Fareed Zakaria's Latest: "The Post-American World"

Though I've often disagreed with Fareed Zakaria on specific policy questions, I've always been challenged and interested by his way of thinking about big issues. I found Zakaria's earlier book The Future of Freedom stimulating, if imperfect. Zakaria seems to be especially good at synthesizing complex issues under the umbrella of a signature "big idea," without choking off qualifications or complexities. He still may a little too close to the buzzword-philia of Thomas Friedman for some readers, but in my view Zakaria's book-length arguments are a cut above Friedman's "gee whiz" bromides. (Zakaria's weekly Newsweek columns do not always rise to this bar.)

Zakaria's latest big concept is The Post-American World, a just-released book whose argument he summarizes in a substantial essay in this week's Newsweek. The basic idea is, the world is becoming a place where the U.S. is not a solo superpower, but rather a complex competitive environment with multiple sites of power and influence. Even as China and India ("Chindia"?) rise, it's not clear that the U.S. or Europe will fall; rather, everyone can, potentially, rise together -- or at least, compete together. Zakaria argues that despite hysterical anxieties figured in the mass media regarding the threat of terrorism and economic crisis, the world has rarely been more peaceful -- and that relative peace and stability has created the opportunity for the unprecedented emergence of independent and rapidly expanding market economies in formerly impoverished "Chindia."

There's more to it (read the article), but perhaps that is enough summary for now. There are a couple of passages I thought particularly interesting, which I might put out for discussion. First, on India:

During the 1980s, when I would visit India—where I grew up—most Indians were fascinated by the United States. Their interest, I have to confess, was not in the important power players in Washington or the great intellectuals in Cambridge.



People would often ask me about … Donald Trump. He was the very symbol of the United States—brassy, rich, and modern. He symbolized the feeling that if you wanted to find the biggest and largest anything, you had to look to America. Today, outside of entertainment figures, there is no comparable interest in American personalities. If you wonder why, read India's newspapers or watch its television. There are dozens of Indian businessmen who are now wealthier than the Donald. Indians are obsessed by their own vulgar real estate billionaires. And that newfound interest in their own story is being replicated across much of the world. (link)

This last insight seems dead-on to me, and it's the kind of thing I think Zakaria appreciates precisely because he was raised in India (no matter how many times he says "we" when talking about American foreign policy, he still carries that with him). This is one of the spaces where Zakaria's status as an "Indian-American" is a real asset, as it gives him a simultaneous insider-outsider "double consciousness" -- he has the ability to see things from the American/European point of view, but also know (remembers?) how the man on the street in Bombay or Shanghai is likely to see the world. [Note: I did an earlier post on Zakaria's complex perspective here]

(As a side note -- for the academics in the house, isn't the narrative Zakaria is promoting in the passage above a "pop" version of what postcolonial theorists have been talking about for years -- what Ngugi called "The Decolonization of the Mind"?)

Secondly, another passage, which I think addresses what might be the biggest hindrance to the multi-nodal global society Zakaria is interested in:

The rise of China and India is really just the most obvious manifestation of a rising world. In dozens of big countries, one can see the same set of forces at work—a growing economy, a resurgent society, a vibrant culture, and a rising sense of national pride. That pride can morph into something uglier. For me, this was vividly illustrated a few years ago when I was chatting with a young Chinese executive in an Internet café in Shanghai. He wore Western clothes, spoke fluent English, and was immersed in global pop culture. He was a product of globalization and spoke its language of bridge building and cosmopolitan values. At least, he did so until we began talking about Taiwan, Japan, and even the United States. (We did not discuss Tibet, but I'm sure had we done so, I could have added it to this list.) His responses were filled with passion, bellicosity, and intolerance. I felt as if I were in Germany in 1910, speaking to a young German professional, who would have been equally modern and yet also a staunch nationalist.



As economic fortunes rise, so inevitably does nationalism. Imagine that your country has been poor and marginal for centuries. Finally, things turn around and it becomes a symbol of economic progress and success. You would be proud, and anxious that your people win recognition and respect throughout the world. (link)

Will resurgent nationalism turn out to be the biggest hindrance to the "smooth" globalization Zakaria is talking about? How might this play out? Will there be a new generation of wars, or will it be expressed in subtler ways (like, for instance, what happened with the nuclear deal within the Indian political system). In the Newsweek article at least, Zakaria doesn't really explore the downside of emergent (insurgent?) Chindian nationalisms in depth; perhaps he explores that further in the book.

"The Age of Shiva" -- a Review

I was surprised by how much the others in my book group didn't like Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva. The biggest complaint was from the mothers in the group (including my better half), who didn't like Suri's use of a first/second person narrative method (the novel is written in the voice of a woman named Meera, addressed to her son, Ashvin). Several people said they didn't think Suri really pulled off the trick of writing about the intimate space of family life from a woman's point of view.

Reading as a man, I didn't notice any particular moments where I felt there was an unrealistic perspective, though obviously I can't be the judge. Certainly, some of the intimate passages regarding things like Meera's breastfeeding of her son (the opening paragraphs of the novel) are quite risky -- stylistically overwrought but certainly plausible, to my eye.

(Chandrahas Choudhury, reviewing the novel in the Guardian, wasn't bothered by this aspect, but by other things. Jabberwock, whose opinion I respect, loved the novel, and found Suri's attempt at a woman's point of view convincing. Then again, both reviewers are men. The only review of the novel by a woman I've come across is by Caryn James, in the New York Times -- and she doesn't take issue with Suri along these lines.)

Though I suspect other readers may share my book group's distaste, I did think The Age of Shiva had some real strengths. My friend "SN," for instance, liked the psychological complexity of the bond between mother and son in the novel, something I also appreciated. The Age of Shiva is, more than anything else, a novel about the overwhelming, consuming love a parent can feel for a child, especially in a situation where the parent has little else to live for. With this as its central theme, the novel is actually somewhat unique (most contemporary Indian writers tend to balk at this much psychology -- where 'nothing really happens').

A second theme will be more familiar: the changing circumstances and possibilities for Indian women in the years after independence. On the one hand, some major cultural transformations seemed to be underway, symbolically represented by Indira Gandhi's rise to power. In the novel, the main agent for "progressivism" is actually Meera's father, who champions what the Congress party says (it takes time for him to learn that there is a big gap between what Congress says, and what it does). But for ordinary women, even in cities like Delhi, not much had really changed through the 1960s, and even "progressive" ideologies can come across as coercive. To illustrate what Suri is after regarding gender relations, here is a representative passage from shortly after Meera's marriage into the Arora family, as she's observing the customs practiced by her much more conservative in-laws:

Each morning after her bath, I would see Sandhya [Meera's sister-in-law] in the courtyard, performing her pooja of Arya [Sandhya's husband]. She would swirl an earthenware lamp resting on a round metal thali in a circle before Arya's face, as one might in front of a picture of a shrine. She would mark his forehead with ash from the platter, and sometimes dab on some vermilion and a moistened grain of rice. She would bend her head and wait for him to color the parting in her hair with a line of the vermilion. Then she would bend even lower to touch his feet--first the right, then the left. She would run the same hand over her head to bless herself as she began to rise.

The first time I saw this pooja, I stood in the kitchen transfixed. The touching of feet was a ritual strictly forbidden by Paji [Meera's father] in our house. 'All this scraping, all this servility--hasn't anyone in this country heard of human dignity? Aren't there enough gods in the temples already to satisfy this national hunger for groveling? We spent two centuries licking the boots of the British--did you ever see them prostrating themselves at anyone's feet?'

Meera's father, referred to in the novel as Paji, is a "reformer" who sharply limits the role of religion, specifically these kinds of religious rituals, in his house. Clearly, part of his distaste at the type of pooja Meera witnesses in her in-laws' house derives from a kind of colonial hangover -- the British didn't do this, so why do we? On the other hand, quite separate from the British, isn't he right about the insidious effects of "servility" and "scraping"?

Interestingly, Paji's character turns out to be coercive and sometimes flat-out cruel. By contrast, the kind of deep devotionalism embodied by Sandhya in the passage above is linked to being utterly disempowered, but it is at least honest. The tension between the two ways of thinking -- two ways of being -- is really the central tension in Meera's mind, as she attempts to survive her unhappy marriage and limited prospects.

* * *

There are other things to appreciate in The Age of Shiva. Meera's husband Dev, for instance, is a singer who tries to make a go of it as a playback singer in Bombay in the 1960s. His idol is the great 1940s icon, K.L. Saigal, who was best-known as a singer of mournful romantic ballads like this one ("Jab Dil Hi Toot Gaya"). The tragic image of K.L. Saigal is a kind of running leitmotif in The Age of Shiva, and adds somewhat to what is a somewhat elegiac tone overall.

Notes From a Punjabi Literature Conference in Vancouver

I was recently in cool Vancouver to give a talk at a conference on Modern Punjabi Literature. The conference was at the University of British Columbia, and it was hosted by the Asian Studies department (which has a strong program in Punjabi language instruction, part of which includes the study of literature).

The community was invited in, and they most definitely came -- including a number of poets and novelists in Vancouver's surprisingly large Punjabi language writers' community. One of the best-known Punjabi poets in Vancouver is of course Sadhu Binning, who has also taught Punjabi at UBC for more than 20 years (he's now retiring, sadly). His collection, "No More Watno Dur" is one of the very few collections of Punjabi poetry I've seen to be published in a bilingual edition (which is especially helpful for someone like me -- a person who reads Punjabi only haltingly, and always with reference to a dictionary).

It was great to meet, for instance, the Punjabi-Pakistani poet, Fauzia Rafiq (who didn't mention she had a blog!). Another writer who seems well worth checking out is Ajmer Rode.

At the poetry reading on the last night of the conference, Nadeem Parmar sang a ghazal in Punjabi. I Googled him today, and was surprised to find that he's written lyrics for many well-known singers, including Jagjit Singh. I also Googled Darshan Singh Gill, and was intrigued to find that he had actually been featured in a CBC documentary about new immigrants in Canada, back in 1958. And those were just a few of the names.

I also met a Dhol player for a Vancouver Bhangra band. He also plays Dhol for a "world music"/fusion group called "Delhi To Dublin", which seems worth checking out. He also plays Dhol for a "pure" Bhangra group called En Karma, which I'm looking forward to listening to.

Those are some links to start off. Below, I'll discuss some of the more substantial issues discussed at the conference.

I was surprised by the number of writers who showed up, and how prolific they all seemed to be. One of the questions we've sometimes discussed on Sepia Mutiny is the future of the Punjabi language (and other Indian languages) at a moment when English and Hindi seem ever more culturally dominant in India. But even more urgent in some ways right now than language in general is the question about the status of Punjabi literature -- with the commercial market for Punjabi-language books apparently drying up quite quickly within Punjab (Punjabi writers in India have an obvious commercial incentive to write in English). Several writers at the conference voiced concerns to the effect that Punjabi language literature runs the risk of becoming more parochial and isolated -- no longer a natural, organic part of the culture (where people publish in Punjabi because they think of it as their primary literary language). Even if it doesn't disappear entirely, there is certainly a live danger of literature written in the Punjabi language becoming a kind of museum piece.

Of course, that is only one part of the discussion. The more "internal" academic issues, including some close readings of major Punjabi writers from the mid-20th century, including Gurdial Singh, Nanak Singh, Bhai Vir Singh, among others. A number of diasporic writers were discussed, including especially Gurumel Sidhu and Gurcharan Rampuri.

There were also discussions about the mistake entailed in conflating "Punjabi literature" with "Sikh literature." Most of the authors discussed in the scholarly talks were Sikhs (in fact, most of the authors were Sikh men -- I did discuss a short story by Ajeet Cour in my talk, but I was one of the few to do so.) But of course, there is a considerable body of writing in Punjabi by Pakistanis. The problem, of course, is that while the language is very close, Muslim Punjabis tend to write in Shahmukhi script (based on Urdu), while Sikh and Hindu Punjabis tend to write in Gurmukhi (the script thought to have been invented by the Sikh Gurus).

The conflation of "Sikh" and "Punjabi" is also an issue when we're thinking about the disciplinary questions surrounding "Punjab Studies" and "Sikh Studies" in North American universities. The Sikh community has, in recent years, raised money to create a handful of Sikh Studies endowed chairs at different universities -- including the University of Michigan, Hofstra University in Long Island, and UBC itself. And while these universities have learned, sometimes the hard way in some cases, that they must retain control when it comes to hiring and evaluating faculty for these positions, questions about how independent these scholars really can be have remained in some people's minds, in part because of recent history.

Those of us who want this kind of scholarship to happen are in somewhat of a double-bind. Without support and encouragement from the community, it is highly unlikely that there would be much interest in studying Sikhism and Sikh history seriously in North America -- universities aren't funding it widely enough to support a sizeable community of scholars on their own, and very few religion departments are well-staffed enough to justify more than one "South Asian religions" person. But then, if scholars in "Sikh Studies" positions partially endowed by the community come out with scholarly work the community doesn't particularly like, the universities find themselves on the receiving end of vehement criticism.

My own paper was called "Secular Sikh Writers," and I was trying to do two things: first, provoke a debate about what is entailed in identifying oneself as a "secular Sikh." In my view, one of the unusual features of the idea of secularism in (and from) South Asia is the possibility that one can retain an "observant" relationship to a particular religious community, while also being strongly committed to freedom of religion (or even freedom from religion), socially and politically. By contrast, in the west, secularism usually is thought to be more or less synonymous with "atheism."

The paper I gave also tried to briefly chart a history of secularization in fiction by Punjabi Sikh writers, starting with Bhair Vir Singh (who was not, I don't think, "secular," according to my definition), then moving forward to Social realist writers like Kartar Singh Duggal in the 1950s and 60s, and finally to the "contemporary" moment, with writers like Ajeet Cour. My argument was that even the contemporary writers continue to interrogate the line between "religious" and "secular" experiences of the world.

A full essay on "secular Sikh writers" would obviously also include some secular Sikhs writing in English, including of course Khushwant Singh and Shauna Singh Baldwin, and maybe also figures like Rajinder Singh Bedi (who wrote in Urdu). This being a Punjabi literature conference,I focused on writers working in Punjabi. Since, as I mentioned, my Punjabi reading skills are weak, I relied heavily on translations, and then checked the original texts where I could find them (mostly at the library at the University of Pennsylvania, here in Philly).

Most of the discussion of my paper, not surprisingly, revolved around the first topic -- what is a "secular Sikh"?

Overall, a fun -- and humbling -- weekend.

Spring -- a photo

In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to start uploading photos to Flickr again -- after a long pause. (Expect some new photos of the little one. Also, hopefully I can get some of the cherry blossoms before they fall from the trees...)

"Satyagraha," by Phillip Glass

The New York Times has a behind-the-scenes look at a new version of Phillip Glass's modernist opera, "Satyagraha," which is playing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York until May 1. There is also a companion video piece, which I could watch but not listen to from the computer I'm working on this morning.

The libretto uses the Bhagavad-Gita as a source, and the opera as a whole aims to index some of the key events in Gandhi's early political awakening in South Africa with the plot and text of the Gita. That alone might be a little confusing, since the central question facing Arjuna in the Gita, as most readers will know, is whether or not to fight -- and Gandhi's signature political contribution ("Satyagraha") is the philosophy of non-violent resistance. The choice could of course be defended depending on your interpretation of the Gita, and indeed, I gather that Gandhi did his own translation -- with commentary -- of the Bhagavad-Gita in 1924. I haven't read Gandhi's version, though I should note that it has recently been re-published as a volume called Bhagavad-Gita According to Gandhi.

The current interpretation of Glass's work adds some new elements, including a strong focus on newsprint and newspaper culture as a theme in Gandhi's story (that at least seems dead-on). There are also towering puppets, made of "newspaper, fiberglass kite poles, light cotton cloth and lots of latex glue," which symbolize historical figures from Gandhi's past (Tolstoy), present, and future (MLK).

It seems like an interesting work, though I have to admit I'm not sure I personally would enjoy it. (And most tickets under $100 have already been sold out, so it's not something where a person would go casually...) Has anyone seen this? Is anyone planning to?

A Book with "@" in the Title

There's a profile in the New York Times of Chetan Bhagat (thanks, Pocobrat), author of One Night @ The Call Center, which was released in the U.S. on paperback last year. Bhagat, an author few in the west will have heard of, has now become the biggest English-language author in Indian history:

But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history, according to his publisher, Rupa & Company, one of India’s oldest and best established publishers. His story of campus life, “Five Point Someone,” published in 2004, and a later novel, “One Night @ the Call Center,” sold a combined one million copies.

Mr. Bhagat, who wrote his books while living here, has difficulty explaining why a 35-year-old investment banker writing in his spare time has had such phenomenal success reaching an audience of mainly middle-class Indians in their 20s. The novels, deliberately sentimental in the tradition of Bollywood filmmaking, are priced like an Indian movie ticket — just 100 rupees, or $2.46 — and have won little praise as literature.

“The book critics, they all hate me,” Mr. Bhagat said in an interview here. (link)

Yes, it's true, we do hate him.

I read One Night @ The Call Center a few months ago, when the American publisher sent me a review copy. Some parts were so bad, they made me cry. I was particularly bored by the chapters detailing the protagonist's unrequited romance with a colleague , which are set off in bold type for some reason (though the fact that they are set off in bold is actually useful -- the font makes it easier to identify the chapters to skip!).

That said, the novel does have some amusing cultural commentary scattered here and there, and I suspect it's the book's candor on the grim--yet economically privileged--experience of overnight call center workers that has made Bhagat so popular. That, and the book is so easy it could be read by a stoned dog on a moonless night.

Here is one passage, on accents, I thought interesting:

I hate accent training. The American accent is so confusing. You mightthink the Americans and their language are straightforward, but each letter can be pronounced several different ways.

I'll give you just one example: T. With this letter Americans have four different sounds. T can be silent, so "internet" becomes "innernet" and "advantage" becomes "advannage." Another way is when T and N merge-- "written" becomes "writn" and "certain" is "certn." The third sound is when T falls in the middle. There, it sounds like a D--"daughter" is "daughder" and "water" is "wauder." The last category, if you still care, is when Americans say T like a T. This happens, obviously, when T is at the beginning of the word like "table" or "stumble." And this is just one consonant. The vowels are another story.

Say what you will about his literary skills, Bhagat has clearly worried about American accents.

A second moment of cultural commentary I remembered came from the middle of the novel, after one of the characters has started to freak out after getting one too many calls from racist Americans uttering epithets of the "rat-eater" variety:

"Guys, there are two things I cannot stand," he said and showed us two fingers. Racists. And Americans."

Priyanka started laughing.

"What is there to laugh at?" I said.

"Because there is a contradiction. He doesn't like racists, but can't stand Americans," Priyanka said.

"Why?" Vroom said, ignoring Priyanka. "Why do some fat-ass, dim-witted Americans get to act superior to us? Do you know why?"

Nobody answered.

Vroom continued, "I'll tell you why. Not because they are smarter. Not because they are better people. But because their country is rich and ours is poor. That is the only damn reason. Because the losers who have run our counttry for the last fifty years couldn't do better than make India one of the poorest countries on earth."

And if reading rants like that makes you feel better about things, you might enjoy One Night @ The Call Center. (Well, parts of it, anyway.)

Suriname's Linguistic Khichri

The New York Times has an article on Sranan Tongo, the creole language that is spoken by a majority of people in Suriname, in South America.

Suriname, like Guyana and Trinidad, has a large Indian diaspora population from the 19th century, people who came across originally as indentured laborers. For a country of just 470,000 people, the linguistic and cultural diversity is truly astonishing:

To get a sense of the Babel of languages here, just stroll through this capital, which resembles a small New England town except the stately white clapboard houses are interspersed with palm trees, colorful Chinese casinos and minaret-topped mosques.



Slip into one of the Indonesian eateries known as warungs to hear Javanese, spoken by about 15 percent of the population. Choose a roti shop, with its traditional Indian bread, to listen to Surinamese Hindi, spoken by the descendants of 19th-century Indian immigrants, who make up more than a third of the population. And merchants throughout Paramaribo speak Chinese, even though the numbers of Chinese immigrants are small. (link)

Is it just me, or is Suriname exactly like Queens? (The food options sound enticing.)

For the curious, there is a Sranan Tongo-to-English dictionary here (not many words derived from Indian languages, as far as I can tell), and a "Sarnami Hindustani"-to-Dutch dictionary here. (Of course, for the latter, you need to know Dutch!)

I would also recommend a reader comment on an earlier post by Vinod (where he mentioned the Surinamese Indians in Amsterdam).

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this week, at the age of 91. He was one of the best-known sci-fi writers of the 20th century, the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others.

As is well-known, Clarke moved to Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1956 -- in large part for the year-around access to diving -- and remained there until his death. The locale inspired at least one of Clarke's novels, Fountains of Paradise:

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, having emigrated there when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke held citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. Living in Sri Lanka afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete. (link)

I first read The Fountains of Paradise many years ago, and I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon for a refresher. There is an intense opening, set in the classical period, 2000 years ago, involving a "Prince Kalidasa," who does not seem to resemble the actual Kalidasa (who was not a prince, but a poet). And there are some rich descriptions of the island of Sri Lanka (named "Taprobane" -- Tap-ROB-a-nee -- by Clarke).

Here are a few paragraphs from the historical section involving Clarke's Prince Kalidasa:

The air was so clear today that Kalidasa could see the temple, dwarfed by distance to a tiny white arrowhead on the very summit of Sri Kanda. It did not look like any work of man, and it reminded the king of the still greater mountains he had glimpsed in his youth, when he had been half-guest, half-hostage at the court of Mahinda the Great. All the giants that guarded Mahinda's empire bore such Crests, formed of a dazzling, crystalline substance for which there was no word in the language of Taprobane. The Hindus believed that it was a kind of water, magically transformed, but Kalidasa laughed at such superstitions.



That ivory gleam was only three days' march away - one along the royal road, through forests and paddy-fields, two more up the winding stairway which he could never climb again, because at its end was the only enemy he feared, and could not conquer. Sometimes he envied the pilgrims, when he saw their torches marking a thin line of fire up the face of the mountain. The humblest beggar could greet that holy dawn and receive the blessings of the gods; the ruler of all this land could not.



But he had his consolations, if only for a little while. There, guarded by moat and rampart, lay the pools and fountains and Pleasure Gardens on which he had lavished the wealth of his kingdom. And when he was tired of these, there were the ladies of the rock-the ones of flesh and blood, whom he summoned less and less frequently-and the two hundred changeless immortals with whom he often shared his thoughts, because there were no others he could trust.



Thunder boomed along the western sky. Kalidasa turned away from the brooding menace of the mountain, towards the distant hope of rain. The monsoon was late this season; the artificial lakes that fed the island's complex irrigation system were almost empty. By this time of year he should have seen the glint of water in the mightiest of them all-- which, as he well knew, his subjects still dared to call by his father's name: Paravana Samudra, the Sea of Paravana. It had been completed only thirty years ago, after generations of toil. In happier days, young Prince Kalidasa had stood proudly beside his father, when the great sluice-gates were opened and the life-giving waters had poured out across the thirsty land. In all the kingdom there was no lovelier sight than the gently rippling mirror of that immense, man-made lake, when it reflected the domes and spires of Ranapura, City of Gold-the ancient capital which he had abandoned for his dream.

In this made-up history of the ancient kingdom of Taprobane, Clarke actually seems to know whereof he speaks; the injections of bits of Hindu culture seem to come from a position of knowledge.

And here is a little from the main section of the novel, set in the present day. The protagonist is a Sri Lankan named Raja (short for "Johan Oliver de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe"), who has retired from public life, and moved to an estate built on the site of "Kalidasa's" original pleasure gardens:

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never regretted his decision. Those who predicted that boredom would succeed where the temptations of power had failed did not know their man or understand his origins. He had gone back to the fields and forests of his youth, and was living only a kilometre from the great, brooding rock that had dominated his childhood. Indeed, his villa was actually inside the wide moat that surrounded the Pleasure Gardens, and the fountains that Kalidasa's architect had designed now splashed in Johan's own courtyard, after a silence of two thousand years. The water still flowed in the original stone conduits; nothing had been changed, except that the cisterns high up on the rock were now filled by electric pumps, not relays of sweating slaves.



Securing this history-drenched piece of land for his retirement had given Johan more satisfaction than anything in his whole career, fulfilling a dream that he had never really believed could come true. The achievement had required all his diplomatic skills, plus some delicate blackmail in the Department of Archaeology. Later, questions had been asked in the State Assembly; but fortunately not answered.



He was insulated from all but the most determined tourists and students by an extension of the moat, and screened from their gaze by a thick wall of mutated Ashoka trees, blazing with flowers throughout the year. The trees also supported several families of monkeys, who were amusing to watch but occasionally invaded the villa and made off with any portable objects that took their fancy. Then there would be a brief inter-species war with fire-crackers and recorded danger-cries that distressed the humans at least as much as the simians - who would be back quickly enough, for they had long ago learned that no-one would really harm them.

Reading this, I can't help but think of Clarke himself, one of the world's most famous writers, living in a remote part of Sri Lanka -- away from it all.

After the opening, the novel has a more conventional science fiction story arc -- the goal is to build a kind of massive space elevator from the top of a mountain in Taprobane...

Interviewing Partition Survivors

Via 3QD, I came across an article in the Washington Post about a 10 year research project, based in Delhi but funded by the Ford Foundation, to interview thousands of survivors of the 1947 Partition.

The story begins with a powerful anecdote:

Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.



At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh's family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.



"None of the women protested, nobody wept," Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. "All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book." (link)

These 'honor killings', where women were killed by male members of their families to prevent their being raped by communal mobs, were not at all unusual. I do not know if they happened in other communities, but in the Sikh community in particular it is thought that thousands of women died this way. (I do not think anybody knows exactly how many it was.)

Thus far, the project has interviewed about 1300 people, including Bir Bahadur Singh. The project ("Reconstructing Lives: Memories of Partition") does not appear to have a web presence, and I'm not sure whether there are any plans to digitize the tapes from the interviews, or publish raw transcripts. Hopefully, that will be in the cards at some point.

Unlike the Jewish Holocaust, where there have been many documentary projects, including a number of survivor interview projects, the Partition of India has only been studied in dribs and drabs. There is, as I understand it, no public memorial to the Partition in India itself (compare to the many museums and monuments devoted to memorializing the Holocaust in western countries).

But a full knowledge of the true history, including these personal testimonials, is extremely important, for a number of reasons. First, it adds to the historical record, and makes it harder for extremist (communal) groups on both sides of the border to distort the story, or to put all of the blame for today's problems on the other party. Second, a fuller knowledge from a position of historical distance might help everyone address the lingering trauma the event created (it's no accident that the person heading this operation is a psychologist), so we can start to address the root causes of this kind of violence.

Other posts on Partition to look at: here, here, and here.

A Little on Poet Alan Shapiro (Revised)

I first learned about Alan Shapiro’s poetry a couple of years ago, when someone suggested I read his book Song & Dance. I loved it, and then when a colleague suggested Tantalus in Love, I ate that up as well. This spring, I decided try and teach Tantalus in Love in my “Introduction to the English Major” course at Lehigh, along with a couple of essays by Shapiro (including this moving memoir-like essay, from Virginia Quarterly Review, about which I have more to say below).

Earlier in his career, Shapiro was included in the movement known as the “new formalism,” where poets started to reconsider the classical forms, and come to use more rhyme, meter, and formal structures in their poetry. Shapiro was somewhat ambivalent about being described that way (by Robert Richman, in the conservative/reactionary journal The New Criterion), and Shapiro wrote an essay for Critical Inquiry called “The New Formalism” (Critical Inquiry 14, August 1987: JSTOR link), where he discussed his ambivalence about the movement.

Yet I am anything but cheered [to be referred to as a New Formalist]. And not because I don’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member, though this may be a part of it; but because I suspect that what Mr. Richman hails as a development may in fact be nothing but a mechanical reaction, and that the new formalists, in rejecting the sins of their experimental fathers may end up merely repeating the sins of their New Critical grandfathers, resuscitating the stodgy, overrefined conventions of the ‘fifties poem,’ conventions which were of course sufficiently narrow and restrictive to provoke rebellion in the first place. Any reform, carried to uncritical extremes by less talents who ignore rather than try to assimilate the achievements of their predecessors, will itself require reformation. If James Wright, say, or Robert Bly, produced more than their fair share of imitators, if they even imitate themselves much of the time, they nonetheless have written poems all of us can and ought to learn from. Maybe we have had too much of the ‘raw’ in recent years. But the answer to the raw is not the overcooked.

This strikes me as right on the specifics, but also worth considering as a general way of thinking about periodization in literary studies (not to mention, literary theory). Later in the essay, Shapiro dismisses the argument that form reflects a poet's ideological inclinations (i.e., if one were to say the New Formalists, who emerged in the 1980s, were in effect practicing "Reaganomics" poetry), and he reminds us that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound pioneered modernist free verse even as they espoused authoritarian politics.

Shapiro affirmatively cites Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," to support the idea that knowing the past well is essential for serious poets, if they want to avoid merely imitating the current fashion. Notably, however, Shapiro doesn't address Eliot's comments on "depersonalization." This is an important omission, because while Shapiro has been attentive to poetic form in his own work, the subjects of his work have in fact been directly personal -- autobiographical, in fact. Song & Dance relates to the death of Shapiro's brother (see "Sleet"), and books like Vigil and The Last Happy Occasion address the death of his sister. If anything, Shapiro appears to be a highly "personal" poet, someone whose subjects follow in the footsteps of those chosen by "confessional" poets, though his style differs sharply from theirs.

*

In "The New Formalism," Shapiro looks closely at the relationship between sound and sense in a series of poems, some by contemporary writers working with meter (not always well), and some from the English Canon (George Herbert's masterful "Church Monuments"). He likes Timothy Dekin's "Sunday Visiting Day" and Timothy Steele's "Profils Perdus"; he criticizes (quite carefully) Dana Gioia's "Cruising with the Beach Boys," and Norman Williams' "Learning to Whistle." Shapiro also draws a distinction between "rhythm" and "meter," which I found helpful ("The metrical norm of iambic pentameter... is an abstraction, a theoretical construction-- I am, I am, I am, I am, I am-- but because no two syllables carry the same stress, that is, the same length and degree of emphasis, every line of actual pentameter verse will and ought to depart to some extent from the metrical norm").

But Shapiro isn't rejecting formalist tenets out of hand. Rather, he aims to show that sound and sense go hand in hand, and that the use of form can in fact be crucial if deployed in the right way:

If the best poetry provides a model of consciousness at its most inclusive and active, then the formal tensions, the rhythmical interplay of stress and accent, sentence and line, become the technical extension or expression of the imagination's power to unify and balance. We can think of meter as analogous to the familiar, the expected, the more than usual state of order; and the variety of rhythmical effects as corresponding to the concrete, the sense of novelty and freshness and a more than usual state of feeling. In its active engagement with a subject, meter provides a kind of dynamic restraint. In much the same way that the narrow banks of a channel can intensify a flow of water, meter can hold in check the workings of passion at the same time as it speeds them on. But to restrain in this way implies the presence of some powerful energy in need of restraining. To arouse and heighten expectation and attention through the subtle recurrences and variations of sound implies something in the subject worth expecting and attending to. Meter in and of itself is worthless.

*

The poems in Tantalus in Love were written long after Shapiro’s essay, and what one sees is an openness to what looks to me like “free verse,” with strong suggestions of traditional meter and form informing the work.

The book in fact has some of the conventions of the oldest poetic form of them all, the epic poem. In Shapiro’s case, the book's poems are structured as a long narrative, but instead of figuring heroic acts, the story is of a modern marriage falling apart. He does offer a classical "invocation," and an "in medias res" opening. The poems themselves, variations on a central theme, might serve as "enumeratio."

I was intrigued to see, in the opening invocation, a variation of an elegiac couplet:

Let there be never again
a moment in which
your sudden shining isn't
sudden as it rends

the dark we walk in. Make us see
no matter where
we gaze that the bush burns
unconsumed.

(Here, the second couplet is similar to elegiac meter, with a longer first line -- I'm reading the four lines as effectively two subdivided lines -- and a shorter second. It's really the second line that comes closest to classical elegiac, though: "we gaze that the bush burns/ unconsumed." The first line is iambic, in contrast to the first lines of elegiac couplets, which are trochaic.)

My students liked Shapiro's poetry, but were divided about his memoir-like essay, "My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son's Depression and the Power of Art." Several students were concerned that Shapiro exploited his son's depression in the essay, by including a number of potentially embarrassing details about his son's suicide attempt, his institutionalization, and even the fact that he's been prescribed anti-psychotic drugs: Even if all this is included in the essay with the son's permission, isn't it a bit much to use his suffering in this way? I defended the use of personal material in the essay, though in the end I did walk away wondering whether Shapiro might have been able to make the same point without including details that might be potentially harmful to others in his life.

Shapiro broader goal in the essay is to articulate a concept of art that is in fact fundamentally personal, in that it is based on suffering -- though it certainly doesn't end there.

Where there is suffering, which is to say, where there is human life, there is art. But art doesn't merely mirror the bad things that happen to us. It shapes what happens into meaning. And there is always great joy and pleasure, even happiness, in the fundamental act of shaping. It's not, as Plato believed that some part of the soul desires to weep for itself; it's rather that the soul possesses a stubborn need for pleasure; it urgently desires to convert weeping into laughter, the sorrow of subject matter into the joy of form. it is a uniquely human instinct--to bring the greatest degree of childlike exuberant playfulness to bear upon the harshest and most difficult realities, answering the tragic gravity of life with the comedic grace of imaginative transformation, shaping life into a vitally clarifying or comprehending image of itself.

The key phrase might be "the sorrow of subject matter into the joy of form." The idea that the form of art (the forming of our experiences through art), can be a way of expressing joy even in suffering, seems to bridge Shapiro's early essay on poetic form with his various poetic and essayistic representations of suffering around him. One doesn't write a sestina or a villanelle about cancer just because it's more likely to be approved by the editor of a poetry journal; one does it because it gives joy to try and find the form that expresses an intense thought or experience in poetic language. And for Shapiro at least, such poems can also directly express -- somehow -- traces of joy even in the face of great difficulty.

Review: Tahmima Anam's "A Golden Age"

A friend gave me a copy of A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam, as a present a couple of months ago, and I finally got around to reading it this week. A Golden Age, it turns out, is a very strong first novel, written in a direct, natural style, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Anam's is the first novel put out by a western publisher that I know of to have Bangladesh's war for independence as its main theme, and for that reason alone, I suspect A Golden Age will become the kind of book that is often taught in college classes on "South Asian Literature" (like the courses I myself get to teach every couple of years). The War is important in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey, but only at a great distance (Mistry's novel is set in Bombay). And a section of Rushdie's Midnight's Children deals with this event, but it comes near the end, and Rushdie addresses it in rather lyrical terms -- you don't really get a solid explanation of how the war started or what it was about.

Here, you do. The center of the novel is, of course, the family drama -- involving a widow named Rehana and her two grown children, Sohail and Maya. Both of the children are politically oriented, and take a strongly pro-Bangla, pro-Sheikh Mujib position on the events that transpired in 1971. By contrast, their mother Rehana is at first reluctant to make a commitment -- though the needs of her children soon force her to inject herself into the conflict. She also begins to come out of her shell emotionally, which is of course what most readers want to see.

Here is an early passage in A Golden Age, one of the first direct discussions of the political situation:

He'll never make a good husband, she heard Mrs Chowdhury say. Too much politics.

The comment had stung because it was probably true. Lately the children had little time for anything but the struggle. It had started when Sohail entered the university. Ever since '48, the Pakistani authorities had ruled the eastern wing of the country like a colony. First they tried to force everyone to speak Urdu instead of Bengali. They took the jute money from Bengal and spent it on factories in Karachi and Islamabad. One general after another made promises they had no intention of keeping. The Dhaka University students had been involved in the protests from the very beginning, so it was no surprise Sohail had got caught up, and Maya too. Even Rehana could see the logic; what sense did it make to have a country in two halves, poised on either side of India like a pair of horns?

But in 1970, when the cyclone hit, it was as though everything came into focus. Rehana remembered the day Sohail and Maya had returned from the rescue operation: the red in their eyes as they told her how they had waited for the food trucks to come and watched as the water rose and the bodies washed up on the shore; how they had realized, with mounting panic, that the would wouldn't come because it had never been sent.

The next day Maya had joined the Communist Party.

Clearly from the above, one can see that Anam sees the war of liberation firmly from a Bangladeshi perspective, where the Pakistani Army is the villain. (Here I should say that I fully agree with her; Yahya Khan is thought to have said, "Kill 3 million of them, and the rest will be eating out of our hands"...) Operation Searchlight is described, as are the attacks on East-Pakistani/Bangladeshi Hindus. The Indian intervention is seen as a positive development, preventing what might have turned into an all-out genocidal suppression. (Estimates on the number of Bangladeshis killed by the Pakistani army in 1971 vary -- from 200,000 to 3,000,000 -- so it seems perfectly fair to suggest, as Anam does at one point, that Operation Searchlight was itself an act of genocide against the Bangladeshi people.)

Though she is undoubtedly a Bangladeshi partisan, Anam treats the gruesome acts of the war from a respectful distance; the story is told primarily from Rehana's point of view, and as a non-combatant she wouldn't have seen acts of torture or rape first-hand (though she does certainly encounter the results of those barbarities). Here I think Anam made the right choice. Extensively documenting the details of what the Pakistani army did in fact do that year would have overwhelmed the novel -- and that kind of documentation is, anyway, the job of a historian. One shouldn't think of A Golden Age as some kind of definitive account of 1971, but rather as an accessible, novelistic introduction to that story.

There's a little bit of Bengali literary culture alluded to in Anam's novel, but not a huge amount. You have references to Sultana's Dream and the songs of Tagore, but not Bibhutbushan Bandopadhyay, Saratchandra, or Bankim. But then, though their children study in the university, the Haque family is not really a literary family, so extended discourse on the Bengali Renaissance would be out of place.

My wife also found A Golden Age to be a satisfying read, and she is a software engineer (who finds writers like Rushdie too ornamental); perhaps her stamp of approval might actually mean more to non-academic readers than my own. That said, she did wonder whether there might be some points of culinary inaccuracy regarding the Bengali dishes described in the novel. For instance, is it likely that an upper middle-class Bangladeshi family would eat a meal of roast lamb, as the Haque family do early in the book, before the war starts? My wife isn't a Bengali, and neither of us have ever been to Bangladesh, but she thought it didn't ring true.

Kal Penn @ UPenn

This past Sunday I went down to the University of Pennsylvania for a rare, open Q&A session with Kal Penn. As readers may remember from Anna's earlier post on the subject, Penn is at Penn this spring, teaching a class on representations of Asian Americans in the Media. He's also shooting episodes of "House" (go, House), and stumping for Obama in his free time, though with that schedule I'm not sure how he has any.

As I understand it, there was initially some controversy about the class -- is this going to be a stunt, or a real asset to a the Asian American Studies curriculum?

If it were just about bringing a little glamor to campus, I would be skeptical too. But I think it's fair to say Penn is both an actor and a careful observer of the representation of Desis in both Hollywood and the Indie film world. If you listen to him talk, it's clear that he's thought carefully and self-critically about his experiences and choices (he's very aware that his role as a home-grown, Muslim-American terrorist on 24 might be seen as "problematic," for instance -- though he still defends the choice to take the role). He's self-conscious enough to know what a racist representation of a South Asian character is, and call it by that name. But at the same time, he's open about the fact that minority actors sometimes need to play ball to get an entree in Hollywood.

In response to one of the questions posed by a student at the Q&A Kal Penn effectively acknowledged that this was the dilemma he faced when he auditioned for his first Hollywood movie, "Van Wilder." Unfortunately, Penn also suggested, in response to another question, that things aren't all that much better even now, for actors who are just starting out:

"I think things for me personally as an artist have changed dramatically, but I know that overall, that change has been slow and incremental. There is no shortage of truly talented actors of South Asian descent in places like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London. There are folks who majored in theater, studied film, and are experiencing the same struggles I went through when I was starting out. I think that was my main point: things for me have begun to change, but things for others are perhaps remaining the same." (Kal Penn, from an email)

For instance, Penn was asked not long ago to do an Indian accent for a small role he had in a big studio film, but the respectful rendition of an Indian accent he attempted on camera was found to be insufficiently comical by the studio. After the film was shot, the studio execs actually asked him to go back and re-dub his lines with a thicker, more comical accent. To his credit, Penn refused to do it -- and there wasn't really anything the studio people could do (the film was destined to flop in any case). As Penn put it in his answer to the question, "They were using racism to hide a bad script. Racism was their marketing strategy."

(That last comment strikes me as dead on, but still distressing. It's not that racism or sexism sneaks into scripts by accident -- it might be that in some ways studios know this is exactly what they need to sell product...)

Penn pointed out that part of the problem is with the writers and studios that make this stuff -- and note that the alternative to unfortunate images of Asians in the media is often the complete erasure of all people of color from the fantasy world presented on TV and in the movies. "Friends" and "Seinfeld" were both shows with all white casts, set, improbably, in New York, one of the most diverse cities in the world. In the Q&A, Penn asked, "How come there are no people of color in their
New York City?"

But of course, it's not totally irrelevant to this that most South Asians in the U.S. are professionally oriented -- there aren't many of us trying to be writers or media people. "We're too busy trying to be doctors and engineers," Penn suggested, to think of this as a serious career option. If more of us were in the business there might be fewer characters like Apu (or Taj Mahal Badalandabad), and more characters like Gogol Ganguli.

I also stood up to ask a question myself, about naming -- since this is one of the things that some readers at Sepia Mutiny have sometimes grumbled about vis a vis Mr. Kalpen Modi (not to mention, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal...). My question was this: I completely understand why you chose a stage name when you were first starting out. But now that you've achieved a measure of success as an actor, have you considered going back to your given name?

Some parts of the answer were expected. For one thing, quite a number of professional actors use stage names. Penn did recount that he had been advised by friends to adopt a more "Anglo-sounding" name when he was first starting out. But he also mentioned something I hadn't known about before, that "Indian uncles" had suggested that, based on Hindu numerology, it would be good luck for him to try and keep his real first name, but add an extra letter to it. And voila: Kalpen became Kal Penn.

As for whether Kal Penn might ever revert to his given name, not likely -- once you started getting credited under one name, he suggested, it's hard to change it. Still, on several of his recent films, he's lobbied to get his real name introduced on the credits somewhere, perhaps as production assistant. On "The Namesake," he was fittingly credited for Nikhil as "Kalpen Modi," and for Gogol as "Kal Penn."

'Every Unsavoury Separatist is Gloating': Questions About Kosovo

Via Crooked Timber (and also 3QD), there is a learned critique by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express, of the recent "engineering" of independence for Kosovo by western European powers and the U.S.

The key paragraph in the argument for our purposes (i.e., with South Asia in mind) might be the following:

In the 19th century, there was a memorable debate between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton. John Stuart Mill had argued, in a text that was to become the bible for separatists all over, including Jinnah and Savarkar, that democracy functions best in a mono-ethnic societies. Lord Acton had replied that a consequence of this belief would be bloodletting and migration on an unprecedented scale; it was more important to secure liberal protections than link ethnicity to democracy. It was this link that Woodrow Wilson elevated to a simple-minded defence of self-determination. The result, as Mann demonstrated with great empirical rigour, was that European nation states, 150 years later, were far more ethnically homogenous than they were in the 19th century; most EU countries were more than 85 per cent mono-ethnic. (link)

In his Column in Indian Express, Mehta keeps his focus sharply on Kosovo's status within Europe, and also considers the seeming double standard as the Western powers disregard Russian objections to Kosovo's independence, on the one hand, while they go out of their way to accommodate China's (unconscionable) policy on Taiwan, on the other.

But there is obviously a question for South Asia here as well, and India in particular. Mehta briefly alludes to the history of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent when he invokes Jinnah and Savarkar, but his column raises questions for us as we think about the present too -- specifically the questions over the status of Kashmir and Assam (maybe also Manipur and Nagaland, not to mention Punjab in the 1980s).

The debate between Acton and Mill Mehta invokes isn't so much a "conservative" versus "liberal" debate -- John Stuart Mill is considered one of the architects of the philosophy of liberalism, but in this case his views come out as less "liberal" than Acton's. Mill supports thinking of nations as defined by race/ethnicity, but that approach can reinforce ethno-religious differences, rather than leading to an environment where different communities have equal status in a diverse nation. I tend to favor Acton's approach, except perhaps in cases where minority communities face imminent violence, or genocidal suppression.

(Incidentally, Mehta builds his arguments on an essay called "The Dark Side of Democracy" in New Left Review, by Michael Mann; for those who have subscriptions, you can find the article here.)

Desis Vote (And, Tooting My Own Horn)

SAMAR Magazine has a new issue up on its website on elections -- both within South Asia and here in the U.S. They have essays on the recent election in Gujarat, the Parliamentary elections in Pakistan, the upcoming elections in Nepal, a piece by an SAFO member, and a piece on the Desi vote in New York. There's also a short essay by myself, on "Skinny Candidates With Funny Names," which brings together points made in several of blog posts on Barack Obama and Bobby Jindal. In the piece I make reference to some Sepia Mutiny comment threads, and I actually quote directly from commenter Neal.

My own piece aside, I would recommend people start with the piece by Ali Najmi on the Desi vote in New York. It's informative, for one thing, and Najmi makes reference to a new organization called Desis Vote, which aims to mobilize participation in the South Asian community.

I would also recommend the piece by Luna Ranjit on the upcoming elections in Nepal. Ranjit explains why the planned elections last year were postponed, and explains why the upcoming elections will be historic for Nepal. In addition to addressing the Maoist question, she talks about some of Nepal's ethnic/tribal problems, with groups such as the Terai.

"Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature"

There is a new book of general interest literary criticism by John Mullan out, called Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature. It's getting great reviews in the British papers, and I wish I could have assigned it back when I was teaching "Secrecy and Authorship." (Better yet, I wish I had written it myself!)

Here are two snippets from the Guardian review. First, some arguments on why authors concealed their names when they went to publish:

He's not interested in works of which we just happen not to know the authors, but in writers who consciously sought to conceal their names. Why did so many people do it? Mullan advances a wide range of reasons, from mischief to modesty. Alexander Pope printed An Essay on Man anonymously in order to trick his enemies into praising him. Mary Ann Evans used the pseudonym George Eliot because "a masculine pseudonym was a claim to authority", and perhaps also because her complex marital career made her feminine name more than a little uncertain. Dodgson, the Christ Church mathematics don, refused to admit that he wrote the Alice books because "My constant aim is to remain, personally, unknown to the world." (link)

There's also the question of why it is we place so much value on authorship:

Why do we need to attach authors' names to books at all? Doing so makes life easy for librarians of course: just imagine arranging all those novels ascribed to "A Lady". Having names on books also helps us recognise works which we're likely to enjoy ("the new Ian McEwan"). It also allows for the simple human pleasure of piecing together an author's interests through their oeuvre, and feeling that you know how they think.

But looked at from a wider historical perspective these are quite recent pleasures, and they don't have entirely innocent origins. When Henry VIII proclaimed in 1546 that the names of printers and authors should appear on all published books, it was not because he was burning to read the latest heretical treatise. It was so he could catch and burn their authors and printers. And when present-day publishers put an author's name on a title-page they do so because an author is now something like a brand-name. Doris Lessing experimentally sent The Diary of a Good Neighbour to publishers under the pseudonym "Jane Somers", and it was repeatedly rejected. When published it sold about one 10th as many copies as "the new Doris Lessing" would have done. (link)

In the end, our current emphasis on the identities of authors is a result of the dominance of the marketplace.