Melodrama in Milwaukee: a Review of "American Dervish"

[Cross-posted at The Aerogram]

When the topic of South Asian diaspora fiction came up on blogs like Sepia Mutiny (or now, happily, The Aerogram) the conversation would inevitably come around to Jhumpa Lahiri--though not always entirely happily. Many readers have complained over the years that Lahiri’s characters are too narrowly of a certain class and milieu – highly educated, upper-middle class Bengalis. Where, many readers wonder, is the second-gen novel that sounds more like ‘regular’ desi life?

Reading The Namesake years ago, I should say that I did not particularly share that frustration, since actually Gogol Ganguli’s experience at Yale resembled my own experience at Cornell in some uncanny ways. The one difference was really the Ganguli parents – Lahiri’s immigrant parents have a sort of stateliness and dignity that the Punjabi aunties and uncles I knew growing up in DC did not exactly have. In contrast to the characteristic quiet in Lahiri’s stories, my experience was most definitely loud: full of melodrama, over-the-top arguments and fantastic fights.

That sense of Punjabi shor-sharabba is something I immediately noticed and found gripping n Ayad Akhtar’s excellent debut novel, American Dervish. Fathers say crazy things after a night’s drinking, wives curse about their husbands’ affairs (“Another of his white prostitutes decided she was sick of his promises!”), and children playing video games in the living room hear it all.

Much of what I have written so far pertains to the Punjabi elements of this story. I should also address what is really the core theme of the novel – the boy protagonist’s troubled relationship to religion. Hayat Shah is about eleven years old when his mother’s best friend from Lahore, Mina Ali, comes to stay with him and his parents in the Milwaukee suburbs.

Hayat’s own father, a doctor, has turned against Islam in large part because he feels that so many of the observant Muslims in the Pakistani community in Milwaukee are hypocrites or fools. But the boy latches on to his new auntie – and she begins to introduce him to her unconventional brand of Islam, one suffused with elements of Sufism and Mysticism. Hayat’s auntie Mina Ali was divorced by a callous husband in Karachi, and decided to leave Pakistan to avoid having to lose her son to his custody – as, under Pakistani custody laws, she would have been obliged to do. Mina Ali is a curious and paradoxical character – a feminist and freethinker, she is also a devout and committed Muslim who resists the idea of ever marrying a non-Muslim despite her earlier bad experience in Pakistan.

Hayat begins to develop an intense pre-adolescent crush on his auntie, which leads him to do some rather unpleasant things to keep her American suitor, a friend and colleague of Hayat’s father, away from her. This forms the core of the novel’s plot, about which I won’t say too much here for fear of giving too much away. What I can say is that his feelings for his Auntie lead Hayat into a pretty intense period of religious study; his immersion in Islam starts as an attempt to please and get close to Mina, but over time it develops a life of its own.

One aspect of American Dervish I particularly appreciated was Akhtar’s willingness to “go there” with some serious community dirty laundry. In this case, the particular dirty laundry is the presence of a continuing strain of theological anti-Semitism amongst some Muslims. This is carefully and thoughtfully explored in the novel – it’s one of Akhtar’s central themes. I was also impressed by Akhtar’s willingness to tell hard truths about how religion can be used as a tool for hurting and suppressing free-spirited women in particular. American Dervish is often powerfully – though also subtly – feminist.

[To be clear, every South Asian religious community has its share of dirty laundry. Like Ayad Akhtar (and like his character Hayat in the novel), I grew up in the 1980s and 90s. For Sikhs recovering from the shock of 1984 that was a difficult time, and I overheard many bitter and angry conversations amongst men of my father’s age expressing anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu statements. So when Hayat hears his local Imam making some pretty nasty anti-Semitic comments in the Khutbah at the Masjid, it definitely resonated.]

In the end the young Hayat turns away from the brand of Islam practiced at the local Masjid, but Akhtar eschews the kind of harsh medicine advocated by activists like Irshad Manji. His rebuttal of intolerance within certain strands of Islamic practice is much more nuanced, grounded in the alternative Islamic discourses of the Sufis. Hayat’s solution to the quandaries over religion he faces do not involve rejecting the faith outright, but rather a subtler reorientation to faith that recognizes how deeply our love for the religious beliefs and values of the people we love might impact our own relationship to religion.

I should say that I “read” this novel as an audiobook, on my daily long commute to and from work. Part of my pleasure in listening came from its being read so incredibly skillfully – with none of the mispronounced Punjabi or Urdu words one sometimes encounters in audiobook versions of South Asian themed stories. It wasn’t until I reached the acknowledgments track at the very end of the last CD that I realized the audiobook was done by the author himself; Ayad Akhtar’s training as an actor and background as a playwright clearly informs his recorded performance of his novel – with emphasis on performance. (As a side note, Akhtar’s play Disgraced was recently performed at Lincoln Center and well-reviewed by the Times.) Many times I felt so drawn into his verbal portrayal of certain scenes that I decided to wait in my driveway or in the parking lot at the university just to hear how a particular crisis moment might end up playing out.

In short, this is a very solid and thought-provoking debut novel and a definite contribution to the rather short list of really good novels about South Asian diaspora life. The audiobook version is so good that it might even be recommended above the text version of the novel.  

On Teaching Blogging in a College Classroom (a Response to Gawker)

Gawker has one of those sneering snarky posts that seems to be giving everyone a good chuckle this morning:

So then, it's a new academic program straight outta Duke University: "Write(H)ers," which will, according to the Duke Chronicle, "create a community of feminist-oriented writers," by, you know, teaching women how to blog. Specifically—direct quote—"The 23 members of the program will participate in personal blogging." This new program is officially sponsored by the Women's Center at Duke University, a school with a tuition of $43,623 per year.

As strong supporters of feminist-oriented writers and bloggers, let us be very clear: this is a total fucking scam. (Source)

Whenever you want to make something unconventional at an elite university sound ridiculous, all you have to do is bring up the tuition. Sex week at Yale? They pay $45,000 a year for that? Just about anything college students might do at any such expensive institution could be made to sound ridiculous with that sticker price. Invoking tuition is, in short, an easy rhetorical move (a bit cheap).

Once you get past the tuition shock, the reason Nolan gives for claiming that the new "Write(H)ers" program is a scam? You can also learn how to write online for free -- just by doing it:

The finest bloggers, meaning the finest writers who happen to write primarily online, got good, like every other writer, by reading, and writing. These things—particularly the writing part—can be accomplished for free, without ever paying a penny to Duke or any other university, and without filling out an application form to an academic program. I hear Tumblr.com works well. Contributing "three blog posts over the course of the semester" is not going to help you. Sorry.

It so happens that this spring I am teaching a course called "Writing for the Internet." It is a writing course, and blogging is a major component of what I have been asking my students to do. The platform are using is Tumblr. It actually does work well. You can see what my students are blogging by starting here. We've used Tumblr's Dashboard / social media design to create a "blog circle" -- where everyone in the course follows everyone else.

I do not know enough about the Duke program to defend it directly, though the Duke Chronicle article cited by Gawker does help a little. For one thing, any university education in the humanities is as at least partially about socializing in future professional networks. And an important part of "Write(H)ers" seems to be oriented to just that. The program has several influential feminist bloggers visiting the campus, and students in the program will be interacting with them. The Duke Chronicle has a helpful quote from a participant named Sara Van Name along those lines:

“This program was a dream come true for me because I read a lot of feminist blogs and several of the women who write these blogs now have the opportunity to come to Duke and explain to this new community how to follow in their footsteps,” Van Name said.

Gawker asks whether it's worth their tuition dollars for students to get access to people like Jill Filipovic (of Feministe) or Rebecca Traister (of Salon) by enrolling in this program; I tend to think the answer would have to be yes for those students, especially if down the line they might want to think about writing for Salon, Feministe, Jezebel, etc.

The other question, which of course this snarky post on Gawker won't bother with, really boils down to whether there's any value in teaching writing in a college classroom to begin with. Over the years many successful authors, especially creative writers, have at times made arguments to the effect of: "there's no point teaching writing in a college classroom, you just have to get out there and do it." (Here's a recent one by Anis Shivani.) But for every commercially-successful novelist that has said something along those lines, there are 20 published and well-reviewed literary novelists who make far better salaries teaching in various university MFA programs than they ever would by selling books alone. I would tend to expect that they believe that what they do when they teach writing has value--that writing can, in fact, be taught. (Though perhaps it's right to acknowledge that not everything about good writing can be taught.)

Could you learn to write well entirely on your own? Yes, surely, if you were very motivated. But teaching can also be part of it: there is value added in working with students to help them learn the mechanics of effective sentences, as well as effective and interesting arguments. They could probably learn some of these skills by going out there and trying to blog "for real," but is Hamilton Nolan really going to argue that it hurts them to have help?  Didn't he have his own modes of help as he learned his own chops at Gawker -- for instance from editors at Gawker itself? Professors in writing workshops often approach their task as exactly that: a first editor. In any case, that's the role I have tried to assume for myself this spring, in "Writing for the Internet."

[Update: a friend pointed out to me an additional point, which I had neglected to mention, that the Women's Center at Duke is not an academic program, and that this is not a part of any course curriculum -- it's extra-curricular. ]

The Killing of Sunando Sen Was Not a "Hate Crime"

The death of Sunando Sen was tragic. For people who ride the subway everyday in New York City or other cities, the second incident of a subway pushing in a month is also frightening -- an Erika Menendez could be anywhere. I have heard at least a few friends in New York mention to me that of late they have started standing further back on platforms for fear of being pushed. 

One thing the subway pushing is not is a hate crime. It is true that Ms. Menendez said some hateful things about Muslims after being picked up by police, but I would argue that because she is so evidently disturbed, her statement is immaterial.

People who defend the use of the hate crime label for this tragic death argue 1) that it matters from the point of view of potential victims of other hate crimes: we have to watch out in case someone else does the same thing. They also argue 2) that her particular fixation on Muslims (and Hindus) comes out of a climate of racial and religious intimidation. She may be mentally ill, but anti-Muslim sentiments are so readily available that there was, in effect, a "ready made" group for her to hate.

Let us deal with point (1) first. To me, what's clear from this killing is that the issue should be the way the U.S. handles severely mental ill people in general. There is no evidence that Ms. Menendez had a history of racial or religious animus (and as anyone who has ever followed a case related to hate crimes surely knows, this matters). Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that she was a violent and severely disturbed person, and she might well have targeted anybody at all; her targeting of Mr. Sen might well have been arbitrary. It's also probably worth mentioning at this point that her comments were actually pretty incoherent: was she targeting Mr. Sen because she thought he was a Muslim? Why then did she later say she hated both Hindus and Muslims? This is a very unusual pairing to pick as targets. (While one can easily imagine hatred of either religious group individually, it's unusual to have both without the additional presence of generalized xenophobia. And yet in her statement to police, Menendez didn't mention anything about immigrants, dark-skinned immigrants, etc.)

Along those lines, here are a few paragraphs from the New York Times article dealing with Ms. Menendez's mental history:

There were ample warnings over the years concerning Ms. Menendez. 

In 2003, according to the police, she attacked another stranger, Daniel Conlisk, a retired firefighter, as he took out his garbage in Queens. 

“I was covered with blood,” Mr. Conlisk recalled on Sunday. “She was screaming the whole time.” 

Just two months earlier, Ms. Menendez was accused of hitting and scratching another man in Queens. She was also arrested on cocaine possession charges the same year. 

Since then, according to friends and people familiar with her record, she has been cared for at mental health facilities in Manhattan and Queens as her problems worsened. 

Between 2005 and February this year, the police responded five times to calls from relatives reporting difficulties in dealing with Ms. Menendez, reportedly stemming from her failure to take certain medication, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly about her medical history. In one of these instances, in 2010, she threw a radio at one of the responding officers, the official said.

 “She has been in and out of institutions,” another law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Within the past year, she was discharged from Bellevue, according to a person with knowledge of her medical history. (link)

Note the random nature of her targets, particularly the guy (who I'm presuming is Caucasian) who was violently attacked while just taking out his trash.

People more experienced with this subject than I am have also pointed in this direction following other attacks by mentally ill people where a "hate" dimension was involved. In June, 2011, Eugene O'Donnell of the John Jay College of Law, published the following comments in the New York Times:

It is impossible to ignore the mental health dimension in the Holocaust Museum attack and an earlier assault at the Federal Reserve headquarters by James von Brunn. There may also be serious mental health issues with Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. Tiller.  

There is a gaping hole in our mental health infrastructure which will not be easy to fill, but needs urgent examination and action. Far too many potentially dangerous people are left to fend for themselves. Even when there are concerned family members or friends in their lives, these guardians are often worn out from trying to help, or do not know where to get dependable care.

We continue to leap at the chance to declare actions criminal despite the fact that attacks like this museum shooting are rooted in an extremely irrational and bizarre world view, and are thus outside the scope of traditional criminal notions of “punishment” and “correction.” And of course, even where the criminal justice system is utilized, extended post-release mental health supervision needs to explored, in some cases for the whole life of the ex-convict. (link)

In short, what Sunando Sen's death reminds us is that we need to be focused on the American mental health system, particularly the metrics and regulations governing how potentially violent individuals can be involuntarily committed to mental health institutions. (This was also apparently an issue in the truly horrible shootings in Newtown Connecticut a few weeks ago.) This is not a matter of simple criminality because people this disturbed are not committing "crimes" based on rational motives -- which are the basis of any theory of criminal law. As Professor O'Donnell points out here, the concepts of "punishment" and "correction" are also inapplicable in such cases.

Attempts to label the killing of Sunando Sen a hate crime imbue a sense of rationality and motive to Ms. Menendez that does not exist, if her prior history is any indication. The labeling of Sunando Sen's death as a hate crime also weakens and cheapens the real problem of violence motivated by hatred of religious and racial minorities.  It gives the appearance that community advocates may be overplaying their hand, which, just a few months after the ghastly shooting at the Gurdwara in Oak Creek Wisconsin, they surely do not need to do.

There is a legitimate question about whether the general cultural climate in the United States at present makes it easy for mentally deranged individuals to pick up on it and deploy anti-Islamic or anti-immigrant sentiments and use them as channels for violent and anti-social behavior (see point 2 above). However, if this is a cultural problem, it likely needs a cultural, rather than a legal, solution.

Americans might be justified in feeling a bit afraid riding the subway after events such as the killing of Sunando Sen. But South Asians in particular are mistaken if they feel this attack is directed at them. It really affects all Americans, and will continue to do so as long as the American mental health system remains broken. 

Notes on MLA 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has already put up some stories about MLA 2013, including this article covering the growing attention payed to "Alt Ac" (Alternative academia) career tracks, and this one focusing on the general theme for the conference, "Avenues of Access," which was explored by the MLA's President, Michael Berube in his address, as well as in numerous presidential forums interspersed throughout the conference that focused on facets of "Access" broadly construed. (The panels on that theme were on everything from "Open Access" journals, to questions of access and diversity in the Digital Humanities, to disability studies.)

I would recommend the above Chronicle links (not paywalled, I don't think) for anyone looking for a general sense of the MLA this year. (Update: or check out this link at Inside Higher Ed, on the MLA's Big [Digital] Tent.)

Below are my own particular notes on the panels that I ended up attending, starting with the one I organized. My goal in writing these notes is not to "opinionate" about the papers or evaluate them, but rather to simply give some thumbnail sketches, and maybe offer up a link or two for people interested in these topics who weren't able to attend. The notes and links are also, needless to say, for myself -- there's lots of "further reading" for me to do in the links and references below.

In general, I attended three "Digital Humanities" panels, two panels related to South Asian literature, one panel on modern Anglo-Irish literature, a panel on "Public Poetry," and a panel on Modern British Literature and the State. I also branched out a bit from my core interests and saw a panel on 19th century American literature ("Secularism's Technologies"), which featured both Michael Warner and Amy Hollywood -- two scholars I admire -- talking about secularism.

Click on "Read More" to read my notes on the panels I attended.

Debating "La Bayadere" a bit on Tumblr: Exoticism, Orientalism, etc.

I came upon this string of comments related to the above animated Gifs on Tumblr:

1/5. Why you should see “La Bayadere”

The drama: Love triangle story that ends in death

yroymustang:

warcrimenancydrew:

searchingforknowledge:

crackerhell:

inheritedloss:

i was extremely confused and for a minute i’m like

why would all these indian people have white makeup on

then i realized it was just white people

and now i has a sad

op means why you should NOT see this pos right?!!

where’s the section called “the racism”?

My first reaction was “Oh look, only white passing Indi… WAIT, THOSE ARE WHITE PEOPLE REPRESENTING MY CULTURE!”. White people representing my culture, I am not surprised, I’m merely mildly infuriated. 

Here were my own thoughts on seeing the above:

First, I respect the reaction, and believe me this bothers me a fair bit as well. 

But we can do more than simply label it "racism." Are we unhappy because these are white dancers performing Indian characters, or because of the whole context of this ballet -- including its original choreographer (the Russian Marius Patipa), as well as the modern choreographers and designers who have produced the Paris Opera Ballet's 2012 version (from which these Gifs are derived)?

This is a ballet called La Bayadere, first performed in 1877. It's part of a long tradition in European high art of using "exotic" Indian themes and settings with all white casts. (Another classic example is the opera Lakme.) It was produced as a reaction to a visit from real temple dancers to Russia in the 1870s. 

Such stories are usually based on actual Indian sources. While there are many elements of La Bayadere that are clearly historically inaccurate (a Rajah's daughter would never be involved in dancing publicly, as the character does in this ballet), it's not entirely out of the question that a story like this could be recuperated and rethought to make it more relevant and 'true' to real Indian culture. 

A future version, for example, might rework some of the original choreography using elements from classical Indian dance formats. And yes, use dancers of Indian origin. (Presumably one reason why they might not be casting any Indian dancers is that there may not be very many who are trained at this level in western ballet. If they change some of the choreography to include Indian classical dance, the complexion of the cast could look very different.)

In short, I'm not thrilled about what I'm seeing in the images above, but maybe this Gif series might be an opportunity to get educated, not just mad. 

Das Racist Splits up

So: Das Racist has split up.

I have mixed feelings about it. As an Indian American kid raised on hip hop in the 1980s and 90s, I was for a while quite taken by the promise of a rap group with two Indian-American members suddenly becoming famous (cover of Spin! K Mart commercials!), even if they were a generation younger than me. But I was also often frustrated with their choices and actual performances (i.e., the terrible performance on Conan), and in some ways I'm not really that surprised they've broken up.  Below I have some thoughts about what I really liked about Das Racist and also some of what I found frustrating.

* * *

I've been aware of Das Racist since Abhi blogged about them on Sepia Mutiny in 2009, though truth be told I didn't actually bother to click on the link and listen until Phillygrrl did her two-part interview (Part 1; Part 2) with Himanshu Suri that September.

I also saw the band perform exactly once, at the Roots Picnic in June 2010 (an event that was photographed and described a little [not by me] here). I meant to write something about my thoughts after that event but didn't. Briefly now: I thought the rise of a rap group with a strong Indian-American presence was kind of amazing, and I wanted to love them -- but the actual live performance was a little disappointing. By that point I had been enthusiastically listening to band's mixtape, "Shut Up, Dude," for a few weeks, and even knew some of the verses to songs like "Ek Shaneesh" by heart.

But at the DR show I went to the sound levels were set so high that it was impossible to hear any actual lyrics. And Heems, Kool A.D., and Dapwell just seemed to be running around the stage like maniacs--not working at all to win over the crowd or draw in potential new fans. DR was followed that afternoon by a Black Thought side project (Money Making Jam Boys), and you could instantly see the difference between Das Racist's self-referential, semi-comic "rap in quotation marks" and the serious posture and delivery style of Black Thought and his peers. Black Thought seemed to care about what he was saying and wanted the audience to hear it and understand it; to my eye, that afternoon, Das Racist did not.

Of course, Das Racist has been, from the beginning, as much interested in commenting on rap music and hip hop culture as they have been in actively participating in it. Even the band's name refers to a famous  MTV meme from 2005 (the band was clearly ahead of the curve in naming themselves after a meme that involved a Gif!). Also, their debut track, "Pizza Hut/Taco Bell," was intended as a kind of clowning version of a rap song, and several of the band's songs on "Shut Up, Dude" seemed to "do" rap more referentially than literally. (The most compelling of these efforts is of course, "Fake Patois," which is beautifully explained and decoded via crowdsourced hypertext links at Rapgenius.)

Still, you can only get so far in rap -- a medium that prizes authenticity and the singularity of the voice (even if those values are present more in the breach than in the observance) -- while performing as a kind of postmodernist simulacrum of a rap group. Either you have to start being real and aim to have an actual career in the music industry, or the joke has to end.

I don't want to suggest that Das Racist didn't write some really amazing lyrics. On their recordings they seem to take their task quite seriously, writing witty and even, sometimes, brilliant verses.

Good vibes PMA
Yeah, believe that
Listening to Three Stacks, reading Gaya spivak
Listening to KMD and feeling weird about Naipaul
Fly or Style Warz, war-style Warsaw
Listening to jams with they pops about dem batty boys
Listening to  Cam while I'm reading Arundhati Roy
Yeah, yeah my pops drove a cab, homes,
Now I drop guap just to bop in the cab home
[Again, see Rapgenius for help decoding some of the obscure references here]

Seeing the references to Gayatri Spivak, V.S. Naipaul, and Arundhati Roy alongside Andre 3000, Cam'ron, and the notorious homophobia of dancehall reggae all in seven short, witty lines is pretty exhilarating. (Not to mention the element of personal biography: Himanshu's father did briefly drive a taxi when he first came to the U.S.)

In a way I am the perfect listener for this sort of song -- as a postcolonial theory scholar and old school hip hop fan, I'm exactly the kind of person who, in college and then graduate school, might have been culturally multitasking on precisely these terms. At some point, I'm pretty sure I've listened to Illmatic or Enter the Wu-Tang while also trying to figure out Homi Bhabha's frequently baffling Location of Culture or Spivak's even more baffling Critique of Postcolonial Reason (interestingly, both hip hop and postcolonial theory can involve readers & listeners hustling to get to the bottom of deeply obscure references).

Despite the exhilarating moments, in the end I often felt a little let down by Das Racist tracks, mainly because the political self-consciousness and desire for critique seemed to lose out to a broader enthusiasm for easier reference points: the banalities of middle-class American consumer culture, and of course the endless references to weed and booze. The booze in particular often troubles me (I'm agnostic on the weed), especially since so many accounts of Das Racist performances in recent years have described the trio as drunk on stage (Google "Das Racist drunk" to see what I mean). From Das Racist I wanted to hear more songs like "Ek Shaneesh" and "Fake Patois" and fewer that contained verses like this one:

Finna spark an L and have myself a Big Mac Attack
Known to rock the flyest shit and and eat the best pizza
Charge that shit to Mastercard, already owe Visa
Catch me drinking lean in Italy like I was Pisa
We could eat the flyest cage-aged cheese for sheez, ma
[Rapgenius]

Pizza, big macs, mastercard, visa, the leaning tower of Pisa... Oy, vey. Can we go back to talking about Arundhati Roy, Gary Soto, and Junot Diaz again? I was feeling that more.

To his credit, Himanshu has taken an approach on his solo mixtapes that seems a little more serious. There were the amazing Punjabi tracks on Nehru Jackets, for one thing (see especially "Chakklo," track 15).  But even more than that I was impressed by the searing condemnation of police brutality and corruption in "NYC Cops" (see Rap Genius again).

Himanshu's second mixtape, Wild Water Kingdom, wasn't quite as strong as Nehru Jackets overall, though I did think the track "Soup Boys," which samples the viral Indian pop hit, "Why this Kolaveri Di?" and nicely mixes the postmodernist randomness of Das Racist with elements of protest and critique (drone warfare, Islamaphobia, Hinduphobia... lyrics at Rapgenius).  

Bal Thackeray: Not to be Mourned, Not to be Honoured

Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray has died. Some Indians will only remember him as a "great man" who founded and led a regional political party.

This is unfortunate, because he had the blood of more than a 1000 souls -- mostly Muslims -- on his hands. He should not be mourned, should not be honoured.

In particular, he played a key role in the riots of 1992-3 in Bombay. Here is a little bit describing his actions using evidence gathered by the government's Srikrishna Commission later:

The Srikrishna Report is clear just where the blame lies for the 1992-1993 riots. On the basis of the welter of evidence before him, the Judge concluded that "the communal passions of the Hindus were aroused to fever pitch by the inciting writings in (th e) print media, particularly Saamna and Navakal." "From 8th January 1993 at least," he concluded, "there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in organising attacks on Muslims and their properties from the level of Shakha Pramukh to the Shiv Sena Pramukh Bal Thackeray who, like a veteran General, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organised attacks against Muslims." He blamed "effete political leadership, vacillation for political reasons and conflicti ng orders issued to the Commissioner of Police" for the State's failure to contain the attacks on Mumbai's Muslims. 

Justice Srikrishna's observations were based on the mass of evidence before him. Dozens of witnesses before the Commission identified Shiv Sainiks as those who attacked them. Reshma Umar Makki, who converted to Islam when she married Umar Makki, had to h ide her husband when a mob of Shiv Sena workers attacked her home on January 9, 1993. Two days later, another vigilante group broke into her home, and "abused her as to why she got married to a 'landya', and whether all Hindus were dead." "She identified the mob," the Report records, "as comprising inmates of Andhra Chawl, out of whom she clearly recognised Umesh, a Shiv Sainik living near Sundar Hotel. He and three to four other boys entered her house, placed a chopper on her head, and threatened her that, if she spoke up, she would be stripped, raped and killed."

SOURCE: http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1716/17160110.htm

"The Gotham"

My son created the image below, with no help or oversight from me, via a website called Weavesilk.com. He decided he wanted to call the image "The Gotham," for reasons I couldn't quite fathom. Click on the image to see a larger version:

Click here to try it.

Beyond "We Take Care of Our Own": Hopes for Obama's Second Term

As the confetti fell last night after Barack Obama's acceptance speech just after 2am, viewers at home were treated to the familiar sounds of a Bruce Springsteen song: "We Take Care of Our Own."



Though the Obama campaign's official Spotify playlist contained a number of other inspiring songs from diverse genres, including country, pop, hip hop, and R&B, it will be "We Take Care of Our Own" that will go down as the campaign song of 2012. (Sorry Chubb Rock!)

"We Take Care of Our Own," despite its powerful chorus, is somewhat of an unusual choice to be an uplifting anthem. Like that other great Springsteen anthem with a killer chorus ("Born in the U.S.A."), its patriotic language and tone is countered by a deep sense of tragedy and failure recounted in the verses of the song itself. Let's start with the second verse of the song:

From Chicago to New Orleans
From the muscle to the bone
From the shotgun shack to the Super Dome
There aint no help, the cavalry stayed home
There aint no one hearing the bugle blowin' 

We take are of our own

Where ever this flag is flown

Of course, the clear historical reference point here is 2005 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which left tens of thousands of people in New Orleans stranded, without basic supplies or help, for an unconscionably long time. It was one of the lowest, most shameful moments I can remember from the past decade -- a national trauma that I don't think Americans have really worked through fully enough.

So when the chorus kicks in: "We take care of our own," there's a sense of irony. In fact, in 2005, under George Bush's FEMA, we actually didn't take care of our own at all. The chorus is therefore partly a rebuke for that failure, not just a clean statement of a compassionate ethos.

Now take the third verse:

Where're the eyes, the eyes with the will to see
Where're the hearts that run over with mercy
Where's the love that has not forsaken me
Where's the work that'll set my hands, my soul free
Where's the spirit to reign, reign over me
Where's the promise, from sea to shining sea
Where's the promise, from sea to shining sea
Wherever this flag is flown

For me this is the most moving and interesting part of the song. The series of rhetorical questions starts out implying that a crucial part of the American dream has been neglected: as in, "Where are the eyes with the will to see?" But of course, there's just enough hope in the lines to forestall an utterly bleak posture, and as the verse progresses the questions start to become answers. Lines like "Where's the love that has not forsaken me" and "Where's the spirit to reign, reign over me" suggest that a constructive, transformative energy (the "spirit") keeps us from falling over the cliff. Where is the love? Where is the spirit? Why, it's here in this song. It's in Bruce Springsteen. (And the Obama campaign wants to say: it's here too, in our campaign, in our candidate.)

So the chorus can be positive and constructive despite the evidence given in the verses of the song suggesting that there might not be much reason to hope that "We take care of our own" is a promise that anyone is actually interested in fulfilling. (And if you listen to the rest of the songs on Springsteen's "Wrecking Ball" or his earlier album "The Rising," there is plenty of bleakness to be found. See for instance, "Death to my hometown.")

One hopes that the sense of the vision of compassion in the United States encapsulated by "We Take Care of Our Own" turns out to be true in Barack Obama's second term. In the first four years of the Obama presidency, there were some signs that it was -- Health Care reform, the various efforts taken to rescue the economy from the brink of disaster -- but also a certain worrying coziness with regards to the Obama administration's alignment with corporate interests and the financial industry. (Will Obama's response to the recent "Superstorm Sandy" be appreciably better than George Bush's response to Katrina? I hope so, but time will tell.)

And I have a deeper frustration with "We Take Care of Our Own" that isn't just about the ideological question of whether the United States is a society that believes "we're all in this together" or "you're on your own" (to reprise one of Obama's standard talking points). As a person whose family originates in India, I can't help but wonder about the nearly seven billion people in the world who don't count as "our own." Do we, as the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, have any obligation to those who live, and sometimes struggle, under flags that are not the American flag? 

I admire "We Take Care of Our Own" and the other recession-era anthems on Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball. And I remain a pretty passionate supporter of Barack Obama, while recognizing his limits and flaws. But when I hear the chorus of this song, part of me is always held back from fully embracing it by its grammar. The truth is, "we take care of our own" simply isn't enough for me. 

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 hoping that his international connections and background -- a father from Kenya, years spent living abroad in Indonesia -- might lead to a new kind of transnational understanding and a shifting away from the rhetoric of American exceptionalism in our foreign policy. But that hasn't happened (though admittedly, during this past campaign it would have been politically suicidal for Obama to make any noises in this direction). I believe the United States has an obligation to take care of its own, but I also firmly believe in the obligation of privileged countries to try and better the circumstances of people living in poorer countries. 

Can we still get there? My hopes for the foreign policy agenda of the second Obama administration might entail: 1) rethinking the disastrous "no distance from Israel" policy that has led to a complete stalemate in progress towards a two-state solution (while the Palestinians continue to suffer under occupation); 2) rethinking the drone war and targeted assassinations in Pakistan and Afghanistan;  3) rethinking the approach to "American jobs" that means that jobs, growth, and development in other countries -- such as China and India -- is only registered a bad thing or a loss for Americans; and 4) a serious investment in working to combat global climate change.

Yesterday, a UC Irvine professor named Mark LeVine published a hard-hitting essay on Aljazeera.net arguing that in actuality Barack Obama doesn't really get the Bruce Springsteen whose message he exploits -- that he doesn't deserve the mantle of a populist or the embrace of the guy who wrote "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

I am more upbeat on Obama than Professor LeVine -- I do hope that President Obama, in his second term, might earn and fulfill the promise of compassion to American citizens that Bruce Springsteen represents. But I hope he'll go beyond the Boss as well: we take care of every one.

In the Times...

Thanks to everyone who linked to, "liked" or tweeted about my post from Sunday. I have been overwhelmed by the support from everyone for the Sikh community in the wake of this tragedy. There may be people in this country who are gripped by hate, but there is no question in my mind this afternoon that they are outnumbered by the voices of tolerance, inclusion -- and indeed, love. (I am still waving my little American flag.)

The New York Times' India Ink blog printed a revised version of the post this morning. And look for meon NPR's All Things Considered Tuesday August 7. [Update: here's the link w/ audio and a transcript of my comments.]

And now enough, I think, of being a pundit for me. If you'd like to support victims of the Oak Creek shooting, you can get information on how to do so here.

Beyond Recognition and Misrecognition: the Shooting at Oak Creek Gurdwara

One of the issues that has come up periodically in the Sikh community in the U.S. since 9/11 has been how to handle the common problem that men in turbans are presumed by many Americans to be Muslims. A man named Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot down in Arizona just a few days after 9/11 for precisely that kind of misrecognition, and there were quite a number of other instances of attacks not as extreme as murder that occurred in those first few months.

2001-2002 happened to be my first year teaching at Lehigh. I was living alone in Bethlehem itself, close to the university, and believe me, I felt the intensity of that hostility, both while driving and of course on foot. But it wasn't just a small town issue; the sense of smouldering hostility was also something one felt on the streets of Philadelphia and, not surprisingly, New York. I heard a lot of ugly taunts and insults, and had a couple of encounters that might have been dangerous if I hadn't decided to walk away very quickly. I was kind of spooked, and like a lot of Sikhs that fall I put a bumper sticker on my car with a U.S. flag, announcing myself as a "Sikh American," crossed my fingers, and tried to stick to stay focused on teaching literature. That year I ate a lot of Drive-Thru fast food and missed the fun grad-school life I had left behind in cosmopolitan (really) North Carolina.

About a year later everyone started to calm down and I put a lot of my feelings from that first year behind me. (And yes, I eventually took the bumper sticker off the car.)

Obviously, the Sikh community realized very quickly that fall that it wouldn't do to simply say, "Don't hate me, I'm not a Muslim." And by and large people have avoided that particular phrasing and rhetoric. The Sikh advocacy organizations that were organized shortly after 9/11, chief among them the Sikh Coalition, were very emphatic on the point that they were opposed to hate crimes directed against any group based on religious hostility.

Today as I've been keeping up with the community's reaction to the Gurdwara shootings in Wisconsin I've been seeing a lot of friends and family reminding everyone not to dwell on the shooter's likely "misrecognition" -- the sentiment that "we didn't do anything, we don't deserve this" is actually not one we should be giving voice to, even if it might be understandable after such a ghastly attack.

Many of my friends online are also suggesting we renew our efforts as a community to educate Americans about who we are. These are well-meaning and valuable efforts, and I myself will try and support them if I can.

But here's the thing: I don't know if the shooter would have acted any differently if he had really known the difference between the turbans that many Sikh men wear and a much smaller number of Muslim clerics wear -- or for that matter, the difference between Shias, Sunnis, and Sufis, or any number of specificities that might have added nuance to his hatred.

As I have experienced it, the turban that Sikh men wear is the embodiment of a kind of difference or otherness that can provoke some Americans to react quite viscerally. Yes, ignorance plays a part and probably amplifies that hostility. But I increasingly feel that visible marks of religious difference are lightning rods for this hostility in ways that don't depend on accurate recognition.

I am not sure why the reaction can be so visceral -- perhaps because wearing a turban is at once so intimate and personal and so public? Walking around waving, say, an Iranian flag probably wouldn't provoke quite the same reaction. A flag is abstract -- a turban, as something worn on the body, is much more concrete and it therefore poses a more palpable (more personal?) symbol for angry young men looking for someone to target. Whether or not that target was actually the "right one" was besides the point for the Oak Creek shooter.

Years ago I tried to make a point along these lines in a conference presentation; I also took it a step further and claimed that in effect the turbans that Sikh men wear mark them as different in ways that rhyme with the hostility that Muslim women wearing Hijab also often face. That comparison wasn't received terribly well, but I stand by it. It's not that what the Hijab means for Muslims has very much to do with what the Dastar means in Sikhism. It's that both have the potential to provoke a kind of visceral reaction by these marks of religious difference worn on the body. Sometimes that reaction is simply a sense of discomfort or confusion, easily allayed by a winning smile or a comment about the local sports team or the weather. Sometimes, however, that negative reaction runs deeper and can't be readily resolved. (And yes, I think Hasidic Jews, for instance, provoke similar kinds of visceral reactions. And while there is likely no "9/11" connection in the minds of anti-Semites, it's worth remembering that anti-Semitic hate crimes and synagogue vandalism continue to occur at a pretty steady clip. And isn't homophobic gay-bashing connected to something similar -- a sense of difference operating at an uncomfortably intimate [to the attacker] level?)

I want to be clear that I am in no way suggesting Sikhs not wear turbans to avoid hostility.  But I also don't think we should fool ourselves that incidents of this nature will be completely addressed purely by "education," nor should we presume that the shooter suffered from "ignorance." If the shooter  turns out to have been what it's currently thought he was (that is, some sort of white supremacist), all that mattered to him was that he hated difference -- and saw, in the Sikh Gurdwara at Oak Creek, a target for that hatred.

Indeed, I don't have any very constructive solution to offer today. I am, truthfully, at a loss right now as to how to understand this tragedy, or how I might explain it to my five-year old son (we haven't told him about it yet, and don't plan to). At times living in the United States seems like an amazing privilege; this year we were out waving our little American flags with the rest of the neighborhood for the Independence Day parade in the suburban Philadelphia town where we live.

But the level of violence that is regularly expressed here (and, seemingly tolerated, since nothing substantial is ever done to address it) also defies explanation. This -- naked gun violence -- is the nightmare that periodically creeps into, and overshadows, the American Dream. And I will try to let my son go on being a typical American kid who doesn't have to think about that. 

Weighing Bobby Jindal as a VP Choice

I haven't blogged about politics in a very long time, perhaps not since the 2008 elections. But Bobby Jindal's name has been in the mix quite a bit this past week as a possible Vice Presidential candidate, so I thought it might be worth looking at some of the arguments that are being put forward, both pro- and contra-.

I worked through some of my own conflicted reactions to Governor Jindal back in 2007, when he was on the verge of winning the governorship of Louisiana (see the comments thread to that post -- a fascinating compilation of unfiltered South Asian American reactions to Jindal).

I talked a lot about my own anxiety in that post, and that's not so much of interest to me today (kind of over it). Now that my son is almost six years old I've been thinking more about him: what it might mean for him, since he's begun to notice the ethnic and racial divide in the U.S. and understand himself as an "Indian American," to see an Indian American in political office at that level. When I think in those terms, I can't help but be a little excited.

Let's start with Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times this week. Douthat goes through all of the major candidates who have been named, ruling out people like Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and Susana Martinez before turning to Senator Rob Portman and Governor Jindal. Here's how Douthat considers Jindal before conceding that Romney may be unlikely to pick him:

But there’s no question that an earnest white Midwestern Methodist like Portman would be the safer choice – so safe, in fact, that he would probably drop out of the headlines the day after he was picked. Jindal, on the other hand, would give the press all kinds of things to fixate on: His youth, his ethnicity, his Ichabod Crane physique, his religious background (he’s a convert from Hinduism to Catholicism) and of course the endless interesting-and-then-some stories that you’ll find percolating in Louisiana politics. 

[Jindal's] no Palin, in other words, but he is the kind of pick you make if you’re willing to accept a little more risk for the chance of a little more reward. As someone who believes Romney is playing things too cautiously at present, I tend to think he should strongly consider the jolt that choosing Jindal might supply him. But as someone who’s also convinced that the Romney camp is entirely content to just aim for a glide to 51 percent, I tend to think they’ll just play it excruciatingly safe and go with Portman. (link)

What Douthat is suggesting is that Jindal may actually be the better pick for Romney in terms of adding a new dimension to his campaign, but he doubts Romney will actually expose himself to any degree of risk (and there is, undoubtedly, a degree of risk in picking Jindal).

I actually think Douthat's premise that Romney is running too "safe" isn't really right: it's not a question of being safe, but of being constrained. Romney has been hemmed in by his past -- he can't spend too much time dwelling on health care, for instance, because he runs the risk of sounding too schizophrenic given his own history on the subject. The same might hold true for any number of other conservative social causes where he's changed his views. Romney, in short, is in a tough spot rhetorically on many issues, but he has a pretty good chance to win against Obama if the economic news continues to be sour. In short, Romney has good reasons to play safe on many of those types of issues: he could win on simply being the Not-Obama.

Still, someone like Jindal might help Romney change the dynamics of the campaign thus far with the injection of fresh blood and a story that looks very different from his own, "my dad was governor and CEO and I am too" narrative. As a child of  immigrants, and as a Catholic convert, Jindal has a chance at least to tap into some new  demographic pools and suggest a new, more inclusive face for the Republican Party going forward.


In my view, the one place where Romney probably really has been too safe and restrained is in reference to his Mormon background and values. As many people have noted, this is a very big part of who Romney is, and even if it makes some people uncomfortable, he should be embracing it as central to his personal narrative. In an odd way, Romney's pattern of skittishness on addressing his Mormon faith might end up being the single strongest point against Jindal. Romney wants to do everything to ensure white Evangelicals that he's Just Like Them, and downplay any and all traces of religious difference. Putting Jindal on the ticket could freak out that same set of conservative voters. That said, it's entirely possible that the "Obama is a Muslim" stuff that has been going around for all these years simply won't be replicated with Jindal, since he really wears his pro-life, anti-Darwin Catholicism on his sleeve. The response could be, in short: "Obama is a Muslim, but Bobby Jindal is a good ol' boy." 

In a blog post for the Washington Post,  Chris Cillizza makes some good points in a post making the case for Jindal. Just as it was with Douthat's analysis, McCain's selection of Palin in 2008 looms large for Cillizza as background. In this case, it's important to remember that McCain likely went to Palin to find a way to blunt the excitement around Barack Obama's historic candidacy:

McCain and his team tried to match history against history by picking former Alaska governor Sarah Palin— she was the first Republican woman on a national ticket — but it blew up in their faces (to put it kindly). 

Picking Jindal would allow Republicans a historic do-over; he would be the first Indian-American on either parties’ national ticket and, unlike Palin, is much more of a known commodity — and hence less of a risk. 

If you want to know how powerful a historic vice presidential pick can be — and how it can drive a positive storyline for days (or even weeks) in the campaign — look no further than when Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman as the first Jewish vice presidential pick in 2000. 

There’s also this x-factor: The Indian-American community can be a major source of campaign cash if they are activated to give. Picking Jindal as VP would ensure huge buy-in — figuratively and literally — from this community. (link)

That last point, about money, is definitely spot on. There is a lot of cash there, and an Indian American population that has tended to lean Democratic -- but not absolutely. Both Jindal and Nikki Haley have already been tapping into this network for their own campaigns. They routinely hold fundraisers in the DC and New York areas with largely wealthy Indian American doctors on the invite list (I have friends and family members who have been invited to some of these). The cash will really start to flow if the stakes are as high as this.

Cillizza also has a sister post, where he makes the counterpoint argument -- the case against selecting Jindal. Among the major points he makes there are Jindal's "Kenneth the Page" problem, from his 2009 speech responding to Obama's address to Congress, and the fact that Jindal actually endorsed Rick Perry at the start of the Republican Primary season last fall. I suspect Jindal's recent spate of campaigning for Romney has probably helped him ease any wounds caused by his earlier preference for Perry, but the Kenneth the Page issue is still what it is. Has Jindal been able to improve his delivery at all? Can he be more telegenic?

If the answer to that is yes, there's a pretty good chance he might be on Romney's ticket. 

Indian Americans and the Scripps Spelling Bee

Indian American kids have won seven out of ten times at Scripps in the past decade, and have had a remarkable recent run -- with Indian American children winning four five years in a row.  

I talked to a reporter at NPR a couple of weeks ago about the phenomenon. Tuesday morning, they ran the story, and quoted me briefly near the end. Pawan Dhingra expressed enthusiasm; I expressed some ambivalence about the academic value of the spelling bees. Below are some further thoughts on Indian Americans and spelling bees. 

There’s nothing in particular in Indian "culture" that might have predicted such emphatic success for South Asian American kids in U.S. Spellings Bees. The secret of that success probably starts with the particular backgrounds of the parents of these kids, who may have immigrated to the U.S. 15 to 25 years ago, often to work in high tech. And here you find a surprise: there isn’t any particular tradition of holding English language spelling bees back in India.

India does have an educational system that emphasizes rote learning to a considerable extent, and several of the parents of Scripps winners have talked about how growing up in the Indian educational system may have helped them prepare to train their children for these competitions (Arvind Mahankali's parents reiterate this in the story on NPR). Why, then, do the children of Indian immigrants take up spelling bees?

First of all, most of these Indian-American spelling bee champs have parents who are highly educated. In that respect, Indian Americans aren’t so different from a large number of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese immigrants from the same time period – many of them also work in science, technology and engineering fields.

A second factor that may be helping Indian American contestants in particular is language; since the days of British colonialism, India has had an effective English-medium educational system. The language the parents speak may be a factor in the choice of ‘bee’. While Indian Americans have come to do well in Spelling Bees, Chinese Americans have dominated the national Math Counts competition. We don’t hear about that as much (unlike Scripps, Math Counts is not televised on ESPN).

Indian Americans weren’t always spelling bee champs. When I was growing up in the mid-1980s, there was only one Indian-American spelling bee champion (Balu Natarajan in 1985). It was really after Nupur Lala won Scripps in 1999, and was then featured in the documentary Spellbound, that suddenly Indian-American children seemed to come out in droves for these competitions.

A third factor has been the influence of an Indian-American oriented organization called the North South Foundation, which is only open to Indian Americans. The North South Foundation competitions in a number of different subjects, including spelling and math. This group has chapters in nearly every state, and it’s been described a kind of "minor league" training circuit for would be spelling champions. The founder of that organization, Ratnam Chitturi, has said that he had in mind that Indian-American children should be encouraged to excel in English alongside math and science – and his initial goal was specifically to set up a program that would help children prepare for the SATs.

Some people do say that the rote memorization involved in preparing for spelling bees does not encourage children to value creative expression. This is undeniably true; memorizing long list of spelling bee words is not for everyone, and achieving success in spelling bees can only take you so far. Then again, training for spelling bees does usually entail learning about Greek, Latin, and Romance language roots and derivations, and that kind of knowledge remains valuable in some professional fields, especially the law and medicine. And I think instilling a sense of work ethic and ambition to learn in a child is valuable as well -- and that's certainly something the spelling bee culture encourages, as long as it is introduced to children affirmatively and as a choice (the last thing any child needs is "Tiger Mom" style punitive discipline).

That said, we have to acknowledge the limits of spelling bees. As I say, memorization does have value, but skills like creative expression, problem-solving, and teamwork can be as valuable, and perhaps even more valuable in the long-term. Spelling is a niche skill, not a sign of comprehensive excellence or overall intelligence. And as I stated in the snippet that was quoted by NPR, I think there's a fine line between success in a particular niche and a kind of academic ghettoization.

Are there others who feel ambivalent, as I do, about Indian American dominance in the national spelling bee?

UPDATE: Congratulations to Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego for winning this year's Scripps Spelling Bee. 

Summer Projects: Victorian Lahore

I have long had a particular interest in Rudyard Kipling's early work -- especially his years in Lahore (1882-1887), where he worked as a journalist while living with his parents and, some of the time, his sister.  This summer I am doing a project on him, and using a sister blog, which I am calling "In the Library," as a kind of white-board where I am posting bits and pieces of research. 


The main project is described below. From time to time I may use this space to synthesize what I am learning through my research. 

Rudyard Kipling is a disliked, sometimes reviled figure in postcolonial literary studies in large part because of his uncomplicated support for British Imperialism – but there is more to him than the familiar image of him as an arch-Imperialist might suggest. As is widely known, in his later years Kipling authored quite a bit of jingoistic war-related poetry, much of it inflected with overtones of racial superiority. I am not interested redeeming or apologizing for that Kipling; the charge that he would become one of the prime advocates of British Imperialism is not under question.

But what about the younger Kipling? What about the young man who spent seven enthusiastic years (1882-1889) as a journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, who wrote playfully and even affectionately about the country in books like Plain Tales From the Hills (1888), The Jungle Book (1894), and Kim (1901)? Before he said that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” Kipling, in Kim, movingly and compellingly described the Mughal-built Grand Trunk Road as a “wonderful spectacle” and a “river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.” The early Kipling was deeply fascinated by India, though he was always uneasy and limited in his relationships with actual Indians as well as Eurasians.

I am interested in two factors that seemed to shape the young Kipling as an India enthusiast: 1) Kipling’s Indian journalism, especially his work at the Civil & Military Gazette, and 2) Lockwood Kipling’s role in shaping his son Rudyard’s ideas about race and religion in Punjab, as expressed in his journalism and early short stories from the 1880s.

Biographers such as Charles Allen (Kipling Sahib, 2009) have indicated that one of the key sources of much of Rudyard’s passion for the country, and much of his primary knowledge, was likely his father, John Lockwood Kipling. After teaching as a professor at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay for a decade, Lockwood and Alice Kipling moved to Lahore in 1875, where Lockwood worked as the Principal of the Mayo School of Arts, and where he was appointed as curator of the Lahore Museum. Lockwood was also a prolific illustrator of Indian animals. His collection of his sketches and stories about Indian animals (Beast and Man in India, 1891) is of as much interest as a work of ethnography as it is of zoology, and one surmises – though no biographer has confirmed it – that his son’s unforgettable anthropomorphizing of jungle life in The Jungle Book may have been inspired by the imaginative world represented in his father’s drawings. But while Lockwood Kipling, as the curator of a Museum largely devoted to Indian artifacts, was committed to understanding and preserving pre-British Indo-Islamic culture in a way that his son never would be, biographers have also suggested that his benevolence had its limits: Lockwood had a clear sense of the rightful separation of white (“British”) and “Oriental” (non-white) races that his son would also embrace and then, later, amplify. Allen, in his biography, pins Rudyard’s first awareness of the power of racial ideology to the fallout from the Ilbert Bill of 1883, where Viceroy Ripon tried to allow Indian judges and magistrates to try British subjects. Kipling, writing for the Civil and Military Gazette, initially wrote approvingly of the change only to face withering ostracism at the Punjab Officers’ Club; in letters and in his memoir Something of Myself, Kipling reflected that it was this experience that forced him to become an “Anglo-Indian” with the strong racial ideology that usually entailed, rather than merely an unattached young reporter free in India with a penchant for nocturnal visits to the “Lal Bazaar” (i.e., the red-light district), and who occasionally experimented with opium in these early years.

Though a growing number of critics and biographers have explored the formative role of Kipling’s years as a journalist in India, few have looked closely at his specific essays and journalist output from the period, or situated them in a detailed account of the life and culture of Punjab that existed beyond the Kiplings (and yes, there was more to Lahore in the 1880s than just the Kipling family). The goal is not to fixate solely on the Kipling family but to use the Kiplings of Lahore as a starting point for a broader exploration of the way colonialism was changing Indian life in Punjab in the 1880s and ‘90s. I am interested in the status of religion and ideas of racial identity as they were interpreted by the students and Indian faculty members at Lockwood’s school of art, as well as at the newly founded University of the Punjab in Lahore (some of these Indian students and professors are in fact mentioned by name in both Lockwood’s and Rudyard’s respective writings, and one aspect of my research will entail exploring whether any of these figures have their own archives).

See my research-in-progress: In the Library.

This project is supported by a grant from Lehigh's Center for Global Islamic Studies. 

Review: "A Night in London" by Sajjad Zaheer

A little while ago I did a blog post on Ahmed Ali, one of the leading lights of the Progressive Wrtiters Movement in India in the 1930s. At the time I mentioned that the key collection of that period, Angare (1932), had never been translated. (I later learned that an Urdu literature scholar has done a full translation, but there may be rights problems that are preventing it from actually being published.)

[Update: Snehal Shingavi's translation is out.]

Angare may remain unavailable in English, but a major missing piece of the puzzle has been published in the form of Bilal Hashmi's translation of Sajjad Zaheer's 1936 (published 1938) Urdu language novel, A Night in London.

This was a novel Zaheer wrote during a period of about two years that he lived in London -- after the banning of Angare, but before the Progressive Writers' Association was formally started in India in 1937-1938. By the time he published it, in 1938, he had become a full-fledged activist whose approach to literature was fully politicized, and as a result this novel about Indian student life in London in the 1930s was downplayed and effectively disavowed even at the moment of publication. In his own Foreword, Zaheer seemed to apologize somewhat for publishing a novel about Indian students, some of them quite wealthy, living a somewhat bohemian lifestyle in London:

It is one thing to sit down at the culmination of several years of study in Europe and, under the spell of private emotional conflict, to write a book of a hundred and fifty pages. But to have spent two-and-a-half years since then taking part in the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants in India, breathing in unison with millions of people and listening to the beating of their hearts, is entirely another matter.  

Today I could not write a book of this kind; nor would I consider it necessary to write it. (Sajjad Zaheer, from the Foreword to A Night in London)

Ironically, the very features that made it less interesting to Zaheer as he was beginning a moment of full-throated left activism might make A Night in London actually somewhat more interesting to readers today. The translator Bilal Hashmi notes in his brief and elegant afterword to the current volume:

The novella, which has since run into several editions, occupies a singular position in the history of Urdu literature. There is nothing quite like it, so far as I know, in Indian writing of roughly the same period, and that alone would seem to provide impetus enough for the work's belated translation into English. 

Still, a few words are in order here, a translator's apology, if you will, as to the limits and intention of the present undertaking. Ever the consummate strategist, Zaheer chose Urdu as the language for this, his most important literary labour. in doing so he parted company with Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and other expatriate contemporaries writing in European languages, largely on the grounds that a new Indian literature could only take shape from within the indigenous literary traditions of India. It was doubtless a political decision at the time (as it remains today), and one which kept the work at a remove from the same world literary marketplace into which it now stands the risk of being all but subsumed. 

I would add that A Night in London is actually a much better instance of ambitious Indian writing from the 1930s than are the books by Rao and Anand that have been so often mentioned by transnational modernism scholars in recent years (and in my view we shouldn't even be talking about Anand's rather dubious late memoir, Conversations in Bloomsbury) . I have long argued that Anand's early novels are not, in fact, very good, either as Indian modernist texts or as contributions to a conversation on issues of caste and colonialism that were active in the Gandhian movement. Admittedly, Zaheer is right in his Foreword to acknowledge that A Night in London is somewhat removed from the ground of Indian politics, but most readers today will nevertheless likely recognize it as a politically engaged work of fiction, which also happens to deploy several of the techniques of the modernist, stream-of-consciousness novel (including parallel, disjunctive plots, and a temporally constricted frame reminiscent of Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses).

So I want my colleagues in Modernist studies to read this translation, ASAP, and rethink how we have been talking about South Asian modernism, preferably to add a greater awareness of Urdu writing like Zaheer's.  Hashmi makes a somewhat similar point in his afterword:

Zaheer's novella was written with as much a nod to the 'socialist realist' Aragon of Le Monde reel (with whom the author rubbed shoulders in Paris), as to English literature's canonical modernists, Joyce and Woolf. It is widely regarded as the first major work of Urdu literature to employ the stream-of-consciousness technique, and that too with an expressly anti-colonial slant, far more radical, at least in that one respect, than anything that had until then emerged from within the Bloomsbury circle. [...] Zaheer was a committed realist, and yet with this work he was on the verge of creating, in tandem with other non-European writers of his generation, something radically new-- a modernism against modernism. 

I think this is exactly right. One of the ironies of Zaheer's career is that the accomplishment for which he is best known, the founding and propagation of the Progressive Writers' Association in Lucknow -- which, to be clear, was a monumental accomplishment -- seems to run counter to the spirit and intention of his most significant literary accomplishment (this novel).

A nice thing about Hashmi's translation is that the supplementary materials allow it to be effectively self-contained, rendering it a perfect teaching tool. Alongside the Afterword from Hashmi himself, there is a highly accessible and informative essay by Carlo Coppola summarizing Zaheer's life and work, and an excerpt from Zaheer's longer memoir, Roshnai, focusing on the period of his life during which he wrote this novel.  (Oh and did I mention it's short? A Night in London itself is just about 130 pages.)

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I should also mention that a pretty substantial excerpt of the novel had earlier been translated by Ralph Russell for the Annual of Urdu Studies (AUS). Those excerpts can be found here. From the chapters excerpted you can get an idea of the themes of Zaheer's novel, but in fact you probably do need the whole novel to understand the continuities in the plot or the relationships between the various characters. So I would suggest again that people interested in this subject pick up A Night in London.