates. (Also worth noting that quite a high proportion of their graduates end up in the U.S. and U.K.)
* * *
My co-panelist Arnab Chakladar gave a detailed paper on two Shashi Deshpande novels, That Long Silence and A Matter of Time. The part that caught my eye was the connection Arnab made between the emphasis on women and property in Deshpande’s novel and the vexed relationship that women have historically had to property – where their rights of inheritance are still not quite equal to men. This is even after the reforms instituted by the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. Things might be finally equalized with the Amended act (see this).
* * *
My friend Monika Mehta gave a talk in a bollywood-oriented panel on the Indian government’s role in sponsoring the ‘family films’ of the 1990s. One thing I didn’t know was that films considered especially wholesome are sometimes exempted from the ‘Entertainment Tax’ that applies to most commercial films released in India. (I knew that patriotic and war films are exempt from the tax, but I hadn’t known about the ‘wholesomeness’ exemption). DDLJ is an example of a 1990s film that was exempted from the Entertainment tax.
Anupama Kapse also gave a very interesting talk on the same panel, on the transformation of melodrama in the 1940s. The authors of The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema have considered melodrama to be a genre quite separate from early silent film genres like the ‘mythological’ and the ‘historical’. But Kapse shows otherwise (and again, I won’t say too much about her argument here). Her two examples were a 1939 film called Aadmi (directed by V. Shantaram) and a 1950 film called Aurat (which was the original model for Nargis’ Mother India). I found the clip from Aadmi to be pretty brilliant -– a self-reflexive satire of the melodrama genre.
* * *
I attended part of a Sikh studies panel, and was favorably impressed by papers by Sunit Singh and Arvind Mandair. Sunit Singh is working on an essay by Bhai Khan Singh Nabla called "Hum Hindu Nahin" (We Are Not Hindus). Though earlier scholars in Sikh studies had situated this text as a response to certain court cases involving the British colonial administration's understanding of the relationship between the Sikh and Hindu communities, one of Sunit Singh's goals is to see the essay as more autonomous and theological. In other words, it's part of a conversation occurring amongst the different religious communities of India; the attempt to sort out the meaning of Sikh identity is not necessarily determined by the policies of the Raj.
Hum Hindu Nahin is probably not an easy text to track down, but it looks like some folks on the internet have been doing a bit of translating on their own: here, and here. The pages translated are messy and the English is non-grammatical, but you can sort of get an idea.
And Arvind Mandair had some interesting insights on the theological work of Bhai Vir Singh. It’s quite a bit more sophisticated than one might imagine, and very non-Indic in many ways: in at least some of his tracts, Vir Singh's approach to philosophy seems to have been ‘onto-theological’ -- in the vein of Pascal, rather than the Singh Sabha movement (or Bhakti, for that matter). Certainly there isn’t anything even remotely similar to it in the Sikh tradition.
* * *
My own paper on the new creative nonfiction genre in Indian writing in English seemed to be received pretty well, even though it’s at a relatively early phase of development. Most of what I was talking about related to defining the genre of Maximum City, but I argued that Arundhati Roy’s literary/political essays as well as Amitava Kumar’s three genre-crossing books are part of what might be a new form of Indian writing.
* * *
As Sepoy mentions, our conference coincided with the annual meeting of the World Dairy Expo. Fittingly, on the first leg of the flight home, I found myself sitting next to a chatty woman who is a family dairy farmer from Vermont, and who was only too happy to school me on the ins and outs of American dairy farming. (For instance, did you know they get up at 2:30 in the morning to milk the cows?) I expected some complaints about big farms and agribusiness, but actually, her biggest complaints were about the 'hippie-types' in the Organic dairy movement. As this farmer (who runs a modern-type family farm) describes it, the whole organic dairy thing is kind of a sham...
[Note: I'm going to be a bit circumspect in describing the talks I saw. For one thing, work presented in a talk, while ‘public,’ is often still in progress. And I wouldn’t want to give anyone’s major conclusions away if they haven’t been published. Incidentally, abstracts from the conference are available as a PDF here. Still, it might be interesting to some readers to see a thin slice of the work South Asian Area Studies scholars are doing these days...]
* * *
Let's start with the ‘Delhi’ panel on Saturday, with Vasudha Dalmia, Lawrence Cohen, Rashmi Sadana, and Veena Das. Given all the attention given to Bombay recently, it seems apropos to think about urbanism in ‘swinging’ Delhi. Of the four papers, Dalmia’s and Cohen’s really seemed to focus in on urbanism and cosmopolitanism. The other two papers were ‘set’ in Delhi, but had other concerns.
Vasudha Dalmia spoke about a Hindi novel by Krishna Sobti called Samay Sargam (2000). Given Delhi's turn to suburbanization in the past 15-20 years, there is a special value attached to some of the gardens in ‘old-New Delhi’; these are the setting of many of the events in the novel. (A review of the novel is here).
Rashmi Sadana spoke about the debates over translation, focusing specifically on the Hindi and Bengali translations of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Apparently, the Hindi translator of the novel, Gopal Gandhi, excised a number of sections dealing with Chamar (low-caste) leather-workers, which he thought might offend his ‘vegetarian’ (read: high caste) Hindi readers. But Seth praised the translation nevertheless (the characters in Seth’s novel are understood to be Hindi speakers, though Seth renders their voices in English).
Lawrence Cohen spoke about some of the recent multimedia-triggered scandals that have rocked the Indian media recently. His primary concern was with the murder of two gay men in a posh south Delhi apartment last summer: Pushkin Chandra and Kuldeep. In the Indian media, the double-murder prompted some discussion of why it might be time to finally try and decriminalize homosexuality in India (Cohen didn't address this issue). But it also provoked a rather offensive and troubling column by Sapan Dasgupta ("The Problem Is Not Homosexuality")>
Along the way, Cohen also alluded to other media scandals, including the MMS sex-video scandal involving two Delhi students, as well as the Tehelka videotaping of BJP officials discussing their flagrant bribes of Zaheera, the chief survivor/witness in the Best Bakery case coming out of the Gujurat riots of 2002.
Veena Das's paper was the product of fresh interviews she and a team of researchers have been doing with working-class Delhi women on their relationship to sexuality. She's making a kind of rejoinder to the psychoanalytic generalizations of Sudhir Kakar, but it sounded to me that the work might be in an early stage.
* * *
Kumkum Sangari’s paper was on Gandhi’s later writings, where he seemed to be going in a new direction philosophically. Written just before his death (and with the tragedy of the Partition fresh in mind), he came to accept a number of propositions that he had earlier rejected -– including the need for separation of "religion" from "culture" (and possibly, by extension, of church and state). (I tried to Google some of the writings from 1947-1948 that Sangari mentioned, but couldn't find reference to them on the internet)
On the same panel, Abha Sur spoke about Meghnad Saha, a famous astrophysicist from Presidency College, Calcutta. Saha is especially notable because he was from a lower caste at a time when most scholars at elite institutions like Presidency College were from higher caste backgrounds. Sur sees an alignment between Saha’s use of social metaphors in his scientific writing with his critique of caste hierarchies at the College.
As an aside (this was not in Sur's talk), Presidency College in general seems to be an important site for many Indian social scientists and humanists in American universities. Many famous people -– including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -- went there. And while Presidency College is not quite as central as it once was to intellectual life in India, it’s still surprising how many of the people one meets at the Madison conference are Presidency College graduates. (Also worth noting that quite a high proportion of their graduates end up in the U.S. and U.K.)
* * *
My co-panelist Arnab Chakladar gave a detailed paper on two Shashi Deshpande novels, That Long Silence and A Matter of Time. The part that caught my eye was the connection Arnab made between the emphasis on women and property in Deshpande’s novel and the vexed relationship that women have historically had to property – where their rights of inheritance are still not quite equal to men. This is even after the reforms instituted by the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. Things might be finally equalized with the Amended act (see this).
* * *
My friend Monika Mehta gave a talk in a bollywood-oriented panel on the Indian government’s role in sponsoring the ‘family films’ of the 1990s. One thing I didn’t know was that films considered especially wholesome are sometimes exempted from the ‘Entertainment Tax’ that applies to most commercial films released in India. (I knew that patriotic and war films are exempt from the tax, but I hadn’t known about the ‘wholesomeness’ exemption). DDLJ is an example of a 1990s film that was exempted from the Entertainment tax.
Anupama Kapse also gave a very interesting talk on the same panel, on the transformation of melodrama in the 1940s. The authors of The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema have considered melodrama to be a genre quite separate from early silent film genres like the ‘mythological’ and the ‘historical’. But Kapse shows otherwise (and again, I won’t say too much about her argument here). Her two examples were a 1939 film called Aadmi (directed by V. Shantaram) and a 1950 film called Aurat (which was the original model for Nargis’ Mother India). I found the clip from Aadmi to be pretty brilliant -– a self-reflexive satire of the melodrama genre.
* * *
I attended part of a Sikh studies panel, and was favorably impressed by papers by Sunit Singh and Arvind Mandair. Sunit Singh is working on an essay by Bhai Khan Singh Nabla called "Hum Hindu Nahin" (We Are Not Hindus). Though earlier scholars in Sikh studies had situated this text as a response to certain court cases involving the British colonial administration's understanding of the relationship between the Sikh and Hindu communities, one of Sunit Singh's goals is to see the essay as more autonomous and theological. In other words, it's part of a conversation occurring amongst the different religious communities of India; the attempt to sort out the meaning of Sikh identity is not necessarily determined by the policies of the Raj.
Hum Hindu Nahin is probably not an easy text to track down, but it looks like some folks on the internet have been doing a bit of translating on their own: here, and here. The pages translated are messy and the English is non-grammatical, but you can sort of get an idea.
And Arvind Mandair had some interesting insights on the theological work of Bhai Vir Singh. It’s quite a bit more sophisticated than one might imagine, and very non-Indic in many ways: in at least some of his tracts, Vir Singh's approach to philosophy seems to have been ‘onto-theological’ -- in the vein of Pascal, rather than the Singh Sabha movement (or Bhakti, for that matter). Certainly there isn’t anything even remotely similar to it in the Sikh tradition.
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My own paper on the new creative nonfiction genre in Indian writing in English seemed to be received pretty well, even though it’s at a relatively early phase of development. Most of what I was talking about related to defining the genre of Maximum City, but I argued that Arundhati Roy’s literary/political essays as well as Amitava Kumar’s three genre-crossing books are part of what might be a new form of Indian writing.
* * *
As Sepoy mentions, our conference coincided with the annual meeting of the World Dairy Expo. Fittingly, on the first leg of the flight home, I found myself sitting next to a chatty woman who is a family dairy farmer from Vermont, and who was only too happy to school me on the ins and outs of American dairy farming. (For instance, did you know they get up at 2:30 in the morning to milk the cows?) I expected some complaints about big farms and agribusiness, but actually, her biggest complaints were about the 'hippie-types' in the Organic dairy movement. As this farmer (who runs a modern-type family farm) describes it, the whole organic dairy thing is kind of a sham...
Huge Earthquake in Pakistan
I've been following the eyewitness testimonies at BBC -- people have written from all over northern Pakistan to describe the quake. There are also folks there from Delhi and Chandigarh who say they felt severe shaking. (A guy in Gurgaon, near Delhi, says his 21-story office building developed large cracks after the quake. If that's happening in Delhi, it makes me shudder to think of what must have happened in Islamabad...)
This seems to be the worst earthquake in South Asia since quake in Gujurat in January 2001.
This seems to be the worst earthquake in South Asia since quake in Gujurat in January 2001.
Off to Madison
I'm leaving for a conference in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow. It's this conference, and I'm on at this ungodly hour.
Highlights from the program might include Kumkum Sangari, Veena Das, and Vivek Bald (the documentary filmmaker behind Mutiny).
Also, I should get to meet Sepoy. That should be fun.
If the conference is fun, you won't hear anything from this site until Monday. If it's a drag, I may just sneak off to blog... (I know, the suspense is killing you.)
Highlights from the program might include Kumkum Sangari, Veena Das, and Vivek Bald (the documentary filmmaker behind Mutiny).
Also, I should get to meet Sepoy. That should be fun.
If the conference is fun, you won't hear anything from this site until Monday. If it's a drag, I may just sneak off to blog... (I know, the suspense is killing you.)
The Paisley Politicos of New York: Suketu Mehta
Suketu Mehta's latest, in the New York Times Magazine. It's primarily a profile of a Desi politico in New York named Alex Martins.
He's interested in Martins because he's made it his business to develop contacts in high places in city government, while traditionally South Asian immigrants in New York have been quite slow to enter politics. Here is what might be the thesis paragraph of Mehta's article:
And there was one other bit that caught my eye:
I hadn't thought about the New Orleans taxi drivers. Has anyone seen NO taxis operating in New York lately?
He's interested in Martins because he's made it his business to develop contacts in high places in city government, while traditionally South Asian immigrants in New York have been quite slow to enter politics. Here is what might be the thesis paragraph of Mehta's article:
Historically, every immigrant group that has come to New York has relied on people like Martins: a man of connections, a man you call when your son is caught shoplifting or your cousin needs a visa or your nephew needs a city job. He is not a politician -- not yet, at least -- but he is a political creature. He is the representative who helps new immigrants reach their elected representatives.
For the politicians whom Martins deals with, the benefits of helping a new immigrant are often not immediately apparent, because most of the immigrants are not citizens and can't vote. But some of these immigrants have money, and many of them will, eventually, become citizens and remember who came to their assistance when they were new to the country. The politicians are also keenly aware that New York's demographics are changing. This year, for the first time in history, non-Hispanic whites make up a minority of the city's voters. Which means that every New York politician seeking citywide office now has to form a coalition: no one can win on the basis of appealing to a single voting bloc, whether it's whites, blacks or Hispanics. Politicians will need the support of the Jains, the Catholics from Goa, the Sikhs - all the people who turn to Martins to get things fixed.
And there was one other bit that caught my eye:
The Democratic state senator John Sabini was recently walking along the street in Jackson Heights when he saw a Pakistani cabby driving a taxi that was clearly from New Orleans. Sabini flagged down the driver and discovered that the cabby was an evacuee and had his wife and 20-month-old baby with him in the car. Sabini found the cabby hotel accommodations through the city's marketing agency and a job through the owner of a taxi fleet. The taxi-fleet owner has since offered a job to any driver from the Gulf Coast. Shams Tarek, a Bangladeshi immigrant and top aide to Sabini, explains that Sabini's office will actively seek out Martins and ask him "if he knows any Sikh cabbies, or anybody from the South who's impacted by the hurricane."
I hadn't thought about the New Orleans taxi drivers. Has anyone seen NO taxis operating in New York lately?
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