Notes on MLA and SALA: Indo-Africa, Blogging, Arab Lit, Ngugi, etc.

The week started out for me at SALA (South Asian Literary Association), some of which I missed as I was staying home to write a paper for the MLA later in the week.

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The highlight of the part of the SALA conference I was able to attend was Gaurav Desai's solid keynote. Unlike many keynote addresses, which tend to be wide-ranging and thin, Gaurav's talk was closely focused on just one topic: the literary history of South Asians in East Africa. I won't say much here about Gaurav's actual thesis -- look for his upcoming book, which is entirely dedicated to the Indo-Africans -- and stick to just mentioning some of the names he mentioned. While Gaurav did make brief reference to some famous Indian Ugandan exiles, like M.G. Vassanji, most of his talk was focused on lesser-known figures. He also gave some helpful bibliographic leads for others interested in the topic (he mentioned, for instance, Robert Gregory's 1972 history of "India and East Africa," as well as Cynthia Salvadori's We Came in Dhows, which is actually quoted on some Sikh websites for the background on East African Sikhs)

While commentators like Shiva Naipaul (Sir Vidia's brother) focused earlier on the distance of the Asian community from black Africans before the traumatic exodus of the early 1970s, Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community -- especially artists, playwrights, and poets -- who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with black Africa.

One name that came up a lot in this regard in Desai's talk was Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan of Indian descent who started a famous African magazine called Transition. Neogy's magazine was a freethinking forum for many of the major postcolonial intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s (some of them are named at Wikipedia, while others are named at the Transition website). The magazine went defunct in 1976, when Neogy was arrested by Idi Amin's henchmen, but it was revived in 1990 by Henry Louis Gates (among the early contributors to the magazine).

Another name mentioned by Desai was Peter Nazareth, a writer of Goan and Malaysian ancestry, who actually worked briefly in the Idi Amin regime before getting out in 1973. He wrote a novel about Amin, called The General is Up, that sounds pretty interesting. According to the Wikipedia entry on him, Nazareth now teaches at the University of Iowa!

Finally, Desai mentioned a writer named Yusuf Dawood, who has also written about the mass exodus of Indians from Uganda in a novel called Return to Paradise.

Has anyone read either Yusuf Dawood or Peter Nazareth?

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At MLA itself I had some professional obligations to attend to, so I missed several panels I would have liked to be at. For instance, I heard that the panel with Richard Serrano, Francoise Lionnet, Simon Gikandi, and Ali Behdad was quite controversial. Richard Serrano has written a book called Against the Postcolonial, where he argues that the narrative of decolonization that dominates in postcolonial studies doesn't really fit the French/Francophone model (see the description here).

The problem at this particular panel, apparently, was that the MLA decided to match up Serrano with the very individuals whose work he criticizes in his book! Normally that should make for a lively discussion, but from the report I heard of the panel the tone of the conversation less than amicable.

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I myself gave a talk on blogging, authorship, and the public sphere at a panel with Michael Berube and Rita Felski on Thursday. It seemed to go ok -- my argument was that the blogging era has, contrary to the predictions of literary theory and despite the dire predictions of digi-skeptics like John Updike, enlarged the cultural power of the "author-function" in some ways. One of the key attributes of that expansion is blog-world's revival of the diary form, in which the figure of the author is always central. I might describe the argument in greater detail in a subsequent post, so stay tuned. For now, let me just say that I was able to work in Samuel Pepys, Susan Sontag, Kaavya Viswanathan (including a New York Times article that mentions Abhi's first post on the subject at Sepia Mutiny), PlagiarismToday, Lionel Trilling, and Jurgen Habermas.

Because I was sitting between two very well-known people, the panel was given a good time-slot, located in a "ballroom," and nearly all the seats (to my eye) were full. Somewhere between 100 and 200 people? (If any of you reading this right now were in attendance, I would welcome any feedback or criticism on the talk)

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On Friday I went to an engaging panel on contemporary Arabic "War Narratives." I didn't expect that blogging would be a topic from the paper titles, but one of the panelists, Carol Fadda-Corney, in light of the war in Lebanon this past summer, decided she needed to change her paper from her original topic. Fadda-Corney talked about the way in which Lebanese bloggers, many of whom are archived now at Electronic Lebanon, created a sense of immediacy and widespread awareness of the situation "on the ground" in Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city through their posts. Fadda-Corney contrasted blogs to literary representations of war, which especially in the Arabic context tend to be somewhat lyrical and abstract (Fadda-Corney didn't mention it, but one thinks of Hanan al-Shaykh's Beirut Blues as suffering from a serious case of "abstractitis").

War blogs give a sense of war that is immediate and raw -- and there can be great power in that, even if not everything that is written on a blog under such circumstances remains meaningful in the long run. Fadda-Corney quoted extensively from "Salti Dispatches from Lebanon", a blog that actually evidenced a serious literary sensibility.

Another good paper on the same panel was by Nouri Gana, from the University of Michigan. Gana talked about the anxiety over aestheticizing war as expressed by some very famous Arab poets, Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis. Every time I hear a translation of one of these poets' work, I find myself wishing I knew Arabic. Here's a few lines of a 1971 poem by Adonis quoted at Wikipedia (this was not in Nouri Gana's talk):

Picture the earth as a pear
or breast.
Between such fruits and death
survives an engineering trick:
New York,
Call it a city on four legs
heading for murder
while the drowned already moan
in the distance.
New York is a woman
holding, according to history,
a rag called liberty with one hand
and strangling the earth with the other. (link)

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I was thrilled to see Ngugi w'a Thiong'o read from his new novel, The Wizard of the Crow on Friday evening. Parody is one of the best weapons with which to battle the sickening corruption of postcolonial dictatorships, and Ngugi wields it with ferocity and charm. I'm looking forward to getting the book.

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I didn't get to do quite as much socializing as I have at previous MLAs, mainly because it was in Philly and I was staying home (=come home on SEPTA & have dinner at a normal hour) rather than at a hotel (=hang out w/grad school buddies until late). But I did get to see many old friends at the Duke party, have coffee with Scott McLemee, and chill with the Valve crew (including of course John Holbo and Scott Eric Kaufmann) at SoleFood Thursday night. There I also had the privilege of meeting the famous BitchPhD in person, though I had to miss her talk at the "other" bloggers' panel. I also met a blogger I hadn't heard of earlier, Amanda of Household Opera (she has a nice recap of her MLA experience here), and Chuck Tryon, a blogger I have known (virtually) for a long time. Nice to meet all of you.

[Update: At least one person has blogged about the "other" bloggers' panel already: "Not of General Interest"]

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And that's about all from my end -- busy week!

Book Announcement: "Literary Secularism"

A few readers may have noticed that I added a link on the side bar to "my book, Literary Secularism" a few days ago. It's true -- my book is out, albeit only in England, and only in hardcover.

"Literary Secularism" was originally my dissertation, though I rewrote the whole thing beginning in earnest in the spring of 2004. I added some new material (chapters on secularism in Indian feminism, V.S. Naipaul, and the crisis of secularism in the post 9/11 world). And I tried to make the writing more generally readable and less densely theoretical on the whole (it's still a bit dense at some points).

I also completely rethought my thesis: earlier, I had conceived of something called "post-secularism," which I was thinking of as a historical phenomenon in parallel with "postmodernism" and "post-colonialism." But I found a lot of resistance to that term -- which sounds like it's suggesting that secularism is dead -- and I eventually dropped it. As I read philosophers and theorists like Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Jose Casanova, I realized two things: 1) I actually deeply believe that "secularism" as a political principle can be applied universally in the modern era of nation-states, and 2) there's something particularly literary about the way in which modern novelists deal with secularism and secularization in their works. The novel itself, in other words, is a unique mode of arguing for secularity. The latter theme, I felt, hadn't really been addressed by critics outside of a Eurocentric perspective -- so that is what I tried to do.

Now, there are many, many qualifications that could be introduced with reference to the first point (secularism as a universal concept, if not a universal practice). There are, for one thing, different secularisms -- India's is different from Great Britain's, just as the British system remains significantly different from the American one. Secularism need not mean strict "separation of church and state," but it does require some measure of institutional (procedural) separation between government from religion, as well as clear protections for religious minorities, women, dissenters, and atheists.

This is not really the time to work through all of the definitional issues on secularism. I do deal with some of the terminological questions in my first chapter, but in fact much of the material on political theory ended up getting stripped from the final version of the book.

In support of "Literary Secularism," I will be doing a series of blog posts in the spring, introducing fresh material not in the book, which will open out some of those issues. You'll find them here, as well as on the new "Literary Secularism" blog I've created especially for this purpose.

In the meanwhile, if you are an academic, I would be much obliged if you could ask your college or university library to order "Literary Secularism" from Cambridge Scholars Press.

The Myth of Martial Races

Though I've always been proud of the Sikh tradition in military service -- particularly in the First and Second World Wars -- the fact that the British Raj designated certain ethno-religious groups as martial races makes me uneasy. And recently I've been reading a book on the Gurkha regiments, (Byron Farwell's The Gurkhas), and after working through a number of chapters I'm ready to throw out the designation entirely.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Gurkhas (or Gorkhas) come from a region of Nepal west of Kathmandu, and have been actively recruited by the British for service as mercenaries since 1815. It so happened that the British discovered the Gurkhas' military aptitude after defeating them in a series of particularly tough battles -- just as they did with the Sikhs, the Marathas, and indeed, the Zulus (all of whom would be designated "martial races"; see the full list here). Often, troops from one recently conquered region would be instrumental in defeating the next group (the Gurkhas were deployed in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, for instance).

As a side-note, though most Gurkha regiments joined the Indian army at independence, the British did retain a small number of Gurkhas for the British Army after 1947 -- and they still actively recruit them today (on a fully voluntary basis, of course). Gurkhas were deployed in the Falklands' War, in Kosovo, and are now in Afghanistan. Retired Gurkhas are also probably going to be deployed to monitor the fragile peace agreement between the Maoists and the new government of Nepal. Joining the Gurkha regiments in the British Army is considered desirable, but it's a tough gig to get: one of the physical tests in order to be accepted involves running uphill for 40 minutes with a 70 pound bag of stones strapped to your back!

The author of the book on the Gurkhas is mainly a military historian, not an anthropologist, so it's probably too much to expect to ask him to deconstruct the idea of "martial races." But it's extremely frustrating that in episode after episode Farwell seems to reiterate a few straightforward stereotypes as explaining the Gurkhas' effectiveness in battle on behalf of the British: they are simple peasants, they are hardened by life in a mountainous region, and they have a strong sense of cultural identity. The same could be said of many other ethnic groups, most of whom were not designated "martial races." So why the Gurkhas?

It seems hard to escape the conclusion that "martial race" is a convenient term created by the British to continue military recruiting patterns favorable to the progress of imperial expansionism.

The authors of the Wikipedia entry on "martial races" have stated the problems with the term quite well:

Martial Race was a designation created by officials of British India. The British officials described these races as naturally warlike and aggressive in battle, and to possess qualities like courage, loyalty, self sufficiency, physical strength, resilience, orderliness, hard working, fighting tenacity and Military tactics. The British recruited heavily from these Martial Races for service in the colonial army. This doctrine of martial races postulated that the ability and desire of the soldier was inherited and that most Indians, with the exception of the specified castes, did not have the requisite genes that would make them warriors. Critics of this theory state that the Indian rebellion of 1857 may have played a role in reinforcing the British belief in Martial races. During this event some Indian troops (known as "Sepoys"), particularly in Bengal, mutinied, but the "loyal" Sikhs, Punjabis, Dogras, Gurkas, Garhwalis and Pakhtuns (Pathans) did not join the mutiny and fought on the side of the British Army. From then on, this theory was used to the hilt to accelerate recruitment from among these races, whilst discouraging enlistment of "disloyal" Bengalis and high-caste Hindus who had sided with the rebel army during the war.



The geography and culture of these martial races had common marks, such as hilly and mountainous terrain, a basis as hunting or agricultural societies, and a history of conflict, whether internally or with external groups. A case in point are the Gurkhas, who challenged British imperial expansion and gained the respect of their enemies for their fighting prowess and tenacity, thus earning them their reputation and their continued employment in the British Army. Some authors like Heather Streets rebuff this Martial Races Ideology stating that the military authorities puffed up the images of the martial soldiers by writing regimental histories, and by extolling the kilted Scots, kukri-wielding Gurkhas and turbaned Sikhs in numerous paintings. The Martial Race theory has also been described as a clever British effort to divide and rule the people of India for their own political ends." (link)

The damning parallel between the groups that were loyal during the Mutiny and those who would be designated as "Martial Races" later seems hard to escape. Though I generally try and avoid paranoid speculation, the idea of "divide and rule" also seems to be relevant here: by keeping the various ethnic regiments of the Indian army divided along linguistic or ethnic lines, they prevented them from congealing along racial (as in, brown vs. white) ones.

For better or worse, groups once designated by the British as "martial races" still tend to carry that badge with pride. But it's a dubious source of honor, and also an extremely dubious way of asserting one's manhood & masculinity. (How much violence against women has been perpetrated in the service of the myth of Jat or Pathan/Pashtun martial masculinity?) I think it would be better if we just threw out all those old myths, spattered as they are with the blood of wars of subjugation.

A Minor Quibble (Wyatt Mason on Narayan)

I first read this Wyatt Mason piece on R.K. Narayan more than a week ago, and I didn't really have anything to say about it initially. On the whole, it's a very helpful review essay -- a nice balance of interesting quotes from different Narayan novels, as well as biographical and contextual information. The anecdote about Graham Greene is especially interesting -- Narayan's experience fits the pattern experienced by several other colonial writers from before independence: they all needed patronage from established British writers. Tagore would never have gone as far as he did without Yeats's enthusiastic support, and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable would likely not have been as influential without E.M. Forster's preface.

Hopefully, Mason's essay might encourage people to go out and discover Narayan all over again, especially now that several of his major novels have been reissued with new prefaces by contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Pankaj Mishra.

But after a reader (thanks, Madhu) prompted me on Mason's essay, it occurred to me that there is one small troubling bit, which might not be so small, depending on how we read it. It's the very last paragraph of the essay:

It is through this idea—that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one—that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not—indeed, cannot—chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land,” are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things. (link)

The point about the non-development of Narayan's characters sounds right to me. But the part I find fishy is Mason's interpretation of Narayan's obsession with fate as the expression of an "Eastern existential perspective." In fact, Narayan's own personal experience of the loss of his young wife -- whom he had married against his family's wishes and against the advice of a Hindu astrologer -- might be the real culprit for his view on the impossibility of changing one's destiny. It is "Eastern" and it is "existential," but when Mason calls it "Eastern existential," he generalizes (to the cultural level) an attribute of Narayan's writing that he has already explained as a result of personal experience. Are there any Indian writers besides Narayan who share his approach to character and fate? If not, it might be more accurate to simply describe the particular comic sense of immobility as "Narayanesque."

As I said, it might just be a quibble. I still much prefer this essay to most other general accounts of Narayan I've seen, including especially Naipaul's.

Absolute Borders: Partition, Pluralism, and Indian Nationalism

Via Desipundit, I caught a link to a post by Qalandar on a recent article in the Calcutta Telegraph by Mukul Kesavan.

For those who don't know, Mukul Kesavan is a pretty accomplished writer -- the author of Looking Through Glass, and an interesting little monograph that came out a few years ago, called Secular Common-Sense.

His latest column is about the lingering consequences of the experience of Partition on the thinking of the Indian government regarding its borders. Kesavan is pointing to a kind of paradox in the constitution of the Indian state -- it was founded on a principle of pluralism across religious, linguistic, ethnic, and caste differences. But once it was defined as such and those borders were consecrated, if you will, in blood during the Partition, the possibility of allowing one or another territory to secede on the basis of ethnic or religious difference became an impossibility. If you do that, the whole justification for holding the rest of the country together could potentially collapse.

Qalandar raises some questions about the rhetorical stance taken by Kesavan in his piece, and Mukul Kesavan himself actually shows up in the comments to clarify some things. In fact, it's in the comments to the post that he gives what might be the clearest account of his position:

Pakistan claims Kashmir because as a Muslim state carved out of British India it thinks it has a right to Kashmir as a Muslim majority province. Israel, as a Jewish state, wants to annex large settler blocs of Jews on the West Bank to Israel and in return would be happy to give away bits of Israel that have concentrations of Arabs. Other nations dispute or defend territory on the ground of language. Indian nationalism refused the temptation of a single collective identity; as a result, the republic it created had no way of discriminating between borders that were negotiable and those that were written in stone. Not only were its borders were colonial and therefore arbitrary, being an ideologically pluralist state it couldn't claim or trade away disputed borderlands going by the nature of the populations settled there. So it decided that every inch of its border was sacred and what it had, it held. (link)

It's an interesting thesis -- one could argue that it might not hold in the case of India's claims to the Kashmir valley (too much strategic and symbolic value to ever think of letting go). But the northeastern provinces seem much more marginal. And just to reiterate in case anyone misses it: Kesavan isn't saying that India should just let go of any territory (indeed, he comes out pretty clearly as saying it shouldn't). Rather, Kesavan is trying to explain why India has held on -- and will continue to hold on -- so tenaciously.

There's more to it, but I think I'll leave it to readers to explore some of the other interesting points made in this discussion, by Qalandar, Mukul Kesavan, and Nitin Pai.

The Ferberizers vs. the Bleeding Hearts

We're more bleeding hearts than Ferberizers, though apparently both methods of getting babies to sleep are equally effective, as long as they're used consistently.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the easiest option is preventing sleep problems in the first place, through simple parent education, whether one-on-one training, group classes or booklets. Such programs typically encourage parents to have a peaceful, consistent evening routine in which children are placed in bed “drowsy but awake” to help them develop independent sleep skills. Three well-designed randomized trials have found that the babies of parents who had such training slept significantly better than those whose parents did not. (link)

Hm, these "teach me how to get my baby to sleep classes" sound great, though I'm not sure we would actually ever go.

Meanwhile, I'm interested to know there is a whole sub-field of medicine devoted just to sleep -- sleep medicine.

Spam, Like Sin, Is Constantly Renewed (and "Digital Maoism")

The best thing I've read today is this blog post at Short Schrift:

"All messages marked spam have been deleted forever."

There's something about the balance and weight of it, that just feels right. Not just techno-speak. It tells the truth.

On the other hand, it's unexpectedly funny. The purported finality is absurd. If your email account is anything like mine, you're going to have to delete all messages marked spam "forever" in about five minutes. (And indeed, I've got more spam in my box since I began typing.) You could take the "forever" not as literal truth (that deleted spam messages are unrecoverable -- is this true? Where do they go?) but as ironic commentary on our deepest desires - that is, our deepest email desires - that we be done, once and for all, with messages we will not read, that we no longer wish to receive. We want spam to be deleted forever -- like a theological salvation, we want to be delivered from spam -- yet spam, like sin, is constantly renewed, something from which we find only momentary relief, if any at all. (link)

Brilliant!

I found it accidentally while surfing for bootleg blog posts of the latest Stanley Fish column (on "career-ending gaffes"). Fish's column (found it) turns out to be not too terribly exciting, but along the way I found this blog post on the changing status of Authorship at Snarkmarket, which links to this article in Forbes on the future of the book in the age of network technology and digitization. According to Ben Vershbow, we are headed for an era of "network books," collective, Wikified editing, and "crowdsource" annotations. But it isn't necessarily going to be an era where authorship is entirely abolished. Arguably, authors are going to be more important than ever as information gets more and more confusing -- but as navigators rather than as "originators."

It's a step short of "Digital Maoism," a concept which was defined here and discussed in this New York Times article.

Hopes for Peace in Nepal

Since the big changes occurred in Nepal this past summer, the longstanding conflict there between Maoist insurgents and the government has ceased, as a "Comprehensive Peace Agreement" (CPA) has been signed. The Maoists have agreed to lay down arms and stay in camps where they will be monitored by international observers. The system they've come up to ensure both parties abide by the agreement seems a little far-fetched, but perhaps workable:

Under a novel agreement with the government and the United Nations, they are to deposit their weapons in padlocked containers at each of the cantonments like this one. They will hold the keys, but their gun closets will be closely watched. Floodlights will shine each night. Surveillance cameras and burglar alarms will be installed.



For the sake of at least symbolic reciprocity, the Nepalese Army has promised to keep an equal number of its soldiers in their barracks.



An initial team of 35 United Nations monitors is expected to trickle in by the end of the year to oversee the Maoist and the army barracks alike, followed by an assessment team to determine the final size of the United Nations mission. (link)

This seems like an awfully fragile system. Though Nepal's 10 year old conflict is a little different from civil conflicts in other parts of the world -- as I understand it, it's not rooted in ethnic differences, so it may be easier to heal -- it seems hard to imagine this method working for very long. Will the symbolic deposition of the King and the advent of a permanent democratic government be enough of a change to bring the country back together after 10 years of civil war?

In the short run, ironically, the Maoists have lots of new recruits hanging around at the new camps. But it's unclear whether the new kids are there because they support the ideology, or because they hope the newly legitimized Maoists might have work for them:

Up the road in the village, among the old men sitting and soaking in the last of the day’s sun, the question of new recruits inspired churlish laughter. Of course these are new recruits, they said, and you can easily tell them from the old-timers. The new ones know nothing, one old man said. The new ones cannot tell the difference between where to defecate and where to bathe, another said. That inspired howls of laughter.



The troops who have gathered here for now rely on the hospitality of the local people. The old man, Ananda Gyawali, introduced one 19-year-old, Krishna Acharya, as a distant relative. The young man is illiterate and came a couple of weeks ago from a village far away to throw his lot in with the Maoists. He claimed to have joined the rebels a year ago.



The boy came only because he thought the Maoists would give him a job, he said, adding, “Poverty is to blame for this.” (link)

Meanwhile, many Royalists loyal to King Gyanendra have begun buying property in places like India and Singapore. A major garment factory in Kathmandu has shut down for reasons that seem linked to the changes. And there have even been some protests against the Maoists in the Kathmandu Valley, who seem more powerful than ever at this point.

Pamuk's Nobel Lecture: Shades of Naipaul

A translation of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize lecture has been posted at the Nobelprize.org website -- and it's pretty good. If you're one of the (many) people out there who's a bit skeptical about Pamuk, or haven't had a chance to read his stuff, the speech might be an encouragement.

The speech actually reminds me a lot of Naipaul in some places -- especially as Pamuk talks about his youthful anxiety about being from what was seen as a marginal, provincial place for a writer. There are also shades of Naipaul in Pamuk's way of meditating on his father's interest in literature and writing. Like Naipaul, Pamuk's father had literary pretentions, and indeed, the frame for the speech is Pamuk's consideration of the briefcase in which his father kept his notebooks.

Near the beginning of the speech, there is a kind of writers' manifesto, which has a nice rhythm to it in Maureen Freely's translation:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

There is also a passage where Pamuk expresses concerns quite similar to those dealt with by postcolonial writers in the Anglophone tradition. Turkey can't be thought of as "postcolonial," but in the following paragraph Pamuk describes anxieties that many "poco" writers -- Naipaul probably chief among them -- have also expressed:

As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was 'not in the centre'. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father's library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul's books – our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail – and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world's otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West – just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking. It wasn't just by reading that we left our Istanbul lives to travel West – it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris, shut himself up in his room, and then brought his writings back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father's suitcase, it seemed to me that this was what was causing me disquiet. After working in a room for 25 years to survive as a writer in Turkey, it galled me to see my father hide his deep thoughts inside this suitcase, to act as if writing was work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason why I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Nabokov: Butterflies, Darwin, Mimesis

From Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

"The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis ("Don't eat me--I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected"). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird's dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. "Natural Selection," in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of "the struggle for life" when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."

My students, I was happy to see, were a little shocked that someone with Nabokov's way of seeing things would say something that might even remotely be construed as Intelligent Design-ish. And indeed, Darwinian natural selection, as I understand it, does have a fine explanation for the "miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior": any mutant variety that doesn't exhibit a perfect imitation is going to get eaten. And if you have enough random-pattern butterflies getting eaten over time, eventually a strain that has a slightly better design is going to come around and not get eaten.

I tried to deflect the conversation onto his real substantive point here, which is that for Nabokov art requires a kind of heroic, almost obsessive attention to mimesis. You put way more effort into representing the world in your art than your predator (or reader) is likely to ever notice. The art comes from the excess, which is, like the butterfly that looks like a leaf with "grub-bored holes," also always in some sense deceptive ("an intricate enchantment and deception"). If art is both mimetic and deceptive, perhaps Nabokov is trying to say that mimesis itself is always deceptive. You make a butterfly that looks amazingly like a leaf, but you don't attempt to clone the genetic structure of the leaf itself. Indeed, in some sense you don't care about the leaf per se (i.e., reality) at all.

Munnabhai beats the rap, mostly

Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt (star of the Munnabhai movies) has been acquitted on the terrorism charge that's been on his head since 1993. The judge did find him guilty of illegal possession of arms, but it appears that charge is much less of a concern: though he may still do years of prison time, according to the New York Times, Dutt's family and friends are celebrating.

Some background on the case is available at Wikipedia:

Mumbai was engulfed in riots as the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid complex in Ayodhya in December 1992. The resulting riots claimed hundreds of lives and it is during this time that Sanjay Dutt claims to have asked his under world friends to provide him with a fire arm for protection. He however had not conveyed to police any threats to his life.



As per the CBI case filed in a TADA court Abu Salem and his men went to Dutt's house on January 16, 1993 and gave him three AK-56 rifles, 25 hand grenades, one 9 mm pistol and cartridges. He returned two AK-56 rifles, hand grenades and cartridges to Hanif Kadawala and Samir Hingora but kept one AK-56 rifle with himself. (link)

Admittedly, the Wikipedia article is a bit slanted towards Dutt here, as it presumes that Dutt's purpose in buying a weapon was self-defense. But the problem with this interpretation is Dutt's supplier, Abu Salem, a notorious terrorist seen as one of the key organizers of the terrible 1993 blasts in Bombay. While it's fair to imagine that a half-Muslim actor might want protection following some nasty communal riots (December 1992-January 1993), it's also fair to speculate that he knew Abu Salem was up to something unsavory by the spring of 2003. Even if Sanjay Dutt wasn't actively involved in the bombings that took place in March of 1993, isn't it possible he knew something about the plans given his association with Abu Salem?

I guess I lean towards Dutt a bit in this case. While I do find Abu Salem's involvement disturbing, it's hard to imagine that Dutt would have been actively involved in terrorism given his famous parents and his status as an actor. That said, if this were the U.S., and Sanjay Dutt had bought an AK-56 rifle from, say, Mohammed Atta, he would probably be permanently locked up in Guantanamo Bay. (Sometimes, the Indian legal system seems more rational than the current American one.)

Dutt served 18 months in jail immediately following his arrest, but within a few years was back and more popular than ever in Bollywood. The 2000s have been the peak of his career, with the two superhit Munnabhai movies. As I recall from the comments to one of my earlier posts on Lage Rago Munnabhai, some people at least have been aware of the irony of an actor in a movie about "Gandhi-giri" being found guilty of possessing an assault rifle. Well, at least he has one thing in common with the Mahatma -- they both did lots of jail time.

Mahmood the Atheist

Mahmood Farooqui is among the bloggers signed on to a new group blog project called Kafila, which I discovered via DesiPundit. (Other names on the roster include Shivam Vij, the omnipresent progressive blogger/journalist, and Nivedita Menon, a well-known, Delhi-based sociologist).

For his first post at Kafila, Farooqui reprints an essay he had recently published in Tehelka, on the uncomfortable position he finds himself in as a secular -- indeed, atheist -- Muslim intellectual in today's India. The place to start might be where he lays his cards on the table:

Let me explain my locus. I am an atheist, I follow none of the Islamic taboos, but I live in a locality in the capital that can only be called a ghetto. I lived here for five years, when I was a student, when I was very self-consciously opposed to the Indian Muslim stereotype. I had grown up on Chandamama and Nandan, Holi was my favourite festival, Karna my hero, Shiva the great God, Hinduism a highly tolerant religion and I had dreams of attaining martyrdom fighting Pakistan. I was studying history and detested medieval Muslim rulers; I would expatiate on the reasons why Islam had trouble with modernity; I admired Naipaul and Rushdie; supported Mushirul Hasan during the Satanic Verses controversy — a novel I deeply admire in spite of its undoubted blasphemies — and I detested many things about Indian Muslims, except, predictably, Urdu literature and Sufism. I was, in short, a model Hinduised-Indian-Muslim, who always put India before Islam. I was desperate to leave Okhla. (link)

Okhla is a predominantly Muslim suburb (slum?) in south Delhi; Mahmood Farooqui has written a little more about life there in this article.

Tellingly, Farooqui had trouble leaving Okhla for Delhi's posher (predominantly Hindu/Sikh) neighborhoods:

But I am now back in Okhla, arguing simultaneously for the legitimacy of difference and the fact of a universal human. Between the self-hatred of my youth and the current uneasiness with my earlier positions lies, possibly, a series of adult defeats — perhaps they have dulled my passions and my hatreds. However now I have, you could say, chosen to live here, after a series of eliminations — Defence Colony, Greater Kailash-I, Jangpura — on grounds of my being Muslim and/or not having a company lease. But, crucially, I came here because I was sickened by South Delhi and because I was incipiently aware of Okhla’s hospitableness. (link)

When he says "eliminations," he means he was denied a lease -- at least some of the time -- because of his Muslim name. What happens to Farooqui as he tries to leave Okhla is a reflection of the double-bind he faces as he tries to balance his social identiy and background with a self-critical attachment to the idea of modern India as a nation. He fits in uneasily in Okhla, surrounded by conservative Muslim neighbors. But mainstream society isn't very encouraging, and as a result the pull of his social loyalites remains alive:

More than this, however, my views, in conformity with the rest of the academic world, about the virtues of egalitarianism, liberty and a democratic welfare state are now far less uncomplicated than they were in my youth. I still search for vestiges of the narrative of liberty in Islamic pasts, I continue to valourise streams of pluralism in Muslim sultanates and extol those Indian Muslims of the past who were ecumenical and tolerant. I would still challenge descriptions of the medieval past that underline forced conversions or bemoan the second-class treatment of Hindus. If I do not have much truck with Islam, why then do I continue to search for narratives of tolerance in the Islamic past? Why do I smart when Vajpayee says that there is trouble and violence wherever Muslims live? Why is my attitude to Islam so defensive? (link)

In this essay (you should really read the whole thing), Farooqui doesn't really come upon any answers to the double-bind he faces, but it is a remarkably forthright and careful attempt to articulate the problem of minority belonging -- which isn't so different from minority belonging in other national contexts.

* * *
More Mahmood Farooqui links:

Recent articles in Mid-Day

More articles in Mid-Day

Articles in Outlook

Amit Varma's post on a controversy regarding a possible instance of plagiarism in a book review Farooqui wrote.

The World Is High, Not Flat

The Philadelphia Inquirer has the first in a series of articles about an illegal prescription drug network that was busted in 2005, as part of Operation Cyber Chase. The ringleaders of the network were the Bansals, a family based in India, though part of the business was run out of a warehouse in Queens.

Here's how the business worked:

Akhil [Bansal] oversaw the family's North American operations, shipping roughly 75,000 pills a day via UPS. In a little more than a year, the network had smuggled 11 million prescription tablets to more than 60,000 American addresses, an operation that grossed at least $8 million. These numbers did not include the steroids or the kilo shipments of the tranquilizer ketamine, a club drug called "Special K."

The family's Internet business represented a dark slice of the global economy so new, and so widespread, that national governments were still struggling to understand it, let alone police it.

Laws were vague, outdated, inconsistent. Technology - new medicines and ways to deliver them - was outpacing regulation. (link)

Unlike Operation Meth Merchant, where a number of the defendants pleaded guilty because they were going to be deported anyway, these guys clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and what they were doing was definitely illegal. In contrast to Operation Meth Merchant, where Indian store clerks were disporportionately targeted, I'm not at all bothered at the take-down of the Bansals -- they deserve to be in jail. Rather, it's an intriguing case study that shows yet again how India's entry into the globalized, internet-based economy goes well beyond the rosy picture suggested by talk of outsourcing and call centers.

At the same time, I don't think the Bansals are especially "evil" (as in, immoral) for smuggling imitation prescription drugs, though it's definitely dangerous for these drugs to be floating around. (According to NPR, at least one person died after purchasing drugs from an unregulated website based in Mexico.) If anything, the Bansals are evil because their business was based on spam, which wreaks havoc with email and is the bane of many a blogger's existence. (Indeed, I have been the victim of comment spam from just this sort of company, as I mentioned last week.)

At its peak, the drug network was a multimillion dollar business. Akhil Bansal, who was 26 at the time he was arrested, was doing an MBA at Temple. According to the Inquirer, he had about $400,000 in his checking account. The DEA had been investigating the case for five months, and cooperated extensively with Indian police in Delhi and Agra (where the Bansals have a second house) to bring down the family.

The Inquirer has created a special website for the series, go.philly.com/drugnet. You might want to check back to the site over the next few days to see what happens to Akhil Bansal and family after the DEA gets ahold of them. [Update: See part 2 of the story here.]

More links: USDOJ press release (PDF)

DEA Article summarizing the drug ring and the arrests made, all around the world.

Article in Temple News

NPR coverage

"My Kind of Exile": The Silencing of Tenzin Tsundue

Via DesiPundit, I came across a string of news articles and posts on Tenzin Tsundue, a talented activist poet and essayist of Tibetan extraction; in 2001 he won the Picador Outlook Non-Fiction essay prize for this moving piece of work. Tsundue was also born on Indian soil, and is therefore Indian in somewhat the same sense as I consider myself American. But with a difference: Tsundue's people, the many thousands of Tibetans who have taken refuge in India, are effectively denationalized. They aren't full Indian citizens (though legally they ought to be), and they can't go back to a home country that doesn't exist anymore.

In 2002, Tsundue got attention in the Indian and international media when he took advantage of a construction ladder and climbed the outside of a fourteen story building (Express Towers) directly facing the Oberoi Towers in Nariman Point, Mumbai. The Chinese Premier was in town, and when he and his delegation arrived at their posh, high-rise hotel, they were undoubtedly chagrined to see Tsundue in the building directly across, unfurling a 30 foot "Free Tibet" banner stitched together entirely out of Chinese flags. (More details)

One of the interesting comments Tsundue made at that time was in response to the danger he faced as hotel security officials were threatening to drop a materials lift above his head on him, when he refused to come down: "'I did not worry about the threat being carried out, knowing that I was in India and not in China,' he said."

Telling words; are they true? The Indian government has recently placed a restraining order on Tsundue in connection with Hu Jintao's coming visit to India (see Nitin Pai's outraged post on this). Tsundue has been ordered not to leave Dharmsala during the Chinese Premier's visit -- on threat of deportation to Tibet! It's understandable that the Indian government would want to protect the Chinese delegation from intrusive protesters, but I think Tsundue ought to have the right to go to Delhi and express his opposition to the Chinese occupation, especially since we know that Tsundue and other Tibetans will do so peacefully. India may be worlds away from China on matters of personal freedom and respect for human rights, but as this case shows, it's still far from perfect.

One other thing: Nitin points out that the Indian news-media has yet to pick up this story. I did find something on "Telugu Portal," but otherwise it's mainly newspapers in places like Malaysia that are covering the story. Shouldn't the Indian media at least be reporting this story?

Update: More coverage is starting to appear. Also check out this new article by Tenzin Tsundue on the current status of Tibet in the evolving Indo-Chinese relationship.

Quoted in Salon

I was quoted in Salon.com yesterday in a short piece on the "macaca" question by Andrew Leonard. He makes some good points, and the comments on the article are also worthwhile (well, some of them).