Frank Zappa, ca. 1963
File under: random jazz archives.
This is Frank Zappa on the Steve Allen Show in 1963. Though the Free Jazz movement was well underway by the time this appearance/performance took place, what Zappa was doing here was actually really on the edge as far as live television went -- as Allen's constant joking around and the audience's nervous laughter shows.
Also watch Part 2.
What I like about Zappa is the way he quite unassumingly asks the host of the show, the musicians in the band, and the technician in the control booth to join him in the performance. He's directive the way a scientist performing an experiment might be, and clearly the music has formal planning principles. But the sound that comes out is essentially completely random, almost not worth listening to. At this early point, Zappa himself is utterly nondescript, and it's what he says and the way he talks (which are definitely a part of the "performance") that interests me most.
Anish Kapoor @ Rockefeller Center
The Indian born artist Anish Kapoor has a major sculpture going up at Rockefeller Center in New York next month, and there's a detailed profile of him in the New York Times (thanks, Tamasha). The sculpture is called "Sky Mirror," and it's essentially a large, convex piece of highly polished stainless steel, roughly in the shape of a contact lens. From the image at the Times (which is computer generated) as well as images of the same sculpture at other sites, I have a feeling this piece is going to be a bit of a tourist sensation.
This high-profile placing of one of Kapoor's sculptures is a coup for the artist, but hardly the first time he's been given pride of place in the western art world. Major pieces of his are on display in the MOMA and the Tate Modern in London, the most famous of which might be Marsyas, a massive construction that filled the Tate's vast Turbine Hall four years ago. Kapoor is one of the most important and influential practitioners of a movement in abstract sculpture called either minimalism or post-minimalism, depending on how exact we're being.
It's a long way to come for a Doon School boy.
Let's get into the art a bit more. Here is the Times:
Both works are extensions of Mr. Kapoor’s almost career-long interest in sculptural incorporeality. Borrowing ideas from Minimalist and post-Minimalist predecessors like Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse but using deep matte colors, reflectiveness and other illusions, he makes boundaries seem to disappear with an effect that is often overtly sensual and spiritual. Mr. Kapoor, who first rose to prominence in the mid-1980’s and won the Turner Prize in Britain in 1991, calls them nonobjects. (link)
Minimalism came of age in the 1960s, and was displaced somewhat by postmodernism and conceptual art, though it never really went away. For the most part I tend to prefer more congenial, conversational art, but a number of Kapoor's pieces do something for me that Donald Judd's roomfuls of black cubes don't really do. Kapoor's best works clearly are social objects, even if they operate in the same general mode as minimalism does.A bit more from the same article:
Though his public work is unabashedly crowd-pleasing, Mr. Kapoor’s intentions are often deeply philosophical. His mirrored piece might be thought of as a sculptural twist on the ideas of the German philosopher Johann Fichte, who wrote about self-consciousness being possible only through the resistance an individual encounters from external objects; in other words, something defined by what it is not. (link)
What I like about the "Sky Mirror" piece and a related piece now installed at Millenium Park in Chicago called "Cloud Gate" is the way they present a kind of prism through which to view the world. They are solid, stainless steel, and point at the monumental architecture around themselves -- and in that sense they are completely of a piece with the modern American city. But in that they have the general look of liquids, they resist the sense of fixity of massive public sculptures, which are sometimes more in the vein of decorative buildings than art objects that inspire contemplation. As the Times notes, in the convex mirror of "Sky Mirror," the towering buildings facing the sculpture are vertically inverted -- another kind of anomaly. Incidentally, many of Kapoor's early works made oblique references to Indian religious rituals -- some of his minimalist forms from the 1980s, for instance, were coated in bright red powder in the manner of Hindu religious shrines (see this piece, for instance). The tie back to India seems to be less evident in Kapoor's recent 'big' works, though many art critics draw on Buddhist concepts of space and being (or non-being) in attempting to analyze Kapoor's work. So it might still be there.
South Asian Poetry "Bleg"
A friend of mine is working on an anthology of "contemporary" world poetry (where "contemporary" means from the 1950s on). He's an Indian-American scholar, and he knows the literary traditions of some parts of India well, but obviously not all of them. His particular need here is poetry written in Indian languages.
As a single Punjabi poem to include in the anthology, I gave "Waris Shah Nu" as a suggestion, though my editor friend also indicated he was curious to know what the readers of this blog would suggest:
Does anyone have a favorite Shiv Kumar poem they could point us to, for example-- with an accompanying translation? (Panini, this means you.) For the purposes of this anthology (since only the translations will be printed), the quality of the English translation is quite important, though I believe the quality of the poem in its original language is paramount.
And needless to say, this goes beyond Punjabi. Above, my friend mentions several other languages as currently deficiently represented. But he does want to keep things "contemporary."
Finally, it would be especially helpful if you could suggest links on the internet, or to previously published translations in English in books. (The project does not have the budget to hire translators of its own. And unfortunately, few scholars working today can compete with the likes of A.K. Ramanujan, who translated many of the poems he included in the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry himself.)
Thanks in advance.
As a single Punjabi poem to include in the anthology, I gave "Waris Shah Nu" as a suggestion, though my editor friend also indicated he was curious to know what the readers of this blog would suggest:
[A]s my "sphere of influence" in this project is South Asia, I'm trying my hardest to provide as wide and disparate a representation as I can of the many voices in India and in diaspora. I recently realized that my selection, not surprisingly, was skewed toward Indian-English poets and that I was lacking many of the other major languages. Indeed my representation of Bodo, Kashmiri, Manipuri, Konkani, Gujarati, Sindhi, and Punjabi poetry is precipitously low, if even existent (that's not to mention a host of other languages, such as Santali or the Bihari languages, which I'm going to have to give up on I fear). Anyway, I wonder if you could point me to some especially good Punjabi poetry in translation, or the most important poets in said language (or any of the other languages, including ones I didn't mention such as Assamese, Malayalam & Urdu).
Does anyone have a favorite Shiv Kumar poem they could point us to, for example-- with an accompanying translation? (Panini, this means you.) For the purposes of this anthology (since only the translations will be printed), the quality of the English translation is quite important, though I believe the quality of the poem in its original language is paramount.
And needless to say, this goes beyond Punjabi. Above, my friend mentions several other languages as currently deficiently represented. But he does want to keep things "contemporary."
Finally, it would be especially helpful if you could suggest links on the internet, or to previously published translations in English in books. (The project does not have the budget to hire translators of its own. And unfortunately, few scholars working today can compete with the likes of A.K. Ramanujan, who translated many of the poems he included in the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry himself.)
Thanks in advance.
Indian Ocean On Tour in U.S.
I saw a group called Indian Ocean last night at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia -- and they rocked. I'll review the concert in some more detail below, but before going any further I wanted to mention that they are doing a small North American tour right now. Upcoming venues include Stamford, Chicago (this weekend), New York (early next week), Houston, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Missisauga, Canada. If you live in one of those cities, go buy tickets!
Indian Ocean are based in Delhi, and have been together since the early 1990s. Though they've flirted with crossover commercial success, the band has built up a devoted underground following without selling out to the demands of the market. (The audience at last night's concert seemed to know all of their songs.) They play a unique style of music that fundamentally defies categorization. A phrase on the Indian Ocean Wikipedia site takes a stab at it: "Indo-rock fusion with jazz-spiced rhythms that integrates shlokas, sufism, environmentalism, mythology and revolution." Another phrase they use is, "organic fusion." Whatever it is, it works.
What I liked most about the band's performance last night was the sense of personality each of the four musicians brought to the table. They work together quite well as a band, but they are also highly individualized players, each quite different from the others. Indian Ocean isn't quite a jazz band, where one often gets the feeing that the players are "putting in time" until they get to do a solo. And it's also not really a rock or pop band either, where the lead singer dominates and the musicians are for the most part subject to the demands of the song. In Indian Ocean, three of the four band members sing, and no one seems quite to be the "band leader" (the standout vocally is Asheem, who plays tabla, and sings for the most part sitting down). There is no generic formula for how these four very expressive and distinctive musicians create harmonious -- and yet improvisational -- music; they simply seem to know what to do.
There is a hardcore musicians' interview at All About Jazz, but some of what Susmit Sen talks about there goes over my head. For the lay, non-Jazzhead reader, the best description of who Indian Ocean are and what they're up to musically is probably this article in the sadly-defunct magazine SAMAR. First, let's tackle the fusion question:
Fusion here is not an attempt to make traditional music hip or fashionable, nor is it an attempt to keep some element of "Indianness" in pop music. With Indian Ocean, it's something entirely different. They acknowledge that they are part of the "Indipop" movement that started in the mid-1990s, to describe popular music that wasn't written for films. But while most Indipop ended up getting drawn into the Indian film industry (witness the demise of Lucky Ali), Indian Ocean seems to have gotten more deeply invested in "roots." They have matured and grown more proficient, while their filmi counterparts have seemingly withered.
The SAMAR article also has some details on the content of Indian Ocean's songs:
My favorite song from last night's performance was also derived from the folk tradition -- Kabir's "Jhini".
Since this is a Youtube age, I should point out that the music video for "Jhini" is viewable here. It's not the greatest music video ever, but you can get a sense of who these guys are musically from it. There's also a video that seems to have been shot on a cell phone at a live concert in Mumbai; it gives you somewhat of a sense of what they are like live.
A few more links:
A decription of the band and the musicians at a U-Minn website
Another article at AllAboutJazz
Streaming audio to their album "Black Fridya"
Streaming audio to their album "Kandisa"
Indian Ocean are based in Delhi, and have been together since the early 1990s. Though they've flirted with crossover commercial success, the band has built up a devoted underground following without selling out to the demands of the market. (The audience at last night's concert seemed to know all of their songs.) They play a unique style of music that fundamentally defies categorization. A phrase on the Indian Ocean Wikipedia site takes a stab at it: "Indo-rock fusion with jazz-spiced rhythms that integrates shlokas, sufism, environmentalism, mythology and revolution." Another phrase they use is, "organic fusion." Whatever it is, it works.
What I liked most about the band's performance last night was the sense of personality each of the four musicians brought to the table. They work together quite well as a band, but they are also highly individualized players, each quite different from the others. Indian Ocean isn't quite a jazz band, where one often gets the feeing that the players are "putting in time" until they get to do a solo. And it's also not really a rock or pop band either, where the lead singer dominates and the musicians are for the most part subject to the demands of the song. In Indian Ocean, three of the four band members sing, and no one seems quite to be the "band leader" (the standout vocally is Asheem, who plays tabla, and sings for the most part sitting down). There is no generic formula for how these four very expressive and distinctive musicians create harmonious -- and yet improvisational -- music; they simply seem to know what to do.
There is a hardcore musicians' interview at All About Jazz, but some of what Susmit Sen talks about there goes over my head. For the lay, non-Jazzhead reader, the best description of who Indian Ocean are and what they're up to musically is probably this article in the sadly-defunct magazine SAMAR. First, let's tackle the fusion question:
At a time in which the "fusion" label has been rendered meaningless, the band vehemently asserts that about the only things fused about them are their brains. According to them, fusion is a band like Shakti -- great people trained in completely different styles who come together. "We are uneducated technically" they say, "and are representative of a modern Indian urban setting where one is exposed to all sorts of music from day one. So lets say the fusion, if any, has happened in our head. And the influences are every single thing you have ever heard -- rock, western pop, Indipop, classical, ghazal and qawwali, and a hundred different types of Indian folk music..."
Susmit's distinctive guitar style based on intricate Hindustani classical scales has been a founding influence along with Asheem's soul riveting voice and imaginative layering of rhythms on the tabla tarang (a set of tablas tuned to different notes). Meanwhile, Rahul's deep brooding basslines syncopated to Amit's intelligently improvised drumming provides the essential backbone to the group's sounds. The rhythms employed are not the regular 4x4 rock beats, but the more leisurely 8ths, 12ths and 16ths frequently employed in traditional music from the subcontinent. These longer cycle patterns allow for more improvisation, and force drummers to not just play in beat but also keep with the flow and the roundness of rhythm. "A good tabla player will fill every single crack and do it differently each time" says Asheem, "you're using fingers not sticks, so you can do a lot more stuff." (link)
Fusion here is not an attempt to make traditional music hip or fashionable, nor is it an attempt to keep some element of "Indianness" in pop music. With Indian Ocean, it's something entirely different. They acknowledge that they are part of the "Indipop" movement that started in the mid-1990s, to describe popular music that wasn't written for films. But while most Indipop ended up getting drawn into the Indian film industry (witness the demise of Lucky Ali), Indian Ocean seems to have gotten more deeply invested in "roots." They have matured and grown more proficient, while their filmi counterparts have seemingly withered.
The SAMAR article also has some details on the content of Indian Ocean's songs:
From "Hille Le Jhagjhor Duniya," based on a poem written by a Bihari revolutionary poet called Gorakh Pande, which urges its audience to throw away the old order and replace it with the new, to "Ma Reva," a eulogy to the Narmada river, a tune Rahul learnt from local communities engaged in the struggle for self determination against the large, ecologically unfriendly Sardar Sarovar dam, to "Kandisa," a soul stirring 2nd century Aramaic mass that used to be sung by the Syrian Christian community in Kerala. But even though they borrow freely, Indian Ocean distance themselves from others who use copyright laws to exploit folk music. "These songs belong to everybody," they claim, "and more specifically to the people who sing them. How can anything that has been sung for hundreds of years be anybody's copyright?"
My favorite song from last night's performance was also derived from the folk tradition -- Kabir's "Jhini".
Since this is a Youtube age, I should point out that the music video for "Jhini" is viewable here. It's not the greatest music video ever, but you can get a sense of who these guys are musically from it. There's also a video that seems to have been shot on a cell phone at a live concert in Mumbai; it gives you somewhat of a sense of what they are like live.
A few more links:
A decription of the band and the musicians at a U-Minn website
Another article at AllAboutJazz
Streaming audio to their album "Black Fridya"
Streaming audio to their album "Kandisa"
Secular Constitutions: the U.S. and India
Happy Indian Independence day, everyone!
I've recently been involved with some discussions where people have questioned why India needs "secularism," and even just what secularism means in India. Since I have researched the issue of secularism as part of my academic work (my upcoming book is called Literary Secularism), I thought it might be interesting to look at the Indian and American approaches to secularism in comparison as a thought exercise. Instead of focusing on recent issues such as the train bombings in Mumbai last month, or almost-current events like the Gujarat riots of 2002, I wanted to back up a little and take a brief look at the texts of the respective Constitutions themselves. I think this comparative exercise might shed some insight on the value and importance of secularism in both countries.
* * *
Let's start with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, implemented in 1791:
Mainly because it refers to so many different things, this has become one of the most hotly debated sentences in the English language. The first phrase guarantees the "free exercise" of religion, and it's coupled with a statement that the U.S. government is forbidden to associate with an "Established" church.
The First Amendment was a brilliant solution to the kinds of sectarian wars that had been so damaging in Europe in the early modern era, and it also addressed the concerns of many religious sects that had fled to America from Europe to escape persecution by their governments. The clause helped to bring the country together at the moment of its founding, and it's worked fairly well for more than two hundred years since. Admittedly, the rule wasn't always applied as strongly as it should have been (many individual states had de facto established churches for many years), and it wasn't really until the 1940s that smaller, more esoteric sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses were guaranteed the right to religious expression that the mainstream had earlier considered an annoyance. (The Jehovah's Witnesses wanted the right to proselytize door-to-door as part of the free exercise of their faith; see Cantwell v. Connecticut.)
But it's also important to note that the U.S. courts made a number of decisions against religious community rights, starting as early as the Civil War era, when the Supreme Court ruled against the Mormons on the matter of Polygamy (see Reynolds vs. United States). At the time the Mormons were extremely unhappy that what they saw as a fundamental aspect of their religious tradition was being declared illegal. But they learned to live with it, and today the community thrives in a modified form.
We can think about this history in light of India, and come to two loose conclusions. Admittedly, the histories of religion and the law in India and the U.S. are different, so there's a limit to how far you can take this. Nevertheless:
1) Allowing the majority religious community to "establish" itself is a bad idea even if some people think that the majority religious tradition is historically a tolerant, inclusive one. Limits ought to be placed on the role of religion in government -- pretty strict ones -- for the benefit of the country as a whole. If the government didn't make an effort to protect the rights of India's many religious minorities at the time of its founding, the country would never have come together to begin with. If it doesn't continue to do so now, it won't stay together.
2) Following the example of the Mormons, minority religious practices that are disrespectful of human rights (especially women's rights) can be banned by the state. That means that the state has the authority to ban polygamy in Islam (still technically legal in India), as well as "Triple Talaq." In the short run, some Indian Muslims would be unhappy about these changes, but in a modern nation-state the government has the authority to decide on fundamental rights for all its citizens. (Of course, given current political circumstances, changing this law is an impossibility -- even the NDA government didn't try it during the years it was in power. Also, many people would argue that the problem in India is that the existing laws aren't enforced adequately -- witness female foeticide, which continues though sex-selecting ultrasounds are banned.)
The Indian Constitution is longer and more complex than America's (there is a decent amount of information at Wikipedia, for those who are unfamiliar with it). The statements concerning secularism are much longer than in the U.S. version, and while they are more specific (the U.S. First Amendment is maddeningly general), their specificity has not made them any less controversial. Moreover, Indian Parliaments have been prone to make many minor and major Revisions and Amendments over the years. In 1976, the language of the Preamble itself was changed -- and the words "socialist" and "secular" were inserted, so that the opening sentence now reads: "WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens..." Were these insertions really necessary? Some of the changes made over the years detract from the power of the Constitution as a whole.
At any rate, let's look more closely at at least one of the provisions concerning secularism in the Constitution, Article 15:
This is just the first of several clauses dealing with "religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth" etc. in the Indian Constitution, and it's immediately apparent that the intent and structure of the Indian text is quite different from the American version. In India, the Constitution Assembly felt obliged not just to establish general laws, but to make specific statements regarding actual religious practices and communities. Untouchability was banned (Article 17); discrimination over access to water was banned (above); discrimination in public places such as hotels and restaurants was banned.
From the beginning, then, the Indian government took on the role of reforming religion in the pursuit of social justice and equality. Nehru, Ambedkar, and other progressives understood traditional religious practices and values (from all of India's religious communities) to be the major impediment to the kinds of modernizing, integrating social reforms they wanted, and the Constitution reflects that focus.
They were not bothered by the American idea of the "separation of church and state." In India's case, religion is so constantly present in everyday life, and so powerful in the social order, that the concept doesn't really make sense. The state has to intervene in religious matters, to guarantee, for instance, that all castes of Hindus have the right to enter temples. The Indian Constitution is an activist, reformist constitution. It is also incremental -- some of the changes desired would not have been accepted by most Indians in 1948. (The Hindu Marriage Act, which made major reforms on issues such as dowry, child marriage, and polygamy affecting the Hindu community, was implemented in 1955.)
What couldn't be included under "Fundamental Rights" for practical reasons was relegated to a special section of the Constitution indicating "Directive Principles of State Policy" (Part IV). These are essentially suggestions for future legislators -- it would be great if you could go in this direction, that's really what we'd like to do, but can't. One of the most famous of these directive Articles is Article 44: "44. Uniform civil code for the citizens.—The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." Sixty years have passed, and nothing much has happened regarding civil codes. Directive Princples like Article 44 solve the question of the Constitutional Assembly's "intent" that dogs so many legal debates in the U.S., but otherwise they don't seem to matter much.
The activist approach of the Indian Consitution has helped to modernize India in many ways quite quickly. But it also has some unresolved flaws. One is the Civil Code issue I already mentioned. The other issue is caste reservations, which are allowed by the Constitution in Article 15:
It's worth noting that while the Constitution bans untouchability, it neither formally nor "directively" bans the idea of caste-based social relations. Defenders of reservations in employment and education argue that any society in which an institution like caste exists is going to be an institution where discrimination by caste exists. Opponents argue, first, that the reservations "Schedules" which determine proportional quotas aren't based on current demographic realities (as I understand it, caste is not indicated in the Indian census). Second, the opponents of reservations say that some of the communities included, specifically on the OBC lists, are no more "Backward" than any other, non-Scheduled group. And third, they argue that the continued growth of this system actually reinforces social division by caste; those divisions might, with the modernization of social life in Indian cities, have withered away.
Though the hot debate we saw earlier in the year has died down somewhat this summer, I think that the reservations issue is going to be one of the most divisive ones India has to deal with going forward. I personally opposed the latest expansion of the OBC quotas that were introduced by the UPA government this spring, but separate from that issue is the general issue of what to do with the caste-based reservations system as a whole. And there I don't have an obvious answer, though I do think this might actually be a bigger issue than Hindu-Muslim relations in the long term, as it encompasses nearly every Indian citizen.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
I've recently been involved with some discussions where people have questioned why India needs "secularism," and even just what secularism means in India. Since I have researched the issue of secularism as part of my academic work (my upcoming book is called Literary Secularism), I thought it might be interesting to look at the Indian and American approaches to secularism in comparison as a thought exercise. Instead of focusing on recent issues such as the train bombings in Mumbai last month, or almost-current events like the Gujarat riots of 2002, I wanted to back up a little and take a brief look at the texts of the respective Constitutions themselves. I think this comparative exercise might shed some insight on the value and importance of secularism in both countries.
* * *
Let's start with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, implemented in 1791:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Mainly because it refers to so many different things, this has become one of the most hotly debated sentences in the English language. The first phrase guarantees the "free exercise" of religion, and it's coupled with a statement that the U.S. government is forbidden to associate with an "Established" church.
The First Amendment was a brilliant solution to the kinds of sectarian wars that had been so damaging in Europe in the early modern era, and it also addressed the concerns of many religious sects that had fled to America from Europe to escape persecution by their governments. The clause helped to bring the country together at the moment of its founding, and it's worked fairly well for more than two hundred years since. Admittedly, the rule wasn't always applied as strongly as it should have been (many individual states had de facto established churches for many years), and it wasn't really until the 1940s that smaller, more esoteric sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses were guaranteed the right to religious expression that the mainstream had earlier considered an annoyance. (The Jehovah's Witnesses wanted the right to proselytize door-to-door as part of the free exercise of their faith; see Cantwell v. Connecticut.)
But it's also important to note that the U.S. courts made a number of decisions against religious community rights, starting as early as the Civil War era, when the Supreme Court ruled against the Mormons on the matter of Polygamy (see Reynolds vs. United States). At the time the Mormons were extremely unhappy that what they saw as a fundamental aspect of their religious tradition was being declared illegal. But they learned to live with it, and today the community thrives in a modified form.
We can think about this history in light of India, and come to two loose conclusions. Admittedly, the histories of religion and the law in India and the U.S. are different, so there's a limit to how far you can take this. Nevertheless:
1) Allowing the majority religious community to "establish" itself is a bad idea even if some people think that the majority religious tradition is historically a tolerant, inclusive one. Limits ought to be placed on the role of religion in government -- pretty strict ones -- for the benefit of the country as a whole. If the government didn't make an effort to protect the rights of India's many religious minorities at the time of its founding, the country would never have come together to begin with. If it doesn't continue to do so now, it won't stay together.
2) Following the example of the Mormons, minority religious practices that are disrespectful of human rights (especially women's rights) can be banned by the state. That means that the state has the authority to ban polygamy in Islam (still technically legal in India), as well as "Triple Talaq." In the short run, some Indian Muslims would be unhappy about these changes, but in a modern nation-state the government has the authority to decide on fundamental rights for all its citizens. (Of course, given current political circumstances, changing this law is an impossibility -- even the NDA government didn't try it during the years it was in power. Also, many people would argue that the problem in India is that the existing laws aren't enforced adequately -- witness female foeticide, which continues though sex-selecting ultrasounds are banned.)
The Indian Constitution is longer and more complex than America's (there is a decent amount of information at Wikipedia, for those who are unfamiliar with it). The statements concerning secularism are much longer than in the U.S. version, and while they are more specific (the U.S. First Amendment is maddeningly general), their specificity has not made them any less controversial. Moreover, Indian Parliaments have been prone to make many minor and major Revisions and Amendments over the years. In 1976, the language of the Preamble itself was changed -- and the words "socialist" and "secular" were inserted, so that the opening sentence now reads: "WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens..." Were these insertions really necessary? Some of the changes made over the years detract from the power of the Constitution as a whole.
At any rate, let's look more closely at at least one of the provisions concerning secularism in the Constitution, Article 15:
15. Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.—(1) The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.
(2) No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to—
(a) access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment; or
(b) the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State funds or dedicated to the use of the general public.
(3) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children.
(4) Nothing in this article or in clause (2) of article 29 shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.
This is just the first of several clauses dealing with "religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth" etc. in the Indian Constitution, and it's immediately apparent that the intent and structure of the Indian text is quite different from the American version. In India, the Constitution Assembly felt obliged not just to establish general laws, but to make specific statements regarding actual religious practices and communities. Untouchability was banned (Article 17); discrimination over access to water was banned (above); discrimination in public places such as hotels and restaurants was banned.
From the beginning, then, the Indian government took on the role of reforming religion in the pursuit of social justice and equality. Nehru, Ambedkar, and other progressives understood traditional religious practices and values (from all of India's religious communities) to be the major impediment to the kinds of modernizing, integrating social reforms they wanted, and the Constitution reflects that focus.
They were not bothered by the American idea of the "separation of church and state." In India's case, religion is so constantly present in everyday life, and so powerful in the social order, that the concept doesn't really make sense. The state has to intervene in religious matters, to guarantee, for instance, that all castes of Hindus have the right to enter temples. The Indian Constitution is an activist, reformist constitution. It is also incremental -- some of the changes desired would not have been accepted by most Indians in 1948. (The Hindu Marriage Act, which made major reforms on issues such as dowry, child marriage, and polygamy affecting the Hindu community, was implemented in 1955.)
What couldn't be included under "Fundamental Rights" for practical reasons was relegated to a special section of the Constitution indicating "Directive Principles of State Policy" (Part IV). These are essentially suggestions for future legislators -- it would be great if you could go in this direction, that's really what we'd like to do, but can't. One of the most famous of these directive Articles is Article 44: "44. Uniform civil code for the citizens.—The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." Sixty years have passed, and nothing much has happened regarding civil codes. Directive Princples like Article 44 solve the question of the Constitutional Assembly's "intent" that dogs so many legal debates in the U.S., but otherwise they don't seem to matter much.
The activist approach of the Indian Consitution has helped to modernize India in many ways quite quickly. But it also has some unresolved flaws. One is the Civil Code issue I already mentioned. The other issue is caste reservations, which are allowed by the Constitution in Article 15:
(4) Nothing in this article or in clause (2) of article 29 shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.
It's worth noting that while the Constitution bans untouchability, it neither formally nor "directively" bans the idea of caste-based social relations. Defenders of reservations in employment and education argue that any society in which an institution like caste exists is going to be an institution where discrimination by caste exists. Opponents argue, first, that the reservations "Schedules" which determine proportional quotas aren't based on current demographic realities (as I understand it, caste is not indicated in the Indian census). Second, the opponents of reservations say that some of the communities included, specifically on the OBC lists, are no more "Backward" than any other, non-Scheduled group. And third, they argue that the continued growth of this system actually reinforces social division by caste; those divisions might, with the modernization of social life in Indian cities, have withered away.
Though the hot debate we saw earlier in the year has died down somewhat this summer, I think that the reservations issue is going to be one of the most divisive ones India has to deal with going forward. I personally opposed the latest expansion of the OBC quotas that were introduced by the UPA government this spring, but separate from that issue is the general issue of what to do with the caste-based reservations system as a whole. And there I don't have an obvious answer, though I do think this might actually be a bigger issue than Hindu-Muslim relations in the long term, as it encompasses nearly every Indian citizen.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
The Author as 'Master': Colm Toibin's Henry James
1895, London. On the opening night of his play, Guy Domville, Henry James was too nervous to actually stay and watch the performance at the St. James Theatre, where it was to debut. Instead, he went down the street to watch a recently released Oscar Wilde play, An Ideal Husband. James found Wilde's writing to be vulgar and cheap, but the audience ate it up, laughing uproariously at Wilde's cheeky epigrams and thin double-entendres; as with most of Wilde's plays, An Ideal Husband would be a smash success. James himself was a famous novelist at a key moment in his career, and his own play was characteristically refined and carefully written, and some critics in the audience (such as George Bernard Shaw), liked it. But the middle-class people in the galley, who had never heard of Henry James nor read his novels, hated it. When James returned from the Wilde play to take a bow for his own play, he was greeted by a schizophrenic audience -- genteel applause upfront, and deafening jeers and catcalls from the people in the rear, who either didn't understand what he was after or knew perfectly well and had no investment in being polite.
James interpreted the reaction as a sign of catastrophic failure, and briefly went into seclusion. Moreover, from this point on, he essentially gave up in his novels any attempt to please Everyreader. I find it an interesting incident, partly because of the unusual intersection of two very different writers. But it's also telling as a moment where a writer, who normally maintained a strict line between himself and his readers, actually had to face them in person with total immediacy -- only to be rejected. Here, for a moment at least, Henry James was not at all "the master."
This scene figures prominently in both Colm Toibin's recent novel The Master, a fictional biography of Henry James, and Leon Edel's 'real', five volume biography, first published in 1969. In this post, I'll talk about both biographical versions of James in turn, and make some limited comparisons between the two. Toibin, I think, draws heavily (perhaps too heavily) on Edel, but also deviates crucially from Edel's version of James on the crucial question of James' personal life.
Toibin's central question seems to be whether Henry James, in the interest of his art, gave up personhood in favor of Authorship. It's a somewhat familiar Faustian-bargain type of question (Did he become a writing-machine who closed off friendship and love in the interest of maintaining complete control?), but it seems especially salient with James in particular. In the middle part of his life, James became close to a series of women, most of whom he at some point later rejected. At least one of his women friends, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, committed suicide after he turned against her in 1894, mainly because he felt she was attempting to become too close. (She was not, as far as we know, a romantic interest; James was probably gay.)
The failure of Guy Domville triggered James to rework his style and his approach to novelistic form. It was during these years, Toibin argues (in agreement with Edel), that James truly came to 'master' his craft. This is when he wrote The Spoils of Poynton, The Turn of the Screw, and The Sacred Fount. These were also the years when James started to develop the seeds of the idea that would become The Ambassadors.
The title The Master thus refers both to James's mastery of his art and his refusal to be drawn into any position of emotional weakness or vulnerability. In the end, I think Toibin does find a way to humanize James, but it's worth noting that Toibin's use of psychology in the novel is very limited, almost invisible. The interpretation of the key events is left largely to the reader; a big cathartic explosion would have been anathema to the image of James we see here. Toibin's approach to James's sexuality is somewhat understated, though his inferences are clear with regard to James' relationships with the Russian painter Paul Zhukowsky and a Norwegian-American sculptor named Hendrik Christian Anderson. For Toibin, James's sexuality is all about discipline and discretion -- whatever personal desires he feels for other men must be strictly contained. James protected himself from the scrutiny of biographers and critics fairly well: though he left hundreds and hundreds of personal letters, and was personally well-known in a wide social circle, there is virtually no direct evidence to support the idea that James had active sexual relationships with either men or women. The circumstantial evidence is, however, quite strong: see this 1996 debate between Edel and Sheldon Novick, a more recent biographer who charged Edel with hogging access to James's letters partly out of an obsessive desire to prevent James's true sexual orientation from being known. (The exchange continued over several weeks at Slate.)
I haven't read Novick's version of James's life (Henry James: The Young Master), and I only picked up the Edel biography for the first time after reading The Master. Initially, my esteem for Toibin dropped somewhat as I started to read. First, one notes that Toibin directly appropriated the title of Edel's Volume Five: The Master. Second, as I've been reading Volume Four of the Edel (The Treacherous Years), I've been struck by the remarkable degree to which Edel's and Toibin's descriptions of the opening night of James's Guy Domville overlap. Here is Toibin:
Compare that to Leon Edel's account of the same incident in Henry James: Volume Four, The Treacherous Years:
There are significant similarities here, as well as with the way Toibin and Edel describe James as he walks out on stage. Both Edel and Toibin imagine James worrying over the fate of his play as he watches the Wilde; both emphasize that he was in some sense surprised at the vehemence of the audience's rejection of his own work. Edel's surmise is backed up somewhat by James's letters, but many of the subjective characterizations ("How can my piece do anything with a public with whom that is a success?") seem to be essentially invented. Toibin's appropriation is probably nothing that could be described as plagiarism, but it is intriguing to consider that Toibin's novel about the life of an author sometimes seems not to be so much authored itself as adapted from Edel's biography.
Admittedly, this moment of borrowing turns out not to be especially common, and Toibin's interpretation of James's personal life is actually quite different from Edel's. As mentioned above, Edel disputes the idea that James was definitely gay (Edel uses the quaint word "celibate," and resists the label "gay" or "homosexual," though he acknowledges that James's friendships with men were intense), while Toibin takes it as a basic presumption that James was attracted to men, but kept those feelings deeply submerged except in a couple of instances (Zhukovsky, Anderson). And that's just to mention the most controversial question; there are other straightforward differences of interpretation regarding James's relationship with his sister Alice, as well as his famous philosopher brother William.
* * *
One final passage from Edel. After Guy Domville, Edel and Toibin show James retreating a bit from the public eye, only to come back writing at a ferocious pace. In the process of giving up on writing drama, James came to the realization that the structure of fiction could be made in the shape of drama. It might not sound like a big deal, but it's possible this is a sign that James's thinking was in some sense in parallel with contemporaries like Joseph Conrad, on the threshold of a new era in the novel:
Perhaps what Edel is describing is akin to the move from the 'readerly' to the 'writerly' that Barthes talks about in "From Work to Text" -- the new dimension that is added to the reading experience with the advent of modernist self-consciousness. I'm not sure it quite holds up -- is The Spoils of Poynton really very different from what James wrote pre-1895? Is James really a proto-modernist? One would have to go back and re-read those novels to be sure.
James interpreted the reaction as a sign of catastrophic failure, and briefly went into seclusion. Moreover, from this point on, he essentially gave up in his novels any attempt to please Everyreader. I find it an interesting incident, partly because of the unusual intersection of two very different writers. But it's also telling as a moment where a writer, who normally maintained a strict line between himself and his readers, actually had to face them in person with total immediacy -- only to be rejected. Here, for a moment at least, Henry James was not at all "the master."
This scene figures prominently in both Colm Toibin's recent novel The Master, a fictional biography of Henry James, and Leon Edel's 'real', five volume biography, first published in 1969. In this post, I'll talk about both biographical versions of James in turn, and make some limited comparisons between the two. Toibin, I think, draws heavily (perhaps too heavily) on Edel, but also deviates crucially from Edel's version of James on the crucial question of James' personal life.
Toibin's central question seems to be whether Henry James, in the interest of his art, gave up personhood in favor of Authorship. It's a somewhat familiar Faustian-bargain type of question (Did he become a writing-machine who closed off friendship and love in the interest of maintaining complete control?), but it seems especially salient with James in particular. In the middle part of his life, James became close to a series of women, most of whom he at some point later rejected. At least one of his women friends, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, committed suicide after he turned against her in 1894, mainly because he felt she was attempting to become too close. (She was not, as far as we know, a romantic interest; James was probably gay.)
The failure of Guy Domville triggered James to rework his style and his approach to novelistic form. It was during these years, Toibin argues (in agreement with Edel), that James truly came to 'master' his craft. This is when he wrote The Spoils of Poynton, The Turn of the Screw, and The Sacred Fount. These were also the years when James started to develop the seeds of the idea that would become The Ambassadors.
The title The Master thus refers both to James's mastery of his art and his refusal to be drawn into any position of emotional weakness or vulnerability. In the end, I think Toibin does find a way to humanize James, but it's worth noting that Toibin's use of psychology in the novel is very limited, almost invisible. The interpretation of the key events is left largely to the reader; a big cathartic explosion would have been anathema to the image of James we see here. Toibin's approach to James's sexuality is somewhat understated, though his inferences are clear with regard to James' relationships with the Russian painter Paul Zhukowsky and a Norwegian-American sculptor named Hendrik Christian Anderson. For Toibin, James's sexuality is all about discipline and discretion -- whatever personal desires he feels for other men must be strictly contained. James protected himself from the scrutiny of biographers and critics fairly well: though he left hundreds and hundreds of personal letters, and was personally well-known in a wide social circle, there is virtually no direct evidence to support the idea that James had active sexual relationships with either men or women. The circumstantial evidence is, however, quite strong: see this 1996 debate between Edel and Sheldon Novick, a more recent biographer who charged Edel with hogging access to James's letters partly out of an obsessive desire to prevent James's true sexual orientation from being known. (The exchange continued over several weeks at Slate.)
I haven't read Novick's version of James's life (Henry James: The Young Master), and I only picked up the Edel biography for the first time after reading The Master. Initially, my esteem for Toibin dropped somewhat as I started to read. First, one notes that Toibin directly appropriated the title of Edel's Volume Five: The Master. Second, as I've been reading Volume Four of the Edel (The Treacherous Years), I've been struck by the remarkable degree to which Edel's and Toibin's descriptions of the opening night of James's Guy Domville overlap. Here is Toibin:
Instantly, as soon as he set foot on the pavement outside the Haymarket, he became jealous of Oscar Wilde. There was a levity about those who were entering the theater, they looked like people ready to enjoy themselves thoroughly. He had never in his life, he felt, looked like that himself, and he did not know how he was going to manage these hours among people who seemed so jolly, so giddy, so jaunty, so generally cheerful. No one he saw, not one single face, no couple nor group, looked to him like people who would enjoy Guy Domville. These people were out for a happy conclusion.
He wished he had demanded a seat at the end of a row. In his allotted space he was enclosed, and, as the curtain rose, and the audience began to laugh at lines which he thought crude and clumsy, he felt under siege. He did not laugh once; he though not a moment was funny, but more importantly, he thought not a moment was true. Every line, every scene was acted out as though silliness were a higher manifestation of truth. No opportunity was missed in portraying witlessness as wit; the obvious and shallow and glib provoked the audience into hearty and hilarious laughter.
Compare that to Leon Edel's account of the same incident in Henry James: Volume Four, The Treacherous Years:
Henry James remained to the end of the Oscar Wilde play. He listened to the final epigrams, heard the audience break into prolonged applause and left the theatre with that applause ringing in his ears. It was late evening. He walked down the short street leading into St. James's Square. Oscar's play had been helpless, crude, clumsy, feeble, vulgar -- James later would throw all these adjectives at it. And yet -- it was almost unbelievable -- the audience had liked it. This suddenly made him stop midway round the Square. He feared to go on to hear about his own play. 'How,' he asked himself, 'can my piece do anything with a public with whom that is a success?'
There are significant similarities here, as well as with the way Toibin and Edel describe James as he walks out on stage. Both Edel and Toibin imagine James worrying over the fate of his play as he watches the Wilde; both emphasize that he was in some sense surprised at the vehemence of the audience's rejection of his own work. Edel's surmise is backed up somewhat by James's letters, but many of the subjective characterizations ("How can my piece do anything with a public with whom that is a success?") seem to be essentially invented. Toibin's appropriation is probably nothing that could be described as plagiarism, but it is intriguing to consider that Toibin's novel about the life of an author sometimes seems not to be so much authored itself as adapted from Edel's biography.
Admittedly, this moment of borrowing turns out not to be especially common, and Toibin's interpretation of James's personal life is actually quite different from Edel's. As mentioned above, Edel disputes the idea that James was definitely gay (Edel uses the quaint word "celibate," and resists the label "gay" or "homosexual," though he acknowledges that James's friendships with men were intense), while Toibin takes it as a basic presumption that James was attracted to men, but kept those feelings deeply submerged except in a couple of instances (Zhukovsky, Anderson). And that's just to mention the most controversial question; there are other straightforward differences of interpretation regarding James's relationship with his sister Alice, as well as his famous philosopher brother William.
* * *
One final passage from Edel. After Guy Domville, Edel and Toibin show James retreating a bit from the public eye, only to come back writing at a ferocious pace. In the process of giving up on writing drama, James came to the realization that the structure of fiction could be made in the shape of drama. It might not sound like a big deal, but it's possible this is a sign that James's thinking was in some sense in parallel with contemporaries like Joseph Conrad, on the threshold of a new era in the novel:
What happened can be read in Henry James's writings from this point on. The image of the key and the lock [which shows up in James's diary] was apt: and it applied to his life as well. He was closing a door behind him. He was opening a door on his future. He would never again write the kind of novel he had written before the dramatic years. The stage had given him new technical skills; these he would now use in his fiction. A story could be told as if it were a play; characters could be developed as they develop on the stage; a novel could be given the skeletal structure of drama. The novel in England and America had been an easy, rambling, tell-the-story-as-you-go creation; novelists had meandered, sermonized, digressed, and long enjoyed the fluidity of first-person story-telling; they had taken arbitrary courses every since the days of Richardson and Fielding. Henry James now saw that he could launch an action and then let it evolve with the logic of a well-made scenic design. Beginning with The Spoils of Poynton, written during the ensuring months, there emerged a new and complex Henry James of the novel. His work required also a new and complex reader: one who had to be aware he was "following," not simply reading, a story.
Perhaps what Edel is describing is akin to the move from the 'readerly' to the 'writerly' that Barthes talks about in "From Work to Text" -- the new dimension that is added to the reading experience with the advent of modernist self-consciousness. I'm not sure it quite holds up -- is The Spoils of Poynton really very different from what James wrote pre-1895? Is James really a proto-modernist? One would have to go back and re-read those novels to be sure.
The Indian Dentist and the Holocaust Survivor: Vikram Seth's "Two Lives"
A biography creates a record of a life, but it must also attempt to assemble many divergent strands and seemingly incoherent fragments of that life into a semblance of a story for a reader. It's hard to do even half-comprehensively with any one life -- it requires, for one thing, intimate access to the person him or herself, as well as a pretty good paper trail. Vikram Seth, in Two Lives, had such access to not one but two people, who were extraordinary individually but even more so as a couple. It's the story of Shanti Behari Seth, the author's great uncle, and Hennerle Caro (Henny), a German Jewish refugee from the Nazis.
The two of them met during the early 1930s, when Shanti was in Berlin to do a doctorate in dentistry, and he rented a room in the Caros' house. In 1937 and 1939, respectively, they left Germany and settled in London. When the war broke out, Shanti enlisted, and served as a dentist for the troops in the African campaign, and later in Italy (where he lost an arm at Monte Cassino). Henny, for her part, lost her nuclear family at Auschwitz: unlike her, they were unable to get out in time. Henny and Shanti became a couple, and eventually married. When Vikram Seth went to England initially in 1969, he knew very little about his great uncle and his foreign wife. But as he stayed with them and then continued to visit over the course of more than twenty years, he became became quite close to them. They even helped him learn German, initially to pass the entry requirements for Oxford, but the knowledge of the language would become indispensible for the project that became Two Lives.
Two Lives is more a book of details than of ideas, though because the sense of the story is so strong it always avoids the trap of familial self-indulgence or nostalgia. Seth did a series of very long interviews with Shanti in the mid-1990s, after Henny died. He also had access to hundreds of letters, including letters exchanged between Shanti and Henny, Shanti and the Seth family back in India, as well as between Henny and her family and friends in Germany. There are, of course, some exceptional synthetic passages, as well as some interesting comments by Seth on his method, both in this book and in earlier books like A Suitable Boy and An Equal Music. One such passage gives a sort of blueprint for Seth's earlier books, but also in a sense the current one. While taking a year off from his graduate studies in California to work on his Big Indian Novel (written in Delhi), Vikram Seth realized he was opening a very big can of worms:
This is a self-reflective comment on the writing of A Suitable Boy, but I think it is also a persuasive statement on the value of embracing complexity and detail over fixed ideology or given narrative formulas. Seth's openness to explore all these different paths and channels in his fictional (and nonfictional) characters' lives allows him to be true to the subject -- as true as it is possible to be in a novel. It also enables the writer to break out of predictable postcolonial narrative conventions. The novel becomes a space for research, discovery, and documentation (indeed, rather like a biography), rather than simply a collection of commonplace observations and fancy verbal effects.
I wish we had better archives and more non-ideological archival research. For many South Asians involved in the tumult of the twentieth century, such paper trails are hard to come by. Of the hundreds of thousands of Indians who served in the Second World War, how many left behind letters documenting their experiences, their everyday thoughts, or their thoughts about their loved ones? Not many, unfortunately. From the Partition of 1947, too, the best non-official documentary evidence has tended to come from personal interviews conducted by people like Urvashi Butalia (The Other Side of Silence). Compared to the amount of documentation associated with individual experiences of the Holocaust in Europe, the Partition archive, as far as I know, is quite small.
Another issue that comes out of Two Lives is a fresh and surprising view of an early bicultural/biracial relationship. A few points of tension between Shanti Seth and Henny Caro on cultural matters are recorded in Two Lives (she didn't have much interest in visiting India, for instance), but they actually weren't especially significant in the relationship. Henny and Shanti were bound by stronger forces than ethnicity -- their shared memory of a pre-war social milieu in Germany that was utterly and irreparably destroyed, as well as a deep need for support and understanding that helped them cope with the damage the war did to them both: Henny, with the loss of her family under unthinkable circumstances, and Shanti, with the loss of his right arm, which might have been catastrophic for a right-handed practicing dentist (he managed, almost miraculously, to overcome it). The clichés about white women and English-educated Indian men simply don't apply in any way whatsoever to the life these two individuals shared.
I wanted to share one more memorable quote before closing. Here, Seth is defining the relationship between Henny and Shanti as an attempt at reconstituting "home":
The idea of exile and the struggle to define a sense of home will be familiar to readers of Salman Rushdie and others. It applies remarkably well to Shanti Seth and Henny Caro -- and perhaps in some sense to Vikram Seth as well, whose personal experience closely lines the tight margins of this book.
* * *
Two Lives may disappoint some fans of A Suitable Boy who were hoping for another page-turner from Vikram Seth. My suggestion might be to give over an hour or so to the book in a bookstore or library. Read the first section (fifty pages). If you're drawn in -- and I think most readers will be -- take the book home.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
The two of them met during the early 1930s, when Shanti was in Berlin to do a doctorate in dentistry, and he rented a room in the Caros' house. In 1937 and 1939, respectively, they left Germany and settled in London. When the war broke out, Shanti enlisted, and served as a dentist for the troops in the African campaign, and later in Italy (where he lost an arm at Monte Cassino). Henny, for her part, lost her nuclear family at Auschwitz: unlike her, they were unable to get out in time. Henny and Shanti became a couple, and eventually married. When Vikram Seth went to England initially in 1969, he knew very little about his great uncle and his foreign wife. But as he stayed with them and then continued to visit over the course of more than twenty years, he became became quite close to them. They even helped him learn German, initially to pass the entry requirements for Oxford, but the knowledge of the language would become indispensible for the project that became Two Lives.
Two Lives is more a book of details than of ideas, though because the sense of the story is so strong it always avoids the trap of familial self-indulgence or nostalgia. Seth did a series of very long interviews with Shanti in the mid-1990s, after Henny died. He also had access to hundreds of letters, including letters exchanged between Shanti and Henny, Shanti and the Seth family back in India, as well as between Henny and her family and friends in Germany. There are, of course, some exceptional synthetic passages, as well as some interesting comments by Seth on his method, both in this book and in earlier books like A Suitable Boy and An Equal Music. One such passage gives a sort of blueprint for Seth's earlier books, but also in a sense the current one. While taking a year off from his graduate studies in California to work on his Big Indian Novel (written in Delhi), Vikram Seth realized he was opening a very big can of worms:
However I soon realized that the novel -- which had opened with a grand wedding -- now had so many characters whom I was interested in that I needed to take off at least a year simply to understand the varied worlds of law, politics, administration, medicine, farming, manufacture, commerce, education, music, religion, and so on, that these characters came from or worked in. What exactly did one do if one visited a courtesan in 1951, and how would I find someone to tell me? How did the credit market for small shoemakers in Agra work, and what might be the effect of a credit squeeze on people who had little to fall back on? What was it like to be a brown sahib in a white managing agency in Calcutta in the fifties? Were there girls at St Stephen's College in the late forties?
Instead of being constrained by this research, I found that it inspired me with new ideas. It also gave me the confidence to imagine myself into the insubstantial beings I had begun with, to give them shape and personality and vividness -- at least enough to make me wish to follow their lives. I wanted, of course, to tell a good story, but I also wanted to get things right. No matter how well a novel is received by readers or critics in general, if it does not ring true with those people who know from the inside the world it describes, it is in the final analysis an artistic failure.
This is a self-reflective comment on the writing of A Suitable Boy, but I think it is also a persuasive statement on the value of embracing complexity and detail over fixed ideology or given narrative formulas. Seth's openness to explore all these different paths and channels in his fictional (and nonfictional) characters' lives allows him to be true to the subject -- as true as it is possible to be in a novel. It also enables the writer to break out of predictable postcolonial narrative conventions. The novel becomes a space for research, discovery, and documentation (indeed, rather like a biography), rather than simply a collection of commonplace observations and fancy verbal effects.
I wish we had better archives and more non-ideological archival research. For many South Asians involved in the tumult of the twentieth century, such paper trails are hard to come by. Of the hundreds of thousands of Indians who served in the Second World War, how many left behind letters documenting their experiences, their everyday thoughts, or their thoughts about their loved ones? Not many, unfortunately. From the Partition of 1947, too, the best non-official documentary evidence has tended to come from personal interviews conducted by people like Urvashi Butalia (The Other Side of Silence). Compared to the amount of documentation associated with individual experiences of the Holocaust in Europe, the Partition archive, as far as I know, is quite small.
Another issue that comes out of Two Lives is a fresh and surprising view of an early bicultural/biracial relationship. A few points of tension between Shanti Seth and Henny Caro on cultural matters are recorded in Two Lives (she didn't have much interest in visiting India, for instance), but they actually weren't especially significant in the relationship. Henny and Shanti were bound by stronger forces than ethnicity -- their shared memory of a pre-war social milieu in Germany that was utterly and irreparably destroyed, as well as a deep need for support and understanding that helped them cope with the damage the war did to them both: Henny, with the loss of her family under unthinkable circumstances, and Shanti, with the loss of his right arm, which might have been catastrophic for a right-handed practicing dentist (he managed, almost miraculously, to overcome it). The clichés about white women and English-educated Indian men simply don't apply in any way whatsoever to the life these two individuals shared.
I wanted to share one more memorable quote before closing. Here, Seth is defining the relationship between Henny and Shanti as an attempt at reconstituting "home":
Shaken about the globe, we live out our fractured lives. Enticed or fleeing we re-form ourselves, taking on partially the coloration of our new backgrounds. Even our tongues are alienated and rejoined -- a multiplicity that creates richness and confusion. Both Shanti and Henny were in the broader sense exiled; each found in their fellow exile a home.
In Shanti's case, the exile was of his making; not so with Henny, though it could in some strict sense be said that she chose not to return when, once again, it became safe to do so. Increasingly from adolescence onwards she would have sensed that she was set apart from her Christian friends -- that her position was precarious, even in the city in which she had been born, in the only streets she had known.
The idea of exile and the struggle to define a sense of home will be familiar to readers of Salman Rushdie and others. It applies remarkably well to Shanti Seth and Henny Caro -- and perhaps in some sense to Vikram Seth as well, whose personal experience closely lines the tight margins of this book.
* * *
Two Lives may disappoint some fans of A Suitable Boy who were hoping for another page-turner from Vikram Seth. My suggestion might be to give over an hour or so to the book in a bookstore or library. Read the first section (fifty pages). If you're drawn in -- and I think most readers will be -- take the book home.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
Khushwant Singh's Journalism: The Illustrated Weekly of India
Khushwant Singh was someone I naturally gravitated towards as a young literature scholar, as he was one of the very few modern, secular Sikh writers with an international profile. (Now we have Brit-Asians like Nirpal Dhaliwal -- though judging from this, I'm not really sure that represents progress.) But while I did read everything I could find by Khushwant Singh early in graduate school, I ended up not writing about him, barring one seminar paper that my professor at the time didn't particularly like. 
The truth is, from a literary perspective Khushwant Singh's novels really aren't that great. They aren't as adventurous as G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, and not quite as carefully controlled as the novels written by his contemporaries in the 1950s -- i.e., R.K. Narayan. Train to Pakistan sold very well in the west, and was in print for years and years. As partition novels go, it isn't bad -- it's actually nicely plotted and suspenseful -- but it's just somewhat unremarkable. I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi, by contrast, aren't especially readable.
After the 1950s, Khushwant Singh changed gears, and became more and more involved in journalism, which is where, I think, he's made his greatest contribution. For nine years, between 1969 and 1978, he was the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, an ancient institution that lasted for more than 100 years, and was, until the 1980s, the biggest English-language news-magazine in India (perhaps in all of Asia). Under the British, it was effectively a colonial society magazine, and it didn't change much under its first two Indian editors. Khushwant Singh was the third Indian editor, and he turned the ethos of the magazine on its head. He describes his approach in the preface to a collection of columns called Khushwant Singh's Editor's Page (1981):
I've spent some time looking at the magazine before, during, and after the Khushwant Singh years (1969-1978), and what he says above rings true. The earlier editors were very "respectable," with relatively safe short stories (often with a 'village' theme), and relatively bland features that mostly just synthesized the news. (In the 1960s, the magazine had a special section for "Women and Children," which says a lot about how it conceived of its readership.) Most English-speaking and reading middle-class Indians in the 1960s hadn't really remiagined themselves in a way that challenged the dominance of English norms. Given how limited the use of the English was at the time demographically, it's not hard to see how a continued dependence on England and Englishness could occur. (Several issues gave lavish coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's tour of India in 1967, for instance.)
Khushwant Singh has always written in English, and he was in every sense a contemporary of the "transitional" colonials: at the time of independence, he was already thirty-two, and had spent several years studying Law in Cambridge and at the Inner Temple, London. But as a journalist I think he broke the stranglehold of Anglophilia by taking the United States as his English-language reference point rather than England. As an editor, it was wild, sometimes trashy American culture in and after the 1960s that Khushwant brought into the pages of The Illustrated Weekly: rock n' roll, the Vietnam war protests, and the counter-culture (including the signficiant component of barefoot, Enlightenment-seeking hippies who ended up in India). Admittedly, some of the pictures of bikini-clad free-love kids in Goa splashed on the pages of The Illustrated Weekly were rather more like tabloid sensationalism than serious journalism, but there's no doubt that these images had an effect on how Indians saw themselves in that era.
I admire Khushwant Singh's secularism, which for me is always best represented by the Mario cartoon he used on his "Editor's Page" in The Illustrated Weekly: a caricature of himself, sitting next to a pile of books, a bottle of scotch, and a girlie magazine. This is the basis for the familiar Khushwant Singh slogan, "sex, scotch, and scholarship," which is also the title of one of his later books of essays. Much has been made of the "sex" and "scotch," both of which are somewhat ironic since testimony from people who've known him has confirmed that he's neither a womanizer nor a heavy drinker. "Sex, scotch, and scholarship" isn't literally Khushwant Singh's lifestyle (nor does it accurately represent his attitude towards women); it's rather a slogan for his fiercely independent ethos. It's something India still has need of: a willingness to publicly be something other than "respectable" and "respectful," to tell the truth rather than wrap the world in mysticism or one or another political ideology.
That's not to say that Khushwant Singh didn't make mistakes from time to time. His support for Indira Gandhi during the Emergency now looks extremely questionable, in that Christopher Hitchens-has-he-lost-his-mind? sort of way. And he probably should never have gotten involved with politics (though it could probably be argued that a Rajya Sabha seat isn't really a "political" post), though at least he knew when it was time (i.e., after 1984) to walk away.
The Sikh community has been somewhat ambivalent about Khushwant Singh over the years. Earlier, he was seen as too close to Indira Gandhi, despite his public rebuke of Operation Blue Star. During the years of militancy in Punjab, his strong opposition to the secesionist movement made things dangerous for him (I believe there was a price on his head for awhile). And even separate from these specific political questions, of course, Khushwant's aforementioned secularism -- his preference for scotch (Sikhs, remember, aren't supposed to drink alcohol), his crude humor, and his public declaration that he has no faith, have all eroded support for him from devout Sikhs. Despite that ambivalence, it's widely recognized that Khushwant Singh's History of the Sikhs is still a benchmark as a written introduction to the Sikh tradition. (Patwant Singh's recent book hasn't really caught on.) And he has, after all, retained the turban and beard that are so important to Sikh cultural identity. In short, despite everything, for most people, Khushwant Singh is still the same old Sardar.
To wrap up. In my view, Khushwant Singh's talent has lain not in deep or revolutionary thinking, but in the writing of his weekly columns and in a keen sense of what is timely, interesting, and important to talk about. He started doing this in the 1960s, and kept it up for thirty or more years, leaving a sizeable body of work. In a sense, this nurturing of the individualized, independent public voice is quite on par with what we bloggers ourselves do. Writing for The Illustrated Weekly or The Hindustan Times (which he took up in 1980), his voice perhaps had more authority than the average blogger's, but his consistent egalitarianism and irreverent tone gives me every reason to believe that Khushwant Singh would have a blog if he were fifty (or indeed, seventy) years younger. But who knows: the guy is still at it -- he might start one one of these days.
* * *
A final note. Khushwant Singh, at the age of 92, is still out and about. This summer he has been doing public lectures in Delhi on the history of the city (his father had a hand in the building of Edward Lutyens' New Delhi in the 1910s and 20s). He's also been publishing essays and books pretty regularly, though they aren't really of quite the same quality as some of his work from the 1970s.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
The truth is, from a literary perspective Khushwant Singh's novels really aren't that great. They aren't as adventurous as G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, and not quite as carefully controlled as the novels written by his contemporaries in the 1950s -- i.e., R.K. Narayan. Train to Pakistan sold very well in the west, and was in print for years and years. As partition novels go, it isn't bad -- it's actually nicely plotted and suspenseful -- but it's just somewhat unremarkable. I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi, by contrast, aren't especially readable.
After the 1950s, Khushwant Singh changed gears, and became more and more involved in journalism, which is where, I think, he's made his greatest contribution. For nine years, between 1969 and 1978, he was the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, an ancient institution that lasted for more than 100 years, and was, until the 1980s, the biggest English-language news-magazine in India (perhaps in all of Asia). Under the British, it was effectively a colonial society magazine, and it didn't change much under its first two Indian editors. Khushwant Singh was the third Indian editor, and he turned the ethos of the magazine on its head. He describes his approach in the preface to a collection of columns called Khushwant Singh's Editor's Page (1981):
Under its first two Indian editors [The Illustrated Weekly] became a vehicle of Indian culture devoting most of its pages to art, sculpture, classical dance and pretty pictures of flowers, birds, and dencing belles. It did not touch controversial subjects, was strictly apolitical and asexual (save occasional blurred reproductions of Khajuraho or Konarak). It earned a well-deserved reputation for dull respectability. I changed all that. What was a four-wheeled victoria taking well-draped ladies out to eat the Indian air I made a noisy rumbustious, jet-propelled vehicle of information, controversy and amusement. I tore up the unwritten norms of gentility, both visual and linguistic. . . . And slowly the circulation built up, till the Illustrated did become a weekly habit of the English-reading pseudo-elite of the country. It became the most widely read journal in Asia (barring Japan) because it reflected all the contending points of view on every conceivable subject: politics, economics, religion, and the arts.
I've spent some time looking at the magazine before, during, and after the Khushwant Singh years (1969-1978), and what he says above rings true. The earlier editors were very "respectable," with relatively safe short stories (often with a 'village' theme), and relatively bland features that mostly just synthesized the news. (In the 1960s, the magazine had a special section for "Women and Children," which says a lot about how it conceived of its readership.) Most English-speaking and reading middle-class Indians in the 1960s hadn't really remiagined themselves in a way that challenged the dominance of English norms. Given how limited the use of the English was at the time demographically, it's not hard to see how a continued dependence on England and Englishness could occur. (Several issues gave lavish coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's tour of India in 1967, for instance.)
Khushwant Singh has always written in English, and he was in every sense a contemporary of the "transitional" colonials: at the time of independence, he was already thirty-two, and had spent several years studying Law in Cambridge and at the Inner Temple, London. But as a journalist I think he broke the stranglehold of Anglophilia by taking the United States as his English-language reference point rather than England. As an editor, it was wild, sometimes trashy American culture in and after the 1960s that Khushwant brought into the pages of The Illustrated Weekly: rock n' roll, the Vietnam war protests, and the counter-culture (including the signficiant component of barefoot, Enlightenment-seeking hippies who ended up in India). Admittedly, some of the pictures of bikini-clad free-love kids in Goa splashed on the pages of The Illustrated Weekly were rather more like tabloid sensationalism than serious journalism, but there's no doubt that these images had an effect on how Indians saw themselves in that era.
I admire Khushwant Singh's secularism, which for me is always best represented by the Mario cartoon he used on his "Editor's Page" in The Illustrated Weekly: a caricature of himself, sitting next to a pile of books, a bottle of scotch, and a girlie magazine. This is the basis for the familiar Khushwant Singh slogan, "sex, scotch, and scholarship," which is also the title of one of his later books of essays. Much has been made of the "sex" and "scotch," both of which are somewhat ironic since testimony from people who've known him has confirmed that he's neither a womanizer nor a heavy drinker. "Sex, scotch, and scholarship" isn't literally Khushwant Singh's lifestyle (nor does it accurately represent his attitude towards women); it's rather a slogan for his fiercely independent ethos. It's something India still has need of: a willingness to publicly be something other than "respectable" and "respectful," to tell the truth rather than wrap the world in mysticism or one or another political ideology.
That's not to say that Khushwant Singh didn't make mistakes from time to time. His support for Indira Gandhi during the Emergency now looks extremely questionable, in that Christopher Hitchens-has-he-lost-his-mind? sort of way. And he probably should never have gotten involved with politics (though it could probably be argued that a Rajya Sabha seat isn't really a "political" post), though at least he knew when it was time (i.e., after 1984) to walk away.
The Sikh community has been somewhat ambivalent about Khushwant Singh over the years. Earlier, he was seen as too close to Indira Gandhi, despite his public rebuke of Operation Blue Star. During the years of militancy in Punjab, his strong opposition to the secesionist movement made things dangerous for him (I believe there was a price on his head for awhile). And even separate from these specific political questions, of course, Khushwant's aforementioned secularism -- his preference for scotch (Sikhs, remember, aren't supposed to drink alcohol), his crude humor, and his public declaration that he has no faith, have all eroded support for him from devout Sikhs. Despite that ambivalence, it's widely recognized that Khushwant Singh's History of the Sikhs is still a benchmark as a written introduction to the Sikh tradition. (Patwant Singh's recent book hasn't really caught on.) And he has, after all, retained the turban and beard that are so important to Sikh cultural identity. In short, despite everything, for most people, Khushwant Singh is still the same old Sardar.
To wrap up. In my view, Khushwant Singh's talent has lain not in deep or revolutionary thinking, but in the writing of his weekly columns and in a keen sense of what is timely, interesting, and important to talk about. He started doing this in the 1960s, and kept it up for thirty or more years, leaving a sizeable body of work. In a sense, this nurturing of the individualized, independent public voice is quite on par with what we bloggers ourselves do. Writing for The Illustrated Weekly or The Hindustan Times (which he took up in 1980), his voice perhaps had more authority than the average blogger's, but his consistent egalitarianism and irreverent tone gives me every reason to believe that Khushwant Singh would have a blog if he were fifty (or indeed, seventy) years younger. But who knows: the guy is still at it -- he might start one one of these days.
* * *
A final note. Khushwant Singh, at the age of 92, is still out and about. This summer he has been doing public lectures in Delhi on the history of the city (his father had a hand in the building of Edward Lutyens' New Delhi in the 1910s and 20s). He's also been publishing essays and books pretty regularly, though they aren't really of quite the same quality as some of his work from the 1970s.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
Censorship Article in Himal, and Other Links
I have a short piece on censorship in this month's issue of Himal Southasian. Probably the key paragraph is this one:
Overall, it's probably not the most brilliant thing I ever wrote, but it's satisfying to have one's views "in print."
* * *
I should also link to Yesha Naik's podcasts of a moderated panel I was on with Amitav ghosh and Vijay Seshadri at the SAWCC conference back in May. I was asking the questions for the first half hour, when I turned it over to the audience:
Part 1
Part 2: What is the writer's responsibility?
Part 3
Thanks, Yesha, for editing these and posting them online!
* * *
Enough tooting my own horn. There's lots of other stuff to read online this week:
--I found this extract from Bruce Lawrence's new book on the Quran to be very informative. Lots of basic information on the history of early Islam.
--I'm always a bit shocked to find how insistent the presence of religion is in some public school systems in the U.S. This article in the Times on a Jewish mother's struggle to fight open Christian proselytizing in in a rural Delaware district (actually not that far from Philadelphia!) is an eye-opener.
--A great article on Samuel Beckett in the New Yorker.
While India as a whole seems to be marching towards liberalisation on both the political and cultural fronts, the future of censorship remains uncertain, partly because of a possible contradiction in the Indian Constitution itself. The very first section of Article 19 guarantees freedom of expression, but the second clause subsequently indicates that the government retains authority “to legislate concerning libel, slander, defamation, contempt of court, any matter offending decency and morality, or which undermines the security of or tends to overthrow, the State.” It is this text that is repeatedly cited by the state when it agrees to demands by religious groups to ban works of art: the security of the state. But security for whom, and from what? The irony is that the threat to security from censorious religious groups is the threat they themselves pose. It is hard to understand why the religious groups responsible for fomenting riots against offensive works are not being prosecuted, and in their places are writers, artists and filmmakers.
Overall, it's probably not the most brilliant thing I ever wrote, but it's satisfying to have one's views "in print."
* * *
I should also link to Yesha Naik's podcasts of a moderated panel I was on with Amitav ghosh and Vijay Seshadri at the SAWCC conference back in May. I was asking the questions for the first half hour, when I turned it over to the audience:
Part 1
Part 2: What is the writer's responsibility?
Part 3
Thanks, Yesha, for editing these and posting them online!
* * *
Enough tooting my own horn. There's lots of other stuff to read online this week:
--I found this extract from Bruce Lawrence's new book on the Quran to be very informative. Lots of basic information on the history of early Islam.
--I'm always a bit shocked to find how insistent the presence of religion is in some public school systems in the U.S. This article in the Times on a Jewish mother's struggle to fight open Christian proselytizing in in a rural Delaware district (actually not that far from Philadelphia!) is an eye-opener.
--A great article on Samuel Beckett in the New Yorker.
"Omkara," "Othello," and the Dirty Business of Politics (a film review)
We went over to the multiplex in Doylestown yesterday to watch Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara on the big screen. It was nicely done -- relatively crisp at two and a half hours (not bad for a faithful rendition of a Shakespeare tragedy), and unpretentiously shot in rural Uttar Pradesh. It was also well-acted by a group of talented actors -- Ajay Devgan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Kareena Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Viveik Oberoi (formerly known as "Vivek"), Saif Ali Khan, and Naseeruddin Shah. The standout performance is probably Saif Ali Khan's Langda Tyagi (Iago), though I also thought Konkona Sen Sharma was quite good as Indu (Emilia).
Omkara bears some similarities to R.G. Varma's Sarkar in that it takes the gruff realism of modern Indian gangster pictures and applies it to politics rather than the criminal world -- the point being, of course, that there isn't that much difference between the two. While Varma's Sarkar was an allegory for the Shiv Sena's Bal Thackeray, the "Bhaisahib" in Omkara is a rural political chief, perhaps a Chief Minister like Bihar's Lalu Prasad Yadav (formerly known as "Laloo"). In his home environment, he commands near absolute authority and devotion from his folloowers -- and reaps untold financial profits -- though the legal system at the Center (commanded by "Auntyji," possibly a figure for Sonia Gandhi) is constantly nibbling away at his fiefdom. In Omkara, Bhaisahib is in and out of court, and he relies on his faithful "General," Omkara, to handle his equally corrupt political rivals -- sometimes by exposing them (on MMS cell phone video, no less), and sometimes by simply shooting them down.
Omkara, like Othello, is not a comforting, uplifting story. Though this is easily one of the best Hindi films of the year in filmic terms, it's unthinkable that it will be a popular favorite because it is thematically so dark. It may do well briefly in the urban centers, but I doubt it will succeed out in the smaller towns and countryside, even though the film is set there.
And the language of Omkara is something else -- there are some extraordinary, even brilliant arrangements of Hindi expletives in the film (leave the kids at home!). Most of it comes out of the mouth of Saif Ali Khan's "Langda Tyagi" (Iago), though some of the other characters are equally coarse. Of course, Shakepeare's own Othello itself has some inspired moments of coarseness, mostly from Iago's mouth. There's the famous "beast with two backs" line, as well as passages like the following, where Iago is trying to alert Brabantio to the fact that his daughter has eloped with Othello:
The way this is rendered in a rural, Uttar Pradesh dialect of Hindi in Omkara is pretty much unprintable in a family-friendly weblog.
Ajay Devgan is well cast as Omkara. He has the kind of glowering, brooding presence one expects of an Othello, though he isn't visually marked as different. Instead of a racial other (the "Moor" of Venice), Bhardwaj marks Omkara as a "half-caste," which is emphasized a great deal at the beginning of the film, only to drop out. Bhardwaj also makes "Iago" Omkara's brother rather than his lieutenant, and gives Omkara a full, established household -- whereas in Othello, the Moor stands absolutely alone.
In an Indian film that revolves centrally around the question of a woman's fidelity, it's hard to escape reference to Sita's trials in the Ramayana. Thankfully, Bhardwaj is relatively restrained in his allusions to Agni-Pariksha. Still, it's hard to escape the fact that Omkara, like Othello, is not a story where women get many good lines.
Political pseudo-pundit that I am, I would have liked more politics and more discussion of caste in Omkara, especially since we're coming off a pretty intense period of debate over caste-based reservations in the Indian education system. But Omkara is pretty well-balanced between these types of questions and the more intimate dynamics and word-play ("O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;/
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on") that also make Othello so riveting.
See also: the Yahoo! India review of Omkara.
My review of Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, a version of Macbeth.
Omkara bears some similarities to R.G. Varma's Sarkar in that it takes the gruff realism of modern Indian gangster pictures and applies it to politics rather than the criminal world -- the point being, of course, that there isn't that much difference between the two. While Varma's Sarkar was an allegory for the Shiv Sena's Bal Thackeray, the "Bhaisahib" in Omkara is a rural political chief, perhaps a Chief Minister like Bihar's Lalu Prasad Yadav (formerly known as "Laloo"). In his home environment, he commands near absolute authority and devotion from his folloowers -- and reaps untold financial profits -- though the legal system at the Center (commanded by "Auntyji," possibly a figure for Sonia Gandhi) is constantly nibbling away at his fiefdom. In Omkara, Bhaisahib is in and out of court, and he relies on his faithful "General," Omkara, to handle his equally corrupt political rivals -- sometimes by exposing them (on MMS cell phone video, no less), and sometimes by simply shooting them down.
Omkara, like Othello, is not a comforting, uplifting story. Though this is easily one of the best Hindi films of the year in filmic terms, it's unthinkable that it will be a popular favorite because it is thematically so dark. It may do well briefly in the urban centers, but I doubt it will succeed out in the smaller towns and countryside, even though the film is set there.
And the language of Omkara is something else -- there are some extraordinary, even brilliant arrangements of Hindi expletives in the film (leave the kids at home!). Most of it comes out of the mouth of Saif Ali Khan's "Langda Tyagi" (Iago), though some of the other characters are equally coarse. Of course, Shakepeare's own Othello itself has some inspired moments of coarseness, mostly from Iago's mouth. There's the famous "beast with two backs" line, as well as passages like the following, where Iago is trying to alert Brabantio to the fact that his daughter has eloped with Othello:
'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on
your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise;
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you:
The way this is rendered in a rural, Uttar Pradesh dialect of Hindi in Omkara is pretty much unprintable in a family-friendly weblog.
Ajay Devgan is well cast as Omkara. He has the kind of glowering, brooding presence one expects of an Othello, though he isn't visually marked as different. Instead of a racial other (the "Moor" of Venice), Bhardwaj marks Omkara as a "half-caste," which is emphasized a great deal at the beginning of the film, only to drop out. Bhardwaj also makes "Iago" Omkara's brother rather than his lieutenant, and gives Omkara a full, established household -- whereas in Othello, the Moor stands absolutely alone.
In an Indian film that revolves centrally around the question of a woman's fidelity, it's hard to escape reference to Sita's trials in the Ramayana. Thankfully, Bhardwaj is relatively restrained in his allusions to Agni-Pariksha. Still, it's hard to escape the fact that Omkara, like Othello, is not a story where women get many good lines.
Political pseudo-pundit that I am, I would have liked more politics and more discussion of caste in Omkara, especially since we're coming off a pretty intense period of debate over caste-based reservations in the Indian education system. But Omkara is pretty well-balanced between these types of questions and the more intimate dynamics and word-play ("O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;/
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on") that also make Othello so riveting.
See also: the Yahoo! India review of Omkara.
My review of Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, a version of Macbeth.
Spinoza
A quick link to an editorial by Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein in the New York Times.
Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow Jews, and his works were widely banned in Christian Europe during his day:
He was a strong believer in the individual's capacity to reason, and in democratic, secular governance:
Just some food for thought.
Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow Jews, and his works were widely banned in Christian Europe during his day:
The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.
The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the “New Christians,” as they were called even after generations of Christian practice, of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe’s first experiment in racialist ideology. (link)
He was a strong believer in the individual's capacity to reason, and in democratic, secular governance:
Spinoza’s faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.
Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of government — only democracy can preserve and augment the rights of individuals. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the light of evidence.
It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the development of the sciences subverts the very grounds for state legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued so adamantly against the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion not only dissolves the justification for the state but is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all others. (link)
Just some food for thought.
Ismat Chughtai's Short Stories
Though her life wasn't as drastically messed up as that of her friend and contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai was definitely a born rebel. She lived her life the way she wanted, and wrote the truth in her many stories, novels, and nonfiction essays.
Chughtai's most famous story is 'Lihaf' (The Quilt), which deals with a lesbian encounter within an all-woman setting (Zenana) in a traditional Muslim household. It's a funny and scandalous story (read it here), but actually, my favorite short story by Chughtai is called "Sacred Duty." I came across it in a recent collection called The Quilt and Other Stories. It's beautifully translated by Tahira Naqvi, who has been Chughtai's committed translator and one of her great champions.
The story is not online anywhere, so perhaps I should briefly summarize it and quote a little. Samina, who comes from a respectable Muslim family in Delhi, is engaged to be married to a respectable Muslim boy. However, the day before her wedding she runs off with her boyfriend with Tashar Trivedi, a Hindu whose family lives in Allahabad. Samina accompanies Tashar to Allahabad, where converts to Hinduism and is married to Tashar in a Hindu ceremony. When her parents get Samina's note explaining her disappearance, her mother's first reaction (the story is told from her parents' perspective) is "Let's go to Allahabad and shoot them both!" Lovely.
After some months tempers have cooled, and Samina's father goes on a mission to Allahabad to reconcile, and to invite Samina and her husband to their house in Delhi. He is so gracious and understanding that the Trivedis agree. But in Delhi the young couple find that the Siddiqui family have quietly arranged a second, Muslim marriage ceremony, which requires Tashar to convert to Islam and Samina to reconvert. He's ready to do it, though Samina isn't, and a great deal of poisonously comical bickering ensues. Finally, from their hotel, Samina and Tashar sneak off by themselves to an undisclosed city, leaving both their manipulative families behind. The high point of the story is the delciously snarky letter that Samina sends her parents as she and her husband disappear:
I love that reversal of guilt onto the parents themselves. In the name of "respectability" and "the family honor," they seem willing to do any number of disreputable and hurtful things. (Indeed, the old tradition of the "honor killing" is alive and well, even in the South Asian diaspora.)
With its rude ending, "Sacred Duty" is a brilliant and fitting change-up on the old arranged marriage drama. And as a story it still feels completely fresh and relevant though it was written fifty years ago. Many of Chughtai's other short stories work the same way, especially when they're competently translated.
* * *
Who Was She? Some Biographical Background
Chughtai was greatly helped in her aspiration to be a professional writer because her husband, Shahid Latif, was a successful script-writer who actively encouraged her (through him, she also tried her hand at script-writing, and was involved in some fourteen or fifteen films in the 1940s and 50s). Chughtai wrote in Urdu and was early on associated with the Progressive Writers' Association. She was a friend of Manto's, and often compared to him, so this post is in some sense a complement to my earlier post on Manto. Manto's inspired take on Chughtai in his essay on her, included in a splendid collection called Ismat: Her Life, Her Times (Edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Sadique), is well worth reading. Some of Manto's comments about Chughtai's status as a woman writer are a bit controversial (Manto was no feminist; he wanted Chughtai to write like a woman). But others are witty and affectionate:
I've tried that, and I must admit it doesn't work so well for me.
Incidentally, Chughtai also wrote an essay giving her take on Manto, which I haven't been able to track down.
* * *
An Excerpt from Chughtai's Memoirs Online
The excerpt from her autobiography published at Chowk is well worth a read. Chughtai talks about her sense of rebelliousness, which began in childhood and continued up through her decision to marry the film-writer Shahid Latif. The anecdotes she tells and her style of telling them reinforces the sense one has of Chughtai as someone with a quick wit with an extraordinary ability to use humor to point out the truth -- and get her way. Here, for instance, is how, as a young girl, she convinced her father to excuse her from learning how to cook, and give her instead the opportunity to go to school and get an education:
It's not as if Chughtai's family were that much more progressive than other affluent Muslim families of her generation. But Chughtai knew how to work her family members to ensure access to an education, through which she was able to get out of her parents house and eventually marry a man she herself chose.
* * *
The Obscenity Trial for 'Lihaf' (The Quilt); Her Account Online
Chughtai's account of her obscenity trial in 1944, over "Lihaf," picks up where the autobiographical sketch leaves off. This is the incident in Chughtai's life for which she is most famous, and it's interesting to see that at the time she took it rather lightly. She emphasizes the pleasant time she and her husband had with Manto in Lahore, where the trial was held, over the legalities and the question of whether or not her story was actually obscene.
In this memoir of her trial Chughtai does of course get into some of the specifics regarding her interest in the subject of "Lihaf," though these discussions happen not in the actual trial, but in the informal "trial" she went through from the respectable people in her social circle. Here is her response to one of her husband's friends, Aslam, when he criticizes her for her story:
It's a rather ingenious defense: the issue of homoerotic desire between women was such a profoundly unspoken thing that it wasn't necessarily clear to Chughtai that it was in fact a "sin." (Of course, this defense doesn't hold if you actually read the story closely -- there one sees there is a strong sense of shame in the chld protagonist's perception of the acts committed by Begum Jan and her lover, the servant Rabbo.) The second part of Chughtai's defense of her writing may be the more important: she saw what she was doing as in some sense an act of recording. In fact, there is some indication that the story was based on real people.
Here is how Chughtai describes the actual trial:
And from there the case against her begins to crumble.
The question of obscenity and censorship is still very much with us today, as many recent incidents have reminded us. The only difference now is that while representing sex acts are considered more or less acceptable in works of literature in India at least (Shobha De has never been tried for obscenity), now the censorship battleground is religion. But even if the theme is different, the arguments are the same: the question of what specifically makes a serious literary work obscene or offensive is as hard to answer now as it was in 1944. Most people recognize that there is a difference between representing an act of communal violence and celebrating or encouraging it. But somehow one still finds that the works of writers and filmmakers whose works criticize communalism -- most recently, Taslima Nasreen -- are banned because they "hurt religious sentiments."
"Lihaf" can be found online in numerous locations, but I would recommend the version translated by Tahira Naqvi here. (The other translation I came across does something odd with the ending.)
More materials online:
Fran Pritchett's Ismat Chughtai links
An essay by Chughtai: From Bombay to Bhopal (PDF)
An essay by Chughtai: Communal Violence and Literature (PDF)
I also want to thank Ruchira Paul for inspiring me to do this post, and for sending me a copy of Ismat: Her Life, Her Times.
[Cross-posted to Sepia Mutiny]
Chughtai's most famous story is 'Lihaf' (The Quilt), which deals with a lesbian encounter within an all-woman setting (Zenana) in a traditional Muslim household. It's a funny and scandalous story (read it here), but actually, my favorite short story by Chughtai is called "Sacred Duty." I came across it in a recent collection called The Quilt and Other Stories. It's beautifully translated by Tahira Naqvi, who has been Chughtai's committed translator and one of her great champions.
The story is not online anywhere, so perhaps I should briefly summarize it and quote a little. Samina, who comes from a respectable Muslim family in Delhi, is engaged to be married to a respectable Muslim boy. However, the day before her wedding she runs off with her boyfriend with Tashar Trivedi, a Hindu whose family lives in Allahabad. Samina accompanies Tashar to Allahabad, where converts to Hinduism and is married to Tashar in a Hindu ceremony. When her parents get Samina's note explaining her disappearance, her mother's first reaction (the story is told from her parents' perspective) is "Let's go to Allahabad and shoot them both!" Lovely.
After some months tempers have cooled, and Samina's father goes on a mission to Allahabad to reconcile, and to invite Samina and her husband to their house in Delhi. He is so gracious and understanding that the Trivedis agree. But in Delhi the young couple find that the Siddiqui family have quietly arranged a second, Muslim marriage ceremony, which requires Tashar to convert to Islam and Samina to reconvert. He's ready to do it, though Samina isn't, and a great deal of poisonously comical bickering ensues. Finally, from their hotel, Samina and Tashar sneak off by themselves to an undisclosed city, leaving both their manipulative families behind. The high point of the story is the delciously snarky letter that Samina sends her parents as she and her husband disappear:
And then, Papa, you arrived on the scene; you're such a good actor -- how genially and amicably you convinced Papaji [Samina's father-in-law] -- I was so touched. My father's so broad-minded, I told myself. Papaji had managed to whisk us off to Banaras with the help of his cronies. First it was Papaji who waved the magic wand at us, but when you warmly expressed forgiveness and brought us to Delhi, you too exposed yourelf as someone really petty; you also made us dance like a monkey and its mate. And we took everything as a big joke, that comic drama too. Don't worry, we're not going to give away your secret -- tomorrow morning, when Papaji [Tashar's father] looks at the newspaper there'll definitely be an explosion [when they hear about the Muslim ceremony]. No, we only said goodbye to them. Goodbye to all of you too -- no, you don't want to know where we're going. If we've hurt you, please forgive us. No, we haven't hurt you, it's you who have caused us pain, you're the ones who should apologize. You have made us a laughing stock. What kind of parents are you, who make your children dance like monkeys to any tune you like?
I love that reversal of guilt onto the parents themselves. In the name of "respectability" and "the family honor," they seem willing to do any number of disreputable and hurtful things. (Indeed, the old tradition of the "honor killing" is alive and well, even in the South Asian diaspora.)
With its rude ending, "Sacred Duty" is a brilliant and fitting change-up on the old arranged marriage drama. And as a story it still feels completely fresh and relevant though it was written fifty years ago. Many of Chughtai's other short stories work the same way, especially when they're competently translated.
* * *
Who Was She? Some Biographical Background
Chughtai was greatly helped in her aspiration to be a professional writer because her husband, Shahid Latif, was a successful script-writer who actively encouraged her (through him, she also tried her hand at script-writing, and was involved in some fourteen or fifteen films in the 1940s and 50s). Chughtai wrote in Urdu and was early on associated with the Progressive Writers' Association. She was a friend of Manto's, and often compared to him, so this post is in some sense a complement to my earlier post on Manto. Manto's inspired take on Chughtai in his essay on her, included in a splendid collection called Ismat: Her Life, Her Times (Edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Sadique), is well worth reading. Some of Manto's comments about Chughtai's status as a woman writer are a bit controversial (Manto was no feminist; he wanted Chughtai to write like a woman). But others are witty and affectionate:
Ismat's pen and tongue both run fast. When she starts writing, her ideas race ahead and the words cannot catch up with them. When she speaks, her words seem to tumble over one another. If sheenters the kitchen to show her culinary skill, everything will be in a mess. Being hasty by nature, she would conjure up the cooked roti in her mind even before she had finished kneading the dough. The potatoes would note yet be peeled although she would have already finished making the curry in her imagination. I feel sometimes she may just go into the kitchen andcome out again afer being satiated by her imagination.
I've tried that, and I must admit it doesn't work so well for me.
Incidentally, Chughtai also wrote an essay giving her take on Manto, which I haven't been able to track down.
* * *
An Excerpt from Chughtai's Memoirs Online
The excerpt from her autobiography published at Chowk is well worth a read. Chughtai talks about her sense of rebelliousness, which began in childhood and continued up through her decision to marry the film-writer Shahid Latif. The anecdotes she tells and her style of telling them reinforces the sense one has of Chughtai as someone with a quick wit with an extraordinary ability to use humor to point out the truth -- and get her way. Here, for instance, is how, as a young girl, she convinced her father to excuse her from learning how to cook, and give her instead the opportunity to go to school and get an education:
"Women cook food Ismat. When you go to your in-laws what will you feed them?" he asked gently after the crisis was explained to him.
"If my husband is poor, then we will make khichdi and eat it and if he is rich, we will hire a cook," I answered.
My father realised his daughter was a terror and that there wasn't a thing he could do about it.
"What do you want to do then?" he asked.
"All my brothers study. I will study too," I said.
My uncle was assigned the job of teaching me. After a month of extensive study, day and night, I was accepted into the fourth grade at a local school. After that I got a double promotion and was promoted to grade six. I wanted to be free and without an education, a woman cannot have freedom. When an uneducated woman gets married, her husband addresses her as "stupid" or "illiterate". When he leaves for work, she sits at home and waits for him to come back. I thought that no matter what happens, I would never be intimidated by anyone. I would learn as quickly as I could.
It's not as if Chughtai's family were that much more progressive than other affluent Muslim families of her generation. But Chughtai knew how to work her family members to ensure access to an education, through which she was able to get out of her parents house and eventually marry a man she herself chose.
* * *
The Obscenity Trial for 'Lihaf' (The Quilt); Her Account Online
Chughtai's account of her obscenity trial in 1944, over "Lihaf," picks up where the autobiographical sketch leaves off. This is the incident in Chughtai's life for which she is most famous, and it's interesting to see that at the time she took it rather lightly. She emphasizes the pleasant time she and her husband had with Manto in Lahore, where the trial was held, over the legalities and the question of whether or not her story was actually obscene.
In this memoir of her trial Chughtai does of course get into some of the specifics regarding her interest in the subject of "Lihaf," though these discussions happen not in the actual trial, but in the informal "trial" she went through from the respectable people in her social circle. Here is her response to one of her husband's friends, Aslam, when he criticizes her for her story:
Using a mild manner and a tone of entreaty, I said, 'Aslam Sahib, in reality no one ever told me that writing on the subject I deal with in "Lihaf" is a sin, nor did I ever read anywhere that I shouldn't write about this . . . disease . . . or tendency. Perhaps my mind is not the brush of Abdur Rahman Chughtai but only a cheap camera instead. Whenever it sees something, it releases the shutter on its own and the pen in my hand becomes helpless. My mind tempts my pen, and I'm unable to interfere in the matter of my mind and pen." (link)
It's a rather ingenious defense: the issue of homoerotic desire between women was such a profoundly unspoken thing that it wasn't necessarily clear to Chughtai that it was in fact a "sin." (Of course, this defense doesn't hold if you actually read the story closely -- there one sees there is a strong sense of shame in the chld protagonist's perception of the acts committed by Begum Jan and her lover, the servant Rabbo.) The second part of Chughtai's defense of her writing may be the more important: she saw what she was doing as in some sense an act of recording. In fact, there is some indication that the story was based on real people.
Here is how Chughtai describes the actual trial:
There was a big crowd in the court. Several people had advised us to offer our apologies to the judge, even offering to pay the fines on our behalf. The proceedings had lost some of their verve, the witnesses who were called in to prove that "Lihaf" was obscene were beginning to lose their never in the face of our lawyer's cross-examination. No word capable of inviting condemnation could be found. After a great deal of search a gentleman said, "The sentence 'she was collecting ashiqs (lovers) is obscene."
"Which word is obscene," the lawyer said. "Collecting," or "ashiqs"? (link)
And from there the case against her begins to crumble.
The question of obscenity and censorship is still very much with us today, as many recent incidents have reminded us. The only difference now is that while representing sex acts are considered more or less acceptable in works of literature in India at least (Shobha De has never been tried for obscenity), now the censorship battleground is religion. But even if the theme is different, the arguments are the same: the question of what specifically makes a serious literary work obscene or offensive is as hard to answer now as it was in 1944. Most people recognize that there is a difference between representing an act of communal violence and celebrating or encouraging it. But somehow one still finds that the works of writers and filmmakers whose works criticize communalism -- most recently, Taslima Nasreen -- are banned because they "hurt religious sentiments."
"Lihaf" can be found online in numerous locations, but I would recommend the version translated by Tahira Naqvi here. (The other translation I came across does something odd with the ending.)
More materials online:
Fran Pritchett's Ismat Chughtai links
An essay by Chughtai: From Bombay to Bhopal (PDF)
An essay by Chughtai: Communal Violence and Literature (PDF)
I also want to thank Ruchira Paul for inspiring me to do this post, and for sending me a copy of Ismat: Her Life, Her Times.
[Cross-posted to Sepia Mutiny]
More Censorship
Sometimes blogging lands you up in funny places. Abhi and Patrix from Desipundit were recently quoted in an excellent San Francisco Chronicle regarding the new Indian comic books. A mystery man named "Ennis Singh Mutinywale" was quoted all over the place after dropping this bombshell. Manish Vij had, as mentioned earlier, a quality piece in Salon after the Mumbai blasts. And a number of bloggers (naturally) were quoted in mainstream media coverage of the Indian blog ban -- not surprising since several prominent desi bloggers are also professional (or at least freelance) journalists.
Today it was my turn, albeit in a smaller way: the Times of London called for a comment on Sonia Gandhi's attempt to suppress Jag Mundhra's planned biopic about her (starring Monica "Mary Magdalene" Belluci as the young Sonia Gandhi). I blogged about it two months ago, and somehow that turned into this:
Admittedly, that last statement was pure speculation on my part (one always wishes the reporter quoted the other thing you said!). But this censorship problem is, as Dilip D'Souza has ably argued, a systemic problem we need to be continually vigilant about. India would be a better place if the default were to allow people to have their say rather than block, ban, and censor. (And it's not just a Congress Party thing; the BJP were no slouches when it came to censoring views they weren't happy about.)
Sadly, the filmmakers here have apparently decided to shelve the film rather than insist on their right to make it.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
Today it was my turn, albeit in a smaller way: the Times of London called for a comment on Sonia Gandhi's attempt to suppress Jag Mundhra's planned biopic about her (starring Monica "Mary Magdalene" Belluci as the young Sonia Gandhi). I blogged about it two months ago, and somehow that turned into this:
Despite priding itself on a constitution that guarantees freedom of expression, India has a history of censorship. It was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Central Board of Film Certification regularly uses the fear of civil unrest between its Hindu and Muslim communities to demand cuts from directors or to keep certain films out of cinemas. Only yesterday, a ban was lifted on 17 websites that ministers claimed were fanning religious hatred after the bomb blasts in Bombay on July 11.
Amardeep Singh, assistant professor of English at Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania, was not surprised by Mrs Gandhi’s attempts to stop the film. "There is a knee-jerk censoriousness in Indian politics and it is a sad reaction to try to suppress the film before it has even been produced," he said. "It is meant to be a respectful biopic, but I think they’re just nervous because the director has a reputation for the unsavoury." (link)
Admittedly, that last statement was pure speculation on my part (one always wishes the reporter quoted the other thing you said!). But this censorship problem is, as Dilip D'Souza has ably argued, a systemic problem we need to be continually vigilant about. India would be a better place if the default were to allow people to have their say rather than block, ban, and censor. (And it's not just a Congress Party thing; the BJP were no slouches when it came to censoring views they weren't happy about.)
Sadly, the filmmakers here have apparently decided to shelve the film rather than insist on their right to make it.
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
"But I Warn You, They Are Not as Peaceful as Me"
Community leaders from Tower Hamlets, London have started a campaign against the filming of Monica Ali's 2003 novel Brick Lane. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a big commercial and critical success. Reactions by many South Asian readers I heard from were mixed, mainly because of Ali's use of a kind of pidgin English in the letters from the main character's sister in Bangladesh, Hasina. (Our blog-friend DesiDancer also had a succinct review: "utter crap", were her delicate, carefully chosen words)
Of course, the quality of the book is mostly irrelevant to the censorship campaign under way. This campaign seems to be an extension of the campaign against the book itself in 2003, and includes some of the same players and the same sad rhetoric of outrage and offense that is routinely trotted out these days in response to something or other:
The misguided attempt to protect the community's honor through censorship will be ineffective, and the censorship campaign itself has the ironic effect of making the community look really, really bad.
The leader of the campaign is making an only thinly-veiled threat of violence if film cameras are brought to Brick Lane:
I love the part where he says, "this is not a fiction book . . . It's all lies." Speaks for itself, donnit? And "I warn you they are not as peaceful as me" is a really ominous, nasty little threat, which I hope the filmmakers will ignore.
Here's a paragraph from the novel itself describing the physical space of Brick Lane in London. Does it really merit this kind of censorship campaign?
Now, if I lived in Tower Hamlets or worked on Brick Lane I might not be happy about the piles of rubbish Ali describes (from my own experience visiting the place five years ago, I don't remember any piles of rubbish, though I visited in the middle of the day). But why are people always so quick to find characterizations like these "offensive" or "insulting"? Is it really worth rioting over?
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
Of course, the quality of the book is mostly irrelevant to the censorship campaign under way. This campaign seems to be an extension of the campaign against the book itself in 2003, and includes some of the same players and the same sad rhetoric of outrage and offense that is routinely trotted out these days in response to something or other:
In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing "pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes" and of containing "a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community".
Community leaders attacked the book on its publication in 2003, claiming that it portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a "despicable insult". (link)
The misguided attempt to protect the community's honor through censorship will be ineffective, and the censorship campaign itself has the ironic effect of making the community look really, really bad.
The leader of the campaign is making an only thinly-veiled threat of violence if film cameras are brought to Brick Lane:
He brushed aside suggestions that a work of fiction couldn't be seen as an attack on a community. "It's not a fiction book," he explained. "This is all lies. She wanted to be famous at the cost of a community."
He also claimed that community groups prevented Monica Ali from being awarded the Booker prize. "This book was contesting for the Booker prize," he said. "We stopped that."
Mr Salique raised the spectre of a worsening in community relations if filming goes ahead on location. "We are living in a multicultural society," he said. "We are in a peaceful situation. This film will make a lot of problems for local people."
He threatened mass protests if the company attempts to film on the streets of Tower Hamlets, saying that "the community feels strongly about this. We are not going to let it happen.
"Young people are getting very involved with this campaign. They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me." (link)
I love the part where he says, "this is not a fiction book . . . It's all lies." Speaks for itself, donnit? And "I warn you they are not as peaceful as me" is a really ominous, nasty little threat, which I hope the filmmakers will ignore.
Here's a paragraph from the novel itself describing the physical space of Brick Lane in London. Does it really merit this kind of censorship campaign?
A horn blared like an ancient muezzin ululating painfully, stretching his vocal cords to the limit. She stopped and the car swerved. Another car skidded to a halt in front of her and the driver got out and began to shout. She ran again and turned into a side street, then off again to the right onto Brick Lane. She had been here a few times with Chanu, later in the day when the restaurants smelled of fresh boiled rice and old fried fat and the waiters with their tight black pants stood in doorways holding out menus and smiles. But now the waiters were at home asleep, or awake being waited on themselves by wives who only served and were not served in return except with board and lodging and the provision of children whom they also, naturally, waited upon. And the streets were stacked with rubbish, entire kingdoms of rubbish piled high as fortresses with only the border skirmishes of plastic bottles and grease-stained cardboard to separate them. A man looked up at some scaffolding with an intent, almost ardent, expression as if his love might be at the top, cowering on the high planks or the dark slate roof. A pair of schoolchildren, pale as rice and loud as peacocks, cut over the road and hurtled down a side street, galloping with joy or else with terror. Otherwise, Brick Lane was deserted. Nazneen stopped by some film posters pasted in waves over a metal siding. The hero and heroine peered at each other with epic hunger. The scarlet of her lips matched the bandanna tied around his forehad. A sprinkling of sweat highlighted the contour of his biceps. The kohl around her eyes made them smoke with passion. Some invisible force was keeping them (only inches) apart. The type at the foot of the poster said: The world could not stop their love. (Brick Lane, page 32)
Now, if I lived in Tower Hamlets or worked on Brick Lane I might not be happy about the piles of rubbish Ali describes (from my own experience visiting the place five years ago, I don't remember any piles of rubbish, though I visited in the middle of the day). But why are people always so quick to find characterizations like these "offensive" or "insulting"? Is it really worth rioting over?
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
A Poem on Bombay, from Adil Jussawalla
I found the following in the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry.
This poem is really a response to the Partition of 1947, but I think it has bearing on the questions people are asking a day after a particularly horrifying terrorist attack.
Jussawalla describes a rootless island city that is in some sense cut off from the "mainland's histories" -- that is on its own. But that sense of detachment has its limits, as Bombay has also been the destination point for waves of migrants and refugees from the subcontinent's recurring troubles. These immigrant Bombayites (or now, Mumbaikars) bring new life and energy to the city ("restore us to fire"), and also tie the city tightly to the mainland's darker episodes (the other meaning of "restore us to fire"). Some elite Bombayites have historically been ambivalent about their connection to the mainland, and even today, there are people who talk about instituting a kind of Hong Kong-esque autonomy to Mumbai, to prevent its being held back by the mainland's elephant slowness.
The idea of Bombay paying for traumas occurring elsewhere was probably true in the case of bombing and riots of 1993, which were triggered by the razing of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, though it's undeniable that local Muslim-led gangs and homegrown Shiv Sena thugs exploited that event for their own purposes. Something similar may be afoot now, if we assume that the bombers in yesterday's Western Line attacks were associated with Kashmiri separatist militants.
And yet, through it all, though the trauma of the tearing and re-forming of communities, and the chaos of life in Bombay (even without terrorism), there is, as Jussawalla says, the reassuring constancy of a cooling sea-breeze, which "uncovers no root,/ And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories." Rootless, and yet yet never detached -- that's Bombay.
Sea Breeze, Bombay
by Adil Jussawalla
Partition's people stitched
Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.
An opened people, fraying across the cut
country reknotted themselves on this island.
Surrogate city of banks,
Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port,
Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work
Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,
Restore us to fire. New refugees,
Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,
come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,
Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.
Restore us to fire. Still,
Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,
Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,
Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,
And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories.
This poem is really a response to the Partition of 1947, but I think it has bearing on the questions people are asking a day after a particularly horrifying terrorist attack.
Jussawalla describes a rootless island city that is in some sense cut off from the "mainland's histories" -- that is on its own. But that sense of detachment has its limits, as Bombay has also been the destination point for waves of migrants and refugees from the subcontinent's recurring troubles. These immigrant Bombayites (or now, Mumbaikars) bring new life and energy to the city ("restore us to fire"), and also tie the city tightly to the mainland's darker episodes (the other meaning of "restore us to fire"). Some elite Bombayites have historically been ambivalent about their connection to the mainland, and even today, there are people who talk about instituting a kind of Hong Kong-esque autonomy to Mumbai, to prevent its being held back by the mainland's elephant slowness.
The idea of Bombay paying for traumas occurring elsewhere was probably true in the case of bombing and riots of 1993, which were triggered by the razing of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, though it's undeniable that local Muslim-led gangs and homegrown Shiv Sena thugs exploited that event for their own purposes. Something similar may be afoot now, if we assume that the bombers in yesterday's Western Line attacks were associated with Kashmiri separatist militants.
And yet, through it all, though the trauma of the tearing and re-forming of communities, and the chaos of life in Bombay (even without terrorism), there is, as Jussawalla says, the reassuring constancy of a cooling sea-breeze, which "uncovers no root,/ And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories." Rootless, and yet yet never detached -- that's Bombay.
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